Welcome:
You’ve had a few days with the title essay from Show Me the Way, published by Atria in 2004. It was subtitled: A Memoir in Stories likely because essays weren’t considered a strong sellers at the time. Labeling it this way likely tapped into the stronger memoir market.
SMTW is not a memoir though. It is a collection of fifteen essays sorted into three categories. Past. Present. Future. The overarching question the collection asks is: How does one mother in the present, and future, from a bullet-riddled past? Translation, do wounds from the past bleed over into motherhood and if yes, what can one do about that? The answer is seemingly provided by the final essay which offers this answer: You do your best to remain present and laugh, and just…well…come to some level of acceptance. The photo accompanying this book was of author Jennifer laughing as a demonstration of this conclusion. But I suspect this wasn’t some Zen kind-of acceptance but rather more like a maniacal “whatever” laugh born from trying to give these publishers what they wanted…a simple story wrapped in a tidy bow…which is simply not possible with memoir, or at least with me writing memoir at the time, but I was trying.
What is an essay again?
Let’s pull these two definitions from the March tenth post:
Essay Defined:
In the West, scholars often date the essay tradition back to the sixteenth-century French writer Michel de Montaigne. Essays, composed in Montaigne’s retirement, laid much of the groundwork for what we now think of as the essay style: informal, frank (often bawdy), and associative….the essay writer tries out…essay in French meaning “to try”…various approaches to the subject, offering tentative forays into an arena where truth can be up for debate. ~ Tell it Slant
The essayist attempts to surround a certain something—a subject, a mood, a problematic irritation—by coming at it from all angles, wheeling and diving like a hawk, each seemingly digressive spiral actually taking us closer to the heart of the matter. ~ Philip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay.
As I wrote last week, I plan to discuss the outer and inner arc and point to where the two stories collide (the climax). Before I can do that well, I have to narrow down what SMTW is about.
At the Time of Creation:
With this particular essay, I wanted to take two different but similar stories and place them next to one another. I was looking to create tension with the opposition. Life. Death. The pivot point of similarity would be a simple, concrete thing: Hospitals. Going to and leaving.
I didn’t realize until I read SMTW for this post that I was also working with other core pairs: relationships with father/husband, brother/husband, what can be known/what cannot be known, thinking/doing.
In one of my comments a bit back, I wrote that writing one’s life is like writing a love letter to your future self. Or that’s how I see it because every time I go back and read something from years earlier, I learn something new about myself. It’s pretty fascinating actually. And when rereading SMTW, it was the same.
I learned TONS…
What I See Now:
I’ve numbered the paragraphs in this story which is tedious, but necessary to illustrate what I’m talking about. You can either do this on your copy or print this one I’ve scanned with the graph numbers written in.
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