Lidia is a longtime Rumpus contributor and interviewee (for a taste of both, see her interview with Dear Sugar). She’s the author of the novel Dora: A Headcase and the memoir The Chronology of Water, the latter of which was a Rumpus Book Club pick back in 2011. You can also check out her work in Get Out of My Crotch!, an essay anthology about women’s health/rights featuring many Rumpus writers.

She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she has what she calls a “bourgeois teaching gig” and is the cofounder of Chiasmus Media.

For more information about Letters in the Mail, click here.

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• Next Letter in the Mail: Maud Newton!
• The Next Letter in the Mail: Alexis Smith
• The Next Letter in the Mail: Seth Fischer
• The Next Letter In The Mail: Dobby Gibson
• The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Scarboro and Lidia Yuknavitch

My Foreign Cities (Liveright Publishing), out this month, is Elizabeth Scarboro’s memoir of her first marriage to a young man, Stephen, with cystic fibrosis, while she was also growing into herself as a person, as a woman. My Foreign Cities is the story of a young woman making the choice to love a man with not enough life to live, even if she was unable to realize the whole of what she was choosing. The memoir is deeply moving, particularly because the writing, the story being told, is not overly sentimental in the way it might have been in the hands of a lesser writer. My Foreign Cities is, in its way, and much like The Chronology of Water, a book about the body, the impossible frailty of it, how love enables us to do the seemingly impossible, and also, about finding joy in the face of overwhelming grief.

My Foreign Cities has been selected by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the Top Ten Memoirs of Spring. Scarboro is also the author of two novels for children, and her work has appeared most recently in the Bellevue Literary Review. She lives with her family in Berkeley, California.

Yuknavitch is the author of the novel Dora: A Headcase, a modern farce, and The Chronology of Water. She writes and teaches and loves and mothers in Portland, Oregon, and her essay “Explicit Violence” appears in the anthology, Get Out of My Crotch, from Cherry Bomb Books, co-edited by Kim Wyatt and Rumpus columnist Sari Botton.

In recent years, as I’ve read more memoirs, I have struggled with how to talk about memoir critically, how to separate form from content. Both Yuknavitch and Scarboro, whose books echo each other in interesting ways, were willing to talk with me about this question of what to do with memoir, and much more.

 ***

The Rumpus: Is memoir a genre we can consider critically? How do we begin to approach such a thing given that memoirs so often expose such intimate things from a person’s life?

Lidia Yuknavitch: The question you ask is puzzling. Though I consider The Chronology of Water to be an anti-memoir for very precise reasons, it is an art form, and thus as open to “critique” as any other art form. Memoir has a form, formal strategies, issues of composition and craft, style, structure, all the elements of fiction or nonfiction or painting or music or what have you.

Your question is itching at the skin of CONTENT. Memoirs have at their heart a content that “happened” to someone in real life. Is that what you are itching at in your question, so that if you are a reviewer or you are writing a critique you might feel as if you are stepping on someone’s actual face?

Rumpus: Yes, that’s definitely where I am struggling. Oftentimes when I am reading a memoir that feels intimate, that shares someone’s difficult personal history, I don’t know how to separate content from how the content is communicated.

Yuknavitch: In both Liz’s excellent book My Foreign Cities and in my anti-memoir The Chronology of Water, we are troping life and experience. We are bringing literary practices to memory and experience, and giving literary shape to them (or anti-shape, as is the case with COW—shapes against the grain of the inherited conventions). On a spectrum of literary productions, memoir is just another form. If the person doing the reviewing or critiquing was ill-educated about literary forms, they could write something dunderheaded about the author or their life (I’ve seen these and barfed at them), but anyone who is well-practiced and educated in literature—why would they leave that at the door when entering memoir?

Fiction and poetry expose intimate things from a person’s life every bit as much as memoir does, and sometimes more. I don’t quite see or live the distinction you are making about the forms. Poetry, for example, goes so deeply into the space between corporeal affect and deep emotion (even primal in some cases) that, as Emily Dickinson said, it can blow the top of your head off. Poetic language is sometimes misunderstood as “abstract” when in reality, it’s precise—precisely the language of emotions and the body. Underneath the forms of fiction and poetry, you can bet your ass the ground comes from someone’s actual life experience.

When I was reading My Foreign Cities I felt a lifestory, yes, but I also felt story. The practice of storytelling. The practice of employing metaphor and image and composition and linguistic choices to move the reader through the content. One thing about humans is that we all have them—lifestories. We live by and through them. But writers of memoir are particularly good at bringing literary strategies and form to experience (at least the good ones are). The thing that turned me inside out in My Foreign Cities is that the ”plot” and the “telos” of the story exploded ordinary expectations. The convention of the coming-of-age story and the love story were literally abandoned—because they had to be—and a new kind of coming-of-age and love story emerged that required a different kind of telling the story.

Elizabeth Scarboro: I never read memoirs until I decided to try to write one. After reading at least fifty, my first response is that they can and need to be critiqued. That’s easy for me to say in the privacy of my own home, where the writers of the memoirs I’ve read will never hear or read my reactions to their work. But I do feel memoirs should be held to high standards (and their authors would want that), even if they are different standards – even if what we want from a memoir is different than what we want from a novel, in the same way that what we want from a documentary film might be different than what we want from another kind of movie.

Maybe one way is to think about how the writer has crafted the story, rather than the life out of which the story has been carved. I’m always interested in structure, because it’s hard to move a story forward and deepen it at the same time, and both are required in memoir. The balance between momentum and reflection seems key. And also the writer’s relationship with his/her narrated self. I loved This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff because I felt like he got that right—he was affectionate but critical, clear-eyed about who he’d been as a boy, and it made me love his character and get bound up in what might happen to him.

It might be more relaxing to critique memoir when you think about everything the writer has left out of the book. It’s the writer’s job to reveal the right intimate details, and to think hard about what not to put in as well as what to include. An intimate detail that might feel awkward to address as a reader has already been sifted through, shaped, written and rewritten many times, so by the time it’s in your hands the writer probably has some distance from it.

I agree with Lidia about the forms being less distinct than they’re made out to be currently. I think about a book like So Long, See you Tomorrow by William Maxwell, which might be billed as a memoir today, but in 1979 was allowed to exist as “a novel based on fact.” The story in memoir runs the way story runs in a novel—underneath the surface, using the plot to bring physical shape to what the writer wants to explore.

In my memoir, I wanted to write about the experience of youth and mortality colliding. I tried writing it fictionally and it didn’t work, so I settled on memoir. Halfway through I thought it would be better as a collection of essays but I was too far-gone. But if a writer can find a form that allows the entire ocean of the story they want to tell in, it’s magic. Which was how The Chronology of Water felt to me. Lidia somehow found a form (and I’d love to know how she did it!) that makes room for the messiness and complexity of experience and memory. I know she considers COW to be an anti-memoir, and I don’t want to step on her toes, but the genre sure could use to include it a straight-up memoir, to crack open the formal possibilities.

Yuknavitch: The WRITER of memoir gets incoming weirdness in very odd ways. I was recently talking to a memoir writer whose work just went meteoric—but some of the comments and communications and gestures she gets in the wake of that success are stunningly and atrociously over-personal, as if suddenly people feel like they know her and her life intimately, and have permission to transgress all her “life” boundaries. To a certain extent that happens with all kinds of successful writers and artists and celebrities, but there is also something about the form of memoir that creates an eerie reader space of intimacy that is only “real” in the space of the text.

The memoir as a somewhat indistinct form is absolutely true. So many of the memoirs I’ve read, and the ones I have gravitated toward most, somehow upend what I expect from memoir and the project seems greater than just the exposition of a life.

Rumpus: Lidia, what you note about the ways people comment on memoir, the liberties they take, is something that has been on my mind as well. Do you ever worry, both of you, about how you expose yourself and about how people may feel entitled when they encroach upon your life simply because they’ve read what you choose to tell them about your life?

Scarboro: I do think about it, but my book hasn’t come out yet so right now I’m in the stage of just hoping for a few readers. When I was still working on it, and getting help from several astute readers, I remember having a hard time when they expressed judgment about the more difficult feelings I articulated in the book. I wrote about my first husband Stephen’s addiction to painkillers, and got the general response of, Why did it bother you, and why couldn’t you just give him a break, since he was sick? Which at first made me impatient and defensive, but when I heard it a few times from people I respected, I realized I needed to address that question in the story, to explore it. I also wrote about the ways he changed after the transplant, some of which really frustrated me, and I got the question, “Couldn’t you just appreciate that he was finally breathing well, and accept and even enjoy his new qualities?” This also ended up giving me a jumping-off point. Now that the book is finished, and I’ve explored the material as much as I want to publicly, I think those same kinds of comments will be much more painful to hear.

Readers might approach me with their own stories of illness and grief and addiction and complicated second loves. That feels all right to me, but I can imagine ways it which it could get weird. I do like when it happens in life—I’d rather talk about death at a party than make small talk. And since these subjects are taboo in our culture, I’m glad to have them out in the open. I always appreciated strangers and acquaintances who were willing to speak about them with me while I was living them out.

Rumpus: I think very carefully about how much I expose of myself in my essays because implied intimacy with strangers is difficult for me to make sense of. I don’t want people to assume they know me because they know of a few experiences I have shared from my life. I don’t want to put too much of myself out there and leave nothing for myself. At the same time, I am sharing those experiences for a reason and it feels important to talk about certain experiences that we tend to keep to ourselves. It’s all rather fraught. How did both of you, in writing your (anti-)memoirs, decide on what to include and what to leave out? How did you begin to shape the stories of your lives?

