Why Writers Hide

I watched Gulcan get a piercing through the ear—sat there while the needle went through, and it glinted after like it was supposed to. Right after, I nearly crashed into my ex-girlfriend getting out of an elevator. Just smiled at her friend and the moment passed. That’s how days stack up.

I was on the U-Bahn with Rocko Schamoni’s Sternstunden der Bedeutungslosigkeit. Someone recommended it as a quarter-life-crisis read. Some guy from Reinickendorf gives me shit about my Chucks, which is funny because I’m actually into what I’m reading—this messy, unremarkable life of Michael Sonntag and his friends. Schamoni’s voice is clean and direct, the way people actually think. It reads honest.

But here’s what gets me: it’s all hidden. It’s not Rocko writing about his life. It’s Michael Sonntag. Some invented distance between author and reader.

He’s not poetic like Murakami. He’s not visionary like Mian Mian. He just writes straight and undecorated, the way you’d think it. And for a book about meaningless hours, that’s exactly what works. But why put it behind a character? Why not write that he’s into his neighbor, that he’s still wrecked over someone, that he has bad breath? Why is it always Michael instead of Rocko?

Same thing kills me about Charlotte Roche and Rebecca Martin and everyone else doing this. Why not just admit you’re into anal sex and Avril Lavigne? Why not write that you’ve gone to bed with guys who stopped caring the second it was over? Or that you pick your nose, or that you’ve made out with girls? These are the real things. This is the actual material. It matters more than whatever clean persona you’re protecting.

So I’m going to say it. I’m Marcel. I like Avril Lavigne. I pick my nose. I make out with girls. No character in between. No protective fiction. No distance. That’s it. It’s not hard once you actually say it plainly.

Though maybe we need to talk about the Avril Lavigne thing separately.