Author: eastbaywriter

Written on the Body

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Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body is one of my favorite books.  Winterson has an ability to mold language in a way that excites me and leaves me in awe.  It inspires in me an appreciation for language and writing that is deep beyond my ability to describe.  The word to describe how her words make me feel is ineffable – too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words.  I love the irony of that word – ineffable.  Written on the Body opens with an exploration of love.

Why is the measure of love loss? … Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?  ‘I love you’ is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them. I did worship them but now I am alone on a rock hewn out of my own body. … Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.  It is no conservationist love. It is a big game hunter and you are the game. A curse on this game. How can you stick at a game when the rules keep changing? I shall call myself Alice and play croquet with the flamingoes. In Wonderland everyone cheats and love is wonderland isn’t it? Love makes the world go round. Love is blind. All you need is love. Nobody ever died of a broken heart. You’ll get over it. It’ll be different when we’re married. Think of the children. Time’s a great healer. Still waiting for Mr Right? Miss Right? and maybe all the little Rights?

It’s the cliches that cause trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. If what I feel is not precise than should I call it love? It is so terrifying, love, that all I can do is shove it under a dump bin of pink cuddly toys and send myself a greetings card saying ‘Congratulations on your Engagement’. But I am not engaged I am deeply distracted. I am desperately looking the other way so that love won’t see me. I want the diluted version, the sloppy language, the insignificant gestures. The saggy armchair of cliches. It’s all right, millions of bottoms have sat here before me. The springs are well worn, the fabric smelly and familiar. I don’t have to be frightened, look, my grandma and grandad did it, he in a stiff collar and club tie, she in white muslin straining a little at the life beneath. They did it, my parents did it, now I will do it won’t I, arms outstretched, not to hold you, just to keep my balance, sleepwalking to that armchair. How happy we will be. how happy everyone will be. And they all lived happily ever after.

I enjoy the way Winterson captures the frustration of love, the way we all want to give up when love doesn’t work out or comes with more difficulty than we imagine.  Then the single phrase within the narrator’s attempt to choose the mundane and safe existence that subtly gives away the fact that the mundane is not what the narrator wants at all – “she in white muslin straining a little at the life beneath.”  The two things I love most about Winterson’s writing are her use of language and the multiple layers that are woven together in her storytelling.  She invokes brilliant images with her words, though this passage is not the best example of that – I’ll post something else later that illustrates her imagery better.  She masters paradox and contradiction in much of her writing, which I love because it’s such a good representation of what it’s really like to be human, and even when she writes of completely fantastical things, I can still connect with the humanity in it all.

Me and my battle with words

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I’ve chosen to title this blog “me and my battle with words”.  I chose the word “battle” because I view words as elusive.  At least, I view the task of finding the right words as elusive.  It’s a battle I enjoy, though.  Many brilliant authors have found their own ways to master language, though I imagine they feel as I do when they write – that there’s a battle in there somewhere.  Finding a way to tame words to your own purpose takes effort, thoughtfulness, and practice.  I took an English Lit class 20 years ago, and was introduced to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.  In section V of Quartet No. 1: Burnt Norton, I found a beautiful description of words themselves that I’ve returned to many times over the years.

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.

The lines I love most, and the language that has come to represent what I view as my battle with words, is from the above:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

Do you have any favorite descriptions of words that represent how you think about the writing process?

Memoir writing challenges

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Starting the process of writing about my life wasn’t that difficult.  That’s not to say that my first pass was perfect – far from it – but, if I didn’t worry about censoring or editing myself as I went, the words mostly just came.  I find the bigger challenges have to do with the fact that I’m writing a memoir.  First, many of my memories are those of a child, and I’m sure they are not all strictly accurate.  I have probably associated certain events with the wrong places (I moved around a lot as a young kid), and I know my memory is somewhat selective.  There are major chunks of time, and some smaller ones, that have been long buried because they were too painful to remember.  I’ve made a concerted effort to investigate my past as openly and honestly as I can, but it’s hard to dig back so many years and try to relive emotional and challenging times. My perspective is only mine – I occasionally include thoughts and memories from my sister, but those are the result of fairly recent conversations.  Other than that, I’m sure others remember the scenarios I write about differently than I do – I’m not trying to speak for anyone but myself, but I’m also trying to do so without being overly apologetic.

