How to use this Page

Oh my friends. Some very big talent has just walked into the memoir room.

My review of Riverine, the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, by Angela Palm, in Printers Row (Chicago Tribune). Click the link here for the full review.

Add a Comment

Local independent publisher Graywolf Press is on a winning streak. Over the past several years they have been publishing some really fantastic stuff. They make me feel both proud and lucky to live in Minneapolis! One of their 2015 publications, The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson is another winner. Nonfiction to be sure but not one of those books that fits into a neat category.

The volume is slim, only 143 pages. The book is written in thought chunks. I have no idea what else to call them, these paragraphs of varying lengths separated by a band of white space much wider than a regular paragraph break. Each chunk is complete but the chunks flow together too to develop an idea or make an argument or tell a story. Then there are slightly wider bands of white space that indicate a change in direction or the beginning of a new story. It makes for a meditative mood and works like thinking or conversation where you circle around things, go off on a tangent and then come back then leap to something that seems completely unrelated but turns out to be associated in some way or another. I very much liked this style and it suits the subjects Nelson writes about as well her exploratory approach.

The Argonauts themselves, you may remember them from mythology, were those who sailed with Jason on his ship the Argo to get the Golden Fleece. They had other adventures too, of course, but that is the one they are chiefly known for. So before even knowing what the book is about, we are given the signal that it is an adventure, and exploration of some kind. Within a few pages of the book we are provided further explanation:

I sent you the passage from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes in which Barthes describes how the subject who utters the phrase ‘I love you’ is like ‘the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.’ Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase ‘I love you,’ its meaning must be renewed by each use, as the ‘very task of love and of language is to give one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.’

The “you” Nelson is addressing is her spouse, artist Harry Dodge, who is gender fluid and does not fully identify as either male or female. Though over the course of the book Dodge begins taking testosterone and has a mastectomy. That information alone might give you an idea about how “Argonauts” applies in an even broader sense than Barthes’ original intention.

Nelson also writes about her pregnancy and motherhood and all of the cultural complications it entails as well as the physical and mental changes it brings. She writes about giving birth and how it felt like she was falling to pieces and sometimes like she was melting. She writes about her postpartum body and how she is supposed to immediately get to work according to all the magazines, and lose the baby weight, get back to her career, get back to a sex life and being sexy, pretty much as if nothing happened at all and there was no pregnancy and no baby. And she writes of her need and desire to define a boundary between her and baby:

I’ll let my baby know where the me and the not me begin and end, and withstand whatever rage ensues. I’ll give as much as I’ve got to give without losing sight of my own me. I’ll let him know that I’m a person with my own needs and desires , and over time he’ll come to respect me for elucidating such boundaries, for feeling real as he comes to know me as real.

The Argonauts is beautifully intimate without being confessional. Nelson balances out the personal with the scholarly, quoting Barthes and Derrida, Judith Butler, Jaques Lacan, Lucille Clifton, even Ralph Waldo Emerson gets a quote. She explores the broader social landscape and the effects it has on her and her family as well as the effects her “genderqueer” family has on society.

Nelson comes to no firm conclusions about anything. She accepts being in a state of constant change, living with ambiguity and having no real closure. Any time she gets near to being able to create some kind of closure, she refuses to do so. This seems to be a theme in a number of nonfiction books I have read in the past year or so and I must say I like it very much. Nelson acknowledges that ambiguity and refusing closure is uncomfortable for a good many people, but being willing to live with uncertainty creates a space for discovery and transformation. One could say it is the demesne of the Argonauts.

Filed under: Books, Nonfiction, Reviews Tagged: Graywolf Press

Add a Comment

My dear friend Alyson Hagy sends gems through the mail. All kinds of art I would never otherwise see. Stories and poems and images that elevate my trust in this world, our capacity, as humans, to transcend ourselves.

Alyson also knows of my great passion for Per Petterson and not long ago sent me Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes, a story collection Petterson wrote early in his career—and has recently been released by Graywolf.

A young boy named Arvid who lives just outside Oslo stands at the heart of these linked interludes. Petterson rushes and hushes us into his world with language that splits seams. He is too young to understand and filter at first. We watch him want, concede, defy, question, and finally grow from childhood into manhood through an act of singular compassion. Arvid's childhood is a most remarkable transformation built of most ordinary moments. It's an astonishing trick, this tiny book. A master class in writing from a child's perspective, a book for adults, certainly, in the same way that Joyce's Portrait of the Artist is for adults. But it is also a book for anyone working within the middle grade/young adult realm.

This is character development.

This is knowing.

This is art.

