NON-FICTION : Dramaturgy / Brittany Ackerman
We featured Brittany Ackerman’s work in the very first issue of The Racket Journal. It was deep, deep in the pandemic and everybody was struggling and Ackerman’s writing drew a laser pointer on the emotional truth behind it all. There’s a vibrant curtness to her work, a way of encapsulating the big ideas of youth and nostalgia and motherhood and love and sex and family and whatever else she turns her attention to in what feel like almost bite size releases. In “Dramaturgy” Ackerman delves into the gray space between friendship and relationship and the emotional freedom we’re allowed as we walk that thin line.
Dramaturgy
Brittany Ackerman
“Writing is a place of Liberty”- Sheila Heti
We meet in a Fiction workshop. We should be sitting next to each other at a long conference table, but instead we are two faces in a pool of squares. It’s the summer of the pandemic. Our workshop leader is someone famous. On the first day, she asks for a volunteer to give a monologue about anything, anything at all that comes to mind. You raise a virtual hand.
I watch as you speak for the next five minutes. The rest of us are supposed to write down what we hear. It’s an exercise in voice.
At my sister’s wedding, I married her and her husband. I made all the speeches and arranged so many things. And then her husband fell down drunk. It was embarrassing. It was deeply embarrassing. So I said the most true thing I could, the most truthful thing to him, that was “You need to sober up, you are upsetting my sister.” And it was like a great trespass. It was like I had unleashed something. It was a chance that felt inevitable. Like one time where I was writing and had all these books open on the hardwood floor and came to find that one of them had shorter lines on the pages. I wondered if my own work could be this way, if it could take on that form and be all right, be accepted. Or if that too would have a core of frailty, of something off, something wrong. Should I write a book like everybody else and keep hidden?
Our workshop leader calls the exercise Dramaturgy. She says it will help us with structure and themes and goals and conventions. Is a writing workshop itself a dramaturgy? Are we putting on the clothes of a writer and saying “this works, more of this,” and are we listening to others tell us “more of this, please” and is this how one becomes a writer? What I mean is, are we all acting in our own play?
*
We begin our friendship by sending each other our favorite essays. Anne Carson. Pam Houston. Rachel Cusk. Melissa Broder. Sarah Manguso. Strong women. Anxious women. Women who have been to Hell and back. We love these women and their stories. After a while, we send each other our own work, our own unfinished things.
We send each other recipes and craft essays and your name is always at the top of my inbox and my text messages and no one is supposed to go outside so we send each other these pieces of ourselves as if we are pulling at threads of our own clothes to keep the other warm. Here, have this, have this, you need it, you’ll love this, have you read this, have you heard this, have you seen this, have this, have this, have this!
You send me a story about being young and riding a plastic toy horse until you pass out and fall down. You send me a story about going to Disney World with your dad and your sister as you become a woman, how sweat pools under your arms and darkens your shirt, how you notice skin hanging over your bathing suit bottoms for the first time, how a therapist asks you if your father touches you and you answer, “I don’t think so.”
We both have eating disorders. We both have complicated families. We both have mothers whom we are codependent on. When we talk on the phone, your mother is often baking something in the kitchen. When we Zoom, you sit in a dark room while your mother interrupts with questions. The light when the door opens creates a glare on the screen.
Why do we feel so safe with each other so quickly? What is it about friendship that makes this intensity feel okay, like something we would not do with a romantic love interest?
*
“Be critical of the work and not of yourself,” our workshop leader tells us. But we have spent our whole lives being critical of ourselves. Maybe in this space of the workshop we can unravel these beliefs and turn the criticism outward, onto the page.
*
“All fiction is about the essence of life,” our leader says. I write it down like a prayer, something I will chant later to heal a wound.
You tell me about your engagement. His name is simple, four letters, just like yours. He won’t let you buy Windex. He works as an analyst for a financial company. He comes from a family that has nothing, and so he feels the pressure to make money. He talks about writing one day. When he lived in New York, he would work fourteen-hour days and then send out stories and try to get them published. “I like that image of him,” you write.
You meet with a realtor to buy a house but things keep going wrong. Something about the satellites. Something about your fiancé’s mother getting in the way. A picture of you and your fiancé on a hike, your engagement ring shining in the cold winter sun, the way you smile and the way his face has no expression.
You ask if my husband is a filmmaker. You say your fiancé goes to the Telluride Film Festival every year. You think he dreams of writing a screenplay. He has celiac, so you don’t usually have bread with gluten at home.
*
A friendship is a whole world. How do I fit a whole world into this essay? How do I paint the days, the weeks, the months that were filled with this friendship? We promised each other that nothing was off-limits, that we were never a burden to each other. We promised that it was never inconsiderate or a bad time to say our feelings. We never called it trauma dumping. We understood that we didn’t need to carry each other‘s load. But I guess you do anyway in friendship, because you live inside of someone else’s world. You visit and you are welcomed to stay.
