a double life: discovering motherhood

I’m so pleased to have another author interview to post this week. Today, I have the pleasure of introducing Lisa Catherine Harper, whose debut memoir, A Double Life: Discovering Motherhood, won the 2010 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize.

This is a lovely, meditative memoir that takes the reader through Harper’s first pregnancy and early motherhood. The book blends narrative and research, and, for me, is a wonderful reflection on the complexities of life and celebration of fully living in the moment. I won’t say too much more about the book here, because I’ve written a full review of it for Literary Mama.

So without further ado, please welcome Lisa to Mother Words!

KH: I’m wondering if you can talk a little about the process of writing this book. Did you know when you began writing that you were working on a memoir?

LCH:  I did. I began writing nearly as soon as I became pregnant. I have a PhD, and one of the things I do as a matter of course is research. I realized almost immediately that my body was changing in ways I hadn’t anticipated and which no one had told me about. I researched extensively in OB/GYN textbooks and medical journals and soon began to understand that the biological changes of pregnancy were just the beginning of the enormous emotional and psychological changes of motherhood.  I wrote the book because I wanted to translate the experience of a very ordinary pregnancy for a general reader.  I believed that becoming a mother was an interesting category of experience—not an isolated experience for women only, but an experience tied to life at all corners.

KH:  One of the things I love about A Double Life is your essayistic style. You ponder concepts like movement, dance, pain (to name a few), and circle around and around each of these, really trying to search out meaning and figure out what you really think and believe. I’d love if you could talk a little about the construction of the book, and whether this essayistic circling was a conscious choice or if it’s just how the narrative emerged in the writing process.

LCH:  The style was a conscious choice. I love the essay form.  On the one hand, I wanted to write a book in the very American tradition of long form journalism, which can take the form of (personal) narrative supported by research.   I intended from the start to support my story with research and the kind of rigorous reflection I was trained in by my doctoral studies. On the other hand, I wanted to write a story that was more than my own.  I aspired to write a story that investigated the universal changes of maternity. The essay form was perfect for both of these ambitions.

KH:  Another thing that I really love about the book is how you so deftly wove research into the narrative. Can you talk a little about the research you did in writing this book? Is there anything that surprised you as you began your research?

LCH:  I read everything I could get my hands on:  every book in the bookstore, all the material from my own doctor, pregnancy websites, etc.  But it wasn’t enough, so I turned to medical textbooks, OB/GYN textbooks, and medical journals. I did a lot of research in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association).  I read extensively about all aspects of the evolving pregnancy. Some days the research itself was so interesting I had to make myself stop to get to the writing. I read a lot more than I had to (which is so often the case with research!). Only a small fraction of my research made it into the book. I had to translate all this sophisticated material for a general reader (and check and double check my facts). I also spoke extensively with my own doctors at UCSF and with a good friend who was a labor & delivery nurse.

Everything surprised me—but most especially the totality of the changes that occur in pregnancy.  The fact that your lung capacity changes, that you have more blood in your body, that your brain is washed by hormones that can cause you to have an orgasm in your sleep –those things seemed to me astonishing and deeply weird.  They still do. It’s not just your reproductive system that changes. Your entire body is transformed. This, of course, is a metaphor.

I was constantly surprised by the metaphors I found in the research. This was one of the most rewarding aspects of writing. In researching, then writing the morning sickness chapter, for instance, I understood for the first time that pregnancy overtakes your whole body in much the same way just as the nausea can: completely and without warning. Working on the sciatica chapter I found the biological explanation for how we experience pain to be the perfect explanation for some of our most cherished notions of identity (I think, therefore I am). These things helped me understand my own maternity better.

KH:  I love the way you write your relationship with your husband, Kory, and this part of the book really feels like a wonderful love story to me. How did you handle writing about your relationship? Did you get his approval before you went to print? How do you balance your need to create as a writer with your family’s privacy?

LCH  I am, however, in everything that I write constantly balancing the true facts of the story (personal details, revelations, confessions, etc.) with the real demands of the story.  I ask myself: is this fact really necessary? How much do I really need to tell? And in the telling, am I really saying something new? I’m even more conscious of this now that my children are older.  I won’t write a story that involves personal details unless I feel I have something significant to say, it does not violate their privacy, and I am not telling it simply to broadcast a seemingly interesting experience. There must be something more at stake when you write about personal history.  For me, restraint must always temper the use of personal facts when important relationships are at stake.  However, I also believe that if you have to tell the story, you also can’t avoid the hard facts for fear of hurting someone’s feelings.

 

KH:  Lisa, you are a mother, wife and a full-time professor (and dancer, friend, etc.). How do you balance writing, your career, and your family?

LCH:  Over the years I’ve learned to accept and embrace the changes that being a parent brings to my work life. I’ve learned to cultivate discipline and silence in my work life, to work very hard during my work time and to set my work aside completely when the kids come home.  (Though I am not always successful at this latter task.) These things, of course, took years to figure out. The most important practical things I’ve done to protect my work life include: 

·      Cultivate discipline: write during the children’s naps, every day.

·      Before my children were school-age, I took Grace Paley’s advice and resigned myself to “writing at different paces.” It was okay if I worked more slowly some weeks or months. I knew that would change.

·      Don’t stop writing until you know where you will start the next day.

·      Give yourself small, specific assignments: one scene, one section, one chapter revised.

I still use these precepts, even though my writing life has changed enormously with the book publication and the beginning of kindergarten for my youngest.

KH:  What was the most challenging part of writing A Double Life? 

LCH:  Getting published.

Writing the book joined my geeky commitment to research and my lyric love of narrative. It was a joy to write. I found it interesting to dive into the material, investigate the story, and tease out the larger meaning. 

But I had a long road to publication.  Motherhood journals/sites often asked me to take out the research. Literary journals were not so interested in the story of motherhood. And the first publishers we approached didn’t know where it would be shelved: memoir or parenting? It’s both, of course, and readers understand that now, but it took years of perseverance.

KH:  Can you talk a little more about the process of finding a home for A Double Life? What would advice would you give to other writers as they embark on this process?

LCH:  In addition to the where-to-shelve-the-book problem I mentioned above, I had editors who loved my prose but found the book too quiet. There are a lot of stories about motherhood that are sensational or exceptional, but this was not my story. But I had a deep belief in my approach and my book, and I worked very hard to write the most incisive, compelling narrative I could, and then I knew I just had to be patient.  I actually got to the point where I was convinced I would have to publish another book first, and then A Double Life would come out as my second book once I had a better platform. But then I submitted the manuscript to the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, and won, and with that award came the publication deal. Most gratifying was that the Prize series editors understood the book’s mission and ambition completely—as have the readers since publication.  Since then, my agent has been able to sell foreign rights in Taiwan, Brazil, and Italy, so it’s been incredibly satisfying after such a long wait to have readers who understand the book as I envisioned it. The thing is, in spite of the challenges writing this kind of a book posed, in the end the it just took that one editor saying “yes” at the right time. This is always the case: “right editor, right time, right place.”

My advice is always to perfect your craft and write the very best story you can. This is the first and paramount responsibility of any writer. Then the writer’s job is to figure out how to enter the conversation.  To whom are you speaking? Seek out publication in the places having the conversation you want to be part of.  These might be local, regional, online, print, niche markets. There are many ways to begin.  Expect editors to say no, but don’t take that no personally. Be brutal and objective about your work, revise if necessary, and persevere. I often think of the opening lines of Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Well Dressed Man with a Beard”:

After the final no there comes a yes

And on that yes the future world depends.