Scarboro: I started with a much wider lens. I ended up focusing narrowly on my relationship with Stephen, and our relationships with CF [cystic fibrosis]. I found I could only handle the three of us fully—maybe this wouldn’t have been true if this were my fifth book, or if it were fiction, but I felt overwhelmed when I tried to follow threads that involved other people who were important to our story. In order to capture a parent, or sibling, or friend, it would require a hundred pages to give him or her the depth and nuance required. People appear, but my relationships with them aren’t fully realized. I also cut lots of parts of the illness, and hospital trips, letting only a few stand for many.

The hardest part of the story to leave out was a close friend’s sudden death. My friend Steve died in a car crash, and his death was life-altering for both Stephen and me. I still miss him, and think about life differently because he’s not here. Originally this was an integral part of the book. But readers kept saying it was too much. It came a year after Stephen’s transplant, and a week after my dad’s near-fatal bike crash, and less than a year before Stephen died. Of course in life it was too much, too, so I tried to write it that way—stepping out of the narrative. But eventually it just felt too large to be held by the story that I was writing. It deserved its own book. Or to not be a book at all—to never have happened. I couldn’t figure out how to do it right.

People assume that when you’re writing a memoir, you’re making peace with spilling your guts. But it doesn’t feel like that to me. You’re definitely revealing yourself in a way you wouldn’t to an acquaintance, or in some moments, even a very close friend. But you’re in control of every aspect of the revealing.

Yuknavitch: This is what happened to me while I was writing COW. Right about page fifty or so, I was hit by lightning. I nearly fell out of my chair. I felt a ZAP of electricity I’m pretty sure was the collective unconscious. I realized two things: one, I wasn’t writing a memoir. I was writing a WEmoir, meaning, the ONLY reason to keep writing would be if even one other person in the world felt less crazy, alone, messed up, wrong, ugly, backwards, invisible after they read it. I got this weird sort of creative “surge” that pushed me to “tell” beyond the fears I had about telling, fears about the form itself and how it gets trashed (not fancy literary enough, too narcissistic), fears about humans related to me or close to me reading it, fears about my weird formal choices, fears about mean things people could say to me.

When someone says something dunderheaded to me about the material, it’s usually a big neon sign revealing their own damage or ignorance, so my compassion kicks in.

I don’t think I exposed myself (but I love the way that sounds). What I exposed, or what I HOPE I exposed, are the limits of a narrow kind of storytelling that validates some people and not others, and the limits of a narrow kind of identity formation that validates some people and not others, and the limits of a narrow kind of writing and reading that validates some people and not others. I set out then to call the tribe—misfits, nerds, fuck-ups, loners, sad people, drunk people, people who got in trouble or struggled—maybe all of us. I decided to let the story be about both the mess and the grandeur.

Like Liz, I had to be judicious about what to bring in and what to leave out. I had a superb editor in Rhonda Hughes at Hawthorne Books—without a doubt the most amazing collaboration I’ll see in my writerly life—so that is very important. But how I decided what to follow as a writer had to do with discovering the “through-line” of my own story. The through-line was this: this is the story of a girl who had to swim back through her own life to resuscitate a self. Anything that did not serve THAT story is for another book.

As far as being territorial about one’s own life, that’s a mistake for ANY writer. All writers everywhere, in every genre, are drawing from their life and the lives of those around them for “material.” Memoirs just make transparent and even amplify that activity.

I LOVE what Liz says when she says, “I think people assume that when you’re writing memoir, you’re making peace with spilling your guts. But it doesn’t feel like that to me.” The best memoirs don’t spill the writer’s guts. The best memoirs—like This Boy’s Life, or Crazy Brave [by Joy Harjo], for instance—bring you through a private river of storytelling that joins a major ocean of human struggle and joy. The act of enunciation—the forms and strategies of storytelling—are every bit as literarily serious as they are in poetry or other prose forms.

Rumpus: What do you look for in a memoir? What stands out to you as “good?”

Yuknavitch: I look for the moment(s) in the story where the writer risked abandoning the glory of the self in favor of the possible relationship with an other. I don’t ever let the market tell me what a memoir is. The first best memoir I ever read was Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. See what I mean? I also thought of The Lover by Marguerite Duras as a memoir. Most of Carole Maso’s books and Kathy Acker’s novels read as memoirs to me. Paris Spleen by Baudelaire. On the Road by Kerouac.

You can see how my memoir turned out different.

But of the variety everybody else likes too, Mary Karr seems to be understood as the Gold Standard (I learned that way back from Andrei Codrescu, who told me to cut one-third of COW out…ha), but I like Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal, Cool For You by Eileen Myles, Yarn by Kioko Mori, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, and The Stuff of Life by Karen Karbo better… Hell, I even liked Just Kids by Patti Smith, though the writing wasn’t artful. And of course there’s my comrade-of-the-heart Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, which pretty much killed.

Scarboro: I agree with Lidia that good memoirs, and I love the way she puts this, “abandon the glory of the self in favor of the possible relation with another.” The memoirs I love best find a way to be deep and wide, even as they are very particular. I need the feeling that the writer isn’t just relaying a story, but is searching to understand it. I’m moved by stories where I can feel the undertow of the writer’s struggle to make sense of what’s happened, to find honest words. A few memoirs I’ve loved are Three Dog Night by Abigail Thomas, Falling Through The Earth by Danielle Trussoni, Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje, and The Mercy Papers by my own comrade-of-heart Robin Romm.

Yuknavitch: One thing I very much admired and felt awe about in your book was your insistence on writing about relationships differently (thank you, thank you, thank you) than the oddly linear plot lines we’ve inherited, available to us as women writers. I’d love to know what you think about that?

Scarboro: I’m not sure how intentional it was, but I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder about that linear narrative so maybe that’s how it came about. Or maybe it was intentional. I made certain choices—like not including a wedding scene—because I felt like it would be expected, especially from a woman writer, and of course that made me not want to do it. But mainly I wanted to stay as close as possible to the particulars of the relationship I lived out, to articulate it as best as I could, which meant being wary of falling back on a structure that didn’t have much to do with the way I lived.

I was writing not only about young love (ugh!), but love in the face of illness (cue an awful movie), so the only way I could do it was to fight any urge to be sentimental or to romanticize it. Hopefully I succeeded at that. I’ve never liked love stories—or, at least, ones with that narrow plot. I am always suspicious of them in books and impatient with them in movies. I just want a life story. When my editor told me she wanted to describe my book as a love story, I said, “Could it be a love story for the love-story-averse?” I know she means love story in a broader sense, but as someone who rarely picks love stories up off the book table, I’m hoping the other love-story-averse readers out there won’t shrink away from my book the way I shrink away from Julia Roberts movies.

Yuknavitch: I get kind of tired of the “But it’s your life!” attitude about memoir. Do YOU? I wrote. I engaged in artistic production. I made a piece of art. Why the preciousness or mystical unicorns around “memoir”? I’m curious how you feel about it just now.

Scarboro: In reviews of memoirs, reviewers write more about the content and less about the form, than they do, say, in reviewing fiction. I find this really frustrating. The life itself isn’t up for review—the book is. I hate hearing reviewers talk about what a crazy life someone led, or how brave they were. It’s not the life that’s being evaluated, it’s the story, and the way the story is told. Just as with fiction, you could give two writers the same circumstances to write about, and come out with very different narratives.

Rumpus: So many of the memoirs I’ve read, and the ones I have gravitated toward most, somehow upend what I expect from memoir; the project seems greater than just the exposition of a life.

Scarboro: When I found out my book was being published I didn’t know that books commonly have the subtitles of “a memoir” or “a novel” so that they can be distinguished for selling purposes. I wanted the title of my book to appear on its own, without the subtitle, but I couldn’t get away with it. I remember when I worked in a bookstore, it was before most had separate shelves for memoirs. At that time (at least at that particular store) memoirs were included all over the place—some in biography, some in with the fiction, some in with feminist studies, etc. Recently, I visited a bookstore that sells new and used books, and for the used section, the memoirs were shelved with fiction. This made me happy. The genre of any book is secondary to the story the author is telling—being the best vehicle that the author can find. I’m the kind of reader who would probably be happiest if all the books at the bookstore were shelved together, so I could stumble across a great book on physics I’d never pick up otherwise.

Rumpus: What are some strategies you use to bring literary shape to your experiences?

Yuknavitch: Most of my formal choices are a combination of everything I learned about form—semiotics, linguistics, and the history of style experimentations tethered to literary movements (formalism, deconstruction, modernism, and postmodernism), and the basic principal of breaking every rule I ever learned from a patriarchal writing tradition that never included my body or experience, and thus has nothing to offer me in terms of representation.

I work from the body—I try to develop a language of the body. I’ve invented a term I call “corporeal writing” around that idea. I love teaching and collaborating around this idea, because no new breakthrough in literature ever happened because everyone was doing what was already there.

With COW, specifically, I was also interested in literally inventing a language that corresponded to the way memory works—specifically in terms of biochemistry and neuroscience. I shaped the words and sentences and fragments according to what I understand about memory. I shaped them around what’s true about the body.

Scarboro: Lidia might kill me here, but I had an aversion to the one literary theory course I attempted in college, so much so that I ruled out majoring in English. But that may have been my bad luck with a particular professor. In any case, I think my strategies come less from an understanding of the larger context and more from the accumulation of all the small things I’ve absorbed as I read—book by book—all the possibilities out there that wouldn’t have occurred to me on my own, whether I love them or run from them screaming.

