Journey of Healing: Gray Is the New Black by Dorothy Rice

Most girls spend the first ten years in their bodies blissfully unconscious of the roller coaster to come. They hit puberty and spend the next ten years in love/hate with the same, albeit changing body. They learn to conflate their body’s pleasure with its power to attract. The confusion in this equation often leads to abuse, whether in aggressive workouts to keep one’s shape or in self-defeating addictions to drugs, booze, or sex with bad men. Whether they eat too little or too much, a lot of women age forty-five and up struggle with some kind of food issue. If a woman’s lucky, and willing to put in the intense inner work, she might spend the final third of her of life repairing the damage that’s been done, finally healing the relationship she’s developed with her physical self.

Dorothy Rice’s memoir, Gray is the New Black, chronicles this journey of healing. The author, a retired California civil service worker in her early sixties, vows to take a year, from January to January, to understand the stagnation in her marriage, face her on-going food issues, and devote time to her writing life. She signs up for a book-in-a-year writing class and decides her project will be this memoir, the year she takes “to get my shit together.” Her goal is ambitious: to “crack the code of living my life in the now,” to make “peace with the past and embrace the present.”

Key characters in the book are the author’s two sisters: younger, fit, driven Juliet, and the free-spirited Roxanne, Rocky, four years the author’s senior. Rice’s husband is another major figure in the book; the author married Bob later in life and the two raised a blended family of teens, plus had a daughter of their own when Rice was forty-four.

Early in the book, Rice’s sister Rocky challenges her to stop dyeing her hair. In the spirit of personal rebirth, Rice accepts her sister’s challenge and two months later, Rice has what one observer calls a “reverse hombre,” with silver streaks growing down into the dark brown. Her hair draws stares and compliments. Even Rice herself loves her hair. As such, her hair acts as a life preserver for the memoir, an honest, thorough chronicle of a debilitating sugar addiction, a years-long relationship with a sexual predator, an abusive first marriage, and ongoing struggles with yo-yo dieting.

From the beginning Rice is upfront about her sugar addiction. Though she begs her husband to hide the jumbo-sized bags of chocolate Halloween candy, she also admits that most people are like Bob, “they don’t get it.” They don’t see the difference between a “major sweet tooth” and a food addiction. “If you’re an addict, you don’t have [just] a taste of heroin,” Rice claims. Nor do you have “a little bit of booze or meth.”

She finds the bags, repeatedly inspects them for holes, a way in. A day or two later, she finds one — Bob must have sampled them — and the binge begins. She starts with just a dozen, then a dozen more. Then the bag is empty. Twelve hours later comes the consequence: a brutal migraine brought on by the sugar, hours of vomiting, dry heaves, wetting herself, and pain in her head that makes her skull feel like a “flaming match tip.” She lays delirious in the dark, vowing never to binge again. 

Until, of course, she does. Such is the nature of addiction. Just as the author can’t stop the bingeing, neither can the reader look away from the harrowing, honest descriptions of an addict in the throes. The power of the scene comes in part from the book’s structure; Rice lets readers witness the first binge early and we dread the inevitable recurrence. It’s hard to read this struggle, and it gets even worse when she begins to examine past self-destructive behaviors, namely her recurring encounters with the rapist she first met at age fourteen.

Here the book takes a darker turn towards the underlying cause of her shame. Rice claims that most women she knows have a rape story, a fact neither defended nor analyzed. In a fiction workshop, Rice tried to write about Ron before. Readers complained that the protagonist was too passive. The story was predictable as soon as the “stupid” girl got in the car. In fact Rice’s rape story is not conventional; she is not attacked but lured into a car by a twenty-something man who regularly trolls her high school. He doesn’t pin her down and force himself upon her; he unzips his pants, grabs her by the neck and forces her to perform fellatio. In his car. Parked on the side of the road.

These encounters with Ron continue intermittently for two years. Rice’s descriptions of these horrific experiences are riveting, as is her honesty about her own confusion:

It’s hard to understand why I kept seeing Ron, why I didn’t stop. I do know that even as I came when he called and did what he asked, I desperately wanted a real boyfriend. I knew that what I did with him was nothing to be proud of. I didn’t tell anyone about it. I didn’t even like to think about it. Nor did I enjoy it or look forward to the next time. . . . It was never about me, or even about sex, but rather power, control, domination. I didn’t get this intellectually, but I knew it in my bones. I’d surrendered free will.

Later she meets some of his other victims, also students at her high school. Mandy, a friend who was disowned by her mother at age sixteen, also had dealings with Ron. But unlike Rice, Mandy refused to acquiesce. “Was he at least cute?” Rice asks Mandy. “Just another loser,” Mandy says. “I can’t believe anyone would ever fall for his bullshit.”

That Rice never admits to Mandy that she “fell for his bullshit” is telling. Perhaps more powerful is what she doesn’t say to the reader. She doesn’t describe the humiliation. She doesn’t wallow in her own gullibility. She doesn’t try to defend or justify her shame. When she finally gets free of Ron, she wants to believe that Mandy’s words triggered her self-esteem. But in fact she has “no such moment to replay and relive with pride.” More likely, she admits, she simply “aged out.” Ron lost interest.

In the middle section of the book Rice and her sister attend “fat camp,” a self-help ranch in Utah where residents see therapists and learn about nutrition. Rice hikes longer and farther than she thought possible. And she experiences inner growth: “I’ve resisted happiness for being too simple, too trite and ordinary” she understands. Yet “there’s no more innate foolishness or simple-mindedness in contentment than there is in perpetual angst.”

Perhaps what sets Gray is the New Black apart from other self-reckoning memoirs is this willingness to take responsibility for the false truths she has clung to most of her life. Nowhere is this more evident than in the description of her marriage. This vector of the memoir is even more empowering than the stark honesty with which she analyzes her time with Ron, and it’s more riveting than the train wreck of her sugar binges. Here is where the reader sees change unfolding.

Rice longs for a more passionate marriage, yet her self disgust after a bout of anxiety eating makes it evident that she doesn’t feel she deserves it: “Probably I should shut up and be happy. I have a comfortable home, a decent pension, time to do the things I want.” As such, she wonders if “a deeper emotional and physical connection, worth jeopardizing all that?”