No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

KH:  I love that, Lisa. And I love how the message of perseverance is echoed among so many of the writers I know and love. Don’t give up, writers. And never let the “no” stop you. 

Lisa, thanks so much for taking the time to be here at Mother Words! 

mothers and daughters

If you’ve been reading my posts in the last few weeks, you know that as I sat next to my grandpa the week he was dying, I was reading Rae Meadows’ new novel Mothers and Daughters. It was the perfect novel to read as I said goodbye to Spencer because so much of the story for me was about grief and loss and letting go.

The novel is told from the perspective of three generations of women—a grandmother, mother, and daughter. Violet left New York for the Midwest at age eleven on one of the turn-of-the-century orphan trains. Iris, Violet's daughter, now dying of cancer, has relocated to Florida and reflects on her mother, Violet, her daughter, Sam, and the love she discovered late in life. Sam, an artist and new mother living in Madison, is dealing with her mother’s death and the loss of her first pregnancy as she navigates early motherhood and tries to find her way back into her creative work and out of the secretive isolation she has created for herself.

So much in this novel resonated with me: needing to find balance between creativity and motherhood, coming to terms with loss, finding one’s way back to oneself. So I’m very pleased to have Rae here today to discuss Mothers and Daughters, writing, and how motherhood has affected her work. Welcome, Rae!

KH:  Can you talk a little about how this book started? Was it with an image, a character, an idea?

RM:  Learning about the orphan trains really was what got this novel started for me, and, soon after, the character of Violet was born. I actually based her on a photograph of my grandmother when she was young.

KH:  You’ve woven together three stories in three voices and alternating chapters. Did you always know that the book would be structured this way? Did you write them separately and then splice them together? I’d love if you would talk a little bit about your process.

RM:  I started out wanting to write a three-story structure—I was inspired by The Hours by Michael Cunningham—but when I got started, I had a hard time envisioning the novel as a whole. It seemed more manageable to write each part separately. I wrote Violet first, then Sam, then Iris. The revision process was very important for this book because I had to make sure the spliced stories worked with each other, both thematically and chronologically.

KH:  What did this involve? I’d love a sense of how long this revision process took. I’m picturing you on the floor with chapters spread out around you.

RM:  At one point I really did have chapters and scissors! And lists of who was born when, what happened where, etc. But I liked the challenge of it. It was kind of like a puzzle. And then I added details and scenes to fill out the narrative and cohere the novel. In the end it didn’t take as long as I feared.

KH:  A big part of this story for me was about the power of loss and how loss can isolate us from the people in our lives. One of the things we learn early in the book is that Sam terminated her first pregnancy because the fetus had genetic anomalies. How did you settle on this kind of loss to haunt Sam?

RM:  I had my children on the older side, so my husband and I had to weigh the risks of genetic testing and address all the possibilities. I felt like for Sam, it’s a complicated loss because she chose to terminate yet on some level she regrets that decision and doesn’t feel she’s allowed to grieve. I wanted to make her complicit in her loss, because it becomes a secret for her that gathers weight instead of fading.

KH:  What was the most surprising and/or challenging thing that happened in the process of writing Mothers & Daughters? (In terms of the narrative itself, your writing process, or how you approached the material.) 

RM:  I started out writing the novel as pure historical fiction, with two other characters at the turn of the century, including a doctor at the Wisconsin Insane Asylum. But when I returned to writing after having a baby, the idea didn’t feel right. After this tremendous life change, I knew I wanted to explore motherhood in some way. It was very much a lightning bolt moment to do a three-generational novel about women. (I’m still waiting for the lightning on my next project…)

KH:  I love this, Rae. Each of the women in the story has a very different experience mothering and being a mother. Was this a deliberate decision? How did your own experience with early motherhood help shape (or not shape) the ways Violet, Sam and Iris experienced motherhood?

RM:  It was a deliberate decision. Sam was heavily influenced by my experience as a new mother, but I really wanted to explore motherhood in different iterations. As a writer, I found it compelling to imagine how the circumstances of one’s life (and even one’s mother’s and grandmother’s lives) affect how one mothers. I liked the idea of legacy, for better and for worse. I couldn’t have written this novel before having children.

KH:  You have two children, and one is a baby. Can you talk a little about how your writing life fits in with the rest of your life—mothering, family?

RM: It doesn’t fit! As you know, it’s a crazy juggling act to be a mother and a writer. I am a full time mom, so writing happens in short bursts, late at night. I try to remind myself that this stage, with the girls so young, is a short one. My writing life will open back up. I try to remember that writing is not a race. If a novel takes an extra year to complete, that’s okay.

KH:  Can you describe the editorial process? (How much did you revise the manuscript after it was sold? Can you also talk a little about what it’s like to work with an editor?)

RM:  I spoke with my editor (Helen Atsma) before I sold the novel to Henry Holt, so I knew that I liked her and trusted her vision. It’s always a little scary to get the first round of editor’s notes back on a manuscript—I generally have a mini freak out—but Helen’s comments were clear and felt doable for me, and not that extensive. Most were about adding here and there to fill out the stories. For instance, she wanted more items in the box of Iris’s, and she wanted the box to arrive earlier. The story of Sam needed the most help, probably because she’s the character most like me! There were a couple little things I didn’t agree with, but Helen didn’t make me do anything I felt strongly against.

KH:  How does it feel to have this book out in the world? What kinds of responses are you getting from readers?

RM:  It’s wonderful to have the book out and I feel incredibly lucky. It’s so satisfying to have people read your work and have it resonate with them. Often people have a favorite character of the three—usually Violet. A lot of women tell me they cried, and that is a huge compliment. One of the most flattering comments came from the owner of a bookstore in Chicago. Given the character of Iris, she thought I would be in my seventies.

KH:  One more question: what are you working on now?

RM:  I loved the research part of this novel so much I decided to do it again. I’m writing an interwoven story about a family in the Oklahoma panhandle during the Dust Bowl and the photographer Dorothea Lange.

KH:  Fascinating! I look forward to reading. And thank you for taking the time to be here today.

Add Mothers and Daughters to your reading list! And to read more about orphan trains, visit Rae's website. 

profile

Thank you to Julie Pfitzinger for the lovely profile and interview in the Star Tribune this morning. Thanks, Julie!

cover me

A couple of weeks ago I finished Sonya Huber’s compelling new memoir, Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, which was released in October from University of Nebraska Press, and I can’t think of a more timely book.

If you’ve ever had stress over healthcare and coverage, you will relate to this story. But perhaps it’s an even more important book for those of you (are there any of you out there?) who haven’t experienced stress over healthcare coverage. Step into Sonya’s shoes and understand how the lack healthcare coverage affected one woman’s health and life.

There were parts of Cover Me that almost started me off on my own anxiety attacks (something with which Huber struggles in the book), other parts that had me nodding my head, and still others that brought tears to my eyes. Huber leads us through her struggles deftly, and by the end of the book I had never been more convinced of the need for healthcare reform in this country.

I’m pleased to have Sonya here at Mother Words today, so without further ado, welcome, Sonya!

KH: I’m very interested in how authors turn shorter pieces into memoirs, and I know that many of your chapters appeared in literary journals as stand-alone essays. Can you talk a little bit about the process of writing this book? Did you always know you were writing a book?

SH: This is a great question, because it was a major challenge! I always knew I was writing a book, but I really wanted the opportunity to try to publish stand-alone essays. My first book, Opa Nobody, is so interwoven and complicated that it was impossible to publish pieces of it. And I didn’t have many journal publications as a result. So for Cover Me, I wanted to try to get pieces of the book out there and test them before the book was published.

