Against Relatability
For relatability to be meaningful, it has to retain the spark of revelation.
“Widespread consent to specific opacities is the most straightforward equivalent of nonbarbarism.” —Édouard Glissant, “For Opacity”
There’s a line in the brilliant Trauma Plot: A Life by Jamie Hood that hit me like a lightning bolt in the chest. She writes that she’s a cool customer. That no one really knows her. That her writing is where she is herself. My next book has a similar moment of revelation, and it’s a revelation that comes in the midst of a chapter recounting the worst thing that has ever happened in my life.
It’s a bit of self-pity, maybe, but also a bit of clarity. I know that I wish I could be different—someone more knowable, someone who doesn’t love more than anything else the quiet of her own mind and putting together an essay. I cut out from a Nylon magazine in the early ’00s a quote from actress, “It”-girl, and fellow Scorpio Chloe Sevigny: “I want to be more approachable, not less weird.” I pinned it to the wall. Still, I’m that teenager. But I know that I’m lucky to have any space where I am myself, where I feel unencumbered by others’ expectations and demands.
Hood and I are different, of course, and the memoir recounts sexual violence—something I’ve never experienced. The worst thing of my life is not the worst thing of hers, but there was that moment of recognition and overlap that surprised me. It didn’t have to be there in this book for me to love it, for me to understand what a triumph it is, to see how formally, it does something wildly interesting and inventive that enacts the psychic experience she has endured through its construction. There didn’t have to be a moment of relatability for me to understand the book. Those moments are important, though, and clarifying when they occur. They inch us closer to each other.
When I was a child, books were a way for me to feel less alone: Often, the characters themselves were writers, and they thought things that I thought and felt things that I felt, and this made me think, I’m a writer. That sort of relatability is developmentally useful: Representation helps us know what is possible when we’re young. But I think it should eventually stop being necessary to one’s sense of self to see, in the work of others, a reflection. Eventually, one should be able to engage with others’ perspectives and experiences without needing to understand it all, without needing to relate.
