Book #38: Room's Unique Perspective

"I count one hundred cereal and waterfall the milk that's nearly the same white as the bowls, no splashing, we thank Baby Jesus.  I choose Meltedy Spoon with the white all blobby on his handle when he leaned on the pan of boiling pasta by accident.  Ma doesn't like Meltedy Spoon but he's my favorite because he's not the same."                                                      -Emma Donoghue, Room

I met Emma Donoghue a couple years ago when I had the fortune to have her as my mentor in the writing programme, Diaspora Dialogues.  I had just moved back to Toronto the year before after a failed stint in academia, desperately wanting to return to my first love, creative writing.  Emma was wonderfully incisive and encouraging in her advice on how I could improve a story I'd been struggling with (it was later published in the anthology TOK: Writing the New Toronto).  I recall her advising me, in an email I read many times, to pay careful attention to perspective and which character I wanted the reader to sympathize with at any given moment.

Little did I know that at the time, she must have been putting the finishing touches on her own masterly experiment in perspective, Room.  As I said when I saw her at the book launch, had I known I was being mentored by a Man Booker nominee (fingers crossed for you, Emma!), I would have probably been too overwhelmed to write.  A couple weekends ago, I read Room straight through - unable to put it down except to shower and eat.  I was utterly mesmerized by the freshness of the narrator's voice. 

Although the premise of the novel is horrifying - five-year-old Jack has spent his entire life in captivity, born to a sex slave - the tale is strangely uplifting.  And I don't think this is simply a matter of the novel's narrative arc, as we follow Jack on his escape.  Particularly in the first half, when Jack's entire world consists of Room, I found myself falling in love with how his imagination brings to life the most stripped down environment so that all things appear charged with unique properties and wonder.  Meltedy Spoon, Plant and Spider spark the most delightful reflections in the child's mind, as his language itself appears something malleable and one-of-a-kind.  I loved the experience of entering his world and perversely, I have to admit, I felt a twinge of sadness when he escapes into the "real" world and is compelled to take on the life of a normal little boy.  But Jack will always retain something of his unique perspective, and this is the beauty of Room......

It occurred to me as I was sitting in a room by myself, staring at the white wall, trying to get started on the twelfth chapter of my book, that Room also offers an intriguing metaphor for the writer's life.

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A Japanese Custom

My short story, "A Japanese Custom," was published in this month's issue of MTLS.  If you feel like it, you can read it here.  It's loosely based on the stories that my grandmother, Kayaco, told me over the years....  Growing up, I always loved how she would reminisce at family gatherings about her girlhood in BC, back in the days before the Japanese-Canadians had lost everything, and her spunk never failed to astonish to me.  I wrote this story two summers ago for U of T's Summer Writing School (Alissa York was an inspiring instructor).  Although I liked the story at the time, rereading it now I feel that in many ways this slice of life doesn't do justice to my grandmother.  Oh well.  I guess my feeling of sweaty-palm-dissatisfaction may push me to write a novel about her....

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Book #37: Breakfast with My Publisher

"In studying old photographs I am struck sometimes by a sense of my being contemporary with my parents - as if I'd known them when they were, let's say, only teenagers.  Is this odd?  I wonder.  I rather suspect others share in their family's experiences and memories without knowing quite how."                                                                  -Joyce Carol Oates, The Paris Review Interviews

This morning I had breakfast with my publisher, Sandra, to discuss the first ten chapters of my book.  Since this chunk of writing contains some deviations from the chapter outline I'd included in my book proposal, I was a tad nervous, and it didn't help that I was jittery from too much coffee.  But as I perched on a bar stool at Canteen, unable to resist another Americano, Sandra told me she was delighted with the new emotional territory I'd broached, and in fact, if I hadn't included the new material, she'd been planning to push me to delve deeper.  As if through some beautiful telepathy, I'd intuited that she wanted more vulnerability and self-disclosure, which was wonderful to hear, because at this point I really am having so much fun reliving and revelling in the most miserable periods of my life - my promiscuous youth, my failed career as an English professor, family secrets, my deformed spine, what have you.  Writing about all that old misery somehow helps redeem it (at least in my mind).

So now I am down to the last three chapters, which I have the next month and a half to write.  No sooner had Sandra and I toasted to saving the best for last than a wave of cold sweat and nerve prickles swept over me.

