On this Halloween, find ways to 'haunt' yourself as a writer

Getty Images

While driving home from work the other night, I heard something that made me want to pull over to the side of the road so I could write it down.

In an episode of the “Poured Over” Barnes & Noble podcast, author Ta-Nehisi Coates said: “The job of the writer, to me, is to haunt the reader.” For this to happen, he said, the writing “has to feel real … it has to feel deep, it has to feel thick. And so even when you're at odds with people, your writing about them will be much thicker if you've actually made an effort to understand them.”

I think this is true, too, of personal writing. To go deeper, to push past the edge of discomfort, we have to make an effort to understand the messiness of our own narratives. We have to haunt ourselves by digging up the past and unearthing new revelations about who we are and how we came to be. Sometimes, doing so hurts. But I’ve found that it can also be clarifying, and it can make for better writing.

We can haunt ourselves — and ultimately our readers — by writing about the parts of ourselves we’ve kept hidden and by interrogating oversimplified storylines. The author Suleika Jaouad has a nice take on this. “If you want to write a good book, write what you don’t want other people to know about you,” she has said. “If you want to write a great book, write what you don’t want to know about yourself.”

Unsplash/Alex Geerts

We tend to shorten storylines over time, narrowing them down to the most obvious facts. But in the process, we render them only half-true. Sometimes the form in which we write can push us toward fuller truths. For many years, I wrote personal essays about my childhood eating disorder and my recovery from it. But at a certain point the essays started to feel stale; I was conveying the same storyline over and over because it felt safe and familiar (and because it fit neatly into 800 to 1,000 words). When I started writing my forthcoming book, Slip: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery, I had more space to explore the many plot points in my own life. And I had some great teachers along the way who pushed me into new territory.

While getting my MFA a few years ago, I wrote a chapter about how my mother’s death caused my eating disorder. When one of my professors read the chapter, she asked: “Was your mom’s death the sole cause?” My initial reaction was “yes, without a doubt.” But as I reflected on the question in the weeks that followed, I started to unpack other influences that were at play. I also sought inspiration from the author George Saunders, who around that same time shared a helpful writing exercise in his Substack newsletter, Story Club.

The exercise — which is meant to help you think about how the outside world has influenced your inner self — is simple: Draw a table with columns that mark six different age ranges (Birth to 5 years old, 5 to 10 years old, 10 to 15 years old, etc.) Then draw six rows that each list a specific topic. The topics may change depending on the age range you’re considering. Saunders suggests the following: Stories, novels, music, movies, TV, experiences, and people. When I did this exercise, I chose books, music, media, people, experiences, and education.

“The focus here is on emotional engagement — what did you obsessively watch? What book did you read until the cover fell off? What story were you always fantasizing yourself into? What toys did you spend way too much time with? (That might want to go under Experiences.) What person springs to mind when you think of that period?” Saunders explains. “The game is to get ourselves to think honestly about this. What truly altered the way you were thinking of the world? Admit it all. Hold nothing back, no matter how cheesy or low or cringe-worthy.”

When doing this exercise, I challenged myself to consider: What were the various factors that played into my eating disorder? I thought about all of the media I was exposed to at the time, all of the teachers who influenced me, all of the experiences that shaped me.

When filling out the “media” row, I thought back to my dad buying me a subscription to Seventeen magazine right after my mother died. He hoped it might hold answers to womanly questions that he didn’t feel fit to answer as a father. I Googled the first issue I ever read — from April 1997 — and saw that one of the cover stories was titled “Girls Who Exercise Themselves to Death.” I dug a little more and was able to track down the actual article, which was about young girls struggling with eating disorders and obsessive exercise. As I read it, I found myself remembering certain parts of the story, and it occurred to me that this may very well have been my first exposure to eating disorders.

When I filled out the “education” row, I thought back to all the teachers who supported me after my mother died. I also reflected on my seventh-grade health class, where I learned about calories and grams of fat, the food pyramid, and how to eat “good foods” and avoid “bad foods.” I started re-reading old journal entries from that time, which jogged my memories of the class — and how it prompted me to ascribe moral values to food by making me believe I was “bad” if I ate cookies or hamburgers or pizza and “good” if I ate fruits and vegetables.

And as I filled out the “experiences” row, I started to think about how I went to school the day after my mom died, acting as though nothing had happened. And how I wrote her eulogy and read it at her funeral with dry eyes. I reflected on how much I suppressed my grief and how I tried to be “strong” by pretending I was okay in the wake of a terrifying loss.

As I unpacked these various influences, I was forced to confront a more complicated storyline — one that challenged me to write about topics I had never before explored. I started out by journaling about them, intent on initially having just an audience of one: myself. Writing for yourself, Virginia Wolf once said, “loosens the ligaments.” It also helps lessen the load of heavy subject matters. Journaling isn’t therapy, but it sure can be therapeutic.

As I shifted from journaling about these truths to writing about them in my book, I began to craft a more nuanced narrative about my eating disorder’s origins. This newly reconstructed origin story haunted me at times; it made me think about how young and impressionable I was as an eleven-year-old who didn’t know how to grieve and who was desperate to find ways to remain close to my mother and be the perfect little girl I always thought she wanted me to be.

But the haunting helped; now I no longer have to hide from the ghosts of my past. I can look through and beyond them, and writing about them feels a lot less scary. 

I’d love to hear from you! How do you challenge yourself to complicate oversimplified storylines? If you haven’t done this, what’s holding you back?

My debut book, Slip: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery is now available for pre-order! Pre-orders help expand a book's reach, and my hope is that this book reaches and helps as many people as possible. You can pre-order it wherever you buy books: