Live Through This Carrying

On writing and on carrying what we can't write, on a light touch, on signals.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about the different kinds of quiet crisis we go through and carry. There are crises that can be public, like certain illnesses. Then there are others that have stigma attached, or are not happening to the person writing them. I am being circumspect; we talk about this a lot in nonfiction and memoir: what is my story to tell?

This isn’t directly my story, but I’m a caretaker. And this isn’t my first go-around with being a caretaker or partner to someone in crisis. In some ways it is the place I have found myself in periodically throughout my life. It’s a hard crisis to bear because it’s not one you can share publicly to just anyone.

Yesterday as I was teaching, doing a panel discussion, and going about my day, there was a part of my brain that wanted to just scream, to blurt: THIS IS WHAT’S HAPPENING AND I CAN’T FIX IT but I am so close to the epicenter. How do we get support if we can’t share what’s happening? I am lucky in that I’ve found sources of support and have friends who I’ve said enough to that I don’t feel alone.

But as a nonfiction writer, the meat of my work is trying to convey and explore experience. In part this is why I scuttled a completed memoir about a loved one’s substance abuse and the decade I spent trapped in its tornado. It wasn’t my story, and yet it scored every day of that decade.

This is not a “me” problem, this is a “we” problem, and there have been countless panels and some excellent craft books:

• Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Writing Family edited by Joy Castro and published by the fantastic University of Nebraska Press

• Beth Kephart’s Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir

• The classic Tell it Slant by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, now in its third edition, which is the textbook I use for my own creative nonfiction classes

(I made a Bookshop list with the books I mention in this post. For some reason I couldn’t get the Scott Russell Sanders book Earthworks to add to the list, so I’ll link to it directly from Amazon.)

But I’m less and less interested in telling the story itself as experienced by another person and more and more interested in the visceral experience of carrying other people’s crises and stories. We all carry so many secrets that are not ours to reveal, and I think for a long time I assumed that if I could just tell and write those secrets, I would feel better.

I don’t even know if that’s true anymore.

I’ve written some things, agonized over some paragraphs in which I “told it slant” after decades of vagueness, and those paragraphs sure were arty and alluded to difficult moments—signaled to those who also had those experiences with the kinds of nods and signals that did not exactly expose. The result was interesting: readers who’d been through similar things picked up on the allusions, while others not attuned to those issues floated right past it. I’ll call this “sly telling.” This I found satisfying because in my recent essay collection, Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook, I got to say some things that were a massive burden, but say them lightly and quickly.

I love the Vermeer painting “Girl with a Pearl Earring” and I think about it a lot with regard to nonfiction: How we can, with one tiny dot of light, say just a dot that tells a larger story.

And as an aside, on the dangers of over-writing or aestheticizing difficulty and trauma, as a warning to myself as I love to play with language and sometimes, I think, use pretty words to obscure: the frame is too much, I think, the way it actually hangs in a museum, and it distracts from the intimacy of the painting itself:

Right? This is weird and I need to think more about this. What it means when the frame is too much. Or does the frame—in the larger context of the wall and the museum—stop the viewer and say “Look. Look here.” I don’t know. Dude—great, a research rabbit hole distraction!!

A heavy frame, at least at first mulling and viewing, seems to detract from the light touch. And I want to say it so lightly that only a certain reader will get it, and with that reader, I will have a deep community, and those will be the people, I think, who reach out and who are sustained by the writing, people touched by similar events. This subtly, of course, runs the risk of being missed by other readers, like a recent review of that book by a young man who said it was all about nostalgia. Wow, dude: no. But okay, I did that to myself. I didn’t scream the truth; I pointed with a few dots.

After so many years of teaching it, I remain fascinated, too, by the Scott Russell Sanders essay “Under the Influence.” And if you want a true exercise in subtly and denial, read his essay “Inheritance of Tools” first. Then read “Under the Influence,” written many years later. I believe the second essay was written completely with the first in mind, in dialogue with it. I could write a whole craft book on those two essays. (OMG… will I?)

But now my task is thinking about the Carrying, also the title of Ada Límon’s shockingly beautiful poetry collection. How do we carry the secrets of others? How does it feel? How does it scribe our souls and tighten our shoulders and pull our hearts out of rhythm?

What does it mean that last night I had a nightmare in several installments that I couldn’t get out of, a true technicolor Golden Age of Television Mad Men saga in which I was trapped in some sort of awful theme-park-like Disneyland with the multiple connecting areas, and I couldn’t reach my loved one. I would catch glimpses, my phone wouldn’t help me navigate, the areas kept leading to each other in the wrong area, my feet wouldn’t work, geography and maps were no help. I am in a mapless place.

The title of this post refers to Deb Gwartney’s beautiful memoir, Live through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love, which in turn was named for the Hole song (and damn it’s a great song). I need to turn back to that book. I also need to turn back to Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Memoir of His Son’s Addiction by David Sheff (weirdly also titled in reference to a song, this one by John Lennon)—check both of these out.

To be clear: my son is fine and this is not about my son. This crisis I’m living through is also (thank all the saints) not about substance abuse. I couldn’t take that again. But these books both talk about the carrying. There are many other substance abuse memoirs, and I read a lot of them, but these two in particular I admire for their complexity.

Thank you for listening to me think on the page. By being here, you are helping me carry this. I think this is what I’m after—to both feel about the carrying of my specific crisis, but also to think about the carrying in general, to think about what it might mean to tell a larger story of the things we carry, especially the stories we cannot tell. And rather than thinking of it as a prohibition I am straining against, one that the secret might unburden me of, I want to think bigger, to think about whether the telling of specific secrets is what I’m after. I am baldly and plainly trying to figure out how art or an art-ish thing can make me feel better. Because it does: I believe in that magic of transmutation, of somehow finding alchemy in which it is our personal suffering that allows us to cross over, to be desperate enough to turn to making with unbridled need and pure devotion, seeking solace. (Also, fine, yes, I am intellectualizing to get a break from feeling shit. Which is fine. I’ve also been crying in the car and eating cupcakes.)