Writing Life

My friend Darrell calls me every morning from Ashland, Oregon, to air a few grievances before he begins the day. Today his main grievance was a writer named Melissa Febos. He heard her interviewed on National Public Radio yesterday and has been incensed ever since. Ms. Febos is the author of a newly published memoir called Whip Smart, about the four years she spent working as a dominatrix in New York City. Ms. Febos is not your average sex-industry worker (not that I would know anything about the average sex-industry worker). According to a brief bio on her website, she comes from a fairly privileged Cape Cod background. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the New School in New York, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College. She currently works as a lecturer at the State University of New York. She is also a member of the faculty at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, and a former instructor of freshman composition at Hofstra University. Ms. Febos is thirty-ish and could be considered drop-dead gorgeous providing that excessive body art doesn’t interfere with your appreciation of the female form. I haven’t read much of her memoir, just the few excerpts that are available at Amazon.com and Ms. Febos’ own website, so I’m not entirely sure what her story is. It appears that she came to New York City in the late 1990s to attend Sarah Lawrence. Her website contains a curriculum vita that summarizes her professional career. There are no four-year-long gaps on the vita, and neither is there any mention of her work in the sex trade, so I can only assume that her career as a dominatrix must have overlapped with some of her other jobs – editorial intern at an online magazine, editorial intern at a literary agency, editorial intern at a publishing house, creative writing instructor for elementary- and high-school students, etc. She also claims to have been a heroin addict for much of the previous decade. Darrell believes that Ms. Febos merely flirted with drugs and sex-work in order to rebel against her bourgeois upbringing and/or so that she could write an “edgy” memoir that would earn her some street cred with the New York City in-crowd. Judging from the examples of her writing that are available on her website, her literary skills alone might not have been enough to earn her much distinction. Here is a heavily redacted excerpt from an essay she wrote recently called “My Funny Valentine: A Love Letter to the U.S.A.”

Darlin, I love your food-grade plastic, because what would I have done in the years before I discovered crack and heroin? I love that reading was my first drug, that you enabled me to [pleasure myself] to stories about men and women [having sex], women and women [having sex], men [having sex with] meat out of the fridge, women [having sex with] dogs, because not only do I feel a sense of sexual entitlement that I did not learn from your teachers, but I also feel entitled to write about whoever the [heck having sex with] whomever the [heck] they want and is willing, and not for a moment do I fear for my life.

That was written on February 13, less than a month ago, so it cannot be dismissed as juvenilia. We’ll have to assume that it is an accurate example of Ms. Febos’ current literary skills. Which, in my opinion, tends to support Darrell’s hypothesis that Ms. Febos’ foray into heroin and horsewhips was an attempt to gain material for a salacious memoir and to spice up what would otherwise be a fairly routine story: Daughter of privilege attends exclusive schools, earns some impressive degrees, and then becomes a career academic. Of course it is also possible that Ms. Febos used heroin and horsewhips to escape the banality of her own imagination, but that is an unkind presumption. At any rate, when Darrell called me this morning it was to complain that Ms. Febos’ memoir was the 187th best-selling book at Amazon.com. Of course, placing 187th on a list of any kind does not sound terribly impressive; that is, until you consider the fact that Amazon.com currently has something like two million titles for sale. You can do the math yourself, but it would appear that Ms. Febos’ book ranks in the top one percent of the top one percent of Amazon’s sales list.

One reason why this rankles Darrell so much is that his own recently published a book, a novel called The Undiscovered Island, currently languishes at number 774,624 on Amazon’s sales list. Darrell spent roughly thirteen years writing, researching, and rewriting his novel. He put the book through more than thirty complete drafts and he traveled at his own expense to the Azores and other remote locales to research his story. He perused dozens, perhaps hundreds, of old maps and books in order to verify all his facts. He began the book when he was in his thirties and didn’t finish it until he was in his fifties. With no literary agent to represent him, he submitted his book “over-the-transom,” as they say, to dozens of publishing houses big and small. One of those publishers, a small east-coast university press, plucked his manuscript from its slush pile and published it last summer. Darrell paid $5200 (about five times the size of the advance he received from his publisher) to advertise the book in the New York Times last December. His ad helped drive the book as high as number 10,000 or so on Amazon’s sales list. But that lasted for only a week or so. Darrell has no more money left in his advertising budget and can only watch as his book sinks towards the one-million mark on Amazon’s sales list. And so, this morning, when he checked Ms. Febos’ sales figures at Amazon and saw that her book was listed at number 187, it felt like a personal affront to him.

“Big deal, she did drugs and used sex to make money,” he ranted to me over the phone. “That stuff was old hat forty years ago. Jim Carroll wrote several memoirs in the sixties and seventies about shooting heroin and selling his body for money. It’s the stuff of a million crappy memoirs, novels, essays, and poems. Mary Gaitskill wrote about it in Bad Behavior. Toni Bentley wrote about it in The Surrender. Hell, Pauline Reage wrote about it in The Story of O way back in the 1950s! When will the reading public finally get its fill of this kind of crap?”

