Ann Patchett on Killing and Writing

 

These passages are from a Byliner mini ebook called The Getaway Car, which can be found here for $2.99. The Getaway Car is also a chapter in Ann Patchett's brand new book, This Is The Story of a Happy Marriage, which is a collection of nonfiction essays (only some about writing) recently out in hardcover. While the larger book is interesting, The Getaway Car blew my socks off so hard that no other essay in the book can even hold a candle to it. Get it. Now.

 Patchett is writing about fiction in The Getaway Car, though Happy Marriage is a book of nonfiction essays. However, what she says about writing fiction here is EXACTLY the same with especially memoir. When she speaks of that butterfly below, imagine she means, instead of the idea of a story, YOUR LIFE. How hard it is to go from YOUR LIFE to WORDS ON PAPER/MEMOIR. Absolutely killer accurate description:

 The book makes a breeze around my head like an oversize butterfly whose wings were cut from the rose window in Notre Dame. The book, of which I have not yet written one word, is a thing of indescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its color, so wild and loyal in its nature that my love for this book and my faith in it as I track its lazy flight is the single perfect joy in my life…When I can’t think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach into the air and pluck the butterfly up. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It’s not that I want to kill it, but it’s the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page…Everything that was beautiful about this living thing – all the color, the light and movement – is gone. What I’m left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled and poorly reassembled. Dead. That’s the book…The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies…Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.

Entering

Entering, LA, January 2013

Sometimes, we run into what Lynda Barry calls "an image" - a deeply set, just-waiting-to-emerge story that really needs to be told. In the last of my seven week classes a few weeks ago, this popped out of my student, Nick Wiesmueller. He said that this memory has always stuck with him.

This piece so well depicts what it can be like to go back and approach these intense images in writing. What it is, what it means, what it feels like to write memoir, or, even more so, for your memoir to write itself. Overpowering, sometimes overwhelming, incredibly enriching.
 

Endings

There was a time on the bus

from camp

A time which lasted forever,

I held my heart close

lead in my feet, hands,

I felt some deep loss

of people

of place

of belonging

of community

of my first girlfriend

and more than acceptance

and love, boy it sure felt

that way

The movement away

left syrupy remains in my body

as if wind pulling at part of

myself gently giving way

piece by piece

held firmly

heavy feet

heavy heart

heavy heart

lead on bus seat

weight,

frigid emotional air as I tried not to cry.

Why, I would always wonder does this tear so deep

Why must I feel so much

I can feel like it

like here

now.

I would hold tightly to vestigials, try to tie loosely

together, contact with

people,

one,

by,

one,

with phone calls, letters

until those connections, spider thin

were taken by distance time.

Yet always my heart belonged there,

and that’s why I chose

my one experiment in the woods

for college.

I haven’t even let myself

believe in that sort of fulfillment

I had there for years.

The fire, when burning just hurt too much.

So deep down it went.

There’s so much I’ve given up and sacrificed just to stay in the groove.

Deep in the groove,

Rutted, drive over and over until every bump, pot hole

is known.

it’s notched  deep, it’s hard to know what it means to leave it,

only that it’s somewhat terrifying

letting this in is deeply unnotched.

But it’s the demon that swims circles through my brain,

as insomnia time ticks the hours the by

It’s also love, tenderness.

That which deny is goodness, turned destruction,

energy bereft of acceptance takes on many unnatural forms,

comes out strange.

So the idea is whole acceptance of past selves,

past need fulfilled.

Not desires, needs pummeled into some outlet,

which though surface beneficial like biking 25 miles at lunch,

often is violence.

A violation of myself.

I have PTSD, diagnosed by a few.

And the amalgamation of emtions,

the incongruent attribution,

the self penalization by trenchant punch of emotion

into something it’s not.

Because there is just so much energy.

All typical.