Ordinary Trauma: A Memoir

by Jennifer Sinor

As if she could not bear to leave it, Jennifer Sinor came into this spinning world twice, once dead and once alive, the first time born from her mother, the second, from a bucket, its silvery metal sides a poor substitute for the womb, yet enough. Through spare yet lyrical prose, Sinor threads together the story of how she learned to carry the bucket she was born into and reclaim all that was tossed away. In short, almost telegraphic, linked pieces, Ordinary Trauma reveals moments in life that are made to appear unremarkable but harm deeply. Set against the late Cold War and a military childhood spent amid fast-attack submarines and long-range nuclear missiles, this memoir delivers a revelatory look at how moments that typically pass unnoticed form the very basis for our perceptions of both love and loss.

Finalist for the 15 Bytes Book Award for Creative Nonfiction

Interview with Tom Williams at Access Utah

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

Published February 15, 2017

About the author

Jennifer Sinor is the author of Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O'Keeffe, a collection of essays inspired by the letters of the American modernist Georgia O'Keeffe and Ordinary Trauma, a memoir of her military childhood told through linked flash nonfiction. She teaches creative writing at Utah State University where she is a professor of English. She is also the author of The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray's Diary, a book about the diary of her great, great, great aunt, a woman who homesteaded the Dakotas in the late nineteenth century. All of her books work to reveal the extraordinary possibilities that arise in the most ordinary moments of our lives.

Born into a military family, Jennifer has lived all over the United States. While she considers Hawaii her first home, she has come to love northern Utah, where the mountains remind her of the ocean in the way they crest all around her.

Jennifer graduated from the University of Nebraska, the University of Hawaii, and the University of Michigan. She is married to the poet Michael Sowder, and they have two boys as well as a passel of animals.

Reviews

[Heidi]

I’m having a hard time figuring out what I really think of this book. I think her message is to find the good and the beauty in our lives amongst all the trauma and hard things, but I have to say that the majority of the reading was pretty depressing to me. I feel kind of down after reading it. I kept reading and wanted to know what happened with Jennifer’s life, but found myself thinking, “no way. Something else bad happened?!”
None of us are immune to issues and baggage and feelings of rejection, people treating us badly. And this memoir definitely brought all that out. It was definitely interesting and thought provoking and well-written.

[Lon]

When she stands in the ocean, body pushed and pulled by inexorable forces and powerless against the ruthless waves, Jennifer Sinor’s father tells her, “You have to go deep.” And so, when the next big wave comes, she dives deep into its heart. In _Ordinary Trauma_, pages of memory rise up to meet us and we, like the memoirist, have no place to go but through. What is revealed in that world beneath the surface shifts and refracts. The ocean is amniotic, as sheltering as a womb. But it also harbors an oil-black tomb.

Sinor’s writing is lyrical but never overwrought. Imagery and resonant metaphors do the heavy lifting—more than explicit meaning-making. Light filters down and illuminates the remembered experiences in ways that let us know these memories are being called forth by a thoughtful, sensitive adult. When, as the memoir gathers energy, the memoirist moves into synthesis and the naming of truths, it feels right.

Perhaps because Sinor is committed to recalling and examining the “ordinary” trauma of her experiences growing up, I felt I could more fully enter her world—in contradistinction to the experience I have reading “sensational" memoirs (whose capacity for engaging empathy seems to be inversely proportionate to their extraordinariness).

Working with our wounds, with feeling discarded, unwanted, unchosen, unacceptable, unworthy; challenging the stories we tell ourselves. This is to dive into the sacred heart of the Kahuna and to be found, still alive.

