Tuesday, February 26, 2008

My First Review

I just got my first real review. It was from Kirkus, a review service - a trade publication - for bookstores, libraries and industry types. It is for anyone who wants to know about a book before it goes on sale. Reviewers for consumer publications read Kirkus before writing their reviews. It is the mother of all review publications. It is the review that begets more reviews. It’s the book about books. The meta book. A good review in Kirkus is important is what I’m trying to say. As you can imagine, I was thrilled when I received very positive commentary regarding CHALKED UP. But it was the following excerpt that got me thinking:

“It’s admirable to aspire to become a champion gymnast, but Sey’s depiction of her roller-coaster adolescence makes the point that it’s far more important to have a happy, healthy and sane childhood.”


Really? I’m not so sure. After all I went through – the emotionally abusive coaches, the bone shattering injuries, the depression, the eating disorders, the temporarily psychotic parents – I’m not entirely convinced that’s true. In my head, I know it is. But in my gut, I don’t really believe it. I struggle with this as I raise my own boys. I want them to have happy childhoods, of course. But adulthood lasts longer, and in my heart of hearts, I believe hard work that leads to success (not financial per se, but achievement in your chosen vocation) breeds happiness in adulthood. Good habits start early. Learning the value of hard work (cliché I know) should happen at a young age. If you don’t learn it when you’re young, I think it may be impossible to learn it later. We all know lazy grown ups. They don’t do the work then they bemoan their fate at not getting what they want.

When people ask my advice about writing (which I find hilarious; what do I know…I wrote one book!), I tell them “just write.” Then I tell them: “after you finish your first ---- (insert document here – book, screenplay, etc), set it aside and write another one. Then do it again.” Practice makes perfect. No matter how much we all want to believe we can be Diablo Cody, the breakout screenwriting star who wrote one screenplay, sold it and won an Oscar, it generally doesn’t happen that way. Many screenwriters – even working screenwriters who get paid to write stuff – toil in anonymity their entire lives. They do re-write after re-write and never get anything made. That doesn’t even include those poor, hardworking (or not so hardworking, as the case may be) folks who write and write and never even get an agent. Their work may not be any good, but that’s not the point. If you don’t work, if you don’t practice, if you don’t keep trying after you get rejected, after you fail, you certainly don’t have a shot in hell at ever selling something, getting something made, let alone winning an Oscar.

I know countless people who’ve written a single screenplay. They send it to me for commentary. (Like I know anything about writing screenplays.) I give my honest feedback because I feel like: If you’re going to ask me, I’m going to try to be helpful. Nice, but helpful. They likely want me to say something like: “This is great! I’ll send it to my agent!” Never mind that my agent doesn’t sell screenplays, she sells books. Even if she did sell screenplays, I haven’t read anything I’d recommend without major revisions – other than my brother’s stuff. But he’s an actual working screenwriter, so that doesn’t count. I give the constructive criticism that I feel obliged to provide, and I suspect many of them give up because I never hear from them again. They never ask me to read a re-write or another story. Imagine, giving up after a little feedback from a barely working writer who knows nothing about that particular craft? If it was your first, it probably wasn’t any good anyway, and I was just trying to clue you in to the fact that you have to keep at it. The first effort is never any good. But perhaps you learned something in writing it that will lead to something better the second time. So that by the tenth time or so, you write something that is actually half-way decent. If you’ve got the natural aptitude to go along with the persistence.

But most people just give up. They try once, assume their God’s gift – the next Diablo or Matt/Ben combo – and throw in the towel when agents don’t line up at their front doors with million dollar offers. My experience has been entirely NOT that. I wrote and then I wrote some more. I’ve got a shoebox full of rejection letters from agents. Ten years after I first tried to write something, I sold a book. When I was a gymnast, I was the one no one thought was any good. But I didn’t accept it. And I labored. If a judge said I was fat, I lost weight. If a coach said I wasn’t strong enough, I did hours of extra conditioning at the end of practice. If a dance teacher said my toes weren’t pointed enough, I had my mother stand on them to bend my feet into perfect arches. I put myself through the grind to prove the doubters wrong. It wasn’t fun, to be sure. But it was satisfying in the end. And despite the brutal disappointment and harrowing and desperate depression that defined the end of my career, I have come to take great pride in what I accomplished.