This is what the brains of the young are capable of seeing, feeling, thinking, and this is what we must aspire to as writers, no matter what age we think we are writing for. The minds and lives of children and young people are complex. They cannot be realistically distilled into issues. They don't organize neatly around obvious plots. They are the last thing in the world from nuance-free one-liners.

One passage of many. He is speaking of his mother.

She'd looked the way she always had for as far back as he could remember, and she still did right up until the day he happened to see a photograph of her from before he was born, and the difference floored him. He tried to work out what could have happened to her, and then he realised it was time that had happened and it was happening to him too, every second of the day. He held his hands to his face as if to keep his skin in place and for many nights he lay clutching his body, feeling time sweeping through it like little explosions. The palms of his hands were quivering and he tried to resist time and hold it back. But nothing helped, and with every pop he felt himself getting older.

He cried, and said to his mother:

'I don't want to get older. I want to stay like I am now! Six and a half, that's enough, isn't it?' But she smiled sadly and said, to every age its charm. And time withdrew to the large clock on the wall in the living room and went round alone in there, like a tiger in a cage, he thought, just waiting, and Mum became Mum again, almost like before.

It is not, contrary to the opinion of some, easier to write for younger readers. It should not be. Our job, I think, is to keep on seeking ways to embrace and elevate the complexity that makes us true and hurt and human.

Add a Comment

There are books that fill you with the clamor of something new—the risk of them, the innovation.

There are books that silence you—how honest and aching and true, how beautifully levered down into the soul.

This morning I am silenced by Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng's impeccable first novel about a daughter whose inexplicable death cracks open the vault of a family's secrets and regrets. A novel about children submitting to their parents' dreams for them, and the woeful consequences. Bill Wolfe had named this his favorite book of the year. So many others, too. Believe anyone who tells you that you must read this book. Believe me. You must.

Ng is a master of the omniscient voice. A brilliant webber of divergent perspectives. A calm creator of sentences. A woman capable of writing with enormous clarity and tenderness about racism, silence, the terrible burdens of doing one's duty, the steep weight of holding that science book in your hand because your mother wants you to, the wretchedness of being the less-loved child. How do you take a heartbreaking story and still leave the reader with hope? You do it by writing through a powerful knowing not just of the past but of the future, too.

I am one of those people who writes in her books—outlining, defining, questioning. I did not write inside Ng's pages, preferring to keep them pristine. I turned back the ear of but one, knowing it would be the page that I shared, the thing that lies most at the heart of this novel. That word "different" and how we use it or abuse it in our lives.

Sometimes you almost forgot: that you didn't look like everyone else. In homeroom or at the drugstore or at the supermarket, you listened to morning announcements or dropped off a roll of film or picked out a carton of eggs and felt like just another someone in the crowd. Sometimes you didn't think about it at all. And then sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching, the pharmacist watching, the checkout boy watching, and you saw yourself reflected in their stares: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the outside, the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again. 

I was reading Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric the same time that I was reading Ng. I was thinking of how many times I have likely gotten it wrong in my own language—despite all these years now with my own Salvadoran husband, all these years fighting labels in life and on the page. Even those of us who should fully understand the nuances of prejudicial language can, horrifyingly, get it wrong, and will again. I mean to take nothing away from Ng's magnificent novel by including words from Rankine in this post, but they do, I believe, go together. They must—both these books—be read.

You are twelve attending Sts. Philip and James School on White Plains Road and the girl sitting in the seat behind asks you to lean to the right during exams so she can copy what you have written. Sister Evelyn is in the habit of taping the 100s and the failing grades to the coat closet doors. The girl is Catholic with waist-length brown hair. You can't remember her name: Mary? Catherine?

You never really speak except for the time she makes her request and later when she tells you you smell good and have features more like a white person. You assume she thinks she is thanking you for letting her cheat and feels better cheating from an almost white person.

Add a Comment

When I am asked what author I recommend to thoughtful teen readers of the male persuasion, I don't blink.  Per Petterson, I say.  It doesn't get much better, in general, than a Per Petterson book.  And with his often adolescent male protagonists, his compelling Norwegian landscapes, his deliberate lonesomeness, his inclination to tell the truth about how growing up feels, Petterson speaks especially well to young, literary-minded male readers.

Out Stealing Horses ranks as one of my favorite novels of all time.  It's Fine By Me, Petterson's newest (translated by Don Bartlett) is equally strong—a coming-of-age tale about a working-class teen who won't remove his sunglasses when he steps into his new school and doesn't want the world to know, well, anything at all about him.  Audun Sletten stands on the outside, brooding.  He wrestles with his own story (a drunken father, a dead brother, a sister he loves, a girl he might like) discontinuously.  He makes a friend despite himself, yields a little because he has to, wants to protect his family but sometimes anger is all he has, all he is.  Anger and the Norwegian landscape, the white winters, the bracing lakes, the one or two teachers who notice, the men at the printing plant where he ultimately works, that best friend again—wry and helpful. 

