Writing Towards Truth: An Interview with Tracy Strauss
by Jessica A. Kent
February 6, 2020
You can’t think of author Tracy Strauss without thinking of the word “resolve.” Her debut memoir, I Just Haven’t Met You Yet: Finding Empowerment in Dating, Love, and Life, that details her search for a life partner while also telling her journey of recovery from childhood trauma, was released last May from Skyhorse Publishing. And for anyone who’s aware of the publishing story of her book, you know the tenacity she’s shown in pushing back against an industry that didn’t want her story out in the world.
Strauss was named one of eight women writers with advice to follow by Bustle (alongside the likes of Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Sylvia Plath), and has had writing featured in New York Magazine, Oprah Magazine, Glamour, The Huffington Post, Boston.com, and more. And since she’ll be headlining two new author events next week – just in time for Valentine’s Day – and launching a new workshop at GrubStreet, we met up in Harvard Square to chat about the memoir’s reception and intricate origins, which authors get trauma writing right, and our mutual love of Boston.
A Launch to Remember
Harvard Book Store hosted the official Boston launch for I Just Haven’t Met You Yet to a standing-room-only crowd last May, ultimately a kind of “I made it moment” for Strauss. She told me that “when I was in graduate school, I used to go to Harvard Book Store for readings and I would think, ‘Maybe one day I won’t be sitting in the audience. I’ll be the one standing up there reading some of my work.’” A Bostonian since 2001, she’s plugged in to the local literary community as a GrubStreet instructor and a local college professor, as well as having been a Writers’ Room of Boston Non-Fiction Fellow in 2015. She knew she wanted to center her writing life in Boston since grad school at BU, and talks about the pulse and connection to literature and history here that she hasn’t found anywhere else. It’s another reason why the Harvard Book Store launch was so meaningful.
Still, that book launch was over ten years and five manuscript iterations in the making – and I Just Haven’t Met You Yet almost never happened at all.
How Layers of Drafts Led to a Whole
Strauss told me the story of a teacher, many years ago in grade school, who asked her what she did the afternoon before. It was actually pretty eventful: She and her brother were skating on an icy patch on a patio, and Strauss got a concussion from a fall. “[My teacher] would ask, ‘And then what happened?,’ and I would say more, and she’d ask, ‘And then what happened?’” And it was from that interaction that Strauss learned about audience interest in the story she told.
From there, Strauss continued to write. In high school, she’d write about things happening to her, including the time she was held up at gunpoint while working at CVS (which is mentioned in the memoir). In college, she wrote obituaries for American Movie Classics – “I would do all this research…it was seeing stories of people’s lives, which relates to memoir” – and eventually went on to get an MFA in screenwriting (and has since added on a second MFA in creative writing).
So it made sense that what was to be I Just Haven’t Met You Yet started as a screenplay, about “a woman who lived in a small town. She was very isolated and she was anxious and depressed,” which Strauss quickly realized wasn’t a screenplay – too much interiority – so tried turning it into a novel. In the process, though, she realized that she was writing about herself. “I didn’t make it past the first chapter because I hadn’t dealt with my truth,” she told me. After a PTSD diagnosis at age 29, Strauss saw the story begin to unfold. But she was only able to write poetry then, capturing “an emotion or an image, or state of mind, or a thought, or use a metaphor. Then I could just leave it. And for me, that was how I kept afloat.”
The first manuscript was a straight account of her past, a way of finally articulating what happened. While it wasn’t written for an audience, she notes, she still workshopped it. And while there was some encouragement, there was a significant amount of pushback as well – not about how it was written, but what was written. “I had these very accomplished authors saying to me, ‘Don’t write about this. No publisher is going to publish this. You can’t write about sexual abuse, it’s just not acceptable.’ And I was like, ‘But why?’” Strauss told me. “I had been silenced in my own life for so long about what had happened to me. So it felt like I was being told again, ‘You’re not supposed to speak your truth.’”
Her second manuscript approached the topic from another angle: Through the story of Hannah, a rescue cat from an abusive home that Strauss adopted. Strauss realized that she could address her own experiences through Hannah’s story in a “pet memoir.” While she gained her first agent with that book, it didn’t sell.
