Fake Missed Connections by Brett Fletcher Lauer
Softskull Press, 2016
225 pages – Softskull / Amazon
It’s not so much that I have thought of committing suicide in a really real way, it’s more that I’ve often daydreamed about dying, or rather I’ve wondered about what successful suicides must have been thinking about before they committed to taking their own lives. How it must seem like such a deep-seeded truth in their mind, how they know with some unwavering certainty that it is the right (or only) thing to do. To me it seems like it is a sudden trick of logic, a rationalization slightly rotated, or as Eileen Myles said in a recent interview about an altogether different topic, “Will is a funny thing. I usually have none and then I have one.” I have thought about suicide not because the world has been cruel to me. In fact, it’s been almost the precise opposite. The world has been decent to me. During the years that I was most outwardly volatile (age 13 to 20) one could actually argue that I had been blessed with dumb luck. Someone in my friend group got arrested for drugs, someone else got a DUI, and another had an abortion before graduating. I had been all of these people, but somehow I didn’t get stuck being those people. I was able to go to college, move out of my parents’ house, get a job, and go to graduate school. And yet, I too often had the overwhelming longing for “a substantial rest from an interior life,” as Brett Fletcher Lauer writes in his memoir Fake Missed Connections. Hence the fantasy of what it would be like to remove myself from it. Lauer, it turns out, has also wallowed in a similar fantasy but concludes that “there were times [he] thought [he] hadn’t taken [his] own life not from fear, but from utter laziness. The work involved in figuring it out was exhausting,” ultimately surmising that “self-inflicted death should be foolproof, or else one is forced to continue life with an additional failure.” This fear of failure can be as good as any reason to stay alive.
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Lauer’s memoir spans his adolescent years in great detail, using his divorce and subsequent online dating as bookends for his past. In order to understand the divorce we (and he) need to understand what came before. The memoir describes a precocious youth who is briefly swept in by the Hare Krishnas and who aggressively abuses alcohol, feels depressed, and contemplates suicide. It further chronicles his misadventures in writing fake missed connections on Craigslist and online dating in the wake of his eventual divorce, both for comic relief and a desperate need not to feel alone. I love to read a good memoir because I am always curious about how other people live their life and how they feel about living that life. It is the litmus test factor that I’m sure draws in most readers of memoirs, that and the comfort of knowing that you aren’t the only one to experience a certain situation. It’s the basic impetus of western literature I think. How do I understand myself in relation to the world around me and how can I make sense of my life now? While this urgency is most openly associated with adolescents, it is a lifelong struggle, especially when making decisions like getting married or getting divorced. So much of your own identity is implicated in your planning and it’s a gamble either way.
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Speaking of gambles, I just got married in July. My gamble is what made me want to write about Lauer’s book. How much of our past influences our future? I connect deeply to being a volatile youth (the subtext of Lauer’s memoir), more so even now, since I have a vocabulary that helps me understand my volatile emotions a little better. Those years when I was acting out and jeopardizing my well-being, what was I really trying to accomplish? In retrospect, and in earnest, I think I surrounded myself with the “bad kids” because I thought their marginalization stemmed from a more intellectual or artistic place. To be clear, these kids didn’t really exhibit either of these traits in any concrete way, but I believed that it’s what they were capable of; it’s what made them “different.” That was how I unconsciously chose to experience them. And though I didn’t get stuck being them, I spent a great deal of time with them because I thought they were something else, that they would lead me to something else, to the person that I was meant to be. And while this is naive, I have longed for this sort of direction for most of my life. But I have found, and keep finding, that the logic of longing is often out of whack, is unsustainable, is eventual spoil. The older I get, the more that I feel like I must be building relationships wrong, that I am pitching a distance without knowing it. How do I know if I am not just choosing to experience my relationships in a certain way, confusing or disregarding facts because they don’t fit into the experience I hope to have?
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Lauer’s marriage begins to end when he gets a phone call that his wife is sleeping with the husband of the woman who is calling. This of course comes as a shock to Lauer. Except as a reader, the details of the memoir that follow sort of render that shock a little less so. When Lauer describes the day after his wedding he reveals that his wife “cried uncontrollably on the couch.” That she explained, “she was experiencing a delayed reaction to the pressure of the wedding.” And this could be true, as Lauer himself recalls, “What did I know–this could be an unspoken initiation for newlyweds.” But as a reader, following the chronology, the clues were there, as they generally are. They are just hard to see when you are in the moment. I worry about these clues in my own life. If there are things people see from afar about my life or my relationship that I can’t see because I am in it.
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Feeling depressed often leads to feeling lonely. And feeling lonely often leads to feeling depressed. It’s a snake eating its tail. Maybe those years of acting out were a manifestation of my depression or my very deep-seeded sense of being alone, something I never considered then. Unfortunately for my husband, my depression and proclivity to feeling lonely will likely be something that persists, despite all the niceties that women of all ages have assured me will come with marriage.
