Where does it begin?

                        It lay buried here

Writing about oneself is a mysterious business.

                                                            It lay deep inside me

Lately I’ve been working on something I’ve come to think of as a confession.

                                                                                                            It’s so deep I don’t think that I can

Speak about it

But I did speak about it, this work of confession, at the colloquium ‘What is Creative Criticism?’ in Oxford in June 2024. And now I am writing about it, in a more or less direct transcription that presumes the form of an essay. The act of delivering this paper was itself a first attempt, a beginning. It was an opportunity to give voice to the productive uncertainties I had been encountering in the face of this project, and also to address its personal stakes, the sense of vulnerability or trepidation I felt speaking about its subject, even in a roundabout way, to a room of people. What you are reading now is a record of that beginning, an encounter with an audience in which I reflected on the lyric mode as creative non-fiction; what it suppresses and what it illuminates.

I began the talk with a statement that was only half a joke:

“I’d like to talk in this paper about a piece of writing I’m working on. It’s the thing that I’ve been writing instead of the thing that I should be writing. And that is my definition of the category of ‘creative non-fiction.’”

It is true that this is the role I often ask it to play, this category. It has something to do with the illicit versus the above-board. Something animated by a sense of indirection or distraction, an utterance which takes shape incipiently. At its most alluring, creative non-fiction writing seems defined by what it is not, in contrast to those writing tasks which feel over-familiar, or pre-determined. (Even if they once arose, too, from this same spirit of not knowing.)

The pull of this category, for me, is related to the space of the first-personal, and to the question of how personal writing and research might interact. There is research as I have mostly understood it, the formation of a critical narrative out of books and articles read, of archival materials sifted through. Then there is the kind of research that I think this project is asking of me. It’s of a different sort, although perhaps it requires some of the same tools in the face of direct experience, a kind of research of the interior. And it began not with a thesis, this time, but a particular song.

INT. Joe’s Pub, New York City, May 2023

A new friend has invited me to a cabaret show on a Sunday afternoon. The room is full of gay men, well-groomed and in-the-know. They are ordering snacks and cocktails to their table as they wait for the show to begin. Among the keen fans, I note that a legend of the East Village cabaret scene is also in attendance, sat with her friends in the far corner of the room. I quickly warm to the performer as he appears onstage, his loud shirt and tender humour, the force of his voice when he sings. His speaking accent is a reminder of home. Pride month is around the corner, so there will be at least two Kylie Minogue covers, scattered amongst his own material. Towards the end of the set, he introduces another cover, this time his piano-bar take on a Kate Bush song. It’s clearly a favourite among his own fans, but it’s not one of Bush’s better-known songs by any stretch, he explains. (Certainly not compared to ‘Running Up That Hill’, which has been everywhere lately.) It feels like a tantalising little detail, ushering the audience into a secret club. My ears prick up when he begins to sing the lyrics to the first verse. Something something deep, something something buried. Something so deep you don’t think you can speak about it. What I hear in these words, not quite consciously, at this moment in time, is an opening.

*

‘Love and Anger’ was a late single from Kate Bush’s 1989 album The Sensual World. Its lyrics focus on an unnamed trauma, attributed in the first verse to a first-person speaker, and in later verses to someone else. These shifts in address are never resolved, and as the song veers nervously but defiantly towards the revelation of this repressed truth, which is ultimately never revealed, we are unsure who is saying what, and to whom. 

 If you can’t tell your sister

                        If you can’t tell a priest

                                                Can you tell it to your heart?

There is something old-fashioned about these religious and gendered scenes of confession, perhaps invoked so as to draw our minds away from the perhaps more obvious reference point of talking therapies. Looking beyond the therapist’s couch, the space delineated by the song feels rather more like a lyric chamber, a subject talking to herself, trying out different guises and voices, making, within the bounds of her own personality an ‘I’, a ‘you’ and an ‘us.’ In the music video (which can be watched on YouTube), Bush begins prostrate in prayer position, alone, lit only by a spotlight. She is joined subsequently by a a group of ballerinas, whirling dervishes and, by the end, a full backing band (with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour on guitar.) The song sounds a call to speaking out, and to the quasi-spiritual presence of others, bearing witness to this act. You can hear, in the maximalism of its production as it builds, from simple piano chords to rock guitars and a full choir, the whoosh of air coming into the room.

Can you find it in your heart to

                        Let go of these feelings

                                                Like a bell to a southerly wind?

While the song appears to travel from silent repression to loud and even ecstatic forms of healing, its curious interplay of voices makes clear that such a journey begins at home, by admitting something to yourself. It lights upon the triangulated self of confession, where the I becomes a you with whom one might form an intimate, collusive dialogue. That same internal ‘we’, or perhaps a different one, is invoked by the song’s chorus.

Take away the love and the anger

            And the little piece of hope holding us together

With lyrics both reticent and revealing, the song might otherwise scan easily enough were it not for this chorus, which bears no obvious relation to the confessional drama of the verses.

Looking for a moment that will never happen

                                                Living in the gap between past and future

While it doesn’t scramble the sense of the song, exactly, it takes us somewhere else, and names an affective relation that is related to but distinct from confession. A shared, but somewhat strained, building project:

                        Take away the stone and the timber

                                    And a little piece of rope won’t hold it together

The familiar themes of the song’s title are given representative weight, as the bare materials holding things in place, a ballast of understanding.

                                                                        We’re building a house of the future together

                                                                                                            What would we do without you?

