twenty-six

“Determined to do everything myself, I turned independence into a weapon. I thought of it as a strength, but it was a faultline along which I fractured. I resisted taking other things too – love, advice, knowledge – even if it was good for me, even if I wanted it. Like my troubled relationship with food, which always felt like too little or too much, this refusal – a fear that merging with another would result in the loss of my hard-won self – was old and it ran deep.

I wanted to be elsewhere, but, trapped in the back of a hot truck, my only escape was to refuse to learn to identify the birds. I battened down the hatches of my mind and refused my father entry. Refused to know. Refused to catalogue those birds into categories of similarity and difference, to recall and compare, which gave my sister and my mother their bond with my father.

fifty-two

“So, I went on at her about my eccentric but good-enough childhood and my well-intentioned parents, doing my best to keep from her everything that really troubled me. The experiences I could neither name nor claim, I had channelled into my writing. I saw no reason to repeat them, but I suspect I knew even then that if I did, she would be onto me – and there would be nowhere left for me to hide.

sixty-six

“I told him that I had tried to write a suicide note, but I could not write one. Nor could I plagiarise the ones I found online, written by people more eloquent than I. ‘Writer’s block,’ I told him. ‘So far, it’s kept me alive.’ I laughed at my joke, but he did not. He looked at me over slender steepled fingers and said, ‘It’s what’s alive in you – your writing, your creativity – that won’t let you finish.’ That was not something I had considered, and it gave me pause.

This was the story I wanted to tell without sentiment or cynicism; the one I thought justified speaking hard truths. The flash of insight I’d had—that I could not leave my mother because I’d become my mother—was my wisdom: a tale of psychological embroilment I wanted badly to trace out.

To tell that tale, I soon discovered, I had to find the right tone of voice; the one I habitually lived with wouldn’t do at all: it whined, it grated, it accused; above all, it accused. Then there was the matter of syntax: my own ordinary, everyday sentence—fragmented, interjecting, overriding—also wouldn’t do; it had to be altered, modified, brought under control. And then I could see, this as soon as I began writing, that I needed to pull back—way back—from these people and these events to find the place where the story could draw a deep breath and take its own measure.