Transparency

I like to tell my writing students that no matter what we're writing about, at some level we're always writing about ourselves. That, in fact, every extensive writing process is a process of self-discovery and self-transformation. And sure enough, it's clear to me now that the huge changes I've put The Undressing of America through reflect changes in its author.
      I always worked behind a curtain. I'd disappear into my writing, not show anyone pieces until it felt good enough, dance around questions like "how's the book going," say little about my inner life, and finally unveil the finished work as the image of me I wanted the world to see. It was a strategy learned in childhood, and it worked well for me for a long time.
      For a while I collaborated on humor writing with Will Jacobs and on comics with artists and editors, but then I consciously turned my career toward books and screenplays I could write alone. I wanted always to be the captain of my own ship, and only to be seen when I sailed into port. (And if possible with time to change into my dress whites before anyone saw me.) Nor was that just in my work life: I worked just as hard to keep my messier thoughts and emotions to myself too, along with some big arenas in my private life.

      Much of what drew me to the story of Bernarr Macfadden in the first place was his unbendable self-direction, his extravagant, swaggering, bull-headed, frequently absurd but strangely admirable belief that he'd learned from his own experience everything he needed to know about everything.
      But the more I worked on this book, the more a different element of his life and character came to fascinate me: he was a pioneer of the 20th Century passion for self-exposure, offering himself as an example to others not only through images of his nearly naked body but with retellings of some of his most intimate and painful experiences. 
      He embodied that passion in a magazine, True Story, that changed popular culture forever by founding an industry on the stripping away of polite concealment, for the purposes of both titillation and inspiration. Another of his magazines ran one of the first mainstream endorsements of Alcoholics Anonymous and its idea that telling our own stories with rigorous honesty can bring recovery.
      For quite a while I followed my shifting interest and thoroughly rethought the book before I put the pieces together: the focus of the story was shifting largely because my own strategies of concealment were no longer working. Without going into too many gory details, my solitary decision making and compartmentalizing had cost me friendships, nearly killed my marriage, and left me feeling deeply isolated. I'd also slammed into a stone wall on the solitary writing road. I could just no longer make myself go on alone.
      Out of sheer necessity I managed to transform my personal life by pulling down the curtains and throwing open the windows. In one of those twelve-step "rigorous honesty" programs I learned that the antidotes to shame and fear were to tell my whole story, and I found, contrary to everything I'd grown up thinking, that people were more likely to accept me if I showed up before them completely transparent.
      In my work life, though, I was far slower to pry off the lid. I sought a community by joining the San Francisco Writers Grotto, but I resisted admitting how stuck I was on this book. Pretty soon, in fact, I was resisting even showing up there, so I wouldn't have to face too many people asking, "How's the book going?" I found alternatives to isolation—collaborating again with my old friend Will, teaching writing classes, helping with Grotto events—but still kept my struggles with this book very private. 

      I did start to blog about it all, and then to tell a widening circle of friends that this book was "giving me trouble," but that was more translucency than transparency, and colored translucency at that, a Coke-bottle-green version of the truth. But I could never really get this final draft rolling until I was willing to tell the world the one thing I was most afraid to say: that I needed help. 
      Because that's always been the one thing I've never wanted to admit. That I couldn't handle a situation all by myself. That I wasn't in control. That I needed someone else to help me. Hence the appeal of solitary writing in the first place. I could create a project that was all mine, withdraw into it, deflect everyone's concern, and emerge only when I'd fixed everything.
      Except this time I wasn't fixing everything. This time I had to admit that I was powerless against my own confusion and fear, that I needed other people to know what I was facing and help me straighten it out. So, like the Ancient Mariner, I told everyone who would listen how pathetically far behind I was and what a terrifying mountain of work rose still ahead of me. To those who wanted to help I've handed my schedule, made regular  productivity reports (or non-productivity confessions), talked through my confusion, and showed chunks of lumpy prose as quickly as I churned them out. In return, I've offered myself as an accountabilibuddy (to steal a term from South Park) in their work.
      It's worked, too. What I was unable to do alone I've been able to do as part of a community. As we were too fond of saying in the '90s, it takes a village. But village life is not conducive to privacy and self-direction. Everyone in a village knows your business, and everything you do affects everyone else. 
     It was the intimacy and communality that comes with transparency that I'd been looking for all along, and it was this book that brought me to realize it, in more ways than one.