Telling a Story

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” Anne Lamott

I first read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird over thirty years ago. It’s one of the best writing books of all time, because it’s also a great life book. 

The quote above is one of its most powerful pieces of advice. 

And it’s why I stopped writing personal stuff the first time.  

It started with an actual bird. 

I don’t like birds. Really. I saw Hitchcock’s The Birds way too young, and it scarred me for life. The fact that I even read Bird by Bird is honestly a miracle. 

But a number of years ago, there was this blue jay that showed up outside of my window all the time. 

(Probably because of the bird feeder on the porch below, which I was against. Because I really don’t like birds.)

That blue jay kind of grew on me. I won’t say I started to like him, but I did enjoy seeing him out my window. I even looked him up to make sure that’s what he was; All About Birds made him sound pretty cool. 

So, I mentioned my growing appreciation for this (one, specific) blue jay to my husband. 

I mentioned it because I thought it would be a safe topic of conversation. I thought he would appreciate my progress in getting over this childhood (childish?) dislike. 

Instead, I got to hear about how mean blue jays are. How I was wrong to like blue jays. How if I was going to like a bird, this one was the wrong one to choose. 

I always chose the wrong bird. The wrong tone. The wrong words. The wrong topics. The wrong TV show. The wrong way of cleaning. The wrong . . . I was always wrong. 

I remember staring at my husband as he went off about blue jays. And I remember thinking, what a fucking asshole. 

In all the times he had ranted at me, loomed over me, yelled at me. . .I had always thought of it as my fault. I accidentally triggered him. I used the wrong tone. I put something where he couldn’t find it. I did something wrong, so he was allowed to yell. Somehow, I’d become convinced that this was ok. 

And then he got mad at me for mildly enjoying a blue jay, and I realized that just maybe it wasn’t. 

Every time I tried to write after that first crack in the foundation he’d carefully laid, I got lost. Even when I tried not to write about my marriage, it wormed its way in. And I was in no position to own anything that was happening to me, so I couldn’t just write about how badly my marriage was going. 

Even now, I’m not sure about sharing this. Even though the marriage ended emotionally quite a while ago, even though he’s dead, I’m still apprehensive. 

But Bird by Bird opens with this line, “The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth.” 

I can’t guarantee that any of my future writing will be good (although I am hoping it will be much better than this piece). But I do know I had to tell this truth before I could write anything else.