Granny Does It: A Rhetoric of Identity

It doesn’t matter that I cobble together ideas about womanizing linguistics, make hallucinatory word salads, create poetics about invasive social orders, or write plays about imagined interstellar beings. My offspring, by dint of being mine, have a duty to prize personal growth and to value social contribution over externally assigned accolades. A writer’s sons and daughters might influence a writer, but she affects them, too.

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While neither gigantic starfish nor shrunken behemoths are meant to replace clergy, therapists, or beloveds as guides for self-improvement, fake fauna constitute viable vehicles for processing otherwise unreachable corners of interpersonal conundrums. Simulations are especially important to those among us who need to flee the malfeasance of ostensibly mild-mannered citizens, i.e., from individuals akin to axe murderers or other villains.

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It’s tough to refute that choices, chances, partners, and presumptions are colored by private acts and that not every answer comes from cutting away connective tissue with a scalpel, i.e., from forsaking one’s identity. Belief can and ought to be made manifest in expression.

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When I construct works about the incredible or the barely conceivable, I’m happy and I’m providing audiences with fresh mental architecture.

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Not only is the employment of pretend friends useful to entice audiences, but that choice is similarly valuable for educating them. In particular, readers that are fatigued by differentiating among intentions, decisions, and actions, professionally and personally, care little that the literature, which they deem tastiest, is riddled with masked intentions, misrepresents social fidelity, or is devoid, overall, of pointers toward private answerability. It’s not for nothing that genre fiction keeps growing in popularity.

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My use of funky critters is my sugarcoating of social linctuses.

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Gone is the era when writers sacrificed profits for principals. These days, most of what gets posted or printed is tripe. Ironically, vanished, too, is the span when writers sacrificed principles for profits. Today, even if authors play strumpets on Naked News, declare an eating disorder on LinkedIn, or snuff baby rabbits on YouTube, no one cares. Most audiences no longer even regale such acts as “performance art.”

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The realm of healthy relationships sits beyond philosophy and rhetoric's disciplinary limits. It’s useless to assign comparative worth to needy others’ statements and almost always harmful to counsel, rather than to be present as a quiet witness. Additionally, shaming, and other forms of coercion never helped anyone heal but has led to broken friendships and even divorces. There’s a reason why wise ones are relatively silent. “Command” is rarely synonymous with “sagacity.” When strategizing over reactions to other peoples’ tribulations, it’s nobler to be wordless that to spout “eruditions.”

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My kids remain the most precious commodities in my life. They deserve all the celebration that I can manifest, so I write about them.

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My burgeoning belly, my leaking breasts, and the many years I spent away from my career while surrounded by diapers, larking at museums and playgrounds, and cooking all manner of child-sized treats, yielded a self-understanding that was very different from that which I had been forced to accept earlier.