On Victimhood

I have so many things to say about Claire Dederer's memoir Love and Trouble* that I can't possibly fit them all into one blog post. Mainly, I find I just want to highlight her words and share them. So I will focus this post on the most highlighted part of the book - her final chapter - "On Victimhood."

One of the things I struggle with the most in my memoir, currently titled Not Alone, is how to talk about sexuality. How to write about it? Really. Really really. When I first started writing about it, it seemed clear - because it is clear - that I was strongly shaped by a couple of young victimhood experiences with sexuality. Older boys - not yet men, but certainly with more agency than me - taking advantage of me sexually. These were both traumas, the two sets of experiences, and at first I thought my memoir was all about how they affected my sexuality. Then I thought, "Well, losing my dad at age 12 certainly affected my sexuality as well." That's true, also.

The fact is, the more I wrote, the less focused on victimhood I was. The more interested in nuance, in exploring all the subtle effects of growing up, socialized female, being cisgender and bisexual. Some traumas, some beautiful explorations. It's possible my young body enjoyed some of the victimizing encounters - that's not uncommon, even if they cause trauma - but that doesn't mean I "asked for it" or even that they are less traumatic (pro tip: if your body enjoys something traumatic that happens to you sexually, it makes it EVEN HARDER to unpack all the shame).

So when I came upon this final chapter in Dederer's memoir, which I was already relating to strongly for its exploration of how her sexuality came up for question again in her mid forties, I was blown away by statements like these. I feel like I am phoning in this blog post just quoting a lot from Dederer, but the fact is, in this final chapter she says so much of what I have wondered about, including feeling icky writing it.

I only wanted to tell stories of how sex had happened to me. Mary Karr has said that the reason she wrote Cherry, her memoir of teenage lust, was that teen sex was never written about, just teen victimhood. Now that I’ve had a whack at it, I can see why—it is easier to write the victimhood. The victimhood was like a vehicle that took me closer to what really interested me, what was obsessing me in middle age as it had done in youth: sex. But if I wrote only about assault and predators, I didn’t have to face myself as a sexual person.

Sex was a home and a site of purest simplicity. You just were. It pains me to write these words more than any other words in this book: I liked it. It’s still so hard to say it. The premise of this book is that I was wild and unhappy as a teen, and my unhappiness stemmed from my sex-crazed nature. But what I really felt was what I feel now: Life was hard, and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, and I was profoundly, near-fatally afraid of failure, and sex was the only thing that made me feel better. And who doesn’t want to feel better?

The conflation of victimhood and desire is very hard to talk about, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real, at least for me. Even writing that sentence makes me afraid, as a feminist, that I am saying something wrong. But for me the freest and purest expression of sex has come with the playacting removal of volition. Being constrained in some manner, whether by hands or ties or just the physical weight of another’s body. 

Of course the moments—and there are more than I’ve told here; a list—when I’ve actually been assaulted were the opposite of pure and free. This is the complication. We all understand that rape isn’t really a sexual act.

Two facts, in conflict and simultaneously true. I can be excited by the idea of victimhood and still have been victimized. Even if I’ve turned into grist for the sexual mill, nonetheless, I didn’t get to choose to be victimized that first time, that first among many. I didn’t get to choose the historical circumstances that have complicated my life. I get to own and even enjoy my excitement over being dominated or punished, but I also get to be pissed at a culture that didn’t protect me.

In this #metoo moment (or, to be more accurate, white female popularization of #metoo, which began long ago under the guidance and care of women of color with less public awareness paying attention to it), words like this feel all the more risky and also essential. Unpacking the complexity of sexuality, especially victims' sexualities, is not only respectful but also crucial. We cannot rest in the place of polarization and dualism, as tempting as it is. Not only do we wind up dismissing those who victimize others, we other the victims themselves/ourselves.

Dederer's book has upped my own game in my own memoir.


*I also want to name that this title is almost the same as a brilliant short collection of fiction from 1973 by Alice Walker, In Love and Trouble, Stories of Black Women. Please read this as well. It's a memoir blog, otherwise I'd discuss that, too!

Recovery Isn't Covered

Discussing a memoir called Loose Girl* by Kerry Cohen with a friend the other night, we ruminated on the lack of the recovery period in memoirs. Recovery. Not the sexy, busy, crazy, wild part where you go manic/have a sex addiction/are institutionalized, but the long, arduous, boring-as-hell-in-real-time but actually super-fascinating-and-inspiring-for-others time period.

We are both often disappointed by the lack of recovery. In fact, we could both use a whole other memoir post-Loose Girl and that ilk (as much as we love these books for their incredible honesty), focused just on recovery alone. How it is to tow the long road from figuring out for real now you have a problem (addiction, mental health challenges, etc) to the point where you can even begin to consider writing a book like this (now-ish).

The "credentials" that appear on a memoir of someone recovered - family, job, degrees - all are supposed to suffice for recovery. We need to imagine how someone got from realization to present moment, as it is often covered in a chapter, if that. I am thinking of often very commercial books like Wild, or Fast Girl, but these issues plague even more literary, mindful and small press memoirs like The Center Cannot Hold, or a favorite here on this blog, The Chronology of Water.

To stop the memoir after all that action and then leap forward to publication in an afterword, if at all, is painful for those of us who live in survivor or recovery mode. We come wanting beautiful painful words, yes, but we also want slow joy and hope, building up how to get by brick by brick, day by day.