After we'd wrapped up our meeting, I decided I needed a short break from working on the manuscript to clear my head.  So I ended up reading a book that a friend lent me, The Paris Review Interviews, volume three.  What a marvellous discovery.  I had no idea that these interviews are so revealing and interesting - it's as if these revered writers are sitting down with you and disclosing the most intimate details about their minds and writing habits, over a glass of wine.  I love in particular Joyce Carol Oates' reflections on how old photographs serve as inspiration and transport her, almost magically, into the minds of her ancestors.  What she's saying resonates with how I feel when I look at the old photos of my grandmother, particularly the pre-Internment photos from her adolescence, and I think to myself, Oates said it perfectly: her memories are my memories.

And so I must finish my current book quickly so I can move on to writing something else.  My deepest desire has always been to write an historical novel.

Photo from: here

Book #36: My Wayward Bones



"The hollow of my hand was still ivory-full of Lolita - full of the feel of her pre-adolescently incurved back, that ivory-smooth sliding sensation of her skin through the thin frock that I had worked up and down as I held her."    -Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Today was a lovely day (and I'm not the sort of person who often considers her day "lovely").  I went to my writers' workshop where I shared a chapter in my memoir that has been troubling me for a while - the chapter deals with a painful deformity of the spine I suffered as a teenager.  The other writers in my workshop were very supportive and encouraging (which came as a great relief, because the chapter is very revealing about my sexual coming-of-age and I was beginning to second guess my decision to include it at all).  This is the joy of belonging to a workshop - a respite from the isolation of writing alone and self-doubts whispering in my head. 

Here is an excerpt from the chapter, where I'm reading Lolita and identifying all too well with the heroine:

I stared at the cover for a long time: a close-up on a pair of pigeon-toed legs, clad in ankle socks and saddle shoes, slightly grubby around the toes. “The only convincing love story of our century,” reads the endorsement by Vanity Fair. I’d heard this line before, and yet I’d never found anything the least bit romantic or erotic about this novel. Fascinating, yes. Sexy, no. For me, it had always been a story about victimization and survival and a wily, foul-mouthed little girl struggling to hold onto some shred of self throughout her sordid predicament.

Humbert Humbert tries to control Lolita’s body – cataloguing all her measurements, policing her diet, relishing in running his hand along the prepubescent slope of her spine. As she gets a bit older, the signs of her body maturing – plumping out, growing curvaceous – are the ultimate turn-off. He desires to freeze her as his perpetual lover-child, his “nymphet,” forever smelling of grass stains and ice cream sundaes.

As I flipped through the pages, rereading my favourite sections, Humbert Humbert’s hands turned into the probing hands of Dr. Foote, as he bent me and molded me, exploring the possibilities of my young body, testing the flexibility of my wayward bones.

I wanted to stop reading, yet I couldn’t stop. The pain (and pleasure) of watching Lolita being violated was too immediate, too fascinating.

Photo from: here

 

Book #35: Looking for Madame Sosostris

"For years she had drifted into fantasy as she lay in bed at night or sat quietly looking at a book without reading it.  Now her fantasies began to serve a more urgent purpose.  It was much more bearable to be a princess getting tortured in a dungeon than a crooked little girl being tortured by doctors."  -Judith Rossner, Looking for Mr. Goodbar

Last week, my boyfriend took me to his office Christmas party, where I had my fortune told.  While mingling over glasses of bubbly, you had the option of slipping off to a table in the corner where an old woman with battle-marked skin and dangly earrings shuffled a pack of Tarot cards.  At first, I was skeptical about going up - I've never considered myself the new agey, occultist type, not since junior high at least - but one of the other guests told me that this woman had discerned all kinds of intimate details about her life and yielded scads of insight.  Curiosity got the better of me.

Whether working from intuition or mystical powers, the fortune teller did draw out a good deal about my life.  She knew (guessed?) that I am a writer and that I'm prone to stress and neck pain (maybe she could tell this just by looking at my posture).  But in any case, some cred had been established in my mind.  So when she said that something - some key ingredient - is missing from my current project, I sat up straight indeed.

Although she couldn't say what exactly it was, I knew what she was getting at.  It's something that has been lurking at the back of my mind, a shadowy territory I've been reluctant to explore in my memoir.

When I was eleven, I was diagnosed with idiopathic scoliosis, a curvature of the spine of unknown cause.  For two years, I had to wear a fibreglass back brace, and after that treatment failed to do much of anything, aside from giving me breathing problems, surgery was the only option.  Several vertebrae had to be fused and a metal rod was stapled to my spine and I was left with a bright red seam that both tormented and intrigued me for years to come.  (It's like the scar's a zipper into me... a reminder of my ability to become undone).

