Judith Hannan's Blog
March 14, 2016
Doors Beyond Doors
It wasn't until the 14th time I sat down to write my mother's story that I was able to tell it with maturity and compassion. What it took to find perspective is described in my post at Brevity. https://brevity.wordpress.com/2016/03...
October 8, 2013
Song is not a Luxury
The above line comes from writer, philosopher, and cancer survivor Mark Nepo’s book, The Exquisite Risk. Nepo had traveled to South Africa and was struck that person after person suffering extraordinary hardship would sing, as if song were both protection and nourishment. This proves, Nepo says, “… that song is not a luxury but a necessary way of being in the world, of keeping the soul anchored in hard time, a way for each of us to experience the fullness of life, no matter what difficulties we wake in.”
My own experience confirms this. I have been making music almost since toddlerhood. I remember going to my flute lessons and complaining to my teacher that I was getting a migraine and didn’t think I could play. “Let’s just play some duets together,” she’d say. “If you don’t feel better in fifteen minutes, we’ll stop.” We never stopped. I always felt better.
I struggle to find transformation in silent meditation. The times I have been moved beyond my body have all involved music. In Motherhood Exaggerated I write about performing a beautiful musical conversation that appears in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion for alto soloist and flute. The performance took place in a gloomy, Gothic cathedral, a physical representation of the depression and anxiety that had settled over me in college. The singer was the voice teacher with whom, as a music major, I had had to study. She had shown me no warmth. But making music together transformed us into intimates. The cathedral and the gloom, internal and external, vanished. At the end, I was just music, not body or breath.
My son Max has sung and whistled his way through his twenty one years. I used to assume he was expressing joy. But over the years I realized Max intuited that making song is a weapon against anxiety and fear. He was making his own joy.
Dance is music made visible. A teacher once told me I shouldn’t move or sway when I played the flute; it meant I was siphoning feeling from the music I was making. I tried to stay still until a friend told me how beautiful I looked when I moved. I was beautiful because I was expressing myself in the fullest way I knew how.
Nadia is a dancer now. I’m not surprised. It was from her that I learned that people with cancer can—in fact they should—dance. It’s what she did every time she heard music, whether tethered to an IV pole, still limping after surgery, or in glorious freedom at home between treatments.
Writing Prompt
Write about a time when music—playing it or listening to it—transported you, brought you from one state-of-mind to another. If you play an instrument or just sing in the shower, write about how it feels to make music. Describe specific scenes of when you turned to music—after a day at work when you were ready to give notice, a fight with a friend, a slog through rush hour traffic. What kind of music did you turn to? Did you dance, sway, or move? Were you alone or with others? Write about the physical sensations within your body.
Now write about the role of music during a time of illness, caregiving, or grief. Once again, be specific in setting your scene, probing your sensations, making the music alive once again.
Additional Suggestion
Set aside twenty to thirty minutes to listen to any music of your choice. Close your eyes and, without analyzing, allow yourself to feel yow your body and heart are responding. Let your thoughts float by without comment. When the music is over, take five to ten minutes and, without pausing or lifting your pencil from the paper (or fingers from the keyboard) write whatever comes to mind about the experience.
My own experience confirms this. I have been making music almost since toddlerhood. I remember going to my flute lessons and complaining to my teacher that I was getting a migraine and didn’t think I could play. “Let’s just play some duets together,” she’d say. “If you don’t feel better in fifteen minutes, we’ll stop.” We never stopped. I always felt better.
I struggle to find transformation in silent meditation. The times I have been moved beyond my body have all involved music. In Motherhood Exaggerated I write about performing a beautiful musical conversation that appears in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion for alto soloist and flute. The performance took place in a gloomy, Gothic cathedral, a physical representation of the depression and anxiety that had settled over me in college. The singer was the voice teacher with whom, as a music major, I had had to study. She had shown me no warmth. But making music together transformed us into intimates. The cathedral and the gloom, internal and external, vanished. At the end, I was just music, not body or breath.
My son Max has sung and whistled his way through his twenty one years. I used to assume he was expressing joy. But over the years I realized Max intuited that making song is a weapon against anxiety and fear. He was making his own joy.
Dance is music made visible. A teacher once told me I shouldn’t move or sway when I played the flute; it meant I was siphoning feeling from the music I was making. I tried to stay still until a friend told me how beautiful I looked when I moved. I was beautiful because I was expressing myself in the fullest way I knew how.
Nadia is a dancer now. I’m not surprised. It was from her that I learned that people with cancer can—in fact they should—dance. It’s what she did every time she heard music, whether tethered to an IV pole, still limping after surgery, or in glorious freedom at home between treatments.
Writing Prompt
Write about a time when music—playing it or listening to it—transported you, brought you from one state-of-mind to another. If you play an instrument or just sing in the shower, write about how it feels to make music. Describe specific scenes of when you turned to music—after a day at work when you were ready to give notice, a fight with a friend, a slog through rush hour traffic. What kind of music did you turn to? Did you dance, sway, or move? Were you alone or with others? Write about the physical sensations within your body.
Now write about the role of music during a time of illness, caregiving, or grief. Once again, be specific in setting your scene, probing your sensations, making the music alive once again.
Additional Suggestion
Set aside twenty to thirty minutes to listen to any music of your choice. Close your eyes and, without analyzing, allow yourself to feel yow your body and heart are responding. Let your thoughts float by without comment. When the music is over, take five to ten minutes and, without pausing or lifting your pencil from the paper (or fingers from the keyboard) write whatever comes to mind about the experience.
October 2, 2013
Why or Why Not
Nearly every story about illness that I have read arrives eventually at one question, “Why?” Even the person who says he or she never asked why is really saying, “I asked myself why but the only answer I could come up with was why not.”
“Why not?” It’s how I answered Nadia when she asked me why she got cancer. It sounds like such a cruel response, as if to strip her of the specialness she thought she had, at least in my eyes. But what I wanted her to know was that she hadn’t done anything to deserve her disease. There are those who might have told her otherwise. There is an organization called Chai Lifeline that provides support to Jewish families with seriously ill children. In their packet of material is a book of prayers and psalms introduced with the words: “One should recognize that all human misfortune or illness is a direct result of man’s evil ways. This awareness will lead him to repentance which is an important factor in alleviating misfortune and illness.” Not much of a lifeline in that for an eight-year-old girl. Not all Jews believe this way, but most religions contain some doctrine that equates illness or tragedy with either being deserved or having some higher purpose.
But it is not necessary to believe in God to search for the “why” of an illness. Self-blame is its own religion. I wondered if the fertility drugs I took caused Nadia’s cancer. Did the fetus that didn’t survive and was reabsorbed by my body make it into Nadia’s instead? Why didn’t I respond earlier to the clues that Nadia was ill, even though they made sense only in retrospect? And, of course, the question that still echoes, shouldn’t it have been me?
When Nadia finished her treatment, still searching for the reason she got cancer, she said, “I think God gave me cancer because He knew I was strong.” The idea made me cringe. It sounded to me no different than the people who tried to tell me that God never gave us more than we can bear. Even so, I was glad Nadia saw herself as strong.
Eight years later, when Nadia had to write her college essay, she tackled the question yet again. She wrote that nether science nor religion can say why she got cancer. Science can say how and it can develop cures; religion can provide comfort. But neither will tell you why.
In his book, When Bad Things Happen To Good People, Rabbi Harold S. Kushner asks, “Can you accept the idea that some things happen for no reason, that there is randomness in the universe.” I would rephrase this by asking, what were the questions that came after “Why?”
Writing Prompt
1. When you or your loved one received a diagnosis, suffered a trauma, or lost a family member, what were the questions that you asked? Begin with why and then continue listing questions in a stream of consciousness fashion. See where your questions take you. Are you still asking? Do you have an answer?
Here are my questions.
Why?
Why not?
Who are you to tell me?
How do you know?
Shouldn’t the trees be upside down?
Who should I be angry at?
Am I angry?
Why are you so angry?
What do I do now?
Can I do it?
What do I need?
Who do I tell?
