Ana Marie Cox edits Olivia Nuzzi. This is a masterclass in deep reading and compassionate feedback.
Life is never cleanly sorted into victims and villains. You can be both. People and events wounded you, and you’ve written around that pain in metaphor, circling it rather than naming it or taking us through it. Give us the scenes. Give us the exact words. Show us what happened rather than relying on the feeling-memory alone. Don’t aim for readers to sympathize with you; tell them in detail (Quotes! Actions! Sensations!) what you went through, and trust that it was bad enough (it was) that you don’t need to persuade them. Maybe they’ll sympathize. Maybe they won’t. They will respect you for the clarity.
There’s one moment in the excerpt where the lyricism falls away—when you move from the symbolic to the literal and describe your numbness in the body (“my chest, my spine, behind my belly button”), and then reveal the presence of the gun. It is the most unadorned, direct piece of writing in the whole chapter: no myth, no monster-language, no fire, no national allegory. No metaphor. Just the fact of the gun, and the fact of your blankness. That’s the level of clarity the rest of the book needs. Not more pain, not more confession—just the courage to stay literal when the stakes are highest. That’s where the truth is.