SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
There are, of course, some happy memoirs, but often memoirs that relive some of our worst days win readers and admiration. Two new memoirs feature their authors wrestling with the cost of trading your worst moments for public consumption. Andrew Limbong hosts NPR's Book of the Day podcast, and he got them in a studio together. This alert - there is a brief mention of sexual violence.
ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: Let's start with Chad Sanders. In June 2020, during all the protests over the murder of George Floyd, Sanders wrote an essay in The New York Times.
CHAD SANDERS: And I sat down, and I just wrote my exact feelings about, you know, wishing that my white friends would stop hitting me up in this moment, because it was making me uncomfortable. It was making me tired.
LIMBONG: The headline was "I Don't Need Love Texts From My White Friends."
SANDERS: It turned out a lot of people that looked like me had that same feeling. And that's the thing I'm trying to do when I write.
LIMBONG: Connect with other people. And the essay led to more opportunities to do just that. He started writing for podcasts, for TV shows, mining his lived experience for content. And he says he started to feel not great about that, which he writes about in his new memoir, "How To Sell Out: The Hidden Cost Of Being A Black Writer."
SANDERS: There was a - I would call it a two-year moment that kind of got stretched into four years, where there was a hunger or an appetite for Black voices who were speaking on their pain.
LIMBONG: There was a market need, and Sanders contorted himself into the product. He says it was like a hole opened up, and he could see the career he wanted on the other side of it.
SANDERS: But to get through it, I had to, like, change shape to really fit that thing so that I could satisfy the appetite for Black pain. And I learned, in the process, as an artist, you don't get to just fake it. If you fake it every day, that's actually who you are at a certain point.
LIMBONG: Jamie Hood also wrote an essay that went viral in 2020.
JAMIE HOOD: And it's called, "[Expletive] Like A Housewife."
LIMBONG: It was about being a trans woman yearning for a very heteronormative sex life. It was published in The New Inquiry in February, just before the COVID shutdowns cost her her bartending job.
HOOD: But by virtue of that essay and the attention it got me, agents started reaching out to me. A small press outside of Cleveland came to me and they were like, hey, we know you have no jobs anymore. Do you want to write a book?
LIMBONG: She was actually in the middle of her new book, "Trauma Plot," which comes out in a few weeks. It's a very personal book about being raped, and she was having trouble getting it done. So Hood shifted gears and wrote a different book instead, something more like a pandemic diary, titled "How To Be A Good Girl."
HOOD: In a way, I was very relieved that that was the first book and not the rape book. Because, you know, having your first book be the rape book kind of puts you in a space where you're always going to be the rape girl, you know?
LIMBONG: Well, that's kind of a part of what we're talking about, right? Like, it's - this book coming out second might not stop that from happening, right?
HOOD: Oh, no, for sure. I'm still going to be the rape girl.
LIMBONG: Yeah. Yeah. And, like, are you worried about that?
HOOD: Yeah. I mean, you can't control your audience. You can't control how you become assimilated in a cultural imaginary, you know? Once the book leaves your grip, it doesn't belong to you anymore.
LIMBONG: Her new book is very much a response to the gender politics of the first Trump administration and the state of the #MeToo movement. But it opens responding to this idea you hear from certain literary critics that there's something wrong with writing - be it fiction or memoir - that relies too heavily on past traumas.
HOOD: That idea is always that these stories are unnecessary or that the people who are telling them - myself included - are, like, somehow dupes of the system. To my mind, I think that to be denied the capacity to tell the story that I want to tell on the idea that I have somehow been manipulated by a publisher, by a cultural moment, that in and of itself feels like another sort of instance of dehumanization. For me - this is going to sound really sentimental, but I am a very sentimental person. I'm very earnest, and I know that's incredibly unpopular in this sort of moment.
LIMBONG: (Laughter).
HOOD: But, you know, for me, like, writing this book, first, was for myself, but secondly, it was also just to sort of put something out there that hopefully makes even one person feel less alone. That feels important to me. That feels worth it.
SANDERS: Jamie's kind of made me remember the art in all of this, which is that I don't feel like somebody thrust me into the position of selling myself out with my art. I chose that. I wanted it is what I'm saying. Jamie said it. You can't take the personhood and the choice out of somebody saying, I'm greedy. I want something. I am going to sell myself out here.
LIMBONG: You know, I'm now realizing, Chad - I thought the title of your book was kind of ironic in that it's anti-selling out, but it's...
SANDERS: It's literal.
LIMBONG: ...Literally how to sell - OK.
SANDERS: (Laughter) If you're going to sell out, here's a way to do it. I'm not saying that it's the thing to do, but if you're going to do it, you need an instruction manual. You need to know what it's going to come with - at least what it came with for me.
LIMBONG: In his book, Sanders writes, this is my last time writing about race. Now, the cost-benefit analysis of both writers might look different, but this time, at least, they both decided the value of connecting with someone was worth it.
Andrew Limbong, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF DARCEBEAT AND JAFZ BEAT'S "HOPE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