[Chelsea]

I am not quite sure what to think of Ordinary Trauma. I’ll start by saying that the title is apt—this isn’t something sensational like Educated or The Glass Castle. The traumas shared in this story pile up—a near drowning, a concussion, a divorce—but each of them, on their own, is the kind of story that anyone might have. The cast of characters are ordinary as well—her dad who shouts at her in rage but flies across the country to her graduation, her mother who holds her close in her worries but doesn’t know how to help her eating disorder. The story seems to focus more on the negative than the positive, with moments of happiness spaced between barrages of fear, anxiety, worry, and that makes it hard to read at times, and hard to judge the happiness of a life.
The memoir also felt oddly paced, languid at the beginning, rushed at the end. Her childhood plods by year after year, her teenage years and college fly by, a couple of chapters talk about her relationship with her cheating first husband, and then we skip ahead through the births of her children, never even really meeting her second husband. On the one hand, I didn’t mind the slow beginning of the book—in fact, I enjoyed the childhood stories the most. But on the other, I don’t think it could be much longer, and the choppiness of the last third made me feel like she didn’t spend enough time on it. Overall, if you’re attracted to the title of the book, it’s probably a good fit for you.

[Richard Owen]

Ordinary Trauma is no ordinary memoir and Jennifer Sinor is no ordinary writer. These connected vignettes told in a generally chronological order, are a search for truth – finding the lovable in the fallible. To explore the truth requires exposing memories, some of which are uncomfortable, if not painful.

All of the stories are short, most no more than four pages. Some of the stories are dramatic, including the opening piece that describes the memorable birth of the author, while others are more commonplace, the kind of moments that fill most of our days. It is the collective events that begin to define the trajectory of a family life.

One element that complicates the search is being part of a military family, moving from station to station every couple of years. The author and her family lived multiple lives during the years of her childhood and youth. It is not a life I know well, having moved only a handful of times in all of my 73 years.

I find very appealing how the author integrates revealing commentary with the description of an event. Sinor masterfully finds more in a picture than what is evident on the surface. Here is one paragraph from the chapter called ‘The Salt’ that picks up on the military practice of transferring families from one location to another . . .

“Being in the military means that the cupboards in your kitchen are always full of other people’s dry goods. Things your mother never would have bought at the commissary: raspberry Jell-O, dried manicotti shells, unfamiliar brands of baking powder. Refugees from the shelves of neighbors who had recently relocated to military bases in other parts of the country. They have the feel of the exotic. You marvel at how your mother would transform the tubes of pasta into something more familiar, slip the Jell-O into a cake mix without your ever knowing it was there. Slowly the supply would dwindle and with it the memory of the family that had left the goods behind.”

For all the pain exposed in Ordinary Trauma, there is also awareness of all that the author learned from living with ‘The Sun’ and ‘The Hero.’

This book deserves to be read. All those imperfections. We all have them. We all experience them in others. In the end we learn “one of the most ordinary of acts, breathing in and breathing out.”

[Lara Grether]

Jennifer Sinor’s memoir is captivating and thought provoking.

As a college student, I was lucky enough to be present when Jennifer Sinor came to read her own work on our campus. Among some of her other pieces, she read the first chapter of Ordinary Trauma. I was immediately drawn to her writing style. My emotions folded into her words as if I had always known Sinor—like I was reading the words of a childhood best friend. Encapsulated in this memoir are stories—some heartwarming, others heartbreaking—that are able to capture events, feelings and, well, ordinary trauma that many people feel but few are able to express.

The first chapter of her memoir is vital to the rest of her story. Speaking of her own experience of feeling unwanted from her birth, she carries a metaphorical bucket throughout the rest of the memoir, struggling with confidence and belonging. Growing up in a military family, Sinor recalls the struggles of constantly moving, and having a limited sense of home. One aspect of a military family includes giving away dry goods before being relocated. Sinor recalled, “When you have given away your dry goods, you know that the end is near. Clean the house for final inspection, a few days in a hotel and then off to a new state, a new house, a new school. Maybe for this reason you always feel protective of the things your neighbors give you. Though the items are often unfamiliar, you know what they mean for those who have just given them up. Continually asked to leave things behind, you become attached to salt” (143).

Ideas such as the one above are present through multiple stories, connecting her memories and life to everyday happenings, to ordinary objects and events.

Sinor’s memoir struck a chord with me. When I turned the last page, I knew I wouldn’t see my own life in the same way. Who am I? What buckets do I carry? What can I let go in pursuit of something greater? This book voiced feelings I didn’t realize I was harboring, and I am grateful for the opportunity it gave me to reflect.

[Alison]

Met the author at NonfictionNow 2018.

Pretty damn brilliant memoir!