Category Archives: Writing

Animal Love and Genre Stereotypes

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Lisa Roney

It’s been a hard week. One of my cats nearly died. I won’t go into the details, but I will admit that it’s involved trips to three different vets, a lot of poop, and a lot of suffering. I had come to grips with the fact that this morning I would likely need to ask for her euthanasia. But, no, after four and a half days of dire illness, she has rallied. No little kitty will last forever, and her days are numbered, but maybe she will enjoy a little while longer.

When I try to think about writing about my pets and why I love them, I encounter whole layers of prohibition, disrespect, sentimentality, and boredom. Yet they are important enough to me that I feel compelled to include them in my literary world, or at least my communicative world. What I write about them may never achieve anything near the level of art, but I think somehow there must be ways of thinking about them that go beyond “Awww, how cute.”

Perhaps, in fact, my desire to write about animals is something akin to certain others’ devotion to genre fiction. My husband sent me this morning a short example of the frequent flailing of professors of creative writing for discouraging students from writing genre fiction—in this case science fiction. It uses a long quote by Michael Chabon expressing some outrage about how he’d been “limited” by this lack of acceptance of his favored genre in his youth.

This dissing of professors this way is a tired hobbyhorse. Genre fiction was far more disrespected before creative writing was commonly taught in universities, and creative writing professors certainly didn’t create the “limitations” Michael Chabon speaks of. That responsibility would have to lie at the feet of literature professors and literary reviewers and critics, though creative writing professors no doubt have partaken in it in their attempt to get a toehold in the academic world over the past fifty years.

However, it is also undeniably true that much genre writing—and much writing about animals—is pretty uninteresting and awful stuff.

The writing professors that I know (in composition and as well as creative writing) place “limitations” on students in order to try to avoid reading the worst of this kind of thing and to encourage students to shift away from the stereotypical thinking many of them are most familiar with. Most of us have tried a variety of strategies—and it is true that some forbid any genre element (monsters, vampires, magic of any kind, futuristic settings, etc.). Some use prohibitions about “realistic” topics as well—I once knew a composition instructor who forbade all broke-up-with-boyfriend or -girlfriend stories. Another banished all first-love stories for similar reasons. Some try less blanket warnings, like “I suggest you not use a gun in your story unless you are actually familiar with guns and know how they work.” I even knew one teacher who disallowed any student from writing about pets.

Mind you, these are from teachers who may admire Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Who may know that Paul Auster wrote Timbuktu very successfully from the point of view of a dog. Who may even think that the Harry Potter books are good. Even those professors who disallow genre elements entirely in their workshops are not unaware of exceptions in the general low quality of certain genre-like or realist-sentimental subjects.

But there’s another, little understood issue, and that is that we try to sort in order to focus our instruction somewhat. This starts, of course, with the more basic use of the word “genre” to distinguish between fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction (which also is distinguished from journalism). Slicing further, fiction becomes “literary” and “genre,” and then genre is divided further into particular genres like sci-fi, mystery, chick lit, and so on. Those genres are broken down even further: this website, for example, lists ten primary sub-genres of sci-fi.

These designations are seemingly designed to be descriptive, not necessarily evaluative, but, because people develop favorites and antipathies, they become evaluative, too. And, I would argue, also because there are certain goals that differ between those writing for “entertainment” purposes and those who at least aspire to loftier ideals. Whether the latter ever achieve them or not is uncertain, just as entertainment purposes or other ideological pursuits in writing don’t necessarily preclude profundity.

In other words, most creative writing professors that I know combine their aversion to the worst possibilities of genre fiction in their classes with an aversion to trying to teach everything in one course rather than any blanket condemnation of genre. How many different sub-genres must we be asked to examine in one semester? How many different conventions and their upending must students be asked to critique in each others’ manuscripts all mixed in together? At my university we actually offer a course on science-fiction writing, separate from the other fiction workshops that focus on literary realist fiction. No one who teaches fiction here disses genre—a couple of them even write and promote it. This may be a new development, distinct from the experience of someone like Michael Chabon from a tonier universe. We live in an era when literary realism is getting harder and harder to publish (at least in book form) and in which there’s an emphasis on the acceptability (even, perhaps, desirability) of hybrids and mash-ups. Genre elements creep in all over the place, and an array of examples are emerging of how to use them without being dominated by clichés and formulas. (One name for this is post-modernism, I suppose.)

Nowhere, though, does anyone talk about the less macho, might I say the less sexy issue of how to approach more domestic subjects without sentimentality. Science-fiction, fantasy, and horror have made inroads in academic creative writing circles. But the fiction world has cast the romance into the world of memoir and has dissed it one genre-definition level up: there are many fiction writers and critics who now claim that memoir (or even all of nonfiction) is inherently inferior as an entire genre to any and all fiction. In literary circles, in other words, it’s now more common for memoir to be dissed as unworthy than it is for sci-fi and fantasy to be.

Which reconnects to my own desire to occasionally write about my pets or about other animals and issues regarding them. A few years ago, I wrote an essay about an elderly neighbor of mine who was feeding strays and my efforts to help him and find real homes for these cats. (One of them became a permanent resident in my home, and I placed six others in good homes and got the one feral one spayed before she escaped capture and disappeared.) It was a great compliment to me when one of my writer-friends, who at that time was not an animal lover (though she has since become one) said to me that I had “managed to make the inner lives of cats interesting,” something, she said, she had not thought possible. Yet I still have not managed to publish this essay. I believe it’s a good essay, and I believe it’s a shame that “cats” are off-limits in most of the literary world.

Still, I have to acknowledge that this is not without reason—people react to the plethora of sentimental schlock about pets, and I can’t blame them even though I’m trying to do something different and even though I believe editors (and professors) might be able to take a little more responsibility for distinguishing value rather than dismissing entire subjects in their entirety. In fact, for a number of years, I have refused to place proscriptions on what subjects my students write about; on the rare occasion when I teach fiction, I suggest very heartily that if they would like to write something with genre elements, they need to make sure they do it in a non-formulaic way and that they toe to literary standards of character development. Few of them try it, but on at least a couple of occasions students have produced great stuff. So, I’m personally not into the proscriptions even though I find about 90% of the well-published sci-fi and crime/mystery stuff I’ve ever read to fall into the dreck category. Still, I believe it would be silly of me to attack lit mag editors for their antipathy toward cat stories.

Similarly, I believe that the genre-fiction aficionados lashing out at the literary realist world are wrong-headed. What they might more usefully do is examine what’s closer to home and begin to make real and substantial distinctions about what has merit within the realms of their specific genres.

In the usual sense of the word, of course, genre fiction refers to the kind of simplistic, poorly written, stereotypical character–filled, predictably plotted kind of stuff that creative writing professors disparage. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t terrific fiction that shares certain features of science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, action, crime, or mystery. The many torrid memoirs don’t mean that there don’t also exist memoirs of the finest order. Whether we speak of any of this work as solidly ensconced in its specific genre or of it “transcending” its genre status doesn’t really matter to me. What matters is that we understand and make distinctions about what is art and what is on the borderland or what falls completely into the category we might call dreck.

Some people are capable of this. Jonathan Lethem, for instance. I just read his essay “You Don’t Know Dick,” in which he examines both the variable career of Philip K. Dick and his own youthful obsession with it. He notes more than once the “disastrous unevenness of his [Dick’s] prose.” Now, this is an intelligent examination of how a writer can fascinate us while we also see his flaws. I wish the same strategy could be applied more commonly to genres as a whole instead of the simplistic valorization of underappreciated genres or the alternate demonization of them.