KH: What was the most challenging part of writing Cover Me?

SH: The biggest challenge was dealing with the connected essay framework I created for myself. I wrote the pieces knowing that they were forming a connected narrative, but then the goal of publishing them separately made them into very individualized little beasts with their own distinct personalities. Each became a little universe with a distinct voice, and then the process of shaping them back into a book was quite difficult. Agents who I queried said that they loved the idea, but a collection of essays wouldn’t sell, and the book in its draft form was “sort of” connected—neither completely essays nor completely memoir. So I had to do some major surgery to reconnect them.

A second trouble spot was the voice. I’ve been so angry for so long about the state of healthcare access in this country that the first years of writing were, to put it politely, pure spew. And I didn’t want to assault the reader with that—I wanted to bring something to the reader. This ended up being a problem of voice. I had to work to make the material approachable and funny, to connect it to a situation that makes me angry while at the same time allowing for breaks and distance. This book, because it’s still new, is unfortunately still suggesting to me other ways I could have done this. But I have to let that go because it’s published.

KH: Was there anything—either in terms of what emerged or in the process of writing this memoir—that surprised you?

SH: I just did a reading last week where I first read something from Opa Nobody and then something from Cover Me, and I was really shocked at how different the voices are. That made me happy because it’s something I tell my students, and it’s actually been born out in practice: that the voice fits the subject matter and leads to the approach for the book. And the voice carries the book (like ‘Til Tuesday sang a long time ago).

I think the other thing that continues to surprise me is the reaction to the politics of the book. Some see it as confrontational and wildly political, and some see it as not political enough. I think that points to the larger fact that personal stories on this specific issue are so necessary, and that one book can’t meet all those needs. I was writing specifically to use a personal story to offer a bridge between Red-Blue, Right-Left and all those other over-simplified divides. I just wanted to show that this is not a ‘boring’ issue—it’s something we can all talk about. We each have the story of the health insurance debacle in our bodies. So the continued strong reactions are a delight and great food for thought.

KH: All memoirists must confront the issue of privacy and decide how they will write about family and friends. You seem to be extremely careful about protecting the privacy of the people who appear in Cover Me. Can you talk a little bit about that?

SH: You rock, Kate. I’m so happy you noticed this! I’m sort of a stickler for this, and that does have its downsides. My goal is to only include someone if they are essential to the story and/or if I am mentioning something so innocuous that it wouldn’t matter to anyone. If someone appears as a character, I usually check with that person before publication, give them the complete text that mentions them, and then ask for their comments. I’m very much influenced by field practices in anthropology and ethnography with this practice. I usually make the changes that people ask for, and I have found this process to be very rewarding. It’s a cheese-grater, for sure, because it’s hard to engage in conversations about old relationships. Boy have I gotten some good feedback about my own past mistakes. It’s like therapy bootcamp! But what other job requires you to do that? It’s a great learning opportunity. And it’s also made for renewed friendships and stronger bonds with family. There are a few places where, for specific private reasons, I couldn’t ask for approval due to the nature of the relationship and/or lack of a relationship, but those are rare. I obsessed over those points, too, and I cut and cut so that, in my opinion, only the necessary pieces of information were revealed. In some cases, a lot of the story is missing because of that. But I’m okay with that. That’s a compromise I make with my books for the sake of ethics and relationships. I’m not of the “write and damn the people” school. I think you have to write it all, but then as you’re nearing publication, you might be surprised at how difficult and then how fulfilling it is to share writing and be open to a conversation about your point of view. All of my work is better because I have asked the people portrayed for their help.

KH: Sonya, you are a single mother and a full-time professor. How do you balance writing, your career, and your family?

Well, one sad answer is that I got sick! I have rheumatoid arthritis, which may have been coming anyway, but it’s been aggravated by the stress of various post-divorce legal issues and the juggling. But on the huge upside, I’ve gone from being a single mom to living in a fantastic household with my fiancé Cliff and my son. Cliff is such a huge support. He came into my life and the life of my son, and we made a family, which is lucky indeed.

The other struggle I’ve had is that, in years past, I would have also added “activist” to that list in your question. But right now I’m up against my limits of health and energy. I’ve had to pull back from important local issues. I don’t socialize as much as I would like. I write an hour a day, then I teach and work for the rest of the day, and then comes everything else. To be honest, it doesn’t feel balanced! It feels like, if there were more social supports for families, things would be a lot easier. So I’m still very committed to doing what I can to support organizations like MomsRising and Healthcare Now! and many other good groups. The issue of balance in a working mom’s life makes the issue into an individual math equation, and that’s where we’ve gone wrong. This is a social problem, not an individual issue, and we’re putting it on the backs of people who are exhausted and are raising the next generation. That’s wasteful, cruel, and unfair, which is why we need things like equal pay for equal work and universal healthcare.

KH: This book is such a beautiful indictment of our healthcare system. What kinds of reactions have you received from readers/the press?

SH: I’ve been really psyched about the reviews; moms in general seem most touched by the book, which is excellent. It’s been so satisfying to be part of the discussion about a book that connects with readers’ current experiences. Opa Nobody was about the Nazis during World War II and socialism in Europe, so it didn’t have that personal connection for hardly any of my readers. I’ve had a few negative comments about my personal choices: yes, I did have sex before I got married, and I did a few very mildly crazy things in my twenties. Interestingly, readers appear shocked by these very common experiences only if the readers happen to disagree with the issue of healthcare reform. I also had one reviewer complain about the number of jobs I held and quit. I think if you’ve been working since you were sixteen, as I have, that’s a no-brainer—especially if you’re a writer. I made the conscious personal research choice to mention ALL of the jobs I had ever held, along with whether or not they came with benefits. Most people, in my experience, don’t have that stuff on their resume so they sort of erase it from their consciousness. I was open about a social class and money issue that’s kind of taboo. The issue of social class—and people’s lack of awareness about how social class affects one’s choices and options—can affect the reading and a person’s worldview. I’m hoping to write a big fat book about that someday.

I had my first truly shocking comment left on Amazon.com earlier this week. A man commented, among other things, that he wished I would have died from an ailment I mentioned in the book. He appeared to be against healthcare reform and also against women who write books, so his politics were pretty different from mine. But the comment about wishing I was dead—that gave me a day of really deep reflection and a bit of sickness. My Facebook posse rallied immediately and complained to Amazon, and the comment got taken down. I guess that made me sad because I really had grandiose illusions that a funny, self-deprecating, personal story about healthcare would allow readers to step away from the political battle to examine how the issue might affect one woman’s life. But I’m always too idealistic. That’s okay—that’s a permanent personality issue that’s not going away, apparently.

KH: That comment is outrageous, Sonya. I’m so sorry that happened.

My last question for you is about what you’re working on now.

SH: I like to work on several projects at once, so I’m getting a bunch of new ones started. Right now I’m working on individual essays, and also working on a series of connected short essays about what life is like for family members of addicts and/or alcoholics. I think I might also be doing a separate but related project on the intersection of Buddhism and the topic of those “witnesses to addiction.” And I also have this strange desire to work on an essay or book that connects the reading of Moby-Dick with living as a single mom. Too many things to pursue, but that’s how I like it.

KH: Thanks for taking the time to join me at Mother Words, Sonya!

Readers, go get a copy of Cover Me!

parents with pens

Thanks to all of you for your kind birthday wishes for my grandpa. He’s had two lovely parties so far and one more tomorrow. (It makes me tired to think about three parties. Imagine doing it when you’re 102.)