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Over a decade ago in a Barnes and Noble in New Jersey I discovered Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine and felt so relieved. The type of loneliness that I felt then was a wayward one. I dreaded being alone in the house that I was renting with a friend, but when I wasn’t alone in the house I longed for the house to be empty. I wanted desperately to connect with others yet skirted every opportunity I got to do so. It was during this time, early-aughts, that I obsessively frequented online dating sites like OKCupid and Plenty of Fish. Now online dating is a something that is so prevalent folks can just swipe left on their phones while they are on the toilet. But in the early aughts its newness was unprecedented. If you were a lonely person vying and failing to connect with others, online dating was a kind of crack, an immediate high once you saw that someone opened your message, that someone liked your profile, that someone sent you a message. In most cases you could chat with the person almost immediately. You could even meet in person on the same day. The promise that this held for me dulled the pain of my loneliness, if only briefly. Lauer comes to online dating six months after his separation because “[he] wanted to find faith in others looking for each other.” He messages women, women message him, awkward and earnest G-chat conversations ensue, many of which are included in this memoir. But the connections he is eager for seem to elude him and as a result he gets creative, noting that “if a dating profile was the curated language one was required to enter in order to participate, a list of likes and dislikes and witty phrases crafting an identity we hope another will share or find value in, then the Missed Connection was just another outlet for longing, and the longing had carved out its own genre.” Lauer’s imaginative writing mocks his loneliness and therefore abates it. He makes a project out of his loneliness, one that he can control. And feeling in control can be one of the best ways to recover from being disappointed, either by the one you love, or by the shortcomings you’ve been carrying with you all your life.
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A poet by nature, Lauer lends much of this sensibility to his memoir, with many beautiful and meditative observations like, “Certain cloud formations on a calm day are as dangerous as certain cloud formations on any other day.” Or on the subject of ghosts, of which Lauer believes to have witnessed in his apartment, “Even the undead were searching for some other to confirm their existence. It is what we do when we’re alone in the world.” Lines like these make Lauer’s consciousness feel real. As a reader, I am drawn to Lauer’s need to write through his struggle, as he “looked to the mystical heavens for answers in an attempt to make sense of [his] life, to find an alternative solution in which [he] was not the only person [he] could depend on.” This isn’t a new technique. Karl Ove Knausgaard is brazenly doing it over 3,500 pages. For me, making a connection with that written consciousness is special. Getting a true sense of the human on the other side of the page, who has sat and thought just like you sit and think, makes me feel less lonely. I don’t want to be the only person that I can depend on either.
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At root, Lauer says, loneliness and boredom is the same thing. I am bored a lot. Most days at work I am so bored that I have to will myself to the nearby Lucille Roberts gym at lunch just so that something happens to my body, so that my body registers some difference in its existence. But maybe I am just lonely. Maybe me and the other middle-aged women who arrive at the gym at lunch time day in and day out are just trying to cope with our own sense of existential loneliness. In regard to loneliness, Lauer felt that he only had two options: “either [he] would live with loneliness or [would] continue to attempt to make connections and fail, in any number of new ways.” Maybe for me it is a little bit of both, going to the gym is a way for me to live with the loneliness of being alive, and writing this essay is my attempt to make connections (and fail). Or perhaps most comforting, Lauer surmises that, “it would be a series of failures until it wasn’t,” with the “it” being interchangeable: love, life, friendship, the things that make life worth living.
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I don’t know what my married life will be like but I know that “failure to try [is] also its own form of failure,” as Lauer writes. I know that my life is about what I do with it, as opposed to what others do or think should be done. Reading helps me better understand my boundaries, helps me understand the edges of myself. I collect quotes as forms of instruction. They compose an internal manual on how I should live. For example: “The eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires,” (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina) or “What we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope,” (George Eliot, Middlemarch). In Faked Missed Connections, Lauer includes some advice that his dad gave to him during a particularly tumultuous time: “Try to look outward. Take what you have and share it with others. Don’t force it; share it. Try to engage with other people in a caring considerate way. Try to do things for them.” This advice outlines the sort of person that I hope to be when I am able to be my best. But sometimes I am unable to be my best. And when I am unable to be my best I look for other consolation and inspiration. Recently, Laura Olin put together a massive google doc where she asked people to share what helps them when they are feeling depressed or lonely for her weekly newsletter Everything Changes. It helps.
Jackie Clark is the author of Aphoria (Brooklyn Arts Press), and most recently Sympathetic Nervous System (Bloof Books). She is the editor of Song of the Week for Coldfront Magazine and small press editor for Boog City. She can be found online at nohelpforthat.com.
