I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry by Nina Boutsikaris has been described as more than a memoir—as an experience. Formed using a triptych structure and strategic negative space, these three interconnected essays create a cynical journey through a young woman’s life as she looks inward, questioning her desires, sexuality, learned, performed behavior and the body. Power, gender, fear, love, and art are all at the forefront of this creative, unique and raw portrait of intimacy.
I was delighted to speak with Nina as she discusses her relationship with uncertainty and curiosity, exploring the desire for intimacy and to be understood and her obsession with non-fiction.
In a work of non-fiction, one typically assumes the narrator is the author, especially when the work is so intimate and telling like yours. Would you label the essays in I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry as confessional? Or did you write them with a kind of distance in mind?
I wonder if my cringey reaction to the term “confessional” is because I’m a woman writer annoyed at the way personal essays that consider the body are bemoaned as solipsistic, whiny diary entries written by wounded women who don’t have the depth of creativity to write the Next Great American Novel, or because I’m a woman writer afraid of getting lumped into that category, meanwhile perpetuating the same sexist bullshit I hate.
Either way my hope is that how I articulate my own experiences feels true to readers; that my authentic desire to peel away the yellow wallpaper —despite how intimately I have to expose myself to seek that thing (or perhaps because of it) —might speak to readers, get them talking, thinking, sharing. I only wrote this book because thinking about these subjects was fascinating to me. I hope it is fascinating to others, too. In terms of distance, I was just far enough away to write with a balance of empathy, longing, and critical thought. The personal experiences still held some emotional sway, but I understood many things while writing that the narrator did not understand while the stories in the book were happening to her, and that’s what made it exciting for me. By the end of the book, however, the narrator and I were more or less synched up in terms of knowledge. I think the whole thing would have been too muddled with hindsight if I’d written it any later in my life — it had to be what it was, from who I was. The last scene in the book was also the last part I wrote (this is not always the case in memoir or personal essay), and as I said, when I was writing that part I was more or less her, the narrator on the page…maybe just a tad smarter.
I love how the narrator speaks with uncertainty about her surroundings, situations and even her own desires. She is clearly still processing who she is, what she wants and who she will become. I found that refreshing, especially as a female reader, because it shows her multiplicity as a woman, which isn’t always represented in literature. Why was exploring this uncertainty and curiosity important to you? Do you think our current culture leaves room for women to explore their desires?
Exploring uncertainty and curiosity is important to me because what else is there? Doing that publicly is an act of resistance, I think. I suppose I’m always attempting to do what all my favorite essayists do, which is to further illuminate or complicate a question, and for me that requires swooping and circling rather than marching down a straight, mown path. I honestly don’t know another way to write narrative nonfiction except through a lens of uncertainty and curiosity. I’m much more stimulated by the process of looking and thinking and asking than I am by the process of deciding, knowing. Though I’m sure if I analyzed this more closely I would find something unflattering in it. Something about my reluctance to make a sound argument or to take up too much space, or a fear of looking stupid.
To speak to your second question, of course historically there’s been little room for anyone who’s not a cis man to explore their desires, sexual or otherwise. But that doesn’t stop folks from trying, folks much braver than me. Personally, my question was sort of how can I even know what desire is when its been clouded by a learned, performed self in a system that offers up a very narrow definition of power —a system which I’ve enthusiastically participated in and benefited from, which has rewarded me while its boot was also at my throat — and ultimately takes power away. Am I sorry? Nah. And absolutely yes. But for what? And to who? Myself? What have I done to others? Who or what made me the way I am? Look at me/Leave me alone. Please see me/I’ll never let you see me. (Recently I sort of defer to Rihanna when it comes to a role model for exploring desire and power. I look forward to her getting older so she can subtly but firmly eliminate our collective disgust of the menopausal woman. Everyone should be paying attention to what she’s up to.)
I also want to say though, that while the book is about sexual desire in some ways, it’s maybe even more so about the desire to find/create any intimacy at all. The struggle with what that even is. The sadness of being a lone self. And the promise of intimacy is what drew me to creative nonfiction in the first place. As a teenager I obsessively recorded banal observations of strangers, and of myself observing strangers, because it filled me with empathy—I felt that writing could illuminate something bigger, could create a net that would catch me and make me part of a world I felt mostly outside of, mostly alone in. I wanted to understand and be understood. The girl in this book is desperate to connect, to be seen and understood, and yet is basically incapable of closing that divide between herself and others, is in fact seduced by that divide again and again. Her desires go beyond half-hearted lust, beyond being desired by men and women, but she has a hard time articulating what those desires really are. On a podcast the writer Steve Almond recently said of his favorite book, Stoner, “God bless a goddamn novel that makes clear how much people are loyal to the sorrow of their childhood.” ITTTYIS is no Stoner, but I do hope it is an honest account of one person’s loyalty to her formative sorrows and the consequences and bewildering “rewards” of that loyalty.
