“I mean—listen, part of the problem is the form, right? I know we’ve had this conversation a handful of times already but I really have to caution you against trying to write another memoir. It’s such a hard genre. Especially for men. I mean, it’s a women’s genre, frankly—and I just think it’s very limiting for you—and if you’re going to do it, well, it has to be extremely focused, with a very strong and marketable hook, and I just don’t think you have that yet. I’m not even really sure what it’s about.”
“It’s about finding myself in my twenties,” Sam said defensively. He looked over Elijah’s shoulder, where a girl in a fringed suede crop top was posing for a photo with her turmeric latte, its saffron foam clinging to her lip. Her friend passed her the phone to review the pictures. Story or grid? the girl asked.
“But you haven’t found yourself,” Elijah was saying. “If you want me to be honest, it feels like you don’t really have the distance to tell this story yet. Like you haven’t learned all the lessons. I see this problem, this lack of self-awareness, so often in confessional writing.”
Sam hated that word—confessional. How diminishing it was. “Oh, I think I’m self-aware,” he said. “I know my problems intimately. I just have no idea how to solve them.”
“And that’s it! That’s the gap between self-knowledge and wisdom. You don’t have the wisdom yet,” Elijah said. “And if you’re going to write a memoir, you need that. This might be therapeutic to write, or even necessary, but it isn’t satisfying to read, and your misery makes you unlikable on the page.” He raised his hands. “Now, maybe if you wanted to write a novel, or a reported work of nonfiction, that might make more sense for you, but I just don’t see a commercial path forward with this.”
The girl in the fringe was taking pictures of her avocado toast now. Am I basic? she asked her friend, who laughed. Yes!
“But this is the only thing I know how to do,” Sam said.
“Memoir is just—” Elijah sighed. “Listen, don’t get me wrong—I’ll sell it if it’s sellable—but it feels like we’re raising a generation of narcissists who believe that their experience is important enough to justify broadcasting to the world. And most of them just...aren’t. Everyone’s a memoirist. Social media is just one big memoir.”
“No, we’re a generation of public diarists,” Sam said. “Your Throwback Thursday—that’s a memoir. There’s a difference.”
“What’s a Throwback Thursday?” Elijah said.
“Never mind,” Sam said. “Elijah, I really believe in this story.”
“I’m sure you do,” Elijah said. “But not all stories demand to be told.”
“So is that what you’re saying?” Sam said. Something inside him twisted. “Elijah, I’ve been working on this for over a year. You’re saying this story isn’t worth telling?”
“No, I just mean...” Elijah sighed. “Maybe there just isn’t a book here.” He rested his hands on the table as if he were about to deliver some bad news, and now his voice sounded kinder, even if what he had to say was brutal. “You know your problem? Because you are young, you think everything that happens to you is interesting.”
* * *
Sam slammed the door hard as he got back into the car. He fumbled in the center console for the in-case-of-emergency pack of cigarettes he had stashed away. He lit one, rolling down the windows as plumes of smoke surrounded him, then sped away.
He knew Elijah had been fair in his assessment, that he had identified the thing Sam was most afraid of anyone seeing—which was that he really didn’t know what he had spent the last year writing. He had begun out of necessity, telling the story of everything that had precipitated his departure from New York, and then had attempted to fashion something resembling a narrative out of that cathartic outpouring, trying to discern why it had all happened the way it did, a Rorschach test with the blood on the page. But this was the maddening paradox of writing about your life: in order for it to be any good, you had to know what it all meant, and in order to know what it all meant, you had to write about it, and there he was, a snake eating its own tail, scouring his past for answers he didn’t have.
And then, stopped at a traffic light on Fairfax, the thought flashed through Sam. What if the shaman could fix it? It was impossible. But what a seductive fantasy, this notion that he could have all his issues resolved overnight. Imagine the book he could write then, with all that profound self-knowledge.
Except life did not work that way. People did not heal in a weekend through some mystical experience. It did not matter how much money you had to try to buy it. It was not possible.
Sam reminded himself of this as he drove back to West Hollywood, past the juice bars and yoga studios and walk-in psychics, and past a crystal store, where a slab of raw amethyst sparkled, smugly, from inside a glass case.
3
Symptoms
Sam paced around his apartment as the sun set. He read and reread the pages he’d been working on, the ones Elijah had found lacking. Furiously, he ordered takeout, a bowl of seaweed and vegetables from a vegan restaurant; if he was going to be a professional failure, he told himself, at least he would not be fat. But by the time it arrived, he had worked himself back up into a frenzy and was no longer interested in wellness. He just wanted to feel secure and heavy. He wanted to eat the feeling, to eat at the feeling, to eat in a way that would both harm the feeling and harm himself for having the audacity to feel it.
He threw the bowl away without opening it. Waste of money. This is why you’re broke. He ordered two burgers from Shake Shack and did not eat them so much as he inhaled them, tearing at the chewy bun with his teeth, tasting the way the salt made his mouth go at once dry and gummy. He smoked three cigarettes on his fire escape, one after the other, sending text messages to all the guys he’d had casual sex with in the last year. Just thinking about you. How have you been? He opened Grindr and began to scroll through the rows of toned torsos, squeezing the flesh on his stomach anxiously.
But then, mercifully, one of the guys he’d texted responded—Martin. Come over, Sam said. He brushed his teeth and punched the remnants of the takeout trash deep into the garbage, lighting a candle to mask the stale aroma of the binge. There was nothing to be done about how queasy he now felt, but this—this need to act out—was like an override switch that would keep his nausea at bay, at least until after this was over.
Sam wasn’t even that attracted to Martin, who was boyishly handsome but a sloppy, overeager kisser, yet being with him was preferable to spending the evening alone, spiraling. Mostly Sam was irked that Martin was, as far as he knew, happily married; Sam knew they had an open relationship, to which he had no philosophical objections, but Sam hated the idea that Martin could sleep with him and then go home to a stable partner. It was so gluttonous, to seek sex on top of love. Sam followed Martin on Instagram and resented him profoundly. Every time he posted a photo of his husband with some affectionate caption—“So lucky to have found this guy!” followed by a string of heart-eyed emoji—Sam felt that rage bubbling up inside him, all those spiteful tides of envy and want rising like bile in the back of his throat. This guy. Sam hated that.