March 16th, 2020 - The Liver

Dear TNY,

“The Liver” is something, but I’m not sure what.

I need to start this letter by saying I’m biased.  I have children.  Two.  And they, like most people’s children, are the most beautiful things I have ever seen.  Clichés abound.  I was not the same person I am now before I had kids.  Somehow, they reached inside me opened up a level of love that I didn’t know was possible.  For simplicity, let’s call it “unconditional”.  Now, I mean that in the literal sense.  Because I think relationships you choose, no matter what you might think, are built on conditional love.  But these two motherfuckers that I helped make, Jesus Christ.  They are…there aren’t any words.

So, like I said, I’m biased.  As a parent.  I’ll try to separate where that comes into my critique, but I won’t be able to keep it all the way out. 

What I think did not work with this story was…I don’t know how to say it.  Length?  Bullshittery?  Like, it’s just not crisp.  It needs compression. It feels like it’s 25% too long, which gives it this meandering quality that caused me to stop paying attention in a lot of the parts, especially the hospital.  Besides all the fat that needs to be cut, I still didn’t get that magnificence of transcendence from this piece.  Like, I can’t quite explain that and it’s causing some internal confusion.  I know that I can say this story was mediocre, but I don’t really know why.

The biggest part of this confusion I have over how I feel about this story comes from the fact that I cried.  This story did what the vast majority of your stories do not, TNY.  I was moved.  But I think that’s because I’m biased.  While I did not have preemies, both my children were C sections.  And the first came slightly early, although he was quite healthy.  What I’m trying to say is that I also looked inside this woman that was carrying my DNA and saw her guts.  I also was tasked with following the baby around the hospital and not knowing what the fuck I was doing.  I also had objective observations about the absurdity of the theatrics of pregnancy through my kids’ current day life.  Hell, this morning my son and I talked about how he is now capable of making semen (or as I put it, your factory is now open; don’t make a fucking mess everywhere and don’t get anyone pregnant).  How is anyone supposed to know how to manage this shit?  There isn’t a fucking manual.  Like, what the fuck am I supposed to do with two humans?  I don’t fucking know.

I digress. 

I really connected with the parental relationship part of this story.  Now, as a writer, would I call that sentimental?  Yes? From a mechanical aspect of this story, I can see how the author attempted to downplay the sentiment.  Extensively.  The discord in this story is thick.  Most of the observations (read: MC descriptions) are negative in nature.  It feels to me like the author knew that without that discord (from what the perception of birth is), the story would come off like a Lifetime movie.  Instead, it’s ugly and awkward, clumsy and selfish, broken and disjointed.  Just like real life.  Because that Facebook/Instagram shit about how life is beautiful and birth is a miracle, fuck all that.  That kind of bullshit is what ruins humanity.  Because it sets a false perception of something, and that leads to disappointment.  But if you expect that it’s going to be a fucking nightmare, then it can only go up from there.

Again, digressing. 

What I’m trying to say is that I don’t know what to say about this story.  I think it’s probably not sentimental because of the honesty in the discord, but is probably sentimental because it’s a parent connecting with a baby. I think this story being told from the male’s perspective was a big factor in masking the sentimentality.  I think it could be shortened to induce a more crisp, tight, and compact emotional drop-kick.  I think the line, “The last thing Kathy had written was “hats and booties in cheerful colors,” and my eyes welled up. What else did we need?” is fucking brilliant.  I think the fact that the couple was finished before she got pregnant was spot on.  I think I liked this story, but I’m not sure.

What I know is this: 

She came to rest about an inch from my face. I turned and that’s when I saw, with a shock, her eyes, as big as bocce balls, those puffy lips, how beautiful she was. I held and kissed her. She’d taken a break from screaming. I held her little cheeks and stared into her big brown eyes, and breathed while she breathed, telling her everything would be fine. In the morning, I found a blue bruise on her neck that I guess I’d given her the night before, but she’d already forgotten, or forgiven me. 

I know that this shit right here is what parenting is, over and over and over again, until you fucking die.  Maybe that’s why I connected with it so much.  Because it’s not just about how beautiful they are.  It’s about how fucking hard you try to do everything right, because they are so beautiful, and you fuck it all up so goddamn bad that you can barely stand yourself.  But they forgive and forget so quickly.  Like, I’d have killed myself if I didn’t have these two beautiful human beings in my life.  Because I can’t forgive myself.  But they do, every single day, and for that I can keep fucking living because no matter how bad it gets up in my head, they have bought and paid for my time on this planet tenfold. So it’s an honor to keep living for them. Fuck yeah, that’s cliché. I don’t care.

Whoa, crying again.

Anyway, to the author, I hope you read this. Please hear this: Thank you. Whether the story is mediocre or not, I remembered when I first said “I love you” to my boys.  But you probably won’t read this. None of you ever read these as far as I can tell.  Why would you?  All I do is tear stories apart.

Digressing…

Nick