There will always be contention in terms of the issue of quality in areas where it’s hard to pin down. Math is “easy” in this regard: either you get the right answer or you don’t. Engineering in this regard is “easy”: either the building or bridge stands up or it doesn’t. In both of those arenas, it may be difficult to master the correct answer, but you at least can identify it.

In many walks of life, however, there is no hard and fast answer. A book, for instance, may be good in a million different ways or bad in a million different ways. It can even be good in some ways and bad in others, or good and bad at the same time to different people in different circumstances. For instance, when I criticized Kris Carr and her Crazy, Sexy Cancer empire, one of my former students noted that she could see what I meant, but that Carr had been important to her in dealing with a chronic illness because it gave her a sense that she could still enjoy much of her life. I think Kris Carr is a hideous fake and her writing is awful, but I can’t and won’t try to deny that someone might find her bromides useful at times. In fact, she probably doesn’t even consider what she does “art,” and so is perhaps not the best example. But think of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, think of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, think of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, think Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. All of these books have formed important cultural commentaries on their times, and all have inspired numerous readers to think in new ways. That doesn’t mean they are all well written or even particularly intelligent.

Well, I’ve already gone on way too long about this today. I’ll just have to revisit it later. This post will be a true rough, rough draft. There’s a place in the world for that, just as there is for laser guns and green slime creatures and murders on the orient express. Just as there is for the basic, accepting love between human and animal. Now I am off to retrieve my cat from the vet so that she may scratch out another day if not my eyes. She is not a particularly sweet cat.

Ironically, when I adopted her, her shelter name was Candy. The only remnant of that is in the sound of her name, Cameo, and in the fact that we sometimes call her Candycane Tail because she is so uptight that she never uncurls her tail. Except, I should say, when she’s very, very sick. A limp tail is a terrible thing.

P.S. I really loved this discussion of “The Top 40 Bad Books” (It’s a PDF, so works only if you search the title or paste the URL into your browser: http://americanbookreview.org/PDF/Top40BadBooks.pdf). What variety! What disagreement! It takes a village to ferret out insights about what’s good and bad.

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It’s My Party

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Lisa Roney

Today is my birthday, and on this occasion I’ve been thinking about my long struggle to be myself. It was on my birthday half my lifetime ago that my mother characterized me as having been “born seven pounds of resistance to the earth.” This blog demonstrates, I think, that the same trait still prevails in my personality. Why? No one knows. All the psychological explanations in the world fall a bit short of defining us, clarifying us, making us all make sense to ourselves and to each other.

I think that’s one reason why I have always been drawn to narrative over theory, as much as I see the usefulness in theoretical approaches and have flirted many times with various theories and their smacking smart practitioners. But, narrative, thank god, doesn’t quite have to make sense in the tidy way that theory does. Narrative accepts a lot of mystery, as Flannery O’Connor would put it. “Your beliefs will be the light by which you see,” she notes in Mystery and Manners, “but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.”

Narrative is about seeing, and my blog obsession with a full range of emotions (rather than an enforced uniform positivity) is about seeing what is there, not just what we wish was there.

So, today I picked Bryan Ferry’s cover of “It’s My Party (I’ll Cry if I Want to).” It’s an anthem of defiance of social expectations, and it reminds me of my own perverse habit of pointing out the less-than-perfect in the world. I like its bald self-assertion—because, truly, denial of the self is desirable in only a very narrow range of circumstances. Most of the time, if we acknowledge ourselves and our own vulnerabilities, we can do the same for others as well. On my birthday, I like thinking about all these various paths we are each on and the ways they intersect and sometimes collide. A life, is, after all, an individualized journey, and I celebrate the unique natures of my friends and enemies alike (the latter at least in theory and narrative, if not in daily experience). Vive la différence.

The song was written by John Gluck, Wally Gold, and Herb Weiner and was most famously recorded by Lesley Gore in 1963. Her It’s My Party album has crying as its theme and includes the luck-and-love-have-shifted song “Judy’s Turn to Cry.” But Bryan Ferry’s cover is the version I remember, and when you start wishing that you could stop passing through more birthdays, retrospection seems to be built in. We also have the perspective that allows us to roll our eyes, especially at our previous youthful selves that put on relationships and discarded them like dirty clothes. And to laugh a little at our tears of yore.

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Imitation Isn’t Always the Sincerest Form of Flattery

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Lisa Roney

Ernest Hemingway with his son John Hadley Nicanor (Bumby), 1927.

One semester I had a student who turned in a story that I believed was plagiarized from Hemingway. The student had frequently spoken of his admiration of the minimalist master, and the story he turned in had the tell-tale traits, at least superficially. I had seen (even assigned) emulations before, but usually they were ham-fisted, amateurish, and identifiable as copies. Usually my students couldn’t keep their own personalities from peeping through. I had also seen completely plagiarized stories—once a student had turned in an entire Stephen King story with even the title intact. So I began searching for this Hemingway story.

I couldn’t find it. And I had to admit that if I couldn’t find it, the student probably hadn’t found it anywhere either. Creative writing students seldom plagiarize, and in my experience they never do so with enough leisure to hide their trails. The story, I decided, also didn’t quite have the Hemingway attitude toward women. I finally came to the conclusion that this student had just written a very good stylistic emulation of Hemingway. The following year I had him in another class, and by then he had begun to write like himself.

This is the usual trajectory for writers. But it might be different for a talented painting student.

At any rate, the production of fake manuscripts by dead famous authors is not a big business. It’s been known to happen, but the difficulties seem to surmount the temptation. Even though the Antiques Roadshow estimates that the lost suitcase of a pile of Hemingway’s manuscripts might reap $3 to 4 million if it was ever found, no one has tried to fake it. Instead, literary hoaxes tend to be more of the James Frey variety, with an author claiming a realm or set of experiences themselves that are false. These are the cases that seem to most common in accounts like Melissa Katsoulis’s Telling Tales: A History of Literary Hoaxes.

However, in the world of the visual arts, this kind of forgery is not at all uncommon. It’s one of the fundamental differences between the various arts, and it is based on the reproducible nature of the written word and music. Original manuscripts and scores may be valuable, but the real money is in an original artwork like a painting. A literary work may be experienced a million times over with the same power even from a cheap paperback copy, and the power of music lies in the details of its performance, but the original painting can only be experienced first-hand, in person, in the flesh. Even rough, imperfect, one-of-a-kind preliminary sketches made in preparation for prints can take on more value than the prints that were their ultimate end.

The New York Times covered such interesting happenings in the art world this week, with a different kind of retrospective from that of Cindy Sherman—an account of what is evidently a fraud perpetrated on the art world for nearly twenty years. A small-time art dealer, Glafira Rosales, is now tangled in legal troubles for numerous paintings she sold as works by some of the best-known Modernists—Rothko, Motherwell, Diebenkorn, de Kooning, and Pollock. Ann Freedman, former president at the famous Knoedler gallery, was evidently drawn into the fraud, bought several of the paintings herself, and helped to sell others for millions of dollars. Now Knoedler has closed and many of the paintings’ purchasers are suing for their money back.

And yet, the case points out the extent to which artists can be imitated, just as writers can. Pastiche, in fact, frequently forms part of an artist’s tutelage, and sometimes people are very good at it. What is viewed as a helpful learning practice becomes criminal, however, if someone gets too very good at it. And in the art world large profits can be had in this way.

In the recent case reported by the Times, there is no conclusion. No forger has been revealed, and some still claim that these paintings might, somehow, be authentic, even though some of the paints used in them were not available commercially at the dates they were claimed to have been painted. But I am compelled to think about that forger or those forgers and how he or she or they decided to produce these masterful paintings and put masterful names on them. These are paintings that fooled some of the world’s experts, and someone decided that money and the satisfaction of skill and cleverness would prevail over someone’s performance of his or her or their own talents. Well, being able to fool the experts is, I suppose, a talent of its own.

I can see the appeal, actually, of working for a fame in someone else’s name.

Of sticking it to an art world where fame and income are restricted to a very select few even though many have talent to spare.

Of playing a trick on a universe where work that is done out of deep, self-motivated reaches of the imagination is then commodified and traded like so much chattel.

And yet…

There is such a hateful despair in the theft involved. It’s hard for me to see one artist doing this to another or to herself or himself.

These cases seem to me to illuminate the chasm between the two channels of art: the need to communicate through whatever medium, on the one hand, and the business of buying and selling and making contacts and fostering fame on the other. It’s not a new conundrum, and different writers and artists and musicians have answered it differently over the centuries.

For myself, it is true that I would love to sell another book sometime, to be paid for my labor. But that isn’t why I do it. I watch so many of my cohort desperately scratching at the door, and I both admire their business sense and wonder what their work would be like without it. Obviously, balance is in order—I would not have all my writer friends starving and homeless, and I would enjoy a world where expertise and skill in the arts were respected far more than they are these days. I know that a lot of writers, musicians, and artists do what they think they have to do to survive and thrive. But I would not have us all pretending to be Motherwell or Rothko or Hemingway, in either name or fame. And I have a sneaking suspicion that the artist who engages with the world without constantly grasping at fame—whether in his or her own name or that of another—is all the more free to pursue the ragged path of art.

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Cindy Sherman

Posted on February 25, 2012 by Lisa Roney

A new exhibit recently opened at MoMA—a retrospective of the work of Cindy Sherman, photographer and chameleon extraordinaire. Sherman’s work is about as different as can be from that of Vivian Meier and Elsa Dorfman, two other photographers I’ve admired on this blog. Meier took gritty street portraits, Dorfman takes posed but simple and direct studio ones. Both of them have taken self-portraits, but most of their work depicts others in frank and realistic modes. Sherman, on the other hand, has used herself as a model for decades and has explored the idea of identity with a variety of costumes, wigs, make-up, props, and atmospheres.

Though on the surface a self-portraitist, Sherman doesn’t really consider most of her work self-portraiture. Rather, in her photographs she tries to take on personae and explore stereotypes and images, especially those of women. They are, in other words, fictional self-portraits. Or just fictional portraits with herself as a stand-in for others, though no doubt there is usually an element of herself in them too. Recently, for instance, she has been playing with stereotypes of aging and the various ways in which wealth can distort a woman’s life, both obviously questions that must be close to her as she approaches 60 a very successful artist.

One of the things that interests me the most about Sherman’s work is that, while her work’s intention is to disrupt female stereotypes, many of her photographs remain so sexy. She has indeed done series of works that are disturbing and that examine the nastier side of the human body, but in these she did not use herself as a primary model. This NYT review of the new exhibit at MoMa points out that this work is also largely ignored in the retrospective.

Sherman is clearly capable of extensive use of prosthetics and appearance-altering make-up. But she focuses these efforts on her face. She dresses and poses her body in a variety of ways, but she shops for costumes that fit her naturally thin shape. She is supreme at creating bulbous chins and noses, opulent lips, and even prostheses that augment her breasts, often in disturbing ways. Yet Sherman has never (as far as I know) done much to alter the traditionally attractive profile of her body.

There seems to me a deep irony in the fact that much of the work of this woman whose goal and mission has been to upturn stereotypes of women can still be viewed somewhat pornographically. Yes, it is a pornography that points out the complicit nature of the viewer, and it may therefore be unsettling. But even now that she’s exploring “women of a certain age,” they can be strikingly strong and fit, as is Untitled #466, which MoMA uses as its representative work on its page about the show and which depicts an imposing woman in a flowing aqua gown. Or like Untitled #463, in which Sherman has superimposed four images of herself dressed up as party-going friends with manicured nails and bare-shouldered clubbing outfits (included in this slide show).

That’s one reason I was so interested in the discussion of the evolution toward paunchy of one recent character (starting about 4 minutes into this terrific 20-minute art21 video). I would love it if she would push this even further and do a “fat women” series. It would be fascinating to see how such work would be greeted.

What I have always valued about Sherman’s work is the same in-your-face quality that makes them honest even though they are contrived. Amid all the various rather dumb debates about fiction vs. nonfiction in the writing world, the world of visual art has been playing with the categories often more successfully. Sherman has stood for me as a hinge between the two genres. She is a person who uses fantasy to tell the truth, at least a certain truth, about the women she becomes. There’s an intellectual honesty that can sometimes disappear from written fiction, but a self-awareness and playfulness that sometimes is absent in memoir. And there’s always this fascinating remnant of herself in her pictures, a remnant she uses rather than denies.

Additional imgaes/videos:

Excerpt from documentary on Sherman’s work by Paul Tschinkel, about her early work (about 4 minutes).

Art21 excerpt about her “fashion” photography (about 3 minutes).

The full PBS Art21 interview (about 1 hour).

An amateur video of a visit to the current MoMA show by James Kalm (not a great video, but fun to “be there,” about 16 minutes).

New York Magazine review with a good, short slide show.

Google images of much of Sherman’s work, for a sampling.

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The Will to Happiness is Contra-indicated

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Lisa Roney


Dear Readers,

In my continuing attempt to try new things, I present to you today a guest blog post. A while back, my friend and colleague John King (also one of my most faithful readers and commentators on the blog) emailed me separately a longer series of thoughts he’d had in response to one of my posts. Casually, I said that I should make him a guest blogger, and, lo and behold, he then sent me this erudite little essay.

Don’t worry. I’m not abandoning my responsibilities. The discipline has been too good for me. But I’m hoping to post maybe one guest blog a month to bring more variety to the contemplations here. So here’s to a spirit of experimentation. Let me know what you think.

L

* * *

The Will to Happiness is Contra-indicated

by John King

I am not certain that, as an ad for The Secret proclaims, Shakespeare actually knew “the Secret,” but I am quite sure P. T. Barnum knew the secret behind “the Secret.”

“Smile and the world is yours,” Henry Miller writes in Black Spring. “Smile through the death rattle—it makes it easier for those you leave behind. Smile, damn you! The smile that never comes off!”

The Will to Happiness, a.k.a. Positivism, is a willful disengagement with the real world, a form of denial, of censorship. This is precisely the sort of thinking that led the Bush administration to scoff at “the reality-based community” as it planned its war in Iraq. Death toll of the Iraq War: 162,000. This fact would be shameful, if reality is a meaningful entity. But the mainstream media machine, including the mainstream punditry, has never reported the actual death-toll, treating this essential statistic like a psychological tar baby.

This is an affirmation of the unexamined life.

Phobias about negativity, about depression, bad news, agita, and strife, are based on a fear of psychic vampirism, that others will drain you of your vitality, your confidence, your mental health. Schopenhauer believed that the boundaries between others and ourselves is illusory, and in moments of moral clarity, heroes see how contiguous we are with humanity, and behave accordingly. But it takes a profoundly strong person to acknowledge this truth, and there is not always something such a person can do to help others, relieve them of certain brutalities and cruelties of existence.

“Can the world be as sad as it seems?” asks the narrator of Throbbing Gristle’s “The Old Man Smiled.” Marlow loses his mind and his humanity when he sees enslaved Africans in Heart of Darkness. His racism and inability to cope with his experiences begins there and then.

The world of business is systematically skewed towards simplicity and optimism in its communication. According to Kitty O. Locker’s Business and Administrative Communication, business writing should exhibit something called “you-attitude,” a focus only on the immediate concerns of the recipient of a message, without burdening the recipient with any of the sender’s extraneous concerns. And all messages should also feature positive emphasis, whenever possible. On The Simpsons, Mr. Burns re-labels a nuclear meltdown at his power plant as an “un-requested fission surplus.”

The opposite of the Will to Happiness, what we might call Romantic melancholia, is of course also ridiculously out of touch with reality. Shakespeare mocked that self-indulgent impulse in 1602, in Twelfth Night, in the character of Count Orsino, who pleads “If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.” (This is, incidentally, more or less how I feel when I hear nearly anything by Abba.) Unfortunately, unlike Shakespeare, Goethe wasn’t kidding about the Romantic sorrows of young Werther, and today’s goth kids lack the sense not to stew in their own weltschmerz as an actual lifestyle choice.

According to the early twentieth century philosopher Henri Bergson, the most primal laughter is a manifestation of the incongruous knowledge that our minds exist in something like a pure mode of being, godlike, but our minds are, nonetheless, attached to a body that is destined to fail, to decay, to die. This is the foundation of Samuel Beckett’s entire literary and dramatic career. This is the foundation, too, of the mythos of Beckett’s beloved idol, Buster Keaton: the expressive consciousness of his face, juxtaposed with the improbable feats of his body as he strives to contend with the gross, sublime physicality of the world. This philosophy is also the core of the dark, ranting comedy apparatus of Denis Leary’s No Cure for Cancer.

I often find myself drawn to the honesty of cartoons, a genre in which the content is considered culturally debased, and so can afford more satirical gravity than what supposed grown-ups watch. (An inexpensive observation: The Simpsons offers profoundly more reality than Undercover Boss.)

No cartoon I know of has more to say about this subject than that 1990s counter-culture classic, Ren and Stimpy, in particular an episode called “Stimpy’s Invention.” It depicts the terror of the Will to Happiness in a way similar to Henry Miller in Black Spring, but far more disturbingly, in Bergsonian terms. Stimpy, the ever-optimistic and cheerful orange cat, is wracked with empathetic sorrow when his companion, Ren the chihuahua, is not happy. So he builds a helmet that alters Ren’s brainwaves that force Ren’s mind into a happy state. The helmet that never comes off! The pressure of the Will to Happiness escalates.

Ultimately, the ability to voice discontent, pain, and sadness is cathartic. To silence such speech is to deny who and what we are, to deny even the possibility of knowing who and what we are, and so it diminishes who and what we can be.

John King is a creative writer, literary scholar, and journalist. His creative writing has appeared in Turnrow, Palooka, Gargoyle, Pearl, and Painted Bride Quarterly Annual, and is forthcoming from The Newer York. He regularly reviews books for The Literary Review and theater for Shakespeare Bulletin, and is a contributor to Celebrations magazine. He is currently serving as a composition sherpa at the University of Central Florida. His most recent works, a short-short story called “Perfection” and an essay called “The Muse of Florida,” will appear in the new book 15 Views of Orlando.

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Invisible Illness

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Lisa Roney

This month marks the 40th anniversary of my diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes. Other than my trumpeting this fact to a few people (and here on the blog), there will be no fanfare. I find it more seemly that way, even though that doesn’t mean I don’t want to talk about it. And it’s not that diabetes survivors are never honored—the Joslin Clinic in Boston has a program to give certificates at the 25-year mark and medals at the 50-year mark, and last year they celebrated a fellow who had achieved 85 years with diabetes. It’s just that most people who become medalists have to nominate themselves.

Even the term “diabetes survivor” seems funny. We don’t think of it as a terminal disease, even though diabetes kills more than breast cancer and AIDS combined. Most people, in fact, have a lot of misconceptions about diabetes, especially Type 1. I’ve already written about that, years ago, in Sweet Invisible Body. The title of that book comes from the very fact that you can live with diabetes and pass for (and even be) healthy most of the time. Many people never see the disease. I even hesitate to type the word “disease” instead of “condition.”

Some years ago, I faced this issue in a different way. I was doing scholarly work on three writers with serious early-age chronic illness—Katherine Anne Porter (TB), Carson McCullers (rheumatic fever and early strokes), and Flannery O’Connor (lupus). I encountered two distinctly different sets of academic communities that were relevant to my work—one was Medical Humanities (and its sub-set Literature and Medicine, perhaps best represented by the journal of that name) and the other was Disability Studies.

Those titles speak volumes. The Disability Studies community was formed mainly by those with disabilities who desired to be recognized in all their complexity and diversity. The Medical Humanities, on the other hand, focused more on physicians, nurses, and their traumatic encounters with patients’ illnesses or how the humanities might teach humanistic values to numbers-oriented medical personnel. The trouble for me was that I didn’t conceive of myself as disabled, and I wasn’t a health-care provider. I wanted a community of those involved in “Illness Studies” or some such. In spite of the fact that people have been writing literary work about illness for as long as literature has existed, there was no such thing.

Although I have kept an interest in both fields, it’s no surprise that the work in Disability Studies was a lot more directly touching to me. I was closer myself to being disabled than to being a physician, and I was tied to the “patient’s” perspective. So for a number of years I participated in online Disability Studies discussion groups. Of course, these groups did not base membership on whether or not an individual was disabled, but there were sometimes discussions of what counts as disabled. I recall a generous openness in terms of various levels of ability, both physical and mental, and a sense that disability of some sort or another is in most people’s future if not their present. I remember that one person commented to the effect that those who exclude themselves completely from the category are disabled by their own ignorance about it.

In a book called The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (1997), Arthur Frank pointed out that this same logic holds in terms of illness as well as disability. The end of the twentieth century saw an enormous rise in chronic or treatable-but-never-cured illnesses. Diabetes is like this, and cancer has become more this way as treatments have improved. And now, through genetic testing, we even have the ability to diagnose illnesses that aren’t even manifest. Invisible illness has shaded over into virtual or nearly nonexistent illness.

This is why the distinction made by my recent commenter on the “Just Crazy, Not Sexy” post is important. She noted that, though I objected to cancer guru Kris Carr’s “claims to have cured an incurable cancer with self-help and alternative therapies,” Carr “is well aware that she has cancer still” but “believes that her diet is keeping the cancer inactive.”

Remission is indeed distinct from cure, and I should have been more precise, even though I think that the overall impression given by Kris Carr is that of illness banished pretty much entirely. What’s fascinating about Carr is the extent to which it is convenient for her to have cancer with no symptoms and no effects of her illness. In other words, she does indeed have knowledge that she has an underlying condition that could one day affect her health, but right now it doesn’t.

This goes to show that illness does have something to offer: part of the mythology of illness is that it can make one wiser (if it does not make one bitter and therefore evil). Carr claims the wisdom, however, without the pain and suffering that supposedly lead to it. In fact, her claims cut in opposite directions: Carr has the imprimatur of serious illness, but she also has the success of triumphing over that illness and restoring her own health. It’s a powerful combination that attracts many followers even though it is full of contradictions. There aren’t too many people who can stay in that position for long—a couple of years ago I wrote an essay (next to last in this e-book on The Patient) about the “Dying Professor” (Randy Pausch) who stormed the world with his optimistic reaction to a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, only to succumb the following year. People mostly quit paying attention to him after he was truly ill. (Or they respected his privacy, if you will. Actual illness is ugly and therefore largely hidden.)

