When I opened up, In The Dream House, a memoir chronicling an abusive lesbian relationship during your MFA, I wasn’t sure what I would find. What I found was an exhilarating read, a tour de force of structural originality second only to the unflinching honesty in the face of abuse, further deepening your already indelible imprint on modern story telling. To me, your first book challenged the literary illegitimacy of genre tropes, while In The Dream House redefines what a memoir can do.
Your book, Wiving, is a love letter to being alone as much as it is a memoir of escaping the constricting role of the Wife, in all her various forms — the Mormon homemaker, the eternally supportive girlfriend, the mother who gives up everything for her children. What does it mean for women to live in a world where they are expected to define themselves only relationally? Where they are caretakers and “pleasers” before they are individuals? As you point out, the seemingly opposed categories of wife and mother vs. whore or victim in fact “grow from the same, sticky narrative… Eve is still with us, all our stories built on her shoulders.”
My name came from my maternal great-grandfather who fled from the Ukraine just before the man-made famine. Truthfully, I knew little about the Ukrainian side of my family, and what I did know was based largely in family legend or the Eastern Orthodox Church my mother re-discovered in adulthood. But reading your collection of linked essays, On Our Way Home from the Revolution, felt like I was exploring a portion of myself I only previously knew in pictures and mythology.
As someone who also uses making food – “a mode of self-sufficiency”, a way of wrapping my head and hands around care I can give to others – to cope, I was drawn to how you shaped your hands around the mass of confusion and chaos in this book, All the Wild Hungers, which became yours as your mother resigned herself to chemotherapy, and what questions you let rise. “What is inside us that never goes away”? You ask us as you ask yourself. Possible answers eke themselves out as you buy a Le Creuset pan for $7.99 at the thrift shop and learn, from Google, to season her, as you watch your nephew “dump… an entire bottle of green sprinkles on a single cookie,” as your mother has the “rare strength… to sit at the table” for the first time in days after her treatment… All the Wild Hungers unfolds expansively in small gestures. “There is chemistry here, even if I don’t understand it completely”. It is created like the “courses” of a meal, taken separately but appreciated together, leaving any reader feeling full.
In The Long Grass, you write about being a mother and daughter, illustrating how it is not easy to be a woman, and impossible to remain a girl. You offer small prayers to a world that seems to creep ever closer towards destruction. You worship all things tiny and treat your words with gentle care. I didn’t realize it until I was deep in your verses, that these poems were the words I needed, were permission to rage, to sorrow, but also to “to see / ‘without blurring the beauty with loss,’” (5).
In Someone You Love Is Still Alive, I was repeatedly punched with poems that left me feeling broken, yet somehow, still hopeful. Battered, beaten, bruised: The violence in your book could not be ignored. But I also could not ignore the tenderness, the sexuality, the religion, the nuanced experience of masculinity and love, and what it means to be both masculine and soft. Your poems stuck with me. I thought about them for days after the first time I read them. I thought about my husband. I thought about his tenderness and his love and his masculinity in a way that I hadn’t before.
Dear Liz,
My grandfather died while I was reading This Never Happened. He was a traditional man—he liked sitting on front porches and he believed “Sure” was an unacceptable answer to a question because every question deserved a “Yes” or a “No.” During every holiday get-together, the matriarch of the family, his aunt and my great-great aunt, always led us in prayer. Every Christmas, he gave every family member a single two-dollar bill with the year written in red scrawl. I’m sorry to say I’ve misplaced many of these bills.
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You, Me, And The Violence, resists classification. It’s a mosaic of desperate pieces that beautifully unpacks the ethics of military drone violence.
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Reading your book, Be With Me Always, I am reminded again of Sherlock Holmes in your approach to every haunting, and every visitation of your body by a ghost. Holmes makes an appearance in your list essay, “69 Inches of Thread, Scarlet and Otherwise”, but I noticed the similarities before this. When you ripped through Vivaldi arpeggios without realizing you had an audience, I pictured Holmes playing his Stradivarius. In “A Pill to Cure Love” you dissect the way a body metabolizes a love affair, and I pictured Holmes performing extractions in his home chemistry lab. Holmes’ devotion to justice, I liken to your hunger for understanding your ghosts. As Holmes hunts for criminals, driven by empathy and a lust for intellectual challenge, so too, do you hunt for your ghosts.
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Nice Things by James Franco is filled with chaotic, yet surprising moments that take readers through a maze of lyrical and narrative twists and bends. Along the way, you transport us through time, alternate us between third and first person, and take us through the stream-of-consciousness, existential processes of an artist.
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