Perspectives & Truth in Memoir: Advice from a Bestselling Author

PERSPECTIVES & TRUTH IN MEMOIR: ADVICE FROM A BESTSELLING AUTHOR
podcast publish date: May 5

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

writing, fiction, book, mfa, nonfiction, authors, talk, life, truth, stories, shit, shithead, endlessly, fallible, mishka, reader, dig, narrative, graduate school, swear

SPEAKERS

Mishka Shubaly, Boni Wagner-Stafford, 

 Boni Wagner-Stafford  00:53

So we are with Mishka Shubaly, who is a Kindle Singles best-selling memoirist and has a Master’s –  MFA – in Fiction from Columbia University. Many other things as well but because this is a podcast for authors, we will kind of keep our focus on all things writing. However, many of the things I’m looking forward to talking to you about, Mishka, today are that intersection between what we write about, how we write about it and how we perceive and process everything else that’s going on in our life. So welcome. 

Mishka Shubaly  01:34

Thank you. Thanks. I – sorry, we had a little bit of a rough start this morning but that’s – this is the life of an author, you know. You have to wear a million different hats, often at the same time.

Boni Wagner-Stafford  01:44

Exactly, exactly. So I have – I’d like to try to keep our podcasts to 30 minutes. I’ve got a million things I want to talk to you about. Okay, that’s a lie: it’s not a million. But many of the things I think might take us a little bit to – to dig into. So I’m just going to dive right in. I’m fascinated by the MFA in Fiction. And then from what I can tell, your books are all nonfiction. So tell me about that.

Mishka Shubaly  02:17

Yeah, the – you know, there are no, there are no straight lines in life. And when I applied for graduate school, I was still, you know, sort of a 22-year-old child. I had no idea what I was doing. I applied to one graduate school and I told – I told myself, “I’m going to apply to graduate school. I’m going to apply to the best graduate school in the country. And if I don’t get in, then I’m going to go to rehab.”

Boni Wagner-Stafford  02:45

Thank heavens, missed that one.

Mishka Shubaly  02:49

Yeah, the – so, you know, the good news is I got into Columbia, which is great. The bad news is, you know, I had even – I was sort of given an excuse to postpone my – postpone dealing with my growing alcoholism for, you know, for another nine years. But so I really, I had no idea what I was doing, you know, I mean, my life has sort of been an exercise of just sort of just flail around and see what works, you know. And in the process, you make a lot of mistakes. So I – I didn’t really have a good conception of what sort of nonfiction or autofiction or memoir was, really, when I went into writing. And I just assumed that I would be a fiction writer. And then my last semester at Columbia, I had a course with Lawrence Weschler called The Fiction of Nonfiction. And that – and so it’s ironic that in you know, in my last semester of my fiction MFA, I was like, “Oh, I, I’m never going to write fiction. I – this is what I will do instead.” So I, you know, I completed getting the MFA and then didn’t write for seven years and then it’s like that – the writing dream – died and then sprung back to life radically. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford  04:15

Yeah, in a pretty spectacular way, I would, I would say. And I loved – I’ve only read one of your books, but I have on my to-do list, or to, to-wish list, the other ones but I’ve got some specific questions coming up for you about “I Swear I’ll Make It Up to You.” But so we’re – Ingenium Books is a hybrid publisher of nonfiction. So we’ve made a conscious decision – you know, it sounds much like you that it’s a, it’s a preference. It feeds a passion. I’ve got a background in journalism. So those true stories: I mean, there’s so much, so many good stories from, from true things – from real life – that I don’t have time to make stuff up. Nor would I be good at fiction, I think. But that’s beside the point. So from, from both your experience and your perspective, how are fiction and nonfiction different? And then how are they the same?

