I Am Trying to Break Your Heart

Once, in a workshop, I was pressed by a shockingly hostile roundtable of peers to explain why, precisely, it is that I write. Within the cobwebby cortex of my brain, a number of fragmented imaginings popped and fizzed like fireworks as, aloud, I moved through a series of speech disfluencies—“uh,” “well,” “you know,” “I mean,” &c.—trying to buy some time. Oddly, regardless of the fact that I’ve been writing fiction for fifteen years and actively submitting to major publications for eight, I’d never before been asked the question. I only vaguely recall my answer that day (emotion, like alcohol, sometimes mercifully discourages the formation of accurate memory), but what I discovered within minutes of the utterance I offered was that everything I’d said was either a justification—a lie I was telling the others—or a rationalization—a lie I was telling myself. I wasn’t ready for the question.

That afternoon, my peers seemed pleased to have me obviously on the defensive. “On the defensive” is never the likeliest time one will offer up honesty, but the issue was trickier than self-protectiveness. The question was too simple, too primal. Like asking a man why he enjoys orgasm. If Freud was right about anything, it was that too infrequently do humans examine their motivations. I’d never asked myself the question; writing always felt like a biological imperative to me. Logically, I knew it was not. I knew there must be a better answer.

Shortly after that class, I sat with a fat glass of scotch in front of my mahogany bookshelves, scanning the titles in my library. Some, I’d read a dozen times and I’d relished every expedition. I tried to descry my own motivation to write by first finding out why it is I read others’ writing. For a while, I was frustrated. I started coming up with contrivances: soundbites which, albeit dishonestly, would seem to answer the damned question if it was ever again asked. Soundbites which, hell, might even make me out to be rather clever and perceptive. But again, none of them were, strictly speaking, the truth.

I decided to take a break before quitting completely. I slipped some vinyl from a waxy dust jacket; I set it on the spindle, and let the needle fall. After a couple of crackles and snaps, my favorite nasal baritone echoed through the room. “So impressed with all you do,” the man sang. “Tried so hard to be like you.” The words were only coincidentally relevant, but I felt reinvested in the question, and scrutinized my library with them in mind. I saw on my shelves the complexly, deftly composed prose of my heroes: Italo Calvino, Andrew Crumey, Kurt Vonnegut, and Douglas Coupland. I adored their works. I was inspired by the ingenuity and labyrinthine metafictions woven by the former pair; inspired by the earnest desperation evident in the plainspokenness of the latter. I looked up at the oeuvres of Kazuo Ishiguro, Dan Chaon, Kevin Brockmeier. Their quiet microcosms of quotidian experience often seemed eerily perfect simulacra; their texts comprise scads of character studies of unremarkable men and women, each going far in proving that everything and everyone unexceptional is generally anything but. Would that I could, I thought. I began to sing along with the record.

By the end of the song, the singer, Trent Reznor, screams over a cacophonic stacking of a half-dozen guitars. “How you said, ‘you and me’? ‘Make it through’? Didn’t quite. Fell apart. Where the fuck were you?” I’d sung this song hundreds of times. The “you” to whom I’d sung had changed over the decade or so since its composition—he was a best friend who’d left my city without saying goodbye; the father I never met, who’d been aggrieved to find I’d been conceived after his vasectomy. She was my dead mother; she was one old lover who’d promised everything while planning a transatlantic escape, or another who’d left the diamond ring in an envelope with some Vicodin and an index card that said, “Sorry. I can’t. This might help.” Above me, on those sturdy shelves, I saw thin trade paperbacks where characters like these might have felt at home: among the doleful, skeletal stories of Amy Hempel, Miranda July. I spotted a volume by Michael Parker and one by George Saunders, both of which detail the exigencies of broken men, pathetic men. Men I often felt resembled me. Dan Chaon penned a text that centered on such a man. It’s entitled You Remind Me of Me. It occurred to me that everything I’d ever read by these men and women should have been disheartening. It was comforting, instead.

I’ve seen it performed, the song I listened to that night. The experience is one of the best memories in my thirty years on Earth. In a room of two thousand, I stood in the front row—sweating through denim, losing my hearing, being beaten from behind by heavier men who craved my space: flush against a rusted, inflexible cordon into which I was pressed with rib-fracturing force. That night, this singer and I, we sang that song synchronously. I screamed the same words into his face that he screamed into mine. We both went hoarse. If he happened to see me there in front of him, I hope he mistook the wetness on my cheeks for sweat and sweat alone.