Those who do focus on the nitty gritty tend to ONLY do that - Anne Lamott's books are all basically recovery books, in which she relentlessly shares her failings and insecurities. Mary Karr, once she gets past the core childhood memoirs of Cherry and Liar's Club, does that with Lit a bit more. And the work of Abigail Thomas** really does this, continuously exploring not just individual difficult events, but the rich weaving of life that goes on behind and underneath survival and recovery.

What I'd love to see is more books in-between - books based on single events, but with recovery woven into the story. It's the denouement, and it is too short-shifted right now. Somewhere between more on-going, contemplative, life-writing memoirs (one of Abigail Thomas' books is titled An Actual Life), and those about single incidents, dramatic effects, or recovering from addiction, there must be a middle ground with a fuller picture included.

*previous posts with Loose Girl here and here.
** previous post with Abigail Thomas here.

Brown Girl Dreaming

Awhile back, I began to contemplate the lines between autobiographical poetry and memoir. I wondered where one would draw the line, saying that poems by a poet were about their lives, but what they created was a book of poetry, or whether something could be called a more poetic memoir?

I found a great book of poetry by memoir master Mary Karr (in this post here), and a good guest article by Keven Bellows on Marion Roach's blog here. Jill Bialosky's article on her memoir History of a Suicide and her contemplations about poetry versus memoir is here. I love this quote in particular from Bialosky:

Both poetry and memoir attempt to uncover what lies behind the unreasoning mask and rescue it into consciousness. The creation of both arts is reliant upon Keat’s ideas of negative capability, of being capable “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

These are all adult memoirists and poets, which is, in some ways was I was looking for.

I realized over time though that I had sort of overlooked the plethora of poetic biographies for children and teens out there. One example I used to use to teach middle schoolers is Poet Slave of Cuba (a biography). In terms of telling personal stories, Naomi Shihab Nye's collection What Have You Lost? is a wonderful tender collection of poems by children and young adults about real life loss.
In fact, it seems poetry is commonly used in younger reader literature, because it is construed as being simpler, more readable, more appeasing to kids. However, that can be deceptive. Intensity can pack a punch in poetry, even moreso than in prose (see Poet Slave).

In particular, Jacqueline Woodson's memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, has been on my list since it came out a couple of years ago, and it is wonderful. Like Poet Slave, it deals with a difficult time filled with racism and struggle, in this case, the civil rights era in the south and north. Her lyrical verse makes it possible to depict difficult scenes - difficult for adults as well as kids! - and actually to reveal the simplicity of the logic that ruled - and still rules - racist thinking.

For instance, she speaks of going north with her family, moving from South Carolina to New York City, and how her mother begins to discipline their speech with switches:

We are never to say huh?ain't or y'allgit or gonnaNever ma'am -- just yes with eyes
meeting eyes enough
to show respect.
Don't ever ma'am anyone!The word too painful
a memory for my mother
of not-so-long-ago
southern subservient days... 

The list of what not to say
goes on and on... 

You are from the North, our mother says.
You know the right way to speak. 

As the switch raises dark welts on my brother's legs
Dell and I look on
afraid to open our mouths. Fearing the South
will slip out or
into them.

Or this amazing short poem, which depicts going back to South Carolina after living up north:

ghosts 

In downtown Greenville,
they painted over the WHITE ONLY signs,
except on the bathroom doors,
they didn't use a lot of paint
so you can still see the words, right there
like a ghost standing in front
still keeping you out.

As is so often the case, my favorite passages are about memoir itself, about memory, about writing. While Woodson is depicting an era, and her experience being black at that time in the US, she also questions the nature of memory itself, especially in family. These are various passages from the amazing poem "other people's memory":

You were born in the morning, Grandma Georgiana said.
I remember the sound of the birds. Mean old blue jays squawking. They like to fight, you know!...That's how I know you came in the morning.That's how I remember. 

You came in the late afternoon, my mother said.
Two days after I turned twenty-two.Your father was at work. Took a rush hour bus tryingto get to you. 

You're the one that was born near night,my father says... 

My time of birth wasn't listed
on the certificate, then got lost again
amid other people's bad memory.

Finally, she writes throughout about her journey of coming to writing. When she was very young, words were exceptionally hard for her, which had a sting because her sister excelled at everything (from "gifted"):

I am not gifted. When I read, the words twist
twirl across the page.
When they settle, it is too late.
The class has already moved on. 

I want to catch words one day. I want to hold them
then blow gently,
watch them float
right out of my hands.

And, of course, as a National Book Award winner, she has done just that.

If you are usually writing or reading in prose memoir forms, explore poetry - whether it is explicitly labeled memoir or not. Play with form, on large and small scale. See if you can find a way to accept the uncertainty and complexity of life with simple forms, in a way complex paragraphs and sentences cannot grasp.

Mary Karr: Poetry Meets Memoir

In my search for poetry-as-memoir, I have encountered something I intuitively knew but hadn't quite articulated or had articulated for me:

Most poetry is memoir. 

Highly autobiographical, with lyricism that can get at feeling over fact, poetry and memoir both  prefer senses, experience and feeling. No wonder I like them both so much.

My favorite discovery so far is finding Mary Karr's poetry. I had no idea she wrote poetry. 

And here's the best part - it's really fucking good. From the collection Sinners Welcome:

STILL MEMORY The dream was so deep
the bed came unroped from its moorings,
drifted upstream till it found my old notch