So here are things that I know are true: You are engaged. I am married. We both teach writing. You have had to save your sister. I have had to save my brother. You use humor as a defense. I use humor as a defense. We both want more, but only you know what more means. You want to go to graduate school. You want to move across the country, or out of the country. You want to leave everyone behind and start anew.
You’ve never really aspired to happiness, perhaps because it feels so far away from self-criticism. But you aspire, instead, to meaning. You find it comforting to think that there might be meaning found in the act of staying steady, in continuing self.
*
I go on medication. I go off medication. I have had three different therapists since the start of the pandemic. I am unable to find a new psychiatrist. A nurse on the phone at an Urgent Care is able to give me a prescription for something new. I take it for three days and then stop.
My husband and I fly to Florida to see my family. We drive to Ventura and stay in my husband’s stepfather’s house for two weeks. We hike in the mountains behind our apartment. My husband’s brother gets married in Telluride and we drive from Los Angeles to attend the wedding. Monument Valley is closed because of the virus. We stay a few nights in Sedona to break up the end of the trip. I get a migraine so bad in Sedona, I think I am dying. The next morning, we hike Cathedral Rock and I fall and scrape my forearm on the way down.
Summer turns to Fall and I plan a trip for my husband’s birthday. We see a movie in a theater for the first time in 7 months. I cry during the previews.
I drive to Santa Ynez for a quarantine bubble girl’s trip. I spend a night alone in a hotel in Palm Springs and eat a turkey sandwich from Sherman’s in bed. I read True Love at the rooftop pool. I send you a picture of myself from that morning in a sunhat.
Our communication punctuates all of these experiences. I never wonder the way I did if a lover was thinking about me as much as I was thinking about them, because I know you are thinking about me.
*
Our workshop leader asks you to continue. I try to write down everything exactly as I hear it. I want to get you right:
Well. I think I was afraid to be seen because in my family it was dangerous to be seen. I had to learn early on what it meant to hide. It was a physical thing too. I was shrinking. And my biggest fear is that at my core I am crazy. That it’s true. And other people might say that’s not a bad thing, maybe it’s a good thing, but I fear it. I fear it will be true. That everyone will be able to see the truth in the core that I am crazy. I was so thin. I ended up in a clinic for eating disorders, which to my father proved how crazy I was. And the book would prove that too. Well, so you see, that is why I had to hide. I think I am still afraid to be seen. I think it is what I carry with me.
*
Have I changed? How have I changed?
My book is being published and I feel bad talking about it. I’ve been feeling sad, like publishing the book is supposed to solve everything, but how could it?
I receive copies of my galley. I take pictures of my book. I post the pictures online. I cut my hair and regret it.
You tell me your fiancé won’t speak to you or touch you. He thought the kitchen smelled. He had it environmentally tested by experts. The last remodel was three years ago and you don’t smell anything. You can’t keep living like this, you say, where false fears drive your life. You don’t know how to get yourself out. You’re not even really sure how you got yourself into it. Your couple’s therapist is turning on you. I believe you. I believe you. You tell me you want to feel brave. You tell me need to finish your book.
I don’t ask if you plan to leave him. I don’t want to hurt you by saying you should. I let you cry into the phone and I try to hold the pain.
You go for walks at night near the mountains. You feel happy to be alive just as you are. You listen to The Midnight Library on Audible and it reminds you of the concept that we’d choose our own lives given the option. You think that the most meaningful feedback someone could give you about your own writing is that you portray the truth of an experience or a time.
I want to tell you that he’s not your cross to bear.
I write, “I honestly feel terrible saying all this, but where it stands now, I just feel like your impulse to get out of there and take care of yourself first and foremost is the truest thing.”
The world collects and settles.
*
Your words begin to feel like my own thoughts. Maybe we are too close? Yes, it’s scary. And yes, I need it to be this way. I need someone who will listen to me while I wonder about my life, through these worries and fears and stuck moments. I imagine a friend as someone who lifts a stone so a stream can continue on its way. And when you speak, it’s like you are putting the stones in your own pockets instead of throwing them elsewhere. You are taking it on; I can feel it. It’s a marvel. It’s a mistake.
I return to your monologue from the workshop, the version of you I wish to hold.
Maybe writing can be a place of liberty, as you said before. I spend a lot of time thinking of other people’s words and wanting to use quotes as a way to express myself, but if I could do it the right way, or a new way, I’d want to say my own thoughts. For instance, when I was in second grade, I was in a choir and there was a candlelight vigil we took part in, and during our song I noticed the smell of something burning until the other kids pointed out my hair was on fire. The other kids were always excluding me, and I'm not sure why. There was a Bug Society where kids collected bugs and archived them, talked about bugs, explored around in the nature of our school campus and excavated the grounds for bugs. Some of them became plastered in frames and hung up in classrooms, butterfly wings, beetle heads, ant bodies. It was grotesque, yes, but I wanted to be a part of it and couldn't for some reason. I'm really not sure why. Maybe because of that thing that’s inside me that I was hoping they couldn’t see, or more so hoping that it wasn’t real.
