Fire Shut Up In My Bones

Charles Blow's memoir of this title is nothing short of miraculous. It resonates with me in a way no memoir has since I Know Why the Caged Bird Sing by Maya Angelou. Two black lives - hers, a generation back; his, more contemporary - lives of poverty, of the south, of resilience and sexuality interrupted. And more. More than this list. Lives of incredible spaciousness mixed with precision.

I read a chapter/passage of this book in the New York Times awhile back. Please read that here. It gives you a strong sense of his voice, his power, and his vulnerability. I knew as soon as I read it that I'd need to read the memoir.

It is so incredibly hard to write about sexual abuse. So hard to truck the line of being a victim without turning it into a litany of victim-hood. And some people do that, maybe some need to do it. But Charles Blow refuses that. He refuses to make a single story out of his abuse, though the book is peppered with references to it and begins with the moment when he confronts his abuser once and for all. It is clear it was one of the biggest events in his life - marked him for a long, long time. A deep wounding. And also that his love - for his mother, for his family, and the love he received from them, though he felt so alone for so long - may not have fixed it, but exists alongside it.

Resilience. We can't write about it until we can respect ourselves, trust ourselves, celebrate ourselves for our own survival. The gritty truth combined with compassion, the mixed-in sense of suffering and insight - these are the combinations I find most compelling. Mixed-in. A part of the same. Not separate. Not as much about overcoming and living within, breathing, surpassing while never forgetting.

Almost impossible to articulate. And yet, Blow has done it so well here, all 228 pages.

Our Need For Story

Lately I have been thinking a lot about - and writing a lot about - the stories we tell and how they help or hinder us. 

The photo above is a page from Abigail Thomas' book, Thinking About Memoir. This little section is called "The need for story". 

Then, the link and excerpt below are from a slightly different angle - a novelist talking about his experience with therapy. I love the article title: "Psychotherapy as a kind of art". A good reminder that we are always, always constructing story, fictional or not. That's human-ness at its core.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/opinionator/2015/01/27/psychotherapy-as-a-kind-of-art/?smid=fb-share&referrer=

But I stayed on, three times a week, for the next six years. And when, two years after that, my family fell apart and I became single parent to my three children, I returned and stayed on, twice a week, for eight years. Session after session, I talked with increasing freedom and trust about anything and everything — dreams, memories, doubts, fears — and about matters that had been hiding in closed rooms of my mind. I approached therapy sessions with the same energy, intensity and sheer playfulness I brought to my writing: I brought in journal entries, letters, books, photographs, my typewriter, my baseball glove and drafts of works in progress. So large was my desire for my doctor to know me that I once appeared at her door with that day’s show-and-tell piled high in one of my children’s toy wheelbarrows.

It may sound funny, but it never fails to amaze me how what we do and need in writing are the same as what we do and need in life, whether or not we are writing about our lives. But especially if we are.