The other day, my husband got a suspicious call about a suspicious package mailed to our apartment. When he called the bluff of the scammer on the other line, they hung up. The end.
Good story? Um no, but perhaps you know I’m alluding to The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger by Charlotte Cowles, a slam dunk of an essay published in the The Cut this week. Reader reactions ranged from “How could she be so stupid?” to “We’re all vulnerable to scams” to “Wait, she’s the finance columnist for The Cut?”
I was less interested in other people’s opinions about the essay than the lively and at times wrenching Sophie’s Choice nature of the conversation. There’s a cliche but ultimately true bit of creative writing advice that goes something like this: allow your characters to make the worst possible choice.
The worst choice “formula” requires bringing a character face-to-face with their worst fear, forcing them to let go of one thing they hold dear to save another thing they hold dear. A finance writer who is threatened with possible harm to her children, or forced into an irrational act (giving away 50K!) wedged between her children and money—between a big regret, one way or the other. When someone puts your kids in the crosshairs, real or imagined, you’re willing to part with any sum of money. That doesn’t sound irrational to me.
Stories, at least the kind we can’t put down, come from these moments of moral opacity. Less successful personal essays tend to swing between schadenfreude and public shaming, absolving the writer of complicity, but the best essays demonstrate self-awareness and force the reader into the writer’s shoes. This brings me to the death— the murder—of Alexei Navalny.
The details, which you probably know, of the attempted assassination on his life and return to Russian despite certain imprisonment, are harrowing, but what really got me was learning that he always trying to prove to his wife that he was worthy of her love. In this interview with Daniel Roher, the director of “Navalny”, it seemed clear his willingness to speak truth to power and stand up in the face of extremism was motivated, in part, by being the man he wanted to be in the eyes of his wife (who is, it must be said, a badass).
Platitudes about heroism, freedom, and bravery get overused into meaninglessness, sure, but what’s troubling is how they overshadow how choices—good, bad, crazy though they may be—come down to single person. A love. A wife, a child. Maybe Navalny was brave. Maybe he was madly in love with his wife Yuliya. Could he be the hero she saw him as, and remain with her in safe irrelevance? No. He had to make an awful choice.
I kept thinking of these two stories in tandem this week, though they’re very different in tenor, and in their stakes. I couldn’t help but think about my choices, or perhaps the ones I don’t make out of apathy or complacency. Perhaps the the most dangerous choice isn’t always the wrong one. Perhaps the path that causes the most pain and suffering doesn’t need to be avoided.
So I’m trying to ask myself this, in both my life, and i my writing: which path will lead to to the dead end of action, and which will build the arc of the story I’d like to tell?