What’s my sister’s phone number?
Should Nadia see me cry?
Where’s the Tylenol?
Does Nadia still trust me?
Are we done?
Who saved Nadia’s life?
Is there a point?
2. Did your response to illness follow a predictable pattern for you or did it alter your way of responding to life. Write about a turning point or time of confusion, from before illness or caregiving. What were the questions you asked yourself then? What were the values or beliefs that helped you through this time? Were you more cynical then or less, more inclined to turn toward God or less, seek community or become isolated. Has illness changed how you respond to the question of why?
“Why not?” It’s how I answered Nadia when she asked me why she got cancer. It sounds like such a cruel response, as if to strip her of the specialness she thought she had, at least in my eyes. But what I wanted her to know was that she hadn’t done anything to deserve her disease. There are those who might have told her otherwise. There is an organization called Chai Lifeline that provides support to Jewish families with seriously ill children. In their packet of material is a book of prayers and psalms introduced with the words: “One should recognize that all human misfortune or illness is a direct result of man’s evil ways. This awareness will lead him to repentance which is an important factor in alleviating misfortune and illness.” Not much of a lifeline in that for an eight-year-old girl. Not all Jews believe this way, but most religions contain some doctrine that equates illness or tragedy with either being deserved or having some higher purpose.
But it is not necessary to believe in God to search for the “why” of an illness. Self-blame is its own religion. I wondered if the fertility drugs I took caused Nadia’s cancer. Did the fetus that didn’t survive and was reabsorbed by my body make it into Nadia’s instead? Why didn’t I respond earlier to the clues that Nadia was ill, even though they made sense only in retrospect? And, of course, the question that still echoes, shouldn’t it have been me?
When Nadia finished her treatment, still searching for the reason she got cancer, she said, “I think God gave me cancer because He knew I was strong.” The idea made me cringe. It sounded to me no different than the people who tried to tell me that God never gave us more than we can bear. Even so, I was glad Nadia saw herself as strong.
Eight years later, when Nadia had to write her college essay, she tackled the question yet again. She wrote that nether science nor religion can say why she got cancer. Science can say how and it can develop cures; religion can provide comfort. But neither will tell you why.
In his book, When Bad Things Happen To Good People, Rabbi Harold S. Kushner asks, “Can you accept the idea that some things happen for no reason, that there is randomness in the universe.” I would rephrase this by asking, what were the questions that came after “Why?”
Writing Prompt
1. When you or your loved one received a diagnosis, suffered a trauma, or lost a family member, what were the questions that you asked? Begin with why and then continue listing questions in a stream of consciousness fashion. See where your questions take you. Are you still asking? Do you have an answer?
Here are my questions.
Why?
Why not?
Who are you to tell me?
How do you know?
Shouldn’t the trees be upside down?
Who should I be angry at?
Am I angry?
Why are you so angry?
What do I do now?
Can I do it?
What do I need?
Who do I tell?
What’s my sister’s phone number?
Should Nadia see me cry?
Where’s the Tylenol?
Does Nadia still trust me?
Are we done?
Who saved Nadia’s life?
Is there a point?
2. Did your response to illness follow a predictable pattern for you or did it alter your way of responding to life. Write about a turning point or time of confusion, from before illness or caregiving. What were the questions you asked yourself then? What were the values or beliefs that helped you through this time? Were you more cynical then or less, more inclined to turn toward God or less, seek community or become isolated. Has illness changed how you respond to the question of why?
June 27, 2013
Writing Prompt: Travelogue of Illness
“The first trip to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center is like arriving anywhere new. A plane takes you down through thick clouds, a train moves you through a dark tunnel, a bus pulls up to the rear of a terminal while you paint images in your head of this foreign land soon to be revealed … We are the pale new arrivals at the beachside resort, catching a glimpse of a sliver of its life.” This is how I described taking Nadia to MSKCC for the first time.
Without making a conscious decision to equate illness with a physical place to which one arrives and journeys through, I found the vocabulary of travel apt. I hesitated when it came to comparing a medical center to a resort, worried that it would minimize the horror of bringing my eight-year-old daughter to a cancer hospital. But I couldn’t escape the sensation that we were entering as exotic a world as any unknown vacation or adventure destination. MSKCC was a mutant Brigadoon, a place you see only when you take a trip there.
The travel metaphor is used by many writers to describe the experience of illness. Anatole Broyard, in Toward a Literature of Illness, describes his prostate cancer as, “… a visit to a disturbed country, rather like contemporary China.” In Autobiography of a Face, a memoir chronicling her treatment for, and the aftereffects of, Ewings sarcoma, Lucy Greeley observes, “Suddenly I understood the term visiting. I was in one place, they were in another and they were only pausing.”
In his introduction to The Tao of Travel, Paul Theroux says, “The travel narrative is the oldest in the world, the story the wanderer tells to the folk gathered around the fire after his or her return from a journey.” Journey, of course, means more than a trip to a distant geography. The listener is not as interested in what the traveler packed in his or her suitcase (although a sidebar is always helpful), but what is carried within that person—the reason for the trip, what or who is being left behind; does the narrator have a hearty appetite for adventure, a delicate stomach, claustrophobia, a sense of humor, frequent flyer miles, many friends or a chosen few, a need for high thread-count sheets. It is the emotional and transformational souvenirs that the storyteller returns with that keep listeners around the fire, that equip them for going to that place themselves.
WRITING PROMPT
Whether you are a patient, a family member, a caregiver, or a healer, you are traveling a new path. You are entering a new culture, hearing new languages, encountering different norms of behavior, negotiating a new topography and geography. Perhaps you are dressing differently, eating different food, changing modes of transportation. Write a travelogue of your journey. Use all of your senses to bring the reader into the same space in which you find yourself, in the same way you would describe a city street scene, a seaside boardwalk, or a hike on the Appalachian Trail. For example, you can write about the hospital as a foreign country—what are the rules about entering, who lives/works/visits there, what language is spoken, how do you travel there, what do you bring, how does it feel to inhale the air. Or the place can be your home. You didn’t travel there, but imagine you lived in Russia when it became the Soviet Union. You are now in a new country with new norms and rules. What would you say about this new country you live in so the reader can understand what has happened to you? You could place yourself in school or the workplace or a visit to your hometown for a Thanksgiving family reunion. Take photographs to accompany your travelogue, draw pictures, add recipe of the “local” cuisine, and, yes, say what you have packed—in the suitcase you carry and in your heart.
Additional Suggestions:
Tell your story by using your body as your landscape, the journey it has been on.
Are you an enthusiastic or reluctant traveler? Write about your relationship with travel. Can you travel now? Where would or do you go?
Without making a conscious decision to equate illness with a physical place to which one arrives and journeys through, I found the vocabulary of travel apt. I hesitated when it came to comparing a medical center to a resort, worried that it would minimize the horror of bringing my eight-year-old daughter to a cancer hospital. But I couldn’t escape the sensation that we were entering as exotic a world as any unknown vacation or adventure destination. MSKCC was a mutant Brigadoon, a place you see only when you take a trip there.
The travel metaphor is used by many writers to describe the experience of illness. Anatole Broyard, in Toward a Literature of Illness, describes his prostate cancer as, “… a visit to a disturbed country, rather like contemporary China.” In Autobiography of a Face, a memoir chronicling her treatment for, and the aftereffects of, Ewings sarcoma, Lucy Greeley observes, “Suddenly I understood the term visiting. I was in one place, they were in another and they were only pausing.”
In his introduction to The Tao of Travel, Paul Theroux says, “The travel narrative is the oldest in the world, the story the wanderer tells to the folk gathered around the fire after his or her return from a journey.” Journey, of course, means more than a trip to a distant geography. The listener is not as interested in what the traveler packed in his or her suitcase (although a sidebar is always helpful), but what is carried within that person—the reason for the trip, what or who is being left behind; does the narrator have a hearty appetite for adventure, a delicate stomach, claustrophobia, a sense of humor, frequent flyer miles, many friends or a chosen few, a need for high thread-count sheets. It is the emotional and transformational souvenirs that the storyteller returns with that keep listeners around the fire, that equip them for going to that place themselves.
