Lizz Schumer and Anne Leigh Parrish Talk About Trust and How Stories Connect Us

I met Anne in that strange, liminal space so many of us are these days: Online, while planning a virtual event reading for my latest book, Biography of a Body. We share a publisher, Unsolicited Press, who matched us up as co-readers because so much of our work explores similar themes. But while I write personal essays and hybrid poetry that delve into what it’s like to be a woman in the world through a highly personal lens, Anne’s fiction brings to life richly painted characters who feel like people you already know. In A Winter Night, we meet Angie Dugan, 34, a social worker struggling with her career, her anxiety, and her difficult family. But like so many of us, she’s also looking for a love she can lean on. Many of the themes in this book — substance abuse, mental health, how much we can trust each other, and whose feelings are worthwhile — feel so pertinent right now, as so many of us grapple with those same issues in isolation. Anne and I talked about what readers can find in this book and how it fits into our broader context.

Lizz Schumer: First, I am always fascinated by titles. The fact that the story is set in the winter certainly tips me off as to why A Winter Night fits on one level, but can you expound a bit on why else that tile works for this book in particular or how you came to it while writing?

Anne Leigh Parrish: I grew up in the Finger Lakes Region of upstate New York, where A Winter Night is set. Winters were long and hard. On a psychic level, winter felt like a retreat, a need to withdraw and seek protection, but it also was a chance to be quiet and reflect. I often sat at my window and watched the snow fall, thinking of the world being covered, lying in wait, preparing itself for the next season. I felt like I did that, too. I waited for time to pass, and my eagerness for what came next was my way of preparing for it.

LS: Without giving too much away, substance use is a major theme in this book. I wonder if you can talk about how you decided to incorporate it, what sort of research you did in order to depict it accurately and thoughtfully. Why do you think it's such a compelling topic, especially now?

ALP: A lot of my characters are train wrecks, and the reason many of them go off the rails is because of alcohol and drug use. These things make someone unreliable, despite his best intentions when he’s sober. My research is personal experience. I have been close to people similarly afflicted, and trying to understand them, and not be harmed by them, spurs me to write about them. With the stress of the pandemic, the economy, and the presidential election, I have to think a lot of us are struggling with substance and alcohol abuse and trying not to jump down our own dreadful rabbit holes.

LS: Similarly, I noticed that weight, food, and the body type of your female characters was also very heavily featured. It struck me that you describe your characters as attaching a lot of value to their size and the food they're consuming (or not consuming). Why do you think that's such a driving force in our culture, and what inspired you to focus on that element?

ALP: Angie Dugan, my thirty-four-year-old protagonist, carries a little too much weight. She’s the only one who cares about this, but she imputes the concern to her love interest, Matt. Early in the novel, she reflects on the fact they haven’t yet slept together, and she wonders if her weight is to blame. I think Angie represents many women in our culture, regardless of what number pops up on the bathroom scale. Men are judged by how much money they make; women by how attractive they are. Angie’s self-doubt is so deep, so hard to soothe and bolster, that even when Matt tells her how great she looks, she doesn’t believe him.

LS: I saw a lot of my own late grandmother's elder care facility in the one where Angie works, which was really touching. I loved the emphasis on the residents' stories. In one scene, two characters talk about the fact that we all tell ourselves stories and that stories keep us human. As a writer, why is it important to you to tell these people's stories, and how do you think storytelling draws out our humanity, in general?

ALP: The purpose of writing — of any art — is to remind us of our common humanity. Stories hold us together across space in one generation, and across time from one generation to the next. The stories we tell ourselves are how we navigate the world. They’re our own private religion and mythology about how we became who we are and why that’s important. Often these stories are based on lies which defend us against how we believe others see us. We take these stories and soften a painful past and brighten an uncertain future.

LS: Similarly, there's a scene in which several of the characters talk about whose feelings are worth protecting. That's such a fascinating idea. Can you talk more about how we make that decision in our lives, and how that sometimes drives our relationships with others?

ALP: I think we learn to view and characterize people through the lens of their weaknesses, or what we perceive as their weaknesses. This speaks again to substance abuse and how it warps not just the perspective of the user, but also the perception of those who have to deal with it. In Angie’s case, her father has a long-standing problem with alcohol. He drinks — or drank, since he’s put much of it behind him now — because he knows how badly he disappointed Angie’s mother, Lavinia. Lavinia suffers a lot, too, but because she just carries on and does what’s required of her, the vibe she gives off is one of strength and being secure in herself, even if she’s not. Angie comes to see that she tends to protect her father because she thinks he can’t take care of himself, when he can. And she tends to overlook her mother’s pain and unhappiness because she functions at a higher level.

LS: I love the complicated relationships in this book, especially those between men and women. Do you model those after anyone in your own life? Who are some of your influences when crafting these relationships between people?

ALP: I’ve been married almost forty-four years, and that’s a long time to spend both observing and experiencing marriage and romantic love. My own parents never seemed to talk about anything important, which contributed to their getting divorced. Many people didn’t open up to their partners back then, probably because it wasn’t encouraged or accepted. I don’t know. My husband and I strive for candor, though we don’t always get there. There’s so much under the surface the other person never sees, yet somehow knows is there. This creates the presence of enormous complexity which both keeps a relationship interesting but can cause strain, especially when other things in life, like careers and what’s going on with your children, go against you.

LS: The meaning of reliability and the limits of how much we can really rely on one another (as well as what it means to go too far) are also explored in depth here. What about that theme interested you? Why do you think it's such an interesting one to explore?