Mishka Shubaly  05:09

The – I mean, I feel very similar to you in that the, the world in front of us is endlessly fascinating. So much so that, like, why would I make stuff up? I’ll never in my lifetime, I’ll never be able to get through all the real fascinating stuff in this world, you know. And the other thing is that nonfiction holds my attention because, you know, a priori, it’s real: this shit really happened, you know. And to me, that’s, that’s sort of endlessly compelling. And I have sort of never been able to get over that. But it’s ironic, too, in that there are things that happen in real life that, if you were to write about it in fiction, you would have to water it down. My mom is from a family of 17 children. If you put that in a work of fiction, everybody would be like, “Bullshit! You – nobody has 17 children.” Well, you should go to – go to northern Canada: lots of people have 17 children. The – so the … I always, you know the – across … You know, people say – sometimes readers say, “Oh, I don’t care if this is real or not because it’s entertaining.” And I hate that. That drives me crazy. Because, you know, there are people like James Frey who I’ve publicly challenged to a fistfight. And James, if you’re listening, I will kick your ass. There is there is a different – difference between fiction and nonfiction. And here’s the difference. You can’t make shit up. You can’t curate your experience to make yourself look better or to make other people look worse. You know, if, if I call you on the phone, and you don’t answer the phone, and then you call me back, I can say, “I called Boni and we talked about blah, blah, blah,” right? Because omitting the you call, me calling you and you caling me back, that doesn’t make any difference. But if I punch you, and then you punch me back, I can’t write, “Boni punched me.” You know, the – so it’s, we, you know as, as nonfiction writers, as memoirists, I feel like we have – we owe a huge burden to the truth, you know, no less so than a hardcore journalist, you know, reporting for the New Yorker or CNN or, you know, whoever. It’s all about the truth. And, and it needs to be 100% true all the time. Period. End of story. You can’t make shit up. You can’t leave important shit out. You know when you’re telling the truth and when you’re not. And you need to hold yourself to a strict standard. The – where fiction and nonfiction are the same is that it’s all about story. It’s all about narrative. You need to include the details that propel the narrative forward and you need to strip out everything else. And, you know, very much like there’s no such thing as an objective narrative, right? The – so you need to tell the truth but also, you need to tell the story. So, you know, through the course of my day, there’s a million different stories that go through it. I’m selling a pickup truck, I’m driving a 1961 Studebaker out to California with my nephew, the contractors were just here to insulate my attic. Those are three different narratives, right? So I could write three different stories, you know, that focus on each of those three things. And each one of those would be true, but they would be three different stories. But so, you know, you – when you’re a nonfiction writer, you have to carefully curate your experience to assemble this narrative but the difference between that and fiction is, you can’t – you can’t make shit up. You can’t inject things that don’t belong there, basically. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford  09:28

Right. Let’s pause for a moment for a message from our sponsor. 

(Commercial 09:34)

Boni Wagner-Stafford  10:04

So that brings up an interesting point, because – and this is something that … I work as an author coach with, with memoirists who’ve not necessarily been through an MFA in writing, although some of them have – but we talk quite a bit about that business about truth but perspective. And there’s a line in “I Swear I’ll Make It Up to You” that I noted right away. And it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to – I’ve got to talk about this.” Fairly early on in the book – I don’t remember exactly where – but you say, “My father was pathetic.” And at that point in your life that you’re writing about it, that is how you felt and that was the truth. But you were writing that from a place where you’ve already moved past it. I’m fascinated by the conscious choice that you make to write about the truth, even though your perspective on the truth has changed by the time you’re writing about it. Can you tell me about that?

Mishka Shubaly  11:09

Right. So the best writing advice that I’ve ever gotten from anyone ever was from Edmund White. And he said, “Be courageous. You have to be brave. You have to be bold. You have to believe in yourself. You have to believe in your writing. You have to believe in your work.” The – I struggled when I was writing that book because there’s a lot of stuff, you know, where I was sort of like, you know, a drunken 19-year-old shithead. And, you know, there’s a lot of interactions with women, with my parents, with basically everyone I encountered where, if I had to write in the moment in that voice as the person I was at that time, right? There can’t be this like authorial remove. And what you want to do as a writer is diminish that. You don’t want to be addressing at every turn, you know, “I was walking down a shady lane but right now I’m 30 years older and typing on an ageing MacBook and you’re sitting at home reading this or maybe you’re listening to it on …” You know, so you want to disappear. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, right?

