what’s your secret?

I’ve been reading Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel, and have just gotten to a long passage about the writer’s persona. One of Smiley’s points is that with living writers, you never meet them at the moment that they are writing in the persona that you fall in love with (or don’t, I guess). You might read their books out of order, sometimes years after they’ve moved on from being the person who wrote that book, and they can’t quite capture that exact persona again (or perhaps don’t want to). The real writer can never live up to the expectation that people have for her, and is constantly surprising people by having petty thoughts about the next door neighbor, or trying to remember to buy milk or diapers, and not thinking about the lofty ideals that she expresses in her work.

It made me think about the immediacy of blogging, and how I can read these blogs one day, and then meet the bloggers in person the next, and there still can be a disconnect between the person that I met and the person that I read. Okay, let’s be real here, what I actually thought about was, “I wonder what those women thought of me when they met me? Am I just a huge fraud on my blog, or do I have the same voice in real life? Is there a disconnect between what I write one day and the way I am the next?”

In some ways, it’s not a fair question. After all, the times that I’ve met other bloggers in person, we’ve both had our children with us, and nothing can keep you from having an honest and open conversation quite as well as mediating the toy-sharing of small kids. If I’d met these women for a drink, we’d have time to have a real conversation. Adding the complications of the kid playdate made that almost impossible.

I wonder, who were the first two people to meet in real life after they ‘met’ in print? The experience is not new to blogging, although blogging has ratcheted it up, I imagine. I was never the kind of person to have a pen pal, but people have had literary relationships with total strangers for years. The ability to have a print-only conversation has existed for centuries.

So what makes a total stranger, in such a world? If someone reads my blog everyday, they may know more about me than my co-workers do. That’s partly due to my weird work situation–it’s not like I’m sitting around in an office with a bunch of people that I hang out with in my off hours, exchanging life stories. All the same, my co-workers can’t be classified as total strangers. But can you? If I tell you that I spent the summer between my junior and senior years of college as an intern at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival in Boise, ID, and that I spent the first week in Boise wandering around wondering where all the black people were, you know something about me that 90% of the people in my real life today will never know.

It’s not because I want to keep it a secret from them–it’s because they’ll never know to ask.

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