I think one reason why someone like Kris Carr has such appeal is that many people still want to think of illness as a temporary situation rather than a permanent situation or marker of identity. In spite of the fact that Frank identified us as living in a “remission society” more than twenty years ago, where illness is almost the norm, there has been no rise in “Illness Studies” and little formalizing of what it means to live as a subject of medical intervention and awareness of the body’s limits for years on end. For many people illness still seems to be short-term—they catch a cold or get a bacterial infection and are definitely ill, but soon enough their good health is restored. That’s the model of our medical world—illness properly treated ending in cure.

In 1999, when I published Sweet Invisible Body, the Guardian published a large (and very negative) article about “malady memoirs” that the author characterized as “malingering” and trivial besides. The author didn’t mention my book, but it was one of about twenty whose covers were reproduced above the article. As an example, the article’s author wrote a satire about an in-grown toenail. That, I thought, is someone who really thinks everything can be cured. That is a healthy person, someone in whose eyes illness is simply an uninteresting transient weakness or something to be hidden. Such reviewers are common, and they judge illness memoirs with a broad brush rather than making distinctions between good writing and bad.

Even many who are ill or who understand the value of examining such experiences prefer the stiff-upper-lip mentality or the “it’s a blessing in disguise” mentality more than something more complex. One of the main reasons they do, I believe, is because they are rewarded for it. It is not the depressed or symptomatic sick person who gets on national TV. Randy Pausch—because of his cheerfulness not because of his illness—gained many privileges, such as visiting with his idol Sting and tossing a football with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Kris Carr—because of her insistence on a can-do attitude not because of her asymptomatic illness—has become a self-help brand-name. The Make-a-Wish thing seems appropriate to me for ailing children, but there is a strong push for a trip to fantasy-land for adults as well, as long as they “deserve” it by being upbeat.

One thing that it’s important to note is that plenty of avowed healthy self-help gurus give us the same basic message that Kris Carr does, only they don’t have the added value of supposedly having overcome cancer (even if in the fine print it’s only “remission”). The cancer’s remission is added “evidence” of the effectiveness of her self-help recommendations.

Why does it matter to me that Kris Carr isn’t symptomatic, that she hasn’t actually experienced much sickness over the years she’s been building her cancer guru empire?

The status of someone in a particular identity category is something we grapple with every day in the field of creative writing. Male writers write women characters, and black writers write white characters, and vice versa. Sometimes fiction writers even use a first-person narrative voice for a character completely unlike him- or herself. We reserve and defend the right to do so. That is what imagination is for, and much good writing takes this kind of imaginative habitation of another life. The best of such efforts, of course, produce great literature suffused with empathy and near clairvoyance.

Yet I believe it does take a sense of responsibility to inhabit a different kind of persona—it is not something to be done in a cavalier fashion. That is why even fiction writers do a lot of research. That is why it’s a perfectly legitimate criticism of certain macho male writers that their female characters are flat and inaccurate. That is why I was so ecstatic and relieved a couple of years ago when one of my students (a young white twenty-first-century male) wrote an honors thesis that was a novel set in the 1930s with an African-American main character, and the African-American historian on his committee said, “I don’t know how you did it, but you really nailed it.” (He did it, I note, by a deep desire to understand, not by a desire to use, usurp, or pretend.)

In memoir writing, this issue is perhaps just as complex and vexed though in different ways. In spite of many naysayers like the Guardian reviewer, memoirs about chronic illness continue to proliferate. I’ve read a lot of them, and sometimes I even sympathize with the Guardian reviewer because a lot of them are poorly written with little insight. In fact, even supposedly literary ones tend to be characterized by a kind of rah-rah boosterism or tried-and-true emotional answers. James Frey’s infamous A Million Little Pieces, which was, after all, essentially a story of overcoming the illness of addiction, turned out to be a false memoir. Some of us suspected it was before the scandal hit—because his story of curing himself of alcoholism seemed way too easy.

As a person who writes fiction as well as nonfiction, I think frequently about identity and identity categories. Certainly, the fact that “it really happened” is never enough to justify a piece of writing. Many in the world of memoir-writing, including me, also support the use of the imagination in writing them. But it’s all too easy for us to ridicule the many slavish readers who thought that Frey offered them hope and a method for overcoming their ills and then became naively furious when he turned out to be a fraud. Yes, they were naïve. Yes, there is often an unfortunate confusion between self-help books and memoirs. But he’s the one who was a fraud. Both fiction and nonfiction should be more truthful than the bull he sold.

So, what is the distinction between imagination and fraud? The two are often closely tied, and many terrific writers are known as frequent fabulists in daily life as well as on the page.

What, in fact, constitutes a truly inspirational story? Do such stories always need to end in triumph?

As a person with a long-lived illness who encounters frequent and ever-increasing symptoms, but who manages to hold death and more severe disabilities at bay for now, I have to answer in a certain way. I have to say that for me Samuel Beckett’s narrator in The Unnameable, sums it up well: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” This is the balance of emotional honesty, and it is based on genuine experience, not what sells. It also, it seems to me, reflects a deeper optimism than “I’ll go on” by itself would. I also have to say that imagination is distinct from fraud, and that there is such a thing as emotional honesty in whatever genre.

It’s the difference between a discreet poisoning and a mere threat, between a stomach ache and gold-bricking. It’s the difference between what is there that we can’t see and what isn’t there at all, at least not yet. It is a tricky little devil to put a finger on.

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The Queen of Garbage

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Lisa Roney

Recycling transfer station, Gainesville, FL. Photo by BWingYZ.

I sometimes feel like the Queen of Garbage. Around our house, I’m the one who mostly deals with it. This is not the result of some plot on Bruce’s part— I am the long-term expert at dealing with kitty litter (and, to be honest, kitty vomit), and I am just far more obsessive about garbage than he is. A friend once told me that I reminded her of Andie MacDowell’s character in the film sex, lies, and videotape (directed by Steven Soderberg, 1989) who sat in her therapist’s office worrying about a barge of garbage stuck in the East River. My friend thought this comic.

My first memory of playing this role arises from my early teenage years when my old friend Sharon visited my family one summer. Sharon’s parents and my parents had played bridge together when we still toddled around with pacifiers in our mouths, and we’d stayed friends of the summer-visit variety. When Sharon saw me take a pile of newspapers down to the garage one day and add it to the considerable stash along the far wall, she asked me what was going on.

“The Boy Scouts do a drive every year to recycle the papers,” I told her. “And see here?” I showed her the extra garbage cans we kept for glass and aluminum. “We take these to the K-mart recycling dumpsters, too.”

“Your family is a bunch of fanatics!” she said. “You’re crazy!”

Thirty-five years later, I feel sure that Sharon and her family recycle, too, but even now there are a lot of people who don’t.

Bruce and I purchase a lot of stuff through the mail. Evidently everyone on our street buys a lot of stuff through the mail. As far as I can tell, I am the only one who bothers to break down boxes for recycling. The recycling people will only take the cardboard if it’s flat. We let boxes pile up in the garage for a while, and then I go out with the hunting knife I found when I bought a house years ago and cut them down. Sometimes I think about the new life I gave the once abandoned knife—that’s a kind of recycling, too.

And I spend hours trying to find homes for the stuff we don’t use. Recently I made a trip to Goodwill with a carload of household items—glass cookware we can’t use on the new induction stovetop, extra mugs that overflowed the cabinet long ago, some of the plethora of cloth book bags that we seem to pick up at every conference we attend. I was dismayed to learn that Goodwill won’t take blinds, as I had finally convinced Bruce to give up a large bamboo blind that we have no place for in the house we bought three years ago. I didn’t, however, put it on the curb. Instead, I put it back in the garage and began making a list of things we can give away or sell for cheap through Craig’s list.

