The Art of Being Misunderstood
I asked the teens to raise their hands if they went through the world trying to be liked by other people. Also: events in SF, DC, Boston + summer classes.
Last week I was invited back to my high school to talk about my path to Wolfish with some English classes. I opened the presentation with a photo of my senior year ID card. I wanted to remind them I’d once sat in their seats.
The glasses and vest were a costume, a caricature of 2000s indie nerd life passed around my friend group. A group of guys in our class did a similar thing with fake neck tattoos. When school photos were printed, we swapped stories about the disappointment of our mothers. Tough luck if our parents didn't want us crystallized like this in institutional memory! Paging through my senior yearbook now, I cringe less at the outfit than its implication of clique—a memory of how much of adolescence selfhood is oxygenated by one's relation to a group.
It had not occurred to me, coming back to it 10 years later, that the photo's irony would be lost when projected onscreen. Isolated from context, I did not look like someone in on a joke; I looked like a goofy, earnest Portlandia cartoon. The outfit didn't read as anachronistic, just vaguely retro, appropriate for the sepia-toned hue of long-ago school. Time had blunted my costume; now it just looked like clothes. When a student said they liked my chunky glasses, I had to explain that they didn't have lenses, and that a friend had brought them for us to pass around. The joke sagged as soon as I started to explain it. We thought it would be funny, like uh, ironic—I waved my hand and clicked to the next slide. Anyway! The teens politely laughed. What was irony, anyway? Why had it once felt so fun?
At first I chalked up their misinterpretation of the photo to the generational divide. But when I then posted it on social media, the same thing happened. I didn't say I was performing a part, so nobody read it that way. I felt somewhat guilty, like I had posted a fictional relic from my past. By the time I thought to contextualize the photo, it was too late. "Omg love your past self!" an internet acquaintance wrote. A stranger responded on Twitter with a post of himself wearing thick-rimmed glasses. "Geek broads are hot," he wrote. His profile pic was a selfie in a Make America Great Again hat. Was he making fun of me? I couldn’t tell.
I share the ID anecdote now not because I’m trying to set the record straight on my sartorial adolescence, but because I've been thinking about the gap between intention and perception. How, in creating a certain version of myself in a book, I have opened myself up to be both seen and misconstrued. A recent review described me as a young woman "often debilitated" by fear. There was no value judgment in the words, but I mulled over their accuracy. Maybe it described the character I’d portrayed in the book, but it didn’t feel true to the younger self I remembered. I squirmed at the gap between reality and my portrayal of it. How to shape a life into sentences?
I once heard the writer Emma Eisenberg say that publishing a nonfiction book meant learning to accept you would be misunderstood. That was part of putting your heart onto the page and into the world: Your intention would not be clear to all readers. It was hard to accept this during the writing process. One day, when I felt particularly immobilized by the prospect of being evaluated by people I did not know, I made an index card and taped it above my desk. YOU WILL BE MISUNDERSTOOD! My brain filled in the rest: And that’s OK.
These words resonate not just as a reminder for writing, but life. So much of living in a body is pretending we have control over it, dressing in this or that to telegraph this or that, while all the while we are constantly "read" by other people and animals, evaluated by their own subjective systems of understanding. When I get a terse text message ending in a period, I occasionally (mis)interpret it as rage. When I moved to the midwest, I went to a house with an American flag and was surprised to find it inhabited by a progressive Democrat. "Only Republicans fly those in Portland," I told her. She was shocked. That read had never occurred to her.
If I spent my teens and 20s trying to "see" my authentic self—to locate my gut’s voice, to learn how to speak it—perhaps a project of this next decade is accepting the limits of how I will portray myself, whether on or off the page. It’s not my failure that leads to my being misunderstood—it’s life. The thing that grows in the gap between other and self.
Maybe it is best to see misunderstandings as generative. A gateway to inquiry. There’s only two small letters of difference between correction and connection.
Last week, I asked the high schoolers to raise their hands if they went through the world trying to be liked by other people. Every hand shot up. Me too, I said. But when you're writing, that can't be the goal. Imagine the social media post that every person hearts: your crush, your great-uncle, your old boss, your childhood bestie. It's probably pretty basic and uncontroversial. Do you want your writing to be that post? Do you want to people-please on the page? Or do you want to write something that, in George Saunders’ words, "create[s] energy," whether curiosity, awe, annoyance, or provocation? "We might even use that as one measure of a book..." he wrote in his newsletter. "Does it delight some people and disappoint or even piss off others? And, if so, how can we, as artists, make that feel OK for ourselves?" How can we accept that part of being seen is being misunderstood?
+
In the middle of my writing this newsletter, my sister called. I told her I was thinking about misunderstandings in both writing and in life. I mentioned the school ID. That because the costume had been interpreted as sincere, I felt like I’d misled people. She laughed. "But Erica, you are a nerd. You’ve always been one." She was right. "Maybe it’s not that the teens were misunderstanding you, but that you’ve been misunderstanding yourself all along. Maybe it was the other parts of your identity that were the costume." In this light, she suggested, the ID photo was something like the truth.
In most of my high school yearbook photos, my smile is forced. Maybe I’m wearing a button-up, or I’ve tried to flatiron my curls. A Wegman dog dressed up like a human adult. It’s only in the joke photo—garbed in “perfect late indie sleaze” as my friend Nora put it—that I look truly comfortable. As if, in costume, my dorky self is finally understood.
Other things:
I am obsessed with this photo of Roger, my friend Walter’s geriatric pup. If you too liked Wolfish, maybe you can write a quick review on Goodreads or Amazon? (You can paste the same thing on each!). I hide from these places but they are super important for helping new readers find the book.
Speaking of school photos…it was a thrill to get my portrait taken as an “Oregon cultural leader” for K.B. Dixon’s series on Oregon Arts Watch. I loved doing meaty interviews for Oregon Public Radio’s Think Out Loud and Minnesota Public Radio’s Big Books Big Ideas; ditto this interview with Fugue Journal. I wrote about WOLF STORIES you might not have read for the Guardian.
Upcoming Events:
THIS SATURDAY, May 6, 11 a.m. – Noon | The Bay Area Book Festival | FREE.
“The Beauty and Urgency of Nature Writing,” alongside Talia Kolluri and Tom Comitta. The Magnes Museum, Auditorium (2121 Allston Way). Recommended by KQED!
Tuesday, May 16, 7 p.m. | Somerville, MA | FREE but RSVP here.
A conversation about Wolfish with author E.B. Bartels! I loved talking to her for this animal-book interview series, and I’m so looking forward to chatting in-person at All She Wrote Books.
Wednesday, May 17, 6 p.m. | Washington DC | FREE but RSVP here.
A conversation about Wolfish with my old friend (and recent Whiting nonfiction award winner!!!!) Linda Kinstler at Busboys and Poets Brookland, 6pm.
Upcoming classes:
Unblock your creative practice! Write about animals! I’m teaching two in-person workshops at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast in mid-July: ‘Telling Animal Stories’ from July 18-19, and ‘Building a Writing Practice’ on July 20th. Spots are still available, and I’d love to see you there. The below image is from my website, or sign up directly here. Spread the word, and reach out if you have questions!
I’m so excited to have a new gig as ~Associated Fellow~ at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters in Portland, joining the brilliant Brian Benson on the nonfiction faculty of the Athenaeum: Master Writing Program, a year-long certificate program for writers working on a longford work. It’s an alternative to traditional and low-res MFAs, focused on 1x1 feedback, craft talks and readings, and literary community and kinship. Learn more here (and applications for 2023-2024 due May 16!).
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading <3