graciespeaks

book 10 of 24 books in 28 days: incidents in the life of a slave girl: written by herself

In a comment to my post on Running with Scissors, Sam Beal opened the can of worms that waits near any conversation about memoir by asking: "So did it seem like 'fiction' the 2nd time around?" 

The answer is I'm afraid so, but I don't know whether Burroughs' book is fiction.  Why does it seem like fiction?  It can't be only because the material is over the top of some definition of normal life--we don't often want to read memoirs about normal life.  It is over-the-top-ness that makes many memoirs fascinating.  So why does it seem like fiction?  I think it's intangible, a question of voice, a feeling, based on details included and omitted.

So when I reread Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (first published in 1861), I was aware that, in my edition anyway, nearly one third of the book's pages were devoted to backup of all kinds: copies and transcripts of letters to and from Jacobs; photographs; footnotes upon footnotes; maps and diagrams.

Jacobs writes that at 14 years old, "The war of my life had begun; and though one of God's most powerless creatures, I resolved never to be conquered.  Alas, for me!"  Her life was a war, and her writing was also caught in a web of memoir/fiction conflicts. 

If she told the truth about her life as a slave (seven years of which she spent hidden in an attic to avoid being raped by her owner and to keep him from harming her children as a means of extracting vengeance on her), other people would be in danger, so she needed to change names and locations.

If she changed things too much, she would be accused of lying.  People who sympathized with the slaveholders would defend Dr. Flint, and might claim that she, a slave, could not have written this compelling narrative.  She also risked the scorn of her readers, and their inability to empathize with her, because of her consensual relationship with another white man who fathered her children. 

She used the conventions of popular nineteenth-century "seduction" novel, addressing her readers repeatedly, and, given the "scandalous" nature of her story, asking for their understanding and recognizing one side of the risk she takes by writing.  She writes,

And now, reader, I come to a period in my unhappy life, which I would gladly forget if I could.  The remembrance fills me with sorrow and shame.  It pains me to tell you of it, but I have promised to tell you the truth, and I will do it honestly, let it cost me what it may.

The last sentences of the book, she writes of her mixed feelings about her life and her book:

The dream of my life is not yet realized.  I do not sit with my children in a home of my own.  . . .  It has been painful to me, in many ways, to recall the dreary years I passed in bondage.  I would gladly forget them if I could.  Yet the retrospection is not altogether without solace; for with those gloomy recollections come tender memories of my good old grandmother, like light, fleecy clouds floating over a dark and troubled sea.

The sentimental remembrance of her grandmother, though in keeping with the conventions of the fictional style she emulates, seems incongruous as memoir.  I don't doubt for a minute the truth of Jacobs' story, but this line underlines the tension for me. 

So what makes a memoir "seem" like fiction to you?

book 9 of 24 books in 28 days: running with scissors

What happened between the first time that I read Augusten Burroughs' Running With Scissors: A Memoir, when I admired its brave honesty and found it engaging and heart-rending, and this time, when I found it upsetting and somewhat annoying?  Maybe I've read too many memoirs lately, and I wanted more than this one could give (I'm starting to sound like I'm in a relationship with memoir, I know). 

I want to say, Augusten, you've gone so far in this thing, telling us all about the crazy dog-food-eating, kitchen-roof-removing, statutory-rape-condoning, bible-as-magic-8-ball-dipping, electric-shock-machine-toying, patient-adopting family of your mother's psychiatrist Dr. Finch; your poet-mother's psychotic episodes; your mathematician-father's refusal to take your calls; why don't you go a little farther and tell us what it means to you? 

In a scene, for example, when his mother is taken away from her home in handcuffs in the middle of a psychotic break, he writes, "I felt a horrific sadness watching her stripped of her dignity and her will.  I also thought, whatever happened to Christina Crawford?  I wonder if she's okay." His digression continues into a reverie about Marie Osmond and whether the cheap motel soap he's about to use will damage his hair.

I don't think this book is "about" his crazy life with the Finch family from the time he was twelve until he was seventeen.  So what do I think it's about?

Maybe it's about the tension between wanting "fabric-softener, tuna-salad-on-white, PTA-meeting normal" and wanting what he calls a "big life."  Or maybe it's about the downside of being told that he can make his own decisions at 13: "The problem with not having anybody to tell you what to do, I understood, is that there was nobody to tell you what not to do."

