j. peterman and me

Years ago, when I first showed my husband something I wrote, he told me I sounded like J. Peterman. Both the pedantic, pompous, overblown character on Seinfeld, and the perhaps overly romantic catalog with a backstory for every article of clothing.

(I adore both, by the way.)

But to him, my writing didn’t sound like me. It sounded like I was selling something. Trying too hard.  Being bigger than I really am. Inauthentic.

Ever since then, I’ve been trying to figure out if what I write sounds like me or not. This is a little hard to do because I don’t really talk that much. I “say” so much more in writing than I do out loud.

In other words, maybe my true inner voice is J. Peterman, just no one hears it because it’s inside me and only gets expressed on the page.

Still, I took his words to heart and spent years and years and pages and pages trying to erase the distance between me as writer and me, the real me. And then erasing the distance between writer and reader. Doing my best to talk directly to you.

Yes, you.

Without affectation. Whether it’s fiction or not. 

Last week, I updated my website and as part of that had to go through every blog post I published this past year and add a thumbnail photo. It really put into perspective what I chose to write all year. I noticed, as I’ve suspected, that I return to certain themes over and over again. That’s to be expected since I write these based on intuition and feeling over anything else.

But I’ve been re-reading my posts with the J. Peterman filter. Do I sound like me, or do I sound like a clothing salesman?

Anyway, it’s interesting to me how there’s a gap between (1) who we really are—if that’s even knowable, (2) how people perceive us, and (3) how people perceive us who know us best.

I guess I write these posts to try to merge all three.

And hopefully not sound like J. Peterman.

Unless he’s hiring…