But it’s interesting, because while we may have come to it differently, what Lidia says, about both memory and the body, speaks to me. Several readers have remarked that MFC is filled with physicality, and I didn’t realize this so much while I was writing, but I see it, looking back. I wanted to get as close as I could to the whole of my experience, and to be as honest as I could. And when I tried to do that, I found myself staying close to visceral memory, to everything that had no words. And then I had to find the words. Many words fell short and got thrown out. (Sometimes I feel disheartened thinking about how many pages I’ve written that are in the trash, but a friend made the analogy to being a musician—hours of practice that go into the final product, but aren’t the product itself—and I like that).

In terms of shaping my experience for the narrative, I was interested in finding a way to convey the underlying feeling, the personal reality, of the life I was leading, rather than conveying the details of the life itself. I don’t know if that makes sense. When I was leading that life, it was always hard to explain that inside that life it felt different than you might think it would, with death always right there in the room. So it was important to me that the book felt like the life, because that was part of what I was trying to write about—to complicate the picture we have—of what kind of life is worth living, or love is worth having.

Yuknavitch: For the record—and this is totally true—I think

The reason I loved theory was that I read all

The material as if they were novels—and then

I placed the authors in my head as if they were

In the novels—Foucault was a suave snappy

Dresser. Kristeva swam naked in moonlight.

Derrida had the best hair and smoked opium

Laced cigarettes.

Rumpus: How, if at all, do you try to “crack open the formal possibilities” in your writing?

Scarboro: I love thinking about form when I read, but in my own writing I love the idea of experimenting with it more than I actually do it. Though I did try in my memoir to not tether myself to the expectation that I’d explore the story only through scenes. There were places I knew I needed a different way to express what I needed to express, or where I’d find myself interested in a particular reflective path, and I’d go where it took me. Lately I’ve been writing essays, and I realize how much I enjoy following the paths that open up unexpectedly in them. Somehow it’s been more natural for me to break open formal constraints, writing essays, than it has been in other genres.

Yuknavitch: I don’t have much interest in writing if there are not opportunities to crack open the inherited forms. The writing I love to read most does this as well. I’m a form junkie. One path I’ve used a lot is to deeply and thoughtfully consider a trope or a tradition, and then set about taking it apart—but only in the service of a character or story that deserves it. Another path I often employ is to put form into “play”— to set it free from its ordinary constraints and let it be free-floating and broken-apart and rearranged. To be honest, we live in an exciting time where form is concerned. My sincerest hope is that more people will notice this and agree to play and invent—the only way to not succumb to the complacency and market-driven schlock of the present tense is to continually interrogate it from the inside out.

Related Posts:

• Book Club Member Josh Anastasia on Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water
• Falling for Lidia
• The Next Letter in the Mail: Lidia Yuknavitch
• “so I took a deep breath and I jumped”
• Fresh Air Fail: What Happens When Personal Writing Draws a Spotlight

Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase is an uncomfortable, edgy, affecting novel. The Chronology of Water had the same charge: take challenging subject matter and build a narrative akin to unpacking tension-wracked nesting dolls, cumulative sadness and worry with each new section. Yuknavitch rattles us, and in this debut novel, as in her previous memoir, it is a worthy and beautiful ride.

Dora shares an affinity with The Catcher in the Rye, Yuknavitch leading with the faults and flaws of the protagonist, making us care for her narrator even as she is presented: problems first. Dora is the shaved head misfit daughter of a father decomposing in infidelity, a mother fading and a peerage each nicknamed by hypertext and cultural rebellion. Then there is Sig, Dora’s psychotherapist and the bearer of her sometimes misplaced rage; Sig sees sex in all Dora shares during their sessions, implications she rightfully resents. But when Jung sweeps in as the pseudo-charming “other” the physical and verbal jousting gains dangerous momentum. This is where Yuknavitch takes us, creating palpable figures of history, fictionally evolved, chasing them through the pages with her bright and malignant Dora, a symbol of all that is the rights of youthful passage.

Look, I text. My dad had a huge coronary. My mum fled 2 vienna. Stuk w my dads ho n demon midgets. Hav no voic. Sum perv trid 2 grab me. Things aren’t ql, ok?

At The Millions, Carolyn Ross’s “Walking Enigmas: On the Reading Habits of Teen Boys” says a mouthful:

At parent-teacher conferences earlier this year, I spoke with at least 10 sets of parents that lamented the uncommunicative nature of their teenage sons.

‘You would know more than we do.’

‘He speaks up in class?  That’s good because he doesn’t talk much at home.’

‘I ask him if he has work for class but he always just says “no.”’

It makes me think that this is why The Catcher in the Rye is a classic. People are just so thrilled to hear a teenage boy’s thoughts.

Then maybe they’re sorry they asked.

Lidia Yuknavitch

Like Salinger’s Holden and Chbosky’s Charlie and de la Pena’s Sticky Boy and Green / Levithan’s Will Graysons, Yuknavitch has written a frightfully insightful voice of youth, mimicking the language of our texters and status-updaters but with an angst and propensity for violence so explosive it puts Holden to shame. As a product of the 1950s, Holden’s bad boy image is as an underage drinker who calls a prostitute to his room, but Dora captures on film the carnage of extreme “prank Viagra” where Siggy’s member has to be drained by a nurse’s needle. Leagues apart indeed. But both Holden and Dora are carrying forward from the same moment of maturation, the same awful youthful realization that the world is imperfect, that people cheat and divorce and fail and die, seemingly without escape, so what is there to do but set the world on fire and lay back in pretended cool, in defiant repose?

And while Yuknavitch’s mimicry of torturous youthful folly is spot-on, her language of these youngsters gloriously robust and biting, the real beauty of Dora is in the complexity of emotions, the layering of a protagonist in such a way that we feel for and with her. Yuknavitch allows us to know, through all the anger and pain, all the seething and hatred, that Dora’s core is intensely human, fragile, brimming with guilt and pity and compassion and empathy, all those qualities we often, in our haste to condemn, forget teenagers possess in equal amounts to their resentment for parents, teachers, psychotherapists. Yuknavitch reminds us that, through most of our teenage years, hate and love are maddeningly intertwined, and as adults we are loath to understand and simply ludicrous to offer cures.

I know what Sig would say. He’d say we live out classic family romances, and there’s no way around it. On the other hand, goddamn it, is everything in life really all that fucking oedipal? Because if it is, you know, just shoot me.

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Interview with Lidia Yuknavitch
• The Next Letter in the Mail: Lidia Yuknavitch
• The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Scarboro and Lidia Yuknavitch
• Weekend Rumpus Roundup
• The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Kat Meads

“I evaded capture and the result became six month’s worth of daily mail: false reports, found objects, collages, poetic rants and obscenity-laden letters that I mailed to our apartment, ephemera that I’m still mining for inspiration.” Michael Berger on making art while on the clock at work.

All Yumi Sakugawa asks is that you leave behind a tiny wormhole into your dreams.

The Rumpus Interview with Ben Strader, codirector of Blue Mountain Center, a creative community in the Adirondacks: “The people who last here [as employees] are those who love art and literature but who aren’t trying to sneak off and do it themselves.”

Lidia Yuknavitch interviews Kat Meads about unlikeable protagonists, “ferocious speak-back,” and making it in the world as a female writer.

Related Posts:

• The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Kat Meads
• Weekend Rumpus Roundup
• Weekend Rumpus Roundup
• Weekend Rumpus Roundup
• Memorial Day Weekend Rumpus Roundup

***

The Rumpus: I was reading an article about successful women writers in The Guardian this morning and their “list” of six used—shockingly—market value as the dip-stick. So the success and empowerment of women writers was once again inscribed by their selling power, which is how “Fifty Shades of Shite” writer lady made it onto the list… So partly what I want to ask you is bald and crass: how do we of the non-bestselling writer category keep from losing heart and shooting ourselves? HA! Here–lemme try and ask it more professionally: how does a woman writer invent self-worth every day of her life in the face of the market? How does she return to her lover art as a living and vital practice?

Kat Meads: Short answer: it ain’t easy. But then again, I remind myself in the dark of night and bright of day: it probably never has been easy, so stop your (my) whining and get the hell back to the desk. I’m not an optimistic sort—never have been. My M.O. is pretty much to expect bad news on a moment-to-moment basis. But I’m also high-grade obstinate. I can be knocked down (and have been, as a writer, LOTS), but I’m also very, very stubborn where my writing is concerned. One way or another, I crawl back to the desk and give it another go. That’s half the battle, right?Giving it another go?

Rumpus: I hear you. It never has been easy. But lately I’ve been thinking about how maybe we should also remember to keep making NOISE about that? So that the story “out there” doesn’t threaten to cover over how it really is for us? I guess I think we should quite carefully and precisely articulate over and over again to anyone who will listen what our personal path carvings look like. Okay, so for me, I tell myself DAILY, you are not about who buys you. You are about your relationship to writing. You are about your desire. You are about insisting that artmaking is a real place that you can inhabit and make room for others. You turn over dirt: revolution. Your turn.

Meads: “You are not about who buys you.” Great mantra! And of course absolutely true. But managing the “reaction” ingredient is wildly tricky, isn’t it? (Even when there’s no money involved.) The first comment to the first story of mine that ever got workshopped was this: “I don’t read stories that take place in a kitchen.” Bam. For weeks, I went around in a daze of bewildered anxiety. I have to avoid kitchens? I have to do this? I have to do that? It was an early lesson in do what you gotta do, trust your own brain—write about toenails, if so inspired. Because once you start doubting your own compass as a writer and turning your back on the subjects and material that make you want to write—zowee. You’re in deep, deep trouble. Also miserable.