ALP: How much you can rely on someone really comes down to how much you can trust them, assuming they’ve shown themselves to be fairly steady in the first place. We learn this first as children under the care of our parents. Mine were reliable in some ways, and unreliable in crucial ways, especially when it came to affection and offering moral support. They were very wrapped up in themselves, and I never trusted their affection for me, as a result. In Angie’s case, she knows her father loves her unconditionally even though he can’t be counted on to be where he says he’ll be. Her mother is the opposite. She doesn’t hand out affection, though she feels it deeply enough, and is always on time. So, I think it’s a study in what it means to be reliable and more importantly, how. Will one reliably show affection? Kindness? Pay the bills and do chores? Some people are better at some of these than others, and Angie’s is trying to figure out just where Matt falls on this spectrum.

LS: There's a line in A Winter Night that "love is giving someone a chance," which I think is a beautiful sentiment. I'd love to know if there was a particular moment in your own life, or during the creative process, that led you to that idea.

ALP: Angie is constantly confronting her doubts about people, especially Matt. It’s easy for her to assume the worst, and figure he’s just another guy who’s let her down, even when he’s speaking and acting to the contrary. He admits his mistakes then goes on making them, and this drives her crazy. I was proud of her for not falling into the trap some women do, where they tell themselves that the man’s failings are her fault, that she didn’t believe in him enough, or give him enough confidence. Matt asks her flat out if she’ll give them a chance and she sees that she has to, that people don’t come with guarantees. It’s a risk she simply has to take.

LS: One of the things I found fascinating about this story is how timeless it feels. It could have taken place last year, or 20 years ago (a few technological tweaks notwithstanding). Was that intentional?

ALP: I can’t say it was, but I’m glad you found it so. It’s a huge compliment, really. I want my stories to last and not be nailed down to the current time, because life always moves on. The situation Angie finds herself in is timeless, I think, because it’s universal. She wants to find love and has been burned. She has to put herself on the line and try to overcome her doubts and not be all starry-eyed and unrealistic. It’s a hard balance to strike, finding that boundary between oneself and another person, especially because the boundary is always in motion, always shifting.

LS: Let's talk a bit about the writing process. Can you give us a little insight into how this book came to be, and who some of your greatest influences were while writing it? Who are you reading these days? Are there authors your readers might enjoy as a dessert course after finishing this one?

ALP: Well, I love Alice Munro and William Trevor. They are my major influences, and I’d suggest both as dessert to the main course of A Winter Night. As to my writing process, I never outline. Instead, I just roll forward then pause and reread what I’ve got, trying to sense the subtext and direction. I also start pulling out plot threads that need to be resolved or carried through. The one thing I must have always have in hand as I go — or even to begin a story at all — is to know how it ends. Then it’s a matter of building to that point, filling in all that’s blank before then.

Bringing a Collective Experience to Light: A Review of Melissa Febos's Girlhood

Melissa Febos opens her new essay collection, Girlhood, with a collage of visceral images of pain inflicted on the body—bloody knees, burned arms, skin rubbed raw. The opening essay is a lyric barrage of beautiful language and poetic image. In the essays that follow she looks back through a scrutinizing lens on her adolescence. Our very grown-up narrator takes us through the years she spent swimming in the ponds of Cape Cod, through most of her early sexual experiences, and into her late teens and twenties working as a Dominatrix in New York City. Using lyrical language and a meandering structure to move through her memories and experiences, the book also contains illustrations by Forsyth Harmon that highlight some of the most beautiful lines in the book.

Many of the places and scenes will be familiar for those who read her first book, Whip Smart, a memoir about being a dominatrix in New York City, and her essay collection, Abandon Me, about her father, her biological father, and a love affair gone wrong. But Ferbos’s voice and authority feel very different in this work. While the outside research and frequent metaphor were a large part of her second book Abandon Me—Girlhood moves from memoir to theory, and back again, with a new voice of authority. 

Febos sets up the problem that she investigates in this collection, the conditioning of a patriarchal society, and really defines it for the reader in her opening Author’s Note:

“This training of our minds can lead to the exile of many parts of the self, to hatred and the abuse of our own bodies, the policing of other girls, and a lifetime of allegiance to values that do not prioritize our safety, happiness, freedom, or pleasure.”

I read this quote with intrigue, but did not feel this until I was well into her second essay, “Kettle Holes,” where our early-to-develop narrator is expelled from female social circles and sexualized and bullied by young boys. A rush of middle school memories returned to me. Friends whose names appeared on the bathroom stall with “slut” written over it in black sharpie markers, lying about periods and tampons and getting to third base, either because we wanted to give people the impression that we had, or because we wanted to give people the impression that we hadn’t.

She builds on this girlhood narrative in the third essay in the book, “The Mirror Test,” taking the reader on a graceful weave of early sexual exploration—safely on her own—and the harrowing experience of her external sexual experiences. Is it painful to read? At times, yes, but in the sense that she is bringing a collective girlhood experience to light, it feels freeing to see that pain and discomfort that is so rarely addressed put down on the page. Febos takes her time to explain that her experiences were not particularly unusual, she was not raped nor did she experience a specific isolated incident of trauma, but instead, she portrays through her narrative a system of patriarchy that young woman endure which is normal, everyday, and troubling.

