writing about the hole from inside the hole (Patreon)

audio for this post is available here.

two and a half years ago I was in a relationship where not even its hallucinogenic newness was enough to disguise the fact it was obviously doomed and also that it was going to kill me. every day there was another reckoning: with previously unknown, disgusting parts of my personality; with my ideas about love as a corrosive force; with my unchecked attitudes towards humanity and the untrustworthiness of people. I would do things like call my boyfriend three times in one morning to clarify something I’d said weeks ago that he’d of course forgotten about, feel certain the fact he didn't remember was a sign he hated me, and then move on to the next insane fiction I’d decided was true (ruminations can roll straight into the next one, like days, or the female orgasm). I cried in grocery stores and parking lots and the parking lots of grocery stores. I cried at the moon. I cried so much I discovered that the morning after a powerful nighttime sob you sometimes develop red pinpricks on your eyelids that look constellations made of very small hells. I got really into this jean valentine poem:

oh lord, oh lord, were we sad on the ground or what!there’s no one reason for my behavior. I wasn’t treated badly, unless you count the predictable emotional incompetence of a pair of near-children as bad treatment. we weren’t hurting each other on purpose. people usually aren't. but we communicated poorly; we’d each created a wide gulf between who we thought the other person was and who they actually were; we were mean and unsympathetic when we argued; I had undiagnosed autism (lmao).our relationship became more emotionally volatile over time. the fights got dirtier, their resolutions less convincing. I had nightmares that got especially bad in the spring. writing a book will help, I said to myself, who was helpless.closer baby closer was originally a novel about a troubled couple who undergo experimental relationship therapy meant to make them feel like they’re occupying the same body. it was a good idea. I still think it’s a good idea. I was reading and enjoying a lot of 🤟extreme🤟 literature at the time, some horror, some not, alasdair gray, chuck palahniuk, dennis cooper, georges bataille – I was back in my snuff era!, telling people how good martyrs is, blah blah. this degeneracy seemed like a clear direction for me, closet sicko. I felt like a demon and I wanted to write something so gross about intimacy being so gross. I went all in. I wrote the first draft in three weeks, possessed. my now ex-agent took a long time to read the book and an even longer time to schedule the meeting to talk about it. when we finally did call – and I say this as someone not always adept at picking up on social nuances – he was clearly stalling. finally he took a long breath and said this book, savannah, I have to be honest with you, I found it incredibly disturbing. wha-blam! it wasn’t a compliment.I worry this frames my ex-agent as a sort of unsympathetic character, dispassionate about championing the ᴛʀᴀɴsɢʀᴇssɪᴠᴇ or whatever, but I need to stress that his response ought not've been surprising. his clients are mainly feel-good non-fiction writers, and he's a soft-spoken, suburb-clean sort of guy with three young daughters, and the book I wrote had necrophilia in it. whoops! embarrassed, I shelved closer baby closer the novel and repurposed some less-egregious parts of it for closer baby closer the poetry collection. but I read it recently and it's kind of good! its problem really isn't the gore – it's never the gore – but that I was writing about the hole from inside of the hole. it's a fine strategy sometimes. to write from the place you're at feels good because it's raw and you think it might be cosmically important and your experiences aren't falsely aglow under your memory's sunlamps, but distance is what makes the point of things clear: the point of your suffering, where it then leads, the wisdom you develop as a result of seeing your predicament in context. when I read the book back I can clearly see my voice is panicked and cornered, like every family of spiders my cat has ever touched to death and swallowed.someday I'll rewrite the book with this knowledge in mind. the clearest point of improvement to me is that instead of being first person from the girlfriend’s perspective it should be in third person. also maybe they shouldn't even have names. I don't know. but anyway, for the curious, I've attached the third chapter from the first draft. all you should need to know is that the therapy is a spooky frequency played to them both at once