I’m pleased to announce that I have Kris Woll here at Mother Words today. Kris is a local Minneapolis writer and mother. She writes the blog A Little Practice, and is about to re-launch Parents with Pens, a local writing group for parents.

KH: Can you talk a little about Parents with Pens?

KW: Parents with Pens is a free writing group for parents who write and/or writers who tackle parenthood as their subject. It is casual and meant to be very supportive -- the kind of place where you can read something your are working on and gather a little feedback, float a few ideas, ponder where you might go with what you are working on. It is also a place to read and discuss some of the great work that is out there on the topic of parenthood. And I hope it's a place where a group of writers can really connect and get to know each other.

Parents with Pens is one of the Open Writing Groups that The Loft Literary Center hosts each month. The Loft kindly provides a space -- their cozy book club room -- where interested writers to gather and talk and read and support each other. Like all the Open Writing Groups, Parents with Pens is free and convened by a volunteer facilitator. And really it's low commitment -- once a month, 90 minutes.

KH: What was the impetus for starting this group?

KW: I first created Parents with Pens in 2009. Then I was still relatively new to Minneapolis, just emerging from the fog of early parenthood, and really eager to connect with other parents and other writers. In PWP’s first incarnation, a small group of us met through most of that year sharing our works-in-progress, but for a number of reasons (you know them -- no time, too much work, stuff to take care of at home, general craziness of life) the group took a break for most of 2010.

This fall I took a writing/reading course at the University of Minnesota, and it was so nice to meet with other writers to read and discuss. As it came to a close it occurred to me that it was very worthwhile to get the PWP group started again. And here we are, about to get started ...

KH: How do interested parents get involved?

KW: The group kicks off on Monday, January 24 at 7pm. For more info, including how to sign up (for this group and others) visit The Loft.

And hopefully, Kate, you might agree to be a special guest at one of our meetings!

KH: I’d be delighted, Kris! Thanks for being at Mother Words today! Head over to The Loft if you’d like to sign up for Parents with Pens.

profile of bonnie rough

Thanks for your kind words and your lists last week. I hope you had a lovely long weekend.

D and I spent lots of time playing with the girls and reading in bed as they played. It was heavenly. I read two wonderful books: Toni Morrison's A Mercy and my friend Alex Lemon's raw and stunning memoir, Happy. I highly recommend both.

And today my interview with the wonderful Bonnie J. Rough is up at Literary Mama. Check out her memoir, Carrier, if you haven't already.

Happy reading!

i'm telling

I’m honored to have Maria Asp, Darcey Engen, and Nanci Olesen of the new motherhood show “I’m Telling” here at Mother Words today. If you were at the Mother Words Reading at the Loft on October 7, you had the pleasure of hearing an excerpt of “I’m Telling” as the opening act. (And if you weren’t there, you can listen to the podcast of the reading over at Good Enough Moms.)

Today, I'll be talking with Maria, Darcey and Nanci about their show, which you can see on Thursday, November 18th at 7:45pm at the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, 2561 Victoria Street North, Roseville, MN.

This performance is free and open to the public.

Kate: Darcey, tell me a little bit about how “I’m Telling” started.

Darcey: The beginnings of this piece started 10 years ago when my oldest son was born. At that time, I was an actress and newly hired professor in the Theatre Department at Augsburg College. With a newborn and career to build, I realized that opportunities for me to perform were forever limited. I wasn’t able to go to evening rehearsals so I began to invent ways in which I could perform that that wouldn’t take me away from my children.

I was dealing with a whole new world. The way in which I worked in my job at Augsburg changed. I worked around childcare. I juggled my need to breastfeed and my need to work using student babysitters off and on during the day. I hired someone for three hours in the morning—ran home to breastfeed and then hired another student for three hours in the afternoon. Just dealing with that was tremendously challenging. I began to wonder if I’d ever perform again. I was a performance teacher and couldn’t imagine that part of my life going away. I was vexed by my inability to juggle full-time career, artistry and motherhood. I realized early on that the only way I could perform was to do a one-woman piece. I started writing about the death of my mother to cancer because it was such a significant part of my journey as a young woman and then realized that it was this balancing act (motherhood, artistry and work) I was doing that was the real story I needed to perform. As I worked I realized that I could manage to pull other mothers in to my process. I made the goal to create an hour piece from a diverse group mother stories and mother performers.

I received a research grant from Augsburg and began Saturday morning workshops that took mothers through a writing and staging workshop. Originally I worked with maybe 5 to 7 mothers. We met every other Saturday morning for six months (seemed like a reasonable schedule for mothers) and used several writing methodologies to generate text. Periodically children and babies would be with us in rehearsals…sleeping, watching, or playing. Eventually our stories were staged and performed at Open Eye Figure Theater in the fall of 2007. After that performance, Maria, Nanci and I decided to work together on a three-mother piece. We wrote and staged additional stories, incorporated music, and constructed the piece so that it could travel easily to where mothers are: ECFE meetings, community centers and church basements.

After we generated material we performed our three-mother piece at Illusion Theatre in the summer of 2008. We hired a director who helped us interweave our stories, we had our husbands watch—Maria’s husband Razz is a musician—he helped with music—Nanci’s husband, Steve, and my husband, Luverne, are both performers. They helped us periodically with editing, performance ideas and the general shape of the piece. Recently, Steve has been helping us hone our work even further.

Currently we are touring this piece because of a Metropolitan Regional Arts Council grant. We are so enjoying continuing to work on this piece and bringing it to communities! This fall tour we have performed in a college Women’s Studies course, an ECFE meeting and two church basements—PERFECT!

Although we began to write about our experiences as mothers, the pieces that we generated focus on many different subjects that reflect larger issues around relationships, identity, parents, grief, artistry, career and many more. We are driven by these rich stories and believe that performing them will encourage deep reflection and conversation about the personal and political importance of parenting in our culture.


Kate: Nanci, you produced the MOMbo radio show for many years. How is working on “I’m Telling” different (and/or) similar to your work on MOMbo?

Nanci: “I’m Telling” is storytelling and theater—dealing with some of the same subject matter as I did on both MOMbo and in “How’s the Family?” on Minnesota Public Radio, but in a theatrical way. This is first person narrative, and we are enjoying using our acting skills and the little splashes that come with telling a story live as theatre. This piece comes first from our writing, but because we have theatricalized it, we’re able to tell the stories in a broader, more entertaining way. There’s one piece in which I talk about maternal depression, but I don’t deal with the topic the way that you would in an informative, fact-based radio show.
And the live-ness of this production is so fun for us. I did radio for 15 years and I loved it dearly, but I was first trained in theater. I remember feeling sort of silly years ago, when MOMbo was new, and I’d step out of the radio studio into the black night and not have any idea if anyone had heard what I said and had poured my efforts into. In live performance, you know right away if people are with you or not. But it’s also ephemeral in that way. You can still hear pieces I did 10 years ago on MOMbo, but “I’m Telling” just exists every time we do it.... and it’s always slightly different.

I am also impressed to remember how hard it is memorize lines! I haven’t had to do that in years!

And I love the camaraderie. We really love being together and doing this show, come what may as we roar into it on stage. We have a great friendship and a great time working together on and off stage. I like that. I’ve always been close with the people I work with in radio too, but it’s more immediate onstage.


Kate: Maria, I’m very interested in collaborative arts, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little about how your pieces are crafted. Do you each come to rehearsals with ideas or already fleshed-out pieces? How do each of you influence the content of your show?