When he decides at the end of the book to separate from his family and the Finches to head to New York at 17 with a GED and a collection of notebooks and journals and a determination to be a writer (and knowing that he succeeds), he says, "Unwittingly, I had earned a PhD in survival." 

Okay, now I remember why I liked it the first time.

book 8 of 24 books in 28 days: autobiography of a face

I read Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face after Ann Patchett's Truth & Beauty, so I was curious to see how they did memoir similarly or differently and how each writer treated their friendship.  They do memoir and friendship so differently that Grealy's book barely mentions Iowa and doesn't mention Ann at all. 

Grealy's book moves around in time, beginning when she is fourteen, moving back to being a nine-year-old diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma, moving farther back to her emigration with her family from Ireland to the United States when she was four, moving forward again through high school and college and graduate school and few years afterward.  The cancer set off a chain of events that always threatened not only to kill her but to define her: chemotherapy, radiation, the loss of most of the right side of her lower jaw, and nearly thirty surgeries, never successful, to try to reconstruct her face.  

The book brought success and attention when it was published in 1994 (Grealy died in 2002).  Like Patchett's relationship with Grealy, Grealy's relationship with her face and the attention it brought was complicated.

In Truth & Beauty, Patchett recalls a reading she and Grealy gave together when Autobiography came out.  "My brave and heroic Lucy made it clear to the audience that she had no interest in being anybody's inspiration.  She was not there as a role model for overcoming obstacles.  She was a serious writer, and she wanted her book to be judged for its literary merit and not its heartbreaking content."  One woman asked,

    "All those conversations, details.  Were you ever worried that you might get something wrong?"

    "I didn't remember it," Lucy said pointedly.  "I wrote it.  I'm a writer."

    This shocked the audience more than her dismissal of illness, but she made her point: she was making art, not documenting an event.  That she chose to tell her own extraordinary story was of secondary importance.  Her cancer and subsequent suffering had not made this book.  She had made it.  Her intellect and ability were in every sense larger than the disease.

The language in Grealy's book, and the thoughts and musings and analyses, are beautiful, poetic.  Just one example: "While our bodies move ever forward on the time line, our minds continuously trace backward, seeking shape and meaning as deftly as any arrow seeking its mark."

This is part of what she's doing in this book, "seeking shape and meaning," creating it even, as she asks why her life has happened to her the way it has, and what it means.  She looks to Catholicism, to Buddhism, to her parents, to philosophy, to art. 

She writes that when she was in middle school, "In the same way I was sure I could prove my love, and lovability, to my mother by showing her I could "take it," I considered the idea that what God wanted from me was to keep trying and trying and trying, no matter how difficult it was.  My goal, and my intended reward, was to understand."  

At another point she writes, "Most people struggle all their lives to avoid fading unnoticed into the crowd, but this was never my concern.  I was special.  Being different was my cross to bear, but being aware of it was my compensation.  When I was younger, before I'd gotten sick, I'd wanted to be special, to be different.  Did this then make me the creator of my own situation?"  Later, she asks, "Was there something wrong with me that I should find such comfort in being taken care of so?  Did it mean I liked having operations and thus that I deserved them?"

Having defined herself by mirrors and refused them entirely, in writing this memoir she holds another kind of mirror up not only to her face but, as much as she can, to her self.  Finally, she concludes, eerily in light of her death at 39, "[I]t is no mistake when sometimes in films and literature the dead know they are dead only after being offered that most irrefutable proof: they can no longer see themselves in the mirror."

 

book 7 of 24 books in 28 days: truth & beauty

In Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, novelist Ann Patchett writes about her friendship with Lucy Grealy, a friendship that lasted from their meeting in 1985 at the Iowa Writers Workshop (although both were undergraduates at Sarah Lawrence, they were not friends there) until Grealy's death (ruled an accidental overdose) in 2002.  More about Lucy Grealy in book 8 of 24.

This is the last of the "loss" memoirs I'm reading this month, and this one is the most narratively straightforward.  Patchett has said that she wrote the book in bed, when she could do nothing else during the three weeks following Grealy's death.  The book begins with Patchett's arrival in Iowa and ends with Lucy's death.  There are few digressions for side memories or the kind of analysis of self or other that seems to be more possible after more time for reflection passes between memoir events and memoir writing.

