Earlier this week I spoke of Eula Biss's first book,
The Balloonists, and how it made me think. This weekend, in the Chicago Tribune, I'm reflecting on Biss's new book,
On Immunity, a book that has been generating much press for its artful exploration of the social ramifications of personal health decisions. My review begins like this, below, and continues
here.You read Eula Biss' new book slowly, with care. You are not sure, at first, where it is going. The topic is immunity, also inoculation, also vaccination, epidemics, social responsibility, vampirism and the impossibility of completely knowing. There are episodes of bright, emboldened insight. There are incidents — sometimes still and sometimes cinematic — of personal story. There are playground questions and interviews with scientists, Achilles and Dracula, myths and birth and a child sleeping. There are others, and there is us. There are the invisible airborne germs and the visible, struck down dying.
As Eula Bliss makes headlines with her new examination of vaccines and social inoculation,
On Immunity, I have been reading her first book, an exquisite inversion of the memoir form. Released in 2002 by Hanging Loose Press,
The Balloonists is a patchwork of impressions and inquiries about marriage. The kind of marriage the author's parents had. The kind the author contemplates on her own. In between, declarations of impossibility.
For example:
"At some point," my mother tells me, "you realize that your parents are not who you thought they were. You realize that they are something separate from what you have made out of them." She tells me this because she knows that I have been writing about her. It is what she says instead of saying, "You don't know me."
"For example," she says, "my sister always felt that our father didn't like her. Of course he liked her, he just didn't understand how to show that he liked her. She didn't really have a father that didn't like her, but that doesn't change the fact that she had the experience of having a father who didn't like her." My mother is telling me that I am not a liar, but that she is not what I write about her.
I took these photos yesterday while walking Valley Forge National Historical Park with my friend, the amazing writer (
Badlands) and teacher, Cyndi Reeves. Over four point five miles (Cyndi tells me), the conversation ranged from Krakow to Siena to the architectural form of stories to the autobiographical possibilities of fairy tales, and, in the final uphill climb, to Eula Bliss, whose
The Balloonists Cyndi had also read years before I discovered it.
I was out of breath on the hill. I was grateful beyond measure to have a friend like Cyndi to talk
The Balloonists with.
