I now, I then

Scattered notes on memoir and identity

I’ve been thinking some lately about character: how we cast ourselves as heroes or antagonists of our own stories, the interesting ways others write us into theirs. They’re half-formed thoughts, for now at least, prompted in part by my own curiosity about the character I have created here in this newsletter. Who is she, this measured narrator, striving for touches of insight or grace – but not too much, not so much as to be precious, or seen to be suffering from #maincharactersyndrome? Honestly, I’m not sure half the time. I’m definitely full of confusion, awkwardness, and struggle – not to mention tongue-tied – in plenty of the day to day. 

In a recent essay in LitHub, Sarah Viren pins this question to the ground. The piece is an excerpt from her new book, which grew, in part, from a viral New York Times essay about the way in which an unstable colleague tried to derail the story of her life with her wife. But the book, as I understand it, encompasses much more than that deeply disturbing event, stretching back to experiences from high school. She writes: 

In researching my latest book—a memoir—I read and read old journals from high school, and in doing so, I found that question everywhere. Who am I? Am I real? Is any of this real? How do we know? These are the questions many of us ask when we’re young, and that some of us tend to lose track of as we age, as life crowds in and the existential get cannibalized by the practical: How do I keep this body nurtured? How do I make this person I am thrive? How do I love? How do I protect these creatures I’ve created? How do I stave off the end we all know awaits us? But if you are a writer, and especially if you’re a personal essayist, your work forces you to return to that teenage self, to that small philosopher, again and again, and ask, “Who am I?”

Well.

I’ve been living in high school – and in college, and in my 20s, and my 30s, and my childhood – an ungainly amount lately. Memories rush in, stumbling over each other in an attempt to gain primacy of place: was this the signal moment of adolescence? Or was it that? Like some mental Marie Kondoing, I’m sorting out which stories I’ll allow to continue to define me and which I’m giving away, with thanks. Some of this has been generated by two back to back trips to my homeland of Seattle, and the deaths of several key people in my own family story. Some of these memories sluice from the gate opened by simply keeping this newsletter: once you start writing about your life good luck keeping it all contained. Some of them spring from the brush with mortality that cancer allows, sure. And some from the post-treatment phase in which in mildly manic frenzy I’m dusting off various identities to try and see which ones still fit. 

Dancer, rower, aerialist; writer, editor, teacher; bartender, electrician, prep cook; potter, punk, performer; Seattleite, New Yorker, Chicagoan; single, dating, married; daughter, sister, aunt. They are all currently living in the flattened circle of my inner timeline and it’s a bit cramped in there these days as I work toward connecting, as Viren (and Virginia Woolf) puts it, the “I now” of the person writing this and the “I then” of the character remembered in the past. 

And then, of course, there’s the “you then.” Hang around with enough writers and eventually you’ll have the out-of-body experience of being cast as a character in someone else’s story. This has happened to me a handful of times, mostly as a bit player, though there was the time someone – a man – wrote a play about me that was not, I was told, flattering. (I was also told not to see it, so I didn’t.) Still, even in cameos, the smallest things stick, redefining our perceptions of the self. An old boyfriend turned memoirist described me, in a tossed off aside about our college romance, as having “a history of ending up with rock guys,” and to this day I cringe a little to be immortalized as such. For one, it wasn’t true: I was nineteen! Even if I talked big, I had no real history to speak of. But also, it set me off wondering: Was I a slut? Or more to the point, was I perceived to be? 

Of course this cuts both ways. I once thoughtlessly inflicted much worse pain on someone by my own pen, and I still cringe to remember the stricken look on the face of the very nice guy to whom I had unfathomably decided to show this piece of creative writing in which he appeared and then was summarily dismissed.

I think I am hyperaware of representation right now because I’ve been reading a lot of divorce memoirs. Why is the subject of a different essay, but one of their commonalities is the scrupulous care with which the authors (all women) depict their exes (generally men). These books are marked by meticulous efforts to center the author’s experience and feelings and a refusal to make the writerly leap to plumb the exes’ inner lives, or attach any motivation or often adjectives to their behavior. It is a high wire act, and one motivated perhaps as much by the nondisparagement clauses common to custody arrangements as by literary aesthetics and the ethics of memoir. 

“What I am convinced of is that when we write “I” in the personal essay it is a philosophical act as much as it is a creative one,” concludes Viren’s essay. “It is an investigation, and an excavation, of the self but also our shared existence.” It’s that shared existence that makes the crafting of character so tricky. Our lives are bound up with each others’ to the point that I am unsure sometimes whether it’s even useful to try and put words to our unique personhood. We long to live on in memory, but to do so requires the intervention of others. It’s a paradox!

I don’t really know where I’m going with this, other than to note that while the urge to commit personal history to page is rooted in the desire not to be forgotten, it is still no guarantee of such. I just added one more volume to the mountain of memoirs piling up in my office: Bette Howland’s W-3. The author of three celebrated books including 1974’s W-3, a memoir of her time in a Chicago psychiatric ward, as well as two later short story collections, Blue Chicago and Things to Come and Go, Howland received a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1984 and then never published another book.  She disappeared from public life and died in 2017, suffering from multiple sclerosis and dementia, the MacArthur award having permanently hobbled her creativity. “If people don’t expect great things from you, it’s easier to please them,” her son Jacob told LitHub in 2015. “But people expect great things from a writer who has won the MacArthur.” 

She would have remained forgotten, in all likelihood, had Brigid Hughes, the editor of A Public Space not found a copy of W-3 in a bargain bin and gone down an archival rabbit hole to figure out who she was and where she’d gone. It’s all chronicled here in a piece by AN Devers, who made waves two years later with a viral Twitter thread and later essay unpacking, with righteous fury, the professional erasure Hughes herself had endured as the editor of the Paris Review. Taken together they’re a case study in the internal and external art of undermining a woman’s career.

I’m reading Howland because I was asked recently to speak about her as part of a Chicago Literary Hall of Fame event on July 11. (If you’re in town, come by!) The invitation came out of the blue, and I was flattered to be included. I’ve been suffering from feelings of invisibility myself this spring, after the long year lying low, and I’m excited to put on the character of “literary person about town” and see if it still fits next month.

I’ll leave you with some bonus material that I’m fond of. Back in 2011 theater critic Christopher Piatt wrote a monologue for the Paper Machete cabaret about the death of newspapers and about being edited by me, back when I worked at the Chicago Reader. I don’t fully recognize the character he has created here – this jaded, tough-nosed editor perpetually on the go – but when I listened to it again the other day it helped me reconsider yet another period of life I thought I had put a lid on. Is it an accurate depiction? No. But it still makes me smile to think that he saw the germ of her in me.