My best friend and I, both straight white Midwestern women, spent much of our twenties attempting to unpack our early relationships and sexual experiences as newly college educated grown-ups. Why were we so insecure? Why didn’t we trust men to treat us well? Why did we fear other women—who might see us as a threat, who might be jealous or callous toward us? Where had all of this come from? This questioning and investigation is just the work Febos is doing in Girlhood. Our thoughtful narrator is pulling apart the threads of these early experiences and giving us a context for understanding them. Much of the book is woven narrative, careful to never leave us too long in those dark moments. She regularly moves into a mode of what I can only really explain as autotheory.

Arianne Zwartjes explains in her essay, “Autotheory as Rebellion” (Michigan Quarterly Review) how mixing theory with personal narrative has power: “In one way, autotheory is the chimera of research and imagination. It brings together autobiography with theory and a focus on situating oneself inside a larger world, and it melds these different ways of thinking in creative, unexpected ways.” While Febos is working her way through her girlhood experiences, she is also reaching out to other woman, seeking their stories. She pulls these characters into her own story and brings their voices to the page. She tells us about psychological research and anecdotal research and in doing so paints a much more layered experience than her story alone could accomplish. She doesn’t stop there. She also examines literature and movies to highlight the experiences we see and read about in the media—arguably forming our ideas and beliefs as much as our own experiences. (Her critique of the movie Easy A, a teen comedy from 2010, was easily my favorite.) This analysis from our patient, if not urgent, adult narrator is leading slowly toward her goal—an understanding of what happened to her and what it means.

In her Author’s Note, Febos explains another hurdle for the content of these essays—“For years, I considered it impossible to undo much of this indoctrination.” This struggle becomes more evident as the book progresses. The narrator becomes a young adult, who struggles with addiction and works as a dominatrix. She engages in relationships with women and men, some of them pretty dysfunctional. She does not give us easy answers, because she doesn’t have any. Her process of investigation, much like her other two books, makes her writing compulsively readable—we want to find out what she finds out. And in so many ways, for me, the reading experience is personal. Her lived experience as a young woman in America was too familiar. I didn’t have a stalker in my early twenties, but I knew other women who did. I didn’t feel forced to give a boy a hand-job when I was twelve, but I did for many years after. Even where her experiences were outside my own, they were achingly close to the darkest parts of the stories that shaped my understanding of sex and relationships growing up.  

The adult Febos introduces us to her fiancé Donika, who acts as a bit of foil to our narrator. She questions the normalcy of the early experiences and pushes more investigation into her past. She offers an alternative way of looking at the “events” as Febos decides to call them, that live in her memories. The investigation seems to come to a head in the penultimate essay, “Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself” when Febos and Donika, along with a friend, go to a “cuddle party.” The seventy-six page essay traverses many topics, but the cuddle party drags us into the uncomfortable experience (at least for some) of physically being close to strangers—proof that Febos didn’t just mentally push herself to understand the lasting effect of her girlhood experiences, but physically tried to find situations that would help her undo them as well. As I read through some of the cringe-worthy experiences, I could help but think, Oh wow, my therapist would be proud of her! And perhaps this is part of the gift of this collection, she is doing a lot of emotional work, that many of us haven’t had the time or energy to do. It is the cuddle party that leads to Febos’s brilliant exposition on “empty consent”—a term that says so much. Febos explains:

“I see two powerful imperatives that collaborate to encourage empty consent: the need to protect our bodies from the violent retaliation of men and the need to protect the same men from the consequences of their own behavior, usually by assuming personal responsibility. It is our shame, our embarrassment, our duty alone to bear it.”

Giving a name to the expression of “yes” when what you really mean is: “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure” or “I want to say no but I don’t want to hurt your feelings or make you angry” was an especially powerful moment in her investigation.

Febos’s narratives continuously circle back to her youth. She raises the stories that dotted her girlhood over and over again. This continuous re-visiting mirrors our own memory, how they can pop up again and again, and allows her to reframe the narratives in new ways as she moves towards understanding. There are many moments that shine in Febos’s often lyric language and vivid imagery, but one that stuck out for me was in “The Mirror Test.” The narrator has gone to a liberal hippy summer camp, and she finds the camp director is a tattooed young woman, beautiful in overalls and a shaved head. She says of meeting her, “When she looked down at me, though I was terrified, I felt more seen than I’d ever felt under another person’s gaze.” Seeing an empowered woman through Febos’s eyes was a striking moment in her story. While Febos cannot literally go back in time to comfort her young self, she seems to have found a way to offer comfort, and a way forward, for her younger self, and for all the rest of us who lived through those troubling and isolating girlhood years. 

Moving and Mesmerizing: A Review of Robert Wrigley's Nemerov's Door

Nemerov’s Door is a collection of eleven autobiographical essays about poetry. It is both moving and mesmerizing. Themes that pop up throughout include family; mortality; politics, nature, man’s relationship to nature, and most essentially, poetry: what it is, how to read it, and why it matters. In form the book is a hybrid: part poetry/part prose; part academic essay/part autobiography; part bildungsroman/part ars poetica; part nature diary/part spiritual meditation.

On the day I received the book, I decided to wade in, reading just one chapter before bed. Instead, I didn’t put the book down until two hours later, having read ten of the eleven essays. You might say that this a book about rivers that pulls you in like a river.

There is an element of hodge-podge among the essays, as if Wrigley threw essays in to fill out the book. You’ll find essays here about My Fair Lady; Frank Sinatra; arrowheads; the Salmon River in Idaho; and the book concludes with a wonderful long poem to Wrigley’s children, largely about Idaho and the state of the nation. But the core of the book, and my favorite part of it, is a series of close readings of the poetry of a handful of modern American poets: Richard Hugo, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Etheridge Knight, James Dickey, and Sylvia Plath.