I want my children to understand this – the value in never giving up, of self-belief in the face of adversity - but I strive to balance it with the desire for them to have pleasant, happy childhoods. I’m just not sure which way the scale should tilt. If I really wanted them to have happy childhoods – HAPPY childhoods – wouldn’t I just spoil them and give them candy for breakfast, McDonalds for lunch and chocolate cake with syrup on top for dinner? With a big glass of Coca-Cola on the side? With no homework, lots of TV and video games? That would make them happy! But I suspect their adulthoods might be filled with obesity, job loss and divorce (the divorce would be caused by activity encouraged later – screwing around, treating women poorly in general. They’d like that as teenagers!) None of these things would make them happy in their 30’s. But boy they’d be happy children.

Thus, I try to find the proper balance. They are young and just getting involved in sports. I like that their karate teacher can be kind of strict and give them the ‘I’m-disappointed’ look when they misbehave. Even though it makes the little guy cry sometimes. You’ve got to act right to learn, to achieve. You’ve got to focus, pay attention, maybe even be a little physically and psychically uncomfortable. My youngest wanted his new belt, the one after the starter white one, on the first day of class. Each day after class he cries because he hasn’t earned it yet and other kids in the class have fancier ones with red or yellow stripes. “Keep working,” I tell him. “You’ll get one.” He’s got to learn that not everyone is going to be enamored of his cute little face. Crying big tears won’t prompt the sensei to hand over the candy cane colored belt, so desperately craved.

The world just cares who does best. And while I don’t wish for them to be young champions or old, rich corporate raiders and I certainly don’t want them to sacrifice their health and well-being ala steroid crazed baseball players, I want them to experience an appropriate level of discomfort that comes from good old-fashioned hard work. To ensure their future satisfaction as adults. As unbearable as my competition days were, I am well-prepared for the world as a grown up. I’m happy. Accomplished. Satisfied. Sane. So maybe I’m not so wrong. Maybe a happy childhood isn’t the most important thing. Maybe a disciplined/healthy/moderately happy childhood is what we should strive to give our kids. It worked for me.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

A New Nightmare

Ever since I wrote CHALKED UP, I’ve had fantasies about being on talk shows like Larry King, talking about the sport (“I don’t follow it”), how I came to write the book (“it was a story I felt compelled to write, my coming of age story”) and what I’ll write next to transition from memoirist to legitimate novelist (“I’ve got a few things in the works, Larry”). I talk about how my true aspiration in life is to become a real writer, someone who can invent stories, pen prose that are more than just personal experience, ultimately proving my literary mettle. The fantasy quickly transitions into a nightmare when my former coaches and current gymnasts are brought out for a he-said / she-said style confrontation. The civilized Larry King tête-à-tête transforms into a Jerry Springer fashioned brawl, replete with chair throwing and name-calling. It goes something like this:

Coach: How can you believe her when she says she was anorexic? Look at this picture? She was fat! A fat pig!
Me: --- (sad face)
Gymnast: And she sucked! I mean look at the film! Now look at me! She was awful compared to me!
Me: ---- (tears while a chair whizzes past my head.)

All my teenage insecurities about never having been good enough, never having been thin enough to actually have deserved the kudos I received as a gymnast, have been brought to the fore once again with this horrific vision. Oh the irony! Those unresolved feelings prompted me to write the book in the first place. The mere writing of the tale was supposed to be just the antidote to cure me of these haunting ailments – self-doubt bordering on self-loathing, anxiety over not being good enough, unconcluded past relationships. What a cruel twist of fate that these things are only brought to the surface once again, completely raw, more complex and nuanced with age.

When I actually managed to get myself an agent and then sell the book, these anxiety dreams became more frequent, interviews a potential reality, however unlikely. My former anxiety dreams – having to get weighed in, trying to go back to gymnastics as a late 30-something, 130 pound marketing executive with two kids – were replaced with this talk show fiasco. Any time I experienced any conflict or unease at work, I dreamed the dream, waking in a panic, sweaty and fretful, pulse-racing preventing the rest of the night’s sleep.

Now that the book is near release, I am preparing with my own grass roots marketing efforts. As a marketer for Levi’s - one of the world’s best-known brands - I am well equipped to sell something I REALLY care about. Me. I’ve got a youtube channel, facebook page, email list and a web site under construction, all thanks to my tech savvy, software developer husband. I keep these digital assets updated and ready for the book’s launch, hopefully prepared for the onslaught of interest and compliments. Imagine my despair when, one early Monday morning before work, upon perusing my youtube channel, I found a mean-spirited slam in response to my fictional short film entitled, The Gymnast. (The film is not based on the book. I made it three years prior as an experiment, bringing to life my endeavors in screenplay writing. It is a made-up story about a young woman struggling with her past life as a champion; while it echoes my book in feeling, the heroine in the film is far worse off than I’ve ever been. Deadbeat, abusive boyfriend, addiction, going nowhere job in a nowhere town. Her life is quite different than mine.) But young ambermarie0x3, shielded by her self-perceived anonymity, wrote: “I think that this was horrible. Why do you need to blam others for your life? Can’t take responsibility?” Yes, ambermarie0x3, I’m “blam-ing” others because I can’t take responsibility. So much so that I taught myself how to make a little movie, taught myself how to write a book, support a family of four and take care of my sick mom who was recently diagnosed with lung cancer. I hate taking responsibility. I wrote something to that effect in response, realized it was defensive and childish and promptly removed it.

