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This Is Us
To Renew Your Friendships, Be Radically Transparent
When I revealed deeply personal details of my life in my memoir, my friendships changed in ways I never expected
I was already a bit of a mess a year ago, just as the world changed forever. I bit my nails, pulled out strands of hair. I stared at the ceiling some nights, convinced I could hear a faint, constant ringing. “Aren’t you nervous for your book to come out?!” people asked. “Not really,” I answered. I don’t know why it felt right to lie. Not right — essential, as though only by performing cool-girl calm could I show my panic who was boss, shove it back into its hole.
I have struggled with anxiety throughout my life, but this wasn’t the generalized hovering kind I was used to. A specific worry dominated my waking life: that when my memoir was published, people would hate me. I took that worry and divided it into dozens of worries, like a baker shaping individual balls from one big mass of dough. I thought about who exactly was going to hate me and how. I imagined what they were going to think, what they would say about me, and it was like pressing “play” on a lifetime of insecurities. All my fears, all the things I hated about myself. It was a long song.
Of course I wasn’t arrogant enough to think everyone in my life would run out and buy my memoir. But just the idea that some of my tenderest truths, my deepest shame, would be out there for all to judge — it sent a ripple of terror through me.
I tried to soothe myself, thinking there wasn’t anything that damning in the book. Or that private, really. Right? Just — mentally scanning its pages — a little promiscuity, my sister’s addiction, my parents’ divorce, my alcoholism, marital infidelity, obsessive relationship with a heroin addict, a miscarriage, an abortion, violent sex, drug use, oh my god I can’t publish this! That was the cycle.
I started to pathologize the impulse to write all of this down in the first place. Who does that? For solace, I turned where I always turn: books. I had kept to a strange literary diet while writing, afraid of unwittingly emulating others’ style. But now, on the eve of publication, I felt I could read whatever I wanted. I devoured…