Rumpus: GAH. Agreed. First comment I got on a story of mine that was workshopped: “Trite—it’s mostly about emotions.” Only my reaction was I wanted to take the guy out into a back alley after workshop and pop him one in the jaw. Sigh. But I LOVE what you say about never doubting your own compass as a writer. I’ve been through two different existential crises on this issue—once ten years ago, and once about two months ago. Our inner compasses are of our own making, and vital, and beautiful. Another way I stay sane about it all is—don’t laugh—listen to my own characters. They often reflect a bravery and sass that helps remind me that it’s in me, too. Which is a perfect way to turn to YOUR characters.

Kitty Duncan and Madam Lenin—talk a little bit about what drew you to them. I love them both so much, and I’m mightily interested in how complex women characters written by women are being received these days.

Meads: Jury’s still out on Madam Lenin, but Kitty Duncan? Dare I say she wasn’t exactly “embraced”? When Chiasmus and you and Andy published [The Invented Life of] Kitty Duncan, I figured there’d be a certain amount of “she’s not a sympathetic character” commentary, but I was no way/no how prepared for the fury behind some of the responses. I visited a class in North Carolina and a student stood up, pointed at me as if I were the devil’s spawn, and started shrieking how much she despised Kitty Duncan, a “manipulator.” “I’ve known too many women like Kitty Duncan” was a critique I heard flabbergastingly often—and it wasn’t meant as a compliment to realistic rendering. I was mid-drunk at a party when this software guy, let’s call him Doug, sidled over to sniff, “Kitty Duncan—not very likeable,” which led me to do some shrieking of my own. She’s not supposed to be likeable, dickhead! That sort of thing. And then there were the hand-wringers, lamenting Kitty’s “fate.” In the end, she wasn’t “redeemed.” She wasn’t apologetic. She didn’t regret. Nope. Not sympathetic, not redeemed, not sorry. And not gonna be, even if there’s a “Kitty Duncan at ninety” sequel.

Rumpus: OH OH OH. Yep. I’ve experienced a similar “but Dora is unlikeable” thingee. Which has inspired in me a quote I’ve been throwing around that I may have made into t-shirts: “Holden Caulfield was a whiney little bitch and Humbert Humbert was a pedophile into teen muff. Neither was ‘likeable,’ nor did we need them to be.” You don’t have to agree with me, but I’m beginning to smell yet another gender bias when it comes to the reception of complicated women characters written by women. I wish I could go back and tell this “Doug” to a) go fuck himself; and b) study up on why. Literature. Matters. You know?

Meads: Sitting in on a session of your “educating” Mr. Dougie would make my week. Actually, it would make my month. I’m grinning ear to ear at the very thought… Two other candidates for your t-shirt list: the venerable Heathcliff and Madame Merle. I mean, what would The Portrait of a Lady be without Madame Merle?!

Rumpus: EXACTLY. For the record, Kitty and Madam Lenin are superb. No qualifying. Just superb. They are superb precisely because they are complicated. They don’t “fit” into lady writing-safe plots or some bozo list of lady character traits that make them easily consumable. This is why I love them. The itch and scratch and the inherited traits and plots for women characters. They are rebels. In fact, the rebel story as it plays out in the bodies of specifically women is a signature move and theme of yours, right?

Meads: Well, hey, thanks for that “superb.” And yes, I suppose I am drawn to rebellion as a subject. My first published novel, Sleep, made saints of Charlotte Corday and Rosa Luxemburg. And the thread that unites Kitty and Nadya K. is revolt—with the glaring difference that Kitty is in it for herself, and Nadya K. intended an entire country to benefit from her subversion.

Rumpus: YES. You are. Drawn to rebellion as a subject. I love that enormously about your literary projects. One of my favorite quotes in Madam Lenin reflects rebellion as subject/subjectivity:

“Beware the suggestive power of fairytales,” I used to tell my Nadya when she was a little girl. “Real life is not so simple. Goodness is never so pure. True evil is not so easily unmasked.”

Neither as a child nor as a young woman did my Nadya heed such cautionary advice. She believed with the whole of her being in the fairytale of revolution. And in that fairytale, Ilyich played the prince.

Meads: That passage comes from one of the elder Krupskaya’s, Yelizaveta’s, sections. Yelizaveta summing up the situation, laying out both sides of the argument. But in my author’s heart of hearts, no surprise, I lean toward the believe-with-the-whole-of-(one’s)-being stance. Otherwise…half-ass.

Rumpus: I think it’s safe to say we are both fascinated by history—and women IN history: how they are located, dislocated, relocated, how they are exiled or exumed… In Dora, I was beyond obsessed with the artistic act of pulling a voice and a body (Ida Bauer’s) out from the dead history of psychoanalysis, and bringing that voice and body back to life with ferociousness. Except that of course I didn’t pull her actual voice and body up through the dirt. I made a new subjectivity through fiction—one that could “speak back” to the forefathers. One thing I absolutely LOVE about For You, Madam Lenin is the “play” with history—how you bring these wonderfully smart, intense, emotional, funny women back up from history and restore their voices and bodies to the so-called grand events of political history. Part of me wants to get all semiotic and Kristeva-y here, but I’ll just leave it as a question—can you describe a little of that kind of fiction/history interplay, your process, what that exploration yielded for you?

Meads: I absolutely think you and I were on a similar mission regarding ferocious speak-back. In the “Interview with History” chapters of Madam Lenin, there are very few polite, accommodating, “pretty” answers from the female radicals to History’s questions. The majority of those interviewees assume, going in, they’ll be underrated and dismissed and they’re pissed about it. Very, very pissed. Writing-wise, those interviews were a total kick. At one point, I did worry that the interviews were starting to overshadow the Nadya Krupskaya narrative, but then I thought: they’re staying in. Because the novel is about more than Nadya Krupskaya. It pays homage to a slew of extraordinary—and extraordinarily under-sung—women radicals. If that makes for a strange little structure, so be it.

And that’s a good way to put it—our mutual fascination with women IN history. Lately, I’ve been reading/re-reading a lot about Zelda Fitzgerald—another Southern gal. In whichever text, when I get to the part where Scott’s dropping her off for lock-in at Highland Hospital, I find myself wanting to pry apart paragraphs in search of the invisible ink passages. The moment Zelda steps through those Highland Hospital gates, the history of Zelda and Scott starts to merge with the history of Dr. Carroll’s Sanitarium with its peanut butter lunches and daily hikes up the same hill and assumptions about “nervous” females. Stories upon stories upon stories. And so much of that missing from the official record.

Rumpus: Is feminism dead or just in dire need of a blow job?

Meads: Not dead, please, not dead! But it is a profoundly disheartening thing that that particular F word, in 2012, in certain quarters, is treated as a joke—or worse. Profoundly disheartening.

Rumpus: Yeah. I do think it might be time for a bump, though. Like perhaps we need to speak and write more openly about new forms and possibilities not trapped in former rhetoric or logics that don’t hold any longer… In both Kitty and Madam Lenin there are epic stories—one delves into Southern mythologies and codes, and the other in Russian geo-politics—what draws you to these kinds of stories? It seems to me—and feel free to slap me if I’m dead wrong about this—part of my pleasure as a reader comes from your insistence that small, personal, emotional intensities and micromovements are as epic as giant historical narratives. I adore that about your work. So what draws you to that kind of sentiment in fiction writing? Is it a feature to your life or lens on life as well?

Meads: I do insist that, don’t I? You caught me there. But what are giant historical narratives if not a composite of the small and intense? Southern mythologies I was weaned on—so all I had to do was be awake and breathing to take in that coded drama. My Russian fixation is more “peculiar,” as they say in the South, because I can’t really explain the “why” of it. I once heard the Russian Revolution referred to as “the last romantic revolution”—that stuck in my head. And, as you know, Trotsky puts in an appearance in Kitty Duncan—as does his wife, Natalia, who gets credit for doing all the typing. Typing is hard work. In my opinion.

Rumpus: What would you tell a woman writer in her twenties about the writerly life or building a writing career?  I can’t remember being twenty anymore, but boy howdy would I love to sit that girl down and have a chat…probably I’d have to tie the little she-devil to a chair. But seriously, I’ve been thinking a lot about our responsibility as published people to those who are waiting with fire and wonder…what do we tell them?

Meads: Brave woman to chat up your younger self, chair-strapped or otherwise! Across from my wide-eyed, twenty-year-old self, I’d have a hard time refraining from yanking Kathy Ann from that chair and shaking her until her teeth rattled. Listen up! Pay attention! Do you have any idea what it’s going to take—economically, personally—to write and keep writing? Not a clue had I. But I learned, as have all of us who’ve stuck it out. Some of the things I wish someone had told me, early on: if you can’t stand your own company for long stretches, pick another trade. If stringing words together/spinning paragraphs/revising endlessly doesn’t make you forget the rest of the world and everything in it, you probably need to rethink committing your twenties, thirties, and beyond to this particular pastime. I’d also pass along that pearl of Lidia Yuknavitch wisdom: find your tribe. Because that tribe of writers whose work and opinions you respect will be your support system in publishing times good and bad. And those are the folks who will remind you again and again (even as you pine for some of that bestseller cash to shore up your overdrawn bank account), that it’s all about the work. If I were queen of the queendom, it’s all about the work is the tattoo I’d require all writers to display, elbow to wrist. Pushing yourself and your art, your craft, experimenting out there on your own edge—what’s niftier than that?

