The Questionnaire
So…I recently wrote a memoir about the time I had to schlep to a remote Caribbean island when my hippy, fugitive father died unexpectedly. The book is coming out in October and I couldn’t be more excited.
Going into the process, I was well aware that modern publishing leans heavily on the author to generate publicity and promotion, and while I was dreading it in the abstract, I felt confident that I could overcome my modesty and insecurities and step up.
Wanting to give my baby every opportunity to succeed and find its audience, I hired a well-regarded PR firm, and on our first call, the publicist strongly encouraged me to utilize their in-house social media manager to help build an attractive platform to support their traditional publicity efforts. Someone to manage my accounts, build an audience, field incoming messages, and so on. It all seemed perfectly reasonable, and I certainly didn’t want to do any of that myself, but my stomach began to churn.
I hate social media. I mean I know that’s trendy to say, but I really detest it. I genuinely think it’s the source of many of society’s ills and that it causes harm to individuals too. Sure, I enjoyed the first decade or so; reconnecting with old high school buddies, befriending people with shared interests whom I never would have otherwise met, celebrating life events like getting married or one of my movies winning an award, and such… But over time I became uncomfortable posting nearly anything at all; Who am I trying to impress? Am I flaunting my privilege? Do I really want these words/pictures/thoughts preserved indefinitely? Let alone the idea of being monitored and marketed to, and otherwise tracked, all of which felt inherently intrusive and sinister.
And so, over several years I successfully weaned myself off. I haven’t deleted my accounts altogether — I’m not trying to make some statement, and I do like the idea of having some tether to the many lovely people I’ve met over the years — but I just can’t bear to fritter away endless hours on the unebbing flood of delectable food, exotic travel, and other people’s children who apparently don’t have rashes or seizures or tantrums and who don’t pour raspberry jam all over the cat. I’m also flabbergasted by the opinions masquerading as fact, the clickbait headlines, inane quizzes, and the ceaseless parade of annoyingly compelling neutral-colored kitchen gadgets that promise happiness, one spiralized cucumber/seared scallop/handmade noodle at a time.
But social media is the modern town square, right? That’s where the people are. This is what it means to “put myself out there” so people will know about my book.
“Sure. Social media manager. Ok.” I swallowed hard.
“Great.” the chipper publicist replied, oblivious to the enormous cognitive dissonance I was navigating. “I’ll shoot you the questionnaire. Try to get it back to us by the weekend.”
I didn’t open the document until after bedtime, once the kids were safely put away, and I was lying in bed, ready to pass out even though it was only 8:30pm. The form was as inquisitive, pushy and shallow as an unabashed 9-year old.
What are your favorite books?
What are your favorite movies and TV shows?
What are some movie quotes you like to use?
What are words or phrases you would NEVER use?
Who are your favorite musical artists?
What do you love about where you live?
What are your favorite foods and drinks?
Huh? Really? Are they going to turn these answers into social media posts?
“HeY EveryBody! — I like spicy food and Bladerunner! YUo too? Hit me back! O, and reeeeeeed my booooooook!”
I found myself suddenly full of rage. Furious — not at the innocent social media strategist who crafted this five-page list of inane questions— but at the world. At our collective failure of communication and social organization that somehow yielded this dystopian, decomposing morass of mass communication, and also at myself for not being able to compartmentalize my feelings and just be normal.
“What’s the big deal?” my wife asked. “Just answer the questions.”
Are you a night owl or morning person?
Do you prefer mountains or the beach?
Coffee or tea?
Paper or plastic?
Do you like shopping? What are your favorite stores?
My favorite stores?!! Have you read my book?! I’m wracked with guilt that I shop at all! Capitalism is poison! Property is theft! We should all be living in the woods and foraging for food! Only then will humanity find the kindness and love and equanimity that justifies our (over)use of the Earth’s natural resources. Never mind that I order from Amazon.com nearly every day, buying disposable plastic elephants and unicorn flavored mermaid rainbow chips to appease (encourage?) my children’s insatiable appetites for trash. Also my eight breadbaking cloches… and that new collection of smart lightswitches to replace the ones I bought six months ago that I never quite figured out how to program…
“Do you collect anything?”
“What is your secret power?”
I can’t do this. It’s humiliating. I’m a fraud. A hypocrite. Why would I dare share any of this information willingly? And how could the sum of these questions actually give some imaginary social media stranger any sense of who I am? Of what I have to offer artistically? This is miserable. This is a mess. This is a mistake.
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I close my laptop and try to sleep.
Hours later, I awaken at 2am, full-on cold sweat, with an image of a cutesy twitter post in my name with a twee #dadlife hashtag dangling off of it. I can’t bear it. I don’t want that. I’m not a hashtag. I’m not the contents of a tweet. I’d rather be invisible than constrained by 140 characters!