WRITING PROMPT
Whether you are a patient, a family member, a caregiver, or a healer, you are traveling a new path. You are entering a new culture, hearing new languages, encountering different norms of behavior, negotiating a new topography and geography. Perhaps you are dressing differently, eating different food, changing modes of transportation. Write a travelogue of your journey. Use all of your senses to bring the reader into the same space in which you find yourself, in the same way you would describe a city street scene, a seaside boardwalk, or a hike on the Appalachian Trail. For example, you can write about the hospital as a foreign country—what are the rules about entering, who lives/works/visits there, what language is spoken, how do you travel there, what do you bring, how does it feel to inhale the air. Or the place can be your home. You didn’t travel there, but imagine you lived in Russia when it became the Soviet Union. You are now in a new country with new norms and rules. What would you say about this new country you live in so the reader can understand what has happened to you? You could place yourself in school or the workplace or a visit to your hometown for a Thanksgiving family reunion. Take photographs to accompany your travelogue, draw pictures, add recipe of the “local” cuisine, and, yes, say what you have packed—in the suitcase you carry and in your heart.
Additional Suggestions:
Tell your story by using your body as your landscape, the journey it has been on.
Are you an enthusiastic or reluctant traveler? Write about your relationship with travel. Can you travel now? Where would or do you go?
April 26, 2013
Writing Prompt: Opening Lines
I do not write in a linear fashion. Motherhood Exaggerated began as a skeleton, but when it came to fleshing it out and clothing it, my process bore more resemblance to the path of a pinball than a train traveling from depot to depot. A right bicep might get carved and then my attention would be pulled to the left foot on which I would place a sock. Fattening up the gut I’d think about adding a pair of pants, but before buttoning them I’d think about time and decide I needed a watch. Applying lip gloss and eyeliner I’d suddenly realize my creation still had a naked right foot. When I finally buttoned the pants, chose a shirt, tucked it in, and strapped on a belt, I’d realize I had forgotten about underwear.
Still, I always knew what the first line of my book was going to be. “Butterflies were scarce on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 2000.” Why was this one sentence so important to me? Because it says something central about who I am. Nature is the place where I have always looked for answers, and now it was becoming unreliable.
Lucy Grealy begins her memoir, Autobiography of Face, with the sentence, “My friend Stephen and I used to do pony parties together.” It is the opening line to a prologue that, in terms of the timeline of the book, is actually an epilogue. It isn’t until a few paragraphs in that the reader learns Grealy is self-conscious about a part of her face and that she is intrigued with the way families other than her own live. The reader waits even longer for chemotherapy to be mentioned for the first time, so if you picked up this book not knowing it was a memoir about a girl who had a Ewings sarcoma, you would arrive at this realization only gradually. The “Ker-pow” to Grealy’s jaw comes only after the prologue.
Other writers choose to tell you in the first sentence what awaits you. “About a week and a half after my baby daughter, Lily, was born she began to throw up.” This is Philip Lopate’s opening to his essay, “The Lake of Suffering,” which can be found in his collection, Portrait Inside My Head. Donald Hall begins The Best Day The Worst Day with what reads like a headline, “Jane Kenyon died of leukemia at 7:57 in the morning, April 22, 1995.” An alternative beginning to Motherhood Exaggerated could have been a sentence that appears on the second page: “There were two pieces of clinical evidence that summer that hinted that cancer was developing in Nadia’s body, two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle whose meaning would only be revealed when seen as part of the whole.”
WRITING PROMPT
How do you want to begin your story? Or, what are the ways you could begin because there is no single place to start. Imagine you are telling your story to a friend, a family member, someone who has had an experience similar to your own, a stranger, a doctor. Experiment with different beginnings. The stranger, who doesn’t know your characters, may allow you to speak more openly about them since you may not feel the need to protect them. But the stranger is also an untrustworthy listener which may make you stifle some of your own truths. To a friend, you might open with your deepest fear, while with a family member you may want to proceed more gently. Keep writing opening sentences. Save them. Return to them to see how they feel. Use them as prompts or talk back to them. What’s the opening sentence you would write if the listener is you?
Additional Suggestion
Write out the opening lines from some of your favorite books. Choose one and make it the first sentence of your own story. Now rewrite
Still, I always knew what the first line of my book was going to be. “Butterflies were scarce on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 2000.” Why was this one sentence so important to me? Because it says something central about who I am. Nature is the place where I have always looked for answers, and now it was becoming unreliable.
Lucy Grealy begins her memoir, Autobiography of Face, with the sentence, “My friend Stephen and I used to do pony parties together.” It is the opening line to a prologue that, in terms of the timeline of the book, is actually an epilogue. It isn’t until a few paragraphs in that the reader learns Grealy is self-conscious about a part of her face and that she is intrigued with the way families other than her own live. The reader waits even longer for chemotherapy to be mentioned for the first time, so if you picked up this book not knowing it was a memoir about a girl who had a Ewings sarcoma, you would arrive at this realization only gradually. The “Ker-pow” to Grealy’s jaw comes only after the prologue.
Other writers choose to tell you in the first sentence what awaits you. “About a week and a half after my baby daughter, Lily, was born she began to throw up.” This is Philip Lopate’s opening to his essay, “The Lake of Suffering,” which can be found in his collection, Portrait Inside My Head. Donald Hall begins The Best Day The Worst Day with what reads like a headline, “Jane Kenyon died of leukemia at 7:57 in the morning, April 22, 1995.” An alternative beginning to Motherhood Exaggerated could have been a sentence that appears on the second page: “There were two pieces of clinical evidence that summer that hinted that cancer was developing in Nadia’s body, two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle whose meaning would only be revealed when seen as part of the whole.”
WRITING PROMPT
How do you want to begin your story? Or, what are the ways you could begin because there is no single place to start. Imagine you are telling your story to a friend, a family member, someone who has had an experience similar to your own, a stranger, a doctor. Experiment with different beginnings. The stranger, who doesn’t know your characters, may allow you to speak more openly about them since you may not feel the need to protect them. But the stranger is also an untrustworthy listener which may make you stifle some of your own truths. To a friend, you might open with your deepest fear, while with a family member you may want to proceed more gently. Keep writing opening sentences. Save them. Return to them to see how they feel. Use them as prompts or talk back to them. What’s the opening sentence you would write if the listener is you?
Additional Suggestion
Write out the opening lines from some of your favorite books. Choose one and make it the first sentence of your own story. Now rewrite
February 8, 2013
Reading Music
Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique is one of the great examples of program music, which means notes, not words, are the storytellers. The story here is a lurid one of opium induced reveries and unrequited love that descends into murder, execution, and hell. I heard it for the first time in junior high school, back when music appreciation was considered a part of a public school’s core curriculum and stories of opium and sin didn’t trigger over-protective hysteria in the PTA. The work became the first piece of classical music I could recognize, despite the fact that music of all kinds (but not Symphonie Fantastique) was ubiquitous in my house growing up. I haven’t heard the work since my son studied it at his own school over ten years ago, nor did I listen to it very much in the many years prior. Still, I can easily hum the piece’s major theme—its idée fixe—recall its unusual instrumentation, and tell the story.
I’ll never know if the music, without the narrative, would have been as compelling. Having heard the tale and been shown in the score where certain events are “told,” I cannot separate the music of Symphonie Fantastique from images of the warped waltz, the walk to the scaffold, or the Witch’s Sabbath. When you attach words to music it is magnified in the same ways pictures enrich words. But I’ve often read books where my image of a main character doesn’t match the one the graphic designer decided to put on the cover. Can branding a piece of music with a story be equally limiting?
Abstract music does not tell a story but that doesn’t mean it can’t contribute toward an inner narrative. As a former flutist, playing was an alternative form for me of speaking a feeling or relating a sensation. When I was in college, I played in the orchestra that accompanied a performance of Bach’s great choral work, his St. Matthew Passion. The work includes a beautiful duet between flute and the alto soloist. We were performing in a gothic cathedral whose gloominess had settled over me like a shroud. The vocalist was my voice teacher who had no fondness for me nor I for her. Yet by the end of the duet, I had become the music and, in becoming the music, had no defense against anything that might harm me. Music leaves me vulnerable.