It is and it isn’t. Rice writes scenes in which she consciously baits Bob, saying she “batted my lashes and hunched my shoulders so my breasts pressed together” then asks him the mother lode of loaded questions: “Do you think I’m beautiful?”  Bob, a retired engineer, responds, “It doesn’t matter how you look. I’m already in love with you.”

Early in the book we sympathize with Rice; Bob is a “literal kind of guy,” and more than a little dense when it comes to speaking his feelings. But Rice baits him in this way repeatedly, and he fails repeatedly. She admits that she can’t be angry; she has gained weight and knows she doesn’t look her best.

By the book’s end, after her year spent excavating shame, Rice can admit that she has “waited all [her] life for a man to say the prescribed magic words to me, to perform the prescribed grand gestures.” Feeling cheated, she has assumed she wasn’t good enough to get the “Lifetime movie moments.” But when she is finally honest with herself, Rice sees that her lifelong dissatisfaction is based on fairytales and movies. Are these good enough reasons, she wonders, “to hold my husband at arm’s length until he utters the magic words? . . .  Does my piano have more than one insistent sour note to plink?”

With incisive, lyrical prose, Dorothy Rice articulates something important about generations of women, especially those who find comfort in language, reading and writing and use these tools to discover why it was so important to them to fit in, to belong, to be wanted by a man, even a bad man, or the wrong man. Why does a woman as smart as Rice “hate herself,” as her mother asks her as an adolescent? We may not get an answer, as readers or writers, or parents, even as older, wiser women looking back at our younger selves.

But that doesn’t mean we should stop asking the questions.

Precise Diction and Vivid Imagery: A Review of Joan Fiset’s Memoir, Namesake

Joan Fiset’s collection, Namesake (2015, Blue Begonia Press), has been described as a book of “memoir vignettes.” Indeed, the passages that comprise the book offer us brief glimpses into Fiset’s childhood and adolescence, ultimately giving us a fuller picture of the author’s life. More precisely, each vignette might be read as a kind of prose poem, as Fiset’s precise diction and vivid imagery allows each passage to stand alone, a tiny slice of life from a time long gone. Passages like “Ballast,” “Wonder Bread,” and “Standardized Testing” give a sense of 1950s American culture and the experiences of a young woman in that time. Nonetheless, each passage, or poem, draws upon or hints at the collection’s larger focus—Fiset’s mother—expanding our understanding of what it means for Fiset to be her mother’s namesake.

For example, in “Mirrored,” the speaker describes her childhood past time of sliding down the banister and a single instance of glimpsing herself in a mirror at the bottom of the stairs: “This face surprised me, a child rounding the bed on her way to some destination. The fleeting image lasted because the mirror was there.” These closing lines simultaneously propel us through the book with the idea of a “destination,” even as the words ask us to linger with this particular passage, to think about the layers of meaning in the idea of reflection. As readers, we understand that Fiset’s mother is the reason the mirror is there. In this way, this vignette of Fiset’s childhood experience speaks more largely to the purpose of the memoir as a whole—a reflection on Fiset’s identity through a reflection on her mother.

Thus, even in the passages that do not mention Fiset’s mother, we have the sense of her presence, of the ways she shaped Fiset’s world. Indeed, as the memoir goes on, Fiset’s mother becomes more and more of a figure in the passages, sometimes blocking out Fiset all together. In “Heartsick,” for example, we actually see a moment from Joan Stone’s point of view: “My mother comes out of the kitchen to comfort me. Years later she can still see me through the window in black-watch plaid. My cotton skirt filled with wind as I ran.” It is as if Fiset, the speaker, has filled her mother’s place, watching her child-self through her mother’s eyes.

As the memoir unfolds, then, the passages move away from innocent moments tinged by the shadow of some family strife until we begin to see a real conflict between Fiset’s parents, and between Fiset’s mother and the world’s expectations. Joan Stone, while present for her daughters, is different from the other mothers and wives around her. She teaches her Girl Scout troupe weird songs and arrives to Fiset’s fashion show in a poorly made dress. In “Entrée,” we learn that “There are sixteen bottles of ketchup in the refrigerator. They stand next to each other, some with an inch of ketchup or less.” This fact is odd, though perhaps not alarming. But the next passage, “S.O.S,” hints more strongly at the mundane paranoia of domesticity: “Turn off the stove; check then check and check it again.” Slowly, these moments reveal something deeply amiss with the mother and the family. In a late passage, young Fiset tells her father not to hit her mother, and eventually we learn of the breakdown that puts Fiset’s mother in the hospital, with shock treatments and medication.

Thus, Fiset’s true talent in this collection seems to be in her ability to slowly and deftly create a fuller picture through these tiny vignettes. While her language is honest and plain, she is never condemning of the figures she depicts. What is more, in revealing her mother’s struggle, Fiset also hints at the struggle of women to find and live out their own identities, perhaps especially in the 1950s and 60s, but also in today’s cultural climate. Before we learn of Joan Stone’s eventual breakdown, we learn of her remarkable early career as an actress on Broadway; she gave up that career to devote herself entirely to her family, to a husband whose love eventually fell short. In the end, we learn that Joan Stone finds true healing only through artwork: “She will talk of how her art grew out of her suffering, how it is the child within.” Thus, Namesake is itself an example of Fiset following in her mother’s footsteps, making art through the sufferings of the past.

While some of the passages do not resonate as powerfully as others, Fiset’s 2015 collection is filled with abiding, poignant concerns. In the selection of moments and images, one can tell that a master is at play. I look forward to reading her newest work.

Feeling Haunted: A Review of In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

When I was a girl I used to read with a kind of anxious-joyful intensity that bodily took me over. I would wedge myself into the space between my creaking bedframe and the wall of my bedroom, and the sunbeams would slant overhead, and the dust would get in my nose, and I would get lost for whole weekends—maybe even weeks if it was the summer. The physical sensations were specific: too-rapid heart beats, short and shallow breaths, a wildness rising in my throat, a wide and unconscious smile, a shivery feeling in my spine, eyes moving rapidly and without blinking until I’d realized periodically that they hurt like a sonofabitch. That specific mania-joy-wonder doesn’t happen for me as often now; I’ve read enough books, and lived long enough, and narrowed my palate. When it does, though, I feel twelve again, and I am once again in my childhood bedroom. I smell the particular smell of the dust and the warm sunbeams and the detergent-rich sheets on my bed.

In Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House, she explores what it means for a space to be haunted—“It means that metaphors abound; that space exists in four dimensions; that if you return somewhere often enough it becomes infused with your energy; that the past never leaves us; that there’s always atmosphere to consider; that you can wound air as cleanly as you can wound flesh.” This is undeniably true. But I think that haunting can work in the reverse too. A feeling can be infused with a specific space, a specific time, and a specific body.

The book haunted me in this way. It haunted me by being unspeakably beautiful and new and clench-my-jaw-hands-are-shaking brilliant. It made me twelve-and-thirty at once; it overlaid my no longer really there Midwestern childhood bedroom over my New York kitchen; it possessed me with all those old familiar drugged-up sensations. I sat rigidly still for hours in the same attitude without even noticing that this is not something which is particularly bearable for me anymore. I ignored fourteen phone calls; four were from my mother. I cancelled one set of plans and declined another. I skipped several meals. And all because I had to—absolutely had to—finish this book, which I did within twenty-four hours of getting my hands on the ARC. And then I flipped back to the front and started again.

It also haunted me with past versions of myself—the “You”s I contain as the book itself takes on a convention of a “You” and an “I” to differentiate the narrator’s self in the timeline of the story. (“You were not always just a You. I was whole—a symbiotic relationship between my best and worst parts—and then, in one sense of the definition, I was cleaved; a neat loop that took first person—that assured, confident woman, the girl detective, the adventurer—away from second, who was always anxious and vibrating like a too-small breed of dog.” From that cleaving, I left and lived on the east coast, lived the most triumphant notes of her life that we think of associated with an artist like Carmen. You’s biographical points are the points which live in her time in Iowa and Indiana, and in the dark of that relationship. I thought you died, but writing this, I’m not sure you did.”) This haunting arises from a number of key biographical parallels which were joy-light-tear-bringing to read, since they are lived experiences I do not often (ever) get to see made vivid on the page. I am suddenly remembering the dedication of the book—”If you need this book, it is for you.”—and at the risk of sounding like an unconscionable egoist, it feels like it is for me, at least when I am alone, in my room, at my desk.

And it is.

And it is not.

This book is, yes, for you (me) if you are someone who can relate to any portion of the experiences or identities outlined and may want to feel a tin bit less alone and more seen.

It is also, explicitly, for The Archive. For a “you” that is collective and historical in context. Which is part of Carmen Maria Machado’s incredible mastery of craft; she can write something at once erudite, personal, and formally complex and experimental, and generous, and contrary, and natural, and meta, and snappy. It’s deft and as weightless as air. I don’t know that I’ve ever read a creative work which has so explicitly engaged with an awareness of the reader, the act of reader, the mind of the reader parsing the text, the idea of text, and the act of writing, while still remaining warm and engaging and funny.

But what can you expect when you pick up the book? (And you should, whoever you are.) Something that feels new. On one hand, Carmen weaves a personal narrative which progresses more or less chronologically through an abusive relationship with a woman she met and dated mostly during her time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. These are presented in a series of what amount to medium-length personal essays, and the language and insight in them is beautiful and touching and clear-eyed. But if this is the more traditional base, the book as a whole is far from traditional, because that more traditional memoir fodder is only one strand which Carmen deftly braids with personal essays dealing with other periods of her life—as the information may become relevant—academic and cultural essays on topics ranging from Louise Bourgeois, the Gaslight films, Saidiya Hartman’s “violence of the archive,” queer history, Gothicism, Doctor Who, folktales, features of abusive relationships, A Star is Born, the concept of hauntings, and more and more. Each essay is playful and smart and different from those around it, starting with “Dream House as…” and taking on variously the form and genre conventions of a bildungsroman, a choose your own adventure, a libretto, a murder mystery, and so on, and so on.

In the Dream House is also, before you get too far into this review thinking that the book is going to be some kind of alternatively maudlin and hyper-intellectually dry tome, very much playful and funny. In the very first section, or essay, or whatever I am meant to call it, “Dream House as Overture,” she begins the whole book with “I never read prologues.” The very next section, when you turn the page, is “Dream House as Prologue.” This tongue-in-cheek, double-back-upon-itself dance permeates the whole work. So too does a sense of interrogating the purpose and use and limitations of the work itself (“the memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection”), but also the strength and power and necessity of it—of memoir and memory. While she explicitly acknowledges that hers are just one person’s—with just one person’s constellation of identities—lived experiences, Carmen addresses early on, and then again and again throughout the book the problem of the archive: of history, and queer history, and the lack of literature and documentation and study of abuse in relationships between people with the same gender identities. History is incomplete, and that has individual and communal implications. So, with her memoir, she “enters into the archive that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon, and that it can look something like this.”

The truth is I’m a little bit in goofy-sappy love with this book, just like I was a little bit in goofy-sappy love Carmen’s debut collection of short stories Her Body and Other Parties, when my good friend Patrick (who reviewed it for this very site) pressed the book into my hands and said ‘no really, you need to read this, YOU especially need to read this.’ And so when I saw that the ARCs were coming in for her second book I leapt at the chance to “dibs” reviewing it (umm, sorry Patrick). So now I arrive at the third way I am feeling a little haunted while writing this review, which is with a tinge of embarrassment. Both the reflexive embarrassment I always when I have a crush (and, yes, I get crushes on books), and also with the lightly mortifying memory—persistently lingering in my consciousness as I write this—of the time that I met Carmen (briefly) at a reading she did with NYU at the KGB bar. When I fainted right there in front of her. (It was hot and overcrowded, I had low blood pressure, let’s just… leave it.) I can assure everyone that she could not have been kinder, or more concerned and gracious. She offered me a granola bar and I was a little out of it, but I remember getting really weird about how I couldn’t possibly, not her granola bars, oh my gosh. I did however take the opportunity to introduce myself and dizzily say “hi, I’m a big fan.” She talked to me for a while to put me at ease, and drew smelling salts in my copy of her book when I asked her to sign it, and very kindly did not make fun of me even a little despite how weird I was being.

