On Confession Albums and Taking the Proust Questionnaire

I don’t know how I went through so much of my life not knowing about the Proust Questionnaire. It’s one of those things that shows up everywhere once you know about it. People during writer Marcel Proust’s time filled out personality questionnaires as an amusement (then called, charmingly, “confession albums”). This was before Facebook and its which-character-in-Game of Thrones-are-you quizzes, but the same idea.

The questions are things like “who would you want to be if you weren’t you,” and one has come to be called the Proust Questionnaire. The writer took it twice, once at age fourteen and once at twenty.

The unofficial social secretary of Balbec’s two sets of answers are revealingly different. His favorite virtue in himself, at fourteen, was the need to be “loved” as well as “caressed and spoiled.” This ranks as a serious surprise from a writer who’d spend much of his later life alone in a cork-lined room. At twenty Proust’s answer to the question was “the universal virtues.” Maybe then he saw cork in his future.

The younger Proust said that he’d want to be, if not himself, the person his friends wanted him to be. The older Proust wrote that he would not answer the question of who he wished to be, then said he’d like to be Pliny the Younger.

Odd Proustiana aside, the list has thirty-five questions and has been used by Vanity Fair to interview writers like Joan Didion and Norman Mailer. Sophia Loren answered it recently--turns out she admires Kamala Harris and her favorite thing to do is eat, especially pasta and whipped cream.

The questionnaire gets cited frequently as a device in writing fiction: have your characters take the Proust Questionnaire and you can deepen your sense of who they are. But I suggest using the Proust Questionnaire for nonfiction and doing it as Proust did: over time.

You may not have six years to wait and see how you’ve changed (though that’s not a bad idea). But we change each day and each hour and probably, minute. We have selves under this and that political leader; pre- and post-lockdown selves; selves during crises. People arrive in our lives, they depart, we gather new knowledge about our fears and desires and our bodies. Maybe, as it did with Proust, one day a cookie dipped in lime tea will change everything.

This doesn’t suggest all nonfiction will focus on the author. It will not. But something that doesn’t change the observer is unlikely to move the reader or auditor, unless they are predisposed to be so moved. It’s an essential question: how have things changed, and how have they changed you.

I once went through a life-or-death event with my child. After that, my answer to the “what would be my greatest happiness” question would simply be not being there, in that time. I’m a different person, with a greater sense of the beauty of the normal day. That fact carries a story, one that questions the nature of happiness itself. And it is, to be honest, a story I hadn’t thought about until just now.

Proust himself seemed to intuit that the questionnaire told a fairly complex tale, one greater than a momentary scribble. Why answer a question by first saying you won’t answer it? Maybe it means some questions shouldn’t have answers. Yet we can’t resist answering them anyway.

Try taking this questionnaire every week or month—take it at least four times. See what your answers tell you and ask yourself whether there’s a story in those changes. Freewrite (aka, scribble!) on why and how the changes you see have occurred. Those short answers will contain remarkably complex stories. Like my happiness answer, your answers will contain worlds.

Here’s the full questionnaire—or more delightfully, confession album.

The situation in Ukraine is unspeakable. Some places that can help include World Central Kitchen, founded by chef Jose Andres—it’s on the ground providing food for refugees and others impacted by the war. Doctors Without Borders is providing medical care. Razom for Ukraine, an organization that has worked to build democracy in Ukraine, is now buying medical supplies. If there are other organizations you can vouch for, send me an email and I’ll add them.

Platform Part Deaux

Since it’s on everybody’s lips these days, I asked a publicist what, exactly, it means to develop platform, particularly through social media. She said, You have to post things that make people want to be you.

Apparently this want-to-be-you’ing means lots of success posts: screenshots of your name in journals and magazines, book selfies, glowing reviews, awards. And in case your followers wonder how amazing life is when you are not racking up publications and awards, lots of other glam stuff, like Mai Tais in front of the surf.  Perfect kiddos, adoring partners, glowing little dogs, whatever. FOMO food.

It was daunting, to say the least. Not that I have none of these things, but enough to sling it out there the required ten times a day? Not really. And anyway, I tend to be more interested in the trip that took years to save up for, but ended in a freak storm, not cute drinks. (Actually happened to me, and more than once.)

 I was once a very would-be writer who was also a high school dropout from an urban part of New Jersey. My undergraduate writing classes, when I made it to being an undergrad, consisted of John Updike, Saul Bellow, Denise Levertov, or one of the other writers who were huge there and then. Some of those writers had great stuff, but their lives had no handholds for me.

Maybe I’m still that insecure young writer. Not that I never do success posts. My working theory is just that people will get tired of them pretty quickly. If I’m honest, I do.

I wrote about platform a few posts ago, but the questions still come. Many come from writers, often newer writers, who doubt themselves when faced with platform, like those marketing statements and questionnaires that ask you to outline your social media reach. I hear from people I consider fascinating and extraordinary that they think they’ll never make it because they’re not sure how to rack up followers on Twitter.