Related Posts:

• Weekend Rumpus Roundup
• The Next Letter in the Mail: Lidia Yuknavitch
• The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Scarboro and Lidia Yuknavitch
• “Dora,” by Lidia Yuknavitch
• To Give A Girl Her Voice Back

Rumpus contributor and all-around rock star Lidia Yuknavitch talks family, words, creative lulls, Freud, and giving girls their voices back in an interview at Freerange Nonfiction.

Also: if you haven’t already read Yuknavitch’s incredible essay, “Explicit Violence,” do so.

Related Posts:

• The Next Letter in the Mail: Lidia Yuknavitch
• The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Scarboro and Lidia Yuknavitch
• “Dora,” by Lidia Yuknavitch
• Weekend Rumpus Roundup
• The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Kat Meads

We love you back!

Related Posts:

• Explicit Violence
• Go Ahead, Feed the Trolls
• The Next Letter in the Mail: Lidia Yuknavitch
• The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Scarboro and Lidia Yuknavitch
• In the Ezo: Behind Closed Doors in Tbilisi

The first time I saw my father’s specific sadistic brutality manifest in physical terms, I was four. My sister was flopped across his lap, barebottom. He hit her thirteen times with his leather belt. I counted. That’s all I was old enough to do. It took a very long time. She was twelve and had the beginning of boobs. I was in the bedroom down the hall, peeking out from a faithlessly thin line through my barely open bedroom door. The first two great thwacks left red welts across her ass. I couldn’t keep watching, but I couldn’t move or breathe, either. I closed my eyes. I drew on the wall by my door with an oversized purple crayon — large aimless circles and scribbles. Not the sound of the belt—but her soundlessness is what shattered me. Still.

The second time I saw my father’s naked brutality he came at my mother – I mean the second time I physically witnessed my father looking more animal than man, his embodied rage – he threw a coffee mug at her head. Hard. He once tried out for the Cleveland Indians as a pitcher. That hard. He missed, and the mug punched a hole through the wall in the kitchen. My sister was long gone—the escape of college. Afterward, there was dead silence in the kitchen. I know because I held my breath. Even air molecules seemed to still. I’d recently written a fifth grade school report on hurricanes.  It felt like we were in the eye.

My father never struck my mother. She told me it was because she was a cripple. My mother was born with one of her legs six inches shorter than the other. She said, “He wouldn’t dare hit me,” the lilt of a southern drawl and vodka in her never-went-to-college voice, some kind of messed up trust in her too blue eyes. Instead, he molested his daughters.

Our legs were perfect.

Baseball.

Purple crayon.

When I was sixteen a boy older than me asked me out on a date. I was as sixteen as a girl could be. Barely able to breathe with the incomprehensibility of my own body. The heat and pulse and lurch.  When he drove me home, and parked outside my house, we kissed. Because I was stupid and sixteen I thought we were alone. I got out of the car, and leaned back in through his open driver’s side window to kiss him some more, my mouth, his mouth, wet heat and tongue of youth sliding into youth, and my father, who was standing behind me there in the dark, grabbed me by the ear and dragged me all the way back to the house. My ear became more than red and hot. Then ringing. Then pain. I thought he would pull my ear off. Briefly, I saw the boy step out of his car—did he mean to save me? I shook my head wordlessly, no. Or maybe it was just in my eyes through the dark. No. He got back in his car.

That night my father hit me with language. Slut. Over and over again.

Purple Crayon.

Belt.

The second time I was molested I was twelve. I was on an out-of-state swimming trip with my swim team. Nebraska. Even now, I understand, the hormonal chaos of all of us half-naked in the pool every day of our lives, six to eight a.m., four to six p.m. pushing our corporeal truths up and out—I understand how hard it was for our bodies to find forms for things. A seventeen year old boy named Robert asked me to come sit by him on the plane and share his Walkman earphones—to hear a song he liked. He had one in his ear and he put the other in my ear. The song was “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty. As I leaned in closely, he reached up underneath my tank top and fondled my barely there tits. I kept stealing glances at the airplane barf bag. But I didn’t move. I remember being terrified to move. Not the terror of violence. I didn’t think he’d hurt me. It was the terror of my own body. My nipples responding to this thing that made me want to throw up.  Or just die there in the seat of the airplane. Crashing, crashing. Wishing for it. “When you wake up it’s a new morning/ The sun is shining, it’s a new morning/ You’re going, you’re going home.”

To this day if I hear “Baker Street,” which is mercifully almost never, I can vomit.

To this day, I would rather have taken ten plane trips sitting next to Robert than live with my father growing up.

Baseball.

Coffee mug.

Walkman.

Barf bag.

The first time a man came at me with a fist I was eighteen. I passed out. Not from his fist though. I’d passed out drunk. When I woke up all my clothes were on the floor, my legs were spread eagle on his bed, and I was wet and sticky and sore between them. There was a bruise between my shoulder and my breast. He was snoring, asleep back in bed. I stood up and watched him sleep. I remember thinking he is beautiful. He had long blonde feathered hair and an astonishingly fit body. He did Karate. Competitively. In fact his power and beauty were what made me go home with him from the bar. I mean I went out of my way to catch his eye, wag my ass, throw my huge mane of blonde lioness hair around. I pretended I didn’t know how to play pool—which my father had taught me when I was ten—so he could “teach” me. He had blue eyes. Standing there watching him sleep, my legs shaking some, I thought, he is beautiful, and I am not, I am stupid, and drunk, and I deserve this and more.

Then I called my roommate from college at 3:00 A.M. and she and her boyfriend came to get me. I couldn’t find my underwear. I waited for them in the dark and cold morning on the front lawn. He came out before they got to me and punched me in the jaw—not hard enough to call the cops, not soft enough to keep my ear from aching, saying, “You tell anyone you crazy little bitch, I’ll find you.” He smiled. He handed me my underwear.

I waited for my roommate to pick me up. I heard a dog bark. I smelled cow shit from Lubbock stockyards. I picked at a scab on my arm like a kid. You’re no victim if you are a drunk ass slut. I didn’t cry. I swallowed it whole.

I didn’t tell anyone. In fact, later that year? I went home with him again. On purpose.

Purple crayon.

Coffee mug.

Vodka.

Underwear.

The second time a man hit me I was in college. The man was a poet. A pacifist. A hippie. Somehow I believed things like that could matter. But he had a hair trigger rage in him. His father had been career military and hit him all through boyhood. The rage in him sat like the crouch of dead dreams in his fingers. Poems came out. And that shot to the bridge of my nose. Probably that’s what drew me to him. It was familiar.

Twice in my life I’ve been homeless, both times the result of emotional trauma. Both times I woke up under overpasses with no pants or underwear, vomit everywhere, a throbbing pain between my legs extending to my asshole. I’m assuming I was raped. But where do you put the story of rape when there’s no man to blame? I put it the only place I knew how to. I put it back into my body.

Belt.

Barf bag.

Baseball.

Purple Crayon.

I’m trying to tell you something here, but it’s starting to sound like what I’m saying is that I deserved these violences. Let me be clear. I did not. No one does. Ever. But when women tell how it is for them, when they self narrate their ordinary lives, it’s instantly sucked up by the culture—there’s already a place waiting for the story. A place where the story gets annulled.  It’s 2012 and I’m still reading about what the girl or woman was wearing that night. Or how she should hold aspirin between her legs. Or how she shouldn’t say the word “vagina” on the floor of congress. Or how a friend at a bar wants the sob stories to end. What I’m trying to tell you is that violence against girls and women is in every move we make, whether it is big violence or small, explicit or hidden behind the word father. Priest. Lover. Teacher. Coach. Friend. I’m trying to explain how you can be a girl and a woman and travel through male violence like it’s part of what living a life means. Getting into or out of a car. A plane. Going through a door to your own home. A church. School. Pool. It can seem normal. It can seem like just the way things are.

To be honest, the first reason I understand the complexities of male violence against girls and women is that I went to college and read a shit ton of books—and even that wasn’t enough education—I went to graduate school, where finally, finally, the books that I read and the films that I watched and the art that I experienced and the teachers that I had showed me just how not normal male violence against girls and women—or boys and men—is. Ever. And yet at the same time, the more conscious I became, the more I also understood that the pervasiveness of that violence has saturated the entire culture. It’s both omnipresent, and unbelievably invisible in its dispersed and sanctioned forms. So many times the cult of good citizenship covering over the atrocities of girls and boys. Mothers who go numb. Counselors who ask the wrong questions. Coaches and priests and teachers whose desires are costumed and sanctified by their authority. Neighbors who go blind and deaf. Paying bills. Drinking lattes.

The second reason I understand is that I am alive. Still. Differently.

It wasn’t that I did not understand the violences against me were wrong. I did. Even at three years of age. It was that I thought I deserved it, and possibly worse:  that deserving it, I could withstand it. Mightily. Heroically. You see? As a righteously indignant defense. I could take it. As good as if I was some body’s son. It was a choice.

When my father raised his hand to me in our garage at eighteen, I said, “Do it.”

When the poet punched me in the nose in my pick-up truck at a stop light, I said, “Get the fuck out of my car or I will kill you.” And I meant it.

I’m telling you this because I know I’m not the only one who came of age like this. Up and through male violence. I’m telling you because there are all the things that need to be done “out there” to stop it. But then there are also all the things that needed to be done in me. To stop it.