I couldn’t answer the question, so I just let Darrell rant and rave for an hour or so, until his fury was mostly spent. After I hung up the phone, I sat down and began writing a personal story of my own, albeit one that will never sell as many copies or earn as much money as Ms. Febos’ book has in only its first week of publication. My story was about my neighbor Deirdre Lawson (not her real name). Deirdre is a young wife and mother who lives across the street from me in a little brick house. She and her husband have a one-year-old son and a middle-aged toy poodle (at least I think it’s a toy poodle). There is a plastic swing dangling from a tree in Deirdre’s front yard. Deirdre is a high-school teacher and her husband works in finance. The Lawson’s are excellent neighbors, friendly and quiet and helpful. We have looked after their dog when they have gone on vacation, and they have looked after our cats when we have gone on vacation. For the last year or so, Deirdre and I have been cooking dinner together. That is to say that she makes dinner for her little family in her house, while I made dinner for my wife and myself in our house. The big picture window in Deirdre’s kitchen is unencumbered by any sort of curtains or shutters. Thus, when she makes dinner, I can look out my living room window and see her in her kitchen. I am not a voyeur. I do not sit in my living room and watch Deirdre prepare dinner through binoculars. But as I am preparing my own dinner in my own kitchen, I occasionally look up and see Deirdre in her kitchen. I imagine that she occasionally looks up and sees me in my kitchen. Neither of us has ever acknowledged this small connection between us. Only recently did Deirdre begin to prepare dinner every night at roughly the same time that I prepare my own dinner. Prior to the arrival of their son, the Lawsons didn’t seem to keep to a regular dinner schedule. But, for the past eight or nine months, Deirdre and I have both tended to begin preparing dinner at roughly five p.m. Because Deirdre has three mouths to feed, and because, presumably, she has to prepare two different meals – one for her son, and one for her husband and herself – Deirdre usually spends more time in the kitchen than I do. And that means that, around five thirty or so, when I sit down to dinner in the dining room with my wife, Deirdre is usually still in her kitchen fixing dinner. While Julie and I eat, I am usually vaguely aware of the fact that, somewhere over Julie’s left shoulder, Deirdre is still puttering around in her kitchen. I didn’t realize how attached I had become to making dinner with Deirdre until just recently, when the ritual came to an end. Julie was laid off from work about two weeks ago. Nowadays, instead of arriving home for dinner at five-thirty or so, she is home all day long. As a result, we have begun eating dinner a bit earlier, around five o’clock rather than five-thirty. And because she likes to cook, Julie has begun to take over many of the kitchen duties, including fixing dinner most nights. Which, of course, means that I have not been making dinner with Deirdre much lately – and I miss it. I thought that my weird relationship with Deirdre would make for an interesting blog entry. And so this morning, after ending my phone call with Darrell, I opened up a new Word document on my computer and typed the words “Dinner With Deirdre” at the top of it. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to say about the subject, but I planned to spend the whole day exploring it at my keyboard. Sadly my plan was not destined for fulfillment.

I had written about three sentences of my new personal essay when the phone rang. I checked caller I.D. and saw that it was Darrell at the other end of the line. I answered the phone and heard this anguished cry: “Dude, now she’s down to 127 [or whatever the number was]! Can you believe it?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. But since Darrell clearly seemed to think I should understand his outburst, I was reluctant to disclose my ignorance. “Wow!” I said, “that’s amazing.”

“Yeah,” he said, “maybe I should have put a dominatrix into my novel. Perhaps that would have generated a few thousand more sales. Of course, I’m not as cute as Melissa Febos, so it probably wouldn’t matter what I write about. Publishers these days are just looking for gorgeous young authors who will look good on Oprah and attract a lot of young buyers to their book-signings and reading parties.”

At last, clarity dawned on me. I spoke some consoling words to Darrell about the harshness of a universe that allows its Melissa Feboses to thrive while its Darrells and Kevins remain forever mired in obscurity and penury. I’ve known Darrell for more than twenty years and I know when he really needs to let off steam and when he is just bored and in the mood to waste some time. There have been plenty of occasions when I have ignored his phone calls or else cut them off after five minutes or so. But today Darrell sounded like he could genuinely use a sympathetic ear. And I figured I owed him that ear. After all, he has let me do plenty of ranting to him during the course of those twenty-plus years that we have been friends.

A half hour later, when I got off the phone, I tried to get myself back into the proper frame of mind for writing “Dinner With Deirdre” but it didn’t work. I had lost my train of thought. When that happens, I usually have to get up and move around. Often, if I perform some mindless chore, like emptying the dishwasher or whipping up some cookie batter, that helps me get my mind right for literary work. So I went into the kitchen and emptied the dishwasher. And because I was in the kitchen it was only natural that I began thinking about my essay. And then, voila, I found myself back in the proper frame of mind to do some writing. So after emptying the dishwasher and reloading it with the handful of dishes I had dirtied while squeezing some fresh orange juice earlier in the day, I went back to my keyboard and prepared to add a few more sentences to “Dinner With Deirdre.” But I never got the chance. Darrell called again.

