Legibility and Cake

Wayne Theibaud, “Folsom Street Fair Cake,” Crocker Art Museum, 2013.

On Thursday our ten-year-old and I made cake for their end of season soccer game. Our ten-year-old is a brilliant cook and baker. When I’m tasked with cooking, I first sweat a lot, staring blankly into the refrigerator, and then make mostly variations on cooked cheese. But our ten-year-old has tasked themself with very thoughtfully and patiently teaching me more skills. The oatmeal cake is a recipe from my husband’s mother, also a brilliant baker. The plan was, we make the oatmeal cake, we cut it into ten pieces, we bring it to give to the team.

Our ten-year-old was incredibly excited. Arlo (this is a made-up Brooklyn child name) had brought (boxed) brownies a few weeks ago and everyone thrilled at them. Apple (also a made-up name, though the actions are real) brought Chips Ahoy to practice and the response was similar.

Now, a brag: the cake we made was delicious, covered in something called broiled frosting which was cream, butter, sugar and nuts. We cooked the oatmeal just slightly, so, when we mixed it into the batter, it retained the fluffy moisture that existed throughout the cake.

Our ten-year-old has been feeling lonely. We moved this year. Fifth grade is complicated, and even more so when the other kids have all been together all six years of school. Our ten-year-old loves planning and anticipation, thinking about and looking forward to moments like this, the thrill, I’m sure, of handing out pieces of their perfect cake—an offering.

They played two games, and the plan was give it to the other kids during the break between the games. They all sit in the hallway (it’s indoor soccer) as a team and plan and talk while the parents stay in the gym. Our ten-year-old ran over to get the cake and then excitedly out to meet their team. Twenty minutes later, crestfallen, face flat, they came back, each piece of cake still in the Tupperware.

No one wanted it, our sweet kid said.

We talked a lot about it after. Maybe they shouldn’t have led with “oatmeal”, too reminiscent of health food. Maybe they could have made a little clearer, how much sugar we put in. After the second game, Arlo passed out tiny individual bags of Oreo’s and everybody took them happily.

Overheard as everyone was leaving, “anybody want one of L’s oatmeal bars before we go?”

It’s cake! I wanted to yell.

We ate the cake ourselves to self-soothe on the drive home.

For months now, I’ve been circling the same question—it first came up in a class months ago and now I see it everywhere I look—how is the process of making ourselves legible also one of annihilating the self?

And then I watched my kid want so much for people to see and love their cake, watched it get rejected, felt unfair fury toward boxed brownies. And then, I thought, of course.

Legibility is “a quality of being clear”, something I think is essential to good writing, to reaching out and making offerings to other people. Some degree of self-annihilation is inevitable as you shift ideas, that murky, mushy shit inside of you into words and sentences. To beat the cake metaphor to death a little: there’s a reason we do what the recipe says, a reason sugar, butter are useful tools when making things that might appeal to other people; there is a reason it feels so good when you get to watch people enjoy eating something that you made yourself.

Like everything though, this line between the legible and self-destruction is slippery and tricky. That first time you get a letter from an agent or an editor asking you to cut the middle hundred pages where, you think, the heart of your book lives. That first time an agent says, I loved the writing, but couldn’t quite locate the central conflict and so have to pass. This shifts the idea of legible into marketable, I realize, but to be able to communicate you have to first be published, picked up. The more legible—and, again, we’re getting expansive with this word—perhaps the more likely that you’re heard.

And let’s leave books a minute: I hate makeup, gave up on trying to learn to choose clothes years ago and just wear black. For years, I felt wholly illegible to people as a woman, but what kind of woman; as a woman, but not the type that anyone might like or want. What are the things we keep to ourselves in order to be legible to people as “a good mother” a “nice person”; what are the things we pretend to be or do because we want to make something clear about ourselves? What parts of ourselves die or disappear, are annihilated, as we present and perform out in the world?

Another word that we could throw in here to make it more transferable is likeability (of course in fiction this word is a tell). I like to be liked. Am often desperate for it. But one of the most important lessons that I’ve learned both as mother and as teacher, also as person, is that if everybody likes me all the time, I’m likely failing both my students and my kids.

A book will never be exactly what it was when you first felt the need to make it. In making ourselves communicable and clear to other people, aspects of what we want to say, aspects that might feel like parts of ourselves, will sometimes disappear. This is something I work hard to help my novel students get past and over. No book can contain all of what you want to say, what you understand about how books are made, and, thank goodness, because then you get to write another one.

And also, if you’re going to make Chips Ahoy, why bake at all?

If a book feels like basically a book you’ve read before but input different characters and setting. Basically, the pace and structure, sense of good and bad and right and wrong, want and fear, that you’ve come to expect but with a different concept and cover, then who cares?

My main criteria for student stories when we start together is try near anything (depending on the class and institution there are pages limits, etc) but just please don’t turn in a story that hits all its beats but feels empty inside. What I mean by this is play, experiment, try to re-consider what a story is and can be. Try to figure out how you might twist and flip the form to get us deeper in. Of course, you have to know the rules before you break them, but if all you do is follow rules, what is it that you’re doing that still feels like yours?

And here’s where it gets tricky. Legibility is difficult and important. Books need shape, movement, a sense of the experience they’re offering the reader—there are few things I love more than thinking and talking through books’ various component parts. There is also, a strange strain of books that get called “searing, brilliant”, in part, it seems to me, because they refuse any attempt to mean or make sense at all.

I have no clear answers to this question. What I’m suggesting is to spend some time inside of all of this: how do you move back and forth between both communication, clarity, and complexity (as writer and as reader, maybe also as person)? Where and how does honesty and truth live amidst all this? When do you give clear answers, offer clear solutions, and when is refusing sense or clarity essential to the murkiness of what you want to show? What choices have you made as a writer whose consequences aren’t quite worth it—you have too many characters for instance (I almost always do this); you switched the point of view six times when three would do just fine—and which have you made that you stand behind? What’s lost as particular moves toward legibility are made? What’s gained?

How do you hold different books to different standards because their ways of being legible are ways you like or have seen before? What are other forms of legibility that cloud your reading? If two books ago, for instance, a writer was deemed “brilliant” how do you work harder to make the brilliance legible even if/when it’s not there? If two books ago, a writer was deemed “commercial” or not brilliant, how does that inform what you look for when you go in?

After the game, as Arlo was passing out the Oreo’s, I suggested one more time that she try the oatmeal cake. We see Arlo sometimes on our commute to school; she’s sweet and kind, and our ten-year-old and I both like her very much. It’s just that I hate nuts, said Arlo. I always have. This seemed a fair and valid reason. It also feels worth noting, universal deliciousness is not possible—a necessary part of finishing a book (also sometimes of leaving the house) is making your own peace with that idea.

Housekeeping stuff:

Please pre-order The Float Test; if I’ve done my job, it’s both the most legible and the murkiest and mushiest of all my books so far. (Publisher’s Weekly called it “remarkable” and my “best yet”; Booklist called me “the queen of the quietly devastating family novel”, which I briefly tried to get the children to refer to me as, but they refused).

I taught a class a couple weeks ago on middles for two hours and really loved it. Some people asked if I’d do more of them. And so, my sweet husband built me a new website from which I’ll be running one 2-hour class on different craft topics per month as well as sending out info on some six-week classes taught by friends. If you have requests for either let me know.

The first taught-by-friends-class will be “Writing Fiction With Teeth” with my brilliant, beloved pal Andrew Martin (Early Work, Cool for America). Please reach out for more info on this.

The next year long novel class will start mid-June. I’ll be sending application info in April, applications due the last week of May. Please reach out if you’re interested.