Meghan Flaherty is the author of Tango Lessons, a personal history of Argentine tango, that was published in June 2018 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Flaherty received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in literary nonfiction. Her essays and translations have appeared in Psychology Today and The Iowa Review, and online at Catapult, The New York Times, The Rumpus, Asymptote, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband, baby, and rescue mastiff in northern California, and enjoys purchasing vegetables in Romance languages around the world. 

EB: Let’s go back to before you even had the idea for this book. I feel like I kind of already know the answer to this, from reading your memoir––

MF: You know everything about me now from reading my memoir! [nervous laughter]

EB: But how did you begin writing in general and what drew you to nonfiction specifically?

MF: I feel a little sheepish saying this but I really do feel like I tripped over my life and landed in grad school. I don’t have one of those back-stories of being a Writer Since I Could Hold a Pen. I kept journals, but tore most of the pages out. I wanted to write. I think I wanted to be a poet when I grew up. But I didn’t feel like I had anything worth saying. At some point someone gave me a copy of The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr.

EB: So good.

MF: That felt significant. But it was really more of a Hail Mary pass. I threw some words on paper, and eventually learned how to put them there with a little more precision. As far as nonfiction goes, it was what I had immediately available. But it became a calling. I’ve always had this desire to make order and meaning out of messiness, and nonfiction allows for that. It’s not inventing something beautiful, but making beauty out of what already is. You take the facts and make them true.

EB: Someone in grad school, maybe Patricia O’Toole, said something about how writing fiction is creating music in a silent room, while writing nonfiction is finding the music on a noisy street.

MF: Yes! You get to tame the chaos. The world is so bewildering, but you can wrestle with a tiny sliver with the hope of understanding what is there. It’s so satisfying, even when you end up asking more questions than you answer.

EB: So, let’s talk about Tango Lessons. Your book is this beautiful and intimate memoir. How do you approach writing personal nonfiction? Is it a different process for you than writing researched nonfiction?

MF: Unfortunately for me—and probably also for the reader—,all my work tends to swing personal, even when I try to stay behind the curtain. Tango Lessons was supposed to be this researched treatise on the sociology of dance. And it… isn’t. But in terms of my approach, I would say the difference is the self-interrogation. I can hide in research. I can anchor things with big fat facts and quotes and feel some confidence in my conclusions. But when I’m writing about myself it’s all doubt all the time. All I can do is just keep chiseling away, trying to be as honest as possible—even at my own expense. Mary Karr says God is in the truth and I think I am going to have to get that tattooed on my ass at some point. That’s my mantra. You have to get beyond the “cartoonish self portrait,” no matter how ugly things get, scratching up against your memory, making it real—even when real isn’t perfect or flattering. Throw yourself under the bus. She also said something like testify and recant, type and delete. That is my process to a letter. With a little Dorothy Parker: I can’t write five words but that I change seven. It’s not just perfectionism, it’s more like obligation: this is too important, I can’t get this wrong.

I also pretend I’m writing in a vault. As though the whole thing is a love letter to a single reader that I will never send. With this book, my editor kept trimming the research and asking for more (and more and more…) of the personal. Now I’m a little horrified to see my dirty laundry out there, flopping in the breeze! But, writing it, I just had to tell myself no one was ever going to read it. That was the only way I could be as honest as I needed to be.

EB: Yeah, I feel like that is everyone’s process, unless maybe you’re a self-involved sociopath.

MF: Which I swear I am not! My editor’s first round of revisions were like the third degree: yes, okay, but what about you? How were you feeling? What was going on in your heart and your mind and your life during that time? So I spent a summer in my aunt’s cottage in Maine bleeding on the page, just lashing myself every day. I felt so accomplished when I finished, and I sent it off all proud, feeling that I’d really gone there. Then I went off to get married, and on the plane, all of a sudden, I thought, oh my god, someone is going to read that.

EB: That’s terrifying! That also leads into my next question. I loved how you wove together all this history about tango and tango music and Argentine history with your own personal story. How did you figure out how to braid the personal narrative and the historical and cultural narrative together?

MF: Tango Lessons started as an essay for a research seminar in grad school. It was never supposed to be a book. I was interested in how the mechanics of the dance have changed, but the music hasn’t. I wanted to know what made tango tango? What was the thing that if you changed it or took it away tango would no longer be tango? I was asking all these questions of essence, of identity, about who has the right to tango, about cultural appropriation, and all these big theoretical themes. But then when I would tell people about it—even tango people—they just gave me these blank stares.