“Dude, now she’s at 112 [or whatever]! At the rate she’s going, she’ll be number one by this time tomorrow.”

Apparently Amazon.com updates its bestseller list ever hour or so. I have no reason to know this because, unlike Darrell, I don’t have any books for sale at Amazon. But Darrell, who only just recently gave up obsessing over his own sales number, now had a new sales number to obsess over. I let him rant and rave for a good twenty minutes before begging off. But once again I had lost my train of thought. So I went back to the kitchen and whipped up a batch of chocolate chip cookie batter. Just as I finished, the phone rang.

“Now she’s at number 104! Do you know what that means? Take away all the Twilight novels, the books by Stephen King, John Grisham, Danielle Steele, James Patterson, and Nora Roberts – and this book would probably be the number-one bestseller in the country!”

All day long, the same pattern repeated itself. Just as I was about to resume work on “Dinner With Deirdre,” Darrell would call and destroy my concentration. Around two o’clock it occurred to me that I might be able to calm him down a bit if I just did a little research into this book, Whip Smart, that had him so riled up. So I sought out Ms. Febos’ website and began reading excerpts from her bio, her resume, and her published work. Frankly, I had a hard time mustering up much outrage over any of it. The work seemed far too trivial to be worth all the hostility Darrell was lavishing on it. The only thing that kind of bothered me was Ms. Febos’ timeline. I haven’t read her book (and don’t intend to), so it’s probably foolish of me to make any kind of comment on its contents. What’s more, I’m not much bothered by the kind of soft-core sex work (spanking, verbal abuse, making water where one shouldn’t) that Ms. Febos appeared to specialize in during her dominatrix days. But judging from the reading material available at her website, it seems likely that the years of Ms. Febos’ foray into heroin abuse must have overlapped with the years when she was employed in various fields that had nothing to do with the sex trade, including possibly the years she spent teaching young writers in elementary and high schools. As far as I can tell, her drug abuse may have been carried out while she was matriculating at Sarah Lawrence or The New School, or while she was teaching at Hofstra or the Gotham Writers Workshop, or developing curriculums for the Baccalaureate School for Global Education in Astoria, New York. If this is true, it calls into question not only Ms. Febos’ own judgment and integrity (heroin addicts, like pedophiles, ought to try to avoid professions where they will be allowed to influence, and possibly prey upon, children) but also the unimpeachable reputations of the many prestigious institutions at which she has matriculated or worked. If a heroin junkie can breeze through Sarah Lawrence or the New School, maybe the curriculums at those schools aren’t all that strenuous. And if a junkie can manage to hold down a job at PMA Literary & Film Management, where, in 2001 and 2002, Ms. Febos, according to her resume, “wrote manuscript reviews, managed correspondence with clients, read submitted manuscripts, [and] proofread, edited, and revised proposals,” maybe PMA Literary & Film Management isn’t an especially well-run operation.

I have no doubt that Ms. Febos’ memoir will soon be heralded in such places as The New York Times Book Review and The Village Voice as a “bold and daring work of self-exposure, lacerating in its honesty, devastating in its depiction of the way American women in the 21st Century still find themselves fetishized and objectified in our supposedly post-feminist society” or some such nonsense. She will appear on talk shows and speak earnestly about such weighty matters as “female self-esteem,” “The Persistence of the Patriarchy,” and “sex as the ultimate American consumer item.” Blah, blah, blah. I doubt if anyone who interviews her or writes about her will bother to ask her about the morality of buying and abusing illegal drugs and thereby putting money into the hands of drug dealers, many of whom, no doubt, exploit young women by hooking them on narcotics and then forcing them to work in the real sex-trade, the hardcore sex-trade and not the phony world of horsewhips and golden showers that Ms. Febos dabbled in while earning her MFA or reviewing manuscripts for PMA. Ms. Febos used her own money to make a great big fat contribution to an industry – the illegal drug trade – that is notorious for driving its female victims into lives of horror and degradation. But don’t expect anyone to mention that in a book review.

Because I haven’t read her book, it was probably foolish of me to have even commented on Ms. Febos. But it saddens me that, just across the street from my house, there lives a school teacher who conducts her personal and professional lives with honor and integrity but who will never get anywhere near the kind of attention or money that Ms. Febos, also an educator, is about to receive because of her crappy book. Even I, who intended to make this essay a celebration of my odd dinnertime connection with Deirdre have instead allowed it to become a 3000-word screed about Ms. Febos and her book – which is currently the 97th best-selling title at Amazon.com.

Blame it on Darrell.