My Dysfunctional Narrative

Abstract

My Dysfunctional Narrative Suzanne Rivecca (bio) When my debut book, a story collection, was nearing its publication date, my publicist—a woman I'd met once—sent me a list of questions. My answers to these questions would be included in the press kit submitted to bookstore buyers and potential reviewers. If I'd had the foresight and savviness to actually anticipate the mechanics of this scenario—a succession of word-fatigued strangers, half-hidden behind a stack of brand-new books wobbly as a Jenga pile, wearily scanning my kit for some angle to seize—I probably would've treated the questions less as an invasive series of direct challenges and more as a tool for controlling the discourse: an opportunity to preemptively neutralize antagonists, in the smiling and slippery way of a politician who repurposes each debate question into a launching pad for her talking points. But I had no foresight or savviness. My initial reaction to these questions was to instinctively recoil, as if backed into a corner by someone I didn't want to talk to at a party, someone who was half in the bag and and flush with faux-confidential insistence, beer on her breath, asking me a bunch of shit, needlingly, for the hell of it. Shit like: You're dealing with some very provocative themes. Were you conflicted about publishing such a sexually explicit collection? And: Do you feel exposed by publication? Do you see yourself in any of the characters in these stories? When I'd met the publicist, months before, one of the first things she said to me was "You're so sweet and sunny! I expected, like, a really dark girl." And I was glad I seemed sweet to her, I guess. I wanted to make a good impression. I'd bought, for the occasion, a green dress and bright-yellow flats with a shaggy leather flower on each toe. The shoes quickly got ruined in a spring downpour as the publicist and I dashed around to lunch meetings filled with people whose names blurred together, people to whom we were supposed to explain what my book was about and why they should care, people who sported the Sphinx-like, leisurely, watchful smiles of Shark Tank panelists, kicking back, waiting for a reason to invest. I was very conscious of not wanting to seem odd: defective, vulnerable, dark. And so I was sweet to these people, too, even though I didn't know how to describe what my book was about. I felt that anything I could say along those lines would [End Page 49] be damning, would give me away as … what? I didn't know; I just knew this wasn't about the book, not really. It was about proving something paradoxical: that I was from a place—a bad place, a place where bad things happened—but not of it. But I felt like I was of it; I carried it with me all the time. During one meeting, I announced to the table, "I think the book's about self-delusion." Did I really believe this? Maybe. Once I'd actually written the stories, once I transcended that first heady flush of acute identification and empathy with my protagonists, once I'd stopped seeing the main characters as extensions of myself and started cultivating a chilly pseudo-sociological distance between us, a distance intended to convey not only my capacity for artistic invention—See, I can make stuff up!—but my comparative functionality as a human being and, by extension, my reliability as a witness—I fell into the habit of using certain terms to describe the girls and young women in my book. Deluded. Self-mythologizing. Self-deceiving. Manipulative. Victim complex. I talked about them as if they were histrionic little sisters: the petulant, performative Amys to my nobly stoic Jo. It was my solemn and rigorous duty, post-publication, to point out how bad they were at defining themselves, how they claimed the wrong labels, believed the wrong things, donned the wrong guises. Bad things may have happened to them, sure, but they capitalized on those bad things; they flailed around in...