Boni Wagner-Stafford  12:24

Yeah. 

Mishka Shubaly  12:25

So we want to – there is that suspension of disbelief. So I had to write in the voice of, you know, that 19-year-old shithead. And in doing so – and that’s also, that’s super important because in that moment, I had to trust my reader that at every – particularly with interactions with women when, you know, when I was a young man and still sort of subhuman – I could follow up every paragraph with a caveat of, “And had I known then what I know now about,” you know, blah blah blah, “I wouldn’t have said that,” or, “I wouldn’t have used this word,” right? No. Just make yourself look like shit. Be hard on yourself. Have faith in your reader to understand, “Oh, he’s writing as his 19-year-old self there. I know that he’s evolved since then.” Because when you spell everything out to your – to your reader, the – it’s like, it’s like you’re giving them an ingredients list instead of saying, “Here’s a cake that I baked for you.” It’s like you’re saying, “Here’s some flour and some eggs and some sugar and …” You know, just say, “Here’s a piece of cake,” and let them eat it and say, “Oh, I taste a hint of vanilla and also lemon but it tastes like fresh lemon,” right? So trust your reader that you’re going to reach out to them as a writer; they’re going to reach out to you as a reader and where, where you’re connecting together, that’s where the magic happens, you know?   

Boni Wagner-Stafford  14:03

Yeah. Well, that, that makes sense. And there was a point that, when I was reading the book right now, I sat down at breakfast in the morning with my husband and I said, “You know, I don’t like this Mishka guy; I’m hoping that he’s going to show me pretty soon in this book that he’s changing. And I know that he is, but like, ‘Oh, my God, if I have to read another …’,” whatever it was, so I was, “Oh!” It was really – I really felt the agony of your personal journey almost as though I was taking it on my, myself as the reader. And I did trust. I mean, it was like, “Okay, he didn’t publish this book to keep telling me a whole bunch more of this stuff. There’s a reason. I know it’s going somewhere. So I’m going to stick with it.” So – but you’ve brought up a couple of things that I think are important, again, for memoirists, and again, you know, these are conversations that, that I have had many times with, with authors, and that is about the relationships we have with people in our lives. And, you know, you’ve mentioned – I’ve mentioned your father; you mentioned that, your relationships with women through, through your lives and, and you talked about having to be courageous. So I have the experience of authors saying, “Oh yeah, but I don’t want to say that because I don’t want to piss that person off.” And it’s like, well, you know, so we kind of get to the perspectives and truth business and recognizing that what you’re writing about is not where you are today. But, but talk to me about the, the practical impact on relationships that you have experienced in the – both in the process of your writing and in the publishing of the writing after the fact. For example, did you say to your father, “This is where I was; be careful with this. How do you feel about this?” What was that like? 

Mishka Shubaly  16:04

There was definitely – there was a point where I was visiting my dad in California and we walked out to the picnic table under the tree in the back and I said, “Dad, I need to talk to you about a thing.” And he was like, “Alright, you know. Yeah. What’s up?” And I said, “Well, when – when I was, whatever, 23 or 24, I was staying at your house and I broke into your filing cabinet and I read some shit that I wasn’t supposed to. And I read about how you were molested by your mother as a child and I – although I stole that information and did the wrong thing there, I need to be able to write about it in the book and put this very private – most private – information out to the world at large, for them all to read about.” 

Boni Wagner-Stafford  16:53

“Great!” he said. “No problem!”

