What Has Already Burned Absorbs Differently

Stephanie Pushaw

I have a long-standing rule: my family does not read my work before it’s published. Not drafts, not half-formed ideas, absolutely not the version tantalizingly close to the finish line where I’m still bargaining with sentences, flipping words around like tongue-tied cherry-stems. Even after publication, I prefer to keep my work at a careful distance. It feels both embarrassing and raw to promote it. If someone asks what I’ve written, I’ll say the truth: it’s online, you can google it. As soon as the piece has left my restless fingers, been processed through the sausage-machinery of editorial gaze and rewrites and encoded permanently into print, I assume a type of amnesia towards it. This holds true for all of my work, but especially for nonfiction.

For a long time, I believed this was my way of protecting the integrity of the work. Nonfiction, after all, requires a particular internal permission: the freedom to compress time, to privilege emotional accuracy over chronology, to tell the truth without accounting for every possible counter-memory. That permission is easier to grant when we imagine a reader who doesn’t know us. Of course, family reads differently, and there’s no controlling their interpretation, and that is where I like to dissociate. 

Over Christmas, I broke my own rule. I was at home in Malibu, where the year was ending with a loud quiet: days of relentless rain, the hills slick and unstable, the ocean darkened to sheet metal. Our phones buzzed constantly with emergency alerts, warning of mudslides and preemptive evacuations in the burn scars left behind by the devastating wildfires creeping up on their first anniversary. The message was blunt: what has been stripped bare absorbs differently. What has already burned is more vulnerable to flood. The first day back, I swam in the Pacific in a bright blue swimsuit under a steely sky. The water was freezing and perfect, and demanded nothing from me. Sea lions lounged in all their earthtones on their small rocky islands, starfish sucked on stones worn smooth by centuries of erosion, and I reclaimed my favorite place: underwater, in the silent pockets of the cold sea. 

I was deep into revision on my novel, The Disasterologist, a book preoccupied with warning systems. Specifically: what they catch, what they miss, and how vigilance can quietly curdle into its own form of harm. Writing it has forced me to ask questions that feel as relevant to craft as to living: at what point does preparation stop protecting the work and start flattening it? When does anticipation become a refusal to be surprised?

It was in that atmosphere, obnoxious alerts sounding from six cellphones simultaneously, the drumming rain probing the stability of every burn-scar slope, that I handed my family the magazine in print. Not a link. Not a soft mention. A physical object. The essay itself felt especially exposed. It dealt openly with themes I often approach obliquely on the page: my phobias, my relationship, my drinking, the low-grade self-loathing that hums beneath so much of my interior weather. In handing it over, I was struck by the inherent self-centeredness of the act—not in a moral sense, but a formal one. Memoir, by design, asks others to pause their own interior lives and enter yours. It asks loved ones, in particular, to receive pieces of shared history reorganized around a single consciousness: yours.

This is where writing can begin to resemble narcissism, or at least brush up against it. Over the holiday, my husband and I talked about the difference between narcissism and self-absorption. Narcissism, we agreed, collapses the world into the self. Self-absorption, by contrast, is often a temporary narrowing. Maybe one way to consider it is as a necessary focus required to make sense of experience, to render it coherent enough to share. Writing nonfiction depends on this narrowing. The ethical question isn’t whether the work centers the self, for it must, but whether that centering opens outward, or seals itself shut.

I knew my family was reading the essay, but I didn’t watch them. Being aware that someone is mid-read, enmeshed within your sentences at that precise moment, is its own horrible kind of intimacy. I made myself scarce. Later, I found myself rereading my own work, attempting a familiar editorial exercise: seeing the piece through another reader’s eyes. It’s the same sympathetic act I perform after recommending a television show to my mother: rewatching scenes, imagining what might land, what might trouble her, where she might feel protective or quietly sad. This kind of rereading isn’t about control; it’s about responsibility.

Print resists intervention. Once the piece exists as an object, there are no footnotes to add, no qualifying conversations to preempt misunderstanding. The work becomes what it is: a shaped version of experience, fixed at a particular angle. For strangers, that fixity often reads as authority. For family, it can feel like exposure. Like being handed a version of your life, refracted sideways through a carnival mirror, and asked to meet your own eyes in it.

What surprised me was the response. My family didn’t interrogate the framing or argue with the feelings. They recognized the vulnerability as an attempt at honesty, not completeness. Their reading was generous, thoughtful, proud. This mattered to me not because it erased the inherent imbalance of memoir, but because it reminded me that self-centeredness on the page does not have to preclude relational care off it.

That generosity seemed to ripple outward. I found myself less filtered, more present. I talked too much. I followed strange lines of thought. I was intense, earnest, probably a little unsettling. And instead of breaking the holiday, this looseness made it feel more real. Less performed. More alive. It occurred to me that this, too, was revision, not of a sentence, but of a posture. A willingness to let the work exist without constantly justifying its focus on the self.

As nonfiction editors, we talk often about revision as a technical process: cutting, clarifying, sharpening. But revision is also an ethical practice. It asks us to reconsider which instincts serve the work and which simply protect the writer. It asks us to distinguish between narcissism and the necessary self-absorption that allows a piece to be made at all.

The new year arrives whether we are ready or not, bringing weather, consequences, and the chance to revise in real time. This winter, as I return to The Disasterologist, I’m thinking of revision less as control and more as calibration: how to center the self without collapsing the world around it; how to tell the truth without mistaking exposure for harm; how to trust that attention, when offered carefully, can be an act of connection rather than withdrawal. This winter, I am trying to reckon with the truth that if I ask others to see through my own eyes, I sort of have to be willing to watch as they borrow my lens.