My musical library is filled with minor-keyed works with oboes that weep, violins that plead, and cellos that intone their loneliness; with chords that pile one atop the other, lush tones the color of burgundy, dissonance with resolution that comes a few beats too late. The closest I have ever come to being emotionally detached from a piece of music is while listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. In my Form and Analysis class in college I could find a great deal to appreciate in the Variations, but my ear, separated from my intellect, likens the work to the performance of a dressage horse whose perfect mincing prance seems a distant cousin of the cantering and leaping hunters and jumpers.
Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings has always been the work I’ve turned to in times of melancholia and sorrow, when I needed to be “teared” the way people were once bled. The music weeps; the notes appear as if they struggle to resonate. They step forward, climb, retreat, tempt you with a moment of resolution, but grief returns. The piece reaches its climax in a long high shimmering note. It could be a scream, an appeal, or a revelation. And then we are brought back down to a more private sorrow. What did I think while I listened to the Adagio? Sometimes I searched my mother’s life for clues to her own sorrows. When my children were babies, I grieved for the innocence that they didn’t know they would someday lose. Other times, the music brought me to my feet and I would dance because it was the closest I could come to riding the musical phrases.
Then I read that Barber wrote the Adagio for Strings as an elegy for men returning from war. It was Pat Barker’s book Regeneration or Geraldine Brooks’ March in musical form. While not a narrative, the work now had a theme, and I allowed the music to carry me into the grief and horror of battle and returning home forever changed. I later learned that Barber did not have this vision in mind. It was too late; my reveries had been altered. I had become sympathetic to others, but each time I tried to search inside myself I couldn’t escape the image of those soldiers. The intensity of the music had been increased, like sunlight through a magnifying glass, but its breadth of potential impact decreased.
Since February, I have been touring with my book, Motherhood Exaggerated, reading to friends and strangers about being a mother during my daughter’s treatment for cancer. I’ve read about the day her jaw cracked, her first MRI, her chemo, her hair loss (actually a funny scene), her surgery, her post-traumatic stress. I’ve recounted my history of anxiety, the death of my mother, the middle of the night isolation when my only company was Nadia’s pain. At each reading there is always someone who tells me I am so brave to tell this story out loud. But the book, which I hold at chest height, is my shield. It is telling the story. I am reading, not reliving. That barrier fell when I paired selected sections of my book with music that punctuated and elaborated on the meaning of the words.
The Kodály Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8, is the musical representation of what happens when trauma strikes. At least that was my response the first time I heard it. Its abstractness had already been contaminated for me because I was listening to it with my story in mind. I heard the ways the music keeps you off balance, how its phrasings and rhythms throb; it is percussive and it sighs. The musician must dig deeply into the cello as if pulling the music out of the instrument rather than imposing the notes upon it. Even the bottom two strings are tuned differently, a symbol for me of the altered states I would be reading about. But Kodály is known for his use of Hungarian folk song and local musical idioms. When I first met Sebastian Bäverstam, the cellist I would be performing with, he referred to the piece’s whimsy. This made me think of music that would accompany a wild carnival ride rather than an MRI; both are scary but only one can take you into darkness.
The program Sebastian and I designed opens with the allegory that begins the book. While I was pregnant with Nadia and her twin brother, there was a third embryo that the doctor said wouldn’t survive. The allegory imagines Nadia absorbing that embryo’s soul into her own, but the soul becomes greedy and tries to take over Nadia’s body until Nadia’s jaw cracks and the soul—the tumor—is exposed. I rarely read this brief section but it seemed an ideal introduction to Kodály’s opening phrase—strident, slightly broken chords, notes that race through the registers searching for a place to be safe the way I had envisioned that third soul.
I had never thought about that soul, even when writing the allegory. I didn’t really believe that embryo ever had one. But entering the music, I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps I should have mourned it. It was in the midst of these thoughts that the sonata’s first movement ended. I wasn’t sure if I could rise, never mind read, as the past pasted itself onto the present.
The next section told of the anxiety disorders I suffered in college which caused physical distortions of my reality: The shower was the worst. When I closed my eyes to rinse my hair, my little stall became a flight simulator mimicking a ride through a thunderstorm. It rocked and pitched. I couldn’t tell up from down. So I sat down, pressed my buttocks and the backs of my legs against the cool floor tiles. I wedged my shoulders into the corner. I kept my hand on the wall. In this way I remained oriented.
From here, I re-entered the warped world I was first sucked into the day Nadia was diagnosed with cancer: As I walk Nadia into the room for the MRI …, see the cylinder, feel the claustrophobia, anticipate the noise of the machine, realize the likely news this test will deliver, I feel those long-dormant anxieties limping alongside me like a phantom limb.
When Sebastian began the sonata’s second movement, with its walking cadences, my phantom limb felt more real than ghostly. It stayed with me as the music ended, and I began to read. And I felt its presence as I came to the end, imagining myself in an MRI tube and confronting the fear that I would be unable to care for Nadia since I had never experienced what she would be going through.
And then Sebastian launched into the final movement. This is where the whimsy that Sebastian originally spoke of is most obvious. Initially, I wanted to exclude this movement; it seemed too celebratory. It made me want to tap my toes. Perhaps it would be best to pair this movement with a section at the end of the book which shows Nadia as the beautiful twenty-year-old dancer she has become. But disorientation is never far away in this sonata. The downbeat disappears. Slippery scales, sudden chords strummed like a guitar, and hectic oscillating between strings brought me right back into that MRI room. I closed my eyes to remove any distraction that might interfere with the work of my ears. But because the cellist must employ every technique at his disposal to play this piece, the performance of it becomes physically compelling. I couldn’t ignore Sebastian’s inhales, shifts, the flow of the bow, the arch and dance of his fingers. The music was causing a physical representation of what I wanted my words to project—that I too had to employ every technique at my disposal to care for my daughter.
What ultimately absorbed my attention was the bow. To draw the music out, it had to sacrifice a piece of itself as hair after hair snapped with the effort. It was literally pulling its hair out. During the applause I took the frayed bow from Sebastian and held it up to the audience. I wanted everyone to see in the bow a representation of Sebastian’s brilliance. I hadn’t yet recognized the true reason behind my fascination with that stick and its threads. Twelve years earlier, I was that bow, drawing and scraping myself across the strings of my daughter’s illness.
Sebastian and I have performed our program twice. At the end of the first one, a member of the audience said to me, “I bet Sebastian will never play that piece the same way again.” I saw this as a positive outcome; Sebastian, a young man who had never experienced what I was reading about, now had his view expanded and he could bring this new depth to his music.
After the second performance, I wasn’t as sure. In response to a question from the audience, Sebastian spoke about how he would think about the dizziness I experienced while he was playing a particular section and try to interpret that musically. I wondered if now Sebastian would always associate that section with the rockiness of my world. What could be cemented into his thinking after the third performance, the fourth?
Sebastian and I made a story from notes that didn’t know how much they had to say. But, unlike words, notes can tell more than one story. Also within the Kodály is the story of my son Max providing clownish accompaniment to a magic show in the hospital, and of Nadia gathering the hair she had gleefully removed from her head and leaving me a bowl of “angel hair pasta” at dinnertime. It could tell other scenes from the book—me and my father in his woodworking shop, or the serpentine dance steps I did with my mother, our arms wrapped around each other’s waists.
Sebastian and I have been thinking about creating a new program, with different music and different words. Maybe a more interesting exercise for us as artists, though, would be to alter only one variable—changing just the words and not the music or vice versa. Kodály and Barber and all composers can tell many stories. All I have to do is shift the angle of my reading glasses.
Note: This is an expansion of an earlier blogpost. You can find this post on ZYZZYVA.org as well: http://www.zyzzyva.org/2013/02/07/rea...
