Working in Advertising Helped Me Write My Memoir

I am trying to resist the temptation to begin this essay with a headline that I know will hook you. I don’t want to trick you into feeling an emotion you weren’t planning to feel, or to take an action you weren’t planning to take, even though I do know how to do both those things very well.

I am, unfortunately, very good at advertising.

For years, I made a living writing and producing ads for some of the world’s biggest brands. Nike. MTV. Facebook. I once ate a turkey sandwich with Britney Spears on a shoot for the VMAs. I won an Emmy for an ad that encouraged teenagers to use condoms. I wrote a manifesto about the grit it takes to be a champion, and Michael Jordan read it in a commercial for his world famous sneakers. Then, in 2018, after nearly fifteen years in the advertising business, I had to leave my career. I got too sick to work. I suddenly had so much time. I thought maybe I should write the story of what had happened, to try and make sense of it.

As a young person, it felt like words would pour out of me. I wrote all the time. I even went on to major in creative writing in college. In 1994, I was awarded my first writing residency to study with beat poetry legend, Diane diPrima. I studied writing in grad school too, where I wrote a passable novella that was just thinly veiled autofiction. Then, in 1999, I moved to New York City, landed a job at Condé Nast, and promptly lost myself.

Suddenly, the millions of likes and hearts and shares that told me what I made was valuable were no longer relevant.

Everything was so sparkly there, so aspirational. I wrote, but never for myself. I deprioritized my own stories in favor of writing stories to move readers to buy more things to fix themselves and to chase unrealistic beauty ideals they’d never, by design, attain. I began to learn how to optimize my creativity in support of measurable outcomes. More readers. More buzz. More sales. I learned good writing could yield returns on corporate investments, and I felt pride whenever I did that. It made me feel powerful and, before long, the parts of me born loving language for its own joyous sake, receded. I kept rising the ranks in industries that use creativity to drive earnings. From magazines, I went on to jobs in ad agencies, then at television networks, and inside big tech where I finally broke. All these different mediums had the same identical drivers: Grab people’s attention. Make them want things. Make it so they return again and again. There was no room for me in any of it.

After the twenty years I spent inside the machine of mass media, my body began screaming at me to finally address its needs. I’d prioritized the firm and fresh bodies of countless celebrities and models and actresses for so many years. I didn’t know where to begin. I asked myself: What would you write if you had no audience to ensnare? And no market share to gain? What would you say if it was just you and the page? And you were telling the truth?

Suddenly, the millions of likes and hearts and shares that told me what I made was valuable were no longer relevant. With the dizzying drumbeat of want, aspiration, power, and fantasy no longer the primary driver of my creativity, I stopped looking for external validation. I began to measure the worth of what I was writing based on only one metric: How do I, myself, feel about it? My language was messy, disjointed, stuttering. I circled around my hardest stories, afraid to get too close. I’d steered clear of the truth for so long that I was afraid of it. I kept going.

Memoir required a confident retelling of experience, a way for a reader to exist inside someone else’s life for a moment. The problem, I was coming to understand, was that even though I wanted to write my life story, I had disappeared inside the stories of everyone else.

I began to see how the writing I aspired to do, where I reflected on my past and made meaning from it, was at odds with the writing I’d done my whole career. Memoir can only be written by looking back, and advertising can only ever look forward. Ads can never be about the past because they, by definition, are the blurry promise of a better tomorrow you can have only after you buy the product. I had never looked back on my own life. I’d been so busy living in the future I was trying to package and sell on behalf of the corporations I was employed by.

As I dug deeper into my own writing, I felt the tension I was butting up against. Advertising can’t hold meaningful reflection because it is pure projection. Look! Over there! That’s when your dream will come true. Follow me. Now follow me again. I had to keep pulling myself back to my present, to my past, trying, day after day, to situate myself in the story of my own life.

The work of advertising is also owned forever by the brand who financed it and the maker’s fingerprints are wiped clean. In ad-making, the authentic feelings of the person creating the ad are irrelevant. Instead, it is your main job to be a medium, to channel the language that will best resonate with your intended audience. I’d loaned my voice out to so many brands and celebrities over the years, I had rendered myself invisible. In advertising, the I does not exist. Every ad, no matter who’s writing it, is always about YOU. What do YOU think? What do YOU want? After I decided I wanted to write my own story, I realized that in everything I wrote, for decades, I was nowhere in it.

Writing my memoir became an exercise in placing myself in my own history. Every day, I wrote and I laid out the bones of my life in front of my house, in the wet grass of morning, to try to make sense of what was left and make something meaningful. In my career, all the things that made me me were liabilities. My sadness, my anger, my uncertainty. Pain does not have a place in ads. Only nice things, please. Only sunshine. So, I never made room for these parts of myself.

All those years I’d spent on the surface of life made me desperate to explore every dark cave of myself, under every rock. I could see then that the point of an ad is to make someone aspire to the hollowest version of existence; to a place there is no history, no shadows, and this creed is, obviously, in direct opposition to memoir. What is memoir if not an illumination of the shadow?

What advertising left me with wasn’t all bad. I’d learned a lot I was realizing I could use. Ads only have a moment to grab attention. The lens must always be focused. Scenes need to be tight, and details specific. I worked to write concisely and with economy. I kept moments compressed. There was also this notion of my voice. For so long, I’d sold mine to help give brands humanity that kept buyers buying. I’d manufactured the voices for so many brands, always making sure each word was weighed and measured like a bunch of grapes on a supermarket scale until it was perfect. I’d pluck a few of them off when it tipped too much and added a handful when it felt too light. It turned out that this skill, of honing a reliable, relatable, confident voice, was great practice to write a memoir. This place of certainty, I learned, could help make readers understand that I’d survived the worst things, I’d made it, and they could trust me to lead them through a difficult story and to the other side.

The most important thing I learned in advertising though, would be the thing that would carry me to the end of writing my manuscript. How to construct heroes. When I worked in television marketing, everything I made elevated some character to hero status, allowing an audience to root for them, to want to see them beat the bad guys, survive the big explosion, to fall in love and live happily ever after. I had never once afforded myself this treatment. I never knew I was worth it. When I wrote with certainty that I was worth the spotlight, the full thrust of a narrative arc with all twists and turns, crimes, and redemptions, was when everything, my life and the manuscript, clicked.

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Don’t Buy What I’m Selling by Lu Chekowsky is available from Little, Brown.