EB: [laughter]

MF: Eventually I realized I had to anchor the abstract with something tangible––I thought, okay, I can sketch this linear thread of a personal narrative to string these big ideas together. But, from that point forward, the consensus was clearly that the personal story had better legs, so to speak, and that material took precedence. But there are probably another 150 pages of deep geekery that didn’t make it into the book. I had a whole chapter on Finland!

EB: What?!

MF: It’s fascinating! Finnish tango is a national obsession. Their annual festival is massive, over a hundred thousand people! They’ve made it entirely their own, though; they incorporate folk melodies and themes into the music, which is a little smarmier and jauntier because they dislike syncopation, and everyone is dancing in their snow boots. It’s like the Galapagos Islands of tango.

EB: That’s crazy!

MF: But it didn’t make it into the book. The book (stubbornly) wanted to be something else: the story of my falling in love with tango and everything that came with it, which includes the history and culture and the sociology, but only to a point that people would actually want to read. I guess not everyone wants to read a ten-page tangent about Finland?

EB: Well, I loved all of your research tangents, but I am a huge nonfiction nerd.

MF: I think you’re my ideal reader.

EB: Shucks! Okay, but something else that relates to personal stuff–– in Tango Lessons you also write about Barry, your dance-partner-turned-husband, along with your parents, and your ex-boyfriends. How do you handle writing about people you love and care about, especially when you know they will read what you have written about them?

MF: Deep, deep guilt.

EB: Great!

MF: Honestly, it keeps me up nights. It’s unavoidable, I guess, but it’s by far the hardest part. I am much more comfortable airing my dirty laundry, but sometimes you can’t get at your own underpants without showing someone else’s.

All my life, I remember my mother being on my case to write my memoirs, but then she would always follow that with: so I can write my counter version. I’m not sure which she wanted more. But you know the Didion: we tell ourselves stories in order to live? We carry around our own versions of the truth. I try to honor that and make room for other versions, which means constantly trying to challenge mine, to cross-reference myself, to crash-test my own blind spots. If you’re going to drag someone along with you, you really need to have roughed yourself up a bit. It’s worth the getting roughed up to be fair. Still, memory is fallible—and I know there must be things I’ve missed or gotten wrong. That haunts me.

Leslie Jamison has been talking about this a lot lately with the publication of The Recovering. Her policy is to show all of her pages to people. This is my tendency, too. I had [my tango friends] Edward and Marty fact-check their chapters. Marty’s biggest complaint was that he wore G Star jeans, not Diesel, which is so funny, because to me it was just designer nonsense, but it mattered to him, so I’m relieved to have corrected it.

EB: I know! You can never predict what people are going to take issue with.

MF: I showed every draft to Barry, and mostly it just made him blush, because he’s British about feelings. I wanted to give people the chance to clarify, protest, correct. I would have loved to take [my ex-dalliance] Enzo out for a beer and hash his chapter over with him, but my editor wouldn’t let me. That was probably wise on her part.

Now I’m working on some stuff about my childhood and my mother, and my father is my only other witness. He usually says well, Meg, that’s how you remember it, so it’s the truth—and damn the torpedoes! But I send him pages as I write them so he can amend whatever I have misremembered or misunderstood. God is in the truth.

EB: Thanks for sharing that. I feel like everyone has really different approaches to how they write about other people––some refuse to show them anything until it is in print, and others give their loved ones full veto power.

Samantha Irby said that there is nothing she wants to write so badly that it is worth ruining a relationship over, and I feel like I fall in that camp.

MF: Me too.

EB: Though I feel like you can say whatever you want about other people as long as you also make yourself look bad.

MF: [laughter]

EB: Any memoir that is just like poor me, everyone is awful but I am a perfect angel, is not believable. Lis Harris said in grad school this great analogy that I always think of. She said that if you went to a used car salesman and he was honest with you and said, I just ripped off the family that was here before and sold them a pile of junk car, you would walk away from that guy right away and not trust him at all, right?

MF: Right.

EB: But when a writer is honest about something awful that they did, you actually believe and trust them more after that.

MF: Exactly! And the only way to get there is to beat the crap out of yourself. In the end, my editor cut out some of the really deep bruises I’d given myself. She spared me a bit. But I needed to take responsibility for my actions, and doing that work made me understand myself and what happened better, and that is really valuable work. Then at least everyone looks bad!

