“It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
What I’m Reading
This week I read Melissa Febos’ Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, a book on the art and ethics of publishing personal narrative.
While I’m a professional writer, I didn’t train to be one. As a student, I studied philosophy and theology. While I am sure that I took some sort of writing composition class as a young community college student, that was more than 25 years ago, and I only have a vague recollection of doing so.
For me, writing has always served as a vehicle for expressing ideas, feelings, and experiences. While I’ve had a consistent drive to put my thoughts on paper, I never really considered my writing to be an art form in its own right. This was true when I was a child and I wrote about my longings in my diary; it was also true when I was a grad student who was being asked to make sense of the theories I was encountering; and it has been most true when I transitioned to sex work and started to write publicly about my experiences with clients, what it felt like to live under sex work stigma, and how unjust sex work laws impact myself and my people.
That is to say, I have always put more thought into the ideas that I am trying to communicate than I have into the craft of writing itself. I kept writing because it helped me to clarify my thoughts and feelings—to make sense of my world. That is to say, it was a means to an end and not an end in itself.
For these reasons, it is rather unusual that I would read a book like Febos’ that is more about the craft of writing than are her other books (such as Whip Smart, about her time as a professional dominatrix and heroine addict).
While there is so much that I can say about the book, for this week I am going to focus on one point, one that Febos refers to as “putting the writer first.” One of the chapters focuses on how to negotiate writing about the other people in her life. This section was particularly relevant to me as I have been writing my memoir and thinking a lot about what to include/exclude about people who are close to me (and in more complicated cases, those who were once close to me and no longer are). Every divorced writer will recognize this dilemma!
At the beginning of this section, she says,
“Once, in a conversation with a writer friend, she asked me how I found the courage to write so intimately when I knew my work was likely to upset the people in my life. I told her that I always let the writer win. I explained to her that in the course of my daily life, I was generally a very good employee, a good teacher, a good friend, a good daughter. But when any of those roles came into conflict with my writing, or I anticipated that they might, I was a writer first. I always let the writer win.”
As I read this passage, I realized that I have never thought of myself as a “writer first.” In fact, my writing—as in the physical exercise of sitting down to write, but also in the way she means it—has almost always come after everything else. After my kids’ needs are met, after the laundry, after my appointments with clients, after paying my bills. Just after.
It would be easy to feel guilty about this (as in, Am I really a writer if I find it difficult to make sacrifices for my art?), if I didn’t also strongly believe in the importance of my relationships, my work, and my other priorities. After all, what would I be writing about if I wasn’t also engaged in the world my writing describes and seeks meaning from?
Interestingly, in this section, Febos comes to acknowledge this mistaken belief that the writer should necessarily come first stems from an immature belief, one that doesn’t recognize the impact that writing has on the lives of others. She says,
“I subscribed to a somewhat shallow, self-interested, and, I now see, heartless perspective on this. A kind of oh well attitude that was rationalized by a grandiose story about the moral imperative of an artist’s vision.”
Unfortunately for Febos, this knowledge came at the expense of someone in her life that was hurt by her writing. She learned through this experience that that art for its own sake doesn’t always trump other important values, like relationships or kindness. She concludes, “There are good essays that there are good reasons not to write. Sometimes it’s important to let the writer lose.”
What I’m Thinking About
While these issues relating to how a writer writes about other people are important and interesting, being a sex working writer is even more complex and makes me want to turn the question on its head: How should I write about myself, my experiences, and my ideas? How will they impact my business and the kinds of interactions that I have with the world, with clients, with my family.
There are the obvious issues about being public about the nature of my work. Those who are not in my sex work orbit know I am a sex worker because they have encountered my writing. But there is an even more delicate issue. Sex workers typically engage in a fan dance of sorts: a seductive reveal and conceal, one that is alluring enough for clients to project their fantasies onto, but not so revelatory as to contradict them.
Earlier this week I had a new client (he was lovely) who told me that he almost backed out of the date because he did a deep dive and found out so much about me and my life through my writing that he wasn’t sure how to interact with me. Thankfully, he was mature enough to say that if he couldn’t handle this information, he should not have gone looking for it. We were both glad that he decided to follow through on the booking!
Yet, he is not the first person to express this sort of concern (not to mention the many times that existing regulars have read things into my writing that either I didn’t intend, or that wasn’t about them). I understand this. In relationships that are as intimate and intense as a provider/client relationship can be, these dynamics can be tricky, especially when I, as the writer, gets to set the framing. Indeed, Febos commented on this phenomena by saying, “It is profoundly unfair that a writer gets to author the public version of a story that has as many true variations as persons involved.”
While I am very careful about what I say about clients and the other people in my life (I’ve never been as blasé as Febos), it is also true that it is hard to project a fantasy girlfriend onto me when I make it so clear that I am a person with a full life. While writing may (and certainly does) attract clients who are seduced by writers generally or by me specifically, it can also be a marketing disaster when the things you write contradict the things the clients come looking for.
I know this, and yet I keep writing. I write because it embosses my work with meaning; I write because I always have; I write because I want to understand the intense and often beautiful interaction I’m having; I write because I want to be understood.
I am incredibly grateful for the clients and the people in my life who have decided to walk beside me on this journey, even when it is uncomfortable. I’m grateful to those who have come to realize that there are many ways to give and receive pleasure, love, and companionship.
I have come to care more about authentic interactions with those people than I have about palatable marketing.
What I’m Excited About
I’m eyeballs deep in the bathroom renovation project I was telling you all about last week, and I’m excited to eventually have a functioning bathroom and a house that doesn’t look like a construction zone.
Beyond that, I’m always excited about connecting with new and regular clients, enjoying the quiet beauty of the winter snowfall, and reading and writing.
Availability & Booking
I will be out of town this weekend (Sat & Sunday), but after that I’ll be back in Pittsburgh for all of February, save the weekend that I am going to Cleveland. I’ll be stopping in Buffalo and Chicago in March, and am looking forward to those trips as well!
My travel calendar is kept up to date on my website.