So, if none of the praises I’ve heaped on In the Dream House have swayed you thus far, here’s one last salvo: it is a good thing in this world and in our community to support and lift up the lovely ones, by which I mean the writers and artists are brilliant and funny, and still warm and kind and human. And Carmen Maria Machado seems, really seems, like a good one.

An Interview with Grace Talusan, author of The Body Papers

The acts of language and speaking, or not speaking, feature prominently in Grace Talusan’s memoir, The Body Papers, winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, so it was truly a pleasure to be in conversation with her recently and to have the opportunity to ask her about the experience of writing her first book. The following interview was conducted over email in the spring of 2019. While Grace and I began by discussing The Body Papers, we soon found ourselves covering other ground as well, from the everyday structure dogs can provide in our lives, to the value of formal education for writers, the vital importance of good editors, and a lot in between.

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Erica Bernheim: As I was reading The Body Papers, I found myself thinking about other writers who have published non-traditional memoirs that make use of collage forms. Lynda Barry (whose name I was delighted to see appear in your acknowledgments), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Susanna Kaysen come to my mind. Who are some of the other writers and artists whose forms and formal decisions you would say have inspired and influenced you?

Grace Talusan: I have loved Karen Tei Yamashita’s books for a long time and while I was editing The Body Papers, I picked up Letters to Memory (Coffee House Press September 2017), a beautiful epistolary memoir. Throughout the book are handwritten notes, photographs, and other images from her family archives. They are incredibly moving and opened up possibilities for me as I revised my manuscript.

Many years ago, I read A.M. Homes’ novel The End of Alice and then the related book, Appendix A: which Homes’ website describes as “a collection of epistemological evidence, clues to the narrator’s mind, his “confession,” and photo scrapbook, his paintings, trinkets he pocketed: a ring, a watch, three teeth, the knife–all remnants of his lingering and deadly infatuation with a little girl called Alice.  Appendix A: is an exercise of imagination, occupying an unexpected space between truth and fiction, art and evidence.” That stayed with me and also showed me that there were ways to put together a book that were nontraditional.

Besides the writers I listed in my “Acknowledgements” (Sandra Cisneros, Jessica Hagedorn, etc), I was influenced by any writer I came across who breaks the rules of what a page in a book should typically looks like. I can remember seeing E.E. Cummings for the first time as an elementary school student and being so excited by the playfulness in his poems. There’s a part of me that has a hard time taking up space on the page and “wasting” paper so it is freeing for me to see writers own the page and do whatever it is they want on it, including only have a few words or taking up an entire page with an image, in order to achieve their desired effect.

EB: Can you speak about the process of selecting the photos you used for The Body Papers? I’m also curious about your decision to caption the photos from the third person perspective, rather than first person. How did you make that decision, and what effect do you think it has for or on your reader?

GT: Until this moment, I never thought about the narrator who captioned the images. I think I was being lazy, but your question brings up interesting possibilities in terms of who is narrating the images and how that is a different voice from the text. My husband, Alonso Nichols, is responsible for most, if not all, of the contemporary photos in the book and he had captioned them already for to use for other venues and I copy/pasted those into my book and then edited them. A more interesting response, and probably truer, is that the photos are very already intimate and captioning them in third person was a way for me, as a writer, as a human, to get some distance. I decided to pull a lot of photos that were initially in the galley because I felt they were too revealing and intimate. What I mean by that is the look on my face in the photos of my childhood says everything. They were too painful for me to look at because I knew the true story behind what I was trying to hide with my smile.

That’s my story and perspective of what I needed to do to get this book out in the world with images in it, but in terms of the impact and effect on the reader, I can only speculate, but the third person captions perhaps builds more credibility? I think other immigrants, people of color, women, girls, and other marginalized folks understand this experience of wanting evidence or “receipts,” as they are called, to back up their version of things. In case the reader didn’t believe me or dismissed my story, I wanted there to be a kind of third person evidence that the reader could assure themselves supported my story. It’s unfortunate, but that is something I’ve learned to do over a lifetime of being dismissed in small and big ways.

EB: In her novel Geek Love, Katherine Dunn describes some of our most brutal moments from childhood, the lessons we learn, including why children conceal information from adults who might be able to help, how painful it is to realize that adults can’t fix some problems: “Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion.” In Chapter 12, when downplaying the extent of your abuse in a conversation with your father, you say that “[e]ven then, I wanted to protect my parents.” For you, does this impulse to protect also become a factor in understanding why victims of abuse may remain silent for so long afterwards?

GT: I can only speak for myself and for the understanding that I’ve gained through talking with other survivors about why we are silent. There are the usual ways that have been talked about and explored—victims are not believed, they are dismissed, they are threatened, they are pressured to “take one for the team”—and this moment with my father was a way to explore a nuance of this experience. Power is seductive and I wanted even a tiny sliver of power, or the idea of power, in that moment, a time in my life when I was quite powerless in dozens of ways. The notion that I could protect someone else’s feelings, even if it wasn’t true, was a kind of power that I wanted. That moment was also one of the most uncomfortable in my life and I wanted any chance to alleviate the discomfort.

I can tell you that I told my friends what was happening to me while it was happening. They were children themselves and looking back, I don’t blame them for their responses, but they did not believe me. They said I just wanted attention. They told the other children in the neighborhood about what they called my lies. They said my grandfather was too nice to do those things. If my friends didn’t believe me, I had no hope that anyone else would.

EB: Throughout The Body Papers, you juxtapose images of domesticity against images of violence and abuse, such as in Chapter 3, when your father “hangs” in the kitchen while watching his mother prepare food, setting up your own story of abuse later, one which occurs from within the “safety” of home and family. And later, you say that “the irony of all of this is that the most hurt I’ve experienced was while I was living under her roof” (pg. 130), in reference to how your mother cares for you in your adulthood. Is there a way to reclaim one’s home once it has been violated?

