Choose Your Own Disaster: Not Taking Full Advantage of Structure

     My friend of 24 years, Chris Clark, recommended I read Dana Schwartz’s memoir Choose Your Own Disaster.  

     Chris and I met in 1995 as freshmen at Bradford College. We were always in each others’ orbits as actors, writers, singers, and friends. He directed me at least once, in Edward Albee’s Zoo Story, and he may have directed me beyond that, but I am old and forgetful. I don’t speak to Chris often but I try to keep up with him online. In my mind, he is one of the first writers who made a presence for themselves online, through his website, and has kept pace with how we can stay Internet active and connected as artists. He is also always creating art. He inspires me.

     These days, Chris is working on his next novel (Exquisite Corpse, due out in September), and he’s the administrative coordinator for the Lesley University MFA in Creative Writing program, where he also earned his MFA.

     Dana Schwartz made a name for herself ahead of Choose Your Own Disaster by penning funny tweets as other personas such as “Guy in Your MFA.”  She is, compared to many writers, funny, or tries to be. She begins her memoir in her early adulthood, with her time at Brown University. We see her struggle with an eating disorder, have affairs with married men, and eventually move to New York City where she interns for Stephen Colbert. She continues to engage with men who don’t love her but whom she tries to impress so that they will. It doesn’t work. By book’s end, she finds a nice guy who treats her well.

     Just reading my description above of the contents of Choose Your Own Disaster makes me shake my head and not want to read it. I know this person, I have been friends with this person, and I don’t necessarily want to read their wisdom on these subjects (I’ve hard-earned by own). Schwartz uses a device from the old “choose your own adventure” books hugely popular in the eighties and nineties to set her book apart from other stories of girls and guys who moved to the big city and date the wrong people. The reader is given options at the end of each scenario for what they will do next. In reality, I just read each of the options available, because one was usually the “safe” way to respond, the other was the “wrong” way, and as it usually turned out, the choice Schwartz made in her real life. For example, when your date takes you to his family’s funeral business, and asks you to lie in one of the coffins, do you or don’t you? Schwartz suggests you can choose not to, but she does. It is an interesting way to structure the book, but one that felt more like a gimmick than a success.

     When I most enjoyed the book was when she dug in deep on issues like her eating disorder or date rape. The former is delivered with such a stream-of-consciousness approach of what it’s like to have an unhealthy relationship with food, it felt urgent. The latter was so painful, I wished I’d been given a warning that my heart was about to be broken.

     I e-mailed with Chris after I finished the book.

About a Book: When did you first read Choose Your Own Disaster and why did you first read it?

Chris: I read it August [of 2018]. I’ve been following Dana Schwartz on Twitter for ages, first her Guy in Your MFA and Dystopian YA parody accounts and then later the account with her name on it. I found her portrayal of the MFA scene…to be frighteningly, hilariously accurate. And so I waited with great anticipation for a book of hers.

The first thing she put out, though, was a YA novel…most YA is not for me. So, as much as I wanted to check out her first book, I skipped it.

When I heard that Choose Your Own Disaster was coming out, and that it was a memoir, I was a bit more intrigued. It was Schwartz’s nonfiction, in a sense, that had drawn me to her. And so, I put Disaster on my radar.

I [found] myself re-reading passages in the weeks after I finished it. 

About a Book: What did you like about it?

Chris: I’m a sucker for non-linear narratives. Because I’ve studied how stories are made for so long—it’s hard for me to read or watch things that don’t play with our expectations of structure at least a little bit.

Beyond the structure…I was intrigued to see into the sensitive side of someone whose mastery of snark was what drew me to her in the first place. My whole reading and writing life is based around better understanding people who I pre-judged initially. And so it was neat for me to see her be vulnerable. As I wrote in my Goodreads review, “the deftness with which she switches between comedy and tragedy and back again in this book is remarkable.”

About a Book: What did you not like about it?

