Writing a Book About the Trump Era Devoured My Life

At times, I felt like I was writing in reverse

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

This essay was originally published in Medium on October 16, 2019. It’s paywalled there, so I’m reposting here for paying Substack subscribers, since I tend to link to it a lot!

I spent the last three years writing a 221-page book. That comes out to roughly one page every five days, something around 300 words a week. Impressive!

Actually, it doesn’t include the hundreds of other pages that, bit by bit, ended up in the wastebasket, often just days after being completed. Nor does it include the hundreds of Post-its and pieces of scrap paper on which I scribbled random notes to myself at all hours of the day, or the countless memos I typed to myself on my iPhone because it was the only writing implement within reach when I lay in bed at night obsessing about my book.

Often I’d wake up to memos like this.

Has intersetionalty been turnd into fashion statment? If so, whats harm?

Is eveyone this rageful or just people on soc media? Is causation or correlcation?

Find Chekov quote (Tolstoy?) about writer solve problem

Buy toilet paper

When I teach writing, one of the rules I emphasize most strenuously to my students is “never try to write about an experience until it’s solidly in the past.” My book, which is about the current political climate and many of the surrounding culture wars, is nothing if not a violation of that rule. I started it — or at least started thinking seriously about it — in early 2016, well before Donald Trump was considered a serious presidential candidate. At the time, the big news stories included the Zika virus and a new phenomenon called “fake news.” Bernie Sanders was giving Hillary Clinton a run for her money but everyone assumed Clinton would be the Democratic nominee and then be elected president (probably in a landslide victory against someone like Jeb Bush).

At the time, I was interested in the ways feminism had become a product of social media and, from there, had split off into synergic if also competing brands. I was interested (and growing weary of) the ubiquity of the “badass,” an increasingly meaningless archetype that applied to everything from Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games to any woman who managed to get out of bed every morning and fight the patriarchy for another day, even if that fight required no more exertion than putting on a T-shirt that spelled out “Feminist” in rhinestone lettering.

This book would be entitled You Are Not A Badass. I knew it wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of macchiato, but I also knew we were about to have a female president, so I figured the world could handle it.

I wrote many pages along these lines. I wrote about how women in the West now have more freedom and opportunity than at any time in the history of civilization, while huge swaths of social media and pop culture are premised on the idea that women remain as much an underclass ever. I explained why I thought the casual use of terms like male privilege and “toxic masculinity” might actually do more to reinforce sexism than overthrow it. I wondered aloud if there was something about my generation, Generation X, that caused us to fetishize toughness, whereas subsequent generations placed high value on fairness. I asked myself — or asked the page — which approach was more useful and if there was any way to combine the two and get the best of both. I briefly changed the title to You Are Probably Not A Badass.

Then Trump became president, the country went insane, and I began writing pages about the insanity. Those pages made the earlier pages seem irrelevant, so I threw those out and continued to write new ones. But then the contours of the insanity would shift somewhat — #MeToo emerged, conversations about race began to eclipse those around gender, the trans movement gained visibility, “woke” became a household word — and the new pages would start to feel old and they, too, would be discarded. In 2017 through much of 2018, I wrote about everything from airplane dress codes to sexist office thermostats to the “Google memo,” a now-infamous document about brain sex differences and how they might factor into hiring practices for female software coders. Only a small portion of this material appears in the final book. (You’ll have to read it to find out which.)

I’ve compared writing this book to playing a game of Whac-A-Mole, but really it was more like the candy factory scene in I Love Lucy. Instead of beating down each new trending topic with a mallet, I’d stuff it into my mouth like Lucy and Ethel downing chocolates as they tried to keep up with a conveyor belt gaining speed by the second. I spit out quite a lot, though not enough to avoid feeling sick from all the sugar. For every new sentence I wrote, I probably deleted three old ones. At times, I felt like I was writing in reverse.

During the writing of this book — maybe we should call this period the Years of Typing and Deleting — a lot of real life events took place for me. I moved across the country, got divorced, and my father fell ill and died. My dog also fell ill and, after rallying for a spell, eventually lost enough quality of life that I had to have her put down. Amid this, there were moments (many of them stretching into entire days, weeks and months) when I wanted to euthanize my book. It had reduced my quality of life to a shard of its former self.

I’ve never been great at work/life balance (a fact to which my now-ex husband can attest) and any author will tell you that writing a book, or at least finishing one, can turn even the most sociable and well-adjusted person into a deranged, monomaniacal, paranoid wretch. But during the Years of Typing and Deleting, I wasn’t monomaniacal as much as mono-paralyzed. It was bad enough that I couldn’t figure out how to write my book. I also couldn’t bring myself to do anything other than sit in front of my computer, not writing it.

