Why did I get this book?
Recommended by someone I trust on Twitter.
Is it what I thought it was?
All I knew was that it was “literary non-fiction” and “essays”. So yes, it’s that. I had no other preconceptions whatsoever other than someone whose opinion I trust really liked the book.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
Not sure, other than recommending it to others. It’s well outside the circle of things I read professionally. It did make me think a bit about the relationship between online writing, especially in a blog-like format, and this kind of highly stylized personal essay. If you ever felt like online writing has cost us other kinds of longer-form reflective writing, this would be a good book to read to make you think about what that other kind of writing was, is and could still be.
There are also some subtle reflections on teaching gently woven through several essays that I really appreciated—in particular, in an essay that deals with miscarriage, with true crime narratives, and with women who have killed their children.
Quotes
“I caught bass then, too, but preferred drinking Coors Lights and watching the dark shadows of the fish on the boat’s sonar system, the sun dance of my bobber on the surface of the lake, and most of all, the ease with which Penny, my bass fisherwoman, would cast and reel, and then after a long stretch of silence, catch. ‘Babe,’ she’d turn to look at me, her eyes wide and blue like a north Texas sky. ‘Wanna learn how to take out a hook?’”
“I would let B. Joe and Mike Haley and the Farmer have their say, I decided, but the story was going to end with those girls and that kiss. That was my choice.”
“I couldn’t develop an argument against patterns built on green suede shoes. Also we were naked, and when you are naked in bed with someone it is easier to ask about the hidden powers of everyday objects than to dispute the fallacies of superstitions.”
“‘Necesitar is only for real needs, like water or sleep,’ she said. ‘Tener que is what you say for everything else.’ I told her that was strange, having two words for need. ‘Only because it’s not your language,’ she said.”
“It was sweltering the day I unmarried Marta, and we weren’t even together.”
“‘This is Marta’s daughter,’ the department chair explained. The older woman’s eyes lit up, and then she looked at me with a kind smile. ‘How lucky you are to get to hold her,’ she said. I was so surprised it took me a minute to respond. ‘She’s mine, too,’ I finally said with a smile of my own. But the woman either didn’t hear me or pretended she didn’t, because after that she only spoke gibberish to my daughter.”
“In the days and weeks that followed, people came to see you. They gifted us pink things. They called you pretty. I hated them for that, but I accepted what they gave us without a word. Over time I softened to the idea. I could see advantages. But even now there are moments when I wish, without wanting to wish, that you weren’t a girl. I wish this for you know than I wish it for me. I know I need to stop. I was a girl once, and it hasn’t ruined me. But it has made things harder.”
“When I saw that infographic about Facebook feeds, the sadness was similar to what I would later feel after the election. It is the kind of sadness you might feel for a lost limb, or for the baby inside you whose heart has stopped before she ever began…We never really own our country, not in the way we think we own ourselves, these shimmering bodies that hold us.”
“I have given up a dog and a home and a past and a country and a tiny fetus that might have been a baby. And I have gained a new home and a partner and a child and then another child and also a new life. Once, I was sitting on a dock looking at the tanned feet of my best friend while Florida’s sun beat down on our backs. Everything I owned has since been lost. Even my memories are not the same…We repeat the past just as the past becomes us.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
I kept trying to think of adjectives to describe the feeling of the essays. I kept fighting “gentle”, because they’re not gentle, especially not to the author herself—they’re reflective, introspective, and often self-brutalizing. “Gentle” kept worming its way in my head I think as a stereotypic threat trying to construct my straight male experience of a series of essays that frequently touch on the author’s queer identity. Though I think “gentle” also came to me because the language is often muted, quiet, melancholic. These are not petitionary essays, they’re not polemics. Quite a few of them concern what she didn’t or couldn’t say in various contexts: as a journalist assigned to cover a conversion therapy conference organized by Focus on the Family, as an exchange student in Guatemala struggling with Spanish—but equally, often, with being a person who is not heard by strangers and lovers, who spends a lot of time inside herself. She isn’t heard when she speaks much of the time, and what she says sometimes turns out to be wrong or misspoken. She doubts, she fears. She is alone, sometimes even when she is together. So not gentle, but not angry or demanding. Not talking at us, and not even talking to us much of the time.
One thing I liked very much in the essays was their thematic coherence. Viren offers a master class on a subject I often raise with students, about the importance of not being too “on the nose” in any form of writing, about how you have to stray a bit from your main point or theme but in a calculated way, that the best line between the beginning and end of your writing is not the shortest or the most direct. Each essay in the volume wanders away beautifully from where it starts but comes back in cometary orbits to the burning sun at its heart, in again and out again.
I especially loved the essay about singing “Tom Dooley” to her child and her uncovering and unpacking the song. My father loved The Kingston Trio and this song in particular and I must have heard it hundreds of times growing up and it was only when I was in my twenties that I actually listened to it and realized what kind of story it was telling and that it was doing what Viren describes very well, which is switching back and forth between a kind of collective third-person admonition to Tom Dooley as he waits to die and Tom Dooley himself telling his story. I remember the day I recognized what the song was actually saying and I felt sad: I’d never be able to go back to just singing along without really hearing. It’s like that for me with a lot of songs that I know by heart: I never really realize what the lyrics are about until I stop and truly listen. It’s been my problem with poetry, too: a resistance to wanting to know the meaning, to want to just skate along on top of the ice with the feel of the words. That’s been changing for me in the most recent decade of my life: all sorts of songs (and some poems, too) are going through phase changes; the ice is melting and I’m really hearing what they’re actually about. This essay really made me think about that—about having been in a world full of “harmless, powerful songs” and suddenly realizing that’s not actually the music of the world as it is.
The essay about memory within family, about who remembers and misremembers and why or when also really connected with me—Viren comes at a subject that I think about a lot, which is what are we allowed to say about the stories of people who are not ourselves but are in ourselves? If we own our own lives, then we own what people have been to us, what we’ve thought about in their lives, but also we don’t. Every fiction writer especially—or literary non-fiction writer—has to wrestle with this. “Write what you know”, but what you know may be for one just plain wrong in factual terms about a person (or many people) and even when it’s right it may be cruel or hurtful to write it to that other person. On the other hand, there’s nothing that disturbs my inner, unspoken world more than when someone insists that their anecdotal understanding of the same people I know is true and mine isn’t—or when someone directly tells me that something I saw happen never happened. Not, “Well, there’s another side to that story” or “I have a different feeling about that person” but “No, what you’re saying is just not true”. At those moments, you have to decide: am I going crazy? Is someone lying? When the conclusions or generalizations you’ve arrived at through observing people are important to how you make sense of the world, it’s hard to just give ground and say, “well, you must be right”, but anybody who is responsible and wants to live in reality has to allow, “maybe I’ve gotten it wrong”. As Viren concludes, “I am trying to tell our story, but the only one I can tell is mine”.
Anyway, I’ll join my Twitter friend and recommend the book very much.
Well, you made me want to read this, Tim.