I can't find Bauby, and other moments on the way to memoir essays

Yesterday, mid-afternoon, a tapping at my front door. It was my friend, Elizabeth Mosier, whom I greeted with wet hair and an exasperated sigh—not, perhaps, the most polite hello to a talented, good soul whom I'd not seen all summer long.

"I can't find it," I said at once, and because Libby is Libby, she was down on the floor beside me in seconds, sorting through my memoir collection in search of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by Jean-Dominique Bauby. It's a slender book, an important book, a book I needed to make a point in an essay I was writing. But because my memoirs are double or triple stacked (and also live in plastic bins—one in the house, two in the basement), finding poor Bauby was becoming an exercise in futility.

Libby and I took our walk, at last. I went to my father's house, to water orchids. I made turkey hash out of the turkey I'd roasted the night before, and then I searched again, until, at last, I had Bauby in my hands.

I've written nearly a dozen essays about memoir in these weeks surrounding the launch of Handling the Truth—meditating on new angles, discussing new books, weighing emerging considerations against old ones. It's been an extraordinary time, a chance to reconnect with classics and to fill my shelves (and iPad) with brand new titles. Not all of the essays have appeared in print quite yet, but I invite those of you who might be looking for more to read to scan the essays now listed here, on the Handling page. I'll share the final essays as they appear.

And thank you, Libby Mosier, for being that kind of understanding book friend.

Read more...

The Preemptive Howl

These claims, only, can be made for this day: I gave it over to dreaming. To preparing even more for the young writers' workshop I'll be teaching tomorrow, though my agenda is jammed already—more to do, more to see, more to talk about than the girls and I could possibly squeeze into one day.

And yet, how can we call tomorrow a success if we don't also speak of Rebecca Solnit's way of seeing, for example, the color blue? The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. How can we not retrieve Jean-Dominique Bauby from the brink? The last time I saw my father, I shaved him. It was the week of my stroke. How can we talk about beginnings and voice if we do not begin with Ondaatje? Drought since December. How can we claim to move toward the authentic and raw, if we do not tantrum with C.K. Williams, if we do not share his "preemptive howl"? And did you really think it would be possible for me to face a group of aspiring teen writers without reading aloud, with them, from The Book Thief? An original book and a popular book. You see, I'll tell them. It can be done.

And then I'll remind them of what Natalia Ginzburg had to say. I'll warn them, so I can warn myself: There is a danger of cheating with words that don't really come from within, that we have fished up from outside at random and skillfully pieced together, for we do become cunning. There is a danger in becoming cunning, in cheating. It is a very difficult craft, as you can see, but the most wonderful in the world.

Read more...

The Details, Stoked

The high, sweet smell of an overripe Bartlett pear, sun that falls silver on the branch across the way, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly read through this morning, a promise I kept for myself. I'd watched the movie a few weeks ago and couldn't get it out of my head, nor was there any reason to: It is a bright pirouette of a film, an affirmation.

Appreciated even more now, in light of this masterful book, this memoir, a mere 132, big-type pages long and steeped. Bauby, the former editor, rendered locked-in by a massive stroke and speaking through the blinking of one eye. Letters read off to him until he consents to one and then another. Words congealing. Story. Hope.

Most of us are blessed with hands that grip pens, fingers that do our calling on keyboards. And yet we are, perhaps, tempted to hurry through scenes for the love of writing the next one, or to subsume a detail not readily recalled, or to lean on a familiar turn of phrase because the melody is familiar (I have done these things; I confess). If we are, if I do, I will again read Bauby, to be reminded of what a man blinking each letter into place can achieve with language and with heart:

The lighthouse and I remain in constant touch, and I often call on it by having myself wheeled to Cinecitta, a region essential to my imaginary geography of the hospital. Cincecitta is the perpetually deserted terrace of Sorrel ward. Facing south, its vast balconies open onto a landscape heavy with the poetic and slightly offbeat charm of a movie set. The suburbs of Berck look like a model-train layout. A handful of buildings at the foot of the sand dunes gives the illusion of a Western ghost town. As for the sea, it foams such an incandescent white that it might be the product of the special-effects department.

Read more...

Transcendence

Two nights ago Bill and I watched "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," the extraordinary Julian Schnabel film based on the real-life story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the bon vivant editor of French Elle who suffered a massive stroke in his early 40s. Condemned to live with locked-in syndrome, able to communicate only by blinking his left eye, Bauby nonetheless authored a memoir that tantalizes, that lives. Schnabel's film is painterly, as one would expect—deeply layered, surprising, reeling off into high color and fantasy. It is a wonder, a feat of the heart.

Films are free to do so many things that books cannot, and yet, "Diving Bell," the film, is a writerly provocation, reaffirming the power of tangents and the fantastical, of flashbacks and dream forwards, within the shell of a story that is ultimately chronological. I am interested in the seams between things, in understanding just how memory and imagination sit inside the frame of narrative. In how memory and imagination become, to some degree, narrative.

I am interested in how one thing sits beside another in a story. In placements. In transcendence. And I am awed, in the end, by this man named Bauby, who found hope and love and power and a way to speak the mind that was still his.

Read more...