Early on Wrigley writes that none of these essays would exist if it weren’t for his being a teacher and it is easy to imagine him as an excellent one. About halfway through, I began to feel like Dante being led down the corridors of poetry by Virgil. As a teacher, Wrigley is plain spoken but enthusiastic, esoteric without ever being scholarly or dry. He’s madly in love with poetry and unafraid to say so. (He describes his entry into poetry at age 21 as walking into a cathedral he had passed many times with disinterest). He has an excellent ear and is keenly attuned to the music of poetry which he describes as the condition of poetry. He describes poets as working with the “fierce concentration” of a “ditch digger” or “mountain climber.”

Wrigley doesn’t suffer much hubris. He is aware of his status as a privileged white male, stating in his essay on Etheridge Knight that out of the 39 poets included in Donald Hall’s anthology Contemporary American Poetry, 0 are black women; 1 is a black man; 4 are white women; and and 34 are white males. “Based on the evidence I had at hand, [I deduced poets] were pretty much all white men.“ It is significant then that of the five essays dedicated to close readings of modern American poets, one is devoted to a black poet (Etheridge Knight) and one to a woman (Sylvia Plath).

I entered the Plath chapter with some skepticism, with a feminist feeling of “ok, show me what you’ve got,” but Wrigley did well with the subject, calling the poems of Ariel a kind of “hyper-lucid and incendiary suicide note” whose emotional content is “sheer force” written by an “agonized consciousness” (90) living in a state of “terrified introspection.” Such, he writes, was her “electrified suffering” and the “strange ecstatic horrors” of her situation that she exhibits a “monstrous sensitivity” like Van Gogh’s. In a line that’s flat out funny he writes that if Sylvia Plath were a character in one of his son’s NBA video games, “her every drive on the basketball court would be trailed by flames.” In the last days before her suicide, he writes, “She was on fire. She was in another place. She had left the rest of us behind. She felt more than most of us ever will for any reason....She [was] seeing into the heart of things.”

With the possible exception of the beautifully conducted close reading of Richard Hugo’s “Trout” (“The Music of Sense”), “Nemerov’s Door” is the book’s most powerful essay and is itself more poem than essay. That eponymous essay is a meditation on Wrigley’s relationship with his father, a car salesman with little aptitude for poetry. In the essay father and son blur, passing in and out of each other like ghosts. The “door” of the title is the door of poetry the poet’s father almost supernaturally leads his son to. It’s a mystical essay brimming with love, the strangeness of life, and the fluidity of generations. “Somehow,” he writes, “in all of this you are yourself and you are your father and you are the small boy in Nemerov’s ‘The View from an Attic Window’ coming into the knowledge of time and mortality.”

But what makes the book most mystical is Wrigley’s John McPhee-like appreciation for nature. One of the book’s most striking moments is Wrigley’s description of waking up on a beach with his son and seeing the sky bent down low over them “all eyes and personality,” as if the cosmos were a curious and gentle creature intimately staring at this sleeping man and his son. Another is his description of waking up on a rock in the wilderness to find a group of coyotes staring from a distance, wondering whether he was dead or alive. Another a description of coming upon a bear in the wilderness rearing on hind legs transfixed by a host of yellow butterflies in front of its nose. These glittering images and many more are scattered across the forest floor of this book.

You will get the most out of this book if you are a poet or at least seriously interested in poetry, but in truth, any sensitive person—especially any person in love with the idea of disappearing negatively capable into nature—can be pulled into these essays as easily as into a river you won’t mind floating—or drowning—in.

This Present Moment: A Review of Alan Michael Parker's The Age of Discovery

“For Now”, the opening poem of Alan Michael Parker’s The Age of Discovery, is an invitation, rather, an invocation to the reader as the muse whom the poet aims to court. It segues into “When Everyone Wrote a Poem”, a celebratory roll call of the quotidian. That quotidian is the launching pad that jettisons these poems into discovery of the present. The poet’s age, past the middle, I assume, is the book’s age of discovery. Looking in the rearview mirror to perceive the present.

Parker’s collection is all now. Wherever and whenever the speaker travels, is this present moment. Even when the poet is engaged in reading of Neruda and his mistress’ memoir, Matilde Urrutia is singing now, not then. It is a moment of discovery.

The deeper I read into this collection, the deeper I wanted to go. Parker’s concerns are modern life, automation, displacement, the natural world and God. The mundane magic of the poems, their drifting from voice mail to Polish cupcakes to blue as a unit of measure, captured me. Maybe it was their diction, colloquial and conversational. This poet is always talking—to us, himself, a lover, his future self as a hummingbird—mostly to himself.

Parker’s skills are most apparent in his charming handle on simile: “The dogs snooze on the sofa like session drummers. Like hipsters, the houseplants wait for whatever” and “limoncello viscous as the night.” His shortish lines hug the left margin and are often in uniform tercets; no experiments with white space or punctuation. A poem with almost entirely 3-line stanzas might include one or more quatrain or singlet. Form is secondary to the poem. 