The narrator often grapples with men, sex and power —how these three intertwine and how she is sort of playing a part in this complex web. I’d love to know more about what led to explore this.
Why does any memoir writer explore anything? These were the things that took up space in my life and I wanted to understand why. When I started writing the illness narrative, I realized that this too was about these other things: my own self-destructive behavior, my inextricable pride and shame, my cozy identification with isolation, with my body and its power over others, over me; this story I told myself about who I was and what I was worth. I suppose what I did was try to take control of all that.
You speak about paintings and art throughout your essays. Can you talk about how these mediums have influenced your writing? Do you have a favorite artist that you are particularly inspired by?
As a nonfiction writer I am fascinated by the constant negotiation between the world and the self, watching and being watched, hiding and parading; as a woman it is inevitable that I also consider the ways in which I, too, am observed. I think of women artists I admire and how they’ve exposed their abject, vulnerable properties on varied creative planes. Marina Abromovic, for instance, literally uses her body as the vehicle of expression, even risking her life in the process of connecting with the audience, whom her curator Klaus Biesenbach considers, in effect, “a lover she needs like air to breathe.” Perhaps this is what we can and want to do in autobiographical writing: at once risk our own lives and save them. Maybe I hope, like Abromovic, to sit at a small table “gazing steadily at the scores upon scores of people who come to take the chair…”, waiting for them to grasp the power of returning that gaze.
I love the structure of your book — the use of the triptych form these essays and the negative space throughout. Can you speak about how you chose the three sections? What did your process look like for constructing this book?
I’m glad you like the structure because it’s the structure that turned off a lot of publishers! For me the three sections represent distinct voice shifts, but shifts that are cyclical, a journey that is obviously unfinished. Quite angry in the first section, the narrator becomes more of an observer in the second, and by the third is mostly curious, has sort of softened, surrendered. And yet… the anger is still there, the toughness too, like waves. And on the last page, she does something that feels defiant in way that is familiar to her; she’s both shifted and regressed, which is a lot like my ongoing experience of being alive in the body I am in. She is not good or bad. She is trying. As the essay form itself also tries.
When did you begin writing these essays? What drew you to non-fiction writing?
I felt all these things, had memories, description, but that wasn’t enough. I knew my memories could mean something more than just gut narrative retellings. So I began to explore the complications of subjecthood and objecthood more thoroughly, searching for language with which to name my discontent. I was pulled further into the complexity of my own relationship with the gaze, desire, sexuality and power with the writings of Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Deleuze, Barthes, and many others. I looked at the work of modern artists and compared them to texts about the nude in western art history; I reread myths in feminist contexts; I studied the essays of Virginia Woolf and the installations of Tracy Emin and Kiki Smith. And soon my anger was replaced by curiosity, even amusement or forgiveness, for myself and others. As I began to pay attention to what others were saying/writing/making about the foundational themes I was grappling with, I saw connective threads winding through many of the scenes from my life. I can’t really imagine writing a personal essay without outside voices/texts, even if it’s just one little scientific fact. You never know where research will take you, but I don’t think it can ever steer you anywhere but deeper into thinking and meaning-making.
In terms of WHY nonfiction, I’ve always been obsessed with what is going on in the room, between people. How weird it all is. How funny and sad. I’m also not that interested in traditional narrative arc, I suck at outlines, and I never know what something is really going to be “about” until I have worked on it for a while — I like to worry over an image and throw more images at it until some clear tension is revealed that I can essay into. There is so much already shimmering and shaking in every seemingly arbitrary situation we get ourselves into. But who knows. I hope I’m always growing and changing. And maybe writing fiction will be a part of that. Funnily enough, I’m currently trying to write the Next Great American Novel. But the poet Richard Siken says that talking about your work in progress feels just as good as actually writing it, and thus tricks us into thinking we’ve accomplished something. So I should probably go work on the writing bit instead… It’s very nice when people enjoy reading your work, want to publish it, to represent you, etc, but it also forces you to admit that the thing holding you back is you — you not writing as much as you ought to be.
Nina Boutsikaris is the author of I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry: An Intimacy Triptych. Her essays have appeared in Fourth Genre, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Third Coast, Hobart, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere, and were included among the Notable Essays in Best American Essays 2019 and Best American Essays 2016. Her short essay “Surrender” will be included in Brevity’s forthcoming anthology, The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction (2020). She has taught at The University of Arizona, Eugene Lang College, Catapult, and Gotham Writers Workshop. She lives in the Hudson Valley.