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.

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teaching Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face

Each teaching semester at Penn I choose the memoirs I want the class to dwell on, learn from.  The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  The Duke of Deception.  House of Prayer No. 2.  Running in the Family.  Slices from Annie Dillard, Patricia Hampl, Vivian Gornick, the memoiristic poetry of Pablo Neruda. More.

This semester we're reading three, and this weekend I was preparing my notes for our coming discussion of Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face, a book with so much to teach that I filled six pages with citations and notes and sent my students more consider-this questions than perhaps a teacher should.  As a child, Lucy has cancer.  As a teen and young woman she endures more than thirty surgeries—first to remove the tumor from her jaw, then to try to resurrect her face.  That's the back story, but it isn't the reason this is such teach-worthy memoir.  I will teach Lucy Grealy tomorrow because of her reach—her attempt to make sense, her generosity, her thematic juxtapositions.

Autobiography is full of passages such as this:

By the end of my freshmen year I'd gained a reputation as one of the better poets on campus, which aided the development of my artistic persona.  How trivial to actually think about one's appearance.  The attire of my fellow scruffy artists told the world to recognize them as geniuses too preoccupied to care about anything as mundane as clothes.  But for me, dressing as if I didn't care was an attempt not to care, to show the world I wasn't concerned with what it thought of my face. In my carefully orchestrated shabbiness, I was hoping to beat the world to the finish line by showing that I already knew I was ugly.  Still, all the while, I was secretly hoping that in the process some potential lover might accidentally notice I was wearing my private but beautiful heart on my stained and fraying sleeve.

This is my home, my table where I sit with family and friends.  Tomorrow I'll take this spirit of community (pretend there are flowers, pretend there are candles), and we'll talk.

  

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English 145 (3)

At the end of class, the question: But how do we imbue our memoirs with meaning? The answer, which came later:

First and foremost, memoir writing is not autobiography. It is not the straight line of the what happened. It is the what happened and why, and what did it mean then and what does it mean now. Mostly it is about asking the right questions about the past and about the human condition. What are the conditions that lead to violence? What is the aftermath of abrasion? How does one survive loss? How do we tell ourselves stories to protect ourselves from the chaos of experience? How are big things small and small things big? How do the refrains from the past shape the condition of our present?

And on and on. Sometimes you can get at those questions obliquely, through structure and elision, as we saw with Running in the Family. Sometimes, as with the Diving Bell, you very directly play the now against the then; it’s in the shock of the discrepancy that we most intimately experience the author’s horror. This is the beauty of memoir. There are a million methods, but in the end, the best memoir is the memoir we read again and again for greater meaning. If all we get is a story, unlayered, we have no reason to return.

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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.

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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.

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