fuzzy lines

So, this afternoon — while I’m feeling particularly unmotivated and a bit scattered — I’m once again pondering the boundaries between personal and professional lives.

Part of this is brought on by Janet Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer,” about the blurred relationships between journalists and their subjects. My friend and fellow writer Jane Hodges recommended this book to me last summer when I was struggling with a few sources, and I’ve only now cracked it open.

But this has also been prompted by an article I wrote this week about dating in Portland.

This piece had me running around town like a more chaste Carrie Bradshaw (heroine of “Sex and the City”), talking to people about a very specific approach to attracting mates, and then experimenting with putting this into practice.

I don’t know that this reported essay was really all that revealing, but it did make me wonder about what current/future dates might make of this — and of similar pieces moving forward. There are enough writers who make their livings publicly exploring the intimate details of their personal lives, but how do their families, friends, and partners feel about this?

There are some people who are so intensely private — and devoted guardians of such — that they’ll clam up at the dinner table when they find they’re sitting next to a writer. There are others whose reaction is precisely the opposite: They are certain that they are so fascinating that they’ll regale the writer with endless facts and figures about themselves, and then take it personally when the writer doesn’t want to drop everything to write their life stories.

Then there are the people already in the writer’s life, who were generally there at the beginning when the first words and articles began to make it into print, and who have over time gotten used to having family outings and coffee conversations show up in a later essay in some newspaper or magazine. I imagine that there are lines drawn by the writer and his/her friends and family, so everyone’s on the same page in terms of what’s off-limits and what is fair-game for material.

I’ve not had to draw those lines in my own personal life. Not until now.

In an article that will run next week, I made brief mention — without using names — of a guy I’d met recently, to illustrate a point made in the text. If I continue writing articles in this same vein, this is going to happen with increasing frequency, and in much greater detail.

Other writers at least partially protect the names of spouses by using initials like DH (“dear husband”) and DW (“darling wife”). At some point, I suppose I could start calling a future partner The Boyfriend, or some such, but what to do in the meantime, while I’m out there dating and writing about my experience?

For instance, I’m really struggling with the “rules of dating,” to which I’m apparently oblivious. And/or such things don’t exist here in Portland. Take your pick. I’ve also been talking with friends about the seeming inability of Northwest men to “man up” and get their acts together, and I’ve had some recent experience of my own in this area. Perfect blog topic! But then I talk myself out of it.

Several months ago, a friend dragged me out to a book-signing where an author of erotica (thinly veiled as fantasy/science fiction) read from her new title. This author brought along her husband, and announced to the large, enthusiastic crowd that he had been the model for her main character’s most regular stud. The author and her husband seemed pleased by the thrill of the audience, but I can’t imagine drawing so plainly from my own intimate life in such a blatant manner. I wouldn’t do that to myself, nor to my partner.

(Not that I’m writing erotica, and not that I have a partner right now, anyway.)

Farther down the line, I guess any guy who wants to be in my life is going to have to get comfortable with the fact that elements of my personal life will appear in print, and this will sometimes include him. I dislike sounding so crass, but anyone who cannot reconcile himself to that is probably not a good fit. But in the meantime, I’m still trying to figure out exactly where to draw these often fuzzy lines.