‘Love and Anger’, I soon discovered, occupies a special place in Kate Bush lore. It took her two years to write it, following a period of writer’s block after the wild commercial success of her mid-1980s albums. She stated in an interview that she didn’t really understand what this song was about, or what it was doing. It makes more sense considered in the context of The Sensual World as a whole, a conceptual record that Bush conceived of as a kind of short story collection, made up of childhood vignettes and portraits which are autobiographically tinged but sung and spoken by different characters. These include the Molly Bloom of Joyce’s Ulysses, in a rewritten version of her famous soliloquy (after the Joyce estate forbade Bush from quoting from the original); a woman who is lured into dancing with a charming stranger in a bar, only to realise afterwards that he is Adolf Hitler, and a figure who falls in love with her computer during a lonely winter.

In turn, The Sensual World conceives the act of confession askance. Not as the singular or epiphanic moment that might never happen, uttered by an integrated or coherent I, but rather expressed through selves tethered along the criss-crossing lines of fiction and non-fiction. It’s an album about pleasure, danger and consent, and what Bush referred to as the ‘mental puberty’ we’re said, by some, to experience in our late twenties and early thirties.

Encountering this song, by accident, at the age of thirty-one, felt like a usefully speculative basis for writing up something as yet unknown to me. It was a little like being ventriloquized. But not in the way philosopher Bernard Stiegler describes, when he observes that songs can ventriloquize us ‘precisely to the extent that its listeners form a ‘we’, such that those songs impose themselves as the colour, the tone, the fabric and in a way as the air of an epoch.’ My recognition of this song had little to do with what I already knew and loved about Kate Bush, about its provenance from the 1980s epoch, or the kinds of cultural codings that would form this larger we of collective listening. Rather, the we felt more intimate, the recognition somewhat uncanny.

It could take me all my life

                        But it would only take a moment to

                                                            Tell you what I’m feeling

Bush names a familiar paradox about the amount of time we might stew in something versus the time it takes to say it out loud. But somewhere outside of this temporal mix sits writing, which inhabits time differently, a life’s work that unfolds gradually, cumulatively, a mode of confession shaped by duration. During that same trip to New York I had been revisiting complicated memories from past times spent in the city. The song’s invocation of something subterranean, heavy and ever-present, refused to let me off the hook. If it couldn’t be spoken, then maybe this beginning could only happen in writing.

But I don’t know if I’m ready yet

*

I’m working on something about sexuality, shame and violence. It’s also about alcohol, addiction and sobriety. Reeling off this list of issues, each of them pertaining in some way to what I have come to recognise as trauma, I feel instinctively a need to crack a joke, to ironise it. Maybe it will lighten to the load somehow, not so much for whoever is listening, but for myself, to get cozy with it. This is not because the stakes of it aren’t real to me, but precisely the opposite. That’s where the embarrassment lies, the sense of exposure. I wonder if this impulse to self-trivialise is conditioned by a discursive online landscape that gives us dispassionate and ungainly terms like ‘trauma dumping’, which refers to the ubiquity of self-revelation in contemporary culture and social life. Nestled in that landfill of a metaphor is the notion that there is nothing intrinsically edifying about the unfettered sharing of painful experiences in public. Yet by disavowing these acts wholesale this argument can also too easily deny the efficacy of confession, the sense that writing about such memories can and does do something. French writer Annie Ernaux, the great explorer of the realms in, around and between non-fiction and auto-fiction, describes that thing as ‘contribut[ing] to a change in private life, help[ing] to shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed, and enab[ling] beings to reimagine themselves. When the unspeakable is brought to light, it is political.’

The question is not whether to write, then, but how, a question of style that is no less politicised within these conversations. Melissa Febos argues in Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative that the inclination against personal writing is often gendered, founded ‘on the false binary between the emotional (female) and the intellectual (male), and intended to subordinate the former.’ As Febos notes in a chapter titled ‘In Praise of Navel Gazing’, this highly mutable form is often written off as one that takes only the most simplistic and unfiltered shape, a direct transcript of experience, hailed by often-belittling epithets like ‘diaristic’, ‘cathartic’ and ‘therapeutic’. But experience is hardly separable from the form of its retelling. The process of revelation, the nitty-gritty of reflection, is its own literary subject. There are many ways of writing the unspeakable.

I suppose what I’m driving at is that a category like ‘creative non-fiction’ can act as a kind of license, to look beyond the received forms our stories might take take, and the received wisdom about their value and meaning. This invitation to hybridity or experimentation may eschew the form of the ‘trauma memoir’, in its more familiar iterations. But that doesn’t require that we reject or disavow such a genre altogether. Frankly, the word ‘creative’ might offer an alibi through form, conferring a certain respectability, but also possibility. An aperture, rather than an exclusion.

We could be like two strings beating

                                    Speaking in sympathy

In my own work, I’ve come to see creative non-fiction as something that, in complex but also helpful ways, serves to mediate the act of self-revelation. The form I have in mind centres not what happened, exactly, the traumatising event, but what is happening now, in the act of the writing about it, placing the past of experience and the present of composition into productive tension.

Hearing ‘Love and Anger’ offered another way to think about my own creative I, and it has become, for me, a literary source orienting my own confessions. I look to this new way of writing as something rooted in the personal, but also the larger archive of works that question what happens in the process of telling. This investigation, from an interior perspective, of different texts and connections names a point where life writing and criticism, or life writing and close reading, might meet. It’s also one hallmark of creative non-fiction, as Mary Cappello observes when she writes that ’what is autobiographical about creative non-fiction is its making manifest a state of mind if not a personality’, a manifestation found in ‘novel juxtapositions gleaned from your own garden of earthly delights: this is where the self resides.’ A garden, or a home. A space of uncertainty, as well as knowledge. A space, back-lit and a little artificial, in which a performance of some kind is taking place. Maybe a band of others is also present, listening or accompanying, dancing ambiguously. The house of the future is not a lonely place.