The elasticity of memoirs
Diverse array of voices, stories can be found
Through the end of the year, the Chicago Tribune is revisiting books worthy of further recognition.
The memoir, at once literary and fact-based, is a shape-shifter, a container for a diverse array of voices, stories and narrative techniques.
A sampling of this year’s entries exemplifies the genre’s elasticity. In eclectic formats, they speak of trauma and healing, family dysfunction, the limitations of medical science and the forging of identity in the face of social and cultural obstacles.
Esmé Weijun Wang’s “The Collected Schizophrenias,” winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, is a mentalillness memoir in essay form. Wang, the precocious daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, offers overlapping ruminations on her shifting diagnoses, bouts of madness and efforts to stay sane and productive.
Wang’s principal diagnosis is a particularly tough one: schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type. It is a variant of schizophrenia, complete with delusions and hallucinations, married to a mood disorder — one of “the collected schizophrenias.”
Sometimes Wang believes she is dead; at other points she is convinced that the people around her are robots. Psychotropic medications help but don’t heal. She longs for “an impeccable self without disorder,” but she fears that “if I continue to struggle toward one, I might go mad in the pursuit.”
Wang’s problems are exacerbated by post-traumatic stress disorder, the aftermath of a rape by a man she once loved. And, as if all that weren’t enough, she discovers she may suffer from chronic Lyme disease, a controversial diagnosis. One doctor suggests her psychiatric symptoms may even derive from that illness.
Of one fact, Wang is certain: Involuntary hospitalization, the go-to remedy when her delusions peak, contributes nothing to her recovery. But is she a reliable enough narrator for us to trust that assessment?
Wang interweaves reflections on psychiatry and culture with her personal history, which includes a prestigious Yale and Stanford education, a job in a psych lab and marriage to the miraculously patient man she calls “C.” The essay format allows her to examine her challenges from multiple angles, with each essay complicating the picture. But it also results in repetition and narrative stasis, something of a metaphor for Wang’s predicament.
The mental illness that dominates Carmen Maria Machado’s formally daring memoir, “In the Dream House,” isn’t hers — it’s her lesbian partner’s. The titular dream house turns out to be a house of horrors, and the woman with whom Machado is romantically and sexually obsessed transforms into a domestic tyrant, consumed by jealousy and rage.
Machado notes that “abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs.” But her unnamed partner appears to be a disordered personality, perhaps borderline — a politically incorrect disaster. Haunted “by the specter of the lunatic lesbian,” Machado writes, she did not want her lover “to be dogged by mental illness or personality disorder or rage issues.”
The memoir is composed in short bursts, with chapters as brief as a single sentence, such as, “Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal.” Chapter titles such as “Dream House as Sodom” and “Dream House as Tragedy of the Commons” situate Machado’s experience within myth, fantasy, history, literature, film or some other metaphorical context. Metamorphosis is a recurrent theme.
Unfettered by chronology, Machado dredges up childhood insecurities and adolescent crushes and fast-forwards to the writing of the book itself. Her nonlinearity and digressive use of literary and cinematic archetypes, as well as queer history, complicate her narrative but never dispel its momentum.
However wrenching her ordeals, Machado’s prose remains exhilaratingly precise, inviting us to share both her initial passion and her cascading terror. As a bonus, the story veers unexpectedly toward a happy ending — not that Machado, as much postmodernist literary critic as abuse victim, doesn’t interrogate the very notion of endings. By then, we expect no less.
Machado positions herself as a survivor. So too does Adam P. Frankel in “The Survivors,” which begins as a third-generation Holocaust memoir about his maternal grandparents. But, confounding expectations, it becomes a mentalillness memoir about Frankel’s mother and a story about his own identity, lost and found.
The common thread is trauma — inflicted, possibly inherited and, in Frankel’s case, ultimately overcome.
The takeaway is the need to confront the past, however fraught.
Frankel’s maternal grandparents are Lithuanian-born Holocaust survivors, loving but psychologically scarred. By dint of heritage, upbringing or misfortune, Frankel’s mother, his principal custodial parent after a divorce, struggles with bouts of depression and outbursts of rage, symptomatic of borderline personality disorder.
The paternal side of Frankel’s family is, by contrast, a source of pride and refuge. One cousin by marriage — Martha Minow, who becomes dean of Harvard Law School — helps the Princeton-educated Frankel land a job as a speechwriter for President Barack Obama.
“The Survivors” takes a sharp turn toward navelgazing when Frankel discovers his heritage is not what it seems. Feeling betrayed, he reaches out, lashes out and eventually seeks therapy.
The narrative flirts with self-indulgence, allowing Frankel a good wallow in his psychic pain. In processing his feelings, he finds himself betraying family secrets, stirring anxieties that haven’t yet fully subsided. But, in the end, he discovers something wonderful: that the people he most treasured were even more loving than he had dared imagine.
The redemptive power of love, in all its complexity, is also one takeaway from “Ladysitting,” Lorene Cary’s gentle but candid family memoir. Cary made her name with “Black Ice,” a memoir about being African American, working class, adolescent and smart at the elite St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, and “Ladysitting” marks her return to the genre.
The titular lady is Cary’s paternal grandmother, Nana, a fiercely independent widow who lives alone, until the century mark, in her New Jersey home. When Cary was a child, Nana spoiled her; by contrast, Nana’s relationship with Cary’s father was strained.
So it is Cary who assumes the burden of her late-life care. She moves Nana into the Philadelphia rectory she shares with her Episcopal priest husband and her two daughters, whose help she enlists with the “ladysitting” project.
Even with paid caregivers and intermittent stints of home hospice, Nana, stubborn and anxious, frail and in decline, becomes increasingly difficult to manage.
“Nana’s presence and her escalating needs had upended our family,” Cary writes. The experience tasks her love, and the memoir is her attempt to work through her complex feelings, “not to forget, but to recall how the end of my grandmother’s life pulled into focus her hundred and one years on earth.”
Cary amplifies her narrative with digressions into family history: her mother’s Barbados roots, her paternal family’s migration from Jim Crow North Carolina to Philadelphia, her parents’ doomed marriage, her own tumultuous childhood and more.
There is no slack at all in Saeed Jones’s “How We Fight for Our Lives.” As a poet, Jones doesn’t waste words. He sets the parameters of his memoir in a poetic prelude, “Elegy with Grown Folks’ Music,” a passionate remembrance of his mother and his childhood longing to be “a prince, a prodigy” rather than a target of derision.
The question animating the memoir is whether Jones can find a black, queer identity that is also a happy one. Raised in Texas in the age of AIDS, isolated and closeted, he visits the public library, looking for books on homosexuality that aren’t also about death.
He trades explicit magazines with friends who turn out not to be. His first sexual partner refuses even to kiss him. His mother discovers his presence in a computer chat room and, addressing his adult correspondent as “Pervert,” warns the man to stay away.
When Jones is accepted to New York University, his mother can’t find the money necessary to supplement his financial aid package. So he opts for a debate scholarship to Western Kentucky University, where he embraces sexual freedom for the first time.
Some undercurrent of self-loathing leads to sessions of brutal, self-abnegating sex, described in passages that are graphic and hard to read. On vacation in Arizona, he stumbles into more sexual violence, barely escaping with his life.
Yet another trauma victim, Jones survives by writing.
“I believed that I could control any story I told,” he says. “How We Fight for Our Lives” turns out to be both a tribute to his late mother and a manifesto about the active fashioning of identity.
“People don’t just happen,” he writes. “We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared raise us.”