Writing With Honesty (I sawed a play)

Not really wild, just up and about, so I haven't been blogging. I've never been to my city's Fringe theatre festival but an old coworker was stage managing a play and I wanted to go see it. So Fernando and I made it a date.

8 Ways My Mother Was Conceived

- by Michaela Di Cesare

The play was excellenty! A one-woman show about a woman whose grandmother's fiancé was away on business when it was discovered she was pregnant. It was inconceivable that such a good girl could be pregnant, so the family decided that she'd had an immaculate conception. And this was the family mythology. One day our heroine has a crisis and she sets out to pop the family's myth-balloon.

It's pretty much a true story. Fernando wanted to see it again the next night, and we met Di Cesare's mother after. She said 90% of it was true. The play was funny, and moving, and confirmed one of my beliefs--that sometimes there's nothing wrong with believing myths.

The author-actress also made herself very vulnerable, which I think explains much of the power of the piece, and her budding success. Made herself vulnerable to the audience, and to her family--she exposed some secrets, and had to wrestle with whether those secrets were even hers' to expose. Was it necessary to the piece or just being ... artsy?

As we were public-transporting to and from downtown I just happened to be reading chapter 3 of the Betsy Lerner book on writers, which is exactly about this topic of writers and how far they're willing to mine their personal lives/truths for their work:

As a young editor I was drawn to writers who went out on an emotional ledge. ... Conversely, when I read a relatively well-written manuscript that made no particular impression (which would describe most of the manuscripts editors evaluate), I couldn't help thinking, Good child. ... In order to tell the truth (and I don't mean what happened in "real life" in any conventional sense, but the emotional truth), to raise what is only hinted at, the writer would have had to risk his place at the table, which is too threatening.

I love that. Good child. Maybe the advice isn't super applicable when writing soufflés, as Stephen Fry described Wodehouse, but it eventually leads Lerner (via Cocteau) to this bold bit of advice that's applicable to any artist:

I think Cocteau had the right idea when he said, "Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that the critics don't like and cultivate it. That's the only part your work that's individual and worth keeping." Throw off the shackles of approval, of wanting to be liked. The minute you capitulate to changing even a single adjective to please someone else, or choose one adjective over another to protect a person's feelings, you pull the plug on your own respirator. ... [Phillip Roth] realizing he had touched a live wire [with his first book], went for the socket with his future books.

Lerner's book is a ton of le fun to read.

Other than that, we were near trendy St-Denis street so we...

had vegan Thai food at Chu Chai on Saturday

and on Sunday we tried dukkah for the first time at Piazzetta (looks like ooh zee French Montreal café experience! but it's a chain restaurant - dukkah was delicious though)



and poked around in super cutesy dessert gourmet shop (shoppe!)

I did have one teeeeeny tiny complaint with the play. It was full of literary references because the author's a big reader, and at one point she and her new boyfriend have a disagreement about whether Jane Austen in smut. And in the end she agrees that: Jane Austen is the equivalent of dime-store romance novel smut for repressed British women.

Ooooh that kind of sexist prejudice against romance novel and romance readers makes my blood boil, and I don't even read a lot of them. Having worked in a bookstore for 15 years I've seen that people automatically denigrate an entire genre solely because it is largely written by and about women, and about emotions and love, which are associated with women. That is sexist. And these opinions are expressed without the person having any knowledge of the genre. And they make the most horrible assumptions about who the readers are, when I know that, not only is it the #1 most read genre on the planet, sometimes read subversively by women of other cultures, but it's also read by women from teen age to 90s, from little education to PhDs, from home makers to CEOs. And yes, by women with great sex lives, as well as women with none. If someone ever wants to actually think in an educated fashion on the topic, they can start with Jennifer Crusie's academic essays.

And to write a play that's all about honoring women, and then to have a joke that denigrates not only one of the greatest women writers, but one of the novel form's greatest originators, who had to write under a pseudonym her whole life because it was so shameful for a middle class woman to be a writer in those days, when one of the themes of the play is about shame... ??

And though there is nothing wrong about writing about love, Jane Austen was also writing about the narrow choices women had in her day, their circumscribed lives, about how much they still did within those narrow confines, about how vulnerable they were to men, about their variety, about her neighbors, the communities she saw all around her... she was writing about women's lives, just like Di Cesare. Ooooooohhhhh!!!!! Makes me want to scrunch up my little face and have a tantrum.

Ahem. But that was the only thing I didn't like. ;-)