Maria: We started out meeting as a group for writing sessions. Each of us was given similar prompts then we would write, read and give each other feedback. Sometime we brought in pieces that we had already worked on and then edited them for the stage. The piece took a big shift when we performed for the Fresh Ink Series at the Illusion Theater. It gave us a chance to work with the director Lisa Channer. She really challenged us to take our pieces and make them less of monologues and look for way to incorporate the other performers’ voices. Some of the pieces lent themselves to this more easily than the others. On a personal note, we are aware of the complexities of each other’s lives and encourage each other to write about new mothering challenges and delights.


Kate: Nanci, you’ve been committed to telling real stories of motherhood for the last twenty years. How have the focus of your interests and stories changed over the last two decades. Where are there still gaps in art about motherhood?

I chose to stop producing MOMbo in 2007 to make way for the work I began at MPR, first with “How’s the Family?” and then as a reporter for the family desk in the MPR newsroom. I used to wonder what it would be like if I had continued MOMbo all the way through now. Now I have a 20-year-old in college, a 17-year-old in France studying for a year, and a 15-year-old at home. Life is so different now. So on a personal level, my daily life with children has changed because they have grown up. At the same time, I have stepped in as a sometimes-caretaker to my little niece and nephew, who are turning 4 and 6 this month. When they were 1 month old and 2 years old respectively, their mom, my sister, was diagnosed with brain cancer. The journey we have all been on since then has been huge in my life in so many ways. My sister died two years ago. The grief has almost swallowed me up. I learned so much caring for a tiny baby and a toddler during her illness. The baby was set up on the weekends in a little crib right in my MOMbo office for a whole year. I have rarely written about it, but I did do one piece on Marketplace a few years back. Since then, I have become a Montessori teacher, and I now work with 3-6-year-olds everyday. I am right back in the thick of it with their parents, who are struggling with all the things I was back when I was a mother of young children.

I tell my stories differently now, but sometimes I feel like it was yesterday that the kids were little. I’m still deeply interested in how motherhood affects us as women, especially in the early years. I still find it very fertile ground to contemplate, to celebrate, and to commiserate about.

I think that many women have deep feelings about motherhood that they might just be too exhausted to articulate. So there are many gaps in art about motherhood. There is, however, much more available to moms now than there was 20 years ago. The INTERNET!! There are so many outlets for moms to think and feel and engage in discourse about motherhood. It’s very encouraging.

On a personal level, I feel that my best writing and performance and perhaps even radio work is in the future—I have so much more experience and perspective now after all these years.


Kate: Thank you, Nanci, Darcey, and Maria for taking the time to e-mail with me about “I’m Telling.” I look forward to seeing your show on Thursday!

If you’re local, meet me on Thursday, November 18th at 7:45pm at the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, 2561 Victoria Street North, Roseville, MN. You won’t be disappointed!

good enough moms

My interview with Marti and Erin is now up at Good Enough Moms. Click here to listen to our conversation about the term "momoir," my upcoming Mother Words retreat and classes, and to hear how writing about motherhood has affected some of my wonderful students.

Thanks for taking the time to talk with me, Marti and Erin!

live through this

I am so excited to have Debra Gwartney, author of the wonderful memoir, Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love, here at Mother Words today.
I first read Gwartney’s writing just over a year ago when her essay, “The Long Way Home,” appeared in The New York Times’ Modern Love column. I’m always thrilled to hear about a wonderful mother writer, so I added Live Through This to my reading list. But then, as you know sometimes happens with me, I got busy with teaching and revising and my girls. A year passed.

When I opened her book this summer, I didn’t want to put it down. I was reading it while we were up north over the 4th, and I kept trying to sneak away from the chaos of the cabin so I could finish it. (I was asked for something to eat or drink at least five times while I was closing in on the last pages. Is there anything more annoying than that?)

When I finally was able to finish Gwartney’s memoir, I had tears in my eyes. In parts, the memoir is heartbreaking and terrifying, but it’s also beautifully written—a testament to the power of love and the necessity of forgiveness.

After a contentious divorce, Gwartney moves with her four daughters across the country to Eugene, Oregon. But the upheaval is too much for her older daughters, Amanda and Stephanie, who begin to rebel, skipping school and staying out all night. Then, when Stephanie is fourteen and Amanda is sixteen, the girls hop on a freight train and leave home for good.

There is so much I’d like to say about this book, which was chosen as a finalist for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award, but I don’t want to take more time away from the interview. So without further ado, I’d like to welcome Debra Gwartney to Mother Words:

KH: Debra, I think this is a tremendously brave book. You don’t sugarcoat anything and most of the blame—though your ex-husband gets some of it, certainly—is directed at yourself. I’m wondering how it felt to expose yourself in this way, to examine your actions and reactions and take responsibility for them.

DG: The early drafts of the book included most of the scenes that appear in the final version—the circumstances, the characters, the unfolding of action. Those aspects were established from the beginning. But what challenged me nearly to defeat, draft after grueling draft for eight years, was understanding the dynamic, the “why” of the situation my family was caught in. I wrote many revisions, then gave those pages to trusted readers only to hear, “you’re still coming off as a victim.” I knew I couldn’t let the manuscript go until I’d scrubbed out as much of the “victim” as possible. The reader is not interested in self-pity or in self-loathing, but instead in agency, and it was agency that I wanted to get to the heart of. As best I could. So, yes, it was definitely difficult to revisit the past—not just once or twice, but dozens of times, and each time with the intention of establishing my role in what went wrong among us. Some days I’d have to circle my computer for an hour or more, folding laundry, baking a loaf of banana bread, balancing my checkbook or whatever, all the while easing myself toward the keyboard. Sometimes I’d do the hokey thing of pretending I was putting on a big, thick cloak that made me impervious to the sorrow or pain of the past before I sat down to write. I never once thought that I should try to be brave or to write a brave book. I was just trying to be honest with myself. The fact that you call it brave is humbling and gratifying indeed.


KH: In the introduction to your memoir, you write, “I’d like to be one of those women who can confront the past’s reminders […] with nothing but compassion. But apparently, I’m not there yet. Something tangled and sore remains unsolved in me. After years of trying to decode and dissect our history, of picking over episodes with my daughter (a fight over a concert, a note found under one of their beds, the nights and nights and nights they didn’t come home), and crawling through the muck again to discover the origins and escalations of our troubles, I want to move on. I want to forgive—Amanda, Stephanie, myself, the times we lived in—so we can stop looking backward.” Memoir writing is so much about looking back and making sense of the lives we’ve lived and times we’ve lived through, and writing memoir—for me, anyway—affects my relationship with this past. I’m wondering if that was the case for you. How did writing this book affect (if it did) your relationship with this time in your life and your daughters’ lives? Did writing this story help you stop looking backward?

DG: I’ve come to believe that memoir is organized, as its name suggests, around memory—that is, not around events in the past, but instead how you remember events in the past. I guess more accurately: why you remember the event that way. When I gave up worrying so much about what we were all wearing, whether the scene happened on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, if it was rainy or clear, etc., and started pushing myself to understand why I clung to certain details in the memory and refused to acknowledge others—the version of the story I was overly-attached to, from which I derived my sense of identity for a long time—the writing became more rich, more evocative, more interesting (not only to me, but to others, I believe). I did develop a new relationship with the past because in order to write a book I had to tear down my own defenses about the past. In those years of trouble in my family, I’d become quite comfortable telling myself that my rebellious daughters were wrong and I was right. Only by giving up my posture as the “good” one could I move into the writing of the true story of this time. I produced hundreds of pages that did not make it into the book. I realize now that all of that scribbling led me to examine my self-delusion, my own tendency to cling to the story that protected and served me. As a writer, I needed to get to the story of a very complicated set of patterns that led to a family crisis. “We are in the presence of a mind puzzling its way out of its own shadows,” Vivian Gornick writes in The Situation and The Story. That was my aim: to puzzle my way out of my own shadows. Most times that didn’t feel at all nice, but instead as if my skin was being rubbed off an inch at a time. Though I didn’t begin the writing as a sort of therapy, of course it became cathartic. Once I could see myself as a player in our problems, and could admit to that agency, my daughters and I could also be more open, honest, loving in discussing this still painful time.