I’ll never know if the music, without the narrative, would have been as compelling. Having heard the tale and been shown in the score where certain events are “told,” I cannot separate the music of Symphonie Fantastique from images of the warped waltz, the walk to the scaffold, or the Witch’s Sabbath. When you attach words to music it is magnified in the same ways pictures enrich words. But I’ve often read books where my image of a main character doesn’t match the one the graphic designer decided to put on the cover. Can branding a piece of music with a story be equally limiting?
Abstract music does not tell a story but that doesn’t mean it can’t contribute toward an inner narrative. As a former flutist, playing was an alternative form for me of speaking a feeling or relating a sensation. When I was in college, I played in the orchestra that accompanied a performance of Bach’s great choral work, his St. Matthew Passion. The work includes a beautiful duet between flute and the alto soloist. We were performing in a gothic cathedral whose gloominess had settled over me like a shroud. The vocalist was my voice teacher who had no fondness for me nor I for her. Yet by the end of the duet, I had become the music and, in becoming the music, had no defense against anything that might harm me. Music leaves me vulnerable.
My musical library is filled with minor-keyed works with oboes that weep, violins that plead, and cellos that intone their loneliness; with chords that pile one atop the other, lush tones the color of burgundy, dissonance with resolution that comes a few beats too late. The closest I have ever come to being emotionally detached from a piece of music is while listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. In my Form and Analysis class in college I could find a great deal to appreciate in the Variations, but my ear, separated from my intellect, likens the work to the performance of a dressage horse whose perfect mincing prance seems a distant cousin of the cantering and leaping hunters and jumpers.
Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings has always been the work I’ve turned to in times of melancholia and sorrow, when I needed to be “teared” the way people were once bled. The music weeps; the notes appear as if they struggle to resonate. They step forward, climb, retreat, tempt you with a moment of resolution, but grief returns. The piece reaches its climax in a long high shimmering note. It could be a scream, an appeal, or a revelation. And then we are brought back down to a more private sorrow. What did I think while I listened to the Adagio? Sometimes I searched my mother’s life for clues to her own sorrows. When my children were babies, I grieved for the innocence that they didn’t know they would someday lose. Other times, the music brought me to my feet and I would dance because it was the closest I could come to riding the musical phrases.
Then I read that Barber wrote the Adagio for Strings as an elegy for men returning from war. It was Pat Barker’s book Regeneration or Geraldine Brooks’ March in musical form. While not a narrative, the work now had a theme, and I allowed the music to carry me into the grief and horror of battle and returning home forever changed. I later learned that Barber did not have this vision in mind. It was too late; my reveries had been altered. I had become sympathetic to others, but each time I tried to search inside myself I couldn’t escape the image of those soldiers. The intensity of the music had been increased, like sunlight through a magnifying glass, but its breadth of potential impact decreased.
Since February, I have been touring with my book, Motherhood Exaggerated, reading to friends and strangers about being a mother during my daughter’s treatment for cancer. I’ve read about the day her jaw cracked, her first MRI, her chemo, her hair loss (actually a funny scene), her surgery, her post-traumatic stress. I’ve recounted my history of anxiety, the death of my mother, the middle of the night isolation when my only company was Nadia’s pain. At each reading there is always someone who tells me I am so brave to tell this story out loud. But the book, which I hold at chest height, is my shield. It is telling the story. I am reading, not reliving. That barrier fell when I paired selected sections of my book with music that punctuated and elaborated on the meaning of the words.
The Kodály Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8, is the musical representation of what happens when trauma strikes. At least that was my response the first time I heard it. Its abstractness had already been contaminated for me because I was listening to it with my story in mind. I heard the ways the music keeps you off balance, how its phrasings and rhythms throb; it is percussive and it sighs. The musician must dig deeply into the cello as if pulling the music out of the instrument rather than imposing the notes upon it. Even the bottom two strings are tuned differently, a symbol for me of the altered states I would be reading about. But Kodály is known for his use of Hungarian folk song and local musical idioms. When I first met Sebastian Bäverstam, the cellist I would be performing with, he referred to the piece’s whimsy. This made me think of music that would accompany a wild carnival ride rather than an MRI; both are scary but only one can take you into darkness.
The program Sebastian and I designed opens with the allegory that begins the book. While I was pregnant with Nadia and her twin brother, there was a third embryo that the doctor said wouldn’t survive. The allegory imagines Nadia absorbing that embryo’s soul into her own, but the soul becomes greedy and tries to take over Nadia’s body until Nadia’s jaw cracks and the soul—the tumor—is exposed. I rarely read this brief section but it seemed an ideal introduction to Kodály’s opening phrase—strident, slightly broken chords, notes that race through the registers searching for a place to be safe the way I had envisioned that third soul.
I had never thought about that soul, even when writing the allegory. I didn’t really believe that embryo ever had one. But entering the music, I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps I should have mourned it. It was in the midst of these thoughts that the sonata’s first movement ended. I wasn’t sure if I could rise, never mind read, as the past pasted itself onto the present.
The next section told of the anxiety disorders I suffered in college which caused physical distortions of my reality: The shower was the worst. When I closed my eyes to rinse my hair, my little stall became a flight simulator mimicking a ride through a thunderstorm. It rocked and pitched. I couldn’t tell up from down. So I sat down, pressed my buttocks and the backs of my legs against the cool floor tiles. I wedged my shoulders into the corner. I kept my hand on the wall. In this way I remained oriented.
From here, I re-entered the warped world I was first sucked into the day Nadia was diagnosed with cancer: As I walk Nadia into the room for the MRI …, see the cylinder, feel the claustrophobia, anticipate the noise of the machine, realize the likely news this test will deliver, I feel those long-dormant anxieties limping alongside me like a phantom limb.
When Sebastian began the sonata’s second movement, with its walking cadences, my phantom limb felt more real than ghostly. It stayed with me as the music ended, and I began to read. And I felt its presence as I came to the end, imagining myself in an MRI tube and confronting the fear that I would be unable to care for Nadia since I had never experienced what she would be going through.
And then Sebastian launched into the final movement. This is where the whimsy that Sebastian originally spoke of is most obvious. Initially, I wanted to exclude this movement; it seemed too celebratory. It made me want to tap my toes. Perhaps it would be best to pair this movement with a section at the end of the book which shows Nadia as the beautiful twenty-year-old dancer she has become. But disorientation is never far away in this sonata. The downbeat disappears. Slippery scales, sudden chords strummed like a guitar, and hectic oscillating between strings brought me right back into that MRI room. I closed my eyes to remove any distraction that might interfere with the work of my ears. But because the cellist must employ every technique at his disposal to play this piece, the performance of it becomes physically compelling. I couldn’t ignore Sebastian’s inhales, shifts, the flow of the bow, the arch and dance of his fingers. The music was causing a physical representation of what I wanted my words to project—that I too had to employ every technique at my disposal to care for my daughter.
What ultimately absorbed my attention was the bow. To draw the music out, it had to sacrifice a piece of itself as hair after hair snapped with the effort. It was literally pulling its hair out. During the applause I took the frayed bow from Sebastian and held it up to the audience. I wanted everyone to see in the bow a representation of Sebastian’s brilliance. I hadn’t yet recognized the true reason behind my fascination with that stick and its threads. Twelve years earlier, I was that bow, drawing and scraping myself across the strings of my daughter’s illness.
Sebastian and I have performed our program twice. At the end of the first one, a member of the audience said to me, “I bet Sebastian will never play that piece the same way again.” I saw this as a positive outcome; Sebastian, a young man who had never experienced what I was reading about, now had his view expanded and he could bring this new depth to his music.
After the second performance, I wasn’t as sure. In response to a question from the audience, Sebastian spoke about how he would think about the dizziness I experienced while he was playing a particular section and try to interpret that musically. I wondered if now Sebastian would always associate that section with the rockiness of my world. What could be cemented into his thinking after the third performance, the fourth?
Sebastian and I made a story from notes that didn’t know how much they had to say. But, unlike words, notes can tell more than one story. Also within the Kodály is the story of my son Max providing clownish accompaniment to a magic show in the hospital, and of Nadia gathering the hair she had gleefully removed from her head and leaving me a bowl of “angel hair pasta” at dinnertime. It could tell other scenes from the book—me and my father in his woodworking shop, or the serpentine dance steps I did with my mother, our arms wrapped around each other’s waists.