The rugose cortices of human beings are riddled with things we call mirror neurons. Mirror neurons explain why yawning is contagious. These cells fire when another performs a recognizable action—they fire as if we ourselves were performing that action. Monkey see, monkey do—literally. A few of the higher primates have them. Not cats. I love my cat more than most anyone, but if I yawn in her face, she merely smells my breath. When she yawns in mine, however, I yawn right back. Mirror neurons make us capable of sympathy. Synchronized feeling.

Recalling the moments my favorite singer and I spent singing that song into one another’s faces, I realized why it is I write. I write to get mirror neurons firing. To synchronize feeling. I write to feel with my characters; I write hoping that my readers will feel along with me.

Most theorists and philosophers, from Aristotle on, agree that all art is inherently cathartic for both artist and audience. The tortured artist, writing to excise his demons, has always been romanticized. But art is not simply purgative, it also expresses a basal yearning: every artist creates a communiqué through which he hopes to be heard, understood, validated, but he also offers up a world in which a reader might himself feel understood and validated. Art isn’t just expulsion, it’s a simultaneous invitation. Art is a communal gesture. And literature is the most personal of the arts.

Human failings often make painting rather ephemeral. A viewer can consume a work so quickly—literally at the speed of light—that many people feel a single viewing will suffice. This single viewing certainly doesn’t allow for a great deal of time to connect. Motion pictures require scores of men and women to assemble. Even that favorite record—on which almost every instrument is played by the same single soul who wrote both the notes and the words he sings—had guest contributors, producers, a sound tech or two. With literature, yes, some editors offer helpful suggestions. But generally, they are not so much co-creators as they are gardeners—pruning the overgrown hedges of text, repotting the roses in more appropriate locations. Reading quality literature is as close as one can ever get to being inside the head of someone else. A good book, or short story, is an overture from the insular to the insular, in hope of a meeting of minds, in hope of at least one moment of communion, interiority—rare as a black lotus. Kurt Vonnegut once suggested that “people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things that you care about…You are not alone.’” Vonnegut was right about the former, wrong about the latter. But the reality doesn’t matter. In some cases, it is the illusion that counts.

The facts are as follows: on the ugly and unjust world we call Earth, no one will ever truly understand any other person, nor will he be understood; communication is always an approximation, a partial illusion—everyone’s lexicon is tainted by personal connotations. It is unpleasant to admit any of this. But it’s all irrefutable. This is where nihilists quit. In Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk insists that something must come after self-destruction, after nihilism, and I believe him. And that something might just be the realization that though the world may be a lonely wasteland, and life is positively not always a gift, there are punctuative moments of grace, and at least the illusion of what Douglas Coupland has called interiority—the experience of “getting” someone, or being “gotten”; essentially a synonym for communion, but without all the unnecessary Catholic connotations. It is in love and literature that human beings feel least alone. This is why I write.

My frequent explorations inside the minds of my favorite writers comprise the hours in my life that I have felt least alone. It is with literature that I have most frequently experienced Coupland’s interiority: this sensation of intimate simultaneity, the comforting of an experience or feeling completely shared. And I want through my writing to do nothing less than at least occasionally create singular moments of interiority for those who would—who do—otherwise feel entirely alone. For the bulk of our lives, many of us will be metaphorically paraphrasing the end of that song: “How you said, ‘you and me’? ‘Make it through’? Didn’t quite. Fell apart. Where the fuck were you?” The goal of my fiction is to provide a series of instants in which my reader is not repeating that mantra. Kurt Vonnegut once claimed that the greatest problem human beings face is loneliness. He believed in a cure. I do not. But I believe in the efficacy of palliative treatment.

For the six hours it took me to cruise through You Remind Me of Me, I felt like I was understood—like I was compassionately understood—and like I understood someone else. His protagonist, Jonah, is an invention, an apparition; I had not and probably will not ever meet Chaon. All of this understanding is ultimately illusory. But it never felt that way. When I read Chaon’s novel, all I felt was the truth of its title: You Remind Me of Me. In a sentence copped from one of my own stories, “the brain is quite easy to dupe using optical ruses.” Reading Chaon’s novel for six hours felt like communion—true human communication. Interiority. This and nothing less is what I aspire to in my own work. It falls to outside judgment whether or not I am successful.

