Certain Writers Make Me Want to Die

For some masochistic reason, I have a subscription to Poets & Writers Magazine. Mostly because I want to peer into the publishing world and see what normies are reading without completely fucking my algorithm online.

In its most recent issue at the time, an author named Sloane Crosley (what a publishable name) is donned on the cover, a white woman crossing her arms in a way that I am sure is meant to look strong but not too girl-boss-y to intimidate any men who may want to smash/publish her. She’s been praised by the likes of David Sedaris and MSNBC (I mean, okay). She wears a pair of smart, square glasses with eyes that beam intensely through the top rim of the lenses. Her eyes say,” god, I am so fucking rich you wish you were me.” They have that smug intensity that lets you know that she knows she’s well-written and desirable, which I might be able to appreciate if this weren’t a thin, educated white woman from White Plains, New York; an area with a median household income of $106,000 a year as of 2021 (I am not giving you a source bitch just go look). I am crying because you have to have a big house and be near New York. I love my grandmother’s (and hopefully one day my) Harlem duplex, but I imagine what it would be like to live off the Metro North fairly regularly. To own moist, dark, brown New York soil and eat from it.

I googled Crosley, and her eyes say this in all of her photos. A literature website crowns her “the most chic writer in NYC” or some shit like that. Since when do we care about writers being chic? Will I have to be “chic?” I am riddled with uncertainty, and the weight in my face has dropped into my neck. I am scowling and trying not to cry. Zora Neale Hurston died penniless with a scarred reputation and was buried in an unmarked grave, how’s that for chic?

As I read her profile, the article’s author makes reference to a broad series of books, films, and humans that I haven’t the vaguest familiarity with, and I become intimidated. I start freaking out because who the fuck am I, why don’t I know anything, but also who the fuck is this lady, and why do people get to know who she is when I am funnier and hotter and more interesting? I read that her first book came out in 2008. Hm. I was growing tits in 2008, but also it’s when I found my voice. Even at age nine, my voice was stronger than this woman’s.

In her profile, Crosley details the burglary that occurred in her Lower Manhattan apartment, and I feel no sympathy; I may even feel glee. I read one of her essays from 2009, and about three paragraphs in, I could tell this was written for someone whose tendency to enact self-inflicted shame is bloated. She’s just so normal. Everything about her makes me feel unsafe.

The style of most consistently published authors gives me pause in the worst way. They’re too sure that their words will reach other people, so they’re writing from the perspective of the reader. Which could be cool if it wasn’t always not. I refuse to believe that this many people’s inner voice sounds this rinsed. This is why I am grateful I didn’t finish school. I can only imagine how stale my thoughts and beliefs might have become if I had subjected myself to a master’s program. Regularly published writers clearly know the formula, and I hate to hate on someone getting their coin, but I do think it squashes any possible innovation in the arts. The voice of these authors is clearly not one of someone interesting (read: crazy and well-lived) enough for me to enjoy. If I were more medicated and followed the heavily trodden path, would I be a “respected” voice by now? If I had submitted to the paddle of academia beating me into that bland shape, would I be on the cover of something? Would other artists know who I was?

Do I care?

I wish I could say I was above ambition, but I have, somehow, amongst the carnage, ruptured the boil of hope that’s grown in my chest, and now its fluids thump through my muscles into the fingers that arrange my words. I could very easily keep my words to myself, but I have developed an understanding that the world of writing needs more people like me, mostly because I can’t find many people with voices like mine and my friends to read. I find myself parsing between the lines of academia-laden language and overused analogies to find the heart of what the author really aims to say. Or constantly editing their words to make them more interesting to read. Making the words dance.

The next section of the magazine is an interview with a different author with the last name Seuss. It’s titled “Cobbled Genius”. The premise of the interview is supposed to highlight the sort of artistic training that can only be gained through life experience and not formal literary education. I thought this article might cleanse my palate, but then the author attributes most of her success to an academic who took a chance on her very young (middle-school young), and I noted that the most relevant aspects of her career do, in fact, happen in conventional classrooms. Discouraging at best! Nothing happened except watching people who are mediocre get praise and be in magazines and live in million-dollar apartments in Manhattan and rural Michigan homes. It all feels very personal.