Second, I write about many things that will inherently be painful for others that were involved in my life.  No life is lived without mistakes, and the people around me made many.  I expect to meet difficulty as I put my writing in front of various people and attempt to get their blessing to move forward with my project publicly.  It’s easy for me to discuss my writing with some of the people in it, but almost impossible for me to figure out how to tackle this with others.  I’ve had some very interesting conversations with family members about some of the topics I’ve included in my memoir.  They see certain things differently – and although that’s not necessarily a problem, it has caused me to pause now and then, and question my perspective.  I’ve made a conscious choice to simply write what I remember and what I think about my past regardless of these things, because if my own memoir isn’t honest from my own perspective, then there is no point in writing it.  It has been a wonderful learning experience, though, and has sparked some discussion in my family that I think is very valuable.

There have been other challenges, but these two are at the forefront of my mind, and are struggles I think are common for people writing about the pain of their pasts.  As others come to mind, and as I work through the process of putting my writing in front of relatives or friends that appear in my story, I’ll post updates along the way.

 

Sheboygan Falls

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When I was 10, I moved to Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin.  I was born in nearby Sheboygan, but hadn’t lived there for half my life.  It was Spring Break, 1984, and I was in 5th grade.  My sister and I were visiting my mother and her new husband, whom we didn’t know at all.  It was an uneventful week spent visiting relatives, and we were supposed to go home on Sunday, back to my dad’s house in Northern Illinois – back to my normal life with my two step-brothers and half-sister.  On Saturday, my mom got a phone call.  It was my dad’s wife.  My dad had disappeared and she didn’t know where he was, but she knew he wasn’t coming back, so she told my mom to keep us.  With that phone call, my life was uprooted once again, and my sister and I left the home we had known for the previous five years – the longest solid stretch we had lived in one place – to live with people who may as well have been strangers.

It had come so unexpectedly.  After receiving that fateful phone call, my mom sat us down and told us we weren’t going back home.  She’d send my step-dad down to Illinois with us on Monday to pick up some of our things and then we’d be living back in Wisconsin.  I couldn’t comprehend what was happening.  On Monday, when we got to our home in Illinois to pack some clothes, no one was there.  I suppose my step-mom was at work and the boys were at school, and my half-sister was with a babysitter somewhere.  Our house was always filled with noise – the noise of five rambunctious children running around, but this time it was eerily quiet, and it felt wrong – like something had died.

The house was a disaster, like it always was.  At my dad’s, we lived in poverty, in filthy conditions.  There were dirty clothes and junk piled throughout the house, probably a foot high in places.  There wasn’t a clear path through the living room where the floor was visible.  In the room I shared with my sister, our dirty clothes also covered the floor, and the dogs had crapped everywhere, so we had to grab what we could, stuff it into a couple black garbage bags, and go.  I doubt we were there more than fifteen minutes, which in one way was OK.  We were young, but aware enough to know that our living circumstances were horrible, and we were embarrassed for anyone to see the state of the house.  On the other hand, we were there and gone so quickly.  There were no goodbyes; there was no closure.  Simply the absurd reality that we were again leaving everything we knew to go live with strangers.  I lingered for a moment alone in the house and I sat with the silence – it was the silence of loss.

The emptiness I felt was overwhelming.  I left with an ache in my heart, thinking of the stupidest things.  I had told my little half-sister, who was still only two at the time, that I’d sneak her into the kitchen with me some night and let her drink some pancake syrup right from the bottle.  It was something I did when I was a hungry and wanted something sweet.  I never got the chance to share my little secret with her, and I felt a profound guilt that I couldn’t follow through on that promise.  I lay awake in bed every night thinking about her and the life I’d been jerked from so suddenly.

My mom enrolled us in school, and we started a few days later.  I was petrified by the size of my new school.  There were 4 classrooms for every grade, and I got lost trying to find my way from my classroom to the office to buy lunch tickets.  My graduating class had 121 people in it, which is small by many people’s standards.  The school I had come from, though, was a tiny rural country school.  It had only one classroom for every grade and was a long hallway of a building.  No corners to turn, no way to get lost.  Fear permeated my entire experience finishing 5th grade.  My face burned with embarrassment as I was constantly stared at.  The hand-me-down clothes that used to be my brothers’ were odd, my haircut was off.  I even stood funny.  I had unknowingly picked up a weird slouch that my father has.  It wasn’t just a slouch in my shoulders.  My whole back hunched, so both my shoulders and my hips sat further forward than my stomach or my chest.

