So, an editor that I deeply admire at a major imprint just started reading DREAM POP ORIGAMI, my experimental memoir about patchwork hapa identity, and of course my internal dialogue for the past week has been nothing but:
Don't-Stop-Believing Part of My Brain: —I know this doesn't mean anything, but it still gives me hope.
Life-is-Pain-and-There's-No-Goddamn-Justice-in-the-World Part of My Brain: —Um, you're setting yourself for intense and massive heartbreak and you know it.
—I do. At the same time, more dudes need to write memoirs (and personal essays, for that matter) about identity, love, pain, emotion, and cultural hyphenation and more women need to write cultural criticism, philosophy, and fact-based nonfiction because there's an insane and bullshit binarism in the nonfiction world right now between logos-based male nonfiction writing and pathos-based women nonfiction writing that has been driving me crazy. Let's celebrate how smart women are by publishing them in EVERY subgenre of nonfiction and let's celebrate the emotional subjectivity of male CNF writers by publishing them in EVERY subgrene of nonfiction too.
—Sure, why not throw a parade and Mardi Gras confetti while you're at it.
—You're really mean.
—I'm really honest. And, I just wanna point out that your naïveté (what you like to call "hope") is gonna fuck you up and keep you up at night.
—I know that and hopelessness is worse.
—Not worse than the feeling you'll get when your shit gets rejected.
—A boy can dream.
—A boy can cry his ass off.
—You literally just described the last two years of my life.
—Only two? Damn, you've had it easy.
—There's nothing easy about being a literary (non) fiction writer in LA where no one reads novels and everyone wants to be (friends with) movie stars or become infamous vloggers with three million followers or start their own award-winning podcast that gets picked up by NPR. It's a dreary landscape for old school media, frankly.
—I literally got nothing for you, except pity. The really bad kind.