The Dream of Writing
The Awful Truth
by Diana Hamilton
Goliath Books, 2017
1. As much as I want to avoid being obvious, the obvious place to begin in Diana Hamilton’s multilayered, deeply funny, and all-around superb book The Awful Truth is at the beginning, with a declaration of intent:
Some say we shouldn’t describe our dreams.
I say: fuck that.
But saying “fuck that” won’t persuade everyone.
Instead, I’ll prove it with “research” (3)
An excellent introduction, not only to Hamilton’s method but also her style: blunt but witty, casually disdainful of academia and its rhetorical requirements yet committed to a serious (and seriously extensive) reading practice. Hamilton, whose previous books include Shit Advice Columnist, which features the author dispensing advice about shitting, and Okay Okay, in which she writes about crying at work, frames The Awful Truth as “about dreams & wishes. Specifically, two: / the wish to write, the wish to feel better” (ibid.).
2. Like anything worth reading, The Awful Truth resists description. In the first part, “Write in Your Sleep”, the wish to write becomes “an annotated bibliography / on how, when we dream, we write.” Quotations from Gilles Deleuze and Leopold Sacher von Masoch, Robert Glück and Bernadette Mayer, Sigmund Freud and Ted Berrigan, are wrapped around accounts of Hamilton’s own dreams, e.g., “Hamilton, Diana. ‘Onion Poet’s Dream, on the eve of her birthday.’ Email message to therapist. December 7, 2013.” In this dream, Hamilton brings “a big loaf of hearty bread, cut onto slices with an onion spread” to “a party of older poets” (4). Bad call: she “forgets that, in real life, she stopped eating onions” due to their adverse effect on her IBS. But the crux of the dream is what occurs next:
Yet in her sleep, she writes a story that
1. minimizes the work women put into preparing food
2. earns her the attention of her elders, and
3. rejects luxury in favor of sustenance (5).
Here, the issues the dream raises––the way labor performed by women often goes unacknowledged, pressure to acquire social capital in the poetry world, class (and/or self-care?)––are translated, in an appropriately dreamlike manner, into a narrative. Or rather, into the act of creating a narrative, a dream of having written, the dream of (being) a writer. Hamilton’s third person narration of her own dreams of narration underscores the many layers of mediation at play. The style is often discursive and essayistic, though, aside from direct quotations and emails, this first section is lineated. (To add a further layer of mediation, some of these dreams have been turned into an interactive video game, Diana Hamilton’s Dreams, by Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford and available through Gauss PDF.) In its various iterations, the book flirts with the dangers and pleasures of over-sharing, and the way such sharing opens onto the terrifying banality of the relatable. Writing in dreams and writing about dreams, Hamilton achieves a tone that is detached, yet fully aware of the pitfalls of “fake ‘neutrality’” (35). In an ironic echo of Barthes, she asks “ ‘who’s dreaming?’ ” (ibid.), and determines that the answer does indeed matter––but without at the same time succumbing to the temptation to offer pedantic apologies or qualifications for this inevitable lack of neutrality.
3. The second part, titled “Fear and Trembling”, is presented as a “novella––if you can call it that” by one Elsie Maria Kingdon. In an introductory note, Hamilton (or someone with the initials D.S.H.), explains that she discovered this text “on Christmas Eve, 2016, outside of Metrograph” where she has just watched Carol. Found “lying in the gutter, it gave the impression of having fallen out of a taxi in some sort of skirmish, the manuscript looked freshly printed, and had the phrase ‘FINAL DRAFT’ as a running header” (67). This move reads as both a nod to, and parody of, the classic metafictional device of the found text. And things only get more meta from here.
Appropriately, given the title borrowed from Kierkegaard, this “novella” concerns “the wish to feel better” from an all-pervading anxiety. The narrator opens the novella with the observation, “Recently, every young person I know agreed they were ‘very anxious’” (69). But the narrator has a solution she calls “film therapy”: she assigns her friends specific roles from films (Adam’s Rib, His Girl Friday, The Piano Teacher, etc.) that they then must faithfully act out, no excuses. The act will serve as antidote to real life by forcing the performer to repeat endlessly his or her “true anxious fantasy” (84). The lines between art and life, fiction and nonfiction, first and third person narration, become thoroughly blurred––perhaps even effaced altogether.
4. In between the narrator’s Cavellian film theories are some wonderfully acerbic takes on (male) writers dispensing advice (e.g., “It is important to make habits, you now, he says, as he always does, before describing his own routine, by way of which he has composed some 1,000 identically bad poems” (79)), and refreshingly unsentimental opinions (e.g., “A perverse side effect of the belief that writing will make you feel better is its corollary: the belief that, the more bad things happen to you, the more you’ll have to write about” (80)). However, the narrator’s theories, and therapeutic methods, run aground on her friend Sophie, who rejects each character suggestion and instead writes the narrator a story “to prove that the act of writing was not incompatible with the act of accepting one’s lack of control” (103). At this point the narrative loops back on itself, as Sophie, echoing the very beginning of the book, writes, “You say we shouldn’t bother to write in the absence of any real control… I say, fuck that” (Ibid.). Sophie’s story, “Silent Treatment”, is about a character named Sophie who decides to refrain from speaking for a week. And if you think Hamilton (or Sophie) doesn’t have any further tricks in store, you would be wrong; the final pages include a lesbian porn sequence featuring a sexy plumber, and a speculative turn involving top-secret dream surveillance. This mélange of genres, this intercalation of texts and stories, is itself a marvelous act of control by Hamilton, thus seeming to prove Sophie’s point.
5. The Awful Truth is also the name of a 1937 screwball comedy staring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant as Lucy and Jerry Warriner, a couple who suspect each other of being unfaithful, (almost) get divorced, and then try to sabotage each other’s subsequent dalliances. Jerry (Grant) has flings with a cabaret singer and an heiress, while Lucy (Dunne) gets engaged to an oilman from Oklahoma. However, aiming to win Jerry back, Lucy crashes a party given by the heiress. She acts drunk, pretends to be Jerry’s sister, and performs a cabaret number. At the end of the night, she tricks Jerry into driving her home, only to maneuver him to her aunt’s cabin, where they are finally reconciled. As one of Stanley Cavell’s remarriage plots, it fits right into the book’s obsessions with film, paranoia, deceptive relationships, and parody. Perhaps the film is even the repressed genesis of Hamilton’s eponymous book? And perhaps Hamilton is even undertaking her own experiment in film therapy by playing the role of Lucy Warriner? Lucy/Diana is a character layering roles on top of roles, styles on top of styles, all in the effort to disrupt (and thus, in some limited way, control) the dream of a life free from anxiety.