Sebastian and I have been thinking about creating a new program, with different music and different words. Maybe a more interesting exercise for us as artists, though, would be to alter only one variable—changing just the words and not the music or vice versa. Kodály and Barber and all composers can tell many stories. All I have to do is shift the angle of my reading glasses.
Note: This is an expansion of an earlier blogpost. You can find this post on ZYZZYVA.org as well: http://www.zyzzyva.org/2013/02/07/rea...
January 25, 2013
Through The Eye of Twitter
A red tailed hawk landed on my fire escape the other day. I watched it for a minute and then thought, I have to tweet about this. There’s a red tailed hawk on my fire escape. It’s so beautiful, I wrote. What a poor representation of where my thoughts would have taken me if I hadn’t been called to my keyboard. I would have noticed the many ways the hawk and I were not alike even though we both live in New York City. I do not perch fifteen floors above the ground on narrow ledges. I don’t find that the best days for traveling are when the air is at its most restless. And so much more of what goes on around me remains unobserved while the hawk can see the twitch of a rat’s tail in the bushes. The hawk doesn’t stop mid-flight and tweet about his upcoming kill.
I started a Twitter account because I have a book to promote. Twitter, I was told, is like being at a cocktail party. You want to say interesting things and be in the midst of stimulating conversations. You want to reveal your life and likes. What you don’t want to do is promote your book all the time. That would be the equivalent of handing out business cards at your daughter’s wedding.
Thus the hawk tweet, which may or may not be interesting, but it’s part of a picture which lets followers know that I am an author who watches the natural world and writes about it, as well.
I started by job as a tweeter with great enthusiasm. It was a challenge going through my day and stumbling upon an idea for a tweet that seemed compelling enough to share. I say stumble because most of my tweets have been accidental, a radio show that makes me think of the homeless mothers I work with at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, a dance concert I attended with my daughter, an art gallery opening. It’s not that I don’t want to share my life—I write memoir after all—but Twitter seems like a perfect venue for self-involved chirping as opposed to reflection, a place where a hawk is beautiful but not a meditative focal point.
The day I saw the hawk, I hadn’t tweeted anything in a while and I was starting to worry that I was the person at the cocktail party who comes with one or two topics of conversation but, after using those up, spends the rest of the evening smiling at the air as the melting ice in her drink makes the glass sweat and the napkin it rests in shred. So I didn’t take the time to balance the benefits of watching the hawk or telling followers I was watching a hawk. I felt once again like the mother of young children I used to be, a camera always interrupting the space between me and what they were doing so it was only in the pictures and the videos that I experienced the actual moment, which, of course, was now virtual. The hawk flew away, just as my kids’ plays and concerts and silly poses did, and I felt as if I had only been halfway present.
But isn’t that often the way it is for a writer? You sit on the subway or walk down the street or go to the supermarket and eavesdrop on conversations, notice what people are wearing, or observe the mannerisms of a group of teenagers just let out of school. You see an accident, an altercation, a place where two forces rub up against each other say, “That would make a good story,” or, “I should write about that.” You are already composing sentences while you watch.
Without distance of the observer, you will still notice that the person who serving you your tea at the diner doesn’t look as good this morning as she usually does; you will be aware of every word—wise and stupid—that you say during a fight with your son; you will see every detail of the hawk’s feathers. But when you go to tell the story, the details will elude you because you will have taken no verbal pictures. The places where you record those “I have to write about it” moments—a back pocket notebook, a phone, a receipt in the bottom of your bag, or a corner of your brain—will be blank.
So it’s true that, because of Twitter, I didn’t fully enter in an experience with the hawk. But then again, here I am writing about it, which may never have happened if I hadn’t tweeted in the first place.
You can follow me @judithhannan.
I started a Twitter account because I have a book to promote. Twitter, I was told, is like being at a cocktail party. You want to say interesting things and be in the midst of stimulating conversations. You want to reveal your life and likes. What you don’t want to do is promote your book all the time. That would be the equivalent of handing out business cards at your daughter’s wedding.
Thus the hawk tweet, which may or may not be interesting, but it’s part of a picture which lets followers know that I am an author who watches the natural world and writes about it, as well.
I started by job as a tweeter with great enthusiasm. It was a challenge going through my day and stumbling upon an idea for a tweet that seemed compelling enough to share. I say stumble because most of my tweets have been accidental, a radio show that makes me think of the homeless mothers I work with at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, a dance concert I attended with my daughter, an art gallery opening. It’s not that I don’t want to share my life—I write memoir after all—but Twitter seems like a perfect venue for self-involved chirping as opposed to reflection, a place where a hawk is beautiful but not a meditative focal point.
The day I saw the hawk, I hadn’t tweeted anything in a while and I was starting to worry that I was the person at the cocktail party who comes with one or two topics of conversation but, after using those up, spends the rest of the evening smiling at the air as the melting ice in her drink makes the glass sweat and the napkin it rests in shred. So I didn’t take the time to balance the benefits of watching the hawk or telling followers I was watching a hawk. I felt once again like the mother of young children I used to be, a camera always interrupting the space between me and what they were doing so it was only in the pictures and the videos that I experienced the actual moment, which, of course, was now virtual. The hawk flew away, just as my kids’ plays and concerts and silly poses did, and I felt as if I had only been halfway present.
But isn’t that often the way it is for a writer? You sit on the subway or walk down the street or go to the supermarket and eavesdrop on conversations, notice what people are wearing, or observe the mannerisms of a group of teenagers just let out of school. You see an accident, an altercation, a place where two forces rub up against each other say, “That would make a good story,” or, “I should write about that.” You are already composing sentences while you watch.
Without distance of the observer, you will still notice that the person who serving you your tea at the diner doesn’t look as good this morning as she usually does; you will be aware of every word—wise and stupid—that you say during a fight with your son; you will see every detail of the hawk’s feathers. But when you go to tell the story, the details will elude you because you will have taken no verbal pictures. The places where you record those “I have to write about it” moments—a back pocket notebook, a phone, a receipt in the bottom of your bag, or a corner of your brain—will be blank.
So it’s true that, because of Twitter, I didn’t fully enter in an experience with the hawk. But then again, here I am writing about it, which may never have happened if I hadn’t tweeted in the first place.
You can follow me @judithhannan.
November 12, 2012
Memoir, Fiction, or Just Prose
The October issue of The Believer magazine has an interesting essay by Francisco Goldman. Goldman wrote a book called Say Her Name following the accidental death of his wife, Aura, while bodysurfing. Around the time of the book’s release, I read an excerpt in The New Yorker. I had assumed it was a memoir. It was clearly Goldman’s tribute to his wife—his recounting of real events, true emotions, actual loss and grief. As such a recounting, I had assumed it was non-fiction. But Say Her Name also includes events that didn’t happen at all or that might have been altered in their telling. So is it a memoir or a novel? Which title projects best the reality of what Say Her Name is?
In his essay, “The Unresilient: On the Inadequacy of Memory to Express Truth,” Goldman challenges what he calls the American emphasis on calling a book a memoir or a novel. Why can’t it just be prose, he asks? I am asking myself this same question. My current book, Motherhood Exaggerated, held no quandaries for me. It is a memoir. While its foundation is my daughter’s diagnosis, treatment and recovery from cancer, it tells my story of evolution during that period.
To understand my evolution, I had to go back in time to a period in my own mother’s life when she suffered from depression. This period would come to affect how I raised my children and how I had to reexamine that influence as I faced an extraordinary event in my daughter’s life. Having written what was not much more than a summary of my mother’s story, I now feel pulled to uncover more. My first thought was to write a book about my mother’s depressive episode in the context of women’s mental health in the 60s and 70s, a turning point in many ways for how women were treated; it seemed as if mothers up and down suburban streets were” losing it. But don’t want to tell my mother’s story as a cliché—another young mother, isolated in suburbia, with babies to care for, a distant husband, handed an idea of perfection drawn up by someone else. This does describe my mother’s life, but it is only the container for her unique story. It would be up to me to uncork, unlock, uncover, unzip—to lift out the artifacts and, through my examination of them, to create my mother on the page.