I did a lot of this when Bruce and I moved into our house together. We owned two lifetimes of accumulated stuff, and we had to winnow it down. But Bruce laughed at me when I said we should do something with all the boxes. We had a lot of boxes—too many to break down for the recycling truck. Bruce was ready to put them on the curb. Instead, I posted them as “free” on Craig’s list. Bruce said no one would want them, but within an hour, I had six different people offering to come and get them. They were perfectly good boxes.

My grandmother, on the other hand, hoarded. It’s a thrifty habit. And like the genes that change our metabolisms when we try eat less to lose weight, I’m sure the saving gene once had a good purpose, too. But we live in a time of overkill not of scarcity, both with food and with stuff. It’s no wonder that obesity and hoarding both seem to be on the rampant rise these days. At least, I tell myself, I don’t hoard.

Nowadays, I take any peanuts and other plastic-y packaging stuff to our local UPS store, where they are glad to re-use them. Because they don’t pick up office paper curbside, I haul mine to campus. I’ve taken metals to a metal recycling business, and I’ve taken electronics to a business across town that supposedly re-uses parts. (It seemed to me that mostly they were in the process of smashing every part and extracting the metal, too, but at least I tried.) I take my diabetes pump supply cast-offs to the fire station in sharps containers for proper disposal of medical waste. (This is relatively easy here where there’s a fire station program, but for years I had to hunt down ways of getting my medical waste into a proper channel.) And I make frequent trips to the garbage transfer station in our area to drop off the many dead batteries that we have from my insulin pump, blood sugar meter, TV remotes, fake candles, and various computer peripherals like mice. I like the transfer station the way some people like the wrong side of the tracks—it is like a glimpse into another world entirely, with the huge, lumbering trucks and cavernous space filled with the detritus of our lives: scary and all too real.

I do other things, too, to try to be environmentally responsible. I long ago quit buying water in bottles, for instance. Bruce and I have a collection of long-lasting drink bottles, and I drink water out of the public water supply. It is the cleanest and safest in the world, after all, even if it’s not from some “pure” spring in Fiji. It was easy to make this change after I saw the water bottling plant in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, where I once lived. Bellefonte’s public water supply came from a spring, so a company bottled it and sold it as “spring water.”

Both Bruce and I—and most of the people I know—try to make choices along these lines. Most of us feel that the earth is a ticking time bomb of pollution and poison. I go to a lot of trouble, but I know it’s not enough. I often wonder if the gasoline I’m using to drive stuff around to these various places is worth it, and I’ve had my suspicions that all the stuff that gets picked up curbside is just dumped back in with the rest, a kind of p.r. stunt. I’ve known people who do a lot more than I do—one who gave up cars completely, one who left his job as a philosophy professor to join an organic farming cooperative, others who established careers related to protecting the environment or educating kids about it.

Recently, one of these latter—an old friend who works as an attorney for the EPA—lamented that she believes that recycling has become just a sop to make people feel better. I know she is right, and she made me think about what it means to be environmentally friendly. How is that term defined in a meaningful way? The EPA has, in fact, deemed the term useless in the commercial world due to a lack of clear definition.

For most of us as individuals, it’s very confusing, and I believe that most of us do only what we can see, what is simple, and what is right in front of us. I find it worthwhile to turn off the lights when I leave a room—in fact, I follow Bruce around and turn lights off after him, too. But in more complicated situations, it’s frighteningly hard to tell what’s for the best. When Bruce and I bought our house, we needed to replace miles of hideous, worn and dirty beige carpet. I did hours and hours of internet research about purveyors of wood flooring, looking for a company that had responsible environmental and labor policies. Pretty much all of them claimed they did.

We went through a similar task when we looked for our wedding rings. Mining—both metal and diamonds—is a particularly nasty business that most of us never see. But in my younger days, I’d driven around Copperhill and Ducktown, Tennessee, and I had seen first hand mining’s destruction. Though much of that land has now been reclaimed, it was denuded for better than a hundred years. I wouldn’t want to live there even now. We bought rings made from recycled metal. At least that’s what we were told. We don’t feel any ability to really know the impact of our choice.

All of this raises for me again and again what it means to be genuinely one thing or another. How do we gauge our own intentions? Do I recycle just so I can have the imprimatur of a “good person”? Do the hours I spend sorting garbage and cutting down cardboard boxes mean anything besides just another form of waste? And are my intentions what matter? No doubt they are good, but I may not demonstrate enough follow-through or commitment. Other things distract me, and my carbon footprint no doubt remains too large. At least, I tell myself, I have been doing a few things over many long years. At least I am not a Johnny-come-lately to trying to do my part.

Bruce and I were talking about this the other day, when I was contemplating to what extent I’m just a half-assed person with commitment issues. We started to generate a list of other ways in which he and I each have been unable or unwilling to “go all the way.” Some of these are not so clearly desirable as environmental sustainability and concern, but they share the expectation of purity.

Bruce and I started our list by chuckling over what I have for a long time called “macho yoga.” Just a few days ago, the New York Times featured an article about the dangers of yoga. I was glad to see them finally catching up to reality. Back in State College, Pennsylvania, during my grad school years, I classified the yoga schools and instructors in town into the “gentle” camp and the “macho” camp. My friend Mary, a returning middle-aged college student, alarmed me when she told me that after a month, her college yoga class was doing headstands. I said, “No way. You’re going to hurt yourself.” Sure enough, she herniated a disc. Yet in our town, there was a certain éclat of the macho yoga schools, and they turned up their noses at anyone else. At a party once, I had one of them tell me that I couldn’t be a true yoga devotee unless I did headstands. I already knew that I was never going to do headstands.

Bruce told me about his own discomfort with the proselytizing brand of Christianity that he was inculcated in when he was at Bible college. “I still consider myself a good Christian,” he said, “but I know a lot of people wouldn’t. For me, it’s more of an internal thing.”

Along similar lines, I have found myself uncomfortable with confrontational politics. Off and on over the years, I have made numerous attempts to advocate for candidates I believe are better than worse, to engage in canvassing, to make phone calls as elections neared, and so on. My brother has always been good at debating issues and has long been involved in local politics, but I am terrible at it. I feel that it’s necessary, but it just about gives me heart palpitations and I usually just end up making someone mad. I am much better at writing things down, and I hope that my occasional forays into issues in this blog is a genuine way that I can make a contribution, even if it isn’t protesting in the streets or knocking on doors.

Perhaps most important of all to me right now is the issue of our marriage. It took me 49 years to get married, even after a therapist told me in 1983 that I had commitment issues. Even now, happily married to a great guy, I tell myself at least once a week that it won’t last. I have learned to talk back to myself and say, “Yes, it will,” but I have a fear of disappointing both of us. I often wonder if I am a genuine wife or if I am kidding everyone including myself.

These constitute an array of issues that I feel very differently about—I want to be totally committed to my marriage, I want to be a better environmentalist, but I have accepted my low-level role in politics and I have no desire whatsoever for Bruce to become more evangelical or for me to do more strenuous yoga. Yet it was interesting to compare the ways that definitions of terms define us in each of these arenas.

