Meditating on Memoir: My Beloved World, Traveling Heavy and Men We Reaped

We are not publishing our journals, or imagining ourselves to be so important that people are actually interested in the details of our lives.  No.  We are taking those details and lining them up, amazed, astonished, rapt the way a child might be, building blocks to form a tower.  We are attempting to make sense out of what we can -- to reach out a hand to the reader across a rough sea of isolation and separateness and offer up something that has shape, integrity, even beauty and symmetry.

Just like life?  Hardly.  But that isn't our job. ~ Dani Shapiro, On Memoir

In April, I started working on my memoir in earnest.

Maybe this sounds like a simple thing, but it was complicated. I have written this story before, so many times, so many different structures. It's a little like watching the same movie over and over. I feel like I've lived a thousand lives since I was little. My parents were around, then they weren't; Mom smothered me with love, then she snatched it away, last year for good, forever.

I have never been able to empathize with people who complain about writer's block. I have writer's diarrhea. I can, and have, vomited on the page, a flash flood of emotions, random memories, dreams, fears and when I look up, an hour is gone, and I've written 5,000 words and I realize that even though I was grounded in place at my kitchen table, I was transported back.

A friend reminded me of the funny exchange between Adam Sandler and an elevator guy in the movie Mister Deeds. Adam Sandler asks the man how its going and he says, "It has its ups and downs." This is what writing memoir is like. It has its ups and downs.

The downs: In the face of the second anniversary of my mother's death which I've written a bit about in a few places, there is the downer of Mother's Day. What to do with myself. How to be. Maybe deciding to do nothing. Possibly doing everything that I can so that I exhaust body and brain. Writing through it, no matter what. I wrote a piece about it I hope will be published on the monumentally sad/frustrating annual reminder of the mothering I didn't receive, the day that makes me wrestle with the fact that I was nurtured in other ways by other mothers. That I am a kind of mother -- to my craft, to my dog, to my family, to my friends.

The ups are incredible. Not manic, euphoric or even particularly beautiful. But noteworthy.

I interviewed Ruth Behar about her beautiful book, Traveling Heavy. Ruth reminded me of the power of being a professional nomad. Though I have been making travel plans for summer and fall, I am actually physically grounded in a place in Austin in a way I never have been anywhere before.

The photographs and details of her memories in the book, as a little girl leaving Cuba and later as an adult who returns, remind us that while we may not physically bring things with us on each journey, we still carry much more than baggage and things. "We travel heavy with our memories, our histories," she says. "In that sense, we all travel heavy with the things that make us who we are. We travel with all our traumas and maybe we relive them when we're elsewhere with strangers. The emotional baggage may be heavier than all the things we carry with us." 

Behar is an anthropology professor at the University of Michigan and, among other things she has been awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant. Her work takes her around the world and she estimates that she travels an estimated 50,000 miles annually. Anthropology has allowed her a passport to all the places she's ever wanted to go.

There is also, too, at the center of Traveling Heavy, the question of whether we ever return home. I mentioned to Ruth during our discussion that I think we all have multiple homes -- at least I know I do. My spiritual home, my physical home (where I grew up) and the place where I am located in the present that feels most like home.

I've been thinking about this as I slowly make my way through Sonia Sotomayor's beautiful memoir, My Beloved World. This has been a great year for Latina memoir - Raquel Cepeda's compelling Bird of Paradise, along with My Beloved World and Ruth Behar's book to me, all published in the first quarter of 2013 to me signals the growing diversity of women of color telling our stories and they all have unique power and of course, a unique perspective to bring to the craft.

I am a huge fan of Sotomayor, and as I await -- like most people -- the outcome of the Fisher vs. University of Texas case, I found it particularly interesting to read about her personal experience with affirmative action. She is a master storyteller and I love that she embeds Spanish in the text without translating it. Her story reads like New York City. She is a New York City girl, even when she visits Princeton, even when she is navigating academic spaces that no one ever really encouraged her to pursue. It is inspiring.

On the horizon is a beautiful memoir by Salvage the Bones author Jesamyn Ward. Men We Reaped is elegiac, heartbreaking and harrowing. It is the story of Ward losing five black men she loved deeply, but it is also the story of the black men we all lose to depression and violence. It will be released in September. It was a devastating but important read.

Reading these memoirs while writing my own has revived a sense of commitment that I hope will show in the work. Writing is such a solitary, often lonely pursuit. You wonder, "Who cares?" But you still can't stop writing. It's strange and beautiful in its own way, a process that feels heavy but it worth the weight of the journey.

My favorite books in 2012

My name is J. and I have a Goodreads addiction. Nice to meet you.

To be fair, my fascination with Goodreads is a natural extension of my book addiction, which started when I was in first grade, led to my three-year adventure in library school and continues to this day.