KH: I was struck by how careful you were in writing about the parts of your daughters’ lives that you didn’t witness. I think there could have been a lot of speculation about what they were or were not doing on the streets, but your respectfully don’t go there. Certainly there are passages in which you are worrying about their safety and wondering about where they are, etc., but for the most part, you have protected the privacy of Stephanie’s and Amanda’s relationship and their time on the streets, and I was really impressed by the way you were able to tell a full story without divulging this information.

With that said, writing about adult children can be tricky, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little about how you navigated this with her daughters. In the acknowledgments you write, “Not one word of this book would have been written if I hadn’t felt my daughters’ support behind me—behind this effort to get a complicated family story on paper.” How involved were your daughters in processing the content of this book? Did you get their feedback as you were writing or wait until you had finished a full draft? Or even later? Did they get veto power over the content of the book?

Have their feelings about the book changed since it was published?

DG: You’re so right that the single copy of the manuscript on my desk was a much different entity than the published book on a shelf in a library or bookstore. My relationship with the physical object changed hugely once it was published—the old cliché that I realized it was no longer mine alone, but now belonged to the world of readers—and I’m sure my daughters also struggled with the difference between the idea of the book and the reality of the book.

But back to your first point: In early drafts of the manuscript, I attempted to explain my daughters’ motives and actions. It was weak and uninspired writing, for sure, but I didn’t know how to make a book without filling readers in about what these primary characters, my girls, were up to. Then Amanda, Stephanie, and I did a segment for This American Life, produced by our dear friend Sandy Tolan. When the three of us sat down to listen to our voices on the radio parsing our own raw experience—oh what an hour that was!—the girls could not stop staring at each other. Absolute intensity between them. They were both very emotional, and for the first time I really got it: they have a story of their time on the streets that is not my story, that will never be my story, and that I really have no right to explore because it does not belong to me. I returned to my writing with a new goal, and that was to write only and exclusively my version of the story, and to leave their version alone. I had to divulge a little of what the girls were up to, where they were, but I was scrupulous (I hope) in not allowing myself conjecture as to their motives or emotions. If they want to write about that time, they can delineate what was going on in their own hearts and minds. My job, I felt, was to explore the angry, defensive, hurt, lost mother left behind and the ways in which I had to relearn the meaning of motherhood if I was going to have a lasting relationship with my daughters.

When I finally produced a manuscript worthy of a good agent—that is, honest enough, well written enough—and the fabulous Gail Hochman agreed to represent me, I realized I was on new ground. This book could become a reality now that an agent was going to present it to editors, and it was time to hash out that possibility with my children. I gave Amanda and Stephanie each a copy and I told them to be brutally honest with me about every word. If in the end they didn’t want me to publish the book, I wouldn’t (I certainly would have argued with them, though, I must admit). They both returned with many comments, some bitterly hard to take, but also with their mutual blessing to publish. Later, I gave the manuscript to the younger girls and we had a good talk about the contents and their mixed feelings about the story out in the public arena.

Looking back, that part was fairly easy.

What’s been hard is the publicity around the book, which the girls have considered exploitative at times, and which has caused anger/rifts between us (all healed now). They were incredibly good sports about the interviews and photos and all that, but they’re done participating, and I totally understand their need to be finished. Hardest of all for us—the truly nasty and consistently anonymous comments about our family life that have appeared on various websites, mostly by people who admit they haven’t read the book but still have a thing or two to say about what’s wrong with us. Perhaps I brought such ruthlessness on myself, but I’m terribly sorry my daughters have had to bear the brunt of public anger.


KH: I’m very interested in how authors turn short essays into memoirs, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little about the process of writing this book. I know you first wrote and published short essays that told parts of this larger story. How did you move into working on the memoir? I’d love it if you could describe the process of creating a continuous narrative from these separate pieces.

DG: When I was younger, I wanted to be a fiction writer and in fact spent most of my creative time hammering away on short stories. Then, when I was a graduate student at the University of Arizona (in journalism, not creative writing) I took several classes with Vivian Gornick, who opened this giant and magnificent door into the world of memoir. I really had no grasp of the genre back then, but after I read such books as Duke of Deception, Stop-Time, Fierce Attachments, My Father and Myself, Confessions of a Catholic Girlhood, My Mother’s House, etc., in her classes, I was certain I wanted to write personal narrative. I tried my hand at some short pieces about my childhood. But then my writing life (except for journalism, which is how I made my living) came to a grinding halt after my divorce, and into the trouble with the girls. It was only after Amanda and Stephanie were back and fairly settled that I tentatively wrote a brief piece about looking for Stephanie in San Francisco. The essay was published in Creative Nonfiction and was a notable essay that year in Best American Essays and (prematurely) got me a bit of agent attention. Around the same time, I published a piece on Salon (The Mothers Who Think column, which I sorely miss), and another in Fourth Genre. Once I had four, five, six twenty-page brief memoir pieces I thought it would be oh-so easy to line them up into a book. I had no idea what I was in for. The arc of a three-thousand-word nonfiction story is quite different that the larger, sustained arc one must discover for a book. I tried for several years and failed quite miserably in my efforts. At that point, I knew I needed help. So I returned to school. I enrolled in the low-residency program at Bennington College and within weeks was on the right track. I worked with absolutely amazing teachers: Phillip Lopate, Sven Birkerts, Bob Shacochis, and by the time I finished the program, I had a book. An honest to goodness book that made sense, had a solid structure, and held together in way that pleased me. It was an expensive decision, Bennington, but I’m convinced I wouldn’t have understood how to go from essay to book-length without that training.


KH: I was also struck by how circular the narrative felt at points. There are places where you are in a scene, then back up and explain how you got there, then you’re back in the scene, and then forward in time. My thought as I was reading was that this heightens the disorientation and the just-getting-by feeling that you seemed to be feeling at the time. I’d love if you could talk a little about the construction of the book, and whether this was a conscious choice or if it’s just how the narrative emerged in the writing process.

DG: I’m delighted by this question, actually, because the narrative was even more circular when I turned it into my brilliant editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Deanne Urmy. She and I talked a whole lot about structure and chronology—what would engage a reader and what would cause a reader to simply give up. While writing the book, I relished the idea of suspending time. For me, the layering of events, no matter the month or year those events took place, helped establish the patterns that eventually led to our troubles. Sven Birkerts writes about this kind of structuring in his marvelous book Art of Time in Memoir, and cautions (wisely I think) against the tendency to get episodic, this happened, and then this happened, and then this. . .

I was much more interested in delving into symbols, metaphors and lyricism, than adhering to chronology, and I tended to pick up on a detail—putting the tent up in our living room, or standing in the rain in the downtown square confronting my daughters, or eating at a Chinese food restaurant with Amanda—and let my writerly mind make intuitive connections with other times, other episodes. So it was a swirl—the disorientation of that period in my family life, as you say, but also the recognition of the nature of your heart and mind when you’re trying to sort out your life, or a significant portion of your life. All kinds of information and memories, and from many different times, pour in as you strive to understand how you got to this point, to this place. At least that’s how the process worked for me, and I wanted the writing to express that somehow. Deanne Urmy wisely convinced me to make the narrative more straightforward, less discombobulated, and I soon agreed that was the way to go. Still, the narrative isn’t linear, and I hope I was able to express the encounters with time, images, and emotions as I began to reconcile the past with the present.