This is an enormous issue in today’s political world. In an article in the upcoming February 2012 issue of Harper’s, “Killing the Competition,” Barry C. Lynn notes that the powers-that-be “have undermined our language itself” by redefining various terms. “Corporate monopoly? Let’s just call that the ‘free market.’ The political ravages of corporate power? Those could be recast as the essentially benign workings of ‘market forces.’” In another recent article, Rodolfo F. Acuña notes how euphemistic language is being used as a tool for racism. Acuña is a lightning rod in battles in Arizona over a recent law that was passed that made it illegal for “any school program to advocate the overthrow of the government, ‘promote resentment’ toward a group of people or ‘advocate ethnic solidarity.’” Like those three things are necessarily related. In other words, any kind of ethnic studies (except, of course, white) has been shut down in Arizona, where attorney general Tom Horne has re-defined many life-long Americans of color as “separatists.”

I don’t have any final answers to any of these definitional questions. The EPA is right, and we all need to look closely beyond the title of “environmentally friendly.” We all need to look closely behind all the double-speak of politics, and we all need to look at how we define ourselves.

I may not be the best environmentalist in the world, but I will still claim the title of Queen of Garbage around here, and I have every hope that my role will be valued in my life-long marriage.

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The Sweet Hereafter

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Lisa Roney

Today’s post commemorates Mychael Danna‘s soundtrack music, but also the film it was written for, The Sweet Hereafter, directed by Atom Egoyan, and the novel of the same name by Russell Banks. The novel and the movie, though distinct, both illuminate the aftermath of a tragic accident of a school bus and how it changes the people of a small town.

This is as wintry a tune as can be, and, though we don’t have much in the way of cold weather in Florida, I know that many are going about new semesters at school (or just another work week) in the snow or chilly rain or snappish air today. May this song make us all take a moment to remember to be careful in all our rushing around.

All of us, no matter the weather, suffer the blame game. We give it and we receive it from others and ourselves. At times designating responsibility is perfectly appropriate, but often the anger that goes along with blame masks the emotion that’s more at root and more genuine: sorrow. That old human condition is as tough as it is beautiful.

Here’s the trailer for and review of the film, and a brief interview with Russell Banks about his inspiration for the novel. And here’s an auto playlist for Mychael Danna in case you have more time for peaceful, interesting music in your day or evening.

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There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Lisa Roney

Lately, I’ve been pretty far from my original subject matter of crying. It’s been important for me to explore other kinds of genuine emotional expression, and I’ve enjoyed my thought travels in that regard. Last night, however, simply by accident, I ended up watching the HBO documentary film There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane. It’s a truly tragic story that you may remember from original news reports after July 26, 2009, when Diane Schuler drove the wrong way on the Taconic Parkway, causing a horrible traffic accident. She killed herself, her daughter, her three nieces, and the three men in the vehicle her van hit head-on, and injured her son, who was the only survivor in those two vehicles.

The case is indeed one that has no sure answers: There is no denying that Diane Schuler had a blood-alcohol level of 0.19 with more undigested alcohol in her stomach. Her blood also contained THC, indicating that she’d been smoking marijuana. Her family—and the documentary—make the argument fairly convincingly that this was completely unlike her, in fact, unbelievable. Both she and one of her nieces had called her brother from the road and said that something was wrong, that she wasn’t feeling well, and she had stopped, apparently sober, to try to buy some pain relievers that the convenience store didn’t carry. They believe that she must have had some other kind of health emergency first—likely a stroke caused by an abscessed tooth. But her autopsy supposedly ruled that out even before the toxicology results came out.

Watching this film is hard, and there is no uplifting ending, so it made me think not only about suffering but about narrative, and the attractions and pitfalls of nonfiction. It’s instructive to compare the documentary, even with its clear sympathy for Diane Schuler, to the fictionalized version in Law & Order’s episode “Doped.” In that version, the police end up proving that its fictional driver had been doped with alcohol in a smoothie provided by someone else and with propofol, an anesthesia drug, in her asthma inhaler. It turns out that one of her colleagues at a large pharmaceutical company has drugged her because she intends to blow the whistle on a bad product.

The fictional TV show is very straightforwardly satisfying: the mother ends up being entirely faultless, her husband it turns out did know her well in his insistence that she didn’t drink, the bad guys are identified and punished, there is a clear explanation for why these terrible events occurred. At the end of the story, we may have sorrow, but we don’t have any questions. They’ve all been answered.

Of course, that is a TV tradition more than it is a habit of great fiction. And most great fiction leaves us with many unanswered questions. Most great fiction is more like nonfiction than TV episodes are. I need only mention Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Think of anything that William Faulkner wrote, especially that ending of Absalom! Absalom! wherein Quentin protests that he doesn’t hate the South and we are left with the same question he is—what his relationship with the South really is and will be. Great fiction doesn’t try to erase the mystery that comprises actual human experience for the sake of a tidy story.

Yet it is true that one of the great difficulties of writing creative nonfiction is that life doesn’t always follow clear paths. The debate in the Schuler case goes back and forth: Are the people who have lost people (Schuler’s brother and his wife, the families of the men killed in the other car) simply looking for a way to file this event in the “explained” file so they can move on? Are they too eager to condemn? Or are her husband and another sister-in-law in denial about what she was capable of? Lawsuits and counter-suits are being filed, and that’s tragic in itself. The whole question of how and why people respond so variously to one event floats in the air as unanswered as the cause of the accident.

For me, when a woman who is not generally much of a drinker and only smokes pot to get to sleep at night is determined to have been smashed and totally stoned at midday with a carful of children she loved, it’s easy to believe that something else was going on. There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane demonstrates that she was a woman who might very well be reluctant to ask for help if she was ill and might think that she could just tough it out until she got home. She had been self-medicating her insomnia for years, and she might have self-medicated herself to death if she were in pain.

Having had that extremely painful hemorrhagic stroke in 2011, I can imagine it. I rode the bicycle a mile and a half home with my head pounding as though being repeatedly hit with a nail gun. I didn’t know what else to do, though I had a cell phone and my husband could have called for help. I am very glad that I was not driving a car at the time, and I am a person not averse to medical help, so I can imagine a person like Diane Schuler trying to ignore her situation and carry on.

Having also had more than one serious medical situation that has no clear explanation, I can also believe that something happened to Diane Schuler that her autopsy didn’t detect. If they can’t always get to the bottom of things when you’re alive to tell the tale, it seems to me that with someone dead, there is a lot that’s easily missed in the body. Once the toxicology report came in, there was no interest or motivation in pursuing anything else. Those who wanted one had an explanation, and it was that Schuler was an irresponsible drunk, in spite of all the evidence of her life to the contrary. In some ways that seems to me like a fictionalizing tendency, or I should say, an oversimplifyingly fictional one just as much as the wholesome-mother version on Law & Order.

That doesn’t mean that I am satisfied by There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane. It starts out with the same optimistic tone of any whodunit. But by the end its insistence on the unknowability of what happened is appealing at an intellectual level, but devastating at an emotional one. It’s the kind of movie where you don’t know quite what to do with yourself when it’s over. I myself remain unsure whether that’s a flaw in the writing and arranging of the documentary or whether it’s realistic and good. It might feel just a little too much like life. But I know I won’t forget it.

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Curry and Kindness

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Lisa Roney

A 1683 map of Sri Lanka from Geographicus Rare Antique Maps

Yesterday I picked up some friends at the airport after their holiday travels. In all the pre-holiday hub-bub we had not communicated all that well so I was early, and the plane was late, so I went round and round the airport drive too many times in the crisp Florida sun. At first I was listening to disheartening stories on the radio, but then NPR’s Talk of the Nation featured an interview with S. H. “Skiz” Fernando, author of the recently released Rice and Curry: Sri Lankan Home Cooking, and I perked up.

