Sable Monroe

I write about the things people are often encouraged to clean up before telling the story.

Family dysfunction. Motherhood. Estrangement. Immigration. Love. Sex. Resentment. Ambition. Aging. Power. Beauty. Survival. The strange and sometimes ugly ways human beings behave when they want something, fear something, love someone, or believe they are entitled to something.

Including me.

Especially me.

I write under the name Sable Monroe, but the experiences underneath the name are real.

I was born in Jamaica and came to the United States as a child. I grew up between cultures, inside a family that taught me plenty about power, loyalty, obligation, survival, and what happens when the people who are supposed to protect you become people you need to protect yourself from.

I learned early that adulthood does not automatically make someone wise.

Neither does parenthood.

Neither does education.

And being related to someone certainly doesn’t make them right.

There Are No Mandatory Redemption Arcs Here

There is a familiar shape that stories about difficult lives are expected to take.

Something terrible happened. The writer suffered. The writer grew. Eventually, she develops compassion for everyone involved, forgives the people who hurt her, and discovers that the pain made her stronger.

That’s a perfectly legitimate story.

It just isn’t necessarily mine.

Sometimes understanding someone better has made me more compassionate toward them.

Sometimes it has made me like them considerably less.

Sometimes distance has softened me. Sometimes distance has allowed me to understand exactly how fucked up something was.

I don’t believe insight has to end in forgiveness to count as growth. And I don’t believe every wound deserves a thank-you note for making me stronger.

Some things hurt.

Some people caused damage.

Some relationships were better left behind.

That’s allowed to be the end of the sentence.

I’m Not Always the Hero Either

This isn’t a website dedicated to explaining why everybody else is terrible and I am wonderful.

That would get boring.

I can be vain. Arrogant. Judgmental. Resentful. Contradictory. I can hold a grudge. I can recognize an unattractive quality in myself without immediately beginning a campaign to remove it.

Self-awareness doesn’t always arrive carrying an apology.

Sometimes awareness leads to change.

Sometimes it leads to acceptance.

Sometimes you examine yourself carefully and think:

Well. There it is.

Human beings are complicated. I don’t see much value in pretending otherwise.

I can be tender and angry. Compassionate and cruel. Vulnerable and heavily defended. Generous and withholding. I can love someone and still decide I don’t want them in my life.

I can understand why somebody became the person they are and still hold them responsible for what they did once they got there.

That’s where much of my writing lives.

Jamaica Comes With Me

Although I’ve spent most of my life in the United States, Jamaica didn’t disappear when I got on an airplane.

It appears in my language, my humor, my bluntness, and the way I think about family, ambition, education, class, respectability, beauty, sexuality, motherhood, and survival.

Sometimes it appears because there simply isn’t an American English expression capable of doing the work of a perfectly placed Jamaican one.

Sometimes a person isn’t merely foolish.

Sometimes the situation requires dunce-bat.

I don’t make the rules.

You Don’t Have to Like Me

Of course I’d prefer you enjoy the writing. I’m not completely ridiculous.

But I don’t need every reader to approve of the narrator.

Some essays may make you laugh. Some may make you angry. Some may make you think I’m an asshole. Some may make you wonder how I had the nerve to admit something publicly.

And every once in a while, I hope you’ll encounter something you’ve thought privately but never imagined someone would actually fucking publish.

I’m considerably more interested in making you feel something than making sure you leave every essay thinking I’m a lovely person.

You don’t have to agree with me.

You don’t even have to like me.

You just have to believe I mean it.

So What Is This Place?

It’s a life being examined while it’s still being lived.

I write about the past, the present, the people I’ve known, the woman I’ve become, and the parts of human nature we’re often expected to edit out of our own stories.

There will be family.

There will be motherhood.

There will be sex.

There will be anger.

There will be beauty and aging and ambition and grief.

There will be humor.

There will occasionally be profanity because sometimes fuck is simply the correct word.

And there will be contradictions.

I am not interested in sanding myself down into a sympathetic narrator or manufacturing a moral lesson every time I tell you something uncomfortable.

I don’t promise to be right.

I don’t promise to be nice.

I don’t promise that every story ends with forgiveness.

I promise that when I tell you what I think, I fucking mean it.

This is memoir without the halo.