Shyness has troubled me all my life. As author Alistair MacLeod has said, ‘There is a theory that writers write about what worries them’ (Collinge & Sohier 2003). In order to explore my troubled relationship with shyness I wrote an essay on this topic for the Meanjin literary magazine (Prior 2009)1. Still, though, my curiosity had not been fully satisfied, and
I decided to keep writing about it.
One of my aims in embarking upon a PhD in Creative Writing was to develop my professional and creative practice by writing a book-‐length work of non-‐fiction. The project was initially conceived of as an informative non-‐fiction book that would
incorporate elements of life writing, but would potentially fit most comfortably within the commercial publishing genre of informative self-‐help books. At the beginning of the research phase I employed the research skills I had gained in my professional life as a journalist, contacting and seeking advice from experts and institutional representatives working in the field of social anxiety, searching library databases for texts with relevant titles, and conducting internet searches for relevant newspaper and journal articles. In this way I gradually formed a more comprehensive understanding of the causes and effects of shyness/social anxiety.
Simply re-‐presenting and/or re-‐contextualising the expert information I gathered in this way, however, would not have significantly challenged my practice as a writer. In order to move beyond those basic journalistic approaches to research and writing, testify to the
lived experience of shyness, and transform my writing practice, it became clear that I
needed to experiment more with elements of the autobiographical form and challenge my preconceptions about the limits of the self-‐help genre.
As a journalist I had been writing for a living for two decades. However the formulaic nature of the journalist’s craft necessarily imposes limitations on how to deal with content: the traditionally distanced, observational positioning of the writer; the necessity to strive for balance in the opinions, information and anecdotes related in the articles; the requirement to adopt and adapt to a publication’s ‘house style’. In writing about
shyness/social anxiety I wanted to escape those limitations, to reduce the distance and ignore the need for balance, and instead explore new ways of combining elements of style.
1. In writing ‘The Shyness Lists’ I have used excerpts from a two interviews I conducted with psychologists about
shyness/social anxiety and temperament theory (Rapee R 2009; Prior M 2009). These interviews were conducted as part of the research for a separate and earlier writing project for Meanjin literary magazine (Prior S 2009). As both interviews were recorded before I embarked on this doctoral project I was advised by Deputy Chair of the RMIT College Human Ethics Advisory Network in the College of Design and Social Context (DSC) that they were considered ‘pre-‐existing data’.
I wanted to move beyond being a gatherer of facts and to evolve as a storyteller. As Robin Hemley observes in A field guide for immersion writing (2012), ‘While the journalist at least attempts objectivity, there’s no such constraint upon the memoirist’ (p. 48). In pursuing this research project I wanted to grant myself permission to explore without knowing precisely where I would end up: to be tentative, speculative, meditative and reflective, rather than definitive and authoritative; to privilege pathos and ethos over logos. I wanted to challenge myself to forge a new form, to find new voices, and in doing so to find a new synergy between form and content.
Over the course of the inquiry, therefore, new research questions emerged as the creative project evolved from an informative book about shyness to an immersive memoir with elements of the self-‐help genre, weaving together narrative and non-‐narrative knowledge, and employing poly-‐vocal forms and narrative suspense to convey key features of the lived experience of shyness.
On memoir
According to Smith and Watson (2010), memoir is a form of life narrative (or life writing) in which ‘the teller of his or her own story becomes, in the act of narration, both the observing subject and the object of investigation, remembrance and contemplation’ (p.1). It is a form of life writing distinguished from the more traditional narrative mode of autobiography ‘by density of image and self-‐reflexivity about the writing process’ (p. 4).
G. Thomas Couser (2012) contends that ‘as a non-‐fiction genre, memoir depicts the lives of real, not imagined, individuals’ (p. 15). The term ‘memoir’ derives from the French word for memory, ‘memoire’. Thus, Couser contends, ‘calling a narrative about yourself a memoir usually signals that is it based primarily on memory, a notoriously unreliable and highly selective faculty’ (p. 19). This characteristic unreliability is acknowledged by William Zinsser (1994) in his description of memoir as ‘the art of inventing the truth’ (p. 99). Zinsser argues that ‘no other non-‐fiction form goes so deeply to the roots of personal experience – to all the drama and humor and unexpectedness of life’ (p. 98). What gives memoir its power is that ‘unlike autobiography, which spans an entire life, memoir assumes the life and ignores most of it’ (p. 99). Whilst my memoir contains
autobiographical episodes that span from soon after my birth to the ‘present’ (i.e. when I finished the book) it omits any episodes that do not relate in some way to the over-‐arching theme of shyness.
To write a good memoir, Zinsser contends, ‘you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-‐remembered events a narrative shape and an organising idea’ (p. 99). In ‘The Shyness Lists’, the organising idea behind the memoir was to come to a better understanding of a life lived with, and in many ways defined by, social anxiety. The narrative shape, as I will demonstrate in the following chapters, was
determined by the challenge of artfully communicating how it feels to be shy: over moments, years and decades.