Since this event was so formative to my identity (my sexuality, my relationship to my body, my "escape" into reading and the life of the mind), it might seem obvious that I should include it in my memoir.  But I haven't, until now.  I haven't wanted to open that closet.  I've said to myself that it isn't important or relevant, but now I sense that just the opposite is true.

Thank you, Madame Sosostris.

So over the past few days, in between eating turkey at Christmas parties, I've been reading for inspiration Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Judith Rossner's 1970s bestseller.  Based on a true story, the novel tells a dark tale about a Catholic school teacher, who suffered from scoliosis as a child, leaving her with a sense of disfigurement that plays out in her games of seduction on the New York bar scene.  While her experience is no doubt different from my own (thank God!  I didn't end up being killed by a psychopath), I have to say that there are certain scenes dealing with memory repression, depression and fantasy that resonate with me all too well.  Now I have to curl up with my notebook and delve into that morass of my own memories.  A little light Christmas reading.

Photo from: here   

Book #34: Atavistic Atwood

"What impressed him that time, he even mentioned it later, cool he called it, was the way I took off my clothes and put them on again later very smoothly as if I were feeling no emotion.  But I really wasn't."  -Margaret Atwood, Surfacing

A few days ago, when I was at my favourite used bookstore, I stumbled across Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. When it was published in 1972, Atwood was elevated to a new level of literary recognition for her caustic portrait of the Canadian wilderness and the wilderness within one woman’s tormented mind (establishing Atwood’s longstanding fascination with the seamy side of nature). But what I remember most vividly about this old novel – from when I plucked it off my mother’s bookshelf and first read it at age twelve – are the sex scenes. These were my clandestine thrills as an awkward, curious pre-teen – to pull an “adult” novel off my mom’s shelf, one day Atwood, the next day Danielle Steel. The high and the low occupied a level plane on her shelf, but I quickly discovered my own preference for the darkness and power games and animal-like perversion that characterize Atwood’s best novels.

These memories stirred at the back of my mind, as I began rereading Surfacing, reacquainting myself with the boorish quality of the nameless narrator’s lover, Joe. He’s not a bad guy. More skillful in bed than most, and good looking in a rugged way, if you go for a cross between a buffalo and a bear. She and Joe explore the extremes of their relationship during a week long trip to the remote island where she grew up – her crazy father has vanished there. Her search for her father is the ostensible purpose of the visit, but it soon becomes clear that the real purpose is to explore the cryptic nature of her own sexuality. Who is she? Why does she feel such malaise and lack of desire, even as she goes through the motions of seduction and falling in love? What is this mysterious “amputation” within herself she keeps referring to?

Reading Atwood becomes a form of self-exploration. There have been times when I’ve felt so depressed that my own world seemed to be folding back into the atavistic world Atwood depicts so beautifully, where bare animal survival seems a struggle. A few years ago, I found myself trapped in a career I thought I would love but ended up hating, living in a town of 5000 that, although picturesque on the surface, became reminiscent of a Lars von Trier film. I identified all too well with the Atwood narrator and the primitive, archetypal world she conveys so well. The bone numbing cold seeped in on me, and my libido curled inward and died.

But just when rejuvenation seems impossible in Atwood’s novels, nature shows her softer side. The wilderness works in sudden, mysterious ways to reveal unforeseen possibilities. And it’s for these subtle, always ambiguous moments of change and awakened desire that I love reading Atwood.

Hmmm…. Just the inspiration I need to start writing Chapter Nine.

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When My Mother Was My Age

When my mom found out I'm writing a memoir about my relationship with my dad, she was very supportive - partly, I think, because she was relieved I wasn't putting our relationship under the microscope.  But the truth is that I've always found my mother a deeply fascinating woman, and I'm hoping in a future literary work to use her as a source of literary inspiration.  Thus when I found out that Jane Friedman of Writers Digest was hosting a mother-daughter interview series at her blog, called "When My Mother Was My Age," I jumped at the chance to participate.  It seemed like a great opportunity to get to know my mom in a role other than "mother" and at the same time, stash research notes for the future.  As it turns out, she suffered from similar sources of turbulence in her life at my age.  My interview with my mom and my reflections can be read at Jane's blog.