What We Talk About When We Talk About Overused Titles

On any given day, you’re going to encounter, on average, and not including this post, 13,879 references to Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

In the last five seconds, I found an article on The Rumpus (“What We Talk About When We Talk About Progress”) and a piece by Eileen Pollack in AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle (“What We Talk About When We Talk About Theme”). Oh, and there’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Vince Carter” on NBA Fanhouse, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Chickens” on The New Yorker blog Close Read, and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Movies” on New York Press. Etc., etc.

Okay, yes. I understand that this, the original, is a great title. It’s fantastic. It’s as long-winded as the story itself is succinct. And though the characters start out by talking about love, when it’s over they’ve gone through–either explicitly or subliminally–violence, drinking, friendship, sanity, empathy, sex, hatred, death, depression, and regret. The title is about subtext: The story itself is less about love and more about the other things, the whole constellation of subjects that come up when we try to talk about it.

My problem is this: I feel like “What We Talk About When We Talk About _____” has become a placeholder for writers who haven’t come up with a better title. Those first eight words function more or less as a prolonged fanfare leading up to the last word, the article’s subject. Instead of “Brands,” we get “What We Talk About When We Talk About Brands.” Why? I think it’s both because long titles are in vogue right now, and because it’s just so easy to stick any word(s) at the end, and presto! You’ve got a title. It works for anything. The filibuster. Revolution. Climate. Democracy. Mad-Cow Disease. A quick Google search will show you just how much this title has been used. Recently.

So the question becomes: How do you properly borrow someone else’s title? Should it always be in the spirit of the prototype? Should authors be obliged to mimic the original relationship between title and text? Or is its function flexible, changing each time a new author appropriates it? And at what point does it expire? After 50 years? After 50,000 uses? Ever?

Or maybe I’m just too persnickity. Maybe it’s the length of Carver’s, er, title that makes it so tough for me to handle its imitators. I guess I just wish people would leave Ray alone and find someone else to poach.

(NB: I wrote this with a small amount of authority. Only two days ago I stole Speak, Memory from Vladimir Nabokov for a blog post. I spent precisely six lazy seconds thinking about it, and I’ve never even read the damn thing.)

(NB Pt. 2: My intention with this post was not to denigrate the writing quality of the above articles. I only wanted to consider the impulse behind choosing a particular title and what our responsibilities are to the artwork it came from. You’ll notice that I’m just skimming the surface of these subjects. All this being said, read that Rumpus article. It’s a fascinating piece about, among other things, how we experience art. Written, like Carver’s story, in the form of a conversation.)

Photo: A poster the poets used to taunt the fiction writers at the Workshop softball game. Love it.