And then Strauss’s mother passed away. Despite a fraught relationship, there was a reconciliation at the end, and Strauss wanted to explore the topic of how mothers and daughters who are estranged can find their way back. That would be the focus of her memoir. But this manuscript sat on the desk of a major publishing house for ten months, and also didn’t sell.
At that point, Strauss was approaching 40, and was still unmarried. “I started to explore my dating life in writing because I was trying to grapple with why exactly I was still single.” Since she had gotten the message that readers didn’t want to hear about trauma, she put together a proposal for a “fluff book” about her dating adventures – and wrote another manuscript.
But when Strauss started circulating the proposal, she got a message: An agent liked her writing, but he wanted to know about the journey. As Strauss paraphrased, “‘I want to know about all the hardships and all the things that you had to overcome and what brought you to this point. Right now, this is just a fluff book.’” After years of getting rejected for that very thing, she was crushed.
And that’s when “the lightbulb moment” happened. The book ultimately wasn’t one manuscript, it was all of them. All along, Strauss had been building the layers of what would become her memoir and didn’t realize it. At that point, it was just a matter of piecing it all together. “I spent eight weeks,” she told me. “It felt like something possessed me. I really had never felt that way before, where I couldn’t focus on anything else. I was even writing in between teaching classes. Or I’d be up late at night or I’d get up early in the morning. I could hardly eat or do my laundry. Eight weeks later I had my manuscript. And it was this book.”
Even then, the industry – while easily accepting stories of sexual abuse, sexual violence, and incest in fiction or in more salacious celebrity memoirs – still wouldn’t take a chance on Strauss, and it was another year of rejection.
So she called the industry out on it.
In a piece entitled “On Cowardice in Publishing,” which ran in Publisher’s Weekly on March 30, 2018, Strauss details her journey butting up against publishers with “the story I was told not to tell,” and implores “literary gatekeepers” to choose to tell the truth, to be revolutionary, and to be brave.
And one was. Skyhorse Publishing reached out to Strauss, and two weeks later she had a book deal.
After all this time and effort and writing and rejection, I had to ask what kept pulling her through. “It was a drive that I had to connect with the world,” she said, after spending a long time in isolation because of what happened. “And the second thing was people telling me to shut up. And it made me angry. I didn’t want to take somebody else’s ‘No’ as a final word.”
Caring for the Reader and Writing the Trauma Mindset
The final draft wasn’t actually fully complete, waiting for the inclusion of letters addressed to her future life partner, which rounded out the structure. Capturing the connection of a relationship, the letters, which split the chapters and use “you” throughout, add an element of hope to the narrative, looking to the future. The letters were also a way to address the reader, to interact with them via the second person voice, to check in with them, and guide them through.
Strauss often talks about caring for the reader, stating that “if you want readers to connect with your story, then you need to write for your reader, not for yourself. Especially with an experience that you’ve lived, that your reader hasn’t experienced. What I learned over the years…is that I needed a way to present it to the reader so that the reader felt safe to go on the ride.” She does so by including the letters, and by offsetting the heavier portions with humor and levity. There are also other techniques that not only she but other writers use when writing about trauma.
In college, Strauss was drawn to stories about trauma – and stories of tenacity and resilience – but didn’t know why. One book she credits as early inspiration is Richard Hoffman’s Half the House, which “taught me a lot about delivery and the ways to present your story or to structure it.” As she went through grad school and beyond, she studied work that dealt with traumatic situations, and she was curious to analyze how the writer wrote it.
Strauss is rife with craft techniques she found writers use in their work, many of which have roots in psychological studies. Ways to reflect anxiety in prose could be through word choice, or lack of punctuation that can speed up the sentence. Flashback is another writing technique that mimics a person’s true experience with trauma. Another technique is to use the second person “you” – a point of view shift Strauss employs at one point early in her book – to move the reader into the place of the narrator.
“As a writer, it’s my responsibility to guide the reader. And one big way to guide the reader is through reflection. So, the letters in the book – I try to use [them] as space for reflection, to provide context or to explain a concept or that kind of thing.” Strauss cites Roxane Gay as a writer who does this well, who “informs the reader of how she might want the reader to receive certain information. She’s very clear in order to prevent the reader from making incorrect assumptions.” Reflection as well shows the reader what the narrator has learned from that experience – and shows that they’re far enough away from it, at that point, to process it.