Listen, these are not the sad stories. Worse things happened to me. Those aren’t the sad stories either.  These stories don’t carry the pathos to signify culturally in my culture. These stories I’m telling you are commonplace. That’s the point. They just happen and you live them and as you go you have to decide who you want to be.

Victim.

Slut.

Bitch.

Crayon.

Baseball.

Belt.

When I was thirteen, in Jr. High, my best friend Emory was beaten and sodomized in the boy’s locker room at school by some sadistic members of the football team. Because he was gay. Or at least that’s what they were aiming at. In truth, Emory had not yet finished discovering his own sexual self. Like my sister, Emory suffered rectal damage the rest of his life. They used a baseball bat. Emory says, I’ll never be in any kind of relationship. Emory says, my chance at being with anyone, a family, feeling OK, died that day. Emory was also a swimmer, and so after swim practice, sometimes we’d sit in the parking lot waiting for our moms to pick us up and drink vodka from a flask an older girl swimmer had bequeathed to me. I never knew what to say about what happened. I didn’t even understand it until we were adults. I’m only glad we are still in contact – writing. The tether of words when the world isn’t safe like it was supposed to be.

The boys who committed this brutality were never charged. Emory couldn’t bring himself to tell anyone, and anyhow, at that time, there were no laws on the books to protect us anyway. Also, he was instructed by his father’s lawyer that the term “rape” was not available to him in this situation.

Baseball.

Purple crayon.

Barf bag.

I’m a writer. It’s all I really know how to do, besides being a wife and mother. I consider myself a success story. Because I am alive I mean, and because I think writing and books and art are the reason. As a writer, I’m not so sure I see much difference in the storylines for women and girls who enter the field. I see that some art is rewarded for being “universal,” and it is written by men. Other art is deemed confessional. Or sentimental. Or too subjective. And it is written by women. I see that straight white men are published in prestigious venues more often than women. I see that women are told by editors and agents and publishers to take explicitly sexual or violent or subjective language out of their work unless they can bend the language toward the culture in a way that will sell. These are gendered terms, laden with a force as real as my father’s. I write my heart out. I do. For better or worse. I write my heart out because my heart, well, she was almost taken from me. Every year of my life until now. It’s something I can “do.” A verb. Something that has at least a chance of interrupting another girl or boy’s story with other options. Write. Make art. Find others. It’s a choice.

Listen, I know this is a bit of a dreary story. But whenever I get told that, by friends, or agents, or editors, or publishers, I think, if this dreary story is hard for you to live with, how are we supposed to live with you?

When my father was thirty, he had all of his teeth pulled. Just bad genes with regard to teeth, I guess.  Early dentures. When he came home from the surgery he turned all the living room lights off, became part of the couch, and turned the television on. It was a horrible week waiting for his mouth to heal. I don’t know how to say it—things went too dark and horribly submerged. If my mother or I spoke, he yelled, but we could barely understand him. Laughter and crying kept getting caught and confused in my throat. My mother made soup. Mashed potatoes. Ice cream. I drew on the walls in my room. It was like his rage had gone underground, under the beds, the house, the dirt. But we could feel it, pulsing.  Pervading everything.

They sent his teeth home with him. I never understood that. I just know I stole one. A molar. Off white as a baseball and like a wrong pearl. I have it still.

Sometimes I think about the children that didn’t come out of me. Four. Three of them were zygotes. The zygotes were sucked out of me in what can best be described as a process involving a hoover upright old-school vacuum. That’s what it always looked like to me. Though medical technology has advanced since I was in my teens and twenties.  And yet it’s 2012 and I keep reading about ideas like forced sonograms where the newly or barely pregnant woman is made to watch. I saw a congressman interviewed who actually said, “Well, no one can really be made to ‘watch,’ the woman could just close her eyes.’” While a camera wand is shoved up her. It makes me think of the film A Clockwork Orange.  It makes me think how yes we are forced to watch, every day of our lives, we are forced to watch how our culture still doesn’t get what it means to live every moment of a life in the body of a woman.

Baseball.

Purple crayon.

Underwear.

Belt.

The zygotes that did not become children—I think about them. Who would they be? Would they have lived? It’s a question I feel I’ve earned the right to, since one of the children who came through my body died—nothing wrong with my body or hers, sometimes babies just die. Though for more than a decade I believed it was my body that killed her. My body I’d made into a war zone to mirror the culture as I saw it. When Christians in particular talk to me about “killing babies” and abortions, in my head I think, trust me, I know the difference between a dead baby and a zygote. Once a white Christian woman with shellacked blonde hair and the smallest green eyes I’d ever seen told me I was going to hell on my way in to Planned Parenthood. I thought to myself, lady, I’ve been there and back. Only it was called “family.”

Those zygotes, would they be boys? Girls? Would I have survived? I had no money during that part of my life. I stole food and did things I’m not proud of so that I could eat and have shelter and go to school. I also worked three jobs. And still I needed food stamps, just to stay alive. What would they have eaten, the three zygotes, where would they have lived? Would there have been a man under the beds, house, down in the dirt, his rage and violence waiting? Would I have let him in the door, his face so familiar I couldn’t recognize it?

I carry deep shame in my body for the zygotes. I don’t know a single woman alive who is “happy” to have had an abortion. Or two. Or four. And it’s not just me. Other women. Republicans. Democrats.  Unaffiliated women. Atheists. Christians. Muslims. Buddhists. Armies of us walking around carrying our body secrets. Our shame over the zygotes. Or maybe there’s something deeper than shame—maybe there’s a second self I had to kill in order to live. The Lidia who believed she deserved it. Could take it. Should. It was a choice.

My father’s tooth is in a pink plastic box that was my mother’s. Inside it too, a lock of my hair and two of my baby teeth and that little bracelet they used to give babies that spells out L-I-D-I-A. I’m the one who put my father’s tooth in there after my mother died. I don’t know why. Sometimes I get it out and look at it – hold it in the palm of my hand. So small. The man who terrorized us. His DNA. So large the culture that let him.

I am a survivor of sexual abuse and male violence. I’ve had three abortions. I also had one baby girl that died the day she was born. I have a husband and a son now. My husband plays cello, and makes films and writes, and in the evening he hits the heavy bag; he’s proficient at Muay Thai and Jiu Jitsu.  My son can’t throw a baseball properly to save his life. His favorite color is purple. He draws and draws. Me, between them, I am alive, unflinchingly.

 ***

Executive Order — Preventing and Responding to Violence Against Women and Girls Globally

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. Policy. (a) Recognizing that gender-based violence undermines not only the safety, dignity, and human rights of the millions of individuals who experience it, but also the public health, economic stability, and security of nations, it is the policy and practice of the executive branch of the United States Government to have a multi-year strategy that will more effectively prevent and respond to gender-based violence globally.

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In addition to writing the award winning memoir, The Chronology of Water, Yuknavitch is the author of three works of short fiction: Her Other Mouths, Liberty’s Excess, and Real to Reel, as well as a book of literary criticism, Allegories of Violence. Her work has appeared in Ms., The Iowa Review, Exquisite Corpse, Another Chicago Magazine, Fiction International, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere.

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The Rumpus: So much of your writing is grounded in the body, the female body especially. Your prose inhabits the experience of living inside of limbs and guts and skin. As a reader, it allows us to feel the experience in a tangible way instead of just noting the emotional register in the character from afar. Will you talk a little bit about your willingness to shove us inside the body of your characters?

Lidia Yuknavitch: I’d love to. One of the things that bugs me about the Western Literary Tradition is that the conventions of narrative in particular seem to confine the stories you can tell about characters to tropes of bone-headed action and old models of psychological realism. And as readers, too, we have been conditioned to understand characters as – and forgive me for saying it out loud – what the market says they should be. Namely, safe, clean, proper.

Every once in a while a messy character who manifests a REAL body emerges, for instance, Lisbeth Salander – and certainly commercial genre fiction is full of examples of real bodied sexual encounters or violence encounters – but for the most part, and particularly if you are a woman or minority author, your characters’ bodies have to fit a kind of norm inside a narrow set of narrative pre-ordained and sanctioned scripts.

The chief reason I shove the reader inside the body – or more specifically, the chief reason I try to get the reader to feel their own body while they are reading, is this:  we live by and through the body, and the body, is a walking contradiction. I love the walking contradiction of the body. I want to make corporeal characters, corporeal writing, I want to bring the intensities and contradictions and beauty and violence and stench and desire and astonishing physicality of the body back into literature.

Certainly I’m participating in an already established and awesome tradition, but it’s a tradition that sort of shoots up and through the mainstream in short bursts and pulses and then gets diluted. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson shot up and then got sucked back down underground under more entertaining and less radical versions of body and self – poetry and prose that posited bodies in more perfect union with good citizenship. William Burroughs and Kathy Acker screamed a body electric and then got sutured shut by best-selling smarmy good feeling couch novels where you don’t have to think or feel anything. Marguerite Duras got ghettoized into “that French stuff,” and Dennis Cooper gets misplaced inside an aging history of punk and perversion…Or all of it gets collected into something called “transgressive” and thus loses any chance it ever had of just telling the truth:  The body is a metaphor for experience.

Worse, the bodies of women, minorities, children, disenfranchised bodies (prisoners, so-called nut cases, etc…) and their truths don’t “count” as either present and important in society or worth Pulitzer prizes as characters in literature.

Well, fuck that. You could say I think the body is the first novel. I take my cues about form and content from her.

