Nowadays it seems we’re glutted with memoirs and tell-alls and other prose which purports to “honesty” and truth. Person A did bad things and now doesn’t do them anymore. Or still does but is unrepentant. Woman becomes stripper but isn’t objectified, she digs it. We’ve seen it and we all know it sells.

But, is it truly honest to lay out a laundry list of behaviors, especially taboo behaviors? I’ve seen people admit to all sorts of behaviors and call themselves “honest.”

“Yeah, I fucked your wife and yeah I shot dope and yeah I robbed people and shot people and stolen their dreams… At least I can be honest about it.” Is that honesty or is it shamelessness? The speaker is tacitly admitting that his actions were negative, and that he might possibly regret them, but the listing doesn’t quite ring as “honest” to me. It’s what I call “cash register honesty” – the day’s receipts are quantified and accounted, but not qualified and atoned.

I’ve long decried the memoir for its lack of honesty. I see so many books and essays in which the author seems to say: “Look at me for being so brave as to admit to doing something most people wouldn’t dare! Aren’t I the special one?” This is so much self-aggrandizement, so much conceit.

While it is true that people in dark places do dark things, it’s the inner story which is the interesting one. A fantasy is just a fantasy, a behavior only a thing to do. I think Elissa Wald, writing in Rumpus, has offered to me perhaps the perfect example of what I have been looking for in memoir writing. She lists taboo behavior she witnessed or participated in or whatever – but she offers this only as a listing, a bare accounting to check the box. She qualifies as a person who’s “been there” and has t-shirts to prove it.

Where her essay, “Night Shifts,” comes to life though is in her insistence on keeping to principles, the focus on the true inner story. Her poetry puts us there with her on this journey so that those of us who have not been to S&M clubs can relate. We all have night shifts and she acknowledges this with compassion and grace – you needn’t go to the places she went to be with her.

I’ve been in dark places and I’ve done dark things. I know others who’ve done far worse. There is an immense prurient interest in an accounting of those things. But such a laundry list is so often a smokescreen, a dodge against the real reasons a person was where they were or did what they did. While Wald doesn’t go into spiritual or psychological detail, she brings us there in poetry and shows it to us in such a way that we can resonate with her experience and say, “Yes, me too, I have a night self.”

I can prattle my abstractions all day. It’s raining outside and I have nothing better to do – and this is a fine distraction from the work I must do. You need to go read the essay. Here.