I Was Wrong About Everything
While I was working on my memoir back in 2022, I had certain assumptions about who its audience might be and how it might be received by certain people. These assumptions were all proven wrong, most of them immediately after it went on sale. Here I will list those assumptions, describe where they came from, and attempt to explain how, exactly, I was so full of it. In the process, I hope I can shed some light on the mental roadblocks and misplaced anxieties that can come with memoir-ing.
I don’t think many people will “get it.” I reached this conclusion right after I read the final draft and decided I was happy with it. You see, I had done the thing that “serious artists” always claim to be doing, which is to say: I made the thing for myself. Having done that, I then asked myself the obvious questions: "If I didn’t make it for anybody else, why should anybody else give a shit? If I didn’t write it for an audience, why would it have one?" No obvious answer sprang to mind. I wondered if the thing I’d written was too oddly specific and therefore would have an incredibly narrow appeal. I hoped that maybe some of my West Point classmates who had similar career paths in the Army (which is to say, brief and unspectacular ones) and comparably warped senses of humor could relate to my experiences, but beyond that? I had no idea.
What actually happened was that the book found a very diverse audience right from the jump - though to be clear, it wasn’t so large that I could quit my day job. Nevertheless, my narrow expectations concerning who might read and like my book were completely blown up almost instantly. I got this wrong because of what is in retrospect a very dumb misconception on my part: that people like memoirs because they are about people who are like themselves in a glaringly obvious way. This is obviously untrue. Anthony Bourdain didn’t sell a trillion copies of Kitchen Confidential because there were a huge number of Culinary Institute of America graduates working as executive chefs at French-brasserie-style restaurants in Manhattan who had shot up heroin and smoked crack in the late 1980s just waiting for that exact book to come out. Reading about the thoughts and experiences of someone who is, at least on the surface, very different from you is part of why memoirs can be interesting in the first place! Conversely, whatever my intrinsic sense of being an oddball, the truth is that (for instance) being a social disaster at high school, only to start sorting yourself out in your 20s, isn’t exactly such a wildly alien personal arc that a normal person can’t wrap their head around it, either.
Some of my West Point classmates might really hate this. I had this idea not because of any specific hot gossip or wild political statements the book contained (it’s very light on both), but because I thought they might see the act of writing it at all as presumptuous. Many of my classmates had long military careers, achieved high rank and received impressive awards; I did none of those things. I could easily imagine them thinking, in effect, “What the hell did this guy do to justify writing a book about himself? Is he on some kind of ego trip?”
This did not happen. Well, it’s theoretically possible that one of my West Point classmates thought this, but none of them have come at me with that take, and I offered them plenty of chances to do so. I think the reason I was wrong was this simply was not a particularly rational worry in the first place. The book was called Rank Absurdity, and its cover was a cartoon version of me looking ridiculous while hanging from a parachute; it would take a particularly thick would-be reader to look at that and think I was on some kind of ego trip. And while I may be biased, I think even a cursory reading of the text makes it even more obvious.
If anything, with the benefit of hindsight I think it helped the book that it’s about a period of time almost anyone in the class could relate to: the struggle to get accepted to West Point, the four years we shared at the Academy, and then the five years in the Army that almost all of us owed after graduation. Without really looking at it that way while I was writing it, it encapsulated the coming-of-age period that many of us shared in broad strokes, granting that the specifics could of course be very different. My story ends right at the point historical forces and personal factors alike tended to really start pulling things apart. Had I looked at it that way, it being embraced by a varied cross-section of my class wouldn’t have been so shocking to me.
Women will not like this. I had a general belief that a middle-aged man talking about what he did in the 1990s was almost definitionally a bad formula for appealing to women, but there was slightly more to it than that. In reading other memoirs written by men, military or otherwise, I noticed that they often tended to become cringe-worthy or outright gross the second women entered the narrative. I didn’t arrive at this conclusion via some particularly deep 4th-wave feminist analysis; these guys just seemed to be incompetent at writing about women, or were creeps in a general, nondenominational sense. Having noticed this, I was very motivated to avoid that sort of thing. A nightmare scenario I had was imagining one of the women from my West Point class reading it and reacting with a disgusted, “Not this shit again...”
At the same time, I was very determined not to whitewash what the young, dumb version of myself was like. I didn’t want to give my younger self credit for having figured out things that I only worked out later in life, and I didn’t want to omit or alter uncomfortable or inconvenient truths for the sake of sanitizing my story. Not that I had any kind of drastic confessions to make, mind you, but nevertheless: there were women in the story, and I absolutely could be kind of a dope in my teens and twenties, and these facts necessarily overlapped at times. I worried that I would botch how I wrote about those situations, and then I worried than in trying not to botch them, I would wring all the fun out of the stories – and almost all of them ultimately were fun stories, either at the time or in retrospect. In the end I just gave it my best shot and hoped the stories would come across in the spirit they were intended.
What became obvious almost immediately after the book went on sale was that a large share of the positive feedback it received came from women, with some of the biggest boosters being women from my West Point class. It seemed that my worrying was not just unfounded, but completely out of phase with how it was received. Needless to say, I was happy with this, but it was also a bit of a shock. Not as much of a shock to the system, however, as when one of my classmates told the ex-West Point professor featured in my [checks notes] “accidentally got high on pot in law class while distracted by the sexy and then flunked a quiz and got the munchies” anecdote that she was in my book. That left me in a state of bug-eyed paranoia for about a week, until she contacted me to let me know that she had read the book and liked it. I'm sure I experienced greater periods of stress than that while I was in the Army, but at the moment none spring to mind.
The funny thing is, I really had no substantive reason to be worried that she’d be offended. She was not the punchline of the story, and nothing about it was vulgar or insulting, just deeply silly. Additionally, several of the book’s proofreaders were women, whose only defect as critics was that they already liked me enough to agree to proofread my typo-riddled rough drafts. I could argue that the fact that I was worried about that element of my writing is why I maybe didn’t mess it up, but I think that’s giving myself too much credit in this case. One of the pitfalls of writing, especially about yourself, is that you can simply overthink things, especially if you’re inexperienced and lack confidence in your writing. It also probably didn’t help that writing the book required me to relive my dismal, dateless outsider years in junior high and high school, when it really did feel like teenage girls were annoyed by everything my teenage self said or did, up to and including their being reminded I existed at all. It's possible that also shaded how I viewed things in some way.
So there it is. Perhaps, in seeing how I was dumb, you can not do that yourself. Be dumb in different, more original ways instead.