KH: A number of readers of this blog are mother writers working on memoirs and novels. Time and again we hear that the mother memoir market is “cashed out,” that these types of books “don’t sell.” This is clearly not the case, and I’d love if you could talk a little about your journey from manuscript to book. What roadblocks did you encounter along the way?

DG: I’ve asked my agent several times (now that I’m working on a new project, and of course caught up in the anxiety of getting this one eventually published, having heard many times that it’s actually harder to publish a second book than a first) about what’s selling and what’s not, and she wisely tells me, “There’s always a market for a really good book.” Which is her way of saying: go write a really good book. I hope I can do that.


Backing up three years or so: It was not one bit easy to sell Live Through This. I’d convinced myself it would be. I’d send Gail my manuscript and within days, hours even, she’d have an offer. But the manuscript was rejected by quite a few editors and a good number of publishing houses, and I grew despondent as the no thank yous kept piling up. But then I’d force myself back into the writing, trying to make passages stronger (editors consistently complained that the narrator wasn’t “likeable,” a confounding dilemma, since that narrator was a persona made from me) and the stakes clearer. Months passed, and I was wondering if a huge rewrite was in order, and then—rather quickly and delightfully—Deanne Urmy accepted the book. I often wish I could go back to the moment when Gail called with the news. The relief, the joy, the sense of accomplishment. I’ll never forget it. Equally as gratifying and thrilling was the moment I learned the book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (I replay that one a whole lot, too, when I am discouraged about the writing life).

At one point along the way in trying to sell the book, someone called it a “momoir,” which bugged the hell out of me. I’m left to sort out my strong reaction to that silly quip. Live Through This is, in my way of thinking, a book about motherhood. About my illusions of motherhood as a young woman, and the critical need to smash those illusions so I could learn to know my children as real, vibrant, capable people. But I don’t want that effort to be belittled by calling it a “momoir.” Once the book was published, I noticed the bias against “mother” narratives: they can’t be all that serious as literary ventures, they can’t hold up against the new, edgy nonfiction out there. On the contrary, I say. It seems to me that we need, more than ever, to hear from mothers who are willing to dig in to both the utter joys and the frighteningly dark side of parenting, who aren’t afraid to express fears, doubts, guilt about raising children in an extraordinarily difficult time. It would be a tragedy for a woman to stop writing because she believes there’s no market for books about mothering and motherhood—because a well-written book is going to say something profound about the human condition, and we need to hear the voices of women who can express the plight we’re all in as humans.


KH: What kinds of reactions have you received from readers?

DG: I’ve received hundreds of emails from parents—and I’m deeply grateful for each one—who’ve gone through some kind of similar difficulty with teens. Some write about teenagers who are surly and hard to deal with but are still at home; some have written me about daughters who’ve been gone for decades without a word. Heartbreaking for sure. It’s nearly impossible to talk publicly about your children who’ve run away from home, because the automatic assumption for most people is that you’re an abusive parent. I’m pleased that some parents who are suffering through this nightmarish experience have read my book and feel like they can reach out to me.

I’ve also heard from parents of young children, who’ve been hugely supportive of the story; from young people who were once out on the street and perhaps now have more compassion for the parents they left behind; from lawmakers, police, agencies who say they’re glad to know more about one mother’s point of view in all of this. Very gratifying.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve also been lambasted by some readers (and some nonreaders). I find it curious that the angriest notes come from people who admit they haven’t read the book but are angered by it anyway. Some who have read the book are infuriated by its contents and by my actions. I’m astonished at the fury this memoir has stirred up. One woman sought me out at the NBCC ceremony to tell me that the book “disgusted” her. She chewed me out about what a bad mother I am right there in the beautiful New York City literary venue—what a shocker. But such reactions come with the territory. The negative responses upset me, of course, but then I try to remember that I wanted to write a book that pushed as hard as it could against the truth, against honesty and my own terribly difficult struggle to know myself better as a woman and a mother. Of course plopping such personal and raw material out there for all to see is going to offend some readers.

***
Thanks so much for your time, Debra! I do have to chime in here at the end and say how much I also hate the term “momoir,” which I’ve blogged about here at Mother Words. I’m also discouraged that readers (and nonreaders!) would judge a mother who has bravely written about the most difficult time in her life. I am grateful to Debra for having written such a well-crafted and honest memoir. Go buy this book, people.

carrier

The first time I heard Bonnie J. Rough read was at the first Mother Words Reading. We had connected through a mutual friend, and I roped her into standing up at the podium just weeks after she became a mother.

Bonnie was the second of three readers that night, and after she had read only two or three sentences, I remember thinking oh shit. Why didn't I go first? I have to follow her?

But after another minute, I let go of my insecurity and let myself be mesmerized by Bonnie’s lyrical prose, by her incredible writing, which straddles a line between essay and poetry.

I think Bonnie is tremendously talented, so it’s no surprise that I love her debut memoir, Carrier: Untangling the Danger in My DNA.

When Bonnie and her husband, Dan, begin to plan for a family, Bonnie confirms something she always suspected—that she is a carrier of the genetic condition hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia, or HED. Bonnie begins a journey to uncover the complicated details of her family’s past, searching for answers to help her and her husband, Dan, face the difficult reproductive decisions before them.

Bonnie takes us into the past, deep into the haunting life of her grandfather, Earl, who had HED, then propels us into the future, into the possibility of her own children having this disorder. Bonnie’s prose is lyrical and her story is incredibly moving. And the book is masterfully crafted, challenging the limits of creative nonfiction and making my teacher-brain work overtime.

Chapters alternate being narrated by Bonnie, Earl, and Bonnie’s mother, Paula. I was immediately sucked in to Earl’s life, into his voice and world-view, which Bonnie pieced together through research, letters, interviews with people who knew Earl, and her imagination. Robin Hemley, who wrote a blurb for this book, said: “Carrier is boundary-busting nonfiction at its finest. This is a book I will not only recommend widely but teach for years to come.” I can’t agree more. I kept stopping mid-chapter, mid-sentence and thinking, Look at what she’s done! Just look at what she's done!

But besides being a tremendous feat of craft, this book is really brave. Any author, especially an author of a work of nonfiction, who writes about a polarizing topic such as reproductive rights is brave. But Bonnie writes with such sensitivity and works through her feelings on the page, so the reader is able to walk in her shoes, which is really extraordinary. Early in the book, as she worrying how her decisions will affect her mother and her brother, who has HED, Bonnie writes: “It is not, of course, a question about whether [my mother] is happy Luke is in the world—that answer is obvious. The question is never about what is. It is about what might have been, and what might be: two things impossible to know.”

I could go on and on and on about this book, and I plan on posting about how Bonnie has dealt with certain issues of craft down the line, but for now I’ll turn to my interview with Bonnie, who is here at Mother Words today:


KH: You’ve pieced together your grandfather’s life—creating him as a believable, three-dimensional character—using research and your imagination. As a creative writing teacher, I know reading Carrier and seeing what’s possible in a memoir will be so liberating for my students. Can you talk a little about how you settled on this method for telling your grandfather’s story and whether you had to adjust your expectations of what memoir is in order to do this?