But there are shadows in the container, places I can’t peer into, can’t reach. There are secret compartments to which I was never given a key. I was eleven years old at the time and between then and when my mother died 19 years later, I never thought to lay claim to this part not only of her history but my own. I was hoping to retrieve her medical records from McLean Hospital where she was treated, but they can no longer be found.
So how do I tell my mother’s story? How important does it remain to me and to readers if I don’t have all the facts? Having a mother who dies when you are both too young, forces you to grow beyond your understanding of each other at the time of that final separation. I want to understand my mother with the compassion and wisdom I have accrued as the 59-year-old I am now.
My only choice is to tell the truth of my mother’s life by augmenting what I know with the way it could have been. Clearly, I couldn’t get away with calling it memoir, but calling it fiction might not unleash in the reader the emotional investment that comes when you are reading nonfiction. Obviously, that is my challenge as the writer, like an archaeologist who must create a vessel from broken shards that can reclaim its identity and hold water.
In his essay, “The Unresilient: On the Inadequacy of Memory to Express Truth,” Goldman challenges what he calls the American emphasis on calling a book a memoir or a novel. Why can’t it just be prose, he asks? I am asking myself this same question. My current book, Motherhood Exaggerated, held no quandaries for me. It is a memoir. While its foundation is my daughter’s diagnosis, treatment and recovery from cancer, it tells my story of evolution during that period.
To understand my evolution, I had to go back in time to a period in my own mother’s life when she suffered from depression. This period would come to affect how I raised my children and how I had to reexamine that influence as I faced an extraordinary event in my daughter’s life. Having written what was not much more than a summary of my mother’s story, I now feel pulled to uncover more. My first thought was to write a book about my mother’s depressive episode in the context of women’s mental health in the 60s and 70s, a turning point in many ways for how women were treated; it seemed as if mothers up and down suburban streets were” losing it. But don’t want to tell my mother’s story as a cliché—another young mother, isolated in suburbia, with babies to care for, a distant husband, handed an idea of perfection drawn up by someone else. This does describe my mother’s life, but it is only the container for her unique story. It would be up to me to uncork, unlock, uncover, unzip—to lift out the artifacts and, through my examination of them, to create my mother on the page.
But there are shadows in the container, places I can’t peer into, can’t reach. There are secret compartments to which I was never given a key. I was eleven years old at the time and between then and when my mother died 19 years later, I never thought to lay claim to this part not only of her history but my own. I was hoping to retrieve her medical records from McLean Hospital where she was treated, but they can no longer be found.
So how do I tell my mother’s story? How important does it remain to me and to readers if I don’t have all the facts? Having a mother who dies when you are both too young, forces you to grow beyond your understanding of each other at the time of that final separation. I want to understand my mother with the compassion and wisdom I have accrued as the 59-year-old I am now.
My only choice is to tell the truth of my mother’s life by augmenting what I know with the way it could have been. Clearly, I couldn’t get away with calling it memoir, but calling it fiction might not unleash in the reader the emotional investment that comes when you are reading nonfiction. Obviously, that is my challenge as the writer, like an archaeologist who must create a vessel from broken shards that can reclaim its identity and hold water.
October 23, 2012
Gulping Words
I had a conversation with "Balls" author Julian Tepper the other day. We were discussing whether it was a good thing when someone says, “I read your book in one sitting,” or “I couldn’t put your book down.” Perhaps for different reasons, we have both received this response to our books. Julian’s novel is a quick-witted and slightly outlandish look at a young man’s identity issues after receiving a diagnosis of testicular cancer; "Motherhood Exaggerated" is a deeply personal journey through my inner life while caring for my daughter during her treatment for Ewing’s sarcoma. Either way, how could we not be thrilled that others found our works so compelling.
Julian and I are both musicians. A musical opus—whether long or short, dense or light, tonal or atonal—is meant to be listened to in one sitting. Would you ever put on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and stop it halfway through the last movement and return to the rest of it later, picking up where you left off as if the drama were just sitting there waiting inside of you to resume?
So, yes, I love it that a person can become so immersed in my book that he or she can’t turn away from it. The need to read in gulps rather than sips is what I hope will happen to me every time I crack the binding of a new book. So much can be lost with each separation from the words on the page. It can be hard to climb back into the story.
But a worry is nagging at me. Is my book too simple? The October 19th issue of the Los Angeles Times includes an essay by Hector Tobar comparing the reading preferences of Obama and Romney. Tobar’s bias is clear. Obama came out on top because he read the “weightier” works, the ones that make you brood and drive you to think. Tobar writes, “Good books take time and effort.” Does time mean how long a book takes you to read, or does it mean how long the words stay with you? By effort, does Tobar mean the sweat you have to put into understanding what you are reading, or does it mean how deeply you respond to the situations and ideas presented. A book that becomes too much of a struggle would make gulping impossible. But if it stirs up emotions or challenges your views or teaches you something, and if it stays with you long after you have read it—bleeding into other books you read or events in your own life—then that would make it a good book in my definition.
There are exceptions, of course. Wine and fine whiskey should not be gulped. They should be sniffed and sipped; their flavors should have time to roll around in your mouth. Similarly, there are some ideas that require you to stop turning pages for a while. You can’t read about quantum physics, interpret a biblical text or figure out the meaning behind a Shakespeare soliloquy without stopping and starting. These books aren’t better books because they take effort to read; it’s just that the difficulty is built into them. But writing anguished sentences or thinking philosophical viewpoints are valid only if they are presented in a convoluted fashion is a façade for intelligent and challenging writing.
I wrote "Motherhood Exaggerated" to invite the reader to enter my life after I had already negotiated its mazes and twists and turns. I don’t want anyone to tiptoe or to get lost or to duck in and out at will. "Motherhood Exaggerated" depends on the reader joining me, perhaps not for a single sitting, but for a series of connected gulps.
Salud!
Julian and I are both musicians. A musical opus—whether long or short, dense or light, tonal or atonal—is meant to be listened to in one sitting. Would you ever put on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and stop it halfway through the last movement and return to the rest of it later, picking up where you left off as if the drama were just sitting there waiting inside of you to resume?
So, yes, I love it that a person can become so immersed in my book that he or she can’t turn away from it. The need to read in gulps rather than sips is what I hope will happen to me every time I crack the binding of a new book. So much can be lost with each separation from the words on the page. It can be hard to climb back into the story.
But a worry is nagging at me. Is my book too simple? The October 19th issue of the Los Angeles Times includes an essay by Hector Tobar comparing the reading preferences of Obama and Romney. Tobar’s bias is clear. Obama came out on top because he read the “weightier” works, the ones that make you brood and drive you to think. Tobar writes, “Good books take time and effort.” Does time mean how long a book takes you to read, or does it mean how long the words stay with you? By effort, does Tobar mean the sweat you have to put into understanding what you are reading, or does it mean how deeply you respond to the situations and ideas presented. A book that becomes too much of a struggle would make gulping impossible. But if it stirs up emotions or challenges your views or teaches you something, and if it stays with you long after you have read it—bleeding into other books you read or events in your own life—then that would make it a good book in my definition.
There are exceptions, of course. Wine and fine whiskey should not be gulped. They should be sniffed and sipped; their flavors should have time to roll around in your mouth. Similarly, there are some ideas that require you to stop turning pages for a while. You can’t read about quantum physics, interpret a biblical text or figure out the meaning behind a Shakespeare soliloquy without stopping and starting. These books aren’t better books because they take effort to read; it’s just that the difficulty is built into them. But writing anguished sentences or thinking philosophical viewpoints are valid only if they are presented in a convoluted fashion is a façade for intelligent and challenging writing.
