Hybrid Memoir: Trivia, My Life’s Remarkable Truths and Secrets

From the beginning, I had planned to write a hybrid memoir. Even if I didn’t know that was what it was called.

That’s not actually true. At the very beginning, it was fiction.

In So Many Words

In the first few years after I met Hiro, the man who consented to marry me nine years ago after twenty-years of shenanigans before that, I started writing.

I had written a lot of other things before that. Poems, essays, newsletters. Heck, I even researched and wrote a thesis for my baccalaureate back in 1988. There is a bound copy of Nesting Behavior in Mus musculus and Peromyscus leucopus on my shelves if you’re having trouble sleeping.

But something about the happiness of my life in Tōkyō pushed pen to paper. After all, Hiro spent nearly every night at my apartment with the view of Shinjuku’s skyscrapers.

I made a rookie mistake, though. In So Many Words, which was what I called that manuscript, was fictionalized memoir. A veil of obfuscation descended over the facts, and the writing, as I can now see, suffered badly from that.

Outlines

As the Covid-19 pandemic began, another source of woe returned. May 2020 marked 40 years since the death of my father. I had grief-demons to exorcise, and friends encouraged me to write again.

By August, I had a rough outline. The book set out to cover the years from 1978 to 1998, puberty, my father’s passing, my closet, my move to Japan, Hiro, and then my departure from Japan, hoping Hiro’d follow me to Seattle. (Spoiler alert: he did.)

My outline followed a unique format—one I know now is called hybrid memoir. I wanted to intersperse the things that I experienced with some thoughts about the culture as it shifted around me. There was data on the number of AIDS cases and fatalities swelled in the US. I could describe how Japan’s gay community evolved in the years before the Internet. And so much more.

When I started writing in September, however, the memoir—its original title, I Should Be Dead By Now, was grim—almost wrote itself. My first draft, completed on the last day of 2020, set most of the interspersions aside. The exorcising of memory consumed me to the tune of nearly 110,000 words. The hybrid work lay nearly forgotten.

Changes

I spent all of 2021 in revisions—all while working my wonderful full-time job and earning a promotion into the bargain. New written content joined the text as memories revived, but a lot of other content was removed. I developed a new title during a workshop intensive, and I worked with the Title Doctor (Kristen Paulson-Nguyen) to find a subtitle. The word count dropped to 80,000, and then, by year’s end, to 70,000.

After teaching a course on proposal writing (a proposal is the document you use to market your writing to an agent and a publisher), I finished my own proposal in January of 2022.

I then asked my friend and my some-time editor, Allison K. Williams, to review fifty pages from the manuscript. She highlighted a section that began with this paragraph, the one section that remained from my original hybrid plans:

Gay porn had a golden age in the early 1980s in the United States. The Physique Pictorial model of the late 1950s and 1960s was centered around athleticism in the hope of flying under the censor’s radar. Models stood heroically, arms upraised, scant posing briefs concealing what readers wanted to see. Mandate arrived in the early 1970s, approaching porn from an art angle. Editors bracketed articles about music and men’s fashion with high-contrast black-and-white photography and poses that artfully kept the genitals from view on otherwise naked men.

from a chapter called Pornograffiti

Her response? More of this! And in follow-up conversations she clarified that these types of sidebars will make my memoir stand out. At first I was dismayed, I admit. I wrote some friends, sharing a note I had over-dramatically titled quo vadis (Latin for where do you go from here?).

Her next suggestion made me laugh, if somewhat sardonically. She really likes it when I break out and talk about the cultural background for things. The section on the history of gay porn, for example. She wants much more of that.

And I laughed because I had originally outlined the book in August of 2020 to do precisely that. But along the way I either got lazy or nervous (I can’t remember which). The research might have struck me as too much work when the actual, coherent transcribing of my memories was already a lot of work. Or I might have worried that those cultural backgrounds and deep-dives would bore readers.

from email draft, April 20, 2022

My friends did what friends do best. They let me feel my feelings, asked what I wanted next, and supported my decision—to return the hybrid memoir I had originally wanted to write.

By May 29, I had completed a pass on my manuscript. I found more boring verbs like was and were, I identified lots of places where conversations could be included, and I also found more places where sidebars belonged. A partial list of upcoming additions includes:

• gay representation in TV and films in the 1970s
• the evolution of medical and psychological takes on homosexuality
• a timeline of the early years of the HIV-AIDS pandemic
• an overview of the Japanese language, including its syntax and writing systems
• the NAMES Project
• a history of enka music
• HIV-AIDS arrives in Japan
• the long story of same-sex relationships in Japan, with divine beginnings
• an overview of religion and morality in Japan, via Shintō, Buddhism, and Confucianism
• a look at Tōkyō’s largest gayborhood, Nichōme, and how it got started
• a list of the different types of sexual attraction for gay men in Japan
• the long list of Japan’s public holidays
• the use of numbers for mnemonics in Japanese
• the etiquette of Japanese seating arrangements
• More than Madonna, and Mariah who? Japanese pop-star divas and their gay fans
• the galaxy of cruising opportunities in Japan
• Japanese festivals and what they encompass
• the history of Sensōji, one of Tōkyō’s most famous Buddhist temples, dedicated to Kwannon
• the izakaya, Japanese pub culture, and the history of a new Tōkyō red-light district, Kabukichō
• changes in gay porn in the 1990s
• Japanese porn and censorship
• the new industry of software localization and its importance to Japan
• Japanese modernization and the lingering presence of 19th-century European influences

Next Steps

The three chapters I plan to include in my proposal—the first chapter, Pornograffiti, about puberty and porn, Freedom, a chapter discussing my first few months in Japan and the home stay troubles I had, and Another Notch in the Tatami, a chapter that covers the year after my breakup where I can flit between serial monogamy and delusional one-night-stands until I finally realize why so many Japanese men want to sleep with me—have been revised to include sidebar content.

I completed revisions to my synopsis to account for the new and upcoming additions. I’m now working on revisions to my proposal. Not only do I have to let people know that this is a hybrid memoir, but there is another comp title to add and audience information to update.

Fingers crossed that I will start a much more powerful round of querying later this month. I feel energized and ready!