 

EB: Ha! Yes. Okay, one last question about your book. Clearly both you and tango are characters in Tango Lessons, but while reading I also felt like New York City became its own character as well. When did you make the choice to characterize New York in that way?

MF: It just happened. I would love to say it was a choice, but it’s just how I interact with a place. The city has human contours. New York always felt like a bad boyfriend who beat me, but I kept going back…and going back. A lot of it might have been the relief (and nostalgia) of having finally left by the time I was putting the finishing touches on the book. Though my editor kept trying to cut all the parts where I mentioned how much the city smells like pee.

EB: But 90% of living in New York is smelling things you don’t want to smell, which is mostly pee.

MF: I just had such vivid memories of that time, of learning tango and living in New York. Tango opened me up to being a sensual person in a way I hadn’t been before, and New York is such a big, vibrant presence. It’s piss and shit and garbage and twinkly lights and margaritas on the sidewalk and romantic sunsets. It’s all the things. It was another love affair I was having.

EB: Also, I have to ask: on page 220, you go on a terrible date with an ex at an Ethiopian restaurant on Tenth Ave. Was that restaurant Queen of Sheba?

MF: Yes!

EB: I love that place! I used to live right near there and my roommate and I went there all the time.

MF: It’s so good, and he almost ruined it for me.

EB: I am so sorry. That’s unfortunate.

MF: [sigh]

EB: You’ve covered some of your specific challenges with writing Tango Lessons, but, in general, what do you find the most challenging about writing nonfiction?

MF: It’s what I was saying before––the self-doubt. And figuring out when a detail is worth telling. Particularly when it’s personal. You get these ideas and you run with them and then, all of a sudden, you’re writing a memoir and sitting in a pile of pages, so sick of your own voice. Especially these days—it feels a little wrong to be writing about oneself when there are so many other stories needing to be told. I just keep wondering who even wants to read this? This is a cheerful answer!

But at some point you have to just hope it resonates with someone. You have to think of the little kid version of yourself who read a book on some obscure thing and felt seen. And how exciting that was. You have to tell the story you know how to tell, and tell it the best you can.

EB: And what do you find the most rewarding about writing nonfiction?

MF: I process so much on the page. Fortunately, I do this early in the process, but I often can’t figure out what I think or how I feel until I’ve written it. When you’re writing nonfiction, you learn so much along the way—obviously through the research, but even just about yourself. There is this enormous capacity to be enriched, just as the subject matter enriches the work. I love that in nonfiction you’re dealing with what is and was, but you can still be constantly surprised. You may think you know what you are writing about, but by the time you finish, you realize that you had no idea when you started.

EB: Would you say that since you started writing nonfiction it has shaped or changed your life in any way?

MF: Absolutely. It’s all sand and pearls and oysters: you’re constantly dredging things up and trying to make something beautiful out of the sludge. I’ve come to deal with the world differently, making meaning this way, which makes me a kind of a junkie. I can’t help but see the world in infinite unwritten essays. A first line here, an image there, a question. I’ve also become more honest, certainly harder on myself, but also more generous with my impressions.

EB: Finally, do you have a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow non-man?

MF: I wish I could just quote you the entirety of H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald.

EB:  I love that book.

MF: I give exactly zero figs about falconry, but I could not put that book down.  It helped solidify my theory on what makes for really toe-tingling nonfiction.

EB: Which is what?

MF: It’s like perfume making: you need a bass note, a heart note, and a top note. You want to have these three things in conversation with each other, to linger in all the right ways when you leave the room. H is for Hawk is a grief memoir, but it’s also a dazzling work of literary criticism, and a simple narrative about a woman and a hawk. The points at which those three threads intersect are so exquisite. Her meditation on T.H. White as Merlyn and his dream of righting wrongs and fixing failures with imagined future selves is just stunningly brilliant.

But I can’t quote an entire book, so I’ll leave you with this little ditty from the immortal Maggie Nelson (from The Argonauts), instead:

But whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn’t all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.

And maybe, in addendum, Maxine Hong Kingston:

Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true.

E.B. Bartels is from Massachusetts and writes nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Toast, The Butter, xoJane, Ploughshares online, and the anthology The Places We’ve Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35, among others. E.B. has an MFA from Columbia University, and she runs an interview series on Fiction Advocate called “Non-Fiction by Non-Men.” You can visit her website at www.ebbartels.com, see her tweets at @eb_bartels, and read her haikus about strangers’ dogs at ebbartels.wordpress.com.