finding, in our books, the persons we must be now.

I write less here on this blog than I used to. The conversation I am having is mostly with myself. When my son calls and asks how I am—when friends ask—I have no news, no funny anecdotes, I am mostly absent. Perched on the edge.

I am reading, I am writing, I am reading more. I am reading memoirs or novels that might have been memoirs or books on the meaning of story. Eileen Myles (Chelsea Girls). Alison Bechdel (Are You My Mother?). Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts and Bluets). Decca Aitkenhead (All At Sea). Sarah Manguso (Ongoingness). Heidi Julavits (The Folded Clock). Ta-Nehesi Coates (again). Claudia Rankine (again). Joan Silber (The Art of Time in Fiction).

Every time I slip inside these books I am living, for a spell, as other. Walking, as they say, in others' shoes.

The news is crisis. It is a madness that requires us to absent ourselves from ourselves so that we might occupy the heart and mind of others. White. Blue. Black. Whatever color it is: take your own off, put another on, and see. Feel. Think.

Two weeks ago I taught memoir to a group of six who, in their glorious differences, were gorgeously one. Tonight we will have dinner with friends who know and love us. In between I am seeking, in the books I read, a path toward greater empathy and knowing. So that when I return to me I'll be bigger than I was. More capable of making some kind of earthly difference.

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all the different ways we have to tell the story of our lives: Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?/Roz Chast

I know I was supposed to be watching the Super Bowl, gauging the plumpedness of those laced-up game balls, but I, beneath my furry blanket on the long stretch of the couch, could not take my eyes from Roz Chast's bestselling, award-winning graphic memoir, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

Like Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, Chast's illustrated story of her parents' later years is devastating and also beautiful and finally heart crunching. An only child of two people who have lived inseparably for years, Chast finds herself challenged by the encroachment of their needs and by the intensifying quirks of her parents' respective personalities. The domineering, almost bullying mother. The talks-too-much-and-can't-fix-a-thing-and-has-a-holy-soul father. They live in a four-room Brooklyn apartment crowded by lifelong detritus. They live increasingly afraid of stepping outside. They rely on Roz, but Roz is hardly enough. And when they finally agree to move into an expensive assisted-living facility, things don't get a whole lot easier.

But like Gary Shteyngart's Little Failure, the memoir we'll be unpacking in tomorrow's English 135 at Penn, Chast doesn't allow her confusion to rise to clanging bitterness. Doesn't allow her own disappointment, weariness, frustration, beleaguered condition to transmute into hateful spite. Doesn't tell her story to trump or exploit. She is just telling it as it was—the good she can remember, the empathy she feels, the anger that flashes, the hurt places in between the loved places, the ambiguity she will always feel about her mother and the love she'll always feel for her dad.

It's not a tirade, in other words. It's an archeological dig.

It's here, it's gorgeous, it proves (again, like Edward Hirsch's Gabriel proves, again) how many different ways there are to tell the stories of our lives.

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Alison Bechdel's Genius

This morning, at last, I read Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel's first graphic memoir. 

Two words:

Blown away.  

By the complexity and vulnerability of this story.  By Bechdel's literate and fascinating mind.  By the structure of this book.  By the many shadings within the illustrations.  How in the world did Bechdel make this book, I wondered.  I am, no doubt, the last to wonder.

Fortunately, she's out there on YouTube, answering the question. 

Perhaps because I am married to a man whose drawings I love, but whose cautions are endless—I am not an illustrator, he will say, repeatedly that dark look he gets in his eyes—I am fascinated by Bechdel's description of the work that she does—layer by layer by layer by layer.  Hundreds of images are required to tell her story.  Look at how she approaches a single one. 

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