For the next few weeks, I’m going to revisit one of my favorite themes and – in my opinion – one of the most important tasks facing any creative writer: Being authentic.

On the plus side, being authentic is as easy as being yourself. There’s only one you and you know that person from the inside out. And if you don’t know yourself, you should. You’re amazing. If you’re not sure where to start, I can recommend some books.

On the down side, writers are inundated by advice that can drain the personality from your work. The market demands such and such. Readers insist on thus and so. If you tried to implement the various have-to’s set forth by the hive mind, your writing might become technically more proficient, but also practically indistinguishable from the manuscript produced by the monkey to your left.

You’ll still find plenty of advice urging you to put yourself into your work – and God bless all of it – but even that guidance is often couched in terms that are intended to render you palatable to the market, whatever that might be this week. You will never read an article in…let’s say Writer’s Digest…urging you to ignore the desires of agents and publishers. No matter how good their advice may be, their articles are intended for writers who want to be steered into the publishing funnel.

I prefer writers who march to their own drum, who write what they want, in the genre and form they want, and who publish in whatever format they want. I would much rather read the interesting but imperfect output of a writer who poured their passion into their work, than a technically well-crafted novel constructed to reach the largest possible audience mass, which could have been written by any anonymous author who mastered the formula. A feature piece in Rolling Stone might be better written, but give me the folded and stapled DIY zine published by a couple of kids who are consumed by love for their favorite local band. One cinematic bomb like Megalopolis is worth 25 by-the-numbers summer blockbusters.

That doesn’t mean we eschew excellence. Excellence and authenticity are not mutually exclusive, but your first responsibility is to yourself. You can become the best possible version of your writing self without one whit of regard for what other people think about your thoughts, passions, dislikes, philosophies, experiences, and observations. In fact, I’d say that’s the latter provides you with the best route for achieving the former.

Of course, being authentic does not mean being half-assed. If you’re going through the bother of writing, you might as well have craft skills. Those skills will help ensure that your authentic self is presented in the best possible way and that your readers pick up what you’re putting down. You may still fail, but do so by ambition, not through laziness.

Let’s call it the Build it and They Will Come School of Writing. Be yourself. Pursue your passions. Avoid the easy answer. Be great. The people who will appreciate you for who you are will find you. They may be outnumbered by the crowd who want the book equivalent of Hallmark Channel Christmas movies, but that smaller group is more valuable than rubies. Those are your people.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to talk about some writers who did it their way, who infused their work with their idiosyncrasies, geek interests, intrusive thoughts, political POVs, and secrets Batman couldn’t beat out of most people. As always, your mileage may vary, but IMO, these are writers who did it dirty and got it right. I guarantee every one of them were told not to do it that way, and every one got blasted by critics for doing it anyway.

I have a half dozen or so books to discuss over the next few weeks. Today, I’m resharing a post from last year, about a writer who wasn’t afraid to be ugly.

Writers are told to write truthfully and to be authentic. Be brave. Don’t hold back. Put yourself on the page. I’ve given that same advice here on the blog a few times.

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott says that if people wanted you to write nicely about them, they should have behaved better. Notwithstanding issues of libel, your experiences, your emotions, your pain, and your successes belong to you. You can and should write about them, even if the particulars are disguised as fiction.

For all that advice, I don’t see too many people sharing examples of what it means to be raw and truthful on the page. Who’s done it successfully? How did they do it? What worked? Someone may throw out a villainous protagonist, like Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley or Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, or the unreliable narrator in Fight Club. But they’re not exactly what I’m looking for in this context. At heart, most of us can’t relate to such characters. I have no doubt that Patricia Highsmith lived vicariously through Tom Ripley, using his victims as stand-ins for people she would have liked to club in real life, but catharsis isn’t necessarily the same as emotional truth.

Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield may be a good example. J.D. Salinger portrays Holden’s crisis of faith in heartbreaking detail, showing how grief can render us irrational and unlikeable. That’s probably something Salinger experienced himself. Most people wouldn’t enjoy spending an evening around such an obnoxious boy, but by the end of his story, we understand the source of his anger. While he annoys many readers, the chip on his shoulder is shrouded in black crepe, ultimately rendering him sympathetic.

But what about truths that aren’t disguised as fiction? Could I find an example of a writer who didn’t distance themselves from their worst aspects via a fictional character? As I brainstormed this topic for the blog, this memoir leapt to mind, a book by someone bold enough to put her ugliest self on the page.

Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession by Julie Powell

In Cleaving, Julie Powell – most famous for her first memoir, Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen – in part shares her obsession with learning to render butchered animals. After a few false starts, she lands an apprenticeship with Fleischer’s, a family-owned butcher shop in upstate New York. Powell’s experience at Fleischer’s takes up a good half of the book, and she doesn’t hold back on the details. A reader may be either fascinated or repulsed by her descriptions of the butchered and skinned animals, how they are rendered, and what’s left when the process is done, but the writing is sensual and compelling.

However, the story of Powell’s apprenticeship is merely the brown paper wrapped around the real meat of the memoir, the emotional butchery done to Powell’s husband, Eric, via Julie’s ongoing affair with a former lover.

Again, Powell doesn’t hold back. She does herself no favors in her writing. She gives no reason for the affair, other than physical obsession. She doesn’t pretend that it’s love. Her husband is aware of the affair throughout, yet doesn’t seek a divorce. Sadly – selfishly, cruelly – neither does Julie. Instead, she desires both the comfort of her marriage and the physical thrill of her affair, regardless of the emotional turmoil her husband suffers. Even when the affair ends, Powell waits for messages from her former lover, like a junkie craving a hit. When she’s gone from home too long, her husband suspects they are together, the trust in the marriage broken.

Throughout the memoir, I waited for a reversal – a reason for the affair, a realization on Powell’s part, or a change in her outlook that would lead her either to end or fix her marriage – but Powell doesn’t give herself that out. She remains unfathomably selfish and fails to identify what she’s missing or what she seeks.

And yet, I still rooted for her to figure it out. Even through the final pages of the memoir, I wanted Powell to share what she learned, what insight she gleaned from this years-long trainwreck she created from her marriage, but she withheld this from the reader. It would have been easy to craft a pat ending or convince the reader that she’d learned her lesson, but the final tone is a messy one, as life often is. She declines to rescue her reputation, which is brave AF.

Strangely, had this been fiction rather than a memoir, I’m sure I would have hated the book. Somehow, diving into the mind of a messy human is a much easier ask than following a selfish fictional narrator. In fiction, we crave resolution, catharsis, some lesson learned, or an emotional change. In this case, we might want a punishment.  We’d root for Eric to find the resolution Julie denies him. Powell doesn’t give the reader any of that, which is very true to life. We behave in ways we can’t predict, that contradict our morals and beliefs. We hurt people we love. We don’t learn lessons. We don’t find our motivation. We simply are, and sometimes that’s not attractive.

This wasn’t an easy read, especially as the version of Julie Powell in my head is the cute Amy Adams movie version. I was left with admiration for Powell as a writer, while disliking her immensely as a person. You don’t have to reveal yourself as fully as Powell does in Cleaving, but if you want a good example of a writer allowing herself to be raw and truthful on the page, you can start with this memoir, whose writer wasn’t afraid to be ugly with a capital Ugh.

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