To survive trauma, one must be able to tell a story about it.
Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey was arguably the best book I read last year. Like so many of the books I seem to be gravitating toward recently, it explores loss; specifically, the loss of the author’s mother. Trethewey’s mother was murdered by her stepfather when she was only 19 years old, and Memorial Drive both grounds and mythologizes her mother’s story, likening her to Persephone of Greek mythology, who was kidnapped by Hades and made Queen of the Underworld.
I love the quote I chose from the book today because I have experienced its truth in my own life. There are some things I have experienced I’m unsure I would have survived had I not been able to create narratives around them; the stories of how I came so very close to the edge, could in fact hear the wind whistling in the canyon below, and how Something always pulled me back.
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Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems by Sonia Sanchez
When I first read the collection from which today’s quote is taken, I had a hard time getting through it. Some of the poems, some of the lines, made no sense to me. I do not like the feeling of grappling for purchase in the dark. I prefer spotlights lighting my path, illuminating the forest floor—guiding me home. I didn’t get it.
I do not like the feeling of grappling for purchase in the dark. I prefer spotlights lighting my path, illuminating the forest floor—guiding me home.
I mined the depths of the page, demanding it to reveal its secrets to me. But you can’t make demands of poetry any more than you can make demands of God. I had to be patient. I had to listen, utilizing sound when sight proved elusive. There is nothing more satisfying in the entire world than allowing a poem to reveal to you its truths. Some poems I have read dozens of times, over handfuls of years, before they have deigned to speak to me. It’s always worth the wait.
…you can’t make demands of poetry any more than you can make demands of God.
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BY EMILY BERL/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX. MYLES PHOTOGRAPHED IN WEST HOLLYWOOD IN 2016.
Movies have caused me to become / an artist. I guess I simply / believe that life is not / enough. I spin dreams / of the quotidian out of words I / could not help but choose.
I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems by Eileen Myles
Myles has always, ever since they first came on the scene, been a master of language. I love the way the artist’s prerogative is characterized here, as something that cannot be chosen, that some other force outside one’s consciousness does the choosing for them.
I love the way the artist’s prerogative is characterized here, as something that cannot be chosen, that some other force outside one’s consciousness does the choosing for them.
I remember reading years ago about someone asking Stephen King why he wrote such horrific stories, and his reply being something along the lines of questioning them as to why they thought he would be able to choose what he wrote.
There is something magical about writing, about any creative outlet really, and also something grueling—fierce and terrible and insistent. Sometimes there’s something you just have to get on paper or you know you’ll combust. A character or a line or an image, something fleeting yet enormous, that demands to be made flesh. So you obey. You commit to memory the thing that lives inside you and hope that eventually it will be sated.
Sometimes there’s something you just have to get on paper or you know you’ll combust. A character or a line or an image, something fleeting yet enormous, that demands to be made flesh. So you obey. You commit to memory the thing that lives inside you and hope that eventually it will be sated.
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I don’t want the people who love me to avoid the reality of my body. I don’t want them to feel uncomfortable with its size and shape, to tacitly endorse the idea that fat is shameful, to pretend that I’m something I’m not out of deference to a system that hates me. I don’t want to be gentled like I’m something wild and alarming. If I’m gonna be wild and alarming, I’ll do it on my terms.
Reading Lindy West’s Shrill made me reckon with the decades of internalized fatphobia I still needed to vomit up. Now, I am unashamed of being fat. One of my best friends and I were having a conversation the other day about how fat people (we’re both fat) cannot make a single self-deprecating comment about our weight without having it psychoanalyzed or misinterpreted by skinny people.
I cannot tell you how many times that I’ve had a conversation that goes something like this:
Me: God, I’m feeling so fat today.
Skinny Rando: Oh, stop it! You’re beautiful!!!
Me: Bitch, did I say I was ugly?
Bitch, did I say I was ugly?