The narrative has a clear beginning, middle, and end, and the friendship was complicated.  Patchett explains how she and Grealy "did" friendship with the recurring metaphor of the grasshopper (Grealy) and the ant (Ann).  The paperback cover colorful beauty of the grasshopper and the small ant at the bottom of the design.  Early in the book Patchett sums up their relationship this way:

We were a pairing out of an Aesop's fable, the grasshopper and the ant, the tortoise and the hare.  And sure, maybe the ant was warmer in the winter and the tortoise won the race, but everyone knows that the grasshopper and the hare were infinitely  more appealing animals in all their leggy beauty, their music and interesting side trips.  What the story didn't tell you is that the ant relented at the eleventh hour and took in the grasshopper when the weather was hard, fed him on his tenderest store of grass all winter.  The tortoise, being uninterested in such things, gave over his medal to the hare.  Grasshoppers and hares find the ants and tortoises.  They need us to survive, but we need them as well.  They were the ones who brought the truth and beauty to the party, which Lucy could tell you as she recited her Keats over breakfast, was better than food any day.

Late in the book, when Patchett is living in Nashville and Grealy in New York, Patchett writes,

Sometimes I worried that Lucy saw me as the ant I was, unglamorous, toiling.  Sometimes I knew she did.  Sometimes I aspired to be a grasshopper myself, to live in the city and go to parties, to have bright conversations with famous people instead of washing my grandmother's hair and making her grilled cheese sandwiches.  I liked to think there was a moment in my life when I could have been a grasshopper and never thought of winter at all, but now I had a house and it wasn't even a particularly charming house with loads of character that needed fixing up.  It was practical, snug, and suburban.

Patchett mentions her ant-ness throughout the book.  She writes her novels steadily, sticking to deadlines, even writing a book before she arrives at the fellowship where she planned to write it.  Grasshopper Grealy misses deadlines and loses contracts, focusing, out of habit and necessity, on the moment rather than the future.

Because Patchett never judges Grealy in this book, and because I am much more ant than grasshopper myself, when I read the following scene that takes place after the removal of the breathing tube after one of Grealy's many surgeries, I cringe for Patchett, all the while knowing I would do much the same.

    It was over and almost immediately Lucy was feeling better.  I got her some ice chips and washed her face.  She was tired and thirsty and sticky with the leftover adhesive of removed tape.   

    "You're such a good friend," she said dreamily.  "What did I ever do to deserve a friend like you?"

    "You're a good friend to me, too."

    "Oh no I'm not.  Not like you." She sighed, watching me.  "But at least I can make you feel like a saint.  That's what you've always wanted."

    I stopped and looked at her, washcloth suspended.  "That's a terrible thing to say."

    Lucy shrugged barely, as much as she could move her shoulders. "It's true."

    I wanted to walk away from her, go down tho the commissary and drink a cup of coffee alone.  I wanted to tell her that she could wait for the nurse to wash her face.  "I"m not doing this for points," I said.  "I'm doing this because I want to help you."   I hadn't wanted to come.  I would rather have been back in my own house, at my own desk working, but in her fog of morphine Lucy seemed to miss it all.  She just smiled at me.

    "My pet," she said.

And as much as I might want Patchett to stand up in any way, I know she can't and won't, and I know I wouldn't have either.

a Valentine to some of my teachers

I've been thrilled by the responses I've gotten for the last couple of weeks, so before I go on (sprinting through the second half of February to the finish) I want to take a second to thank readers and commenters and tweeters and bloggers.  Everyone I'm going to thank is on Twitter, so I'll use their twitter names in my list.

• @whollyjeanne, whose blog is www.thebarefootheart.com
• @penelopetrunk, whose blog is www.blog.penelopetrunk.com and whose post inspired this series
• @lemead, whose blog is www.adesignsovast.com
• @shirleyhs, who graciously blogged about my challenge at her blog www.100memoirs.com
• @jerrywaxler, who read Shirley's post and writes about memoir at www.memorywritersnetwork.com/blog
• @squarepegkaren, whose blog is www.squarepegpeople.typepad.com
• @thewordwire, whose blog is www.thewordwire.com
• @coachdian, whose blog is www.authenticrealities.com/blog
• @wifsie, whose blog is www.bluamaryllis.wordpress.com
• @bwlight, whose blog is www.windshieldthinking.wordpress.com

Please follow them on Twitter, read their blogs, and read their excellent comments here.