GT: I have heard of people having rituals and ceremonies that helps with this. I have never had the experience of feeling truly safe in any home I’ve lived in so I don’t know. I’m not one who is always checking the locks on my windows and doors, but I can say that if there are strange noises, at first, I am completely prepared for anything to happen, for a stranger to walk into my bedroom. Then I have to remind myself that our windows and doors to the outside are locked and I am safe and it is unlikely that that small noise outside is someone breaking through our locked windows and doors.

I worked with a cognitive behavior therapist on this once. She told me to imagine a red traffic Stop sign when I had these intrusive thoughts. I do that. My home is my body and I will likely work the rest of my life trying to reclaim it.

EB: Dogs make intermittent appearances throughout The Body Papers. Your father has the chance to re-live his tragic childhood experience with Lucky through your family’s pampered beagle, Sashi. And later, your husband notes how differently he is treated when he is walking your sister’s dog than when he is walking by himself. Are there other ways that animals and your own relationships with them have factored into your writing?

GT: We don’t have our own pets at this point, but my husband dreams of having have two dogs. So we don’t have animals in our life expect intermittently. In terms this book, I wrote several pieces while dogsitting a yellow lab named Finn for a friend. My writing scheduled revolved around walking and feeding him. I would take him out and feed him early in the morning and then I’d go write for a few hours and then walk him at noon and then return to writing and then walk him and feed him dinner and then read or write and then walk him before I went to sleep. This was a wonderful schedule for me. It forced me to walk and take care of my body between writing sessions and it also put me next to a friendly loving dog who was happy to see me.

EB: The moment of closeness between you and your father in the final pages of The Body Papers is incredibly moving, and I loved the re-telling of it from both of your perspectives. How did you decide where to end your memoir?

GT: I have my editor, Nathan Rostron, and publisher, Ilan Stavans, to thank for helping me find the ending. We went through many iterations of this book. Countless. Dozens. We had many different table of contents. We were moving and shuffling pieces of the book up until the very end. I heard John Irving speak once and he said that he knew the ending of his very long novels, the last line, and he was writing to that line. Whatever that is that he’s talking about, I did the opposite of that for this book. I didn’t know where the ending was and I was not sure that this was the end, but we were constantly moving things around and at some point, this became the ending. I thought it was a placeholder until we found the right ending, but eventually, I realized that this was it. I was nervous to end it here, at this discrepancy between two versions of the same event, because I thought it would raise too many questions for the reader, but the feeling was right where I wanted to leave the reader.

EB: In Chapter 12, you mention that “[d]espite my grandparents’ lack of formal education, they understood its value.” What value do you place on formal education for artists and writers specifically?

GT: I do not believe that artists and writers need formal education to make their work; however, I do believe the value of MFA programs and other similar writing courses is that you are in community with others who could help you in many ways with your growth and development. This often requires money and time. I also think emerging writers need to be careful and discerning about where they take classes and who they invite into their lives. Some teachers and fellow students can be destructive to your writing and you have to guard against that. I have taught for many years at GrubStreet, Inc in Boston and that is the best writing center around. They have intentionally built a writing community that is rigorous, supportive, and responsive.

EB: I noticed in your acknowledgments that you have attended a number of wonderful summer workshops and artists’ residencies, including Ragdale! (I hope you saw the phone booth that Lynda Barry decorated when she was there!) How important have these spaces been for you, not just for your writing, but for connecting with other writers and artists?

GT: Yes! I would stand in that tiny, magical room of her drawings and have a moment almost every time I passed it.

Because of time, I can only attend a summer workshop or residency every few years. I really enjoy them and feel they are a way of resetting and reminding myself that it is ok to put writing and art at the center of my life ever now and again. The Ragdale residency and places like it that are multi-disciplinary are wonderful because I am living and working alongside artists who are musicians, sculptors, painters, fabric artists, and performers as well as other writers. We work alone all day and come together at night to eat dinner. I feel there is a way that all of us impact each other, even in small, but vital ways. I also have loved the spaces where I’m just around other writers. I can be around other people who are like me in that they spend many hours of their life reading and writing to no guaranteed end. Whenever I published an article or essay in a literary magazine or online, my immigrant father would ask me how much I was paid for it and then how many hours it took me to work on the piece. I would want to scream. Being at a residency reminds me that there are other people like me who are motivated (but also privileged) to work in a different kind of economy where the reward is not often financial.

EB: How do you perceive genre and the usefulness of it overall? Where does it overlap for you, one genre into another, both as a writer and a teacher of writing?

GT: I was a child immigrant, the Philippines to the US, but I also was constantly moving cultural contexts every time I left my house. I am very interested in knowing what the rules and norms, explicit and implicit, are for every occasion. I like to know where boundaries and borders are. That said, I have come to realize that the writing and art that excites me the most breaks the rules and opens up what is new and possible. The writers I am drawn to the most are making work that is between or on top of one or more genres. My friend Christopher Castellani, who comes from an immigrant family from Italy, recently published the gorgeous novel, Leading Men, and this book has a play in it that he wrote in the style of Tennessee Williams. When I read that, I thought, “What? You can do that? It’s allowed?” From Chris’ example, now I know that you can. Anything is possible. I need to be like Chris and be braver in my work.

In terms of the fiction versus nonfiction (and there are many kinds of nonfiction—literary journalism, reporting, memoir, lyric essay, and on and on), as both a teacher and a writer, I don’t want to be tricked. Just tell me in some way somehow that this is imagined or fiction or made up. Respect your reader.

EB: Who are some contemporary writers whose work excites you and makes you want to read more?

GT: I am lucky in that I am in the best writing group in the world, the Chunky Monkeys. I am excited by their work and want to read more of it. Looking ahead, I can’t wait to read forthcoming books from my group: Calvin Hennick’s Once More to the Rodeo in December 2019 and Jennifer De Leon’s Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From in February 2020.

I have been paying a lot of attention to contemporary writing by Filipinx writers. I am so excited for Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror in August 2019, Ricco Siasoco’s The Foley Artist and Other Stories in fall 2019, and Meredith Talusan’s Fairest in spring 2020. I just read Malaka Gharib’s I Was Their American Dream, which I am buying in multiple copies and putting into the hands of people I love. I have always wanted to write a book where people felt that way about it and did that.