BJR: As I wrote this book, I learned how important it is to write the story that is trying to be written—and to worry about labels later (if at all). Yes, in Carrier, my late grandfather and my mother deliver their personal histories in first-person monologues alongside my own. I realize that inhabiting other voices may seem a risky thing to do in a memoir, but theirs were the voices I heard inside as I went on my journey to uncover what had happened in my family’s past. Theirs were the voices that gave me guidance, reassurance, and fair warning as I faced momentous decisions about the future of my branch of our family tree. I was working very hard to find the facts, and I also wanted to be sure I was using total empathy to understand my grandfather and mother as fully as possible. From the very beginning, that meant discovering their interiority.


KH: Earl’s voice feels so authentic to me and I’d love to hear a little about how it evolved. How fast do you settle on this voice for him? Did it change at all the deeper you got into your research/his story?

BJR: In the beginning, before I had learned the full story, Earl’s voice was simply that of a country boy who was smart, idiomatic, and a bit stung. As I came to know him, I discovered the depth, beauty, and tragedy of his 49 years of life. That meant I had to come to terms with the fact that this person was not only a farm boy but also a chemist, an inventor, a husband, a father, and a grandfather who had held me in his arms—the only grandchild he would ever know. I had to deepen him and be sure the language was not too consistently lyrical—because he was not consistently in a state of deep emotion. I needed to acknowledge his practical side and make room for the simple language of the everyday.


KH: One thing I admire so much about this book is the respect and compassion with which you consider the impact of your story and your choices on your brother and mother. I’m wondering if you would talk a little about how you dealt with your family’s possible reactions in the writing process and later, as you prepared Carrier for publication.

BJR: As I wrote early drafts, I tried not to worry about what my family would think. I had enough sense to know that the draft they would eventually see would be as sensitive and thoughtful as I could make it, up to the point of asking for their feedback. Still, I think it must always be hard for memoirists to reveal to their families just who, and how closely, they’ve been observing. It was hard for me to show my brother the life of my grandfather, in case he thought I was pigeonholing the two of them together. And it was also hard for me to reveal to my mother on paper some parts of my journey I hadn’t been ready to reveal to her as they unfolded in real life.

Closer to publication, I sent Carrier to all of my immediate family and gave them veto power. I told them I would change or remove anything that didn’t sit right with them. The job of Carrier is to tell my story, and I use other people’s stories as they touch mine, but there was no reason to overly expose anyone. My mom had been working closely with me for years, providing me with stories, data, memories, photos, and artifacts, so she had a huge interest in what was written. She didn’t really ask for many changes at all—she seemed committed to a story that depicted everyone as full humans, foibles and all. My brother told me it wasn’t an easy read for him, emotionally speaking, but he also wanted the book to stand mostly as it was. “This is your story,” he said, “people aren’t going to judge me.” And he turned the tables on his big sister, showing me his support and protectiveness. He made it pretty clear that he didn’t want to see me hurt.


KH: At one point in Carrier, after you’ve visited your grandfather’s grave and have spoken to him, telling him your plan if you become pregnant with a boy with HED, you go back to your car and dig through your bag until you find paper and pen. “Scribbling as quickly as I could,” you write, “I recorded everything. I couldn’t wait to see Dan. I needed to tell him that our decision was safe. I had finally written it down.” I loved this idea of safety being tied to writing down the words, writing down your decision. Could you talk a little about how writing—the physical act of getting words on the page—changes your relationship to what you’ve written?

BJR: The day I wrote down our plan, I was acting on the advice of a wonderful doctor who had suggested I do so, after I had told her I was worried I would waver at a critical moment. “Write it down,” she told me. “Make your agreement with your husband, and put it on paper.” The effect reminded me of what I do each day with my journal. I unload the things that I don’t want to carry, the things that weigh me down, and I put them somewhere outside of my body, outside of my head and heart. Writing down our plan removed it from my constant thought, giving me a sense of security without a constant weight of worry.


KH: I’d love to hear about how this book—what it was about, your dreams for it—changed as you wrote it.

BJR: That’s a great question. When I began this project, I was in my mid-20s and experiencing something I think many women do at that age: the desire to better understand one’s mother. I called my mom from my house in Iowa on a cold January night and asked her how she would feel if I wrote about her childhood as the daughter of an enigmatic and difficult father. I would need her help—her memories, ideas, and patience. She agreed to help me, and the project quickly moved me into an obsession with learning every detail of my grandfather’s fascinating and heart-rending life. I had pieced together most of his story for my MFA thesis, which I finished around the same time I published an essay in The New York Times Modern Love column. The essay was about the possibility that I was a carrier of HED, the genetic disorder that had so powerfully altered my grandfather’s life. In the essay, I revealed the dilemma of my genes and grappled with the options my husband and I faced: not having kids at all, adoption, IVF/PGD, or natural conception with prenatal genetic testing and the possibility of very difficult choice.

Even though I wrote these things simultaneously, I still didn’t realize how strongly linked my grandfather’s story would become with my own. Finally, a few months later at my thesis defense, a smart professor who had seen the NY Times article said, “Isn’t it true that your grandfather’s life represents your worst fears for your own children?” In an instant, I saw what my book needed to become.


KH: I think of you primarily as an essayist. I wonder if you can talk a little about how that sensibility worked for (or against) you as you wrote your way through this material?

BJR: I love that you think of me that way! I think the link is in research and the thought process that flows from it. Whether I’m writing an essay or working on a larger personal project, I always begin with an obsession that I explore with a period of intense research, combining immersion, interviews, travels, document and photo recovery, etc. Then comes the hard part: letting it all settle. I have to step away and give the data and details some time before I know what they really mean to me. Once enough time has passed and I find myself arriving at insight, I have a story to tell: What I wondered, what I discovered, and how I changed.


KH: How has motherhood changed the way you write?

BJR: Motherhood has been a wonderful thing for my writing. Being a mother is at once the most humbling and the most validating experience I’ve ever had. I’ve found ways to use that humility and that sense of validity in my writing. Staring my flaws in the face day in and day out—which motherhood has forced me to do—makes my flaws less scary. I can see beyond them now, into my simple curiosity, my nascent opinions, my boring and sometimes funny humanness. These are great starting points for an authentic voice, whether in essay or memoir. And now, because I also feel validated, I find it easier to trust that what I want to say is actually worth saying. “Making art” feels so much less tortured now.


KH: Your book has only been out a couple of weeks, but I’m wondering if you have had any feedback from readers.

BJR: Technically, the release date is still coming up: Monday, May 10! But for the most part, the book is in stores and it has been available online for a few weeks. I’m getting more positive feedback than I ever imagined I would—especially since we’re still in the period before the book’s official release and before great media exposure from interviews like this one, Kate! I’ve been getting three or four notes a day from people telling me how it felt to read Carrier. The thing I keep hearing—which comes as a huge surprise to me—is that the book is a page-turner. People are telling me they were hooked and couldn’t put the book down. I keep hearing it takes only two days to read! One person even described the book as a combination between memoir, suspense, and mystery. Reassuringly, people are also telling me that even though the book is fast and gripping, it’s not leaving them easily. The story and the emotions seem to linger, in a good way. It’s hard to express how glad I feel to when I hear that Carrier has moved someone. What more could I possibly want?


Thank you for your thoughtful answers, Bonnie!!

If you’d like to learn more about Bonnie and see photos of her family (fascinating to scroll through as you read her book), visit her website. And if you’re in the Twin Cities, come down to the Open Book tomorrow, May 8, at 11 am and listen to Bonnie read from Carrier.