And Valentines Day love to Michael, Michelle, Meredith, and Tania.

book 6 of 24 books in 28 days: a three dog life

After struggling with Vidal’s Point to Point Navigation, rereading (yes, I broke my skim-only resolution again) A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas has been pure pleasure. 

Richard Rogin, Thomas’s husband, was not dead, but seriously, permanently injured. Thomas writes about the five years following his traumatic brain injury from being hit by a car. One evening, Rich left their Manhattan apartment to walk their dog, Henry, but Henry escaped the leash, and Rich ran into the street after him.  Henry found his way home but Rich did not.

Thomas explains her unique circumstance: “[M]ost widows remember more vividly the last weeks of their husband’s lives than the span of their lives together.  I am not a widow, but my husband as he was is gone.  I concentrate on who Rich is at any given moment and I lose sight of who he was, who we were.”

The book begins with the story of the accident, but Thomas returns to it from time to time, offering additional fragments and details, as one might include them in the course of telling a friend or oneself a story over time.  At the end of the book, five years after the accident, Rich, whose memory is sporadic, tells her that he remembers the accident, and he wants to talk about it to the extent he can.

In the pages between the accident and the last scene of remembering, Thomas writes of the rebuilding of her life, first in Manhattan and later in Woodstock, near the long-term care facility where Rich lives.  Her three-dog life includes first only Henry, then also Rosie and Carolina.

Thomas “does” memoir without pulling any punches.  She admits to a certain rush in the crisis of the first few months following the accident: “There is an exhilaration to it, a high born only partly of exhaustion, and I find myself almost frighteningly alive.  There is nothing like calamity for refreshing the moment.  Ironically, the last several years my life had begun to feel shapeless, like underwear with the elastic gone, the days down around my ankles.”

She marks the passage of time with some surprise: “Twenty-four months since the accident.  If it were a child, it would be talking, walking, climbing into everything.”  Later, “It has been almost three years since Rich’s accident.  I bought this house, which is only twenty minutes from where he lives.”  And near the end of the book, she writes of a chance conversation with someone she hasn’t seen since the accident: “How is your husband? she asks. ‘It’s been almost five years,’ I say, and I start to cry and can’t stop.  Five years sounds so permanent.”

While the narrative moves in a more or less straight line in time, Thomas occasionally throws in what might seem like random bits of information such as  “List of knitting 2002 to present.”  And, in second person, “How to Break Up a Dogfight” and “How to Banish Melancholy.” These sections show us her life in ways that more standard narrative wouldn’t.

Right away she tells the reader, “There is no irony here, no room for guilt or second guessing.  That would be a diversion, and indulgence.  These are hard facts to be faced head-on.”

The other “Loss” writers have focused on grief, and Thomas touches on grief and also on anger.  But in spite of her statement that there’s no room for guilt, and maybe because Rich is injured but alive, she gets to it, and I find the  “guilt” sections some of the most interesting.  She feels guilt for the event of the accident and for going on with life afterward. 

She tells of befriending a woman named Crystal, whom she meets when Crystal and her children are standing in the rain asking for money outside a grocery store.  As her relationship with Crystal progresses, and until Crystal has safely left town, she wonders what will become of her if Crystal asks for more than she can give. 

I wonder for just long enough about the significance of Crystal’s story but then I understand that Thomas asks the same questions about what she can give to caring for Rich.  She moves on to guilt:
“I am obsessed by guilt because I think mine’s gone, at least the all-purpose kind that makes you feel you are to blame for a bad dinner party at which you are only a guest, that toxic mist that can be activated by small offenses . . . . I burned out my receptors for that nonsense.  I know what real guilt is.”

She continues, “And then one day I asked myself a terrible question.  If I could make Rich’s accident never have happened, would I do it?  Of course I would.    Wouldn’t I?  and instead of yes, I hesitated.  But by posing the question I had assumed the power, and by hesitating I put myself behind the wheel of the car that struck my husband.  You want to talk about guilt?”

She also feels guilty because she has reconstructed her life, even experiences happiness. “But, look at you, I still say to myself.  How dare you.  You built on this tragedy.”

But she looks up the word “acceptance” and finds the root “to grasp,” “from the old English for ‘a thread used in weaving,’ and bingo, that’s it.   You can’t keep pulling out the thread.  You have to weave it in and then you have to go on weaving.”

She “does” her marriage in a new way, giving and taking love and comfort as she and Rich can: “During the days when it is impossible to communicate in words, I get into his bed and we hold hands.  Nap therapy.  This is a familiar posture, something we can do without speech, without thinking.”

