Excavating Heart Berries

I have spent a lot of the last 36 hours submerged in the memoir Excavation by Wendy Ortiz. 

I anticipated reading this book for a long time. I read an essay by Ortiz and most recently someone discussing how she does something miraculous with this memoir - Ortiz talks about having an affair with a teacher in his late twenties while she was a teenager, without casting him as a perpetrator or herself as a victim. 

I was intrigued. At first, this was a personal memoir study/feminist theory kind of intrigued. Then the end of June, and the beginning of the Shambhala blowout happened, and I got even more intrigued. So I finally put it on hold and got it from the library. Still, I sat on my loaned copy for three weeks, and finally, up against the due date, I started to read it.

Just as I was cracking it open, i went on a walk with a close friend, and she mentioned that she had just finished that very memoir and asked if I'd read it yet. I replied that I hadn't but I was just starting. My friend's teenaged daughter, who had also read it, deemed it wasn't written very well. My friend and I talk about this kind of thing often, this tender thing of critiquing/judging art. What did she mean by “Not well written?” My friend reflected for herself that she agreed with her daughter, and in her case, not well written meant “Not well held,” “Without the right container,” “Unprocessed in flavor.” 

I've just finished the book - and I'm not sure how I feel yet.

Some parts were deeply arousing, and I let them be - I let fantasy take over, I let myself feel her and his arousal then, and mine now, even if all three are confused. This felt volatile and I was angry at feeling aroused - alternately at him, then at her, then at myself. He should have controlled himself, she shouldn’t have written it in an arousing way, I shouldn’t have been aroused. So many shoulds.

The arousing parts are well written. Lots of the book is well written - processed, held, interesting to behold. Substantial parts of the book felt slapped together, too surface level, unexplored, unprocessed.

***

A few weeks ago, I read the memoir Heart Berries by Terese Mailhot and I struggled with similar issues. Both of these memoirs are experimental in form; Mailhot's writing is far more lyrical, and her processing seems deeper than Ortiz’s. But also some parts of Mailhot's book felt too easy, not thought through enough. I felt a heat rise up in my jowls as I finished. Was I judging her writing this way because she is Native and doesn't fit my white, even though not scholarly and generally pro-lyrical, gaze?

Mailhot’s memoir has an interview at the end, which I gulped up. In it she says parts of the book may appear effortless, but those are the parts she had to work at the hardest. Ortiz cites Lidia Yuknavitch (Chronology of Water); Mailhot, Sherman Alexie (You Don’t Have To Tell Me You Love Me) - both people who wrote more lyrically looser memoirs that I thought could have been tighter despite their brilliance. 

So is this a newer form of memoir? Am I missing something here - the modernity my peers and near peers (all four of these authors are in their 40s and 50s) have picked up on? All four are higher educated in writing, or at least have workshopped with professionals, so who am I to say anything about how tight or loose their writing should be? 

I feel a little small and unsure. I question whether my assessments of published, much less in-process work - my own and/or my clients’ - are accurate. They - I are/am not perfect. There's always more to learn. And yet. As I reconnect to my memoir and try to write about abuse and sexuality in nuance ways, I feel i want to do it differently - somewhat like they did, and yet different still.

Early on in writing, I wrote a review that never got published of a hip hop book for a magazine. The editor, who had specifically commissioned it from me, said even after a few revisions they found I was too focused on trying to make the book I was critiquing into another book. “You can't seem to review the book you read,” he said “You are reviewing how it compares to a non-existent version in your head.”

That accurate critique of my critique comes back to me now. I realize now this is actually less about credentials or self-doubt, and more about trying to expand and learn, absorb possibilities, while still getting clear about what I prefer and what I need to do. I don't need to decide on whether one person's work is better than another's - I simply need to take from it what is worthwhile for my own writing and that of those I work with, and leave the rest. I am developing the resilience to not make conclusions about value or merit for things I don't understand. Instead I can rest with them, be curious, keep studying.