Writing Life: Publication is Time Travel

Photo by JACK PELLING on Unsplash

About ten years ago, my brother told me a story about meeting a famous comedian. During their conversation, he had made passing reference to his favorite bit from one of the comedian’s stand-up routines. The comedian smiled slightly before telling him that it always felt a little weird to be reminded of jokes he’d told years earlier. He’d moved on to new material, after all. But in interactions with fans, he was constantly being brought face-to-face with reminders of what he’d thought was funny years earlier.

I think about this story every time someone slides into the contact form on my website to invite me to speak to their students about my book Not All Dead White Men. A book that I signed a contract for in 2015, wrote in 2016, and re-wrote for a President Trump era in 2017 before it was released in October 2018. Being asked to talk about the book feels a lot like coming into contact with the ghost of my past self.

I noticed how much publishing felt like time travel the very first time I had a peer-reviewed article published. I’d written it more than five years earlier, and seeing it finally hit print felt bizarre, like I’d just unearthed a time capsule of my thoughts from long ago. And that was just a few years! In my newsletter a few weeks back I talked about an article I loved that was first published two years before I was born. I’m pretty sure my ex mentioned that article to its author, Froma Zeitlin, when my ex was interviewing at Princeton. I wonder if Froma felt a lot like that comedian did.

If you’ve ever read something you wrote a long time ago, you probably know the experience I’m describing here. It’s a lot weirder than just looking at an old photo of yourself, because a photo just shows how you used to look. Words you’ve written reveal how you used to think, which, to me, is a much more profound part of what makes me who I am.

When I was writing NADWM, people gave me a lot of warnings. So many warnings. Oodles of warnings. I was warned that the book would make me pretty much unhirable, at least on the tenure track (probably true). I was warned that I was going to get a lot of right-wing harassment and trolling for it (definitely true). But I wasn’t warned — maybe because people more experienced in publishing than I was thought it was too obvious to bother issuing a warning — that once the book came out, I would become, well, the author of that book, which meant that people would associate me with it for the foreseeable future.

Ok, written like that, it does seem pretty obvious.

But I didn’t understand what it meant. After the book, I didn’t really plan to continue doing research about Classical reception in online hate communities. I’d never intended to make that my “thing” forever. It was a project that I invested a lot of time in and was proud of, but it wasn’t my passion. (Even thinking about it being my passion makes me shudder a little.) By late 2017, when I turned in my revision, I was already pretty ready to be done working on the topic. And the book hadn’t even come out yet! But I liked to tell people who asked that my next project was going to be about, like, puppies in ancient Greek novels, or something. I didn’t realize what the book’s publication would mean for what people thought I spent all my time thinking about, long after I’d stopped thinking very much about it.

Instead of puppies, because BrAnDiNg, I found a compromise: I was going to write my next book about feminist reception of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, which felt a lot more fun and involved a lot more online research in spaces that I could actually stomach. And sure, I’d planned to include a chapter about incels, because that would provide a hook from my first book and all and keep my research on that stuff fresh and current, but it wasn’t going to be my main focus.

But that project wasn’t to be. I explained why in more detail here:

Going through a month that includes the birth of a baby, the release of a book, and my spouse coming out to me as trans was the kind of upheaval that divided my life neatly into “before” and “after.” The person who wrote Not All Dead White Men was very much Before Donna. So every time I spoke about the book, for years, I felt a little bit like I was playacting as a version of myself who didn’t really exist anymore.

The baby I gave birth to just weeks before that book was released is now old enough that he can tell you his top five favorite cephalopods (number 4 will shock you)!¹ That’s how long it’s been. And people still talk to me about that book as though *I* am its writer. Which I both am and am not.

Also, I always feel awkward in these conversations because I haven’t done any new research on the topics in the book for five years. None of the alt-right subgroups I studied in the book really exist anymore. And they’re not the “far right” anymore, either. Their ideology has just sort of become standard right-wing talking points. But if I think about that too much, I’ll get sad, so I’m going to think about my son’s favorite cephalopods instead.

True story: when my book came out, I made a rule for myself that I could only look at online hate and negative reviews while nursing, because at least then I was doing something productive and not just totally wasting my time. It really worked. I’m usually a rejection-sensitive flower who wilts if someone even looks at my writing too long and starts apologizing for wasting their time. (sorry about all of these words I’ve written here I’m sure you have something better to be doing!) But back then I felt invincible. I truly could not have cared less what some angry dudes on Twitter/4chan/parler thought about how hilarious (OR SINISTER???) it was that Mark Zuckerberg had a woke classicist sister with a Jewish agenda to destroy Western civilization or whatever. I had a human to feed. And in the face of the complexity of the challenges I was facing with my neurodivergent child and transitioning spouse, the idea that I would care what those dudes thought about my intelligence felt laughable.

Maybe once upon a time I’d have cared. I’d have been tempted to try and impress them by showing off my superior knowledge of Greek and Latin. Maybe I’d even have accepted one of their many, many “offers” to debate them that were definitely not lose-lose traps. Once upon a time there was a version of me who might have done that.

This kind of time travel comes up a lot when writing a memoir. Phillip Lopate has written beautifully about the “double perspective” of memoir, which braids together the memoirist’s memory of events as they unfolded at the time with a present-day understanding of what those events meant that can only come with wisdom and hindsight. Sometimes, I’ve noticed, there’s even a third stream, when I’m writing about a time when I remembered an earlier moment, and my narrator is trying to find meaning in two different events and in the resonance between them.

sort of like this, I guess?

The double perspective is particularly obvious in my current project because of my ex’s transition. In earlier drafts I used he/him pronouns and a male pseudonym to describe my ex up until she came out to me, then switched to she/her pronouns and a female pseudonym. I had my ex’s permission to do this, and she and I even worked together to come up with a male pseudonym we both liked. But in my current revision I’m planning on using she/her pronouns throughout. In a sense, this isn’t historically accurate — for example, in scenes where my mother and I were talking about my ex, we would have used the pronouns my ex was using at the time, which weren’t the ones she uses now. But it feels more important to be kind to the person my ex is now than to be scrupulously accurate to the perspective of Donna-from-20-years-ago-who-thought-she-was-dating-a-boy, a person who existed once but now is sort of a figment of my memory and imagination. The trick is to try to make the gaps in the double perspective as seamless as possible. And to not think about how complicated that chart up there would look when it would include a reader of the memoir talking to my future self about it.

For me, the scariest part of writing and publishing is putting a piece of myself out into the world and waiting to see if it resonates with people. Thank you to everyone who comments, likes, or shares these pieces, by the way. Knowing that they meant something to you means so much to me.

My life can be very, very weird, so it’s always a pleasant surprise to find that other people have had similar thoughts to mine. In Stephen King’s book On Writing, Chapter 2 is titled “What Writing Is”, and the first sentence of the chapter reads “Telepathy, of course.” Writing is an attempt to transplant your thoughts into someone else’s brain. Or, I guess, the attempt your past self, who may feel very different from your present self, made to transplant their thoughts.

I don’t think it will ever stop feeling strange. But it’s sort of magical, too.

1. In order: vampire squid, chambered nautilus, blue-ringed octopus, pyjama squid, dumbo octopus. The pyjama squid, he tells me, is not in fact a squid at all, but a cuttlefish, and it is both venomous and poisonous, the distinction between which he always corrects me on if I get them mixed up. And he is my least pedantic child.