am i even allowed to do this?

thoughts on permission and how to not be guided by your inner-dick

If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

-- Zora Neale Hurston

From the moment I started admitting out loud that I was writing a memoir, people began telling their stories. And their stories were not just interesting, they were crazy. Riveting and wild.

Men and women I barely knew would sidle up to me at the after-school picnic or in the coffee shop queue and say, “So I hear you’re writing a memoir… wow, that’s so brave.”

Then they’d launch into the story of their mother, how she was an adopted chess prodigy from Bangladesh who gave birth to twins at sixteen before divorcing their abusive stand-up comedian father and marrying a Serbian war criminal who later changed gender and died of a heroin overdose.

Once I’d picked my jaw off the floor and finished hyperventilating, I’d say, “Good god, your story is amazing! It’s insane!”

“Yes,” they’d say. “Try living it.”

“Have you written it down?” I’d say. “You have to write it down!”

“I’ve thought about it,” they’d say. “Everyone tells me I should. I’ve even tried a bit but honestly, I can’t. I just can’t.”

“Why not?”

Then the person with the crazy amazing story would explain that writing a memoir would cause all kinds of unnecessary drama or stir up trouble. Or they were worried it wouldn't be worth the bother. Plus their brother/father/aunt/step-cousin/ex-lover would never speak to them again and they’d get disinherited or be accused of lying or it would infringe someone’s privacy or be a violation of some cultural coda or taboo. Basically what all of these people were saying was that although they had lived their crazy amazing family story, and told it regularly to friends and lovers or random writers in the coffee shops, they did not feel permitted to it write it down. Because writing it down was against the rules. The rules of their crazy amazing rule-breaking family.

To this I respond by quoting the words of the original literary rebel, a little French schoolgirl by the name of Madeline who, on a field trip to the Paris Zoo, sized up the tiger and said: Pooh-pooh!

(When Maman and Papa put you in a convent at the age of five you get to say whatever the hell you like.)