Mishka Shubaly  16:55

And that was a terrifying conversation. Because, you know, had he said no, I, you know, I feel like that I would have had to respect that and I have no idea how I would have solved that problem in the narrative without expositing like, you know, the – those really horrible details from my father’s childhood. The, you know – but I think that, you know, by expositing that information, you know, every reader and any reader is like ready to forgive him for anything, after that, you know. Because it, you know, it’s such a horrible thing he lived through. The – I am going to have to write about this at some point, you know – a sad postscript to the process of writing this book and sort of going that deep into my relationship with my father is that at the end of – you know, when it published, my dad was sort of like, “This book is about me. That means I’m the hero of this book. It means I’m a good guy.” And I was like, “You need to read it again because you’re the villain. And at the end, we – you know, we have some rapprochement but you’re not the good guy. You never were.” And furthermore, in the course of writing the book and being part of my – me finding a way to forgive my father was this letter that I had understood, that he had written to my mother to try to fall back in love with her. And after I had turned in the final manuscript, before the book had published, my mother unearthed that letter in her storage unit and we discovered that no, he had signed his name and it was addressed to his secretary. So I forgave my father on sort of false pretenses and he was more than happy to sort of lead me along that garden path. So unfortunately, that and four years of Trump, my dad and I no longer speak to each other. However, I still have the peace that I got from writing that book and taking that journey and sort of doing that exploration. And I feel that peace because I know that I, I did the work. I did everything that I could to – I gave my father every opportunity to have a working relationship with me. I gave that relationship every opportunity to survive, to thrive. I gave him and I gave me and I gave us every opportunity to understand each other. And he couldn’t meet me there. And that’s fine. And so we don’t talk anymore but it doesn’t bother me the way that it did before because I know that I did everything that I could to make it work.     

Boni Wagner-Stafford  20:01

Right. And that’s, you know, that’s, that’s tough stuff. What I saw in the journey – the interior journey that you went through and that you wrote about in “I Swear I’ll Make It Up to You” – was an understanding and acceptance that your father is fallible in the same way that you are fallible, and then, you know, clearly you’ve come to a decision point where it’s like, “Okay, fallible is one thing; owning up and making a choice to be different is – it’s quite something else.” So if I could dig a little bit more into the – and maybe we’ll just be going around in the same circle, but, but I have a notation here about: so you’re, you’re writing about your 19-year-old shithead self, from a place where you’re not your 19-year-old shithead self, thank goodness. But that is not something everybody can do. There is a deep level of personal awareness – self awareness – that you can’t write about what you can’t see. So how does an author and in – and how did you make that journey? How did you become able to see it well enough so that you could then write about it? 

Mishka Shubaly  21:34

Well, sadly I haven’t moved that far from my 19-year-old self. So it wasn’t too hard to cast myself back. But man, that is some grim archeology to go through: to sort of make a timeline of your life, and particularly when you’re a drunk and be like, “Okay, 1997: where was I? What was I doing? Who was I talking to? What were – you know, who were my friends? What were, you know, what were my hobbies?” The, you know, typical … Gmail is such a curse because you can go back and look at every single email you’ve ever sent when you were a drunk and, you know, like, “Oh, God, the …” So it was really, really bleak. You know, I mean, it’s the – you know, it was very much, you know, the – metaphorically coming back to this archeology because you’re writing – I was sort of digging up the, this bones, you know, but it wasn’t just like bones of a stranger or bones of a family member; it’s me. You know, it’s like, you know, Walt Whitman’s line about how each of us contain multitudes. You know, we are all – we’ve all been different people in our lives and those people sort of like live and die. And I sort of had to go and like sort through the bodies of all the people I’ve been to this point. And it was really grim and it was really bleak and it was incredibly stressful. There were definitely times when I thought – I was like, “Ironically, I’m going to relapse while I’m writing a memoir about sobriety because this is so stressful.” However, at the end of it – you know, with it all behind me – I feel like I got paid to go to therapy, you know. To sort all of that stuff out. And I do – having done it, gone through it, it’s sort of like – it’s sort of like doing your taxes, when you’re like, “Oh God, this is going to be such a nightmare,” and, you know, you think about it for 11 months and you’re like, “Oh God,” and then it’s just a day or a day and a half of suffering and then you’re like, “Oh, shit, that wasn’t as bad,” you know. And then you sleep better and you’re – it’s not weighing on you, you know. So I’m glad that I went back and did all that. And, you know, I wasn’t happy with what I found but also, any monster you can dream of is less terrifying than a dog snarling at a locked closet door. You know, the – the unknown is always more terrifying than the known. So I went back, I made it through all that shit, I know who I am, I know who I was, I know all the bad things I did, I’d taken an exhaustive inventory of them and now I’m sort of like, “Eh.”