“Two Men Disagree, and Row Out to Sea”, opens with “The boat was right for their anger.” This first line, echoed later, has a nursery rhyme bounce and allegorical feel. Its repetition of phrase, of recast line, is reminiscent of a villanelle if Mother Goose had penned a villanelle. Throughout the book, Parker uses repetition deftly. Although the phrase and words that reappear vary, the device creates a familiar pattern and welcome echoes. In the title poem, “and someone” becomes a meme partnered with actions and ways of being that resonate with the speaker and lay bare our connectedness.

Where Parker stands out is with surreal imagery, such as when he writes that watching a painting “was like being a plum”. Or this opening stanza from “Half the World Is Ours”:

Why all the secrets
sewn into the lawns
and into the fields
and into the clouds with needles of light?

Parker has an excellent ear for rhythm and sound that he uses to good purpose. In “The Trains All Arrived”, the stanzas count down 3, 2, 1, in the cadence of a locomotive. The varying meters in these lines from “When I Am a Hummingbird” bounce from iambs to land on a spondee.  

I love the dog who leans
matter-of-fact in her need
and the big smile of the small Pit Bull

The speaker isn’t always alone in these poems. Characters in the poems are often strangers.  The character of the driver in “The Ride” is “a girl who needs a listener”, as she blathers on injecting serious news she must share. Overall, this collection is conversational in tone; big news is dropped in like mail through the slot of the front door.

There is a lot of delight and humor in The Age of Discovery. Comparisons might be made to Billy Collins or Ron Koertge, but Parker is more relaxed than Collins and more acerbic than Koertge. Any sweetness tasted here is mellow, warm, never cloying. Parker’s poems are freewheeling. Less confined to regular lines they may veer into a heady space or the sky or the heart. “Later, Love” opens with “Who among us has just had sex?”

I believe this speaker. As a young reader I gravitated towards James Baldwin and Carson McCullers. It was the authority in their voices, in short stories, novels, essays, that drew me to them. Parker’s voice has a similar effect on me. Out of the blue statements, magical thinking-like, surrealistic, yet I believe them. I hear that voice most loudly and assuredly in “Neruda on Capri”, an 8-part poem. It is the center of book literally and figuratively. It is part narrative, part meditation and borrows lines from Matilde Urrutia’s memoir.

On the heels of “Neruda on Capri” comes “A Fable for the Lost”. I wondered if it is a commentary on the preceding poem. After the less formal shape of the Neruda poem, this “Fable” is bold on the page with tercets leading with anaphora, opening phrases that act like an incessant kickstart to what the fable might possibly be about.

The litany of “Egypt, North Carolina” takes a turn in the second unprayer-like stanza:

Soon, it will be my time.
I’ll take out the trash,
ill-fated as any Pharaoh,
and stand myself in the can.

“The New World” follows with the humming of a hymn and an unknown woman crossing herself. The world, or at least the speaker’s reality, becomes an ark for this collection of the public that is a diner. Parker holds a taut line here where we, prodded by TV—a character in this poem—cannot surrender our suspicion that someone has a gun.

“When the Moon Was a Boy” repeats phrases and we hear another nursery rhyme at its core.

and he wanted to give the sun a pear,
and he wanted to give the wind a pear,
and he wanted to give the rain a pear,

The speaker in these poems has been around the sun long enough to know what daybreak can bring. “Hold still, the whole scene says, before the sun drives in the first nail”, he writes in “Aubade with Two Deer”. Lacking nostalgia, the poems have a knowing wisdom that is sometimes self-mocking and at other times exquisitely, magically sage. Knowing what daylight can bring, means knowing what it has brought. These are twilight poems. Anyone who has had a colonoscopy understands the twilights that its process and its anesthesia evoke—being of an age to have the procedure and the quasi-existence of the twilight sedation where one is sort of aware, but not really. Therefore, Parker’s “Psalm”, which is akin to a Shaker hymn, is a perfect ending for this collection. It is a bedtime story, a kiss goodnight.

The Body Remembers: A Review of Jeannine Ouellette's The Part That Burns

Jeannine Ouellette is no stranger to pain and chronicles it most beautifully in her new memoir, giving name and form to the multi-faceted circumstances that have produced her exquisite trauma. The Part That Burns holds a light up to these events, crystallized over time, and marvels at the rainbow prism that radiates outward. While pain needn’t necessarily be productive, it is ever present; Ouellette demonstrates through strategic structures how her past trauma—and the generational traumas before her—live alongside her, shaping her choices throughout marriage and motherhood. And though healing might never be comprehensive, she demonstrates it can be clawed, bit by bit, out of life’s indifferent hands.

It is first obvious and required to say Ouellette’s imagery alone make this book worth an afternoon of careful contemplation. “A flat disc of moon hung like a nickel, slicing open black water with a sharp tunnel of light.” The colorful streaks of pool balls rolling down a sidewalk. Her father, not a swan: his bones “not hollow inside his flesh.” One might be tempted to think the beauty acts as a shield, softening the atrocities she chronicles in these aesthetic metaphors, bright details and a vibrant world both situating and de-centering the ugly. But another reading is this simply is Ouellette exulting, as any survivor might, in both the glory of the world around her and her ability to make it her own. A world that has given her a bad hand of cards is still home to pontoons on the lake, and Wyoming wildlife, and children.