Since a trait of the trauma experience is dissociation, and not being able to stay present, Strauss recommends grounding the reader in setting. “Therapists teach their clients who have gone through trauma how to literally ground themselves in the time, space, and place where they are currently. That’s a technique to use to help the reader to stay there while this other information is being dealt with.” A writer also has to answer the question of how graphic they’re going to be in their narrative.
A great example of writing that captures the trauma mind is Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, both the short story and the collection. “The thing I was always struck by is…where he lists all the things that they carried. That’s very numbed out, unfeeling. It’s just a list. And then he alternates that with these bursts of dramatic writing, in-scene writing that makes it come alive, where the emotion is.” Another technique O’Brien uses is repetition. Strauss cites Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, and how there are psychological terms for what O’Brien is doing on the page: constriction, when the brain can’t process any more information, so there’s only an intrusive repetition of the event – like the image of Curt Lemon’s death in “How to Tell a True War Story.”
But even though I Just Haven’t Met You Yet includes an account of Strauss’s trauma, the book also includes a kind of hero’s journey into the hard work of recovery and healing. One of the earlier letters to her future life partner explains that she kept “my spirit buried underneath protective layers of denial until…I felt safe enough to begin to resurrect myself, piece by piece” (54). The narrative acknowledges the past, but also recounts Strauss’s decision after decision to live life on her own terms. “I didn’t want what happened to me to define me and to define the rest of my life, especially when you go through a traumatic situation. In that moment you don’t have power, you don’t have control over outcome,” she told me. “I wanted to reclaim my power. And for me that was to let go of the things I couldn’t change, because it happened. I knew what I could change was what I did with my life going forward. I could heal from something, and I could overcome obstacles. No one was stopping me from doing that.”
The Story Continues
Since the book launch, Strauss has been touring, giving interviews, and raising the awareness of her story. At these events, she’s been able to connect with her readers and see how the book has touched them, and understand better how her story has come across.
Because of the different facets of the narrative, she found that reception came in different ways. One thread of the book is searching for a mate, and “Some people were single people who had been looking for their life partner and hadn’t yet found [them]…they were there, saying how, in reading about [my experience], they didn’t feel alone.” One of the reasons Strauss started writing was to become part of a community, so “it’s really a great thing as a writer to hear that people don’t feel alone.”
Another thread of the narrative is her story of recovery – and readers responded to that, too. “I had people who had been through trauma, whether it was sexual assault or other types of trauma…or they knew someone who had been through trauma, and they found that they learned a lot about what someone coping with a really heavy life circumstance would be dealing with, and how to help them,” she explained. The book has been able to open the door on the conversation around trauma and sexual abuse as well, because while “we’re talking about these funny dating situations, like the whiskey tasting class, now we can segue to…talking about the more serious stuff. It gives a buffer for some people to broach the subject with me.”
But the readings and events weren’t always serious, and while there are dark parts to the memoir, there’s also a lot of humor and levity as well – and audience laughter. “I loved that. You can go through some really terrible times in your life, but a sense of humor and levity is a lot of what gets us through,” Strauss told me. “And it’s not minimizing the serious stuff. But it’s also just part of life.” That levity, as well, was a way to show her readers that she got through it, that she’s Ok.
For now, Strauss is content to move on from memoir to fiction, and feels like she’s done with this story. Still, she knows that some of the themes she’s explored will continue on in a future novel, themes of relationship and connection, and what disrupts that; deceit; how people choose to move forward or stay stuck; how people find their purpose – and what keeps them from fulfilling it.
Meanwhile, the story of her life continues beyond the pages of the memoir. While I Just Haven’t Met You Yet may be finished and published, it’s not over, as the search is still on for Mr. Right – and she’s content to keep pressing forward in that search.
“The story’s still going. He’s out there somewhere.”
Tracy Strauss will be in conversation with Gina Barreca in “Writing About Love” at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, CT on February 12, and will be discussing I Just Haven’t Met You Yet at Trident Booksellers & Café on February 13. Her workshop at GrubStreet, “Writing Narrative Nonfiction About Sexual Assault, Abuse, & Harassment,” which will take place on February 22, is open for registration. Learn more at www.tracystrauss.com.