Boni Wagner-Stafford  24:35

Yeah. Good fodder for stories. Yeah. You – on your bio, it mentions that you teach at the Yale Writers’ Conference – I don’t know if that is still current – but, but I wanted to know if there are some common themes or questions that you get when you’re in those, you know, classroom scenarios and when you’re, when you’re coaching other people who’s passionate is to write. And does – does it surprise you if you get kind of common, repeated kinds of questions?

Mishka Shubaly  25:15

I mean, I think, you know, for memoirists, a lot of us are looking to writing as therapy, that we’re trying to sort out, you know … I often deal with hideous, heartbreaking back stories: you know, people who – eating disorders, rape, incest, you know, alcoholism, drug addiction, you know, people who have lost their children or lost their spouse. You know, these horrible stories that people come to the workshop to, to tease apart the threads of this, you know, trauma through writing. And I totally encourage that because, you know, writing really saved – you know, I can’t say it saved my life but it definitely saved my ass, you know. And writing is the – you know, writing and running were the two tools that I used to get myself better: to heal my head and heal my heart and sort of like move forward as a human being. However, your writing coach or your writing professor is not your therapist and that’s something that I try to both be, be gentle and be firm with my students about, which is that, “We’re going to work on your writing: I’m here to improve your writing; not to improve you.” You end up doing a little bit of therapy anyways because when people have been through shit, if you’re a human being with a heart – you know what I mean? – you’re not going to, you can’t just put it all off entirely. But I specifically, I’m like, “Okay, we’re not going to talk about your father or your aunt or your grandmother or whatever; we’re talking about the words on the page.” And the other thing is that the – if you’re, if you’re writing in a writing workshop, the words on the page are public. They – they’re not to – those words are not to serve you; they’re to serve your reader. You’re working for your reader. Your reader is the boss; you’re not the boss. If you want to write for therapy, write that in a journal, set it on fire, burn it, set yourself free, bury it in a whole, whatever, you know. But the private writing is radically different than public writing, you know, and what I do – what we’re working on in the writing workshop is public. So if – this is not my quote but it’s a great quote: “You have to write from the scar; not from the wound.” Right? These things that you’ve been through in your life, you have to heal enough in order to write about them so that we can talk about them in a workshop and so I can say, “Oh, in this passage where you’re going back and forth from first to third person, it’s not effective,” and that should not be emotionally devastating to you because we’re talking not about the trauma that you lived through but we’re talking about your writing. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford  28:22

Yeah, very, very interesting perspective and that you write for your reader; not for yourself when you’re doing it. And you benefit as yourself when you get there. Mishka, I am going to wrap this up: we’re approaching our 30-minute mark; I try to respect the 30 minutes. I feel like I could go on digging into this and talking about this forever. I didn’t get to ask you about your writing or your music. So, you know, I believe that writing, we’re creators as authors and writers and so the creator side in the terms of the music, it is – it is aligned. So don’t be surprised if you get another invite from me to come back and we’ll start digging into some of those other kind of creator areas. And thank you so much for your time today. 

Mishka Shubaly  29:19

Absolutely. My pleasure.

Boni Wagner-Stafford  29:20

Okay, perfect. Sounds good. Thank you. 

Mishka Shubaly  29:24

Alright. Take care, Boni. Good to meet you.

Boni Wagner-Stafford  29:26

Bye bye.