LITMIR.BIZ

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higher each time. So I return again and again to questions about the nature of the self, what it means to live in a body, why we are all lonely, how to use language to say what can’t be said. These are questions of intimacy and separation, and the answers are ambiguous at best. Long before I knew how to describe it, I liked ambivalence. Certainty has always seemed a bit dishonest to me.

      Being a writer of the long personal essay is a little like being the village blacksmith. It takes decades of training, and there may not be much demand. I think I’m a good writer, but not a very good author—that is, I’m rather introverted and uncomfortable with self-promotion. As the noise level rises, I retreat a little more. Writers are increasingly expected to be multimedia performers, chasing the zeitgeist and molding their work to fit. I remember hearing the word midlist for the first time, decades ago. My editor was gently explaining her modest expectations for my book, but my first thought was, yes, that sounds about right. The midlist is disappearing now, and I could spend a few more years fretting about it. But the cure is to write.

      To write—which is to say, solve the problem. I sometimes imagine the barren stretches, false starts, and breakthroughs that I experience with almost every story are kin to what any scientist or inventor feels. The essay is the problem and I seek the solution: a structure, a start, an end, a phrase. A word.

      My basement is filled with failures—boxes of unfinished drafts, scribbled outlines, entire books collapsed into chaos. Countless dead ends. But it is as important for writers to fail as it is for any inventor. A year of not succeeding is a year without editors or deadlines. No other voices intrude. There is, finally, nothing to fear. If you don’t know what to do, and finally you don’t know so completely that the entire world seems to be the question—well, then anything is possible. When we don’t know the way, a thousand paths exist. All I have ever had to do to succeed as a writer was to fail, because not solving the problem means the solution lies ahead.

      I write out of what really happened, a huge field in which to roam—but a bounded field nevertheless. I sometimes work with students who are struggling to write at all. I might ask them to draw a picture of their writer’s block. One young woman covered a page in black and wrote across it, “I will be found wanting and thrown out of the universe.” We are all imposters, never more so than when we try to tell the truth. To write the essay is to be haunted by our own lies. No story is the whole story. Everything we know is shadowed by what we’ve missed, forgotten, or been afraid to see. The title essay is my answer to a question that I have asked myself and been asked by others countless times: how do we know what is true? What is fair for me to say about others? What do I have the right to say, when I can never be sure about the truth?

      I try to solve the problem.

      Few things are worth writing down—that’s why there are so many boxes in my basement. But there is only one way to find out what those things are. Now and then, I have imagined not writing. What a different shape my life would have had. How much time! Mine has been a very indie, mezzanine, remainder table, 367-followers-on-Spotify type of career. What if I wasn’t writing or trying to write or avoiding writing all the time? What if I didn’t have this witness on my shoulder? What if I just … stopped.

      Instead, I fall asleep to language bouncing around my skull. Words pour through my life like drops of water, running together into a stream, becoming—

      Start here.

       Orphans

      LAST CHRISTMAS EVE MY FATHER TOOK ME BY THE ELBOW and whispered: “Your grandmother died ten years ago today. Be nice to your mother.” I had forgotten. He is a reticent and furtive man, but he remembers things. For years he would wait till a few days before Christmas and then hand me $20. “Go buy something pretty for your mother,” he would instruct, gruffly, and turn away.

      That evening while we watched television, all lined up beside each other and chatting desultorily, my mother spoke abruptly, in a new voice. “My mother died today,” she said, wonderingly, as though she’d just been told. The television prattled on. She deflects expression and emotion by riposte and foil, deftly, and we exist in the cautiously defined spaces between. It is an inharmonious harmony, tense, with voices rarely raised.

      She asked me what I remembered of my grandmother, and I told her of driving fifty miles out of our way on our last vacation just to see my grandmother’s house, the house where my mother was raised.

      “Was the ivy still on the chimney?” she asked, for since the house was sold she hasn’t been back. The threads tangle while we talk, a tweedy web of shifting associations: my mother and her daughter, her mother and my grandmother, and around us father and husband, brother and children, their children, my children. This is her surprise for me, her secret: my mother yearns to be a daughter again.

      My mother’s mother was a forbidding woman, stern and drawn, with an immaculate house and a tiny yipping dog that nipped at our heels from behind her calves. She would stand in the gleaming kitchen, hot in the summer morning sun, with a spatula raised as though to swat at the first sign of disobedience. It was a house of territories, borders, boundaries, permitted and forbidden places. I knew as an undeniable law that what I valued she often ignored; that she placed value where I couldn’t see it. I searched for snails in the rose bed, hid dolls in the mail chute. She waxed the kitchen floor.

      Once in fury at her I sat on the concrete steps and tore apart her favorite philodendron, leaf by leaf, scattering the green shreds like dung, like ruin. The old straight-backed woman cried, still and trembling in the doorway. It was an enormous crime. I sat in the curious silence of shamed regret, curling inward, surrounded by pieces of something I couldn’t put back together again—and saw behind my grandmother my own mother’s stricken face. She had somehow permitted this crime, had failed, and become subject to her own mother again, through me.

      And so I always found it odd, watching from the doorway, that my dour grandmother and stoic mother spent hours talking over a single pot of coffee, relaxed, girlish. These scenes are elongated and mysterious, one of the forbidden places. I sprawled on the huge rag rug, following its oval track from the center outward, from the outside in, while they laughed and gossiped. At night my sister and I lay in the soft guest bed, fighting over territory, and heard more talk, muffled, more laughing, and now and then through the magpie voices my father’s deep, short bursts of speech.

      Now I have three children, and new appreciations. I call my mother, three hundred miles away, to talk about them, and she interrupts, anxious to return to her book, her television. She takes her cool pleasure in us from a comfortable distance, and our conversations are often short. She parries better than I can, and I forfeit. Hanging up in sudden discontent, I am all over them, passionate and physical, rubbing and wrestling and jouncing, whispering subliminal permissions, tiny pleas, in their downy ears.

      I give up my common inhibitions, rules of conduct, when I hold my babies. It is a pleasure instinctive and heavy, and breathlessly free. Bit by bit time wedges us apart, forging separation, and amnesia. I love my parents because, after all, they are my parents, and my babies love me for the same good reason. We are bound in a loom of pulling away and pushing back, letting go and holding on. My children’s task is to pull away and they do, they do, tugging furiously at the leash I strain to play out an inch at a time. We hold back, let go; I still tug. A friend, telling me of her mother’s death, begins, “I remember when we were dying.”

      My mother was orphaned a decade ago, and she still shivers with loss, denied the requisite delights of regression. Nostalgia is its own reward, its own burden; it illuminates our imagined history. My grandmother lived in that house a long time after her husband died of cancer, long after she found out that she, too, had cancer. The house was sold, furniture parceled out. The tough woman in the kitchen became a weak bundle of pain, and I lifted her under her arms and swung her from the bed to the commode, commode to chair. She admitted no complaint. I could feel in her dried and sagging arms a most peculiar substance. I could feel, blushing, a twisted skin in the faces that watched us; my mother and her daughter, my sister and my mother’s sister and my grandmother’s granddaughters, all of us at once and together and almost wholly unaware of it: the

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