The truth is it’s mostly not clear what your public presence means. One smart literary agent told me that unless your social media reflects what you write about—you write about snow leopards so you post pictures of snow leopards and exciting tidbits about snow leopards—it’s not going to do you much good.   Which tracks with my own experience. I have friends whose social media, and Mai Tai photos, get lots of traction but their books don’t sell. I have friends who have little or no engagement with the world of “social” but whose books sell really well.

But. That still leaves us filling out those weird author questionnaires or statements, sometimes before even getting manuscripts to the reading stage. Twitter? Instagram? Facebook? How many followers? (And isn’t that a weird word anyway, like we’re all leading some kind of cult).  It feels demeaning. And to many of us, like some game only the privileged are going to figure out. Maybe it’s today’s equivalent of “just be John Updike.”

So let me say something that is a truth, and a good one to take to your soul. You have platform already. You have tons of platform. Platform ultimately means how you stand out and how people will recognize you. And you have that. You do need to recognize it and to own it.

Whatever genre you write, your own life is the most important platform you bring to it. The things only you know, because you do know things that no one else does. Not just what you’ve lived, which is always more interesting than you think it is, but how you’ve thought about what you’ve lived.

These discouraged writers I talk to have been raised in yurts, raised their own kids as exhausted single parents, bartended, gone from poverty to teaching kayaking, bred Malamutes. And done many other freaking interesting things. Not always splashy things but things that cut to the heart of what it is to be alive. And they often don’t recognize the value of that at all. Because we’re trained to expect beaches, Mai Tais, shimmering awards. In other words, privilege.

But really we read to learn what it is to be human in another set of circumstances, another body, another mind. Emily Dickinson did not have, by any public standards, an interesting life. If you balk at that statement, think about what in her writing interests you—that she encounters snakes in the grass on a walk, or her mind.

It’s a bit of a talent to learn to fit that amazing being you are into marketing statements. It’s depressing that we’ve even come to this place. But it is where we are, so learn to take your own life seriously. Think about what only you have done and what only you know. IT’S THERE, I promise. Not just what you’ve lived, but how your life has lived you. Maybe you’ve learned that only Malamutes understand what unconditional love is. That they trained you. That being an exhausted single mom in your shoes during covid is unlike exactly any other exhausted single mom.

Either way, I want to learn what you know. Ask yourself what your stance is toward what you write, your flood subjects (to quote Dickinson), what experiences you bring to the page. Ask those you’re close to.

Massage your knowledge into statements by saying that you are the only person who can tell the story you’re telling, as specifically as you can. Maybe say that people on social media love to hear you talk about x. That there is a huge audience out there of people who will connect to and need your story. Get to that any way you can. Say that there are x number of exhausted mothers, off-the-gridders, dog lovers, etc. out there and they will want to hear from you, because that’s true. Marketing people love numbers. Find them some.

And maybe whatever social media you do have, you use regularly to elevate other writers. That kind of post gives them some platform. Good for your soul too.

On Ideal Readers and the Big Why

The poet Charles Wright once told me that he, after lots of the why-do-I-do-this’ing we writers are prone to, found an answer. Or at least, his answer. He gave a poetry reading and at the end of it a nun came forward and showed him a locket. It held a copy of his poem “October.” Because, she told him, she wanted to die with that poem on her body.

            And, he said, that was it. He’d found his ideal reader. And whatever publishing biz came along after it—rejections, acceptances, getting prizes, not getting prizes—sunk before this woman and her locket.

            I write essays, poems, fiction, and books. Do they sell well? Well enough for me to be happy, but not any publisher’s idea of stellar. Do I make money? Hmmm, no. I’ve gotten several very small book advances and two decent ones. Considering the time spent on a book, even the decent ones come to pennies per hour, if that. The truth is that even when there’s the decent advance, I travel for my books, do research, buy books, turn down other paying work. I’ve probably lost money on every one.  If I did something like drive for Uber, I’d make money and get the daily company of other people. Rather than my computer screen, ridiculous piles of paper, and a very bored kitty.

            I found my ideal reader at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual conference, which is a strange place to find anything soul-nourishing. I forget which city it was in. This was pre-covid, during the years when AWP was enormous—think as many as fifteen thousand people. And intimidating. People not on panels wondered why they weren’t on panels, people on panels wondered why they weren’t giving readings, people giving readings wondered why they weren’t keynoting. That kind of thing. I always felt those who felt good about themselves at AWP probably were spoiled as children, though that may just be my own pique.

            Then, while I did the thing I enjoyed doing, which is staffing the Bellingham Review table, I met that ideal reader. I don’t want to reveal too much of his story. I’ll just leave it at this: he told me he had conquered an addiction one summer, and part of what got him through it was reading one of my books over and over again.

            Whatever in my book helped him was a smidge of me and a heap of goodwill from the universe, for both of us. But I’d had the experience Charles had. I met my ideal reader, and I really haven’t gone too far into the weeds of “why” since then.

            When you sit at a table at a conference like AWP, you basically stand there grinning while humanity rushes by, hoping someone will want to stop and talk. It occurs to me now that this is pretty much what it means to be a writer—you stand around bashfully, hoping someone wants to extend that conversation you threw out into the void with your words. And if you do this long enough, I believe, you will also find your ideal reader.