A Conversation Between Kelly J. Beard and Adrian Koesters: Part Two

Kelly J. Beard and Adrian Koesters continue their conversation about the writing life, their experiences of faith, and the legacies of poverty and violence in this conclusion. Click Here for Part One of this conversation.

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AEK: And of course, as you so movingly and astonishingly describe in your book, you take all the rules you learned as a child with you into adulthood, and continue to play by them, consciously or unconsciously. The main reason I created Carmen as a mixed race person, other than to represent the real mix of black and white in that neighborhood, was because, first, I needed a renegade who was a woman; and I needed a woman who would have very good reasons not to care about anything. Carmen turns not-caring into an art form from a very early age, and part of that for her is passing “as white,” though in fact her mother is White. In Carmen’s mind, race is something that, at least consciously, she doesn’t think about as applying to her. But again, I think in that location, this is something that would be possible where it would not someplace else.

The rage and inability to navigate the world you identify I also understand well, even though, like you, it took a lifetime to recognize and understand how directly these came from being poor. It is a very long time since I have not had enough to eat or enough money to buy shoes, and beyond that, I have a Master’s degree and a doctorate, though both were achieved pretty late in my life. For that reason alone, I will never not be a privileged person again, no matter what my material resources. But as author Ruby Payne would say, I have those resources but still lack understanding of social rules. Among my so-called “peers,” I still never really know what the rules are, and see how I still break them all the time. I have lost friends and relationships this way, and experienced a great deal of social isolation. In that respect, I would say that most places at most times of my life, I have been passing as a middle-class person.

For the story of Union Square itself, I also chose to use the Rashomon technique for the first four days of the narrative to replicate the fracturing and isolation I wanted to convey, that as far as I can see is not a part of middle class culture as a rule, while exploring this place and the kind of people who lived in it. Young Emerson represents both the neighborhood and the social isolation that comes with not having been taught how to take on an adult set of rules. Catherine likely represents the more healthy, though immature side of myself, or as I say, who I wished I had been. Petie is the solid guy who is provoked to violence as nearly his default response to every situation—he’s the kind of hot-head who populates such places, though he’s a good person. He’s also the one who really belongs to and understands the environment as such. And Paddy and Carmen, of course, represent the sum of what it means to be broken by such experiences, and how they break everyone else in their turn.

KJB: One of the most compelling and risky aspects of your nonfiction work, I think, is how you directly embrace your faith. Your novel does so as well, albeit more obliquely. I wonder if you get asked about this when you’re reading or talking with folks about your work. How (or why) does one retain her faith despite having witnessed or experienced deeply wounding betrayals by the human representatives of that faith?

AEK: Yes, that is definitely one of the hardest parts of all of this. Mostly, people don’t ask that question directly. I get the feeling they sort of put up with that part of me because they respect me as an artist, for which I’m grateful, but I do find it amusing and yet often frustrating.

The early days of my childhood in the Catholic Church were mixed of fear, awe, and love, and there’s no other way to say that. I have very hazy memories of incidents that seem to have involved clergy members. I can’t say more than that, because I don’t really remember, but the feelings about it are both strong and often debilitating. But I have always had a feeling of “knowing” the presence of God, even in my nominally atheist teen years—and in fact, they were not atheist years, but anti-religion years. I had a hatred of fundamentalist Christians that would have burned your eyebrows off—but that was the embedded rage against all things religious.

The change for me came when I (against all expectation) decided to go to Creighton University here in Omaha for my undergraduate degree. At the time you had to take what now would be considered a dual minor in theology and philosophy, and I ultimately majored in theology. We thought we had discovered the Holy Grail of Catholic truth, Vatican II, and we were taught by lay professors and Jesuits, many of whom I owe a great debt of gratitude to, for their intellectual honesty as well as their care and kindness for me as a young person. In those years, I had a conversion experience, came to understand Jesus as a person, and I’ve never deviated from that since. I went on after graduation to work as a volunteer for a year, and taught high school religion for three years after that. Our family, my husband and daughter and myself, are not what I would call deeply religious, but thoroughly religious. This is simply a matter of fact, not of any kind of superior stance or any assumption.

But having faith and hope in the reforms of Vatican II have obviously been no sinecures for the terrible abuses that came to light over the past four or more decades. As an adult, college and beyond, I have known some truly horrible clergy members. A handful tried to seduce me, or I knew of them seducing or attempting to seduce other young men or women. A priest I held in the highest esteem turned out to be a child molester, maybe a child rapist, I don’t know. Any number of them had adult relationships which, had they been married, would have made them adulterers, and as I understand it, that’s actually one of the commandments you’re not supposed to break. The scope of the revelations of 2002 that were followed by the film Spotlight were shattering, and at one point I was not sure I would survive them.

So, it’s a complicated situation to say the least. Like A. Richard Sipe, I consider myself Catholic, and though I try to be part of a faith community, that is not always possible. Many of the poems I have written are essentially “problem of evil” questions, as Union Square is in many ways a problem of evil novel. No one can get to the bottom of such matter—I certainly don’t pretend to. On the other hand, I also believe that no one has the right to rob you of how you express your truth and belief. So much of the Church right now is bad, but I still think that its core is the revelation of God that I am meant to follow. Though I have tried, I’ve never been able to completely deviate from that stance.

I wonder how your answer will differ from mine, as clearly you were equally part and parcel of your faith and that world as a child. Have you had to reconcile how that influenced you, and have you made a new choice or a different one?

KJB: I have so much trouble with that question. In part because I can’t say I’m Catholic or I’m Jewish, or otherwise claim some presumably concrete theology. When people ask (as they do) “What do you believe now?”) I’m stumped. I spent years dragging my husband and daughter to every church within a ten-mile radius of our home, trying to find a church I felt comfortable in, but after weeks or months, or sometimes years, I’d walk away feeling disillusioned, and often angry. It was usually a tithing sermon that sent me over the edge. I grew up in a church that prioritized tithing over everything – including buying decent food or clothes – and I can’t stand to hear sermons on tithing. In any event, every church experience was ultimately a let-down. I stopped attended services three or four years ago.