Ouellette’s slim memoir recounts the events of her childhood and early marriage in conventional, standard prose, then returns to these stories in other chapters via series of vignettes, conversations with her daughter, and her ninth grade autobiography. Some are structured by different members of a similar theme: when organizing herself via various childhood dogs or songs that hit number one on the charts on their respective New Year’s Eves, she uses flesh and fur and Madonna to anchor us to her world. This cyclical structure echoes the cycles of generational trauma that flows from her grandmother to her own daughter but operates as a spiral, pulling us deeper into her understanding of the years of her life. She builds foundations of events in broad strokes, then returns later to sprinkle new detail, realized complexity, and a more full sense of self into the mix. How sobering, to read her molestation from her perspective as a four-year-old and then again as a mother, looking at her own toddler. We can collectively, but compassionately, wince at tenth-grade-Jeannine’s confidence at her Spanish abilities as she sets off to Mexico alone and at the calamities that ensue. Her own mother’s behavior often seems incomprehensible, until we learn her personal trauma includes being orphaned at seventeen, instantly losing two best friends (and, briefly, her ear) in a house explosion. Ouellette meticulously traces the ways our understanding of our pain grow and change when compounded and put into conversation with other experiences.

Some pages I wanted to cover my eyes and read between cracked fingers like one would stare at a smoldering car wreck—not to avoid them, but to shelter myself from the acute feelings she masterfully, and heartbreakingly, shares. Most jarring is her first postpartum sexual encounter, after giving birth to her daughter Sophie. We are transported to a hotel room: John, her first husband, has purchased crotchless lingerie for her, his parents are babysitting, and so deprived from six weeks of no sex, he is ready to “come like a freight train.” But between her cautioning him to be gentle and his first thrust, Ouellette sandwiches in the memory of her episiotomy. A doctor took a scalpel and cut “all the way through the thick, strong muscle of the vaginal wall,” rendering her unable to stand on her own for a week. (As someone who has never had a child, this alone is effective birth control.) Forty pages later, we’re back in the hotel room where Ouellette invites us to another turn of the screw. She tells us that she “slowly recalled,” when first looking at her body post-episiotomy, John had slid down the wall, paralyzed in ashen horror, staring at his young wife. She bloomed with a “swollen bruise the size of a grapefruit,” in so much pain she couldn’t breathe. John, we remember, had requested she keep the bodysuit on during sex: the crotch hole providing all necessary access, the black Lycra providing all necessary coverage. Ouellette ends the paragraph there. What else is left to be said?

During their marriage, Ouellette tells John of the various abuses she suffered at various hands over the years. He offers his pains and embarrassments in exchange: a bout of constipation, drinking as a teenager, and driving his former girlfriend to an abortion clinic. The juxtaposition feels intentional, with its chasm of magnitude so grotesque: John’s long-married, attentive, middle class parents shaped a stable childhood entirely unlike hers (which he unfairly wields against her in arguments that she does not defend). She could easily play the oppression Olympics, pitting circumstances against each other to crown herself the ultimate sufferer. And yet Ouellette is generally earnest and sympathetic about his problems: solemn that he did not go through with his first wedding, acknowledging his long commute, long work hours after fights. To readers more prone to anger, she displays remarkable empathy here. (Or, as someone who has never been married, perhaps this is what it takes to sustain decades of almost-love.)

And while it is true that one can be sympathetic to a spouse and still upset about her own problems, Ouellette savvily understands where actions speak louder than her beautiful words, both in her life and constructing her narratives. John’s frequent selfishness—displaying sorrow “for the pain of wanting and not getting,” his would-be affair, and neoliberal attitude towards sex—willing to go to a sex therapist, but says, “You’re frigid, and nothing will ever feel good to you,” when it isn’t working—builds the case for ending their marriage even before Ouellette guiltily admits to falling in love with someone else. As a child, when she tells her neighbors Mafia is killing her mom, they decline to help and retreat into their home. When she orchestrates a drive to Duluth and pleas for refuge for Rachael with her grandparents, they turn them away (Mafia is in legal trouble for abusing another young girl). What did speaking up do for her?

Pain and sorrow so frequently warp and deform their recipients, but for all her woes Ouellette is externally neither bitter nor resentful. Instead, she turns her attention inwards and fixates on her own brokenness. Ouellette is accustomed to suffering in silence, a practice learned from her mother who “closes the book” on the “particular sorrow” of her abuse. This silence is gendered, of course: it is almost redundant to explain the ways women are taught to be silent, about everything, especially for survival. This is why Ouellette curls her toes and bites her lip to avoid complaining during sex. Foreplay and her own pleasure, she tells her therapist, isn’t of interest. As a child, she is ‘grounded’ frequently and lives the life of a ghost, sleeping in the basement, making separate meals for herself. (And when she stays with a friend, her mother calls the police to forcibly retrieve her runaway daughter.) Most telling is in the basement of Trinity Lutheran. One member of the childhood sexual abuse support group is noticeably loud in discussion: she is moaning constantly, “a low, wet gurgle,” until tears spatter and stain her shirt. At the same time, Ouellette holds her breath to stop her body from vibrating, desperately focused on containing and suppressing her emotion. She hates this woman, she writes: “for being exactly like me—ruined—but letting it show.” She hates this woman for refusing to be silent.

Instead, Ouellette processes her world by escaping her own body, leaving the physical constraints of her circumstances. “I just pull myself through a doorway inside of me,” she explains after referencing her mother’s explosion, the tickle game with Mafia, and how jackalopes try to trick hunters to reach safety. She watches herself from above when she has sex with her first boyfriend; she dissociates: “my body is not me. I am connected to my body by a string.” Her mother takes long drives to nowhere, which Ouellette spends a chapter eulogizing: empty distance, barren country roads, the heft of the boat-like sedan encasing its inhabitants in safety. She eagerly searches for portals to another world in a canyon full of wildflowers. And she passes this practice to her daughter Lillian, who uses it after her own abuse. “My Self with a capital S—that’s what Mama says—would push against the boundaries of my skin,” the couch her boat, floating in the sea. Unanchored, unbothered.

