A frequent contributor to such estimable publications as The New York Times Magazine and GQ, David Rakoff began his writerly career on Public Radio International’s This American Life. He is author of two aching, witty essay collections: Fraud and Don’t Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems. He spoke with Essays Editor Sandra Allen on the telephone. Afterwards, she realized her ancient tape recorder had failed entirely, to which he replied, “Oh, honey, I had to re-interview Mary Tyler Moore once because I wasn’t plugged in. I completely understand,” and re-answered all her questions, this time in writing.
Sandra Allen, Wag’s Revue: You began your writing career in journalism (or what you’ve referred to as faux journalism), writing features essays for various publications. As you’ve gained the ability to call your own shots as a writer, though, you’ve continued to produce essays. Though you’ve read a humorous poem or two on This American Life, you haven’t yet done what many writers would do with a bit of attention and convert to fiction writing. Why the essay?
David Rakoff: It’s for exactly the reasons you say, precisely because of those words “with a bit of attention.” Although virtually no one knows who I am—I’ve been at parties and such where I run into self-professed rabid fans of This American Life, arguably the closest thing I have to a semi-regular gig, certainly a venue to which I owe my career, and one with which I am fairly strongly identified, and when I say my name or describe my work in response to the whole “What do you do?” question, all I get back are blank stares, so I don’t want to make it seem that I’m overstating my essentially non-existent renown—but things do feel a little more public, the bar raised higher, etc. Anything new that I might try is subject to more scrutiny than it was when I was just writing for myself and still holding down my day job.
I don’t think I’m unique among writers when I say that writing a novel would be some sort of Holy Grail (the true dream would be to write a play, but it scares me so precisely because of how much I’d love to have done it, so I probably never shall), although I don’t read as much fiction as I do nonfiction. And there are times when I am about to go out to report a story when I am overcome by the kind of frightened disinclination that marks most new experiences for me, and I am almost undone by a desire for the talent to stay at home and make it up out of whole cloth from my imagination, but I’m not sure I’m capable of that. I never fail to be struck, when overhearing something on the subway or street, or interviewing someone and they say something, and I think, “I could never have made that up.” It’s not even something terribly interesting or strange, but it’s the specificity of it, and the undeniable separateness from me and my experience that brings me up short a little bit.
As for the essay form, I’m not entirely sure I write proper essays. I think a proper essay proves a point more than I generally do. I meander somewhat and use that old collagist trick of juxtaposing things and hoping that their placement near one another imposes some internal logic and epiphanic purpose. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. And it’s my most fervent hope that they do sometimes prove a point. It’s the perfect form for me, though, because it requires that I observe the outside world and it allows me to be ‘present’ as a voice, which suits my narcissism, I suppose.
SA: In a 2001 Salon interview, you were asked if you saw the rise of the personal essay or memoir as a negative development, and you said “I think anything I’m involved in, frankly, should be viewed as a negative development.” I can’t believe that you actually hate the genre, because you’re a loyal practitioner of it. Are there issues, though, that you take with the way most people go about writing personal essay or memoir?
DR: I suppose I do take issue with current state of the personal essay and memoir. I tend to think what I write are actually more correctly described as familiar essays, although more on that in a moment. But as for the current mania for personal essays and memoir, I find it vaguely dispiriting for a variety of reasons, chief among them is that story seems now to trump writing. There’s an adage that goes, or words to this effect: “Remarkable stories happen to those who can tell them.” I don’t want to make writing seem like an elite club or a closed and secret society. Quite the opposite. But it is a craft, an art, even, and I can’t help feeling that we are living in a current climate where those very notions of craft, of language used deftly, are not even secondary to how harrowing the tale, or how unjudiciously details best kept private are cast out for public consumption. They are almost beneath consideration, those questions of craft.
I know this makes me sound like a hopeless Colonel Blimp (even using the term Colonel Blimp marks me as out of touch. I told an Isadora Duncan joke not too long ago {“Wear the long scarf, dear. It’ll bring out your eyes…”} and I realize that it’s like telling a President McKinley joke), that I have no understanding of younger people’s far more casual relationship to notions of privacy. But I call Total Bullshit on that, frankly. Even in an age where shame no longer exists, I think people will absolutely rue the day they posted or e-mailed masturbating cell-phone pictures. But I’m getting off topic here. Here’s what I want to say: there was a marvelous memoir by Kate Simon, called Bronx Primitive, if I recall. Nothing happens. She wants to go to a dance, her father doesn’t want her to…who remembers? But what I do remember is the writing. This pitch-perfect evocation of a time and a place and the way people thought. Read any of Sally Belfrage’s sublime memoirs. They’re out of print but eminently findable. She was brilliant and beautiful and never failed to encompass the world in her writing.
