The humblebrag (RIP Harris Wittels) seems to be part of our contemporary culture, but its literary variety is of an ilk slightly different from your normal “I-seriously-need-to-stop-going-to-the-gym-5-days-a-week” kind. For those unfamiliar with said normality, a humblebrag consists of a self-disparaging or self-deprecating statement cleverly wrapped within the bounds of a self-laudatory one. For further reference see the sadly defunct Humblebrag Twitter account.
Just like everyone else, writers tend to brag about themselves in terms of accomplishment and prestige. Unlike everyone else, however, they also carry with them more than the usual amount of insecurity and rejection. Literary humblebrags, than, can run the gamut of the standard “I’ve been consistently writing 1,500 words a day, yeah, but it’s basically all garbage that I’m going to have to rework” to “I seriously will never win a contest. My life right now only consists of being first-place runner-up” to “It was super lucky that I sold all my books at the reading, because I read way too long and kept stammering over every single word that wasn’t ‘and’ or ‘but.'”
As has previously been noted, humblebrags can also manifest themselves in the Acknowledgments or Liner Notes section of one’s book. Met a famous writer at a literary conference or retreat, one who off-handedly encouraged you to keep on writing? Thank her on the Acknowledgments page via the sentence, “For her fierce insistence that I continue on with my life’s work, no matter the senseless toil and struggle, an eternal thank you to [famous literary name here] for being there just when I was about to give up and give in.”
The steady ascent of “quit lit” also has the air of humblebrag about it. As Megan Garber makes clear in “The Rise of Quit Lit,” the subtext of any quitting—and then subsequent writing about that quitting—is that it is in fact possible to quit [Facebook, Twitter, the Internet, dairy, dating, automobiles, gluten, shaving, sugar, television, your category here], and by virtue of that fact one should do it, should quit. There are too many examples to reference, but so many of the books wherein the author renounces God are humblebrags for the benefit of agnosticism and atheism, of accepting one’s inconsequential nature within the vast confines of the universe. Writing about one’s godlessness might actually be a way of confirming one’s unique place in the temporal world. And who wouldn’t want to brag about that?
Literary humblebrags, however, can also just be downright depressing. I recently had lunch with a writer friend who has been creatively stuck for the past five or so months; everything he’s written simply hasn’t, in his opinion, measured up. He actively desires to write outside of the genre in which he has published the most work and feels most comfortable. This desire has forced him to reconsider seemingly everything he previously took for granted about his writing. (Poets, it seems, take on less outside research than creative nonfiction writers; a poet’s idea of “fieldwork” could be walking through the meadow behind his apartment, rather than traveling halfway across the country to interview someone specific about something specific.)
As lunch winded down, our conversation devolved to the point where he was humblebragging about how little he had recently accomplished—“I didn’t write anything or submit anything. And I didn’t even really think about writing anything, because I knew that whatever it ended up being would suck. All I did was eat pasta, walk my dog and complain about the rain. I seriously don’t think anyone has done less than me in the past three months, for real.” Although the humblebrag here is simultaneously a cry for help, it nevertheless contains a roundly egotistical element—I’m a bigger failure than you are and I can prove it.
To brag about one’s failures as much as one’s successes is a peculiarity perhaps specific to the contemporary writer, and with so many different avenues to fail in—web, print, and other—these types of humblebrags are particularly easy to succumb to. And where authors from past eras would privately poster their office walls or stuff their desk drawers with rejection slips, 21st-century ones create blogs dedicated to tracking and highlighting them. As anyone can view them, such blogs are subtle humblebrags in and of themselves—I might not be getting any acceptances right now but I’m writing and submitting all the time. I’m working, I’m working, I’m working.
The art of the literary humblebrag isn’t hard to master, no. But it is infectious. And often very funny. There are worse things in the world than having a healthy self-esteem, especially one that is tinged with a crippling insecurity about the nature of that healthiness. My favorite literary humblebrag has often been attributed to Samuel Beckett, although its actual province seems to be apocryphal. It’s perfect. It reads, “I’ve won several awards, yes. But I try not to beat myself up about it.” And trying is half the battle, right?