Writing oneself onto a page

The joys and sorrows of self-commodification

There’s some talk doing the rounds in the usual places these days¹, pertaining some of the negative effects of writing oneself onto a page. The conversation follows a well-trodden path, which goes something like this: Author X writes a candid book (often a memoir dealing with painful topics); the industry sells this product to readers (consumers); some readers don’t respond in the way Author X expected them to respond; optional: Author X pens an opinion piece² about the industry failing in its duty to protect authors.

I’m aware that I’m dangerously breaking protocol here, by sidestepping the very contemporary demand that I be candid about my own mental health and / or traumatic life events when writing remotely close to these topics. So I’ll bow to this convention: please note that I’m no strange to mental health predicaments (and trauma) and it was actually a psychiatrist who told me twenty-five years ago or more that I should never stop writing, because it was good for me and useful for our sessions. I’m not sure if she was right or not but I took her suggestion to heart (probably because I was desperate) and I never stopped writing (for other reasons). Of course she said this as a therapist and not as a reader or literary critic or agent — she never commented on the quality of my writing, for example. And there were many other things that she didn’t mention. For example, she didn’t say that I should entertain a career writing about myself because it’d be healthy, or that I should keep writing even if it caused me suffering, or that writing should replace therapy or medication. Neither did my psychiatrist say that I should turn my struggles into a parapet from where to snipe safely about certain topics, so the above is all I’ll say about my mental health in writing, hopefully for the rest of my life, because it’s my right to keep some things to myself. Convention fulfilled, I hope.