June 2011 Archives

I'm back in The Rumpus, this time in their Readers Report Back From...Running Away. Scroll down, it's the last one. Or better yet, read all of them. I really love this series. A writing prompt, a 400-word limit, and usually less than a week to work on it, so you get pieces that are tiny and raw and direct. And most Rumpus readers are also writers, and they're smarkle, as The Boy likes to say.

From Bluets, by Maggie Nelson:

I have been trying to go limp in the face of my heartache, as another friend says he does in the face of his anxiety. Think of it as an act of disobedience, he says. Let the police peel you up.

I fucking love this book.

Darin Strauss read from his memoir Half a Life at Book People last week. He talked about how the memory plays tricks on you. He went to the funeral of a girl who he had hit with his car and killed, and he wrote in the book that his father went with him but his mother stayed home. Later, after the book came out, his mother said, "I most certainly was there, don't you remember?"

I talked to him a little afterwards, since I have those same kinds of weird gaps in my memory, and they are showing up in my writing. When I wrote "The Helen Keller Ice Cream Social", every single sentence in that piece came from a memory in my head. I can see all of them. I knew when I was writing it that I was not sure if some of it may have happened on a different day, because this was part of a larger event that spanned a couple of days, maybe part of a week. The other person in the story read it afterwards and said, yeah, some of it happened on the second day. I can't remember. It's all a blur of one day in my head. And she says the grapefruit knife bit was kind of tangled-up the way I wrote it; she was actually trying to cut vegetables with a grapefruit knife because I had stolen all her sharp knives. But in my head, I hear it the way I wrote it. I can't remember her reality.

Darin said, "Well, that's why they call it memoir, right? You're not writing about what objectively happened, you're writing how you remember it happened." Our memory of a thing is as real to us, maybe more real, than what would have been objectively recorded by cameras if this all took place on a reality show.

I'm also reading Robert Boswell's The Half-Known World: On Writing Fiction, where he says, "A fully-known world is devoid of mystery. There are often plenty of secrets, but ultimately all you can do with a secret is to reveal it." And later, "There can be no discovery in a world where everything is known. A crucial part of the writing endeavor is the practice of remaining in the dark."

I think Strauss and Boswell are talking about related, maybe complementary things here. What makes a great memoir is the same as what makes great fiction. This idea that the story is only half-known, that there is a similar process of exploring the character, what he wants, what he needs, what he fears, and that this process can be stifled by hewing too rigidly to a fully-defined real world that might be at odds with how the character experiences his world.

But in memoir, see, the character is yourself.

Strauss has a great line that I noticed during the reading, but I didn't want to pull out my phone and copy it down because I thought that would seem rude. (I have a notepad app on my phone that I use for jotting down things I hear or things I think of that I want to remember later when I'm writing.) I found the line in the book. He is talking about the eyes of the girl he hit, and the stillness of death, and he describes it as "everything present; nothing there." It is brilliant in its simplicity and wholeness. It's like a little haiku. Very tiny and very precise and very complete. I wonder if he labored over that sentence for hours or if it just blorped out on the page in the first draft. Both ways are valid, I guess. Both have worked for me.

I have a little micro-memoir piece I've written, I'm working on getting it published though mostly it's been getting rejected so far. It's about a day in the hospital when my grandmother was dying. I had to hold her down once when the respiratory therapist suctioned mucus out of her throat, because she woke up in the middle of the procedure. I tried to describe what it was like when it was done and she went back to sleep, and I had all kinds of overwrought shit written about the sleep that was not sleep, wherever it is she goes in her head, blah blah blah barf. It was awful. And my girlfriend Linda, who was sitting across from me while I was writing it, kept trying to get me to talk out loud about what my grandmother actually did, what I saw, what it was like, and I finally got frustrated and said, "How the hell do I convey that when it was done, all she did was go back to dying?" And Linda's eyes got wide, and she said, "Say that." And I thought a minute. Huh. Back to dying. That pretty much says it.

So now I'm writing a short story. In it, the protagonist drowns a mouse. I drowned a mouse once. I've been trying to write what its eyes looked like. You know how you can tell, the eyes, they don't look in the least bit different but they're obviously dead. There's nothing there. Everything is present, nothing is there. Brilliant. But Darin said it already, so I need to say something else.