which came first: love or the love story?

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I was sitting at my writing desk, about a year after my parents split up, when the pictures I’d taped on the wall above me caught my attention. There were four photographs:

J and I at our friends’ wedding: We were twenty-two, dressed up, slow dancing in the grass, sweating in the humidity. He grins broadly. My eyes gaze into the camera, glinting in the Tennessee sunlight. Our fingers are wrapped around each others’ like we’re afraid a great wind might come up and sweep us apart. What I remember most about that day is how, just before they cut the cake, he’d grabbed me and whispered in my ear, “You look beautiful.” He’d never said anything like that to me before. I don’t think anyone had. Because he lived in Ecuador at the time, and because I was just about to move to Florida, we’d been working hard to convince ourselves and the people around us that we were just friends. But when we were alone for a moment, he’d grab me and kiss me, like he was memorizing my mouth for the months ahead. They were the kisses I’d spent my adolescence dreaming about. I don’t remember being kissed like that before or since. Looking at the photo, I can see how blatantly our act must’ve failed. My round, red cheeks betray us.

The house I grew up in: It sits atop a small ridge. Brick with three dormer windows and a wrap-around wooden porch, it was my mother’s dream house. The green lawn is freshly mown with the perfect diagonal stripes of a baseball field. The sky is cloudless blue and the pear tree, its trunk just out of the frame, is a burst of white confetti blooms. Looking at the photo from our tiny one bedroom apartment in Vancouver, I could see, for the first time, the indulgence in such an expanse of property–three acres and four bedrooms. But from Vancouver, I couldn’t see the half-furnished rooms or the for-sale sign staked in the grass by the road. I couldn’t hear the way the tv echoed off the pine floorboards. From three-thousand miles, it looked like a kind of pastoral paradise with antique rockers on the porch and a dog lazing in the grass.

My parents at the prom: My dad was a chaperone again, twenty years later, but this time as a high school principal. Mom stands just in front of him in a black dress she borrowed from my closet. In perfect prom-photo style, his palm rests on her elbow; her hands are neatly clasped. Beside the piano, standing on an antique Persian rug, they are a handsome couple.

A postcard of a sculpture by Auguste Rodin: Two stone bodies against a black background. A man lifts a woman above his chest. I bought it in Paris, years ago, at Musee Rodin.

In Rodin’s Je Suis Belle, a man hoists the crouching, compact figure of a woman toward the sky. His every muscle is tensed, in exhaustion or ecstasy I can’t decide. She is delicate, almost inhuman with her frog legs pushed up into her abdomen. One arm hangs down, pinned against him. Her face turns away from his as he bears the entire weight of her body on his chest. His knees bend, his buttocks ripple. I wonder, is he bringing her down from the hands of God or offering her back up?

And I wonder why this image? Why these lovers? Why not Rodin’s The Kiss, a more popular, more conventional scene: a man and woman in a passionate embrace? What stories of love had I surrounded myself with? Or, was each image just another version of the same story?

I used to believe that the problem with my own relationship was that I expected it to look like my parents’ relationship–and it never would. But when they split up, I was suddenly free from that expectation. Here were two people who seemed to have done everything right, and they still couldn’t make it work. So maybe it didn’t matter that we kept making mistakes. A couple of months later, J and I moved in together. I remember those first weeks in our tiny apartment, walking around and saying to each other, “Isn’t this a happy home?”

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on reading your own writing

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Just before bed last night I was looking at what wordpress calls “the dashboard”–your basic blog control panel–when I saw that someone had arrived here yesterday by Google search. The dashboard shows daily “referrers”–links that bring people here–and which pages visitors read each day. For this blog, most people come from Facebook or an e-mail subscription. But for the first time, someone had come because they’d searched for me. Query: “mandy len” Vancouver.

When your online presence is as small and new as mine is, having someone intentionally seek you out sends an electric signal straight to your ego. And having someone stick around and read every post? It’s totally gratifying. Because what writer doesn’t want to be read?

