This memoir was written as she was moving out of her marriage and into a new identity. Everything around her is disintegrating, and she seeks a new composition. Her life, in that state of flux, partly in the past which seemed to vanish in ruins, and partly in the future, which she’s trying to compose with us. And as tends to be the nature of transitions and flux, the 'gift' of the troubles, the time and space proximate to the churn and chaos can be a rich source of memories, thoughts and feelings, life aground, thrown asunder while the person, gasping for air, helpless, seeking a grip, or an anchor, if not a float, digging, searching everywhere, shallow, deep in that accumulated debris of living.
And as readers, we are the ones rewarded with those feelings encapsulated in a slim volume that one can read through over an evening, and mull over for a month.
Through this memoir, as an outsider to herself, she tries to observe her own past selves at different stages of her life, and bit by bit, reclaims her own 'self', giving permissions not sought previously, and laying out new, extended boundaries for that 'self'- composing herself anew in that disintegration.
Her life revolves around writing:
“At this uncertain time, writing was one of the few activities in which I could handle the anxiety of uncertainty, of not knowing what was going to happen next.”
"Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart."Her prose at times, perhaps in an unintended way, exposes her vulnerability, her fragile state and yet her humility, faith and openness to life. Struggling to make ends meet, living in a small apartment, seeking a room of her own, she finds a guardian angel of sorts, who gives her the shed to write in and lets her that much needed space, the solitude and a desk – “to be valued and respected in this way, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, was a new experience.”
“An idea presented itself, came my way, perhaps hatched from a grief, but I did not know if it would survive my free-floating attention, never mind my more focused attention. To unfold any number of ideas through all the dimensions of time is the greatest adventure of the writing life.”
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The rewards of reading such a memoir are in the contemplation of parallels and intersections. Laying bare their lived, raw moments, closely examining them for the reader, the author, subtly coaxing you, as a reader, to reflect and go on that journey into the interior yourself, drawing out meanings and questions from the author's deep-in-the-chaos narrative. At times then, one agrees with the author, and at other times, views diverge significantly. Not only it allows you to know the author a little more, it lets you know yourself a little more.
She struggles with several questions - of having it all,
of minor and major characters in an equal relationship, of femininity and of masks, of how to be in a new
context uprooted from a life built over twenty years, and when everything’s up for
the taking, what do you take.
“It is so hard to claim our desires and so much more relaxing to mock them.”
I find the following thoughts that she shares on her mother beautifully summing up the struggle she tries to live through, of finding the self while playing the role.
“There is a photograph I have kept of my mother in her late twenties. She is sitting on a rock at a picnic with friends. Her hair is wet because she’s just had a swim. There is a kind of introspection in her expression that I now relate to the very best of her. I can see that she is close to herself in this random moment. I’m not sure that I thought introspection was the best of her when as a child and teenager. What do we need dreamy mothers for? We do not want mothers who gaze beyond us, longing to be elsewhere. We need her to be of this world, lively, capable, entirely present to our needs.
Did I mock the dreamer in my mother and then insult her for having no dreams?”
It sums up the struggle so nicely. Yet the inherent certainty of the statement – "we do not want mothers who gaze beyond us…” somehow ends up distressing me. I strongly feel that by giving such words a sense of certainty, even in the context of recounting the past, and not letting them breathe in doubt or even a ‘perhaps’, we draw firm boundaries that the author might have questioned, but seemingly accepted. I feel that one needs to let such seeming 'certainties' stand in a fog of doubt, to let them some space to shift.
Just the way I feel about 'certainties' like these floating around everywhere in all kinds of media.
A little later, she portrays the complicated world of women wishing to have it all – “When our father does the things he needs to do in the world, we understand it is his due. If our mother does the things she needs to do in the world, we feel she has abandoned us. It is a miracle she survives our mixed messages, written in society’s most poisoned ink. It is enough to drive her mad.”
Maybe it is so, maybe not. The way most world seems to currently approach this situation of women wishing to have a fuller life. I feel that perhaps the questioning needs to happen at the level of the mother bothered by the mixed messages and the poisoned ink - why does she need to be so bothered? Can we do something about that? Perhaps if we begin looking at that question, and ponder on that, we might find a way out of the difficulty of even calling it a ‘having it all'.
A difficult question. Easy to frame it for others, but the moment one begins to look inside, and ‘live’ the question the way Rilke asks us to, we get to grasp the difficulty and enormity of the work needed, the internal work.
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An interesting read. Will hopefully read more from the author soon.