I examine my physical symptoms. My pulse is up, my breath is shallow, my eye is twitching. I’m riddled with adrenaline. My amygdala is behaving like there’s a ogre banging on the door. What the hell am I terrified of? Being misunderstood? Being stereotyped? Being exposed? Who cares? I don’t care what people think of me. I never have. For Crissake, I went to the grocery store the other day wearing sandals and socks. How could this be worse?
I put on my brand-name earbuds, open the trendy meditation app and play the binaural beats with the gongs and the rain sounds and focus on my h̶y̶p̶o̶c̶r̶i̶s̶y̶ breath until I finally fall back asleep.
The next morning I’m giddy with a new plan. “I’ll create a persona. I’ll make up the answers to appear enigmatic and inscrutable. Deliberately inconsistent and bizarre!”
“You’re paying these people to do this. Why are you fighting?” my reasonable wife posits. I groan insufferably. I’m never going to get through this.
Day 3:
Okay. I can do this. I can answer these stupid questions and get this over with. I race through the questionnaire, holding my resentment just below the surface.
I like the beach AND the mountains. Who doesn’t?
I hate coffee and tea equally. Who needs caffeine when you have an anxiety disorder?
To hell with morning people. I used to gleefully stay up til way past midnight, in fact that was always my most creative time, but since my first kid was born six and a half years ago, I’ve been woken up before 6am every single day, rendering me perpetually prickly and irrefutably irritable.
And I haven’t seen a decent movie in more than a decade. Modern culture sucks.
“What is wrong with you?! They’re just trying to get to know who you are. Let them in! Do you really think casting yourself as a miserable prick is going to get you positive coverage?” My wife again, growing increasingly impatient with my petulance. “Do you want people to read your book or not?”
I sit with this. I know she’s right, but my visceral repulsion of this exercise is real. I can’t just ignore those feelings. My brain is trying to tell me something.
In the 90’s, when I was in my 20's, I stumbled into a job designing video editing software for a rogue, underdog computer company called Apple. The details of that serendipitous adventure are for a different post, but this experience reminds me (by contrast) of the pervading idealism that governed our efforts back then. We were on a mission to “democratize media.” At the time, making even a simple film or video required complicated, expensive equipment and a wide range of specialized skills. We were going to change all that. We were building a tool that would dramatically increase the number of people who could produce professional-quality video content.
Everyone has a story to tell, and if we give them the means, they will rise up and tell their stories. And if everyone’s stories were finally heard, people from across cultures, across belief systems, across social strata, we would realize how similar we all actually are; that beneath whatever differences we may have on the surface, we’re all humans with the same basic needs and wants. And as that universal truth became self-evident, empathy would reign and a great unification would occur bringing never-before seen peace and prosperity for all.
It’s hard to remember, but in the 90’s, the Internet (and tech in general) was strongly associated with idealism. How on Earth did we stray, sway, careen from those lofty ambitions to today’s leviathan tech empires led by libertarian nihilistic trolls gleefully promoting the most vile provocateurs, profiteers, and propagandists — civil society and human well-being be damned? Our idealism may have been naive, but this… this outcome, this inversion, this collapse is not just a sad state of affairs. It’s a failure. And in some small way, it is my failure. I never imagined I could actually be an enabler of QAnon and Plandemic and The Big Lie. My years of work trying to build civility and cohesion actually turned out to play a part in destroying those very things. Even Apple turned out to be a profound disappointment. (Again, I’ll save that story for another post.)
So maybe that’s what’s going on for me when I’m urged to play along with the idea that this artificial banter and self-promotion masquerading as friendly conversation is not just OK, but is required now. That adapting to the algorithm has become de rigueur. That authenticity is just another commodity.
The irony that social media — borne of values and reverence for individual voices and authenticity — has devolved into something primarily performative and artificial (almost by definition) is abhorrent to me.
Still… I want to make every reasonable effort to get my book seen and read, and to retain whatever integrity I can to my own sense of authenticity — the authenticity and honesty that underlies what my book is and why I wrote it.
I do want people to read the book. I honestly think it might be helpful, healing, cathartic. So many people suffer with complicated relationships with their parents, with their siblings, with themselves. And my book might just inch some of them towards the forgiveness that can set them free. My decades-long suffering and the revelations that my father’s death illuminated for me are worth sharing. I know that to be true. Plus it’s funny, and a quick read. (I swear!) And besides, the intimate details revealed in the book are far more personal than anything that might be shared on my “managed” social media accounts.
So here I am. At least, hopefully, in starting this blog, I can present a voice online that attempts to honor my own reverence for authenticity; full of hypocrisy and unconscious biases, and flaws. But me. And if nothing else, it gives the social media manager something to link to on Twitter.