But then it dawned on me that whoever searched for me wasn’t looking for the blog itself. If they know my name and know about this blog, they would’ve just typed in the web address. Or they would’ve searched for “mandy len” “love stories”, not “mandy len” Vancouver. So it was probably someone who had my e-mail address and guessed that Len was my last name, someone who doesn’t really know me. And since I’ve only given my e-mail address to one person in the past few weeks, I think I know who Googled. This realization sent another, more complex signal to my ego which can be translated as a series of questions: What would someone who doesn’t really know me think of me based on what I’ve written here? And would someone who stumbled across this blog want to read the book I’m trying to write? Would I want to read the book I’m writing?

I looked back over what I’ve written and an uncomfortable thought came to me: this blog would probably not motivate me to read my own book. I even suspected that I might sometimes be annoyed by its writer. When she is rushed, she lapses into what Orwell would call “ready-made phrases,” as if she cannot be bothered “to hunt about” for the best combination of words. She is careless and imprecise in a way I often caution my own students against. On a bad day, she and her rhetorical questions might easily be written off as a member of the “Carrie Bradshaw” genre.

I originally pitched the idea of a blog to myself as a workspace, a place to play with ideas, as something that would necessarily be rough and unpolished. I was okay with that. But sometimes reading your own writing is like listening to your voice on the answering machine. Its cadences are familiar, but the tone is warped. You hear as with someone else’s ears, and you become a stranger to yourself. When I was writing with no audience other than my writer’s group, I could be sloppy. I could let things simmer. Or I could polish feverishly. My writers group expected things to be messy, and all anyone else would ever see would be the clean, shining gem that might appear one day in print.

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another kind of love story: sex and writing

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When I was twenty-two I attended a writing workshop with Percival Everett, who asked us to write a sex scene. It would take longer than we thought, he warned, so we were all to head back to our rooms and get started. The next day in workshop we would read them aloud.

I spent that entire afternoon holed up in a white-tiled, airconditioned dorm room in the flattest part of Texas, staring blankly at my computer and willing my fingers to type something. Every sentence I found myself fighting off weird analogies and echoes of bodice-ripping romance novels.

Everett bellowed his deep, echo-y laugh whenever someone’s writing amused him, and I made it my goal to make him laugh. If I could make him laugh, I reasoned, the class might not notice how my face had turned beet red because I was reading a sex scene. That I wrote. Which meant I knew something about sex (which was better, I guessed, than knowing nothing). But I was twenty-two and from a rigorously-puritanical part of the world, where people didn’t talk about sex in private much less in public. I was also the youngest, whitest, most apparently-vanilla person in an otherwise diverse group. If I’d been able to hide how much I felt out of my league before the assignment, I was sure it’d become apparent quite quickly after.

Eventually I realized my problem: I was trying to write a love scene, not a sex scene. Once I took love out of the equation, writing about sex became a lot more do-able, and even fun.

I am thinking about this now because I spent the weekend trying to write a description of a man’s body. Not a sex scene, but a kind of inventory of another person. I wanted to articulate the physical-ness of him, the topography of his skin, the way you can love someone simply for how they exist in space. But it was a disaster. Saccharine and flowery and utterly un-subtle.

I’m a firm believer in attempting to eff the ineffable. After all, that’s why we created metaphor. But some things, like sex and love and the body, will always be kind of elusive. My friend Lee posted this video on facebook. I haven’t seen the entire movie, but I was charmed by this clip–a fairly SFW sex scene–and inspired to keep eff-ing:

avalanche stories

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“It’s like skimming cream off the top of fresh milk,” J says. As he says this, he pivots on the balls of his feet, turning his heels from one side to the other, bending his knees with each turn and stabbing the floor with an imaginary ski pole in a perfect marching rhythm. On his face is this strange, faraway grin. He’s left the living room and is floating down a fresh powder slope, leaving a perfect single-helix trail in his wake. Laying trenches, the boys call it. They look at the snow forecast and giggle like school girls.

