Narrative Nonfiction

Reading Ariel Gore (The End of Eve) makes me want to shout some truth. Reading her and Mary Karr (The Art of Memoir) at the same time makes me want to tell everything. All of it, right down to the smallest details, no matter what the consequences. Of course, I'm not them. My most interesting drama at the moment is mostly not about me, really, so it isn't my stories to tell. So telling the truth about it is not something I can do. I would at best be telling other people what I think about them, and at worst, be completely denying my part in what surrounds my life but is not what I generally think of as my life.

It's fascinating to me (and I guess what I mean by divine tension) that emotions can be so complexly contradictory and layered, so much so that trying to get to "the bottom" of them is a mire of trying and most likely not having a "there" to get to. At my writing group we were talking about mystery, and how you are advised to leave some in your writing, not to tease but mostly to give the reader something of their own to chew on, to not wrap the package up all enticingly and then go ahead and open it yourself. I'm thinking a lot about expectations, how deep they run, and how we can almost not avoid them, or avoid suffering from them. They're not realistic, but some of us (and by that I mean me) have developed a practice of avoiding even having them, not being willing to endure the disappointment. It's got euphemisms: going with the flow, making the observation "it is what it is," and for me it has grown to be a set of behaviors with which I just don't set myself up for disappointment. I enjoy what I do get, and try not to see it as a meager portion of all that life has to offer.

I settle, I suppose, and fail to risk enough to get what a lot of people cling tightly to, mostly other people. That's what Ariel and Mary write about, their abusive and outrageous parents, the damage that set them to becoming, the challenges to which they rose, their failures, their choices. They reveal their porous boundaries, but also their fearlessness, their counter-intuitive capacity for vulnerability, what made them cry, what cried in silence inside their heads when they didn't apologize or deferred from taking all the space they deserve. They wrote down most of what they thought and said and did, and made it a good story with spaces and mysteries and the right amount of satisfaction for the reader, for me. But they published the written account of it, the filtered story that came through their damage to our eyes. They put it there for us, but probably they wrote it for themselves, mostly. Because it was fun, and it felt good to use skills, and the stories, or the messages in them, were worth telling.

I stopped just before the end of Ariel's tale of her dying mother. I have to save it for a little while, after being able to do little else but read the book in the last 24 hours. It's far too short, for a book this important, this fulfilling. It is also a good idea for me to step away when I get this excited about relationships and people, particularly damaged people. I start to resonate loudly, start to get all about me, start to, I guess, (sigh,) get triggered by my own damage into my own drama. I invariably feel compelled to write. My advice to myself is to keep it in my journal, but it feels braver to put it here, where 30 or 220 (that's my alltime high so far) people read it, and where it had better not be a lie, and it had better not be too real. This isn't my journal, it isn't my Book of Secrets where I used to write really awful thoughts, ones I really never wanted anyone to know I was thinking, but just couldn't stop having until I wrote them down. If I put it on Facebook it's public even, like a zine I drop off at the library with my heart's address right on it.

I suppose that is what draws me so powerfully to these writers. They put out all this damaging evidence for me, of what crushes people to bits and ruins their lives, and they wave a flag over it, a kind of bravery flag. They make that intentional connection to the universal, and they make it clearly, and then they walk away and you are left thinking to yourself, well, there go all my excuses. There really is nothing but this present moment when I decide what my life is about. I decide what I feel, what I have, what I have just gotten or lost, and how much that matters.

That can feel harsh, confronting all of that wasted time and knowing that I will continue to waste time. Life's getting shorter and shorter. My life isn't really exactly what I want it to be. I could do more, say more, write more, think more clearly, try harder, and I know I won't really do better. I've already decided on the low-stress path. Maybe I've made the right choice, maybe there is no right choice. Maybe it is always a mire, and if you don't lose your boots or fall over, that's the best you can expect. I'm finishing this a week or two after I did finish the Ariel Gore and the Mary Karr books, and am on to other reading, somewhat less passionate. More choices, more excuses. No answers. We all just keep going, because it might be really cool what happens around the bend. We might find an even better book and get even more inspired. We might even put up three posts in three hours. Life is for sure, surprising.

Because to everyone else, what matters so much to me, doesn't matter. They have their own essentials, their damage and their moments. They get up every morning and drink coffee or don't, check email or not, write in their journal or not, and go out and do their work, the work they have decided to make the substance of their lives. It doesn't make them happy or unhappy; they do that. At every turn, we each decide if it is a most beautiful of days or if all that sunshine makes us a little stressed that we aren't out in it doing something remarkable.

All the time, I think maybe I'm doing it wrong, life. I am so happy to be unhooked from the world of desire to have a partner, to be loved in an intimate relationship, to have a lot of family demands on me. I have probably substituted my organizations and my work for those things...the Jell-O Show was my birthday party, and the weekly Market is my church service or maybe my family dinner. Country Fair is my ecstatic trip to an exotic land where I pretend that I don't work my ass off for a solid week and try to catch a sweet life moment as the dusk gathers or in the morning when that thrush sings.

As long as those sublimations and substitutions are in place, I feel fine. It can't be all that wrong. Anyway, there's no judge. Just the mire and the nice sheen on it that makes it look so pretty in the morning.