People really enjoy telling on themselves. You see, for the first thousand times I had that interaction, I didn’t really think much of it. But eventually, I looked deeper. When I say that I’m fat, and someone counters with something asinine like No, you’re beautiful, they’re (consciously or not) letting me know that fat can never = beautiful in their estimation.
When I say that I’m fat, and someone counters with something asinine…they’re (consciously or not) letting me know that fat can never = beautiful in their estimation.
As fat people, we confuse people when we exist in the world without the specter of shame hanging over us like a cloud. To live in a fat body, and to have the audacity to not cower, to deliberately take up space, to not cover every square inch of ourselves with fugly industrial fabric, is still considered radical. People want me to explain to them why I’m so confident in my skin. Sweetheart, have you seen me? How could I not be confident? I am so gorgeous and radiant I should come with a UV warning.
To live in a fat body, and to have the audacity to not cower, to deliberately take up space, to not cover every square inch of ourselves with fugly industrial fabric, is still considered radical.
I earned every single stretch mark that traverses my skin like so many highways all leading me home. They tell the story of how I survived, and how I keep on surviving, despite every cacophonous magpie screaming at me and asking if I’ve tried the SOUTH BEACH JENNY CRAIG KETO CARROT JUICE WONDERLAND DIET? Hell no, and you can keep it—I’ll stay fat and happy.🖕🏻
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You’re the only one who can say who you are with authority.
I love this. It is so succinct in conveying the idea that it is up to each of us as individuals to decide who we are and in which way(s) we will present our identity(ies) to others. It also reminds us that we do not have to take on the words other people assign to us, especially those which are harmful misrepresentations of our characters or even contradictory to the ways we view ourselves.
It also reminds us that we do not have to take on the words other people assign to us, especially those which are harmful misrepresentations of our characters or even contradictory to the ways we view ourselves.
It takes a lot of courage to tell the world who you are and I believe everyone deserves the right to be seen and celebrated as well as have the opportunity to see others like them celebrated. Simply stated, representation matters. As a bookseller, I love those moments when young queer people clock me as a “sibling in the struggle” and look to me for resources for people like them.
When you’re fourteen or fifteen years old, and you’re any kind of Other, reading about an adult who looks the way you do, loves the way you do, worships the same way you do, or speaks the same language(s) you do, and is happy and healthy, is incredibly life-affirming. It says to them that it is possible to be authentic. To not compromise. To be radically yourself and still succeed. That feeling of being able to help someone else feel seen is like oxygen to me. I rely on it. I use it as a compass when the ugliness of the world threatens to make me lose my way.
That feeling of being able to help someone else feel seen is like oxygen to me. I rely on it. I use it as a compass when the ugliness of the world threatens to make me lose my way.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
Truth & Beauty is an exquisitely written and heartfelt evocation of a friendship. Reading it reminded me that most of the time we are incapable of saving anyone other than ourselves. We love, and that love may indeed be reciprocated, but we cannot pull someone back from the cliff of their own self-destruction by sheer force of will. Love is not a panacea. Losing someone we love is torture in its most essential form, distilled and pure. In the absence of someone we’ve loved more than our own lives, how do we reckon with what comes next in the aftermath? I don’t know that there’s an answer for this. Perhaps memory is the only thing that saves us. By committing to memory and the page everything that we hold dearest, we stave off our own oblivion, if only for the briefest of moments.
Perhaps memory is the only thing that saves us. By committing to memory and the page everything that we hold dearest, we stave off our own oblivion, if only for the briefest of moments.
I think that’s why Ann Patchett wrote Truth & Beauty. By writing about the love and friendship she shared with Lucy, everyone who reads it will know that there were once two friends named Ann and Lucy who loved each other with everything they had, and that death could not quell that love or erase its impact.
Favorite Quotes from the Book
We had invented time and could not kill it fast enough.
For the first time in my life I’ve found myself praying for actual things. Before I only prayed for stuff like wisdom and love and states of mind. These past few months, though, I’ve been much more materialistic. I want definite action on God’s part. Is this wrong? I worry that I’ll get punished somehow. I need to get out of this mess but I just don’t know how so I ask for his help.