For my holiday vacation, I arrived at my destination with a library book and a thick book for review under my arm, and I will attempt now to make it home with three additional books (two for review) along with the e-book I checked out to read for fun.

Not only is Goodreads like carrying a bookshelf around in my computer and on my phone, but it
also helps me keep track of the books I've been reading, and makes it easy to come up with a list of books I loved in any given year.

So here they are in no particular order:

She Walks in Beauty: A Woman's Journey Through Poems 
edited by Caroline Kennedy
This was published in 2011, but a friend gave me a copy for my birthday, so I got to read it early this year, between my birthday and Valentine's Day. Here's what I wrote on my blog, with longer excerpts: "One of my favorite women in the world gave me this book of poems selected by Caroline Kennedy. May the sweet, enormous love in some of these lines fill you with enough passion to share -- with yourself &/or with others. The book is full of greatness."

Gathering of Waters 
by Bernice McFadden
I interviewed Ms. McFadden over the summer ahead of her visit in Austin. Gathering of Waters is a beautiful in the soul-stirring, spirit-infused tradition of Gloria Naylor's Mama Day. It is connected to the story of Emmett Till, but it is fundamentally a love story.

The Rules of Inheritance
by Claire Bidwell Smith
Claire Bidwell Smith writes in this touching memoir that grief is like another country. The writing is honest, raw and poetic. It is unlike a book like Cheryl Strayed's Wild in that it has more of a quiet levity and far more dark contours than light sarcasm.

Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change
by Pema Chodron
I love Chodron everything. Here's a bit more of a review: "In Living Beautifully, Chodron writes with her trademark simplicity and directness about living with uncertainty, opening our hearts to transitions and pain through tonglen practice and learning that the “time of the lone wolf is over” and we cannot make any real changes to ourselves or the world on our own."

Quiet
by Susan Cain
I almost never read any book about introverts that doesn't make us seem like crazed, abnormal hermits. So it was really refreshing to read this, and I'm really happy Susan Cain got all the press and accolades she did for her work. The TED talk was also great.

The Power of Habit
by Charles Duhigg
Fans of Malcolm Gladwell's books will enjoy this one. Duhigg, a business reporter at the New York Times, looks at important brands, like Starbucks, Febreze, Target and even Alcoholics Anonymous to give readers a sense of how habit shapes what we purchase. Most of it is fascinating, though I was less interested in the parts describing lab rat experimentation. I learned enough about Target's practices to give me pause when I purchase products there.

Sister Citizen by Melissa Harris-Perry

Melissa Harris-Perry refers frequently to the crooked room in which African American women find ourselves in her book, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes and Black Women in America. She writes of Zora Neale Hurston's protagonist, Janie Crawford, falling in love with Tea Cake and Michelle Obama, owning her body, her connection to the legacy of black motherhood, her respectability as a woman who has chosen domesticity while also owning her power as an educated black woman. She mentions Ntozake Shange's play and Tyler Perry's misinterpretation of a film, too.

When they confront race and gender stereotypes, black women are standing in a crooked room, and they have to figure out which way is up. Bombarded with warped images of their humanity, some black women tilt and bend themselves to fit the distortion...it may seem inexplicable that a respected black woman educator would stamp her foot, jab her finger in a black man's face, and scream while trying to make a point on national television, thereby reconfirming the notion that black women are irrationally angry. To understand why black women's public actions and political strategies sometimes seem tilted in ways that accommodate the degrading stereotypes about them, it is important to appreciate the structural constraints that influence their behavior. It can be hard to stand up straight in a crooked room.

When she wrote that "black women are rarely recognized as archetypal citizens," or that to be a black woman is akin to trying to stand straight (and tall) in a crooked room, all I wanted to do was cheer. She named for me, as a writer and a reader, impressions and ideas that are rarely named in our culture. I knew that she would, which is why I loved the book and the idea of it before I even read it.

There are few authors who write extensively about the misrecognition of black women in society or the emotional, financial and political implications of that. There are also few books that explore the crooked room and gaze of black women in the church - they have remained the backbone of traditional Christian organizations, for example, while largely being cast aside for leadership positions.

For us to fully be citizens, it is required for us to at least try to stand up. And often, because of the myths associated with our superhuman strength or our supposed mannishness, we are criticized when we try. As Harris-Perry writes, "Sister politics is also about challenging negative images, managing degradation, and resisting or accommodating humiliating public representations." The most refreshing part of the book for me was Harris-Perry's analysis of Michelle Obama's significance to black women and American culture. She deftly sums up what it is, exactly, about Michelle that has prompted odd discourse about our First Lady.

It is an act of resistance for a black woman to demand that her body belong to herself for her pleasure, her adornment, even her vanity, because in the United States, black women's bodies have been valued only to the extent that they produce wealth and pleasure for others.

It would be so nice if this weren't true. But because it is, the best we can hope for are more books that provide solace for those of us who effort to stand straight in the crooked room.