And yet, I have never lost my faith. When I try to answer that question about faith – what and why I believe – I am reminded of Jung’s late-in-life answer to that question. He declined to reveal or write about his own faith until he was in his 80s, fearing that to do so would marginalize his work. But in his posthumously published Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he writes that he never lost his faith. His faith came to him experientially, he wrote, and thus he could never lose it. It’s precisely what you said earlier. You can’t lose faith you gain through experience, that is, you can’t un-know the experience of knowing.

And, like you, in the midst of all the pain and craziness, there were moments of knowing and transcendence. I include a few of those moments in the memoir. The times when, inexplicably, I experienced moments of grace – miracles, if you will – that I can’t discount. I suppose that’s the best explanation I can give for why, despite everything, I have never lost my own faith. Sometimes I’ve felt the door closing between me and that knowing, and I work at faith then, because I don’t want to lose it, I don’t want to bear the darkness alone.

AEK: “You can’t un-know the experience of knowing”—wow, that is exactly how I was wanting to say that, thank you.

I guess I would end with the question of culpability and forgiveness, which in a novel is really not the same kind of issue, as long as you don’t condescend to any of your characters by making them holier than everybody else, or more evil than they are. Paddy was the best exercise in this for me, and my aim was to get as close inside the head of such a person as I could, so as to (at least for a while) deliver him as a person and not a cipher or a cartoon. But in memoir, you also have the choice about whom to picture as the enemy and whom the beloved, and you have the duty to take responsibility for your own sins. I believe the accuser and the accused can be unjustly conflated far too easily, that we can put ourselves to blame and shame far more readily than those who hurt us. And I suppose you have already gotten comments from readers who wonder how you could forgive especially your father, and how you could write about that. But that is where I would really appreciate hearing your thoughts, as you must have wrestled with them greatly.

KJB: I have had a few readers ask some iteration of “I hate your dad, why don’t you?”  That just makes me think I didn’t do what I set out to do, which was to work against stereotypes and caricatures with intentionality – to write difficult characters with enough of their experiences and contradictions and complications on the page to make the reader empathize with them – even when the reader may not want to. I feel most heartened by responses like one I received in an email the other day, where a woman said she felt like she should hate my dad but she ended up loving him instead.

It’s deeply complicated, of course, and it brings to mind the Watson research from the ‘60s (studying, among other things, the effect of maternal negligence and abuse on chimpanzee babies, and how the babies kept trying every strategy imaginable to evoke love or tenderness from the parent, no matter how many times the mother ignored or abused the baby – it’s really heartbreaking, but pretty eye-opening, too) concluding that babies and children are so hard-wired to love their parents it’s almost (almost, but not completely) impossible for a child not to love her parent.

Also, I believe that with very few exceptions, if we really get inside the skin of another person, if we can move around in that person’s interiority long enough, we will find empathy and compassion – and love – for that person. I think I spent my whole life prior to writing this memoir trying to figure out the why of my parents’ abuse, the why of what prompts someone who loves you (and who you love with the wide-open heart of a child) to also hurt you. My dad died in 1996, long before it occurred to me to ask that question directly. My mom is still alive, though, and I recently asked her some version of that question. It wasn’t a very satisfying answer. She’s in her 90s now, and has some cognitive challenges, so I didn’t think anything would be served by pressing it, even though her answer was to blame my dad.

AEK: I have pretty well spent my lifetime trying to extinguish my need to walk around in those people’s shoes, but the difference is likely that your father and mother clearly loved all of you. But there is a point at which I just have to say, forgiveness is God’s job, not mine. As one pastor said to me a long time ago, if one of those people showed up at my door and was truly contrite and asked for my forgiveness (and, when your father, Kelly, does that, it changes everything about him for the reader), then I would have a choice to make. I never had to make that choice.

My private feeling is that the betrayal of the mother is worse for most of us. Whether she is the abuser or complicit in abuse by father, sibling, whoever it is, she is the one who is supposed to not be that person. And I would think someone like your mother would have to blame someone else. I agree with you that there is a point at which hammering out the truth despite the expense just isn’t worth it. It doesn’t make us less authentic, I think, but really more so.

And I have to compliment you in turn: what you achieved was obviously a breath-takingly delicate balance of what is, in your life, the truth, the authentic. It is an incredible accomplishment. I love your book and hope there is another one to come, and that we can meet again.

KJB: Thank you so much, Adrian. I was already a huge fan of your work before we had this chance to chat, but getting a peek at the person behind the work has been a thrill. I hope our paths cross again.

After the Death of Shostakovich Père by Maya Sonenberg

Maya Sonenberg’s memoir/personal essay, After the Death of Shostakovich Père is an intermingling of family-related memories, authors that shaped her as a reader and as a writer, contemplations on grief, and how this coalesces around a sense of identity. Within four sections, Sonenberg takes a non-linear approach to examining her father’s, Jack Sonenberg’s, pivotal life events. Ms. Sonenberg often addresses the reader with invitations to “imagine,” and takes an authorial stance that is overtly aware that what is offered from her accounts of a daughter making sense of her talented father’s demise and death, are experiences presented to strangers, unknown readers who find her book, but trusting, as every writer trusts, that the personal life of a writer can instinctively correlate to the personal life of a reader.

Sonenberg includes other narrators in addition to her own lyrical prose and occasional lines of verse. We hear from Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional characters, Sonenberg’s own fictional characters, and most compelling, as she curates her father’s own words by means of diary excerpts and recorded dreams. The intertextuality adds inspired echoes throughout the memoir and essays. In addition to the personal writing, is an effectively unnerving short story. The wide-ranging mixed genre in After the Death of Shostakovich Père feels much more substantial in scope than the page count suggests: it is rich with well-placed imagery, and intricate psychological insight.

In “Prelude,” Sonenberg succinctly paints a portrait of her parents and her childhood; she was raised by an artistic and passionate family—with professions and interests in painting, music, activism, and natural habitats. And a portrait of a herself emerges as a well-read person who is forensically observant, and empathetic. This preciseness encourages the reader to relate to the author’s experiences, and this is consistent throughout the work. Details such as, “…a cold mountain stream ran, the water delicious but laced with arsenic,” clues us in to the bittersweet reality of giving ourselves over to the vulnerability of loving someone entirely. She invites us to imagine along with her as she constructs an experience of grief that she can make sense of, and so that we can as well.