As I sat there, coffee mugs and strands of dental floss collecting on my desk, sunny weekends drifting past my window like unopened party invitations, I began to feel less like the ostensible author of this project and more like its prisoner. I was no longer writing a book — I was in an abusive relationship with one.

My friends, at least the ones I could bring myself to see or talk with, became concerned about my well-being. In the first year of Typing and Deleting, when people asked, “How’s the book going?” I put up a good front and said it was coming along. The second year, by which time the book was now a year overdue to the publisher, I murmured things like “It’s a tough time to try to write a book,” and “The project is evolving.” By the third year, anyone stupid enough to inquire about the book either got a sharp “Don’t ask me that!” or was subject to a fit of such epic self-loathing and despair that it would have been well within their rights to send me a bill later for psychiatric counseling.

Not that I actually would have sought psychiatric counseling, since that would have cut into my non-writing time. The same went for socializing, outdoor recreation, cleaning my apartment, or reading anything that wasn’t related to the ever-expanding morass of topics I was trying to cover in my book. In other words, watching neuroscientists argue with each other on YouTube: good. Going outside for a walk: bad.

Inside my head, possible book titles clanked around like keys that wouldn’t turn a lock, each of them either totally ridiculous or totally perfect, depending on the angle of the sun outside my window:

You Are Not A Badass

You Are Probably Not a Badass

Everybody, Shut The Fuck Up

Shut The Fuck Up, Everybody

What The Fuck Was I Thinking Trying To Write This Book?

Woke Me When It’s Over

I was trapped inside a tyrannical mind game. The main rule of this game was very simple: I could not have a life until I finished my book. I could not take on any extra writing assignments. I was not allowed to teach. (Eventually I started running out of money and loosened those restrictions.) I was not allowed to do any kind of traveling, let alone take a vacation, unless it was absolutely professionally necessary. Once in awhile, I would grant myself permission to have dinner with friends or go to a party, but as time went on I often didn’t want to do these things because I felt I had nothing to say for myself. Single again post-divorce, I nonetheless had little in the way of romantic relationships and barely even went on any dates. What would have been the point? As far as I was concerned, no man could possibly be interested in a woman who hadn’t completed a book about the current political climate and surrounding culture wars.

Somehow I finished the book. Or at least I finished it as much as you can finish anything about an unfinished situation. That is to say that, despite knowing I could keep flying forever, I looked for the nearest airfield and tried to guide the plane toward it as smoothly as possible. As I write this column, the book, which comes out next week, is sitting on the tarmac, waiting to pull into the gate. Boy, do I have to pee.

My sincere hope is that we can stop being afraid of our own contradictions and confusions and recognize that feeling conflicted is the essence of honest thinking.

I often encounter students who are trying to write about an experience, for instance a relationship or a parenting journey, that they’re still in the middle of. My advice is to set a quit date for the end of the story. I tell them to write up until a year ago, or three months ago, or two weeks ago. I tell them that none of us, individually, can ever tell a whole story anyway. All we can do is try to lay things out as we see them, and do so with as much honesty and intellectual courage as possible. That Chekhov quote I was looking for (it was indeed Chekov) is this: “The task of the writer is not to solve the problem, but to state the problem correctly.”

I ended up calling my book The Problem With Everything. It felt right, and not just because for so long I assumed the project was the cause of everything that was wrong with my life. It felt right because it captures the chaos of the era. In one sense, of course, it refers to the way so many things — not just things, but human beings — are labeled “problematic” these days. In another sense, it refers to the lack of shading and complexity in public discourse. If I can’t solve the problem of why modern life feels like a game of outrage-driven Whac-A-Mole, at least I can try to retrace some of the steps that brought us to this place. In the end, the book isn’t an indictment of badasses or an evisceration of wokeness as much as a call for nuance. It’s an expression of my sincere hope that we can stop being afraid of our own contradictions and confusions and recognize that feeling conflicted is the essence of honest thinking.

This can be uncomfortable, believe me. Not to mention lonely. I’ve spent the last three years in various states of both. I’ve been so desperate to get on with my life that I’ve wanted to cry “woke me when it’s over” more times than I’d care to admit. But as I ended up realizing, and as I say in the book, it’s never over. Everyday becomes yesterday before you know it, and there are always tomorrow’s problems to look forward to. Sometimes the problem with everything is that we feel like we can’t keep up with anything. That’s called being human, which is the one problem we all share.