Yesterday, I tweeted, and for that I would like to apologize—for the shame this has brought my family and loved ones, and to you, the people, and to any strangers who happened to see the tweet, whose day was three to five seconds shorter for having read the tweet, for the three to five seconds that I stole from you and them by tweeting. No one should ever tweet, and I’m sorry. That was wrong.
The tweet was just a rehash of a silly old complaint of mine, a whine born out of the annoyance of having listened to hundreds of NPR author interviews and reading-or-mostly-glancing-through ceaseless NYT book reviews these past few years, and so many of them about memoirs, each written by someone younger and less meaningfully accomplished than the last. Not that one must be old or accomplished to write a memoir, of course—though perhaps it’s worth noting that Hitler wrote Mein Kampf when he was about 35, and Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell came out when he was like 30, two memoirs that sold spectacularly well, and neither of which are examples that speak to the virtue of asking a young-ish person to describe their life and/or goals up to this point.
In response to an about-to-be-published memoirist’s opinion as expressed in the New York Times and then posted to Twitter—that “a fair number of the nonfiction books published today would be just as good or better if they were the length of a long magazine article”—I suggested that no one under 50 years of age should be permitted to publish book-length memoirs, in keeping with both my curmudgeonly ways and with the emphatic declarative hyperbole of the medium of Twitter, a bad website. Ari Shapiro, the memoirist in question and also an oddly frequent presence in my kitchen (via the radio), amusingly took the opportunity to pump his book pre-orders, as is both his right and his fiduciary responsibility to himself and his agent.
He also helpfully directed me to an excerpt from said book, which I may have already read when it published a while back, but I’m not sure. In either case, I obligingly read the excerpt, using up my one free article at The Atlantic this month, at least until I go cookie-hunting.
It Wasn’t Just Another Nightclub
Five years ago, I went to cover the Pulse shooting—and found myself unexpectedly close to the story.
By Ari Shapiro
The essay is about Ari going to cover the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub massacre, and how he believes that his unique perspective gives him special insight that some of his colleagues—professional, capable, well-meaning though they may be—simply lack. (The phrase “lived experience” makes its obligatory appearance, naturally enough for such an exercise, the fundamental redundance of the phrase no less glaring for having become well-ensconced cliché in The Discourse.) As someone who had spent time in the intimate and even sacred spaces that marginalized groups often carve out for themselves as refuge from a culture that pushes them away—in this case, gay bars—he feels particularly perspectivally qualified to understand the story, and hopes to use that understanding to communicate the story to the outside world. He wants to be careful not to instrumentalize the people he’s covering—he wants to treat them subject-to-subject, not subject-to-object, in the language of the piece.
One of the founders of the modern gay-rights movement, Harry Hay, used to talk about “subject-subject relationships.” He argued that society raises straight people to think about relationships as subject-object: the pursuer and the pursued, the conqueror and the conquest.
Journalism often feels that way. I arrive in a community and gather stories from people who live there. Their voices become ingredients in a recipe that I mix up, bake, and serve to an audience of strangers.
Hay believed that one reason gay people exist is to demonstrate a different way of relating to one another: not in service of a selfish goal, but in mutuality and recognition of one another as more than a means to an end. Not subject-object, but subject-subject.
The “de-meansing” of other people is perfectly admirable from a humanist perspective, of course! It’s even, perhaps, a good moral frame to keep in mind when approaching the work—work for which the former subject is paid, along with a travel stipend and a per diem and reimbursement for hotel and car rental, no doubt. There are all sorts of useful, humanitarian fictions that we construct that serve the underlying human dignity of the various people we interact with in our daily lives, and a reporter trying his best to keep the basic humanity of the people on which he’s reporting at the heart of his story is an example of this, and—bonus points!—it often serves the work. Especially when the work is covering unspeakable human tragedy. When the work is, ultimately, a product for unseen millions in their cars and their kitchens, going about their own human lives, subjects ourselves. Subjects with wallets.
Objects, too, then. All of us.
The maintenance of these fictions is crucial to the broader empathetic project of simply being a good person. One could even argue that the maintenance of these fictions helps make cooperation and mass human endeavor possible, and is one way we are distinguished from the other animals on the planet. But I think that an honest appraisal of such a project requires acknowledging the unyielding facts underneath those fictions—in this case, that Ari was sent to do a job, to produce a product, to turn this story of human failing and misery into a sort of newsradio widget (Or, in his framing, a baked good.) There is nothing wrong with the production of newsradio widgets, especially when done humanely, as Ari clearly strives to do it. But admitting to the transactional, instrumentalized nature of even this “subject-subject” relationship doesn’t undermine the humanity of the latter subject—rather, it reinforces it. Acknowledging the truth of the distance is a way of respecting that no matter how qualified the perspective, no matter how in-tune to their experience, you, the interloper, are not them. That there is not actually any such thing as being able to walk in another’s shoes. We humans are too big for that, our experiences too individualized. That their experience is fundamentally their experience, and that there is no overcoming the fact of our individuation. They are who they are, and the reporter is who he is. Whatever empathetic leveling the reporter brings—in terms of identity, in terms of lived experience—the reporter also takes. They take and they produce a widget. For us to listen to on the radio.
