It Is I, the Imposter

Or, Syndrome Thunderdome

The launch of Splice of Life is literally sixth months away, but I’m already shitting myself about it.

A year ago, Andrew Gifford of Santa Fe Writers Project reached out to me to let me know the press was interested in the book. “I want to publish this memoir,” he wrote. “It's really good.”

My first reaction wasn’t joy, or relief. I didn’t dance around, or call Bill with happy tears surfing down my face. I didn’t back and smile slowly, a warm feeling of satisfaction radiating from within me.

My first reaction was just a one-word thought: Why?

This isn’t my first book, and it’s not even the book I worked on the longest, so maybe that reaction is weird. Even in my own mind, it feels ungrateful. But it’s what really happened. I wasn’t being ungrateful. I was being confused. Why would anyone want to publish this weird book about movies and episodes from my life?

The harder question was waiting for me around the corner, after I signed the contract.

One of the first things writers have to do for their publisher is full out what’s called a Marketing Questionnaire. It’s full of prompts about the writer, your connections and networks, and invitations to write a summary of the book you just spent years unfurling over 200+ pages. You also have to describe who your reader is.

Reader, I just didn’t know how to answer that. I’m not sure I do even now.

With poetry, I know who the audience is. First of all, it’s not many people. That’s a big relief. Stakes are low. If I bellyflop, not many people are going to hear the splash.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why this book is so scary for me, and I think I just figured it out. While some of my poems are based on my lived experiences, my thoughts, my feelings, only a small portion of them are obviously about me. The great liberty of poetry isn’t its small readership. It’s the ability to hide behind a big lofty concept we call The Speaker.

“The Speaker” is a concept we learn in our earliest poetry workshops. “Remember the ‘I’ in the poem is not necessarily the poet,” your poetry teacher will tell you before you dive in. “That person is The Speaker of the poem, and we shouldn’t conflate the two when we discuss the poem itself.”

I love the anonymity of the speaker! I have poems in the voice of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dorothy Gale, a film director recreating the death of his beloved on film, a 1930s physicist who discovers a dimension that only sustains sound, a television as you flip through its hundreds of channels, a ventriloquist’s dummy, Isadora Duncan’s scarf as it strangles her, Achilles’ heel, a nameless composition student, Tyra Banks eliminating a girl from America’s Next Top Model, several versions of a “Florida Man” based on newswire articles, Clark Kent lamenting Lois’s love of Superman but not him, Eurydice (Orpheus’s girlfriend), Prospero from The Tempest, and a B-list actress whose latest movie finished at the box office behind one that featured an animated singing manatee.

I’ve got no shortage of masks, you see. And I love them.

But Splice of Life…that’s me with the masks off.

I think that’s partly why I reached for movies to embed into each chapter. That’s me reaching for a mask, a familiar voice, but instead of wearing it, I’m holding it up next to my face. Look how similar we are, I think I’m saying. Look at how art (my book) imitates life (my life) imitating art (the movie) imitating life (some other writer’s life).

Maybe part of me hopes you’ll pay more attention to the movie. *nervous laughter*

So, yeah. I’m nervous. About being seen (my moon is in Scorpio and I love my secrets). But ironically, also about not being seen in this moment (my Sun is in Aries and I can’t help myself).

And maybe the hard part about promoting a memoir is that I’m also, in some weird way, promoting my scars.

Look what the world did to me!

(Except it wasn’t the world. It was some very specific people! And also sometimes me—hi, it’s me, I’m the problem, it’s me.)

There are some funny parts in the memoir. There are some hard truths there, too. Things I’ve only told a few people. One thing I never told anyone before I wrote it down. I’ve always been really protective of my reputation (Scorpio moon), which has also meant being protective of what people know about me. So in some ways, this book is the first time I’ve fully unmasked myself.

Or, to rephrase the Taylor Swift lyric I just referenced: Hi. It’s me. I’m The Speaker. It’s me.

Over the next sixth months, I’ll be sharing lots of little fun factoids about the movies and the essays in the book, some here and some on social media. I hope you’ll find them interesting and fun. That’s the spirit in which I share them.

And I’m grateful you’re here, going along on this ride with me.