MFA Bitch

Dear Lisa,

If MTV Books is smart enough to publish your novel, I’ll take back everything I ever thought and said about them. It’ll feel a bit like the first time I saw the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video and believed there might actually be hope for mainstream culture.

Of course, when you become a pop culture phenom, you will have to claim (as many have done before you) that this was really, honestly, the last thing you wanted. They can even interview me and I’ll corroborate the claim. I’ll say, “Lisa always said she never cared whether she got published or not. It was always about the art, not the money or fame or any of that.” Which is true. And at the same time, not at all.

For my part, I have more pressing concerns than my art these days. I have discovered that my jeans hang down so low in the back that I routinely expose myself to passersby. This was explained to me rather succinctly by a carload of young men who drove by shouting out the car window: “Kick Crack!”

What they didn’t know was that while my ass was exposed to the street, I was handling an infant who was screaming for his pacifier. What they couldn’t know was that my jeans are too small because I just gave birth. What they will never understand is that this “crack” of mine is here to stay, despite the expectations of society that if I don’t hide my postpartum body indoors, I should at least hide it inside an oversized pair of mom pants. These crack jeans are cool, damn it. And I’m gonna wear them.

So, consider my crack a feminist statement. It is the symbol of my rejection of the bullshit patriarchal paradigm.

Or maybe I just need bigger jeans.

Yours in sisterhood solidarity,

Jessica

Dear Jessica,

Is it wrong, that after reading your post, the first thing I did was search Google for MTV Books? Looking for submission information to send to my agent, for my yet-unpublished first novel that has already been rejected all-over “New York”.

At least the fact that this book got published meant you had a marketable idea. Yes I said marketable, because unfortunately that is all it really comes down to in the end, not talent, not inventiveness-marketability. I think I am too angry to be marketable.

Or, I had a bad idea- that I spent 6 years working on, but who’s counting?

I didn’t join the writing group. I know you’re surprised. The next time I tell you I want to read something by someone in a craigslist writing group please just send me to read graffiti on the bathroom wall at Burger King. My guess is it will be more interesting and it will certainly take itself less seriously.

On a even weirder note, after reading a sample of my work, the leader of the writing group and I may have a writing group affair where we critique each other’s work one on one. Which to me, seems as good as her admitting that her craigslist writing group is sub par, but that doesn’t make me feel any better about it.

I’ve gotten over my obsession for trolling craigslist for writing groups, at least for this week.

I would review the book as positively as you can. Then when you complete your memoir you can use your review, disguised with someone else’s name, as proof that people like books like this when you are trying to get someone to like the damn thing enough to publish it. Or slam it, you are the one with all the power now.

I’d write more, but I have to email my agent about Novocaine Princess’s one last gasp with MTV Books.

Write On,

Lisa

Dear Lisa,

Obviously, I should’ve finished that damn memoir.  All the people who told me that I was too young, didn’t have anything to say yet, and should focus instead on writing essays about my cat or the time I hiked through the redwood forest were, in fact, full of shit.  Because the book I’m reviewing for the (homeless) newspaper is my book, written by someone else, but still, the characters, the voice, the setting… it’s exactly like the book I was writing when I started to believe my professors knew more than me.  

Why did I ever start believing that?  I think it has something to do with workshops.  You sit around week after week, month after month, semester after agonizing semester, while everyone and their dog tears your work to pieces and you wonder why you were even admitted into the damn writing program in the first place if you can’t actually write.  And then, like any good re-education, the professor comes to you at the end of it all with what seems like a good answer to the question of “well, what the hell am I gonna do now?!”  They have the secret to getting published, damn it.  They’ve been in Oprah magazine.  They know exactly what you need to do.

So they take the charred remnants of your confidence as a writer and attempt to rebuild you.

In short, I’m Frankenstein over here, without a single original thought in my head.  Thanks formerly-published-author-turned-professor-who-can’t-get-a-book-deal-to-save-their-life!  Now we both suck!

I kinda have to give Stephanie K. credit.  While her book sucks (and it does, it really really really really does) she managed to write it, and she didn’t listen to all the bullshit telling her to actually get better at writing first.  Stephanie K., you are my inspiration.  No joke.  You told the story of my adolescence — albeit badly, and as a work of fiction — and you actually got MTV press to publish the damn thing.

(Yes, the MTV conglomerate has a publishing arm.  And yes, their taste in books sucks about as much as their taste in music.)

So while her book is bad and mine was actually cool (because mine was true… and my dialogue didn’t sound like fourth-graders on acid… and I didn’t make our tiny midwestern town sound like its punk scene was cooler than Chicago, which, Stephanie, lets get real here and admit that it wasn’t… and by the way, no one grabs for a beer while they’re having sex, especially for the first time, even if it’s the worst sex of their life…) I applaud her for writing the thing and getting it published.  She’s a better writer than me in that regard, for sure.

So, I really have only one question… When I’m reviewing a book I could’ve written (should’ve written), and it is so terrible that it causes me physical pain, do I actually have to finish it?  Giving old Stephanie the benefit of the doubt, it might actually get better.  But in the meantime, in between time, as I desperately hope for the writing to improve, as the story gets more and more unbelievable, how do I survive it?

Plus, if I ever want to finish my memoir (and I do… those bastards haven’t gotten me down yet) how will I separate her fiction from my fact?  Drug-addled memories are hazy at best, and vulnerable to even the smallest suggested editing.  I feel like I need to protect my true world from her crappy pretend one. 

Any ideas?  Besides burning the book, taking a photo of me burning it, and then sending that in as my review, with the title “Bitch Steals Book From My Head”?  So, besides the obvious?

Jessica

PS I think describing her dialogue as “fourth graders on acid” actually makes it sound better than it is.  Maybe it’s more like ninth-graders pretending their on acid.  Which is, rightfully, a completely different image.