Carvell Wallace: “There’s a misconception about memoirists"

What a delight it was to talk to Carvell Wallace, the author of August’s book of the month, in our live Q&A session earlier this week.

Over the course of an hour, we talked about Another Word For Love, about writing about trauma and recovery, about working with expected (and unexpected) audiences, and about the difference between a memoir and its author. We also touched a little on getting life advice and even on the wisdom of Samuel L Jackson. 

Here are some highlights, lightly edited for clarity.

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Even though many people were taken by the difficult experiences in Carvell’s story, this is not a book about trauma—it’s a book about what it looks like to recover.

“The part about my childhood and the attendant traumas is only, like 90 pages: it's not that much of the book. The large part of the book is focused on recovery. And that’s by design. I wrote about the suffering so that you know what a person was recovering from. The point of it wasn't the suffering. But I may have underestimated how much that suffering would reach the reader… I think of my suffering as not in any way unique, but [maybe] it seems a lot within the frame of reference of the audience that it's found thus far.” 

“I knew that I needed to do just enough of that to get it established, so that we knew what the recovery was about. But then we're moving beyond that. But I had a statement that's really kind of at the turning point of the book, which is: it is not enough to hurt and know that you're hurt. What love requires of us to do is to heal.”

Black writers often get asked to perform their trauma in exchange for money. So Carvell asked other people for advice on how to avoid the trap.

“I was acutely aware of that going into it. And I had a lot of conversations with other artists about this. I did a profile of Terell Alvin McCraney for the New York Times Magazine, who wrote the play that eventually was adapted into the movie Moonlight: I asked him about this particular notion of how we as artists, black artists, deal with our pain. Basically what I asked him was: ‘ever feel like you're trading your pain for rent money?’ His answer was nuanced. But I had that conversation with a number of artists before I even undertook this project, so it was very much on my mind.”

It’s important to remember that the book and the author are not the same thing—even in something as personal as memoir. There’s editing. There’s writing!

“As a memoirist, it doesn't feel like you have to separate yourself from the work. But that book is not me: it's a book I wrote. And even though it's about me and about my story, it's not me, it's a book I wrote. And so if people like the book, that's great, and if they don't like the book, that sucks. But it's not me that they like or don't like. It's just the book that I made.”

“I think people don't know that memoirists—in many cases, not always—[are] doing the work of curating and art creation and novelization, even though the source material is their own story. I think there's a misconception that memoirists are people who just kind of sit in front of their computers and vomit out everything that ever happened to them.”

And the perception that memoirists are somehow different to (and lesser than) other writers is unfair.

“Because memoir is frequently done by women and people of color, I think sometimes people think that there's writing, with authors like Hemingway and Saul Bellow and whatever, and then there's memoirists who are just these touchy-feely people who write down their feelings in a way that other touchy-feely people like. It's tricky, because as a writer you're not trying to prove that you're a good writer in your writing—that's a really quick way to get to bad writing! But you do want people to at least recognize that … I'm here as a writer: that's actually what you're paying for. You’re not paying because I lived a hard life, you're paying for the book because I've struggled and practiced with a particular methodology of communicating and using a particular media as a way of communicating about the human experience.”

Carvell also talked about how, in his other life as an interviewer and profiler, he has learned a lot from other people.

“I feel like I cheat on interviews because… it's just a big ruse to get life advice from successful people. But I feel like Sam Jackson, when I first interviewed him, had a lot of ways that he approached the world that I found compelling. But the second time I interviewed him [for a forthcoming piece], I really felt even a new version of like, ‘Oh, this guy really has figured something out that I'm trying to figure out, and I don't quite know what it is.’”

“I did interview Lena Waithe for a piece back in 2019, and she had a few really interesting things to say about this question of black art for pain. And I also did love talking to Viola Davis, because I really related to her story—the fact that she really came from nothing, but once she found acting was like ‘I'm going to make this happen come hell or high water.’ And she did that over tremendous odds, she did that by becoming a really good actor—and she was very open about the fact that when she first started, she was not a very good actor. I went to theater school, and I know what it's like to get on stage every day when you know you're in over your head with the material, with the language, with the emotions that the scene is requiring. You have to have this kind of willingness to just get better despite the embarrassment. Talking to her really reminded me of the power of that process.”

And, as always, we asked for book recommendations.

Titles that inspired Carvell in the writing of Another Word For Love? “There were many, but the one that I always shout out, because not that many people talk about it, especially outside of California, is Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. There were many, though, definitely there were bell hooks’ Belonging: A Culture of Place was a bigger influence than All About Love, although everyone can sort of immediately identify the All About Love influence. And then The Collected Poems of June Jordan was also always ever-present in my approach to the book. Ninety-Nine Stories of God by Joy Williams is a little experimental fiction piece that I think had an outsized influence on the book, particularly the structure and just what I thought was possible with it.”

Books that he turns to again and again? “I'm not a huge rereader, but some foundational books are Working by Studs Terkel, because when I was in college… we did that as a main stage production at NYU. I became obsessed with it after that. I got a copy of the book, and I still go to it all the time. These are books that I go to, I don't even know if they're so important to me or if they're so good or influential, it's just that I always go to them. My mother got me a copy of the Complete Works of Shakespeare when I was like 15, and that's a book that I open up all the time and just randomly read. I like books that I can just open up to any page and read something and be interested. I also felt that with [Maggie Nelson’s] The Argonauts. And right here I have Strangers On A Train by Patricia Highsmith, which is another favorite: that one I've gone to a couple times because I'm so stunned with how it's structured.”

There are two big perks to this club for me—sharing great books with other people, and getting to talk to the people who wrote them. It’s such a privilege! Subscribers get exclusive access to watch the entire video on YouTube, so even if they can’t join live they have the option to watch it back later.

Thanks again to Carvell. What a pleasure.

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In the meantime, I’m just getting ready to send out next month’s book—look out for the announcement next week. But I can tease you by saying it’s about three things I love: food, science and history. If you want to sign up to get your copy, there’s never a better time to do it than now.

That’s it for this week.

Onward!

Bobbie