She repeats this scene: “Rich and I sit together, we hold hands; we are warm-blooded creatures in a quiet space, and that’s all the communication we need.”

She shares similar comfort with her dogs, all together in a double bed: “We are steeping ourselves, reassuring ourselves, renewing ourselves, three creatures of two species, finding comfort in the simple exchange of body warmth.”

Thomas “does” memoir honestly and in her own way, weaving her threads seemingly as they come to her.  She nods to Montaigne, seeing his “Essays” on a shelf in Barnes and Noble while she sits on the floor changing her socks.  She writes that she didn’t start writing until she was forty-seven (encouraging to me!), and that she struggled with all the questions of whether she was good enough. 

She breaks through her own writing resistance one day, though, when she finally writes a story:  “For the first time a story was more important than my ego, and the know-it-all voice that told me not to bother held no sway.  That’s the voice I need to banish every morning.”  I love the idea of a story being more important than my ego.  It helps me banish the voices that tell me not to bother.

book 5 of 24 books in 28 days: point to point navigation

Gore Vidal writes in his 2006 Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir, "I left myself at the end of my first memoir, Palimpsest, in the year 1964, when I was thirty-nine.  It is now April 2005."   I came upon this "Part 2" of Vidal's memoirs via some list or other of "grief memoirs," and Vidal does write about the illness and death of his partner of fifty-three years, Howard Auster.  But his grief extends beyond the loss of Auster into the loss of many people and even the impending loss of himself. 

There is something deeply uncomfortable, ill-at-ease, in this book, and it has rubbed off on me.  I have been writing this post for three days, trying to get a handle on the book's slipperiness and my reaction to it.

When Vidal nods to Montaigne and Rousseau, and what they might require of him or think of him, he is very "meta" about his memoir.  But just when I'm about to think I've "got" him, he invokes Howard in an ever-so-slightly loving way, or mentions his own mortality.

Toward the end of the book, he writes, "Eighty sounds serious to me.  Certainly when people ask 'How are you feeling?' they are actually interested, for the moment at least, in your answer.  Most people my age are safely dead and I must soon throw out my book of telephone numbers since nearly everyone in it has, as they used to say, fallen from the perch or ridden on ahead--mad euphemisms abound."

One has the sense of his looking through this book of numbers, remembering not only Auster but Johnny Carson, Paul Newman, Tennessee Williams, and enough others that this book has an index which consists primarily of people's names.  He moves from memory to memory, character to character, story to story in a free-associative journey through his life since his last memoir.

As for my repeated questions of how did he and Auster "do" their long-term relationship and how Vidal does grief, Vidal gives a few answers.  On the question of grief, he defers to Jefferson:

"Jefferson once noted that although he could see the possibilities of some good, even utility, in most human emotions, no matter how negative, he found nothing redemptive or useful in Grief."

Later Vidal writes, though, "If Thomas Jefferson had found nothing at all useful in grief, I found it weirdly energizing.  Certainly, the aftermath of a death in today's United States brings one into contact with all sorts of strangers: lawyers, accountants, morticians, insurance claimants, not to mention old friends in their thinning ranks and new acquaintances in their thickening ones."

As in so many other places, Vidal seems to bob and weave, moving between the jarring honesty of "weirdly energizing" and the more distant ironic stance of the last line of thinning and thickening ranks.

Writing of his relationship, the vascillation is more disturbing to me.

"We had been together fifty-three years.  He confessed that he thought he was just passing through my life and was surprised as the decades began to stack up and we were still together.  But then it is easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part and impossible, I have observed, when it does.  Each had a sex life apart from the other; all else including our sovereign, Time, was shared."

It's not so surprising that he and Auster did not have sex (with each other), but again, after that cool revelation, in the same sentence Vidal moves into the more intimate, to me, belief that they shared everything else, and the recognition of Time as their sovereign moves me.

After reading The Pure Lover, in which passion for the lover's body is intimately central, or centrally intimate, the absence of sex or bodies from this relationship is striking.  When Vidal does describe Auster's body, it is after death, and he does it at all, he says, because it is what Montaigne would require of a memoirist. 

The following passage describing Howard's death and the immediate aftermath made me deeply uncomfortable--as if I were being given a glimpse that I did not want to see, as if he were forcing himself to tell us something that he did not want to tell, and then after he told it, he did not delete it but negated it by writing something else.