You’d think that we’d be happier to live in an environment that wasn’t abject poverty, but we weren’t.  I missed my brothers and my friends unbelievably.  I felt completely out of place.  My fear and anxiety didn’t go away – instead they grew.  I was afraid to leave my family.  I didn’t want to go to school.  I didn’t want to go to other kids’ houses for birthday parties or other social events.  I was truly petrified at the idea of leaving home.  I cried and cried, begging my mom not to make me go.  I skipped school some during those last few months of 5th grade, because my parents went to work before we had to leave for school.  I told my sister to go on ahead, and I stayed home because the thought of facing school and more strangers was just more than I could bear.  The move had done something to me that I didn’t understand, and wouldn’t until years later.

After watching me struggle for a few weeks, my step-dad came to school with me in the morning to talk to my teacher.  Outside the classroom, he told her I was having a hard time adjusting, hoping she could do something to encourage me to make friends with other kids.  I had made him swear the night before that he would tell her in a way the other kids wouldn’t learn of – I was afraid of being singled out even more.  My step-dad says he asked her to keep his request quiet, but she immediately walked into the classroom, shut the door, and said, “Class – Missy is having a hard time adjusting to her new school.  I want each one of you to make friends with her.”  I was mortified, and I slid down in my seat in a futile attempt to disappear into my desk.  Of course, no one did anything different to try to make friends with the odd and quiet new kid.

I missed my family in Illinois, and I couldn’t explain that to anyone I was with in Wisconsin.  It seemed my mom and her family all assumed I should simply be happy to be there.  I don’t know if that was because whenever I did get to visit them, I was always sad to leave, or if they just didn’t know how to deal with my sadness so they pretended it didn’t exist.  I’m not sure how much my mom’s family was aware of the level of poverty we lived in with my dad, but my step-dad certainly saw it when he took us home to get our clothes.  My aunt had gotten a glimpse of it, too.  She dropped us off at home after my mom’s wedding the prior year, and she brought some leftover food to leave with us.  As soon as she set it on the table, the boys dug in and inhaled it – so there was some idea we were in bad shape, but no one wanted to accept what our circumstances were, so they ignored it.  What could they do about it, anyway?  When they later heard what it was like, our stories validated to them that we should be happier where we were, and no one knew how to address the fact that I was anxiety-ridden, afraid, horribly lonely, and more than a little broken.

My step-mom, who divorced my dad shortly thereafter, told me years later that my half-sister used to wander the house, in her diaper, with a picture of Karen and me.  She cried endlessly after we were gone.  When I let myself look at the image I carry in my mind of this scene, it still causes me to choke up and feel that deep loss all over again.

I tried to write letters back and forth with a friend or two, and I hid them in my clarinet case so no one else could read them.  One of the friends I corresponded with was a boy.  We were too young to be boyfriend and girlfriend, but we were close friends, and sort of thought of ourselves that way.  At ten, we didn’t know what romance was, but in one letter he sent me he compared us to Romeo and Juliet, kept apart by our family circumstances.  One night after I was in bed, I heard my mom recounting details of the letter to my step-dad and laughing about it.  I was embarrassed, and felt so completely violated that my mom had been going through my things.  I thought I’d hidden the letters cleverly, but she’d found them and was making light of them, and I just felt even lonelier.  I pulled the blankets over my head and cried silently, wishing with all my being that I was back at home with my dad.

I also couldn’t understand why my dad left, and wanted desperately to hear from him.  I didn’t, though, until four years later, and that brought a new and intense pain to my life.  Living at my dad’s for a few solid years was the first time I felt any sense of permanence.  I had reached out to him in my own way, whether it was obvious to anyone but me.  His attention and approval was so important to me, that when he wouldn’t correspond with us at all, I naturally internalized some feeling that it was my fault he left – he had seen something in me when I opened up that he didn’t like, so he took off.  My sister felt this, too, but her reaction was a little different.  She thought that we had to be perfect living with my mom and her new husband, or they would send us away, too.  As I got older, I realized I shouldn’t think of it as my fault, and my dad’s problems had little to do with me directly, but it didn’t stop me from losing any confidence that I had.  It didn’t stop me from expecting other people not to like me, or not to like me enough.

