When asked if I plan to have a second child, my answer is an immediate NO! as if I have been asked, instead, to debone a whole fish. (As Sara nears school-age, I have been delighted to get sleep, poetry, and other kinds of freedom back.) But there is another urge that has been growing in me for years: to join so many Americans in the strange act of writing a memoir.
Memoirs, in my understanding, used to be something you wrote when you were older or had experienced something catastrophic. Now, the field has been opened up and it seems that anyone, no matter how young or inexperienced, can write a memoir about anything. My creative inspiration has always been experience, and the only experiences I feel confident about recording are my own. Anais Nin wrote, “We write to taste life twice,” and I think there are some of us who have that taste—for whom living once isn’t enough. To have an experience, good or even awful, is one pleasure; to recreate past worlds of sensation and feeling is another that suggests a further pleasure of opening the vault of private experience to a wider world (why I blog): making private life into public record. Clearly, some people would rather be shot in the face than do this, but I have had an exhibitionist streak since the times when, during naptime in kindergarten, I would cross to the boys’ side of the room and flash them (who suggested this—them or me—is unclear).
I have read many memoirs this year as I’ve turned this wish over in my mind. Some were beautifully written—like Mary Karr’s Lit—some were about some combination of food, romance, and France; or, extending this further, butchery and infidelity (I really like, and was slightly embarrassed by, Julie Powell’s second book). Some also served as a self-help manual for the reader, teaching by example; maybe all, since another person’s story can always be internalized. Some I’ve read and thought, I can definitely write a better book than this person. But when it comes to it, I can never commit to a topic (depression? motherhood? marriage/divorce?) and get started. Maybe underneath, there is some conviction that I don’t dare speak about my little experiences; that I have nothing valuable to say to people.
During my senior year of college, I worked as an artist’s model. Once a week, myself and several forty-somethings met at a beautiful little house out in the country—lots of warm wood and glass doors, a transparent kind of house—and ate avocado salad and plates of rotini, sometimes proceeding to the outdoor hottub with our wineglasses and sharing a joint. Then, off would come my robe and I stood (or sat, knelt, or lay) among some white pillows in the center of the basement room under a spotlight. I did this, for something like $20 a session, because I thought it was a cool thing to do and because it scared the hell out of me. As a result, I did not create the best or most graceful poses. I think I looked rather stiff and awkward and, as one (male) artist remarked, I appeared skinnier when wearing my clothes. My nipples, as another person despaired, kept changing size due to uneven heating of the room (this was winter in upstate NY). In other words, I was completely under scrutiny: more than physically, it felt like. Because I believed the body—my own not-so-skinny 21-year-old body—to be the gateway to love, to being known as a person by another person. This was something I could barely conceive of at the time, since I’d had very few lovers and was about 10 years away from discovering the clitoris and any sense of ease during physical intimacy. But to reveal oneself, I learned, is an opportunity, opening one up to criticism, joy, and the complexity of things.
Self-disclosure, whose different forms I’ve pursued ever since, has never brought happiness—for long. But it has occasioned knowledge and, as my friend recently wrote in an email reflecting on my (transparently) messy life, knowledge is the most faithful of lovers.
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