Stories About Scars: On Peter Grandbois's The Arsenic Lobster

For my thirtieth birthday, I had a storytelling party. When no one knew what to talk about, I asked for a story about a scar. Even though I cringe through them, even though I cover my mouth, even as I gasp and violently shake my head and fall just short of shrieking, I love them. Stories about scars give me an experience I could never otherwise have.

My own scars are uninteresting. Surgeries. Tattoos. Stupid adult mistakes. My only scars I find interesting are the ones that precede my memory. I’ve got a straight line down my bicep a couple inches long. I’ve had it “forever,” but I haven’t a clue what happened. I’ve got a flat slug under my chin, gnarled and white and mysterious. I wasn’t born with it — something happened to me. It happened one time and it stayed with me, living in my skin all the way to now.

Back when it first happened, I was a different person. It was anyone’s guess who or what I’d become. At some point, it was possible that I could’ve been the sort of person who sought out scars. I could have decided that stories weren’t enough. Self-sabotage is attractive when dressed up as experience. Undoing, erasing, or ruining your life becomes a viable prospect when the alternative is never doing anything: a life of inexperience. But even after you’re experienced, self-sabotage stays with you, just like a scar. And you wind up fighting every person you’ve ever been.

So it goes in Peter Grandbois’s book, The Arsenic Lobster. Labeled as a “hybrid memoir,” I found myself wondering how much was true — did the second person narrator really swim for miles in a rancid canal? Did he really chase down a six-foot boa constrictor? Did he really hang off the top of his friend’s car while his friend tried to send him flying with his own recklessness? Of course he did. And of course it’s true. The physically dangerous decisions we foolishly made in childhood — especially a suburban childhood like Grandbois had (and like I had) — were easier to accept because, when you’re just a body, you don’t care what happens. You’ll heal eventually. But after you become a mind, a conflicted, oversensitive brain, decisions become harder to make. It becomes more difficult to accept what you’ve done because you’ll remember it, because experience is permanent. Grandbois exploits the transition between body and mind, between childlike faux-impermanence and concrete, selective amnesia:

“The further back you go, the more shadows you find. You catch glimpses beneath the surface of memory: Kids alone in their house sniffing glue. Do you want some? Another kid takes a baseball bat to a parked car. Do you join him? Another tells you to distract a clerk while he steals the Dungeon Master’s guide. Do you go along? Another pulls down his pants and asks you to suck his dick. Do you? Another hits a defenseless kid. Calls a kid a faggot. Calls a kid a queer. Do you stop them? Many, many kids drinking, taking shrooms, smoking pot, disappearing in rooms. Images flash through your mind, but strangely, your part in these memories remains in shadow. Flicking in and out like the old TV show, The Outer Limits. Don’t adjust your vertical hold. There’s nothing wrong with your television set. You stand on the edge of memory, always observing, wondering when, how, if ever, you participated.”

Upon reaching adolescent self-awareness, Grandbois taps into hyperawareness, watching everyone watching him. So he takes up fencing, a spectator sport that scars him physically and emotionally, breaking his hand, ending his first marriage, making him both more and less noble than he would’ve been otherwise. He describes his life away from fencing as a dream, the sort you can’t wake up from. He is most alive when fighting, be it with himself, or with an imagined self. He risks those selves each times, but they always seem to multiply, just like choices. With the right amount of perspective, anything is possible, but then, how do you choose? It’s no easier than choosing who to be. While Grandbois is himself, always, he is only one of many selves, with each self becoming more dominant, more permanent, more willing to sacrifice another part to be the real you in the end. And even in the end, still taking risks, abandoning dreams both likely and remote, he imagines the future, wherein he’s still fighting and still collecting scars and making new possibilities and imagining the self that will get to win out, the one that hopes “when he is that age, he will be able to look in the mirror and whisper to himself, Go to hell.”

My most unmysterious, pre-memory scar comes from a mirror. I first discovered it when I was twenty-two. I shaved my head, making me look very different than the person I’d been before, and about four inches from my forehead, there was a length of sickly white skin where my hair didn’t grow. I remembered an inconsequential story my father once told me about a mirror that had fallen on me when I was very young. Apparently, I caught the corner with my head. In my invented recollection, it happens one of two ways. Either I see a baby, which I understand is me, and the mirror falls and hits my head and there’s a bit of blood, then it’s over; or I’m very short, but not a child — that is, I’m me, only smaller, and the mirror falls toward me and breaks before it makes contact. Neither is true, but I don’t really think it matters. Like any experience, I can’t go back and undo it. And, like the experience I borrow whenever I hear a story or read a book, it’s difficult to imagine a mirror that doesn’t hold a dozen selves.

I Always Thought I Was the Only One

The first time I read some of my writing out loud in front of people I almost peed my pants. You see, the story was embarrassing and it was about me. I write creative nonfiction, which means there’s no hiding behind a safe filter of a fictional narrator.

The story I read that first time was about when I heard the news that my ex-boyfriend of four years was engaged, and how completely crazy tailspin nutty emotional it made me. There’s another story about when the mean girls in seventh-grade P.E. pantsed me in front of the entire class. Then there’s my favorite: my experience posing for nude photographs. The first time I read that one out loud, my dad was there.

But as scared as I was to read my first-person, nonfiction story, the reward of sharing it was like nothing I could have anticipated. People I didn’t know came up to me and said things like, “Thank you for sharing your story,” and, “I’ve felt the same way and always thought I was the only one.”

People wanted to know how I got the courage to share something so personal. And, really, I’ve just never known any other way to write. I think it’s a shame that much of the human experience gets hidden behind constructed façades based on our perceptions of what the world expects of us.

The more I write and the more I share my stories, the more I realize that people long for authentic connection — no matter how miniscule a connection they make — even with a stranger. They want to know they’re not alone in their pain, lust, embarrassment, hate, mistakes, flaws, anger, addiction and longing. They want to know that someone else has had a similar experience, and survived to tell about it.

So I started a storytelling project in the form of a digital micro-magazine. It’s called Under the Gum Tree, a literary magazine exclusively publishing creative nonfiction and visual art. It strives for authentic connection through vulnerability, by harnessing the power of sharing stories without shame.

And there is power. After publishing the premiere issue in August 2011, I received an email from a subscriber thanking me for manifesting my own creativity and saying that reading the magazine provided her with an “infectious inspiration.”

The premiere issue features an excerpt from the hybrid memoir The Arsenic Lobster by Peter Grandbois, a meditation on porches and losing one’s mother by Kate Washington, and stunning photography by Bryan and Stephanie Mazzarello.

We’re about to publish the third issue, and we are publishing stories from writers like Steve Almond, whose piece questions whether the convenience of technology diminishes the music-listening experience, and Colleen Kinder, whose extensive essay explores life as a chronic blusher:

“Willpower accomplished nothing. In fact, willpower like mine just stoked the fire. So I tired avoidance. I steered clear of any situation that might give my skin occasion to flare. I wore shorts under my plaid uniform skirt. I locked my journal in a small box under my bed and hid the key inside an unassuming stuffed animal beaver whose tail region I had split open with scissors. I did not raise my hand.”

–from “One Bright Case of Idiopathic CraniofacialErythema”

Perhaps the thing I am most proud of in creating Under the Gum Tree is that alongside these accomplished artists, I also published a story by my childhood best friend about her first pregnancy: one that was a surprise to her and her then-ex-boyfriend (now husband) and an abomination to her devout Christian parents.

I have the chance to help others tell stories that need to be told, because we all have a story that can help at least one other person in the world. That’s the goal of telling stories without shame.