Draft Four: Tell your story

On personal essays, and why experience is expertise.

I’ll be upfront: I hope this letter convinces you to buy and read Ioana Burtea’s Fără instrucțiuni de folosire (No operating instructions), her first collection of essays, which just came out. I’m biased, as I’ve edited and published most of these stories in DoR, but this invitation is about more than that.

It’s about the importance of telling personal stories, telling them sincerely and vulnerably, making space for readers in your inner world, trusting them they’ll thread carefully and find something for themselves on this journey.

I’ll come back to Ioana’s book, but first, some context.

It’s not like we don’t speak in the first person. For the 25+ years I’ve been online the number of voices has only increased: we made personal webpages in the 1990s and 2000s, jumped into anything and everything social in the 2010s, did #storytimes on all platforms, answered 71 questions, and today we’re memeing and TikToking our every mood & vibe.

Notice something – this is all speech that technology has made democratically available. But getting personal writing through traditional gatekeepers – papers, magazines, book publishers – was tougher in this part of the world.

I discovered magazine length essays while doing my masters in the US, and I was flabbergasted this could be journalism (some of it Pulitzer and National Magazine Award prize worthy). They were often rigorously and painstakingly researched memoirs or personal accounts that shed light on essential moments in life.

I wanted to write and publish these stories, and I started doing that as early as 2007, when I worked for Esquire Romania. Back then, I published a story about my own family and the things we don’t tell ourselves. It revolved around a plastic bag with a stack of poems, newspaper submissions and a novel my grandfather had written and that no one would publish. He had died by the time I wrote this piece, so I couldn’t ask him: did he want to be a writer? Was me being a journalist somehow related to this? Was my mother, who had also just passed away, disappointed I had chosen this career?

I kept writing, commissioning and editing essays everywhere I went. DoR was partly built on personal narratives – we had them in the first issue and continued through to the end. (We also had amazing essayists join us at The Power of Storytelling over the years). I have trouble claiming credit for things we’ve done, but not about our paving the way for more of this writing. We pushed for personal experiences as ways into important Romanian stories: discrimination, sexual abuse, poverty, mental health and many more. We did so because we believed in their power, which we gaged from the countless messages we got from readers when we published an important one.

Ioana wrote some of our most memorable ones. Not only are they collected in a book now, but that book is part of a new Romanian narrative nonfiction collection, published under a newly launched imprint. (To be fair, there were some stray forerunners, such as translations of Aleksandar Hemon, Leslie Jamison or Jia Tolentino, and, closer to home, Laura Ionescu’s touching collection of stories about the her mother).

Romania has come far. Are we more prepared today to hear one another’s stories?

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When Ioana wrote Vorbesc. Ca să nu știu doar eu. (in English, here), the essay that powers her collection, we talked a lot about what she wanted from it. The situation it starts from is traumatic, a sexual abuse that Ioana suffered as a child at the hands of her own father, but its aim is not revenge or justice at any cost.

It is, like the rest of her pieces, an invitation.

First and foremost, it’s an invitation to accompany a woman on a journey of growing and self-definition not in spite of trauma, but alongside it. Second, it is an invitation to take the shame of such trauma and share it with others, to make storytelling a communal act of healing and reentry.

Once the experience is no longer private, the shame loses some of its power; the story is a mediator and a path back into the world. It may never bring complete healing, but it helps to broaden a spectrum of belonging – both the author’s belonging to society, and the belonging of others who share her story – to a community that no longer lives with the burden of loneliness, but with the reality of a shared experience.

After that essay, Ioana received dozens of messages about the experiences of many other women who felt seen and understood.

The story was also about them.

This is Ioana with her book on Saturday, one day after the official Bucharest launch; this picture was taken at a handball match, because the book should travel.

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I can’t tell you how important this is. Writing an essay – especially about a traumatic experience – means speaking to the world about something the rest of us would rather not think about.

I’ve learned to look at storytelling this way from Michael Jackson, an existential anthropologist who was written about how the battleground stories of soldiers make war a more complicated affair than the black and white conflict we’d like it to be; how stories of refugees confront us with the reality that we are not the welcoming peoples we think we are, and many more.

If you take his view, personal accounts are subversive (and storytelling is political). They challenge the entrenched narrative. When spoken from outside the system, they demand to be heard. The hearing brings acknowledgement.

“The sense of shame that condemns one to remain silent about experiences that cry out to be told is a function of the impossibility of converting what is felt to be private into a story that has public legitimacy or social currency”, Jackson writes in his book The Politics of Storytelling. “Shame, in other words, is an affective measure of the socially constructed and uncrossable line between private and public space.”