Chris: I don’t want to give anything away, but something you address here…really had me nodding. And that’s that the “choose your own adventure” aspect could have been more developed than it was. I like the way that often in the book, if you make the “wrong” choice, you end up back at the question where you started. I like the commentary that’s providing on how we don’t learn from our mistakes. Because the truth is that we could just pick the same answer we did the first time, and that I think she’s trying to tell/show us that that’s what we do so often. Too often, maybe.

But, that said, I think she could have used the “choose your own adventure” structure to create a really unique blend of nonfiction and fiction. That opportunity to genre-bend is a missed opportunity.

I wonder how many classic Choose Your Own Adventure books she read as part of her research. Just enough to pick up on the basics of the structure, or enough to really grasp what those books were about? She’s younger than you and me, and I don’t remember if Choose Your Own Adventure books were still a thing when she was growing up. There is this tendency you notice as you get older, for the young (or younger) to take inspiration from some art form or cultural touchpoint of the past without really taking the time to understand what makes it tick. Like, it’s one thing to be super into vintage stuff, which I think a lot of young people are. But it’s another thing to make the leap and truly understand what makes one piece of vintage clothing work and another piece from the same period be so laughable that you can’t believe it’s survived all this time.

About a Book: Why did you recommend it?

Chris: I teach undergrads, people in their late teens and early twenties mostly, and many of them are still very much in their own heads. They have dreams of how their lives will turn out, they have pre-conceived notions about the lives of others in their field and how they’re going to do better. I think they need a reality check, many of them. So I recommend books like this because they offer that reality check in a palatable format. With undergrads, you have to be careful to notice what they’re ready for.

So, are there better memoirs out there to recommend to them? Maybe. Probably. But there are some of them who I think would crumble if they read about life much harder than Schwartz’s. 

Of course, all that said, I often forget that not everyone I’m making book recommendations to is an undergrad.

About a Book: I found myself annoyed quite often as I read this book. From my perspective, Schwartz was like, “Poor me, I am an Ivy League graduate with an internship with Stephen Colbert, playing golf with him in his office, and it’s hard to date in New York,” like, who cares? How am I supposed to feel sympathy for this person? Any thoughts on that?

Chris: I think this is another possibly missed opportunity here, and I think it’s partially on Schwartz and partially on the fact that so much—too much—of our media is based out of New York City. Many New Yorkers seem to leave perspective at the other end of the tunnel or bridge they take into Manhattan. I’m envisioning a stack of of suitcases just abandoned on the dock as the Staten Island Ferry takes another boatload of unsuspecting kids off to that island of misfit toys.

I’m sure that life did seem hard for Schwartz, but it’s almost as if, at times, she’s taking for granted that we’ll all understand, that we’ve all been there, even those of us not “lucky” enough to have ever made it to the City.

About a Book: Have you read anything else by Schwartz? 

Chris: I still follow her on Twitter and find her to be a pretty good cultural critic. She doesn’t take herself too seriously, though I do think she takes her work seriously. Schwartz is a case where I really want to see how she develops. I think she’s just beginning to scratch the surface of her talents.

About a Book: Is this genre one you are drawn to (genre being memoir, maybe humor), and why?

Chris: Actually, no. It takes a lot for me to pick up a memoir. I’m so busy studying the genres and forms that I write in—“weird” short fiction primarily, those stories that aren’t quite sci-fi but are too strange to be straight-up “literary” fiction—that I don’t have a ton of time for anything else. So I’m pretty discerning. Something has to hook me: the author, the subject, the structure. Something!

About a Book: What are you reading now?

Chris: The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish. It’s this fantastic novel that goes back and forth between an aging/ailing scholar of Jewish studies in the present day and an undiscovered female Jewish philosopher in the 1600s. The idea, as I understand it, came out of the question, “What if Shakespeare had an equally talented sister?”

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I can’t say it was a total pleasure to read Choose Your Own Disaster, but it was a quick read, and a pleasure to commune with an old friend about it.

You can find Chris as eccbooks “just about everywhere that socials are socialed,” though he’s most active on Twitter and Instagram.

His recently redesigned website can be found here.

I recommend reading any of his books.

Lastly, Chris and I will be giving a reading of our fiction and nonfiction on April 13, 2019 in Stoneham, MA. Formal announcements coming soon.