R. Fay: The Ache of Writing Memoir and Not Having Any Answers In Their New Book, Bruise//Nelson Malushizky
In late winter, R. Fay’s leg snapped on impact. It actually snapped. Taking a step back might have kept the car from killing them but their leg took the blow instead, breaking both bones in their lower leg. “It spun me and flung me into the street like 10 feet or something,” Fay recounts. The man behind the wheel stopped his car long enough to see them on the ground before stepping on the gas.
Even the most insurmountable inflictions of pain will identify with everyone in its own specific way. It can create a void so thin between two people, yet just enough for one to never truly borrow or take from the other. A wall almost, with so many layers of worn paper to be peeled, endlessly. Using writing as a bridge between the pain and the audience can aid, but rarely does it precede being used as a tool for survival and understanding first.
R. Fay has always written about pain, but they’ll be the first to admit it doesn’t always feel good. In “Bruise: A Triptych”, their newest chapbook, Fay calls the process of writing “the pleasure of unlodging a splinter from underneath your fingernail.” They claim “it only feels good because it’s necessary.” Sometimes, to be a true witness to pain is to understand it for yourself and hope at least half of it lands for someone else. Fay doesn’t have the answers for healing, neither are they okay with not knowing. Their writing maps trauma, pain and takes quick breaths of droll humor to even it out.
Bruise is a collection of thought and writing split into three pieces. Despite being written over the course of their recovery from the accident, Bruise rarely names the injury. Following 2021’s “The Me Outside Me: thoughts from a year without time,” it aims for a more calculated structure while still riding an unpredictable train of muses and darkly humorous prose. Fay began conceptualizing Bruise over two years ago, citing their diary as a direct source for the form of the book. Each piece reads closely autobiographical, reaching into ideas of cynicism within the act of writing, the liminality of queerness and the dizzying melodrama of self pity under the scrutiny of anxiety.
“I am my own witness. I don’t need anyone else to witness what I witness to find meaning or value or art in it,” Fay says, speaking on their own writing. Bruise is entirely Fay’s witness, acting as a direct pipeline into their head. Fay’s writing can be quick, cutting and as effortlessly unconcerned as a passing, intrusive thought. Simultaneously paranoid and unbothered, Fay writes like they’re pretty confident an answer is never going to come. But just maybe, something could happen. They don’t know whether to be optimistic about it or cover their eyes.
Calling upon the likes of Maggie Nelson and Eileen Myles, R. Fay felt their inspiration to reflect the “perfectness of their language” and their detail had expired when he got to Bruise. “I don’t feel that way anymore,” they admitted and it shows. The third act of Bruise is a racing monologue, Fay discounting the ability for joy to be profound, wishing to be “fucked up” rather than have god and apologizing immediately after for not being a better person. You could almost mistake it for a panic attack.
“It’s scary. Sharing your real self is always going to be scary and if it’s not, it’s probably not working. If it doesn’t scare you, then there’s probably something missing.”
Bruise reads as a memoir that doesn’t wish to be polished, its honesty is heavy but so connected to the strain of anxiety only a time like this could produce, that its relatability comes around to being a comfort. “It really annoys me when people try to make universal meaning out of their own suffering or experience,” Fay says. “It doesn’t feel accurate to me. Ultimately, it kind of offends me I guess.” The alienation in the pain and suffering Fay feels is a nightmare for them as much as it is a joke. “I hate how self-flagellating I sound,” they write after calling happiness a collateral distraction for them. “As if my pain is somehow special.”
How do words effectively build a room of the pain you’ve felt, without leaving anything out or cheapening it? How do you transform it into work that will land with an audience even when you know there’s no way you will ever be able to properly communicate what you have seen? R. Fay has no interest in miming trauma, dressing it up or making theater of it beyond self deprecating comedy. They have described themself as an emotional exhibitionist, finding reward in the connection they make by being radically transparent with their audience.
It’s most visible in the way they write to the queer perspective in their own relationships (The original idea for Bruise, inspired by Brontez Purnell’s 1,000 Boyfriends, was going to chronicle the ex-boyfriends of Fay’s). The Child and Its Lover, the first piece in the triptych, begins with a dream in which Fay’s mother pours a glass of HIV+ blood onto their face. “It was like a ritual or a religion,” they recall. From the start, it’s abrasive and tough. Perhaps putting a drastic visual to a feeling or sense of fear queer youth can grow in tandem with uneasy familial relationships. The piece caters to aspects of Fay’s experience where the unpreparedness of queer identity became sour and the blame uneasy to cast: unknowingly abusive relationships, sexual violence and the desire to be needed.
Fay also tells the story of when they would scrape their palms on the driveway as a child so they would become “rough,” attributing this wish to the masculine expectations for their hands to be “sandpapery.” His sister finds him for his soft hands, yet ridicules him for trying to make them more masculine. Fay writes, “I guess she thought I was cheating.” It’s one of the most succinct and beautifully understood passages in Bruise. A moment where the ability to be both more than yourself and only yourself become a silent crime. A small space in which flexibility is damned and standards revoke their claimed responsibility out of fear.
Queerness as a state of being, as a motive for living and a desire become confusing. To be seen as a reproof of normality and also be punished for not understanding how to achieve it when you’re trying is the groundwork for the queer body, the queer experience. Fay is at war with the pieces of their personality that seem to be so abrasive to one another. How it presents itself to other people, whether it’s too much or never enough of one angle for their audience. How do we weigh out the constant correction or analysis we do in our heads, especially when related to one’s queerness?
Writing with the expectation that someone is going to take the material into their own and possibly compare it to a level of their perceived normality is part of the freeing art of memoir. Bruise knows this, it doesn’t care for who will misinterpret but it stands so distinctively in its own language that it would be difficult to surmount it to something outside of its own realm. When I asked if writing from their own experience was easy, Fay responded, “It’s scary. Sharing your real self is always going to be scary and if it’s not, it’s probably not working. If it doesn’t scare you, then there’s probably something missing.”
Fear rests behind many of Fay’s thoughts in Bruise, yet they never feel unreasonable. They lean into the ugliest parts of self depreciation. The minute pieces of ourselves that can take hold of our self-perception and twist it into something else. Maybe it’s dark, maybe it’s silly. Or both. Either way, it’s all of us. “I have found over and over again that the things that feel the most personal to me, and the most specific to me, and the things that I don’t expect anyone to understand are the things that people find they relate to the most,” Fay explains.
Bruise, as a document of pain and reframing, is entirely about sincerity. R. Fay doesn’t have the answers and neither do they feel like they need to. Alleviating pain is not always knowing how to fix the damage but just learning to simply look at it. Respect it. In what forms do we mold our pain and give it a different direction to stare in? Fay’s writing is ultimately reaching for an ear, for something, anything that will hold on from the other side of where our minds take us under distress. An exercise in expelling and expecting no meaning from it.
R. Fay knows how to be a witness. To their body, their trauma and the words that frame it. It can sometimes take everything in your power to withhold caving in from pain but Bruise isn’t afraid to hold onto what is broken. That act in itself is seeing and trusting. That authenticity is true wealth. The writing would admit it's a lot uglier to face than what a sentence could surmise. It may not be beautiful, but at least it’s a sharp, quick breath out. Just quiet enough that no one may hear. And that can be enough.
R. Fay is a writer and cartoonist from Jaars, North Carolina. They’ve written two chapbooks, The Me Outside Me: thoughts from a year without time and Bruise. They now live in Durham.
Nelson Malushizky is a co-editor and designer for The Crawfish. You can find him here.