"I sat in the chair opposite and did all the things that we have learned from movies to determine death.  I passed a hand in front of his mouth and nose.  Nothing stirred.  Montaigne requires that I describe more how he looked--rather than how I felt.  The eyes were open and very clear.  I'd forgotten what a beautiful gray they were--illness and medicine had regularly glazed them over; now they were bright and attentive and he was watching me, consciously, through long lashes."

In the next scene, the nurse, Leto, wept.  Vidal writes,

"I envied him--the WASP glacier had closed over my head.  It took over an hour for the ambulance to come take him away.  During the wait, I pulled back the sheet for one last look at those clear gray eyes--could they still see?--but the substance of the eyeballs had collapsed and two gelatinous streaks of the sort snails make had coursed down his cheeks."

Does he write this in deference to Montaigne?  To be unfailingly accurate?  To thaw and refreeze the WASP glacier?  To emphasize how quickly the body changes after death?  Why does it disturb me so?  What does this book, and this passage in particular, teach me about memoir?

I'm still working out these questions to which there are no easy answers.  I hope for more of your excellent teaching in the comments.

book 4 of 24 books in 28 days: the pure lover: a memoir of grief

On the back jacket, Philip Roth and Mark Doty call David Plante's The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief "wrenching."

Their words can't prepare you for the experience of reading this book.

In the prologue, David Plante writes,

Nikos Stangos died April 16, 2004.  We had been loving partners for some forty years.  He died of cancer--of the lungs, spine, and brain.  I was with him when he died, in our bed, after six months of physical and mental deterioration.

He continues,

It was as if all my nearly forty years of life with Nikos contracted into no time, into no place, as if from outside our day-to-day relationship, so a recollection from late in our lives together was followed by one from the very beginning, and event remembered from his last weeks in London followed by one long before, in Greece or Italy.  No doubt some inner reckoning of my grief was evolving.  These notes seemed to me spontaneous but random, yet I sensed that grief knew more than I did about the evolution of grief, knew something whole while I knew only flashes of the whole.

Perhaps it is a stage in grief's evolution to want to try to put some order in the notes I took, much in the same way there is a stage in grief when the bereaved suddenly wants to put order in his lost lover's clothes, papers, the effects of his desk drawers.  Over and over, I arranged and rearranged the notes--the markings of grief's way--and slowly tried for some coherence in time and place.

Do the fragments come together as a whole?  I imagine this: an invisible Greek amphora, larger than all the assembled fragments, shaping the larger invisible whole.

I could tell you that I quote at length this Prologue, because here Plante explains how he "does" memoir.  I could give you a link to a Wikipedia page in case you (like I) don't know that an amphora is a two-handled vase.

But that can't prepare you for the experience of reading this book.

The first chapter, "Alpha,"  like the rest, consists of fragments, bits of the political and personal history of Nikos Stangos.  The personal fragments use the second person extensively, as if the book is a long letter to Stangos, maybe even as if Plante is double-checking with Stangos the details he, Plante, has been told over the course of forty years.

He writes of their domestic life (Stangos was adamant that toilet paper rolls should be placed on the holder so that the paper rolls toward the wall--I admit that I remember this because I disagree).  He tells us about the ways they loved one another, and his use of the second person reinforces the sense of their deep connection.

The book is so raw and the writing so poignant (and, Mr. Roth and Mr. Doty, so wrenching) that to quote from the fragments seems wrong.  As powerful any of them might be, they are so much less than the whole that I have to recommend that you read the whole amphora.

The way Plante does memoir gives us (gives you) his full vulnerability.  He trusts the process of grief and I answer him, yes, the fragments come together as an exquisite whole.

book 3 of 24 books in 28 days: the best day the worst day

Like Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (my "book 2"), Donald Hall's The Best Day the Worst Day is a writer's memoir of the death of a writer/spouse.   

Jane Kenyon was ill and treated for leukemia for fifteen months before she died, as opposed to John Gregory Dunne's sudden death from heart failure.  And whereas Didion completed her book one year and one day after Dunne's death (actually writing it, according to Wikipedia, in a little less than three months), Hall's book was published ten years after Kenyon's death.  Hall published a collection of poetry about Kenyon, Without: Poems, on the third anniversary of her death.

I've wondered about how time between events and writing about them affects what one writes.  How would any of the books I'm reading, or the one I'm writing, be different if more or less time had passed?  I'm still thinking about it--maybe I'll have an answer someday, or maybe someone will answer in the comments--anyone, please?