*
All my married friends are having “pandemic babies,” but I don’t feel ready yet. I love my husband and I want to have a baby, but I'm so unsettled. I want a baby, but I also want to be okay. My therapist says that our mental health is usually rooted in what we find value in, what we find significance in, meaning in.
You tell me via email that you’ve left your fiancé. You plan to get away for a while, house-sit for a friend of your mom’s, do some work, take time for yourself, write.
So much has changed since the workshop, since our days sitting with each other on screen. Things didn’t feel so heavy then. Our roads are forking in opposite directions. I feel you magnetized elsewhere. I feel bad for wanting to pull you back to me.
*
You send me flowers on publication day. I call to thank you while I'm driving to therapy. You ask what it feels like to be seen. I feel obligated to lie. I say that it feels like the hard work has finally paid off. But the truth is that it feels like relief, one that does not last.
In therapy, I recall a memory from a family vacation, one where my brother gets drunk for the first time. He had disappeared for the evening and then reappeared at our hotel room at 3:00am. His friends knocked on the door and left him there. He was unconscious. My parents pulled him inside and put him in bed. He was wearing someone else’s clothes. He threw up all over the bed and my parents moved him to the bathroom. This is what I talk about in therapy, how I am still in that hotel room wondering if my brother is going to survive.
As the therapist helps me return to the present moment, I take mental notes for an essay I’d like to write about this memory. I don’t want to be back in the room. I want to keep living inside my head so I can get the scene just right.
*
You tell me you are seeing someone new. It happened so fast. You ended up in Paris and so did he. It’s so far from any relationship you’ve ever had. It’s kind, supportive, connected. It’s a meaningful reminder that you never know what your life will be or how it will change.
You ask how I'm doing. You say that you think of me often and would love to catch up. But it doesn’t feel true. It feels like pity, like the stones have been thrown back in the river and it can no longer flow. It feels all wrong.
I tell you that things haven’t been good, that I’ve been feeling depressed, that I feel bad to feel depressed because of the book. I tell you that I know it doesn’t make any sense. I tell you that I'm sorry. I ask why it took you months to write me. I apologize. I ask why you won’t answer the phone. I ask when’s a good time.
The world collects and settles again. I don’t hear from you.
*
I delete all our emails, the entire thread. I want to text you again, to try calling you again, but I don’t. I refrain. I’ve always hated that word, refrain: to hold back, to stop oneself. Isn’t that the antithesis of what we had?
I prefer the refrain of song, the Latin refringere, “to repeat a line of music or poetry; the chorus of a song; in popular music, the refrain may contrast with the verse melodically, rhythmically, and harmonically; it may assume a higher level of dynamics and activity.”
In my understanding, this refrain is what creates the beauty, how the structure of its own dissonance makes it beautiful, how one friend is up and one is down and the two can exist together in harmony, they can synchronize, their cords sound and reflect and bounce and divide and sting and puncture and settle and move and flow and exist. They sing together.
*
On The Hills, when Heidi Montag says, “The only thing left to do is forgive and forget,” and Lauren Conrad says, “I want to forgive you and I want to forget you.”
On the show GIRLS when Hanna and Marnie fight about who is the bad friend, “You’re the wound. You’re the wound. YOU are the wound. Stop staying that. I am not a wound. YOU are a wound.”
Carrie from Sex and the City asks, “If you love someone and you break up, where does the love go?”
*
We never even met in person.
*
When was it ever right?
I find a rogue email from you:
“I feel sometimes like I am in a pantomime, acting out the roles for others and I become so silent about what I care about most. I feel sick sometimes about how I don't write or send writing out or connect with people I care about most (including you and your friendship.) When I was growing up and through my twenties, I cared so much about everything. I think back to those times and I just feel like I was raw--the pain and the love so close to the skin. To build a relationship with my dad, to write that book for years alone, to work with my Jungian therapist, I trained myself not to feel. I imagine that I hold myself physically very still and in a way leave my body, not all that unlike when I fainted as a child. It seemed like this was ideal, that I had finally found a way not to be so vulnerable. I think that these pieces or "poems" I kept writing wound tighter and tighter and losing so much weight, it finally felt like some control. In retrospect, I was killing myself on multiple levels.”
Was this not too much to say?
*
We start trying for a baby. We move across the country. The day after we land, it is announced that no one has to wear masks anymore.
I get pregnant right away. It’s a girl. My hair grows long and I stop dyeing it.
I block you on social media and it feels cheap. I still look at your profile sometimes. You’ve cut your hair. Someone takes videos of you while you write and look out into the distance. Are you happy? Have you found the meaning you were looking for?
I block your phone number too, just in case you ever feel like calling.
