Excerpt from The Private I

Close that door! This is a very personal book about privacy — from the quirky points of view of people living their private lives in this public age. How we get privacy and how we lose it grips these writers' imaginations, and their essays flush out a panoply of essential desires — from sex to solitude, from intimacy to the simple need to be left alone. While The Private I explores the secrets of privacy from childhood to death, in contexts rural and urban, aesthetic and legal, flamboyant and reserved, it has no pretensions to be comprehensive. The eccentric and passionate points of view of its authors give their essays the lushness and depth that only personally chosen secret places have.

Privacy, seemingly one of our hottest issues, in fact, has taken over a century to ignite. Beginning in 1890 with the famous Brandeis and Warren opinion on the "right to be let alone," and fed by judicial, domestic, social, and scientific debates throughout the twentieth century, privacy issues really began to sizzle during the Cold War, when government spying was advanced by surveillance technology, according to University of Pennsylvania Professor of Law, Anita Allen Castellitto. International spy technology turned domestic with the investigation of participants in the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War protests. Then the courts weighed in with rulings on abortion, birth control, and the right to read pornography in the privacy of our houses. In the sciences, neonatal-care innovations, gene mapping, and the right-to-die movement raised bio-ethical concerns. In the 1970s federal legislation about computer privacy began, attempting to insure financial records from prying eyes. And, after Watergate, the media began to assume an unprecedented degree of intrusion on the lives of public figures. The frenzy flash point, Professor Allen concludes, now is the Internet.

Into all this comes our Private I. We begin with Janna Malamud Smith's definitions of solitude, anonymity, reserve, and intimacy, then enter the realm of personal life with Josip Novakovich's ode to childhood's secret places in the former Yugoslavia. Next sassy Bronwyn Garrity explores Internet privacy through the lenses of teen web sites. While Dorothy Allison insists that fiction creates both truth and privacy, Vivian Gornick reacts to her mother's response to her memoir, and then lays out her tough-minded views on personal writing. Michael Groden, having made a scholar's bargain to hide behind his subject, describes his astonishment at suddenly finding himself exposed. I admit that, as his wife, I'm the one who did the exposing in my memoir Paradise, Piece by Piece. My own essay explores privacy and creativity, my mother and her near-contemporary Anne Sexton, and how the revealing of secrets actually preserves privacy.

Physical boundaries define solitude, and Cathleen Medwick, a self-acknowledged intruder on private interiors for shelter magazines, delicately unfolds the character of privacy as it is built in rooms. But Yusef Komunyakaa's East Village rooms are invaded by multiple burglaries He reconfigures his zone of privacy in a literary meditation — ending in a walk on a nude beach. Dr. F. Gonzalez-Crussi introduces us to an antique chamber pot, talisman of a Chinese empress (who was never left unattended) while he muses about the polarity of warm Latin community versus cold North American isolation.

We can't always take our private lives this seriously, so Victoria Roberts places two cartoons on intimacy's altar. Actor Barbara Feldon, best known as Agent 99 on the sixties' Get Smart TV comedy series, exhorts us to reweave the veil of glamour for celebrities, and Wayne Koestenbaum meditates on stardom as he peeks into the scandal of Lana Turner. Inverting the public-private telescope, Jonathan Franzen claims both that the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal invaded his private citizen's life — and that the public isn't all that pumped up about privacy after all. Legal philosopher Anita L. Allen compares Clinton to Oscar Wilde as she makes an argument for lying by public figures about sexual affairs. Evans D. Hopkins takes sex to the jail cell, and Wendy Lesser examines the issue of public attendance at executions. Penultimately, attorney Robin West argues against legislating for privacy altogether in favor of a bias toward community. How can an individual live privately in community? Kathleen Norris provides the last word as she tracks the trails of gossip in a tiny South Dakota town.

How did I, a tell-all poet, come to edit a book on private life? I've been writing over and under the line between personal and public for decades. Then, when I wrote a memoir about how I made my most important decisions, particularly deciding to become a poet and deciding not to have children...well, The Private I has turned out to be so personal that even the editor, usually hiding behind her choices, has had to submit to scrutiny. My husband's essay outs some of my motives. Personal life in a public age? The searchlight is everywhere, especially at home.

Each essayist in this book sails a special zone between the undiscovered and the revealed. Each discovers that, very much like a river, the issue of privacy will not stay still. It keeps on flowing. Trying to capture it, finding the vocabulary for its ideas, is like painting light on water. It can only be almost done. Yet we all feel we know absolutely when our privacy is sovereign and when it is trespassed. And these writers establish those certain uncertainties of personal life.

Copyright 2001 by Molly Peacock. All rights reserved.