Dear Book Therapist: A New Advice Column from Rosalie Knecht

Do you have a problem? Do you want a book to help you solve it? Book Therapist is Rosalie Knecht, LMSW, a licensed therapist and author of the novels Relief Map and Who is Vera Kelly? (Tin House, June 2018). She will be taking questions monthly for Lit Hub at booktherapy@lithub.com. You can also follow her on Twitter @rosalieknecht and Instagram @rosaliekn.

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Dear Book Therapist,

I have forgotten, or maybe I never knew, why I shouldn’t listen to the nasty, self-loathing voice inside myself, let alone take what it says as objective truth.

Perhaps (another) book can solve it?

–Listening to Loathing

Dear Listening to Loathing,

Whose voice is it that you’re hearing? We come into the world blobby, porous, and indefinite. We only learn that we’re individuals by bouncing off others, feeling that friction and give. Once we know we’re individuals, we work on figuring out what kind of individuals we are. But we first learn that by what others tell us, and by the time we’re old enough to be discerning about other people’s opinions, some of the bad ones have settled in deep.

So whose voice is that, the loathing one?

It might be hard to ignore that voice because it belongs to somebody you love. Or it could be that it’s backed up by powerful ideas in the culture you live in. It could be both. But as long as you’re not sure where it’s coming from, it will continue to sound like a profound and universal truth instead of some dumb nonsense that you have outgrown. I can tell you’ve outgrown it because you’ve already externalized it—you know it’s not you, exactly. But you’re not sure that it’s not right. (It isn’t.)

I saw Lynda Barry speak once, and she said, referring to the inner voice that tells a creative person that they’re an idiot and their work is trash: “Would I listen to anyone else who talked to me that way? No, I would think ‘That person’s an asshole’ and I would never talk to them again.” I’ve found that this is an extremely useful rubric to apply to self-talk. Would I remain friends with a person who spoke to me the way I’m speaking to myself right now? Would I even remain in the same room with them, for that matter, let alone spend the rest of my day in dialogue with them?

From Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!

Lynda Barry has written and drawn a lot about feeling fundamentally incorrect—that she is not the right kind of girl, girlfriend, daughter, woman, artist, person. Always slightly off, too much, not enough. She definitely knows who her inner loathing voice is (it’s her mom!*). And she has learned to live with that voice without paying too much attention to it. This is one of the themes of her work, evident in all of her comics of weirdo kids, but is perhaps most explicitly the subject of her lovely and semi-autobiographical One! Hundred! Demons!, which you should read.

The demons of the title are a drawing exercise, but really they’re the inner voice. Confronted with demons she has drawn herself that are hurling invective at her, Barry does nothing dramatic. She just continues to draw, and the demons slowly quiet until she can observe them with interest instead of run from them. “Why are we compelled to repeat the past?” she asks later, as a bad boyfriend is transformed before her eyes into her mother, complete with cigarettes, bathrobe, and Tagalog curses. She doesn’t answer the question, but a therapist would say that we repeat it because we’re hoping to get it right this time. To please the unpleasable. The unconscious has a slippery grasp of time.

–Book Therapist

*Book Therapist tries not to fall into reflexive mother-blaming, which is one of the banes of the psychotherapeutic professions, but Lynda Barry’s mom is really mean.

Dear Book Therapist,

I am a 23-year-old software engineer looking to begin writing seriously. I have taken courses in the past and felt that they had improved my writing, but I still could never begin telling a story, could never begin writing an essay or a book review. I feel my writing will never be seen.

I am looking for a book about writing, not so much about style or storytelling, but how one makes a career of it, how one begins to “be” a writer. I don’t just mean being a novelist, it could mean beginning to write essays. Maybe a book on the writer’s life and how they began and what it means to be a writer.

–Engineer Waiting to Write

Dear Engineer Waiting to Write,

Please forgive me while I make a series of assumptions about you based on the little information I have. I’m really struck by the words, “I feel my writing will never be seen.” I’m also struck by the fact that you seem to feel inhibited—very inhibited—about putting the words down, so that they could be seen; that you’re young, and that you have the kind of job that requires very little revelation of yourself to others. Because writing is solitary and private, we sometimes forget that it’s possible to get stage fright about it. I think you have stage fright.

There are infinite answers to the question of how to be a writer. It depends on what kind you’d like to be! Would you like to be the kind of writer who makes a living teaching at a college, has sabbatical time in which to write huge sprawling prestige works, and spends a lot of time introspecting while also strenuously avoiding real insight into your own behavior? Please take a crack at Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys. Would you like to be the kind who actually makes a lot of money on books and scripts, takes the art of it quite seriously, is fired by huge ego and intense insecurity, and cuts a swathe of destruction through Hollywood and himself? Please read Tom Hiney’s Raymond Chandler: A Biography, which is a valuable lesson on the fact that success does not make happiness, although it can take the edge off misery. How about something that might be closer to your actual life—a person with a steady corporate job, who also writes? There’s a character like that in the multivocal and lovely Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris’ novel about the various souls bumping around inside an ad agency. Would you like to be cured of any romantic notions about the actually-utterly-broke type of writer, the pawning-your-winter-coat, persistent-cough, holes-in-your-shoes artiste? Read Down and Out in Paris and London, in which George Orwell barely survives by washing dishes in a restaurant kitchen after getting his meager earnings from writing for magazines stolen from his room in a boarding house.

Also, consider the amazing fact that Mary Renault wrote her first novels while working as a nurse during World War II, which I keep in mind to check myself from complaining about not having enough writing time on weekends.

But here’s the thing. The way that you will be a writer is by being you, but with writing added in. Exactly where you are right now is a perfectly good place to start. The thing holding you back is not that you don’t know what to do (no one does). It’s that you’re afraid to reveal yourself. The only way it gets easier is by practice. As a software engineer, you probably have discipline. That’s a great gift! Use it. And thank God you don’t have to grapple with being Raymond Chandler at the same time.

–Book Therapist

Questions may be edited for length and clarity. This column does not constitute medical advice. If you’re in distress, please talk to your doctor or contact 1-888-NYC-WELL. If you’ve been thinking for a while about seeing a therapist, maybe today’s the day to reach out.