From one of Lucy’s letters to Ann
She [Lucy] loved Christ for his suffering, for what they had in common. With all his strength, even Christ had asked if this burden could be lifted from him. The idea that pain was not a random thing, but a punishment of the evil upon the good, the powerful upon the weak, gave her something to rage against. After all, what is the point of being angry at nature when nature could care less? If you cried against barbarism, then at least you were standing up to a consciousness that could hypothetically be shaped. When Lucy believed that there were actually things in the world that were worse than what had happened to her, she could pull herself up on this knowledge like a rope. When she lost sight of it, she sank.
I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it’s pretty obvious to me that more often than not, the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try to call on it just like a light bulb cracking off when you throw the switch.
From one of Lucy’s letters to Ann
History is strangely incomprehensible when you’re standing in the middle of it.
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All of this is powerful, but the part that really resonates with me is Help me to forgive but retain the wisdom that pain has taught me. It reminds me of the words by Ovid, Someday this pain will be useful to you. And why should we expect any less of pain? After all, isn’t the only benefit of pain the knowledge we glean from it? In the moment, it shatters us, but what matters is what we create from the shards. Someone somewhere is going to read this and roll their eyes, but let them. Pain teaches us how to be in pain—how to survive it, to make it through to the other side.
In the moment, it [pain] shatters us, but what matters is what we create from the shards.
Every day, someone in the world makes it through something they thought would be unendurable; wear those moments in your life like armor. And I’m not just talking about physical pain. I’ve had three kidney stones, and not one of them was more painful than the unrequited loves I’ve held close at night while crying silently into my pillow.
Every day, someone in the world makes it through something they thought would be unendurable; wear those moments in your life like armor.
What I want for you, what I want for myself, what I want for all of us, is to quit suppressing the truths that pain teaches us. Pain will be there no matter what, and if we allow it to make us stronger, it might hurt a little less the next time. Take care, my friends.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It’s everything in between we live for.
I am late to the Ann Patchett party, but luckily there were plenty of hors d’oeuvres and champagne flutes left to go around. She writes with such clarity, such emotional precision, that there can be no question of veracity—you know you’re getting the truth as she sees it, no matter how hard it is to swallow.
To amend a quote by Vivek Shraya, the beauty of love is that it ends. Whether that’s in death, or any other form of separation, love (being the bond of affection shared between people living in the mortal plane) is finite. And thank God it is. We are only here for a short time, so let us fill our days with love, with connection, and with joy.
We are only here for a short time, so let us fill our days with love, with connection, and with joy.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
Isn’t that what divinity should be? The embodiment of truth.
The world is never not ready to kick you in the teeth, my friends. Wear your truth like armor and they can never use it against you. You are brave. You are resilient. You are the end result of eons of grand design leading to the person looking back at you in the mirror. Own it. Rise. Roar.
You are the end result of eons of grand design leading to the person looking back at you in the mirror.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
There are two reasons I wanted to tell this story, the story of how I learned to surrender. First, because it’s mine. It doesn’t belong to the tabloids or my mom or the men I’ve married or the people who’ve loved or hated my movies or even my children. My story is mine alone; I’m the only one who was there for all of it, and I decided to claim the power to tell it on my own terms. The second reason is that even though it’s mine, maybe some part of this story is yours, too. I’ve had extraordinary luck in this life: both bad and good. Putting it all down in writing makes me realize how crazy a lot of it has been, how improbable. But we all suffer, and we all triumph, and we all get to choose how we hold both.
God, I love Demi Moore. I’m quite the sucker for celebrity memoirs, but Inside Out was so meta. She really guts herself on the page and shows you who she is and what’s she’s been through and how it has all transformed her into the person she’s become. Not the movie star or the tabloid queen or that woman who was married to Bruce Willis and then Ashton Kutcher. No, within the pages of her memoir, you get to see the real Demi, warts and all. It is quite the journey.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
The Voracious Bibliophile 