After discovering her comment, I trolled for more. Hers appeared on my channel, permitting me the liberty of removing it if I cared to (I didn’t; the purpose of these types of sites is free and open debate no matter how inane). What I found off-channel, was far more ugly and malicious. Beneath a video of me from some meet when I was well past my prime, deep in the throes of injuries that were beyond repair and depression beyond easy abatement, were the following comments by hard hearted strangers:

No1zmeskalfan: “…this girl is probably the worst US champ ever. She’s terrible.”
WHATTHEBUCKSHOW: “it was an off year!”
Metsdudenj: “Someone pls explain to me how this girl managed to win the 86 US title. Did everyone else have a broken leg?”

It goes on. And on. It brought me to tears. They are right, I am certain. I wasn’t any good. And it’s too late to fix it now. I’m nearly 40. I can’t go back and prove I was good enough. A heavy sadness sunk in, deep and abiding. I carried it with me through my busy day at work, my harried evening of preparing the next day’s lunches and studying spelling words with my son. Throughout the week, it rested heavy on my back; I dragged it through my days, plagued with the feeling that people hated me and that I deserved it for being pathetic and unworthy. Unable to effectively carry on my demanding day job with this unwieldy burden dragging behind me, I vowed not to look on youtube anymore. I recognized that I wouldn’t even have known that these vindictive comments existed if I simply hadn’t encountered them. They would have had no impact on my head, my heart, my soul because they would simply never have been.

But I was addicted. The damage was done and I was rubbing salt in the 22 year old, putrid wound. I couldn’t stop looking. There were occasionally new posts, but I obsessed over those cited above. I figured ambermarie0x3 was a gymnast who felt I was trying to demean her beloved sport with what she perceives to be an exposé type book. (Not so! CHALKED UP is my personal story, not an indictment of the sport. If you read it ambermarie0x3, you’d see. I loved the sport and miss it all the time.) This insight helped, but not a lot.

I wanted to respond with aliases. “She was great! What are you guys talkin’ about!” But I resisted. I didn’t delete or respond to any of them, after that first impulse. Instead, I got to the work of readying myself for the intensity of the potential backlash. People are unkind, especially when shielded with anonymity, when it’s easy. On the internet, you don’t have to face the person, you don’t have to look them in the eye when you are attempting to bring them down, make them cry, pierce their spirit.

I hope the book prompts forthright debate rather than petty derision. Because really, what does it matter if I was any good as a gymnast at this late date? I turned some cartwheels twenty years ago. I make no claims to having been the best; I simply won one meet on one night that would shape the way I feel about myself forever in good and not so good ways. But my life is here and now – a professional, a nascent writer, a wife, a mom, a daughter. If there’s talk about gymnastics instigated by the book, it should be about whether or not the conditions I recount still exist. Are girls emotionally abused? Do adults put the needs of children aside to accomplish their own aspirations? Do eating disorders run rampant? Do the athletes put their physical and emotional health and well being aside to win? Does our culture put everything else aside in prioritizing winning? Ultimately, though, I hope the discussion is about the book’s merits. Is it well-written? Compelling? Emotionally resonant? Does it have relevance beyond gymnastics? This book is not an exposé. I intend for it to be my first endeavor towards becoming a writer that constantly strives to tell the truth, whether factually through non-fiction or emotionally through fiction. And I’m unflagging in my belief that through writing about my tribulations, I can someday resolve these issues of exacting self-doubt, transforming them into self-belief tempered with a healthy dose of humility and poise. In the face of cowardly, mean-spirited aspersions, this will be required, as I choose to put myself out there and open myself up to criticism. Thank you ambermarie0x3 and metsdudenj. Because of you both, I’ve realized, I am not yet there. I am not yet over this. Though hindered by a persistent need for approval, and easily knocked off my game when desired validation is withheld, I am armed with courage and confident that I can prevail.


© 2008 Jennifer Sey