Rumpus: Body as the first novel. Sounds about right. You mentioned to me in a previous conversation that you wrote Dora while finishing Chronology of Water. Such different books! I wonder if Dora didn’t help to diffuse some of the memoir writing of COW. What was the experience like: writing such dissimilar books in tandem? Was it necessary for these two to grow from each other?

Yuknavitch: Yes, I was finishing COW when Dora started coming out of me – though I did not write them on top of each other…I absolutely think I had to write COW in order to write Dora. I don’t actually think they are very different at all, though I respect your reading experience. From my point of view, COW is in part the story of how I survived the space called daughter and woman, how I had to invent a self and a means of survival in my own terms, how art saved me. In Dora I created a daughter character who journeys in similar ways, passes through similar life and body and heart crucibles, and who finds she must create a self and reasons to live in her own terms.

Too, COW was a psychosexual narrative; Dora is absolutely a psychosexual narrative. In my real life I had to confront the sins of the father, but it’s also a symbolic journey – a social, psychological, sexual journey for women and minorities who must pass through patriarchy and the symbolic order in order to claim a self.

In the novel I had a chance to re-enter the land of fiction—my first love, and the most radical of writing forms from my point of view—Dora is the flag of disposition for outcasts and nerds and alienated people. She is my loveletter to everyone who ever gets told they are doing a self wrongly, or a life wrongly. She is my funny fuck you to authorities that try to convince those of us with the MOST imagination and promise that something is wrong with US, when really, something is more wrong with a culture that tries to reform us.

It’s like COW birthed Dora. She’s the logical outcome. She’s loud, noisy, unflinching, tender, smart, creative, confused, contradictory, and most importantly, “other” to society’s version of a clean and proper girl. Which is exactly why she is the ONLY figure who can take that same culture on and…well, explain to the authorities how their junk is hanging out inappropriately.

I do have one regret though. I wish Kathy Acker was still alive. I wish I could go swim with her again. My literary indebtedness to her is enormous. She’s a more important mother to me than anyone can possibly imagine. In language I became a daughter worth a crap because of her. In language I redefined daughter, woman, I became a writer. Dora is an homage of sorts.

Rumpus: You have your Ph.D. in English Literature, how does your academic background infiltrate your writing? Do you ever feel the need to shove away the theory in order to get down and dirty with your art? Your work, though it happily destroys convention and lives in the world of the reader, seems informed by an intellectual curiosity. Do you think so? Do you think some of this came from spending some serious time writing a dissertation and living inside academia?

Yuknavitch: I’ll say this about academia—though when I left I burned the bridge—it DID give me a “place” to set my intellectual curiosity on fire. It may be true too that I would not have encountered the most important books and art and ideas of my life had I not chased down a Ph.D. I’ve thought about that a lot….MAYBE I would have found the same books on my own, but I can’t know for sure. Too, some of my teachers helped me to navigate those books, showed me the maps and paths and secret decoder rings—people like Linda Kintz and Forest Pyle and Mary Wood and Diana Abu Jaber. They didn’t treat me like a messy writer girl in combat boots who had infiltrated the smart people room. They treated me like I deserved to be there, potty mouth and all, they helped make a space for me to rage and ride my own intellect. That’s why I’m saying their names out loud.

I’ve noticed over the last twenty years or so of my writerly life that women writers in particular are discouraged in cleverly disguised forms from including the intellectual in their creative material way more than you would believe. Let me clarify—you can bring as much intellectualism as you’d like to your poetry or fiction or nonfiction—but if you want it to see the light of day, if you want to prosper in name or financially, if you want to win prizes for your novels, you’d best dumb that shit down. Particularly in America.

Which is mightily ironic since one of the most common criticisms of American women novelists (it’s a load of crap but it gets bandied about a good bit) is that they don’t write the “big” stories about “universal” or “worldly” concepts…Jesus. Um, when we do? We get told to get back in the kitchen and bedroom—go back to writing about love-y wife-y mother-y things.

Right. Tell that to Elfriede Jelinek or Herta Muller.

That’s probably part of the reason why most of my favorite women writers are not rich and famous.  These words “accessible” and “emotionally available” get thrown at us from agents and editors and publishers – or the reverse – if it’s not all goo-ey and sentimental we’re told it’s “cold” or “uncaring” or “emotionally vacant.” In other words, responses to women’s writing in particular continue to be “gendered.” If I hadn’t spent a big chunk of time in academia I might not have the depth of consciousness I do about ideas like that. I might think, for instance, that Freud was no big deal in terms of the shape of social organization then or now. I might think that the discourses of politics and law are real and stable and fair. I might think that equality has been achieved, there is no power relation going on in terms of class, race, or gender, I might just want to drink my latte and buy pretty shoes and write books about girls who marry, die, or go insane, then go get my nails done.

But I can’t do that. I read The Madwoman in the Attic, like a gazillion years ago, and call me crazy, but I think we’ve not come all that far. Yet. I think we still have work to do. I think we are still writing our way out of that attic.

Rumpus: The attic, of course. Feminine forms and domestic private spaces in literature. Let’s get into this. Dora doesn’t fit into convention, and she doesn’t subvert in expected ways. One of the things most obvious about Dora is her willingness to be violent. Why is this so shocking to see in a female narrator?

Yuknavitch: I’m kind of still down with Virg Woolf on this one:  “women must kill the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been ‘killed’ into art.” But my friend the amazing writer Vanessa Veselka claims that Dora’s violence is totally tame. I love Vanessa…but anywho, to recast your question a little, why was I so excited to see Hannah? Why did I nearly pee my pants when Ripley takes on the alien and kicks its motherfucking ass? Why did the scene where Lisbeth Salander restrains the dude who is psychologically, emotionally and sexually abusing her and tortures him by tattoing “I am a sadistic pig, a pervert, and a rapist” on his gut make me feel elation?

Because rage and violence are human emotions and drives and capacities that inhabit us all. SEE CARL JUNG. Or that hipster Joseph Campbell. Because we all take archetypal journeys in a million ways – literal, symbolic, you name it – that figure, disfigure, and refigure violence. HOWEVER. Only the violent acts of men “count” toward something besides evil in a patriarchy. It is the male story of violence that is sanctioned both socially and aesthetically. The male hero and acts of heroism require violence. Everyone is okey dokey with that. We are only beginning to see that constricting set of truths open up a little.

Why it’s taking so long is a little mystifying to me. Never underestimate the power of power relations.

Rumpus: Speaking of Vanessa, (I love her, too) in a conversation you had with her, you say that in both of your writing “there is an insistence that violence is available to women in ways that are both generative of new meanings as well as negating of them.” This is a fascinating concept. In what ways can violence be available to women to generate new meaning? Where else do you see this being done?

Yuknavitch: Let’s go back to the body for a second…and the fact that women carry life and men do not. At least not yet exactly. First of all, reproduction in biological terms is VERY violent. The union of sperm and egg to create a third term is LETHAL to both sperm and egg. If that’s not violent I don’t know what it. And yet it’s generative of life.

Birth is of course violent. I mean JEEEZ. Right?

Menstruation is violent. Trust me, if men’s penises opened up once a month and shot blood, we’d be hearing about the violence of it.

The maternal impulse in animals to protect their young—that kind of instinct and subsequent violence is quite beautiful. Mythic even.

There is a complex violence to sexuality and the act of having sex – I don’t mean in terms of destruction or power or abuse but in terms of animalism, the loss of ego at the moment of ejaculation, penetration and radically receiving the other and the drive to fuck – you only have to tweak your understanding of the word “violence” a tiny bit to reimagine its energy as alternately generative of meaning.

When a female character sets herself on fire in an effort to interrupt her culture’s violent abuse of disenfranchised people, or physically tortures and punishes her guardian rapist, or picks up a gun and fights back in ways that make her not pretty, or aggressively rejects her role as the object of desire, or when she balances the scales in terms of power for herself or the people she loves through killing or war, or even when she waddles off into the woods to squat and have a baby without (gasp) the safety and expertise of hospitals and doctors, these are the kinds of violences and stories we can learn from.

Who wants to sit at a table with me, share a scotch, and convince me that those stories should go away, but rape, abuse, slavery, exploitation, and human rights violations against women should remain? We can’t handle violence in women characters but we CAN handle what’s done to women in our present tense every second of the day worldwide? Or next door? Or in political or medical discourse? Please.  That idea just makes me want to crap on a table at a very fancy restaurant. You know?

Rumpus: Ha ha! I do know, and I love how you put it. What authors did you read in your formative writing years? Who did you read that made you say this is what I want to do? Who spoke about the female experience and the feminine space (for you) in ways that stirred the soup?

Yuknavitch: Marguerite Duras. Kathy Acker. Gertrude Stein. Walt Whitman. Dorothy Allison. Toni Morrison.  Joy Harjo. Leslie Marmon Silko. Mary Gaitskil. Elfriede Jelinek. Herta Muller. Carole Maso. Helene Cixous. Adrienne Rich. Christa Wolf. Clarice Lispector. Laurie Anderson. Patti Smith. Emily Dickinson. Lydia Davis. Margaret Atwood. Ursula K. Le Guin. Flannery O’Connor. Jeanette Winterson. Ai. Katherine Dunn. Virginia Woolf. Anais Nin. Rikki Ducornet.

Wanna know what about all those women (and Walt)? Every single one of them moved from the fact of the body out toward story. Every single one of them rejected the story her culture handed her about who her “self” should be and made up a new one.