Inspiration

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There are a number of things that inspired me to write my life story.  I’ve often been told by others I should write about it because it’s an unusual story.  A couple of years ago, I began to do some genealogy research, and was immediately sucked into it.  I’ve spent tons of time investigating members of my family tree, and working to build the stories of their lives from various records I’ve found.  Many of the most interesting stories involved incredible tragedy, and I started to think about how traits and behaviors make their way down family trees.  I thought about these people in relation to me, or in relation to other people in my family, and felt there was an element worth investigating within the framework of my own life.  I also started going to a therapist for the first time in my life, in an effort to work through some of the issues I face as a result of the way I was brought up.

These three things – my personal history, stories about ancestors I located in my genealogy research, and my experiences in therapy are the inspiration for my writing, and they have become the three main components I follow in my memoir.  It has been tricky to determine how to move between these elements and still create a primary thread that weaves its way through the story from beginning to end.  The structure of the story has been much more difficult for me to plan than the writing itself was, but I enjoy the challenge, and am looking forward to getting feedback – good and bad – about my writing.

Where to start?

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When I finally decided to write about my life, I didn’t really know where to start.  I had plenty to say, lots of stories to tell, but figuring out where to start was daunting.  In the end, I decided not to worry about it, and  just to write.  I made a list of topics – some were people, some were places, some were specific experiences or memories – and I just picked a topic from the list and wrote about it.  Some things were easier to write about than others.  Often, my first pass was absolutely horrible – full of facts and not much else; reading it was like listening to someone read the phone book.  It gave me a framework, though.  I was getting words down on paper (well, figuratively, at least).

The facts were important, though I knew the end product would need a big dose of emotion to bring my life back off the pages.  I spent weeks working on revisions, much like peeling off the layers of an onion.  I had to figure out how to connect with old emotions that I’d long since buried, and that was a chore.  I also had a really long list of topics that I’d written about in no particular order, so I had to decide how to string together all those pieces.  My story still has no title, and also has no ending.  Yes, I agree.  Those are fairly big things to be missing – but, I needed a break.  So, I’ve put it down, sent it to an editor friend whose opinions I trust and respect, and am moving on to do some writing here.

They say to be a decent writer, you have to exercise your writing muscles.  That’s what this site will be for me – my writing gym.  I intend to write about my memoir and post excerpts of it here.  I also intend to write about the events of the rest of my everyday life.  Well, some of them, anyway.  We’ll see how that goes.

Grand ideas

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When I was a kid – and by kid, I mean maybe 20-ish – I wanted desperately to write a book…. Someday…. I never actually attempted to write a book back then.  I wrote – but it was bits and pieces – sort of journal style, sometimes chunks of poetry, mostly just the repetitive rants of a disillusioned, broke, and miserable kid.  Society was my enemy.  My life was my enemy.  I had some grand idea that I had something to share with the world, but the world blocked my attempts, so I got angry at it.

In reality, I had no idea what I wanted to say, no dedication or willpower or follow-through to find a project and stick to it, no clue who I was or who I wanted to be.  Eventually I became an adult and forgot all about it.

Almost two decades later, I had an epiphany.  Actually, it may be more accurate to say I had something of a nervous breakdown.  In any case – I remembered I wanted to write a book.  And I finally had some fuel for it – some stories to tell and some pain.  So began my attempt at writing a memoir, another grand idea.  It’s not done yet.  It will probably never be published unless I publish it myself and I haven’t yet decided whether I want to do that – but, in this space, I will document my attempts to write in the midst of living my normal life, and see where it all ends up.

Anonymity

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I’ve decided to publish my posts anonymously for the moment.  The memoir I’m working on includes a number of characters from my life, some of which may not want me to write about them or my experiences with them.  Until I am able to discuss my project with everyone (which may not happen overnight), I’m going to keep everyone’s identity under wraps, including my own.