Prologue: Literary Enema

Since Murry died I've had the opposite of writer's block. You'd think I had a literary enema. I feel kind of guilty, since writing consistently is something I've wanted to do for so long. It's not like I wanted him to die so I could get this story off my chest. It's as if his release from this earth allowed me to release the secret I had been carrying inside me nearly my entire life, and that relief gave me the courage to write. Before, I just never had the heart to hurt a man by exposing his secrets, especially when he was already down in the many ways life treated him.

I used to have the opposite problem. I had plenty of ideas for things to write about, but I lacked the passion and intensity of emotion to change them from ideas into anything meaningful. I wanted to write about my abuse, but until I felt the time was right, anything else I tried to write about was like busy work.

Here's something I found recently in my files of old writings. I wrote it almost two years ago, long before we knew Cheryl was terminally ill let alone Murray. It shows how I struggled with wanting so badly to write this story, but also not wanting to hurt any one's feelings by telling the truth. Writing has always been not only a career aspiration of mine but something that I find tremendously therapeutic. So Murray's death in a way led to the birth of my storytelling and my healing.

I have some survivor's guilt like Timothy Hutton's character in "Ordinary People." And I understand now why people get in touch with their spiritual sides when someone you're close to dies. I sometimes wonder if Murray's some kind of afterlife muse guiding me. I'll know something's up if I suddenly feel compelled to use the word queef in a sentence.

Here it is:

I want to do the impossible. I want to write the story of my sexual abuse without bumming you out. I want to be the Proust of autobiographical fiction, the Sedaris of the confessional memoir. I want you to go away from my story smiling and happy, knowing things are right with the world. I want to be the disciple of compassion, of triumph, of forgiveness. I want it to be that when my book is on Oprah or being discussed in book groups or reviewed in the New York Times Book Review it is not just described as a book about sexual abuse. When people ask what To Kill a Mockingbird is about, no one says, “It’s a book about rape.” I want that to be the case with my book. I want people to say about my book what Wikipedia says about To Kill a Mockingbird: “The novel is renowned for its warmth and humor, despite dealing with serious issues of rape and racial inequality” only substitute “rape” and “inequality” with “sexual abuse” and “victimization.”

The problem is, I don’t even have a rough draft. I have a book - it’s inside my head. But I haven’t written it down for others to read because my Boo Radley still lives across the street and I don’t want to draw unnecessary attention to him. But I need to somehow gather the courage to do it because it’s time to lift the taboo engulfing sexual abuse, if for no other reason than the fact that sexual abuse flourishes in secrecy. Communication douses the fire of sexual abuse.

I feel like I need consent to write about something that happened to me without my consent. I know it’s absurd. It’s hard for me to expose the person who did this to me, because people don’t understand. People will see him as a monster and not as my brother, first and foremost, and as a person who was himself abused.

I know, it’s no excuse. He did this to me and he’s to blame for that. But is he? Is our grandmother, who did this thing to him which led him to do this thing to me? And who before her? We’ll never know. We’ll never know where it all started. What we do know is that it exists. It’s common, way way too common. Not in just my family, but all families. In all countries. In all socio-economic groups. And people don’t talk about it because they don’t want to be vulgar and ill-mannered, but I say fuck that. This happened to me. This happens to young girls and boys all the time. We should be able to talk about it without shame. We need to capture these moments and analyze them so we know how to prevent them from recurring. You have to focus the lens to make the picture clearer.

But without his consent, I feel like I’m taking advantage of my brother. For one thing, this story shall be from my perspective, and as any Masterpieces of the Cinema student who has written about Rashomon will tell you, one person’s side of the story is not the entire story. But also, I’m writing about embarrassing things he’s done without his permission. And yes, I know I shouldn’t be so worried about his feelings since he did this thing to me without my permission even though I did grant it to him because I was certainly not old enough yet to advocate for myself. But it was a long time ago. And I have a mostly happy life now. And although he caused me much misery, he has caused himself so much more, and I just can’t bring myself to add any more sorrow to such a sorrowful situation.

And I know that if I am to do such a thing, cause no further sorrow, I have to convince you that the person who did this to me is not a monster. Because that’s what people will assume. But when it gets out that this happened, and people figure out who he is, I want people to say, “But how can that be? He’s one of the nicest guys I know.”

And he was.




The following story is about getting this story out of my head and into the world where it belongs. My only regret is that my brother died before I got the courage to ask for his consent to write about it, or to even talk to him about it. But that's the thing about taboos. The secrecy and discomfort that accompanies them keeps them alive and thriving. It's time to put this taboo to rest. How can we ever find ways to stop sexual abuse if we're not willing to talk about it and examine it and admit it's going on?