Ouellette is keenly aware of the efforts healing requires to achieve only incomplete results, of the ways our bandages and scars layer on top of one another. From the way her new wedding ring, after replacing the engagement ring intended for the other Janine, catches on items around their home to how thick scar tissue finally replaces the pea-sized rock embedded in her knee, pain transmuted into new forms remains and adapts. She contemplates the metal pins in her mother’s shoulder. “Trauma is coded into our genes, mapped into our DNA,” she reads, to ask the question: can we eradicate our experiences? The ghosts of the past occupy the same physical space on our bodies and in our homes, lingering without a friendly neighborhood ghostbuster on the scene. Memories too are their own location that our minds visit, over and over, as she is plagued by thoughts of Mafia. Bravery, it would appear, is one solution; choosing love despite the circumstances. “Still, I had you,” she tenderly admits to Lillian. A decision once declined, now accepted. Despite the genetic propensity to inherit pain, abuse, fear. “Still, I have you.”

We receive an eponymous chapter in the middle of the book. “I am the part that burns,” Ouellette explains, as she tends to her fruitless garden; worries about toddler Sophie’s bad habits; confronts her mother about her childhood; remembers the explosive trauma her mother suffered; has her second child. She anxiously monitors all of her attempts at healing, knowing breaking the cycles requires growth, requires a venture into the unfamiliar. Repeated actions, her cycling through time, generate friction, fertile for a jumpstart. Her mother taps her cigarette before the explosion; she strikes a match on her marriage. “Fire starting is a felony, but workers need work,” she reasons. The burning, it seems, accompanies the healing; temperatures reaching a crescendo to melt and fuse broken pieces together. Cells and tendons knitting together to smooth over into a lumpy scar. Torn and whole, the body remembers. This memoir is her healing.

Beautiful and Contemplative: A Review of Ellen Birkett Morris's Lost Girls

Ellen Birkett Morris’s first collection centers around the lives of women—some lost, some found, and all searching for more. It’s this thread of longing woven through the stories that pulls them tighter and tighter, fine-tuning the tension and exploring the different ways women discover who they are as individuals, beyond their restrictive places in society.

Morris shows great range with her characters, from young girls to older women who “never planned to be obsolete.” As seventy-year-old Abby Linder says in “Harvest,” “The years had slipped away, and the person she had been disappeared with them, replaced by an old woman with wrinkles and bifocals, who men opened doors for or offered a hand up but nothing more.” In the story, despite everyone’s efforts to make her confront that she’s old, Abby finds a way to recapture her youth while visiting a friend at the nursing home.

By contrast, there is the teenager in the titular story, who lives in the same town as a thirteen-year-old girl kidnapped from a strip mall. Even though “creeped out,” the main character imagines her own disappearance would be a welcome surprise—one less reason for her parents to fight, and for her, “a change of scenery.” Dreaming about her new life she imagines captors who look like Archie Bunker and serve her cake, the worst aspect of it all being life “in some commune, forced to mix batches of granola and make homemade yogurt day and night.” Even as she ages, she sees the kidnapped Dana as “somebody’s prize.” This teen’s mindset—the naivete, the selfishness—leaps from the page, with the story ending at a startling moment. What’s impressive as well is that Morris is able to convey all of this in three pages.

One of the strongest stories in the collection is “Skipping Stones,” which is also the longest, at sixteen pages. Here we follow Terri through her last year of high school and her relationships with a boy she thinks she might like, his older brother, and a third boy who believes he’s entitled to take what he wants. Shadows of violence haunt the story, along with a depressed mom and the father who has abandoned Terri and her mother. At graduation, her father “sat alone in the last row and handed her an envelope with a $50 bill inside.” These are such small details—the last row, the fifty-dollar bill—but point to one of Morris’s real strengths: presenting understated moments so clearly they resonate with the reader. The reader knows from the details how awkward the father feels, and that handing over fifty bucks is no small act of generosity for him.

Another standout story, “Religion,” follows a thirty-year-old virgin who stumbles into a Lactation League meeting, and becomes so enamored with the bonds between babies and moms that she rents a breast pump in hopes of capturing the magic. Morris goes well beyond the story’s creative premise and into the loneliness, desperation, and hunger this woman feels. Once again, Morris has fine control of tension. As the story moves forward and the protagonist bonds with these new moms, one of them asks her to babysit, and while doing so, the character attempts to breastfeed. The instability of the woman, combined with the narrator’s empathy toward her, leaves the reader shattered at the end of the story.

Many of the stories here clock in at three or four pages, and the majority are under ten. While all showcase Morris’s talents for details, some of the shorter feel less fleshed out and more like character studies, albeit well-drawn ones. Overall, this is a beautiful and contemplative collection, exploring the supposedly simple lives of complicated women who survive grief, loneliness, and love, and emerge on the other side having found themselves.

A Review of Kat Meads' Dear DeeDee

If one does not know what is meant by the experiences of memory in the living presence of an image of things past, nor what is meant by seeking out a memory, lost or recovered, how can one legitimately ask oneself to whom this experience or this search is to be attributed? . . . [I]s memory primordially personal or collective?

