On answering a critic, and what Eminem teaches me about turning life into art
I've been spending a lot of time in the car with my kids listening to Eminem, and have been inspired by his lack of inner censorship and the truth he achieves through that.
Some time in the recent past, I was having a tricky and heated conversation with someone I know really well who suddenly, mid argument, asked me:
“Why do you have to be so public? Why can’t you stop writing about your life?”
We were in the middle of very heated conversation, one of those ones that’s like a dropped box of pins: tiny sharp points of resentment and disagreement and misunderstanding spilled all over the place, waiting to hurt us both as we put our hands around them.
We resolved what it was we were fighting about, kind of, but that question, and the accusation within it, stayed with me. It’s with me still, every day, as I sit down, in a library, in a cafe, at my kitchen table, looking into the heart of darkness that is all the blank pages, lying ahead of me at this moment, as I face book no 5. Why do you have to be so public? that voice asks me, as I try to wrestle with the prospect of writing deeper, harder and further into the outer edges of my feelings, this time through the prism of sex, desire and commitment, which are the subject of my new writing.
Ok, let me answer this one - why do I have to be so public?