You may be thinking: “How self-centered can this person be to assume two authors of whom they had no awareness before this instance are below them in terms of skill and authenticity?” I would respond by saying I think my lack of context actually gives me the upper hand. “Stupid People Rights,” as Ziwe would say. When I look at someone’s entire line of work, and I am mostly unimpressed… I begin to question what these magazines, grants, and award ceremonies are actually looking for. I wonder what makes magazines reject my very visceral stories while another privileged person produces a bestseller. I can only think I would never get that famous with the same portfolio because of who I am and what sells. I did not ask for any of this.

Sometimes I worry a book of my essays would just make a publisher say, “You probably need help, and also you deserved everything that happened to you.” I worry even more that when I get published that the public says the same thing.

Similarly masochistically, I have been re-reading So Sad Today by Melissa Broder. This book did a lot to help me find my voice as an early adult in my first year of undergrad. After being force-fed “classics” my whole life, this was some of the first contemporary literature I’d been exposed to. The book contains many raw aspects of reality that absolutely require out-loud reckoning. Punchy and easy to read, but not without intense feeling and honesty. But it’s still a fucking white woman’s book. I find myself relating, and then I remember all the times a white woman has gone out of her way to make my life as miserable as she had it in her power to. I can’t put that past this author. I am actually so sure this woman would treat me like shit if given the chance.

In the essay “Google Hangout with My Higher Self,” Broder enters the metaphysical chat and says she “feels like the plants, babies, trees, the ocean, and the moon hate her.” Of course, her higher self tries to cheer her up, but all I can think is maybe she’s right and it’s because *insert history of white women here*. If I were the moon, I would hate Melissa Broder, and I wouldn’t care if she killed herself about it. Me and this woman do not have middle ground.

At the time I am writing this, there is a full moon in my tenth house. This is the house of ambition, technique, the way you work with large, often distant groups of people, how you spend great spans of your time. I confronted the fear that my aspirations will disappoint me, and the confusion that comes from navigating any career/way of making money/living a human life without the dilapidated road map we’ve been prescribed for time immemorial (the 21st century). Berating potential colleagues probably isn’t the best way to attempt a start, but I’ve never known a cancellation to truly hinder a career, so I am provoking famous people like a toddler banging a hornet’s nest with a stick. I am infamous in a few places for being extremely apt at hating, and why abandon what I do best?

I keep finding myself knowing I am special, but I am still empty of want for being accepted by something bigger.

I am disconcerted when talking to people who obviously had emotionally safe backgrounds. It makes me wonder who I would be if someone bothered to tell me I could be whoever I want. I hate the calm in their eyes and demeanor. I hate when the white mom says that in the white movies, because everyone only told me anything I ever did was wrong. My writing is not for you if your mommy loves you.

And that’s what I hate about Sloane Crosley and Diane Suess and Melissa Broder; their mommies love them in a way that it’s probably been a lot longer since they or their ancestors had to pack up everything and forget everything and then also play pretend as if they had no problems to speak of. All just to be way too loud about the problems they do have. I hate them because they get to not remember and also because they get to be so confidently fucking average. They keep getting published. Writing is their day job.

This hate is not meant in sanity, and I don’t care if you know “well actually” that these women went through something horrible. I know they did, it’s what they write about. The difference is they get to scream it on mainstream media platforms and make lots of money and not be sent to the hospital about it. Their pain is a spectacle people pay to see; my pain is just the collateral of reality.

Sylvia Plath, I hate you too, your creativity was only good for killing yourself. And you too, Mary Oliver. I’ll never forgive the middle-aged Midtown Atlanta otter that tried so hard to you-pill me. But you’re right, I do not have to be good. I spit on Pulitzer Prizes.

I really resent moments when my ambition pokes its little head out because there is no major accolade in this system, in this society that would not require me to gut major core facets of my being. The machine demands blood.

There is no purpose, I am just full of words, and it helps a smidge if someone can hear me think them. But I do kind of hope one of these bitches sees this and sues me, or something. I need the publicity.