So here’s the deal. About family, you have to make it up. Seriously. I know amazing single women and their children who are families. Gay men and women with kids who are families. Bisexuals and transsexuals who family up all over the place. People who don’t have partners create families in everyone they touch. I know women and men from a multitude of sexual orientations without any children just doing their lives who create families that kick the can down the street. The heterosexual trinity is just one of many stories.
If your marriage goes busto, make up a different you. If the family you came from sucked, make up a new one. Look at all the people there are to choose from. If the family you are in hurts, get on the bus. Like now.
I’m saying I think you have to break into the words “relationship” or “marriage” or “family” and bring the walls down. Don1t even get me started on the current BAR PEOPLE WHO LOVE EACH OTHER FROM MARRYING fiasco. Annie get your gun. Jeez. Anyway. The key is, make up shit.
Make up stories until you find one you can live with.
I learned it through writing.
Writing can be that.
Writing to bring the delicate dream to the tips of words, to kiss them, to rest your cheek on them, to open your mouth and breathe body to body to resuscitate a self.
Make up stories until you find one you can live with.
Make up stories as if life depended on it.
Though I admit my resurrection and transformation have been a little strange, I can say it in a sentence now: my mother did not protect me. As a girl, I died.
So when my child died in the womb of me, it was as if I’d done the same thing. I’d killed a girl I meant to love.
It’s a big deal to make a sentence.
The line between life and death.
It took me 10 years to emerge from the grief of a dead daughter. You have to forgive women like me. We don’t know any other way to do live than to throw our bodies at it. I was the kind of woman whose relationships were grenades and whose life became a series of car wrecks-anything to keep the girl I was and the girl I had — tiny daughter dolls — safe from this world.
So yes I know how angry, or naïve, or self destructive, or messed up, or even deluded I sound weaving my way through these life stories at times. But beautiful things. Graceful things. Hopeful things can sometimes appear in dark places. Besides, I1m trying to tell you the “truth” of a woman like me.
The things that happen to us are true.
The stories we tell about it are writing. A body away from us. Writing-with its forms and contortions, its resistances and lies, its unending desires, its on and on.
Listen I can see you. If you are like me. You do not deserve most of what has happened or will. But there is something I can offer you. Whoever you are. Out there. As lonely as it gets, you are not alone. There is another kind of love.
It’s the love of art. Because I believe in art the way other people believe in god.
In art I’ve met an army of people — a tribe that gives good company and courage and hope. In books and painting and music and film. This book? It’s for you. It’s water I made a path through. I’m not speaking out of my asshole when I say this.
Come in. The water will hold you.
Interview with Lidia Yuknavitch
RHONDA HUGHES, PUBLISHER AND EDITOR FOR HAWTHORNE Books, conducted this interview with Lidia Yuknavitch.
RH: Your memoir opens with the loss of your daughter and your grief process. It is some of the most beautiful writing in the book, poetic, rich imagery, lines that demand the reader speak them aloud. Your ability to transform profound grief into art, into literature, speaks to me. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to publish your work. You write, “Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory, but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear.” Can you talk a little bit about your experience recreating with words this time in your life?
LY: You know Faulkner said, “Given the choice between grief and nothing, I choose grief.” The same quote has been attributed to him about pain.
I’m not sure it is possible to articulate grief through language. You can say, I was so sad I thought my bones would collapse. I thought I would die. But language always falls short of the body when it comes to the intensity of corporeal experience. The best we can do is bring language in relationship to corporeal experience-bring words close to the body-as close as possible. Close enough to shatter them. Or close enough to knock a body out. To bring language close to the intensity of experiences like love or death or grief or pain is to push on the affect of language. Its sounds and grunts and ecstatic noises. The ritual sense of language. Or the cry.
Poetic language — and by that I mean the language of image, sound, rhythm, color, sensation-is probably the closest we bring language to experience — poetic language takes you to the edge of sense and deep into sensation. So after I name my primal grief, the death of my daughter the day she was born, it felt precise to move directly to poetic language. The metaphor of collecting rocks is more “true” to me to the experience of grieving than to say, I was intolerably sad. It feels precise to draw that metaphor of collecting rocks out, to extend it as long as possible, to let the reader feel the space of grief in the house the way I did. It’s my hope that at least one person will find resonance in that extended language space.
I want you to hear how it feels to be me inside a sentence. Even if some of the sentences seem to lose their meaning. I want the rhythm, the image, the cry to remain with your body. You could probably go through this book and literally chart the moments of emotional intensity by watching where the language — to quote Dickinson-goes strange.
You have published both fiction and nonfiction. Can you talk about your experience with both genres as well as the role memory plays?
While I was writing this book, many things occurred to me about both memory and about the relationship between fiction and non-fiction.
About memory, after my father drowned and lost his wits — specifically his short-term and a good bit of his long-term memory, I became rather obsessively interested in how memory works at the level of neuroscience and biochemistry. I was trying to deal with the fact that the things he’d done had been “erased” from experience. Part of me didn’t believe it-I’d look at him and think, is the dark side of him still in there? Tucked deeply behind the gray matter?
Turns out, according to neuroscience, the more you actively “remember” something, the more the headstory you carry around changes. Every time you recall something, you modify it a little bit and that’s because brains-this is very cool — brains work through a mixture of images, pictures, feelings, words, facts, and fiction-all “recollected.” Eventually you are not remembering what happened at all, but your story or head movie about it. The safest memories are probably those embedded in the brains of people who have lost the ability to retrieve them.
In writing, every narrative and linguistic choice you make forecloses others, directs the story a certain way, focuses on a particular image, extends a metaphor that on another day, you might have chosen very differently. Form has everything to do with content in this sense. So what is “true” in non-fiction writing is also always “crafted” — given shape and composition and emotional intensity-through our narrative choices as writers. And that’s in addition to the science of memory. So the true story is always a fiction. This is why I have come to believe that non-fiction and fiction are as inextricably linked as memory and imagination — which, as it turns out, also use the same brain circuits when they are active.