The world recedes when I read Petterson.  I find his intelligence essential.  I talk about crossover books—YA to A.  But may the tide reverse and may Petterson's work cross into high school classrooms and become standard reading fare not just for adults but for teens.

A passage:

And I don't see any animals, but long Lake Elvaga is glittering in the sunshine.  About halfway, I stop and slide down and sit on the slope by the bank.  It is fine and open here, and the trees are naked.  I take out the roll-up and a little notebook I like to think is similar to the one that Hemingway used in the Twenties in his Paris book, A Moveable Feast.  I light the cigarette and try to do what he did:  write one true sentence.  I try several, but they don't amount to any more than what Arvid calls purple prose.  I give it another go, and I try to get down on the paper the expression on Dole's face when I dragged him by the leg across the floor of Geir's bar.  It's better, but not very good.

Display Comments Add a Comment

"Am currently in the middle of Ander Monson's VANISHING POINT," Carl Klaus wrote to me, a few weeks ago, "and find it such a venturesome work of literary nonfiction that I think it might be of considerable interest to you and your students."  Since Klaus is himself the author of the venturesome The Made-Up Self, not to mention the founding director of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, I didn't much hesitate in making my purchase.  Yesterday and early today I've been reading Monson's essays (a Graywolf publication) through.

It's interesting stuff—quotable, inventive, daggered, asterisked, me-dominating and me-avoidant, not quite memoir, though Monson himself would be the first to count all the sentences beginning with (or featuring) that wily single letter "I."  Monson, like Klaus, like many of us teaching and writing personal pieces today, is full of rue and half-steps, full of self-disclosures that may or may not reveal the actual self.  Full, most of all, of the questions:  Can the actual self be revealed?  Can the we be known?  Is the I a reliable story? (Not a bankable story; that question, in the wake of so many bestselling memoirs, does not have to be asked.)

Monson is thinking out loud, in these pages, about truths and dares, about how the technology we write with may or may not shape what we write.  He is thinking about solipsisms and (magnificently) assembloirs, and he gets us thinking, too.  Perhaps the most powerful pages of this book are Monson's asterisk asides.  For example:

If we choose to represent our lives as story, it's no surprise that our stories converge, that we all want highs and lows, the reckonings with our pasts and flaws and loves that we are otherwise incapable of in real life.  Maybe we are the same, we are telling ourselves, no matter how much we try to invent our way out of this, and that's the thing we can't stand to hear or know.

I also like this:

The snap of art onto life is bothersome, too, a delinquent, a troubled fit.

What do we teach young writers, I kept wondering as I read, about truths and dares?  How do we talk about the flawed veracity of the assembled self without turning each and every one of them either to despair or to some version of David Foster Wallace (not that he was a bad thing, of course, but he was and should remain his own one thing)?  I want to speak honestly, want to teach truly, want to leave my students with something that means something.

Monson—playfully, insistently, self-defeatedly, self-aggrandizingly—puts even more at stake.   




 

Display Comments Add a Comment

I took just one book home with me from this year's BEA, Jessica Francis Kane's first novel, The Report.  It's a Graywolf Press title—Graywolf, a first-rate house responsible for such first-class books as Alyson Hagy's latest, Ghosts of Wyoming.  I don't think you can go wrong with a Graywolf book, and I can say, with absolute confidence, that you will not go wrong with The Report.  Smart, compelling, riveting, whole, The Report is a book about history and those who write it, about blame and the consequences of diffusing it.  It is a novel based on the real-life horror of a night in March, in London, in 1943, when 173 people seeking protection from a possible air raid, died on the steps of the shelter that was supposed to protect them.  No bomb had gone off.  No bones were broken.  All of those who died died from asphyxiation—from an inexplicable pile-up on the stairs.

How in the world had it happened?

Laurence Dunne, a magistrate, is asked to find out.  Systematically, he interviews 80 survivors.  He listens to those who blame themselves and those who cannot be honest and writes a report so novelistic, so empathetic, that it haunts him and others for a long time hence.  In Kane's perfectly well-imagined novel, that event, those survivors, and Dunne himself materialize, devastate, haunt.  I was a most captivated reader, a reader Kane kept wholly spellbound from the first sentence to the very last.

Kane notes that she got the idea for this book some ten years ago, and that her two children were born during its creation.  I believe that.  There's so much wisdom here, so many important thoughts quietly but compellingly collected.  Kane is a transparent writer, working with absolute clarity, allowing her reader to see straight through to the complicated heart of things.

Display Comments Add a Comment