I wrote "Motherhood Exaggerated" to invite the reader to enter my life after I had already negotiated its mazes and twists and turns. I don’t want anyone to tiptoe or to get lost or to duck in and out at will. "Motherhood Exaggerated" depends on the reader joining me, perhaps not for a single sitting, but for a series of connected gulps.
Salud!
October 9, 2012
Words, A Cello, A Frayed Bow, A Frayed Heart
Since February, I have been touring with my book, Motherhood Exaggerated, reading to friends and strangers about being a mother during my daughter’s treatment for cancer. I’ve read about the day her jaw cracked, her first MRI, her chemo, her hair loss (actually a funny scene), her surgery, her post-traumatic stress. I’ve recounted my history of anxiety, the death of my mother, the middle of the night isolation when my only company was Nadia’ pain. At each reading there is always someone who tells me I am so brave to tell this story out loud. But the book, which I hold at chest height, is my shield. It is telling the story. I am reading, not reliving. Last month, my barrier fell.
I have written often about my relationship with music. It is what I studied in college and the field in which I had my first job. Musical themes and allusions appear throughout Motherhood Exaggerated, and in this month’s Opera News I have an essay on music in a time of crisis. http://www.operanews.com/operanews/te.... In both, I share the story of a moment of transformation that occurred for me during a college performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. I was playing first flute during a duet with the alto soloist. The setting was a gothic cathedral whose gloominess had settled over me like a shroud. The vocalist was my voice teacher who had no fondness for me nor I for her. Yet the music unveiled my heart. By the end of the duet, I had become the music and, in becoming the music, had no defense against anything that might harm me. Music leaves me vulnerable.
Last month at The Oracle Club in Long Island City (www.theoracleclub.com), I paired with Concert Artists Guild Winner, cellist Sebastian Baverstam http://concertartists.org/baverstam_b.... The concept was to design a program of selected sections of my book with music that punctuated and elaborated on the meaning of the words. When I received Sebastian’s repertoire list, it was obvious what we should do.
The Kodály Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8, is the musical representation of what happens when trauma strikes. It keeps you off balance, its phrasings and rhythms throb, it is percussive and it sighs. The musician must dig deeply into the cello as if pulling the music out of the instrument rather than imposing the notes upon it. Even the bottom two strings are tuned differently, a symbol for me of the altered states I would be reading about. Having been knocked around by the sonata’s first movement, I wasn’t sure if I could rise, never mind read, as the past pasted itself onto the present.
I began by reading about the anxiety disorders I suffered in college, which caused physical distortions of my reality: The shower was the worst. When I closed my eyes to rinse my hair, my little stall became a flight simulator mimicking a ride through a thunderstorm. It rocked and pitched. I couldn’t tell up from down. So I sat down, pressed my buttocks and the backs of my legs against the cool floor tiles. I wedged my shoulders into the corner. I kept my hand on the wall. In this way I remained oriented.
From here, I re-entered the warped world I was first sucked into the day Nadia was diagnosed with cancer: As I walk Nadia into the room for the MRI …, see the cylinder, feel the claustrophobia, anticipate the noise of the machine, realize the likely news this test will deliver, I feel those long-dormant anxieties limping alongside me like a phantom limb.
As Sebastian began the sonata’s second movement, with its walking cadences, my phantom limb felt more real than ghostly. It came with me all the way to the end of the chapter, which I began at the movement’s completion, to the moment I lay in bed pretending I was in an MRI and had to confront the fear that I would be unable to care for Nadia since I had never experienced what she would be going through.
And then Sebastian launched into the final movement. I closed my eyes to remove any distraction that might interfere with the work of my ears. But I couldn’t ignore Sebastian’s inhales, shifts, up bows and down bows, the arch and dance of his fingers. The music was causing a physical representation of what I wanted my words to project. In the final movement, which begins with brio and moves into a whirl of sound, I had to watch. What ultimately absorbed my attention was the bow. To draw the music out, it had to sacrifice a piece of itself as hair after hair snapped with the effort. It was literally pulling its hair out.
During the applause I took the frayed bow from Sebastian and held it up to the audience. I wanted everyone to see in the bow a representation of Sebastian’s brilliance. I hadn’t yet recognized the true reason behind my fascination with that stick and its threads. Twelve years earlier, I was that bow, drawing and scraping myself across the strings of my daughter’s illness.
What will happen the next time I read these same words without Sebastian, or when he plays those notes without the words? I can only believe that we have changed the experience of performing our art in a permanent way.
You can hear Sebastian by going to http://soundcloud.com/sebastian-baver.... And I invite you to check out my website, www.motherhoodexaggerated.com.
I have written often about my relationship with music. It is what I studied in college and the field in which I had my first job. Musical themes and allusions appear throughout Motherhood Exaggerated, and in this month’s Opera News I have an essay on music in a time of crisis. http://www.operanews.com/operanews/te.... In both, I share the story of a moment of transformation that occurred for me during a college performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. I was playing first flute during a duet with the alto soloist. The setting was a gothic cathedral whose gloominess had settled over me like a shroud. The vocalist was my voice teacher who had no fondness for me nor I for her. Yet the music unveiled my heart. By the end of the duet, I had become the music and, in becoming the music, had no defense against anything that might harm me. Music leaves me vulnerable.
Last month at The Oracle Club in Long Island City (www.theoracleclub.com), I paired with Concert Artists Guild Winner, cellist Sebastian Baverstam http://concertartists.org/baverstam_b.... The concept was to design a program of selected sections of my book with music that punctuated and elaborated on the meaning of the words. When I received Sebastian’s repertoire list, it was obvious what we should do.
The Kodály Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8, is the musical representation of what happens when trauma strikes. It keeps you off balance, its phrasings and rhythms throb, it is percussive and it sighs. The musician must dig deeply into the cello as if pulling the music out of the instrument rather than imposing the notes upon it. Even the bottom two strings are tuned differently, a symbol for me of the altered states I would be reading about. Having been knocked around by the sonata’s first movement, I wasn’t sure if I could rise, never mind read, as the past pasted itself onto the present.
I began by reading about the anxiety disorders I suffered in college, which caused physical distortions of my reality: The shower was the worst. When I closed my eyes to rinse my hair, my little stall became a flight simulator mimicking a ride through a thunderstorm. It rocked and pitched. I couldn’t tell up from down. So I sat down, pressed my buttocks and the backs of my legs against the cool floor tiles. I wedged my shoulders into the corner. I kept my hand on the wall. In this way I remained oriented.
From here, I re-entered the warped world I was first sucked into the day Nadia was diagnosed with cancer: As I walk Nadia into the room for the MRI …, see the cylinder, feel the claustrophobia, anticipate the noise of the machine, realize the likely news this test will deliver, I feel those long-dormant anxieties limping alongside me like a phantom limb.
As Sebastian began the sonata’s second movement, with its walking cadences, my phantom limb felt more real than ghostly. It came with me all the way to the end of the chapter, which I began at the movement’s completion, to the moment I lay in bed pretending I was in an MRI and had to confront the fear that I would be unable to care for Nadia since I had never experienced what she would be going through.
And then Sebastian launched into the final movement. I closed my eyes to remove any distraction that might interfere with the work of my ears. But I couldn’t ignore Sebastian’s inhales, shifts, up bows and down bows, the arch and dance of his fingers. The music was causing a physical representation of what I wanted my words to project. In the final movement, which begins with brio and moves into a whirl of sound, I had to watch. What ultimately absorbed my attention was the bow. To draw the music out, it had to sacrifice a piece of itself as hair after hair snapped with the effort. It was literally pulling its hair out.
During the applause I took the frayed bow from Sebastian and held it up to the audience. I wanted everyone to see in the bow a representation of Sebastian’s brilliance. I hadn’t yet recognized the true reason behind my fascination with that stick and its threads. Twelve years earlier, I was that bow, drawing and scraping myself across the strings of my daughter’s illness.
What will happen the next time I read these same words without Sebastian, or when he plays those notes without the words? I can only believe that we have changed the experience of performing our art in a permanent way.
You can hear Sebastian by going to http://soundcloud.com/sebastian-baver.... And I invite you to check out my website, www.motherhoodexaggerated.com.
