How Much Can Any Narrative Form Hold?

When I moved to China four years ago with my husband and our two young boys, I knew I wanted to write an account of our time there. There was a story unfolding before me in that concrete Beijing high-rise we lived in for close to three years. And that story had everything to do with those boys of mine, ages four and six, who looked out their bedroom window at the Beijing moon and asked me if I understood that China was in outer space?

So after my husband and I got the boys enrolled in pre-school and first grade, and after I'd bought us mattresses (think of very hard Chinese ones) and sheets (top sheets don't really exist in China) and a teapot, I finally sat down at my desk and faced the page. The story was still there waiting to be told, but how to tell it? I'd been writing for years before we moved to China—first poetry in college and then more poetry—lyric-narrative hybrids—in grad school. I loved the form for its concision and mystery and surprise. But after I had the boys, I stopped writing poetry. And I didn't know why.

What I see now is that I needed something continuous—a narrative I could step in and out of while I tried to learn how to be a mother. Poetry demands a kind of crystallization that I didn't seem capable of in that sleep deprived place we all live in after our babies are born. And I wanted to tell a longer story by then—one that I could pick up after the boys went to bed, and drop as soon as one of them cried out for me.

So what I did once my second son began crawling, was I started a novel. Writing prose was like entering a whole new border region in China—the novel spoke some of the same dialect as poetry but the sentences could go on a whole lot longer and there was all that back story needed. All that character development. I dove in and found a rhythm and the novel began to write itself, and then I knew I'd found myself a different form.

Around that time, I opened up a creative writing center in Portland, Maine, with two writer friends. We called it The Telling Room, and we went to all the schools in Portland, proselytizing about the power of story and how writing could change your life. I was the teacher who said it didn't matter what you called the things you wrote—it just mattered that you generated material: poetry, fiction, non-fiction, who cares what the form was. My mantra became (and still is) writing begets writing begets writing.

But there I was in China. How would I find the right form for this travel story I wanted to tell? It was a tricky thing at first. I recently read that Mary Carr said something to the affect that memoir is poetry's first cousin. But back in China, I didn't have Carr's wisdom. I sat at my desk that looked down over the old work barracks in the hutong out behind our apartment building, and I wrote what I saw. The words came out in long, narrative prose poems. And these poems didn't connect back much to one another—they seem to live untethered to any larger, narrative arc.

That's because I didn't understand non-fiction yet, or the arc of my own journey. What I did know about was metaphor. Poetry had given me that, as well as the tools to edit a flabby paragraph. So I squeezed all the metaphor I could out of daily life in Beijing. A lost homing pigeon landed on our windowsill, and because I'd been trained in poetry all those years, I looked for the metaphor that would give language to the experience. And slowly, very slowly, I began to weave these poems together, until low and behold, the poems became prose and told a larger story. There was an arc happening. I was walking the path between poetry and memoir.

Then something happened that derailed the whole thing. I got cancer in China. Suddenly, there was no book project, no form to decide on. I hadn't ever intended to write a story about breast cancer in China. And so I wouldn't. I could write pages about how hard it was to learn Mandarin in Beijing and how long it took me to figure out how to weigh apples at the Chinese mega-market. I could write about my loneliness in China and my doubts about myself as a mother. Because there were many. But what I didn't think I could do was take my memoir and turn its gaze towards my disease.

Because what form could hold all the confusion and fear inherent in the place that cancer lives? Certainly not the book I wanted to write. That book was cancer-free. And how could I put the weight of cancer on that narrative structure? How much could any narrative in the end hold? I thought on it.

I got different cancer treatments from a whole soccer team of doctors. And I thought on it some more. And after my treatments were done, and we'd moved back to China for another year, I looked at that draft of my memoir and I saw that there was no way back to the place where cancer wasn't in the story. Cancer had become part of all my stories now. And maybe memoir was more malleable than I thought. I saw that it could bend.

I titled my book The Foremost Good Fortune and I put the cancer in. Then I went back and wrote more stories about the boys and the Mandarin lessons and the view of Beijing. It was a view that had been changed by my cancer, but my memoir had a subtext now and a context, and I learned that the form could hold it all and more.

This blog post was originally published in San Francisco Book Review: http://This blog post was originally published in San Francisco Book Review: http://www.sanfranciscobookreview.com/featured/2-1-11-how-much-can-any-narrative-form-hold/