ALMOST CARRIE ~ Truth is Stranger

I have a stockpile of “Almost Carrie” stories to tell, and I can’t post any of them. I’m stuck, stymied, silenced by the man. The “man” in this case being my husband, mother, boss, in-laws, sister, even my fellow Sex and the City guides. I’ve got a big piece of duct tape over both my mouth and my keyboard.

People ask me if I’m running out of weekly ideas for this column. The short answer is YES—it’s not easy stitching such fragile gossamer threads between my life and a decade-old HBO show week after week. The more complicated answer, however, is NO—I have them, but I can’t use them. The details of what I did last weekend, for example, would make a truly terrific post—funny, snarky, with a smidge of human condition thrown in for good measure. The trouble is that that particular story (and my particular take on it) would offend several dozen people, and my psyche just isn’t up to the task.

Likewise, I have great things to say about my last company meeting, along with the email exchange I had with my supervisor this week, but of course, I’d rather keep my job. There are poignant, Carrie-ripe tidbits I could share about my sex life, but my mother-in-law happens to be my most loyal reader. I’m certain the level of drama in my own mother’s life could earn me a Pulitzer, but she lives in a town so small that even the gas station attendant weighs in on your business. And don’t even get me started on my husband—so stringent is he about privacy that I’m not even allowed to open junk mail addressed to people who lived in our apartment three years ago. He sulked for two days after my post about the stomach flu (see Bellyaching, 1.12.12), spouting hyperbole about “airing our dirty laundry.” Please, if that’s our only dirty laundry, I’m thrilled to let it flap in the wind.

This is not the first time I’ve dealt with this issue. I got an M.F.A. in Creative Writing with a concentration in non-fiction, and it seemed that half my graduate education was spent discussing how any of us could possibly publish any of what we were writing. The great, true stories from the girl whose parents dealt pot out of their three-car garage; the secret, promiscuous youth of a Born Again Christian; the real reason why no one ever liked Uncle Ted—these are the stories that excite publishers and give writers ulcers. I myself wrote a memoir, a book about my childhood, and although it’s filled with what I consider love and truth, the thought of passing it around to the extended family makes me want to retch.

Carrie, it seemed, never had to confront this. Why, for starters, is Charlotte not more upset when Carrie discusses (for an entire season) Charlotte’s sexless marriage and Trey’s inability to get it up? More importantly, why doesn’t Trey tell Carrie to stop fucking writing about my impotence already? Even if she had changed their names, it would have been futile. Everyone in their circle would know the pretty brunette with the Scottish doctor husband who plays tennis and reads Juggs.

There is no way around it—true stories can be a real pain, but that is the same reason why readers are drawn to them (and why I’ve never missed an episode of The Real Housewives of New York—even phony truth gets me off). Regardless, I’ve turned to writing more and more fiction, a genre that allows writers to use all the great stories they’ve collected and then say, “What? No way, you’re reading way to much into it.”

Emily Sproch is a writer and a Sex and the City tour guide. Each Friday, she chronicles the fine line between reality and fiction in her column “Almost Carrie.”