Falling for Female Memoirs

Hi, you’re still here! Time moves differently now, and I feared so much of it had gone by that I may have lost my readership entirely.

It’s mid-November, and New York’s first snowfall blankets my Brooklyn block. At the beginning of this month – nine long weeks after his premature birth and two weeks past his due date – my son finally came home from the hospital with us.

For so long, our worlds were distinct. My husband and I at home in Brooklyn, surrounded by unused cribs, unworn clothes, and unopened toys. Our son Finnegan at NYU Langone’s NICU in Manhattan, buffeted by the beeps of machines, the wails of alarms, the cries of other babies. Bringing him home collapsed those two worlds. Now there’s a baby where a baby is supposed to be – playing and feeding and crying and cooing as I always imagined he would – and our lives make sense in a way they haven’t for a long time. It’s still a strange time of course, though now largely in the way that the sleepless delirium of new parenthood is strange for everyone.

One of the oddest parts of this very odd time is how thoroughly I’ve fallen away from myself. My independent self has been replaced by an interdependent one. When asked lately how I’m doing, I reply with how Finnegan is doing. My son’s fortunes and mine have fused so thoroughly that I don’t even have my own moods anymore. If he’s sleeping, eating, and breathing well, then he’s great and so am I. If he’s struggling, so am I.

But enthralled as I am by my son’s every gassy smile and sad tremble, my imagination doesn’t stop at his nursery door. My husband recently joked, “Read and roam? You’re more like sleep at home,” and while it’s certainly true, it won’t always be this way. So as I spend my days feeding, soothing, and trying to get some sleep, I’ve also been reading. No longer baby books, but instead the memoirs of women who walk the world in daring, difficult, and unconventional ways. First Tara Westover’s Educated. Then Glynnis MacNicol’s No One Tells You This. And, finally, Porochista Khakpour’s Sick. And lest I depart from the theme of this blog entirely, they also happen to be memoirs in which place plays a prominent role.

Educated, Westover’s examination of her childhood as part of a survivalist Mormon family in rural Idaho, was my favorite of the three (it’s everyone’s favorite, and another Obama pick). At its outset, she describes her home’s landscape so movingly:  

“The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sagebrush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads. The shape of the dent lasts only a moment, and is as close as anyone gets to seeing wind.”

For all the sad and specific traits of Westover’s early life – forced to labor in a scrapyard, beaten by her brother, demonized by her family – Educated ultimately reads more like a universal parable about how talent can propel you out of even the toughest circumstances. Having never attended elementary or high school, Westover manages to work her way first to Brigham Young, then to Cambridge, to Harvard, and finally to Cambridge again for her PhD. It was there that Westover was introduced to Isaiah Berlin’s definition of positive liberty – the ability “to take control of one’s own mind; to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from addictions, superstitions and all other forms of self-coercion.”

Berlin’s thinking was game-changing for Westover, and reading about it was impactful for me too. I’ve always been a person who engages in a lot of self-manipulation - for instance, the belief that life resets on Monday morning or the notion that new Moleskine notebooks are a fresh start professionally. I’m also prone to magical thinking. When my brother got married earlier this year, he told a story during his vows about how, when he used to play basketball, he’d say to himself “If I make this shot, I’ll get to be with Nicole forever.” I do the same thing - “If I make this subway, it’ll be a good day,” “If I buy this outrageously expensive purse/sweater/skin cream, I’ll become the kind of person who is worthy of it,”- that kind of thing. This is particularly true now, since Finnegan was born. I tell myself, “If I sit by his bedside, he’ll sleep,” “If I sacrifice all of myself, he’ll get stronger,” and “If I just want it badly enough, he’ll thrive.”

Tara’s life is not mine, nor her childhood my childhood – I’ve been lucky in that regard. But I can relate to her dependence on the stories we tell ourselves, can see myself in the illusions she operated under for much of her childhood and adolescence. Reading about how she achieved clarity in her life filled me with desire to grab and hold onto some focus in my own.

Next, I picked up No One Tells You This, a memoir of single adulthood build around a simple question Glynnis MacNicol asked herself on the eve of her fortieth birthday: “If the story doesn’t end with marriage or a child, what then?” As MacNicol writes:

“It was a truth universally acknowledged that by age forty I was supposed to have a certain kind of life, one that, whatever else it might involve, included a partner and babies. Having acquired neither of these, it was nearly impossible, no matter how smart, educated, or lucky I was, not to conclude that I had officially become the wrong answer to the question of what made a woman’s life worth living. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the years ahead, if they were to be lived in a way that didn’t leave me feeling like I was standing in a corner watching the action but never living it, would require me to transform into a person I could not yet recognize and was not totally convinced even existed.”