It’s a perfectly fine piece. I’m not trying to dump on it. That would be rude. But Ari himself makes the crucial point for me, and I don’t think it’s merely a semantic one. I think recognizing the difference matters, especially in terms of how we see other people—how we might imagine they are failing to live up to our “subject-subject” standards, when in fact they might be respecting the depth of others’ humanity in their own way.
I always try to warm up a guest with small talk before an interview, especially during a tragedy. So I mentioned to Billy that I’d been barhopping in Orlando more than a decade ago, where I’d made friends with those two bartenders.
Billy asked for the name of the bar where they’d worked.
“Oh, I don’t remember,” I said. “I’m sure it closed years ago.”
He prodded: “Well, what did it look like?”
I described the layout—dance floor to the left, cocktail lounge to the right.
“That was Pulse,” he said.
Of course it was. I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me earlier. Maybe I didn’t want to put myself at the center of the narrative. Maybe I didn’t want to imagine myself on that dance floor.
He uses small talk to make his subject more comfortable. Because it helps them relax and warm up to him, no doubt. And because that serves the work—and there’s nothing wrong with that. The widgets won’t make themselves, after all.
“Maybe I didn’t want to put myself at the center of the narrative.” A great instinct! And not just because of some old THE REPORTER MUST MAINTAIN STOIC DISTANCE AND PERFECT OBJECTIVITY nonsense that nobody can really keep to, anyway—but because the story isn’t about the reporter, or his identity, or his lived experience. It is about the people to whom this awful tragedy actually happened. Whether it was journalistic instinct or a decision made consciously, that psychic distance was good! Finding oneself—indulging the coincidence of identity and perspective—at the center of such a narrative would be to take something far worse from the objects of the reporting than simply instrumentalizing their story would be. It would be taking from them the thing that they possess that makes them distinct and dignified and themselves, the thing that makes them human. Their right to their own objectivity, gained through subjectiveness.
The subject—and the work!—is best served by acknowledging the distance, by respecting the underlying fact that we are not the people to whom it happened. By telling their story as humanely as possible, you already leave open the possibility that someone else will see their humanity reflected back at them. But it’s not the reporter’s various identity qualifiers that bridges the distance between the object of their reporting and the audience back home—it’s the humanity of the subject. Ari laid it out himself:
She said she didn’t know what her words were that night, and she doesn’t want to. Someone had sent her a recording of it, but she hadn’t listened. Yet, five years later, I often think of her words: “You are brave, and you are stronger than you think. We are going to get through it.”
Here is a subject who really doesn’t want to center herself in the narrative. Who won’t even listen to herself speak the words of defiance and courage that brought solace to her community, and whoever else needed to hear it. And I mean this with no cynicism: how instructive, how useful!
I want to go back to the Harry Hay paraphrase Shapiro uses in his piece, which—full disclosure—I believe comprises the entirety of my exposure to the writings of Harry Hay. The sort of broad sociological pronouncement referenced—that “one reason gay people exist is to demonstrate a different way of relating to one another: not in service of a selfish goal, but in mutuality and recognition of one another as more than a means to an end”—is very weird to me, and argues against itself. Gay people are not uniquely qualified in this regard, nor are straight people uniquely blinkered. This flattening of the broad range of human experience is a function of all broad sociological pronouncements—#NotAll_______s!—and, in this case, very plainly instrumentalizes them. The gays are here to show us how to be more humane to one another is just another way of trying to justify something that needs no justification.
Authority-via-identity claims are bullshit for many reasons, but primarily because they obscure the underlying human fact. Identity claims are useful in so far as they offer additional information, in so far as they are contextual—but they have been rebranded and almost weaponized as authoritative. This is perhaps understandable, especially because most authority-via-identity claims are made by those who believe themselves—often correctly—to have been marginalized in some way. But a person does not need the permission structure of their various identities to justify the authority of their position. A person is not more humanly expert than another because of their identity—this is not graduate school, your sexuality or skin color or gender is not a Master’s degree. Identity claims are a hat on a hat. To the extent that your identity opens otherwise closed doors, it is imperative to leave them there at the door, in recognition of the fact that the door ought not have been closed to anyone else in the first place. That the correctible mistake was believing that there are qualifiers on human dignity.
But lived experience can be worth something too. And I brought a unique set of experiences to this particular story.
Identity can be a useful way in, an empathetic shortcut our brains take to make other humans more immediately human to us. Identity makes it easier to tell the stories of other people to ourselves, but is often antithetical to telling those stories to anyone else. Identity, as understood here, is necessarily self-centering.
Memoir is also the act of centering oneself, for better or for worse. It always feels like a shortcut to human understanding to me, and usually a false one—a Wikipedia summary of a life, the SparkNotesing of a human. I find them more interesting as unintentional windows into the mind of the author, or what he or she wants me to believe is the mind of the author, than whatever it is they’re ostensibly trying to tell me. If I really want to learn something about a subject—or hope to communicate it, for that matter—I find our various fictions a much more humane, and humanizing, approach.