Some of my methods in pursuit of this goal may seem counterintuitive. The world depicted in my fiction is not gritty; gritty is a word for films noir. Rather, I’m shooting for representative. I aim for candor, which necessarily entails description of the grotesque, the vulgar. The world constructed by my fiction is reportedly discomfiting, like the disgusting, but more satiric, slapstick universe of Chuck Palahniuk. However, unlike Palahniuk, I’m not trying to shock anyone. Rather, as Michael Parker once said during an interview, “I am trying to break your heart.” I hope the world my fiction works to create more closely resembles the still-discomfiting—but not gratuitously vulgar—stark, ennui-ridden, and disappointment-heavy worlds described in the stories of Amy Hempel and especially Miranda July. Regardless, I do intend my fiction to make the reader if not a little queasy, then definitely disquieted. But this is because for a thing to be transcendent, there must first be something to transcend.

In language, my fiction strives to emulate Ishiguro’s meticulous attention to seemingly banal details which feel, eventually, relevant and fresh—defamiliarized, in the Shklovskian sense. His Remains of the Day is about the tiny life of a butler who consistently fails to act. Yet it is riveting. Ishiguro’s prose loses nothing in its self-indulgence, its propensity to focus and dwell so intently on a setting, an object, an action. This is a quality I hope could be ascribed to my own prose. Similarly, the prose of David Foster Wallace is unafraid to alienate a portion of its audience right off the bat. I commend his artistic decision to craft such insightful, yet Rube Goldbergian prose; I believe that this is a gesture of enormous faith in and respect for his readers (no one likes to be spoken down to). And while I am not afraid to lapse occasionally into a similar sententiousness, into sesquipedalism, I hope not to immediately alienate 95% of my potential audience as Wallace tends to. I believe that there’s nothing wrong with high art that excludes people; indeed, I believe that high art must be to some degree elitist—otherwise one ends up pandering to the lowest common denominator. I’m not working towards creating prose which might be sold on a rotating kiosk in an airport bookstore. But I’m also not working to create Finnegans Wake: to craft sentences which can only be completely understood by people with multiple PhD’s (many of whom are still pretending anyway).

Recently, a professor likened my use of language and syntax to the sonic qualities of Trent Reznor’s body of work. I had never considered this. His modus operandi is to layer dissonant and grating sounds to the point of confusion and sometimes beyond; he works in chromatic melodies—following one note with another that even untrained ears know should not go together. Occasionally, my sentences are labyrinthine; punctuation becomes complex in multi-clause structures; the vocabulary of my stories, though intended to allow for greater specificity, sometimes seems designed only to exhaust my readers. And in my metafictional dalliances, my stories consistently interrupt themselves with satirical and meandering footnotes. Sometimes that musician’s songs seem flat-out aurally harrowing: one uses for percussion the sound of African children slapping the hide of a dead elephant; another degenerates purposively into a “bit-crunched” unpleasantness which intentionally replicates the sound of blown speakers. But at the core of each of his compositions is something more generous and tender. This man who’s made his name by making music that is the opposite of mellifluous is, after all, a classically trained pianist quite capable of rendering traditionally beautiful music. And indeed, upon pondering, a listener may observe that his songs often prove to be delicate and beautiful, naked and vulnerable, but disguised by a harsh mask. That mask is more than machismo or posturing, more than mere defense mechanism. It exists because for a thing to be transcendent, there must first be something to transcend; because, anymore, no one trusts undefended earnestness. Similarly, beneath the sometimes exhausting façade of my stories, there lurks an absolutely guileless core in which I want desperately to share something very specific with my reader. Whatever complexities describe my writing, at the heart of it all is a hope for connection.

