The collage of life
On narrative in writing and living. Also: what feminism means, getting sick of chill, and more in the weekend roundup.
I’ve been thinking about stories and narrative, in a writing sense and in a life sense.
I recently started reading Nina St. Pierre’s Love is a Burning Thing—a memoir that investigates her mother’s past—in no small part because I’m currently working on a memoir that investigates my own mother’s past. St. Pierre opens with an author’s note that at first glance reads like a mea culpa for the genre: “Like the story it tells, its construction is an imperfect collage,” she writes of her book. “Memoir is not autobiography. It is a curated work of memory.”
This imperfect act of curation isn’t just part of writing a memoir, it’s also part of living an examined life. It’s part of trying to make sense of yourself, your family, or the world by telling a story—on the page or in your mind. I’m reminded now of how Vivian Gornick differentiates in the art of personal narrative between the situation (“the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot”) and the story (“the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say”).
The work of finding the story, in that big-picture wisdom sense, changes you. The events I write about in this book have changed me, but the writing of the book itself has also changed me. Both in equal measure, I’d venture.1
I kept thinking about St. Pierre’s author’s note as I started reading Sarah Manguso’s Liars, a novel about a woman in an emotionally abusive relationship, where storytelling traps her before providing her escape.
At first, the protagonist of Liars can’t seem to get free from her own story about her happy marriage, which is not actually happy at all. She also gets stuck in her gaslighting husband’s stories, which serve as cover for his affair. In a search for the truth, she finds herself writing out the tl;dr of her marriage, over and over in different ways.
Eventually, toward the end of the novel, and the end of her marriage, the protagonist says, “There were so many perspectives on those fourteen years, and each one was newly, separately instructive. Once I could stand looking at it from one direction, I discovered another and had to figure everything out all over again.” And yet! In the end, the protagonist of Liars has a clear-eyed perspective on her husband, their marriage, and the false narratives that got her “enmeshed in a story that had already been told ten billion times.” She’s able to wrestle some hard-won truth from that multitude of perspectives.
Which brings me right back to St. Pierre’s author’s note and the “imperfect collage.” We try to wrangle ourselves and our lives into a story. Standing in our way are the lies we tell ourselves, and the lies that other people tell us about ourselves. It’s not always clear what is what; there are so many different and instructive perspectives. It’s best in memoir and in life to grapple with what you don’t know and what might be. It’s how you arrive at “story” in the Gornick sense: insight, wisdom, and the thing one has come to say.