It's likely no accident that at the very moment I’m fulfilling the most traditionally female role I may ever fill, MacNicol’s alternate reality – both its pleasures and its pitfalls – so fascinated me. When she writes about perhaps the chief – if unromantic – advantage of marriage, I nodded along with a sort of recognition I may not have had even a year ago:

“When I looked around, all I could see was a husband-shaped hole. It was outlined by the dishes I’d left in the sink; the bottle of wine I’d forgotten to buy; the food I found growing moldy in the fridge; and the notice from my landlord that my rent would be past due if not paid in twenty-four hours: all reminders that there was no one else to help pick up the slack - even temporarily. This is why people get married. To hell with romance, and men who ran across rooms to speak to you, or sent you a hundred text messages a day. Fuck flowers. None of that really mattered. You got married so that you wouldn’t be in the trenches alone, so that there was someone else to take the wheel from time to time. So that you didn’t have to ask for help; it would just be there.” 

It's true: never before have I needed Emmett so badly, and never before have I so valued his place in the trenches with me.

No One Tells You This also renders New York in precisely the soft focus I remember from my early days here, from the time when I was consciously acting out what I thought “Living in New York” looked like, rather than merely living:

“When I’d first set foot in New York, age twenty-three, it had been like one of those videos of captured animals being released back into the wild. There’d been no transition. When I thought of those years now, what I remembered most was the sensation that I was in the exact center of the world, inside the best secret, one that I shared only with those around me. I felt lucky.” 

Later, she’s more circumspect. “Live in the same place long enough,” she writes, “And it eventually becomes a map to all your past lives: a different version of you waiting around every corner. And there had been plenty of versions of New York City me.”

Finally, I read Sick, a memoir of Porochista Khakpour’s life with late-stage Lyme Disease. While both Educated and No One Tells You This offered me escapism – chances to ponder concepts like achievement, identity, and the choices we make – Sick served an entirely different purpose in my current world. As I sat vigil for months at Finnegan’s bedside this autumn – and as I now usher him to and from countless doctors’ appointments – I can’t help but wonder at the nature of sickness and health. Specifically, how fragile health is, and how frustratingly opaque the source of sickness can be. Khakpour’s depiction of her chronic disease – caused by a tick bite of unknown origin – gave me some much-needed perspective on what she describes as “an odd life, a waiting game, a rehabilitation, a strangely beautiful no-life.”

And like MacNicol – a Canadian now living in Brooklyn – Khakpour is a New York City transplant who long idolized the city from afar:

“My mind always went to literal distance, eyes on the globe landing without fail on New York. It’s hard to know if all the movies of the era did it, Fame and its many knockoffs, Annie and all the stories of rags-to-riches miracles in Manhattan, told me New York was the motherland for misfit creatives to thrive, for foreigners with big dreams, for girl authors.” 

But Khakpour takes ‘city as symbol’ even further than MacNicol. Location is everything in Sick - it’s the source of her mysterious illness, holds the possibility of healing, and serves as a metaphor for her body. Some of Khakpour’s beautiful writing about that sense of place is below: 

“In telling this story, it occurred to me that it wasn’t character or plot or even theme that was the ruling principle of its composition, but something far less likely: setting. Location changes have been more than simple set switches for me. One could imagine the variations in physical location are what in some ways got me to illness - and Lyme disease - in the first place. It wasn’t Iran, but then was it California, was it New York, was it Pennsylvania, was it... where? I would be destined never to find the bite on the location of my body, just as I’d be destined never to know the location I was in when beat by the tick. The question of where would be the most mysterious of all.”

“My PTSD was always tied to setting. There was never a home for me as a human in the world. There was never a home for me outside as there was never a home for me inside - my own body didn’t feel like my own.”

“It has taken me many years to see my own shell, this very body, as a home of sorts. I can report that even now I struggle with this concept, that even as I type these words, something feels outside of myself. I sometimes wonder if I would have been less sick if I had had a home.”

With three female memoirs down, I now find myself motivated to chronicle my own story (or at least the more interesting bits of it.) But first I’ll take on Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir, in the hopes of gleaning some tips to make my own tales sing. Someday soon – between cluster feedings, diaper changes, and dutifully replacing the pacifier in my son’s mouth every 30 seconds – I just may review it here.