For Paul John Eakin (1999) the formal distinctions between memoir and autobiography are less interesting than the function they have in common – to remind us that self, memory, identity and the body are all inextricably linked:
we are all becoming different persons all the time, we are not what we were; self and memory are emergent, in process, constantly evolving, and both are grounded in the body and the body image. Responding to the flux of self-‐experience, we instinctively gravitate to identity-‐supporting structures: the notion of identity as continuous over time, and the use of autobiographical discourse to record its history (p. 20).
This notion of an emergent identity ‘grounded in the body and the body image’ proved to be central to the self-‐reflexive inquiry I engaged in whilst writing the memoir ‘The Shyness Lists’.
The current popularity of memoir is situated within a contemporary artistic movement described by David Shields (2010) as ‘reality hunger’. Shields identifies ‘self-‐reflexivity, self-‐ethnography, anthropological autobiography’ as key components of this movement (p. 5). In a chapter of his book Reality hunger (2010) entitled ‘autobio’, Shields asks of autobiography, ‘To what degree is this a solipsistic enterprise?… To what degree can solipsism gain access to the world?’ (p. 153). In relation to this research project I have interpreted Shields’ questions to mean: to what degree can self-‐reflexive life writing offer writers and readers insights into the way individuals and societies function? Further, to what degree can this self-‐reflexive life writing project illuminate for readers the way socially anxious people might view the world around them? These are some of the questions I have endeavoured to answer in this ‘writing shyness’ inquiry.
The memoir form has traditionally consisted of a range of sub-‐genres, summarised by Couser (2012) as conversion narrative, apology, confession, bildungsroman (or coming of age narrative), and testimony. However as Couser acknowledges, literary genres are no longer thought of as pure, stable, discrete entities: ‘Instead, genres are seen as hybrid, dynamic, malleable and culture-‐bound’ (p. 34). ‘The Shyness Lists’ evolved to incorporate
elements of all five of Couser’s sub-‐genres, as well as borrowing elements from other literary forms and genres, thus demonstrating the fluid, hybrid nature of contemporary life writing.
In A field guide for immersion writing (2012), Robin Hemley identifies a further sub-‐genre: the immersion memoir. According to Hemley, the immersion memoirist:
takes on some outward task or journey in order to put his/her life in perspective… the immersion memoirist is interested in self-‐revelation or evaluation… The immersion memoirist is interested primarily in understanding the Self… (p. 11)
The inquiry into the ‘self’ that unfolded during the writing of ‘The Shyness Lists’ employed immersion as method, including an immersion in memories, as well as research forays and dialogues with experts and intimates. It has been dominated by the drive towards self-‐ revelation and self-‐evaluation. Given that evaluation and self-‐revelation have both been identified by psychologists as particularly anxiety-‐inducing dynamics for self-‐identified shy people, the inquiry has therefore involved a second layer of immersion in some of this author’s deepest fears.
Hemley identifies several different categories of immersion memoir, and ‘The Shyness Lists’ evolved to incorporate elements of at least two of those categories. The investigation form of the immersion memoir is one in which the memoirist explores a personal
obsession, producing a ‘detective story’ in which:
(it is) the memoirist’s unenviable tasks to sift through the crimes of the past and try to assign culpability. Often the blame rests on the memoirist’s own shoulders, or if not blame exactly, at least a kind of personal responsibility for the past that he or she has not been able to face until now (p. 49).
This memoir has been written in a confessional style and the inquiry conducted during the writing of ‘The Shyness Lists’ has involved an attempt to identify what responsibility can be assigned to my anxieties – and perhaps more importantly, to my attitude towards my anxieties – for determining the narrative trajectory of my life. I repeatedly ask myself: what blame can be attached to my shyness for the events and encounters (or absence of events and encounters) in my life that I now regret? And how might I survive my sudden immersion in the deepest fear that haunts most shy people?
Patricia Foster (2004) contends that contemporary memoir offers an alternative to the previously dominant narrative of progress:
Although the prevailing myth of the late twentieth century is one of social, economic and political progress, the current memoir suggest a countermyth of private shame and disgrace, a narrative of breakdown and recovery, a spiritual longing that goes unfulfilled (p. 83).
‘The Shyness Lists’ certainly fits within this definition of a contemporary countermyth suggested by memoir, although in this instance I would substitute for Foster’s notion of ‘spiritual longing’ a term that sits more comfortably within the discourse of the social sciences: a longing for self-‐efficacy and self-‐actualisation. This memoir traces an
individual’s lifelong quest to become the person she thinks she could – and should – be, in the light of one troubling temperament trait.
Philip Lopate (1995) contends that the dynamism in personal narrative non-‐fiction texts comes from ‘the need to work out some problem, especially a problem that is not easily resolved’ (p. 178). ‘The Shyness Lists’ could be described as ‘an investigation into the problem of me’: more specifically, why I have been so obsessed with, and judgmental towards, my (self-‐assigned) identity as a shy person, and why I have been so anxious for so long.
It could also, however, be described as a quest memoir. According to Hemley, ‘A quest suggests a journey, but there certainly are quests that are not so much about travel as about personal goals’ (p. 50). The quest behind this inquiry was to write about shyness in order to understand the influence of my shy temperament on the ways in which I have constructed a particular narrative understanding of my life and, ideally, to gain more of a sense of control over that narrative in the future.