The guy sounded awkward and smooth at the same time, which always fascinates me. And then the show featured a call-in session. At first this annoyed me—each and every one of the callers just wanted to talk about herself. One, who admitted to living in some isolated place like Wyoming, even wanted to talk about the difficulty of obtaining kefir lime leaves, which Mr. Fernando had immediately said are not part of Sri Lankan cuisine. Another said she met Mr. Fernando when he performed in Paris a decade ago—and the radio host interjected to explain that he is also a hip-hop artist. Clearly, Mr. Fernando did not remember the caller at all, though he treated each caller gently.

But then the radio show host read a few emails, including one from a guy, now living in Florida, who wrote that he had fond memories of the Sri Lanka Curry House in Minneapolis from when he’d lived there a couple of decades earlier. He noted that it has since closed, and that it didn’t include “mild” on the menu.

I laughed at the collision of time and place and suddenly found myself more sympathetic to all those who called to display their memories. I too live in Florida now but lived once in the Twin Cities. The Sri Lanka Curry House was a long way from my home in St. Paul and required a car to reach, so I only ate there once. But I remember it, though it was important only because I discovered something bad about myself. I had gone there with a large group of women, some of whom were my friends. I’m not sure of the occasion, but it might have been after a lecture given by Germaine Greer. We had been provided tickets by a friend whose mother had been one of the organizers. So, if my memory is correct, we were a bunch of feminists. Several of our crew were also lesbians.

It’s hard now to even remember how big a deal that was in 1979 or -80. I had some mixed feelings at the time, not so much about how any individual expressed her sexuality, but how the politics played out. Frequently, one of my lesbian housemates had told me that sooner or later I would see the light. Surely, she said, I would evolve. I could accept that she was a lesbian, but she could only accept that I wasn’t as a temporary setback.

The peer pressure was enormous, and with my many man troubles, I sometimes wished that I could at least claim bisexual status. But I have never been one to cave in to peer pressure. Instead, I get stubborn and resentful. Until that dinner at the Sri Lanka Curry House, I hadn’t really felt that consciously.

One of the women at the restaurant that night was named Marcie. I didn’t know her well, as she had repeatedly snubbed me at various house parties due to my retro-hetero status. As the waitresses put together several tables for our group, Marcie strutted up and down, sorting out where to sit. She noted repeatedly how much she loved hot food and how much she looked forward to this. The rest of us shuffled out of her way. Finally, she chose the middle seat on the table’s opposite side from me. I sat near a corner.

From what I recall, the Sri Lanka Curry House did have a “medium” designation on the menu, and they recommended it to all non-Sri Lankans. Most of us acceded to the waitress’ recommendation and ordered our curries as mild as possible. Not Marcie. She insisted that she was a pro with curries and that she loved her food hot. The waitress tried to talk her out of it, but she shook her head for emphasis. “Very hot,” she said.

Soon enough, the food came, steaming cardamom, cinnamon, turmeric, coriander, cloves, cumin, and fennel. I was not knowledgeable enough to smell the hot flavors of the chilis and mustard, and I wondered that the strongest tasting things often don’t have the most identifiable aromas. We oohed and aahed around the table, eager but tentative, taking mostly small bites and passing each other the condiments of coconut flakes and tomato relish.

Marcie lifted her heaped fork to her mouth and dug in. After a moment, her face blanched and sweat popped profusely out of her forehead. I had never seen anything like it. She grabbed for her water glass. “No!” someone yelped, too late. Marcie gulped water and then grabbed her neck as if to strangle herself. “Water is supposed to make it worse,” the helper said.

“It’s fine,” she said, gasping just a little. “Amazingly hot. But I’m okay.” She dragged her fork across the dish and lifted it again, more slowly this time.

Everyone looked at her, then we went back to taking our own small bites of our own super-hot “medium” dishes. I didn’t figure that Marcie would eat all of her dinner, but I found myself not minding. I found myself feeling a little mean.

After a bit of dawdling with her food, Marcie ventured a second bite. As soon as she took it, the sweat began running down her cheeks. She blinked twice, slowly, and pushed the plate away from her. Suddenly, she was face down on the placemat, groaning slightly. “Here,” her neighbor gestured to the waitress. “Bring a lassi. Mango lassi, please, quickly.”

Soon enough, the wise waitress appeared with the sweet, milky drink, and Marcie’s neighbor at the table clapped her on the back and coaxed her to sit up. “Here,” she said, “this will cool you off.” Marcie shook her head no and gasped out that her throat felt burned.

“You’ll feel better,” her helper said. “Really. It will soothe your throat.”

So Marcie alternated between rolling her head side to side on the placemat and sipping the lassi. Eventually she sat up and wiped her face with the cloth napkin, though the sweat continued to pour. Everyone cooed around her, asking if she would be okay, patting her on the back, and reassuring her that the food was “insanely hot” and that she couldn’t have known. Most everyone ordered lassis to keep her company.

I recall growing quieter and quieter as the evening went on. I didn’t order a lassi because I knew it would be too sweet for my diabetes, and no one talked about how great the food was except for the lassis. (The food was great.) One thought kept echoing in my mind: Machismo is dumb whether exhibited by a man or a woman. I had also discovered my own inescapable judgmental nature, and I knew this wasn’t a nice thing about me.

This is something I have struggled with ever since. Judgment is something we all need, but need to temper with kindness. I never would have set Marcie up for such a painful episode, but the fact that I really didn’t feel all that bad for her demonstrated to me my propensity to blame people for their own ills. It might have been easy for me to do that in such a clear-cut case, but most cases of blame are not so clear.

I have always had a hard time making excuses for people of the “you couldn’t have known” variety. And this has made me very hard on myself as well.

Lately, I have been thinking further about the way that language can be shaped to an interpretation. Some of this has come out of my reactions to all the “lucky” and “blessed” labels bestowed on me in recent weeks. But it goes beyond that to thinking about how our interpretations in the world of politics can be so different when reality is presumably the same (or at least close) for all of us. And to thinking about so many self-help endeavors that claim that if you view things positively, you will do better. I want to make more distinctions in all of this about what we can affect this way and what we are lying to ourselves about with euphemisms. I want to be able to tell the difference.

In teaching introductory creative writing, I often do a lesson about denotation and connotation. What, I ask my students, is the difference between red, maroon, scarlet, vermillion, cherry, rust, and cerise, not just in shades of hue, but in implication? What is the difference between wine and claret? Within individual word choices, of course, lies the way to truthfulness and accuracy in our writing. But they can also lead to manipulation.

These days I have been noticing these differences in day-to-day description even more. I am thinking about what the difference is between the opposites that we use for the same situations and things. The weather reports long ago changed from “partly cloudy” to “partly sunny” to try to keep people happier with the newscast. Someone said to me the other day that she wasn’t sure if her holiday had been relaxing or frantic. “I could describe it either way,” she said, “and both would be true.”

There have long been issues like this that are hard to split. In another memory from my college days, I actually remember having a conversation about whether or not all “nice” guys were also necessarily “boring.” Having since been trapped on many a date with a boring man, I can say that I no longer think the two words synonymous. In fact, now I think that the kind of man typically described as “exciting” might be boring in his likely narcissism and avoidance of depth. I wouldn’t use the word “exciting” to describe such a person at all. I would describe my husband both as exciting and as one of the nicest guys on earth.

What, I might ask, is the difference between mild, medium, hot, and very hot?

I am setting as one of my New Year’s resolutions to think about how to make these relationships between words and the world meaningful, and also to at least consider a kind interpretation when I can. Marcie, after all, could never have known how hot “very hot” was, even though I still feel a touch of satisfaction that she found out. Wink.

May we all have spicy kindness in the new year.

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