My characters, as I’ve said, are intended as representative. I have no Skywalker-type heroes, no rascals with hearts of gold, no classically tragic Icaruses. My fiction centers on characters who fail more often than they succeed, as do Ishiguro’s, Chaon’s, Parker’s, and Saunders’. They change very little if at all, which—though I realize it violates a cardinal rule of storytelling—I believe is an accurate representation of human existence. See Ishiguro’s little-changed (or changed-too-late) butler in Remains, or the unnamed main character in Wallace’s “The Depressed Person.” I believe too many fictional characters are possessed of too much continuity; I believe there is an important difference between “keeping in character” and creating dull, lifeless, dishonest characters. As such, my protagonists contradict themselves in subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways, as do real people, but hopefully not to such an extent that they seem unrealistic, or not possessed of unity. And most importantly, they are alone—at least they feel that way.

These methods—settings which are dismal at best, language which is often arduous or tortuous, and miserable characters who consistently fail—may seem nonconducive to my goal of creating fiction which allows for interiority. But I believe fiction that most closely resembles the world in which we, as readers, really live is the writing in which people can find occasional moments of human communion. Fairy tales don’t comfort us as adults. And sitcoms merely provide escape. It is impossible to recognize oneself in the panglossian; and if no mirror neurons are firing, there can be no synchronous feeling. Loneliness persists. My stories, I hope, are the sort which allow for the intimacy of interiority.

“The Proxy” creates a grotesque world, dominated by a man confused about what it means to be masculine, in order that that world might be transcended. It is intended to discomfit so that the moments of grace it eventually attempts to convey can be sensed more acutely—a sort of painting with negative space. The world of “Closed Even When Open” is less vulgar and more bleak; its finish is quite nihilistic. Still, I hope that that world will seem not exaggerated, but familiarly disappointing and that this will allow readers to connect, to commune, with its protagonist, and his moment of sheer existential dread.

Of course, I try and make every sentence of every story deliberate and distilled—by which I mean I try not to waste words—but I don’t consider it wasteful to try to pen sentences as linguistically beautiful as they are functional, even if that makes them seem more indulgent. Many are composed with both sense and consonance in mind—a technique common in the fiction of another influence, Alex Rose. The language of “Ebb,” in particular, is unapologetically tortuous—some of the vocabulary is abstruse, some sentences leave subject and predicate well out of friendly distance. Again, I realize that this may be off-putting to a percentage of readers. Yet I maintain that sometimes difficult prose—in the case of Wallace or even Calvino—compliments its readership by implying a belief in its readers’ ability to eventually decipher and delight in the text.

“Gehenna” centers around a lonely, failing man who barely changes, as he weaves in and out of the lives of women who have been able to change, to overcome. He is not inspirational. But he may feel familiar. If he is successfully fleshed-out, I intend him to serve as a sort of mirror. Each reader, in his heart, has a dark place where he worries that he isn’t good enough, that he is a fraud, that he has wasted his life—the specifics differ from individual to individual. Most people strive to avoid this place within themselves because it is unpleasant, because it is there that they feel loneliest. Reading other authors, it is with characters that dwell in that place, that earnestly express these troubling, estranging sentiments, that I have best connected. It is through characters like that, who have reflected my own vulnerability, I have learned that “vulnerable” is a synonym for “open”; in turn, it is only with such characters that I have been able to truly commune. I have read stories with protagonists for whom I feel both compassion and real love; in turn, I have tried to write characters who are sympathetic, who can be loved. Error, from “Gehenna”; Cara, from “Ebb”; and Cyril from “Revenants” have been especially constructed with this idea in mind. I hope for them to produce in at least a reader or two moments of interiority, of anti-loneliness.

One of the few things I’ve learned in my life which I might brashly presume to be a nugget of wisdom is about that dark place within us all. There, it seems everyone either fears or believes that he or she is, for some reason, abnormal. Fear and belief, in this case, may be synonyms. But, curiously, it seems to me that the reasons a person worries he might be strange are the things which, if he let them, might connect him most to others—prompting people to say, “You remind me of me.” I can think of no more intimate expression.

I expect no one to “relate” to the often bizarre protagonists in my work—the phrase “I can relate” is more often than not an empty and disingenuous reaction to literature. But I do hope that these pitiful and pitiable men and women, fleshed-out and intended to be more human than human, will incite the firing of mirror neurons. That, in reading the details of an amputee’s phantom pains, a young woman’s fight against a dependence born of modern American media saturation and socialization, or a questionably heterosexual sadist’s exploitation of a boy’s love for his handicapped brother, readers might, surprisingly, feel less alone—if only for a moment.