Sonenberg brings in stories of others’ experiences of grief to refract shared loss, in the way that relatable personal stories can buffer individual grief. In “Prelude,” Dimitri Shostakovich’s father suddenly dies in 1922, forever changing the trajectory of his life and that of his mother and sister. Shostakovich writes a piece of music and dedicates it to his father, and plays it with his sister, to “‘include her in this act of mourning.’” The music that Sonenberg and her father enjoyed together was part of their bond, a way for Sonenberg to illustrate how shared experiences often define relationships.

In “Danse Fantastique,” we are given more excerpts that chronicle her father’s life, her youth, and authors that influenced her. These memories meander non-linearly and highlight moments of her father before and after a devastating stroke, taking us into ruminations spun off of Jorge Luis Borges’ story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” and examples of Borges’ characters who encounter ancestors, just as Sonenberg engages with ancestors when she crafts a story out of her father’s life.

Then in the fictional story, “Nocturne,” a young woman and her niece are on a road trip when by chance, the main character, Reba, stops at a small-town motel, waking in the night to supernaturally meet the ghost of her neglectful father. Embedded in the story is a photograph of Sonenberg’s father, a ghostly reflection in a mirror gazing out of the photograph at the reader. Once again, Sonenberg’s impulse is to invite us to accompany her on this exploration of grief, which successfully creates a sense of solidarity, and solace.

The last section, “Finale,” includes more black and white candid photographs of the author when she was a child and her father when he was in the prime of life. Sonenberg offers from the pages of her father’s writings, his own account of his mother’s death, “…3 a.m. in her sleep—mercifully—her agony not drawn out—enough agony being told by the doctor—seeing in all our faces the awareness of her death…’” And once more, Sonenberg returns to a familiar text which reflects her own reevaluation of death as she revisits Borges’ story, “The Library of Babel,” a tale she once loved, but then as her life changed, the re-reading of a text, as so often does, changes because we have changed. She goes on to poignantly confront the limitations of memory and language when faced with the inevitability of death’s muteness, and those finite memories of what “…is remembered and what is forgotten? By whom and for how long?”

I recommend listening to Russian Composer, Shoskovitch’s, Suite for Two Pianos in F Sharp Minor, Opus 6 while enjoying this engaging selection of memories, candid photographs, fictions, and diary entries; it enriches and deepens the reading experience as the music with its moments of repetitive, obsessive circling of notes is not unlike revisiting memories of loved ones after their passing.

Tomb Song: A Novel by Julían Herbert

Julián Herbert’s mother is dying from cancer in the Saltillo University Hospital. He sits by her side, keeping notes, remembering her life as a runaway and a prostitute, cataloging their family’s slow ascent into the middle class, sharing, at times, in her fever dreams. His bedside thoughts become the novel Tomb Song, a piece of lucid autofiction that finds its structure in association and metaphor more than in any conventional plot. In one chapter, we move from the history of the small fighter squadron Mexico committed to World War 2, to the construction and architecture of the University Hospital itself, to eavesdropping on two orderlies having sex in the morgue in the present day. In Tomb Song, the present serves as more than a framing device, it constantly resurfaces with acute descriptions of Julián’s mother’s failing body and the machines attached to it, of the Kafkaesque hospital bureaucracy, of Julián’s own excursions around the complex. Though any small association can lead from the present to a memory, or story, or dream, we always return, eventually, to the reality of the hospital room, the helpless son, the dying mother.

The primary point of departure from other contemporary autofiction like Knausgaard or Lerner, is Tomb Song’s willingness to abandon the truth. Specifically, Julián seems interested in the corrosive effect that narcotics and fevers have on both actual and narrative reality. During an opiate binge in Cuba, we are introduced to a degenerate artist named Bobo Lafrauga, who Julián follows to a bar called El Diablito. We later learn that Bobo was the intended protagonist to a novel that Julián scrapped when his mother fell ill, that Bobo and El Diablito are aborted fictions blurred into autobiography. In one breath, Julián will describe a prolonged, heated affair with a television weather woman and in the next he’ll claim that none of it was true. Fiction and non-fiction intersect in this way throughout much of the novel and Julián is always present to help or hinder the distinction between the two.

The associative propulsion from one tangent to another, from the real to the unreal, is often smooth but, due to the distractibility of the narration, topics are sometimes dropped before they have a chance to develop into anything substantial. Micronarratives start off focused then wander. In one instance, Julián remembers what he characterizes as his complicity in the death of a neighborhood boy and how this complicity has haunted him. He then steps back, describes how his family had come to live in the area and only later mentions that the extent of his involvement, in what turns out to be an accidental killing, was that he was there when the murdered boy’s brother bought the gun. There is little reflection here to guide the reader to understand Julián’s self-blame. The benefits of fiction could be used, in instances like this, to enhance these tapering anecdotes or to better calibrate suspense.

Early in the novel, Julián takes stock of the state of fiction while setting a challenge for himself, saying: “we demand it (narrative art) be ordinary without cliché, sublime without any unexpected change of accent.” The real achievement of Tomb Song lies in Julián’s solution to this paradox: his narrative voice. Throughout Tomb Song, we have access to Julián’s lucid, honest, perspective. His voice provides continuity and allows for beautiful and unusual motifs (including a particularly strange sea cucumber metaphor). Though the subject matter is often clinical and bleak, and though he is far from the first narrator to wax poetic by the side of a deathbed, Julián provides so many fresh perspectives, analogies, and turns of thought as to make avoiding cliché in such weighty moments seem simple. It should be noted that it is Christina Macsweeney’s excellent translation deftly brings Julián’s pin-point word choice to English.

In Tomb Song Julián Herbert draws unexpected associations between dozens of disparate topics, stories, observations, and dreams. In the last chapters, from this kaleidoscopic fabric, a larger picture takes shape, a unique perspective on life and the living of it. Readers looking for a current, honest, and unique novel or fans of Ben Lerner, Michel Houellebecq, Samanta Schweblin, and even Roberto Bolaño, will find a lot to love in Tomb Song.