– Paul Ricoeur

Wry and deeply nostalgic, Kat Meads’ novel, Dear DeeDee, lands on the cusp between two broad categories of the epistolary novel form. In the traditional construct, the author beckons readers to observe an unfolding of love, the tension in its development, the harrowing moments of near collapse whether by distance, poverty, death or disappearance. Here, think of Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk, a novel of letters exchanged between impoverished distant cousins in St. Petersburg, Russia, who live across the street from each other, and yet send daily letters. Fast-forward in time to Nick Bantock’s popular tale of love and art intricately staged in the letters of the eponymous Griffin and Sabine.

The contemporary incarnation of the epistolary novel frames a skirmish in the battle over the position of the reader’s experience, particularly vis-à-vis realism and whatever one might claim as its antithesis, and so is only too ready to upend trust in the authorial voice. Take for example, John Barths’ novel LETTERS, or Chris Kraus’s I love Dick. Both quite exhilarating for the reader who enjoys watching a train speed off of well-worn tracks, engaging the reader in questioning the limits of the form, and especially of how, when, and by whom speech within a contextual milieu becomes authorized, and when speech invites distrust. It’s the “world-making capacity of language,” as Susan Stewart notes, that actively situates and transforms the reader as a narrative declares its intention to either mimic reality or to point to language’s place of origin in constructing everything the reader experiences.

In a series of short letters dated over the course of eleven months, Mead’s Dear DeeDee tells the story of the letters’ writer, Aunt K, born and raised in North Carolina. The stories in Aunt K’s irreverent and often poignant short letters unfold from a rear-view perspective, one developed long after she moved to the West coast. Aunt K addresses her letters to her college-aged niece who also grew up in and remains in North Carolina. Aunt K’s letters seek to bestow sage coming-of-age advice, offer tender descriptions of DeeDee’s father, and select tidbits of uniquely small-town, Southern, White life.

As the novel begins, Aunt K notes the difficulty of getting started with her project, running through a halting series of salutations, only to cross each out before the ink dries: “Dear, Dearest, Darling DeeDee, Darling niece, Greetings.” In the opening letter, Meadstips her hand toward the arch tone she  maintains through much of the novel, referring to the distaff members of DeeDee’s clan as “ancestresses,” each plagued by the effects of the Southern mores Meads makes careful note of, those that shuttle older women into a state of “grumpiness” rather than of “confidence.” In Dear DeeDee, memory unfolds along a matrilineal line. Men come in and out of view but mainly to serve as markers of female introspection: the curious case of the uncle who cries silently at the dinner table for no apparent reason; DeeDee’s father’s black patent leather shoes; a series of nameless boyfriends.

Meads engages in a bit of gamesmanship as Aunt K advises DeeDee that “literature teaches us to lead with force, provocation, mystery, feeling” and then worries whether her opening gambit contains enough of these in any measure to hold her niece’s attention—an undercutting move, one taken to prime the pump of sympathy for the storyteller.

The substrate of Meads’ novel, then, as memoir, enacts memories of her early years in a voice that is at once jaded and swaggering, disarming and joyful; a voice intent upon providing loving counsel to DeeDee, but one that seems to want to unknow the very same emotional wrangling with adolescence, spoken and unspoken family disagreements, admiration and shame of her small-town roots: “Recalcitrance. Pretty standard Southern hiccup”; “Digging in one’s heels, affably appearing to agree. Both regional staples. What I reiterate here, you no doubt figured out rolling in your crib.” Aunt K occasionally askes DeeDee a direct question: “And how are you spending your undergrad Sundays? Cramming for Monday midterms? Throwing back Tequila shots?” These direct addresses bring DeeDee to life in tiny spasms of presence that break, for a moment, the cadence of Aunt K’s storytelling.

Dear DeeDee mimics the movement of a certain type of social discourse—a banter of Southern, snappy retorts one might expect to hear spoken among those who haven’t left home, those who are overqualified but continue to slug it out in a series of dead-end jobs. Until leaving for the West coast for good, this was Aunt K’s world, with the exception of a brief stint in NYC—and ostensibly Meads’ as well.

The depth of field Meads painstakingly develops in Dear DeeDee creates a kind of Geertzian modality, a thick description of the valences of time, place, mood—all of which make it a pleasure to read, full of local color, brimming with remembrances of a certain strain of American family life, with its quirks, snarky asides, and quiet tragedies. Quite interestingly, the letters are full of literary, film, and brand references too numerous to name here, with the exception of Virginia Woolf’s work and life, which have a place of prominence. Aunt K uses these copious references to literary work, and its making, to foreground her own story as fabrication, world creation.

The reader will soon begin to intuit that since DeeDee never replies with letters of her own, she doesn’t exist, nor does DeeDee’s father, whom Meads takes great care to describe. DeeDee is, as Aunt K finally concedes, a conceit created as a reason for the discovery, naming, and parsing of memory: memory at once vividly personal and tangentially collective; the latter unabashedly pointing to a kind of genealogy, to bloodlines writ large as persona. One might assume that a memoirist might choose to keep certain members of the family disguised for the sake of privacy, and while this may be the case, Meads seems to have something else up her sleeve. The simultaneous embrace and refutation of her project—of which she says her “working theory is to pimp nostalgia as connection, a connection with who I was and therefore am. Unfortunately, that face-saving spin ignores a basic horror. The past is set. No revising or improving it.” Meads’ Dear DeeDee declares itself as writing in-and-of-itself, and perhaps with no more allegiance to the past than DeeDee herself.