Rumpus: You wrote an essay recently for PANK on being a woman writer. In this fantastic piece you talk about editors, or just others in-the-know, telling you to take the “I” out of your work. Too much I. Does this happen to you often, the higher up trying to get you to distance yourself from the page?

Yuknavitch: Only when I make movements away from the tribe of indie art and literature. Maybe that’s something important for me to keep thinking about. What you gain, what you lose, why and how. Maybe the edge of the page is the place for me. Maybe that’s OK.

Rumpus: Why Freud? Why Ida? Did you do much research for the book?

Yuknavitch: Yup. About 25 years worth…ha…what I mean is, I first read Freud’s famous case study on hysteria based on his client Ida Bauer when I was in my twenties. It pissed me off so badly it haunted me for 25 years. But I had to wait to be a good enough writer to give Ida her voice back. And I had to go get my own first too. I not only know the case study inside and out, like most women, I lived a version of it. Maybe it’s time for us to tell our versions.

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Last weekend I rode the subway towards two indulgent firsts: I spent half of my latest paycheck in a swanky, mirror-lined restaurant with a coat check, and then I walked across the street and spent the other half on a vibrator. Both felt good. One feels better. 

Like everyone in this world and out of it, I have a relentlessly complicated relationship with sex. Sex is my back-rubbing, silky-voiced soulmate who sometimes—more frequently than once a full moon—goes werewolf on my physical, psychological, and emotional makeup. Sex is my self-love and my self-hate. Sex is my pride and my shame. Sex and I go way back, but we need to be re-introduced every time we run into each other. Sex feels right and wrong; it is gentle and rough and meek and overpowering and safe and dangerous and vanilla and deviant, and all of those are good and bad and everything in between. I’ve launched into A Tale of Two Sexes to establish two things: both that my contradiction-laden sex-life is utterly inseparable from my life-life, and that, aside from that very fundamental connection (and contrary to all evidence thus far), sex has very little to do what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is orgasm. Or, more specifically, elusive orgasm.

Until very recently, I had no experience with orgasm besides observation, frustration, and failure. Any concrete reasons for that last one, failure, were—and still are—pretty murky; a gynecologist helped me rule out physical inability as an explanation, although it was easier for me to insinuate to my partners (and for them to believe) that something was vaguely broken down there. As for the psychological factors at play: of course there were many, all equally dark and present, all as real as my body itself and the dense history it has traveled through. So in order to continue having and enjoying sex, I accepted some widespread wisdom: that sex wasn’t all about the climax. It wasn’t all about the climax, I was quick to tell myself, so it didn’t really matter that the climax had failed to show up. And, of course, it rationally followed that if it wasn’t all about the climax, it could be not at all about the climax. I clung to that fast-moving train of logic, even as it became increasingly difficult to for me to hang on as sex continued to culminate with me in a state of agitated confusion and with someone else, crashed against me, assuring me that “it had been great.”

Sometimes, it had been great. But always, stretching out alongside us like another naked body, was the non-event. I knew, in pretty non-negotiable terms, what orgasm was supposed to look and sound like; When Harry Met Sally taught me the basics of that vernacular long before anything more pornographic entered the equation. The telltale orgasm signs, that crescendo of gasping and thrashing, informed nothing about my own physical experiences, however. Like Sally, I could fake it in bed or over a turkey sandwich. I had the culmination memorized, but none of the process.

I’m the progeny of two English teachers, so my go-to analytical tool, for better or for worse, is the close-read. It is telling, I think, that the two words I tended to associate most with my anti-climax were “stupid” and “failure.” Let’s start with the first. Orgasm was a concept my body seemed too stupid to grasp. It refused to learn, or was incapable of learning. I imagined myself, as in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Tulips,” a frozen and “stupid pupil”—an open, unseeing eye; a blank-faced student—taking everything in but feeling nothing. The distance between not coming and coming felt cognitive: I wanted to master my body like I wanted to master a language or a narrative device. If I practiced sex enough, surely I should be smart enough to learn how to feel and speak its tongue.

I’ve already half-consciously dropped the second word into this piece a couple of times. Considering myself an orgasm failure has become almost second-nature at this point. My inability to come felt like just that: a lack where there should have been a presence; a block of ice where there should have been a thaw. With that word, “failure,” the theory that sex wasn’t about the climax had already come unravelled. If it wasn’t about the climax, how could I be so consistently failing to perform? My stupidity was causing my failure; my failure to realize this stupid feeling was stupid.

“Stupid” and “failure” took on an oppositional set of meanings, too, which was paradoxically meant to push orgasm into the realm of irrelevance and frivolity. In the back of my mind, there seemed to be something inexplicably weak and absurd about that mysterious moment of climax. Coming implied a letting go that felt ludicrous and shameful. It seemed to be a relinquishing of bodily control—the very opposite of that mastery I so craved. Orgasms were careless, dangerous moments of surrender, and I wanted to be in control, damnit! On some level, I needed the bizarre agency that faking gave me. I wanted to be the brazen Sally-over-a-sandwich, knowing that I could scream and feel nothing and have everything feel like my choice. I never fundamentally questioned that about myself. I never fucked anyone who asked me to question that.

In October, I met a Dear Sugar column that grabbed me by the face, looked into my eyes, and told me in no uncertain terms to question that. It was Sugar’s interview with Lidia Yuknavitch, a conversation in which those two bold women first deconstruct, and then discuss the “hottest sex” they’ve ever had. Now, my moments of “epiphany” tend to happen as gradual, quiet processes. They’re as un-sudden and unromantic as a fine, beneficent dust gathering in certain corners of my brain. But upon reading Yuknavitch’s “hottest sex” story, moments of religious epiphany—moments that are said to shake and rattle the core and blow all the dust from the tiniest thought-crevices and clap an entirely new lens over all of existence—began to make some sense to me. Because suddenly I knew several profoundly unsettling things at once. One of those was that I needed to leave a relationship with a person that, so many months later, I’m still in love with. The somehow more urgent and terrifying revelation, though, was that I had to learn to love myself like this:

“The hottest sex I’ve ever had was not with anyone. Or it was with myself. Or it was with water. What I mean is, I was in a hot spring by myself. I was twelve. I was at some kind of summer camp. There must have been counselors or other pubescents nearby, maybe they were roasting marshmallows or singing kum-ba-ya or something nearby, but in my memory at least, I was alone in water. The water was heat and stillness like it is in natural hot springs. The night sky wore her black hair nestled with stars. I put my fingers between my legs and played with everything about myself, the inside cave of myself and the outside skin and lips and folds of flesh. I opened my eyes I closed my eyes I laughed my throat got tight. It was the first time I’d discovered my actual clit — the beautiful small roundness of her rising and waiting. I’d already masturbated in my life, but it involved a lot of rubbing against things or rubbing things against myself in sort of not very gentle ways. A lot of panting and grunting and teeth clenching. In this warm water I found the site of sexual pleasure on my own. And it was just. Mine.

I peed when I came. Everything water.

All thought blasted into the night sky.

I’ve never shivered and convulsed as hard in my life.

And that’s saying something.”

Just those words awakened longings and sensations that were blissfully beyond my realm of control. Just those words fucked me more powerfully and completely than anyone else’s body could. I wanted that pleasure, and I wanted it to be just. Mine. The wants were new, or they had been there all along and they were finally opening themselves to me. Whatever the case, I apologize to Yuknavitch for stealing her sexual reverie, and I thank her deeply for putting it out there for the taking.

Entering that warmwater exploration loosened everything inside of me because of the pure love and ownership that its author—and her younger self—took of her body. The moment wasn’t just a sexy discovery of the clit: it was a hyper-awareness of the throat tightening, the skin hot and cold against the water, the body belonging completely to itself. My body had never experienced such ownership, such belief and delight in its selfhood. Or if it had, I couldn’t remember the occasion. My memories are all cluttered with the nearby counselors and pubescents, roasting marshmallows. I had never torn myself away from all of them to locate something of my own. I had never been profoundly alone, and profoundly mine. Reading and rereading Yuknavitch’s words, I shivered and convulsed. I needed to break away from the bonfire and head for the water.

Sportswriter Bill Simmons once asked Isiah Thomas to share with him the “secret” of basketball. Thomas responded, “The secret about basketball is that it’s not about basketball.” Fuck yes, Isiah Thomas. Because isn’t that that always the secret? The secret about sex is it’s not really about sex. The secret about orgasms is they’re not really about orgasms. The thing itself is important, but what it’s about and what’s about it—what surrounds it and sustains it and makes it worth the search—is always secretly more important.

I do a lot of reading about women and our navigation of the whorls of body and mind. Often, I get a thrill from reading pieces that celebrate and claim female sexuality, exalting pleasure and shouting orgasm from the rooftops. Similarly, I find strength and solidarity in the writers who so bravely share their experiences living through some combination of sexual pain, trauma, and self-doubt. But rarely am I able to find stories that speak to both sides of this divide, which—in my case—critically inform each other. Rarely do I read about those of us presently engaged in the search to locate our bodies in the midst of sexual contradiction and cacophony.

The vibrator is small and white with clean lines a nubby tip. In all its sleek simplicity, it looks like an Apple product, except that its only application is to my clit. I appreciate that there is nothing remotely phallic about it. I appreciate that the box explains, as if it’s a watch or a pair of boots, that it’s waterproof. But the secret about the vibrator is, it’s not about the vibrator. It’s about finding myself in the middle of a lake, looking up at a start-sprent sky, and asking me to be mine.

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