If I ask of Hall's memoir the question of how he and Kenyon "did" marriage, I think it answers in two ways:

"With rare exceptions, we remained aware of each other's feelings.  It took me half my life, more than half, to discover with Jane's guidance that two people could live together and remain kind." 

He makes a similar observation about the importance of kindness and consideration earlier in the book, and I agree with him that it's a worth restating. 

He also writes about the importance of a couple's having a "third thing" at which to look together.  A third thing could be children, pets, travel, church, any number of things, but he concludes that for him and Kenyon, the primary third thing was poetry:

"Of course: the third thing that brought us together, and shone at the center of our lives and our house, was poetry--both our love for the art and the passion and frustration of trying to write it."

The book is about how he grieved the loss of his wife, but he also writes about how he and Kenyon "did" grief during various losses during their twenty years together, and again he goes to poetry:

"When someone died whom we loved, we went back to the poets of grief and outrage, as far back as Gilgamesh; often I read aloud Henry King's "The Exequy," written in the seventeenth century after the death of his young wife.  Poetry gives the griever not release from grief but companionship in grief.  Poetry embodies the complexity of feelings at their most intense and entangled, and therefore offers (over centuries, or over no time at all) the company of tears."

As for how Hall "does" memoir, he uses an alternating chapter structure.  He says that when he and Kenyon gave poetry readings together, they alternated, ABAB, taking turns at being A and B, and he uses that ABAB structure here.

The first chapter concerns Kenyon's death and funeral, and then in the second chapter he moves back in time not to the beginning of their relationship or the beginning of their marriage, but to the time three years after their marriage when they moved to Eagle Pond, where they would live together until Kenyon's death and where Hall still lives.  Then in the third chapter he goes to Kenyon's diagnosis of leukemia, and in the fourth to how they met, and so on, alternating chapters focusing on the pre-leukemia years and the last fifteen months of their marriage. 

He contrasts the two phases of their lives:

"It was Leukemia Day, to be repeated for fifteen months.  In our twenty years at Eagle Pond, Jane and I lived by routine, repeating the same motions in our big old house, schedules of work and love, reading and gardening.  Now the schedule was nausea and dread, elevators and cafeteria, boredom and panic and occasionally relief."

Hall is frequently poetic, and I found myself underlining simply for the beauty of his language.  A few examples:

Regarding the funeral, "I embraced two hundred people beset by a remediless disappearance."

Regarding an evening spent alone in a Days Inn while Jane was in a nearby hospital, he mentions a "tubal basketball game dimly observed."

And finally, he writes, in the book's epilogue, "Today, ten years after her death, her poems endure.  So do I, still at Eagle Pond Farm, where Jane fills the air around me like a rainy day."

book 2 of 24 books in 28 days: the year of magical thinking

I set up some rules for this series of posts: Do not reread books already read.  Skim underlined passages only.    Skim and blog, skim and blog. Save time for books as yet unread.

I promptly broke my rule when I came to the second book on my list: Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. 

When I wasn't able to put it down, I realized something basic about why I read memoir: to discover how other people "do" life.  I read it the first time almost two years ago, not too long after my ex-husband's death.  I was trying to figure out not only what I was grieving but also how I was going to write about it.

How did Didion "do" grief?  I read to discover how she grieved the loss of her loving forty-year marriage to John Gregory Dunne.  And I read to discover how she "did" writing.  How did she write about the marriage and its aftermath?

I figured out that (in shorthand) I was grieving the loss of time and possibility.  And I used, well, stole, actually, her "year" structure for the first few drafts, hanging my story month by month on the prop of the calendar until there was enough flesh for it to stand on its own.  In the most recent draft I finally took out the references to months, and in the next draft I think I will not even remember that they were ever so important.

After having written several drafts of my own, I was impressed all over again at the seamlessness and apparent ease of her movement in time from present to recent past to distant past and back.  She includes psychological texts and fiction and poetry without losing her narrative thread.  In space she moves from New York to LA to New York.

Didion moves so easily among times places and genres and impressions and descriptions and people and associations that it's as if she has woven a large, beautiful tapestry of very fine threads.  My internal critic says that in comparison I have woven a grapevine basket.  But that's okay for now.  Baskets can be beautiful, and with each revision I can move from basket toward tapestry.