Behind the scenes post of a writer’s vision, knowing you will likely miss the mark (especially with a memoir), and a prompt. 🎤
“It was a book I wanted to read….” Tony Morrison said about The Bluest Eye. And she went on…saying that she her first book wasn’t for the “white gaze” but for her own vision of herself and her community.
Ms. Morrison also said that The Bluest Eye was an experiment that “didn’t work as she had envisioned:
When I began writing The Bluest Eye, I was interested in something else. Not resistance to the contempt of others, ways to deflect it, but the far more tragic and disabling consequences of accepting rejection as legitimate, as self-evident...The project, then, for this, my first book, was to enter the life of the one least likely to withstand such damaging forces because of youth, gender, and race. Begun as a bleak narrative of psychological murder, the main character could not stand alone since her passivity made her a narrative void. So I invented friends, classmates, who understood, even sympathized, with her plight, but had the benefit of supportive parents and a feistiness all their own. Yet they were helpless as well. They could not save their friend from the world. She broke…
In exploring the social and domestic aggression that could cause a child to literally fall apart, I mounted a series of rejections, some routine, some exceptional, some monstrous, all the while trying hard to avoid complicity in the demonization process Pecola was subjected to. That is, I did not want to dehumanize the characters who trashed Pecola and contributed to her collapse.
One problem was centering the weight of the novel’s inquiry on so delicate and vulnerable a character could smash her and lead readers into the comfort of pitying her rather than into an interrogation of themselves for the smashing. My solution—break the narrative into parts that had to be reassembled by the reader—seemed to me a good idea, the execution of which does not satisfy me now. Besides, it didn’t work: many readers remain touched but not moved. ~ Toni Morrison
Such depth of self-study and artistic transparency opens this post—the final of the Flying Lesson #7—because what Ms. Morrison has to say goes directly to the exercise of looking at ones own work with a loving but also critical eye.
What is your Vision?
We writers have a vision in our minds and hearts, perhaps even in our souls, about the book we hope to write. We have ideas about how best to convey that vision, too.
My vision was two-fold.
First, I wanted to see into my past and discover if love had been present in the house on Mary Street. True love, lasting love, the sustaining form of love I could dip into like a love bank account because I couldn’t remember being loved that way. Ever. And the reason writing about it felt important was because I was considering having a child of my own. If I hadn’t been loved…could I love?
I suffered from the curse of the orphan. When adopted, I lost love but more, I lost home. I lost that first recognizable voice, smell, taste, and sound. I lost the biological ground of mother, father, siblings, extended family, and heritage. No one talked about all this loss though. No. Adoptees are usually expected (at least in my adoptive family) to overflow with gratitude toward their adoptive parents and to keep mutinous feelings like longing for familiarity and a true sense of home to themselves.
So, I wrote into the past, grasping at photos, slivers of memory, and clouds of conversation barely remembered. I allowed myself to drop into the dream of that past to see if I could touch something resembling love. At the time, I believed I had felt it. My adoptive mother, Janet, loved me, and I grabbed that belief greedily, wrote about it as best I could and went on with my life to have my son and then a daughter. Amazingly, I discovered that I shouldn’t have worried because loving them came easily. Bonding effortless. I hadn’t needed a story of love because love was already there. It’s there in all of us all the time. Love is.
As for Janet, my adoptive mother, did she love me? All these years later, I honestly don’t know. I’m thinking no. I think she loved the idea of me, a little girl to round out her family, but me, the adopted child of another woman? The baby who refused to be held or comforted? The one who cried non-stop for the first year of her life?
Doubtful.
And I’m certain now that my adoptive father did not love me. After Blackbird came out, I learned from his older sisters that he would introduce me as his “adoptive daughter.” And I also learned that he hadn't wanted to adopt a child.
Then there was the fact that Janet was sick, in pain, medicated, and slowing going mad.
I don’t know. I don’t know.
But I wrote what I could about our interactions and how I felt at the time, which mainly was pride (and relief) for doing what I was expected to do: Look after her. Keep her company. Be good.
This all became wickedly apparent years after writing and publishing Blackbird when I found my way to my original home and people.
When I heard my birthmother’s voice and saw her face, I was in love. Boom. No questions to ask. It was instantaneous because she was my home. And after spending time with my birthmother, hanging out, and drinking a cup of coffee, I had my answer. I wasn’t loved by Janet, not as I thought, and the love I was looking for wasn’t in that childhood story. Yes, I learned many things about myself that I’m still sorting out, thanks to good mentors and teachers, but this love I speak of…no. I was an object to my adoptive family, there to fulfill capricious desire and enslaved to perform a prescribed series of tasks.
The second reason I wanted to write Blackbird was to give voice to the shocking story I had uncovered in Janet’s medical records. My research, and the many interviews I conducted, unveiled a tale of greed, neglect, stupidity, and arrogance beginning with the many bungled diagnoses by many so-called experts; the mountain of pills she was prescribed that didn’t help her but instead created more infections and exacerbated, even brought on, mental illness; and finally, the ruination that the medical establishment brought down on the family.
“Primum non nocere” or “First, do no harm” is the vow doctors take in school, yet in reading through my mother’s medical records, I discovered she was harmed again and again. Remember, my adoptive mother was only thirty-four years old when she died. From age twenty-four to thirty-four, she was prey to a form of medical madness that no one talked about.
Then came the financial devastation. My dad didn’t have health insurance (he ran his own business, so it wasn’t available to him). The fiscal weight of her care crushed him. He died eighteen months after she did, at thirty-nine, of a heart attack.
Another part of the story was that my adoptive mother grew up in Boise, which was in the fallout cloud of the many nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada test site. The benign tumor in her back, likely growing since childhood, was another outrage. This American woman was hurt by the military and killed by its medical establishment. The collateral damage was my father's death and, later, my brother's death.
How do you tell a gigantic story like that in a country that doesn’t want to hear it?
You don’t.
You can’t.
Like the adopted child dare not complain about vague longings for the biological mother, the every day person isn’t allowed to ask these big questions without bringing some big consequences down on her shoulders.
Having left journalism back in the nineties, seeing this truth firsthand after many of my reports were altered if they conflicted with the desires of our advertisers, I knew how dangerous it would be to take on the true story in a direct way. So, I wrote in a child’s POV, present tense, and kept it as close to that child as possible.
But like Ms. Morrison said about her own first book, it didn’t entirely work for the reasons I’ve included in this lesson. And that’s okay. That’s writing. We have a vision, we try, we get close, we study and revise and try again, and then say, “That’s it. I’m done.”
Your Turn 🎤
Take a moment to write down your vision. There can’t be a judgment about this either. Your vision might make you cringe and roll your eyes but try to trust that deep, quiet, and earnest voice within. Give it room in your mind and your heart. Then set that vision statement aside and look at it now and again, tweak it a few times by adding a few more words or taking a few away.
Post it in the comment section!
I appreciate you and look forward to your shares.
~ Jennifer, 🍎
I love this!
I just wrote my 'vision', it's breathing, will tweak it some - and eventually post it here.
Thanks.
Loved the photo of you and your birth mom.
Your Turn 🎤
Take a moment to write down your vision. There can’t be a judgment about this either. Your vision might make you cringe and roll your eyes but try to trust that deep, quiet, and earnest voice within. Give it room in your mind and your heart. Then set that vision statement aside and look at it now and again, tweak it a few times by adding a few more words or taking a few away.