That’s why Ioana’s essays is called: I’m speaking to know I’m not alone. It’s a way of directly tackling the shame of being seen, because she knows that once the story is public, it’s a chance for both connection and reckoning. Now we know. Abuse happens and it can happen anywhere. It’s no longer private, it’s no longer shameful, it’s no longer just hers to deal with. It’s something we all need to confront.

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I say all this to emphasize that her collection is not a book of life lessons, certainly not a collection of memories or diary entries. Ioana is an author who chooses fragments of what she has lived through, then leans in to dissect them and discover what they are made of and how they come together to shape a life.

They are stories told around the age of 30: both before and after, an essential first milestone in which we tell ourselves who we are, how we got here, and how we’ll move forward. This way, Ioana wraps up a stage of her life and makes sense of the moments lived thus far: abuse, family history and heritage, her relationship with her mother, that defining romance from college, friendships, the jobs she’s had.

These are true stories from modern day Romania, and if they have a power of universality, it’s because Ioana understands the role of an essayist: to use her own life to say something about many of our lives.

The essay is therefore the form through which the writer tries to give meaning to an idea or a lived experience. It is a documented journey in which she becomes a guide through what she has experienced, not just for our voyeuristic pleasure as readers (which is not to be discounted), but also to remind us that, despite all that separates us, we have much that unites us.

We come from a certain community that has left its mark on us, we had moments of rebellion, we fell in love, we did terrible things, we broke up, we suffered, we left and came back, we tried, we failed, we succeeded.

The sum of these moments and what we understand from them is who we are.

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Of course Ioana isn’t writing about all millennial women. Not even about all those in Romania. There are numerous stories that other women – who grew up differently, had different experiences and circumstances – could tell. There is a universality in all, but the individual experience is unique.

And it would be amazing to listen to as many of them as possible. And not only them. Any other group you can think of. Any experience you can think of can have their storytellers.

What we as listeners and readers can do is treat this experience as expertise.

Let me repeat that: experience is expertise. What happened to you, where you live, what you went through – as a mother, as a child, as a world class athlete, as someone making a painful medical decision, as someone struggling with mental illness – should be enough to qualify you to join the conversation.

Yours is not the only truth, but it’s on par with other forms of expertise.

This is what I wish journalists would understand sooner, especially as they go into the world to (supposedly) show the impact of policies made by those in power. Find people who have experienced the fallout of bad decisions, or will be impacted by further bad decisions, or who don’t even get decided upon. That’s expertise. Treasure it.

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And you, reading this, what’s your story?

What’s stopping you from telling it? If you worry it’s “a lack of talent”, think about it this way: living day to day doesn’t require talent. So why would recounting this living require it? Yes, some coaching, editing and rewriting might come in handy, but making a story better can only happen once the story starts, or the idea is expressed. So start it.

What else is stopping you? That nobody will care? Nobody really cares anyway though, right? Think about it in a different way – remember that time you felt alone going through something, and then someone told you a story of their own, which oddly almost mirrored yours, and you went “wow, I thought it was just me!”? You could be that person for someone you’ve never met and who, right now, thinks they are the only ones going through something.

What else? Shame? I understand. I feel shame more often than I want to admit it. But I hang on to this idea: shame can only be defeated when the private becomes public, when our communities make room for the story of the individual. I’m not going to lie – sometimes a story is too much to take for your community. But it might also be the story that opens up different communities for you.

Tell your story.

Don’t trust me. Trust Ioana: “[Thinking bad things never happen to us] is a lie we’re maintaining in our society that favors abusers, isolates victims, stigmatizes vulnerable communities and cuts their access to platforms that could share their stories, to justice, to credibility. I don’t want us to keep lying to ourselves and I don’t want to feel like my story doesn’t belong here. It does. Here I am. I’m not going anywhere.”

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SIDE DISHES:

1. You can buy Ioana’s book from the publisher’s website or just catch the tail-end of the book tour, where she joins editor Eli Bădică and writer Raluca Nagy. On Sept 25 they’ll be in Ploiești, then Brașov on Sept 26, Timișoara on Sept 27, with a closing in Cluj on Sept 28.

2. Here you can find tons of essay DoR has published over its history. Three deep cuts: on opera and death, on finding the step-sister you never met, on becoming a mother of triplets.

3. Other books you can read on personal storytelling: The Situation and the Story, The Art of Memoir, Bird by Bird.

4. Of course, not everyone loves the personal essay. Here’s Merve Emre speaking about the impersonal essay.

5. Bleachers have a new song out. Enjoy. (Plenty of personal references in Jack Antonoff’s songs. Here’s a live version of another Bleachers song I adore).

6. PS: There’s a future-oriented poll in here as well.