Powder skiing is what my friend Kirsten would call type-1 fun. Like dancing ’til dawn or playing with puppies or eating my dad’s pulled-pork barbecue, every moment of a type-1 fun activity is intensely pleasurable. Type-2 fun typically denotes things that you don’t necessarily enjoy in the moment, but that you can look back on and say, “Oh yeah, that was fun,” things like camping in torrential rain or traveling by bus in some parts of the developing world. (When googling the term I found a blog that put it succinctly: “When you engage in type-two fun, you’re investing in your future self.”) But powder skiing, once you learn to make even two or three turns without bailing, is addictive, hypnotic. The satiny float of your skis on the snow, the momentary weightlessness as you straighten your legs. You crave it. The dopamine levels in your brain rise just thinking about it. And you find yourself engaging in all kinds of type-2-fun activities just to experience it.

type-1 fun

I took my first avalanche safety class last February, primarily because of a dawning awareness that I needed access to more powder skiing. An avalanche safety class, especially on a day when the dumping gray snow obscures the tops of trees and soaks through to your long johns, is definitely type-2 fun. But I was up for it. The year before, my roommates–the boys who had titled our wireless network “powderhounds”–had spent the winter sniffing out the fresh powder in the British Columbia backcountry, and now I wanted in.

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an attempt at an honest and unsentimental discussion of breaking up

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Last weekend I came across a quotation I’d scribbled in my journal a few months ago:

We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily, we do not need to learn it.

Rilke’s “Requiem for a Friend” is about grieving the loss of a friend, not romantic love, but I’m pretty sure romantic love was what I’d had in mind.

When I wrote it down, my own on-again-off-again relationship was in a precarious position: back on. Being on after being off is scary. Mostly because you know what off is like. Off is terrible. It’s that raw state of constant low-level self pity that, in certain desperate moments, you would do anything to escape.

I’d spent the entire preceding month listening to Harry Potter audiobooks and tearing up–on the bus, or on my bike, or in Whole Foods–each time a character died or, on particularly hard days, whenever someone told Harry he had his mother’s eyes. I downloaded Adele’s latest album. And I spent one entire afternoon searching youtube for covers of “Someone Like You.”

But after some self-pep-talking, I went on a few dates with smart, funny guys who had good taste in beer. I was making progress with off. Did I really want to risk returning to the old relationship? If it still didn’t work, I’d be starting all over, back at The Philosopher’s Stone. I couldn’t return to being the girl who wandered around the pastry counter with her bike helmet on and her earbuds in, desperately clutching a soft pretzel while dabbing recycled-paper napkins at the corners of her eyes. That’s why I wrote down the Rilke quotation. If I was going to go back to on, I needed to prepare for the risks involved.

Most of us expect love to make us happy, and neuro-chemically speaking, it does, at least initially. (Radiolab has a pretty entertaining podcast on this very topic.) And we Americans love happiness. The pursuit of it, after all, is not only an unalienable right guaranteed by our Declaration of Independence, but it is also the promise of our fairy tales.

When my parents split up a few years ago, they offered little more explanation than to say, “We’re not happy.” It was a hard argument to counter. Didn’t I want them to be happy? But, for the first few days at least, I was furious. Their separation had come as such a shock to me; I’d sensed no unhappiness from my life three-thousand miles away. I was sure the real problem was that they weren’t trying hard enough. They’d given up. And if my parents had taught me anything, it was that quitters never win. Continue reading →

memoir and the space-time continuum

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A warning: I’m going to talk about science, physics in particular. I’ve been doing a little reading about time. And when I say little, I mean very little, because I am not a physicist. I’ve only ever taken one physics class, in fact, and that was with Mr. Sheffield, who was also our high school’s resident computer expert. Whenever anyone had a computer problem, they’d come interrupt his class. And since this was 1998 and computers were still rare and somewhat mysterious in my high school (I learned to type on a typewriter in the 10th grade), this meant he was always gone. We spent most of our physics class goofing off and copying each others’ answers to questions about how fast a ball rolls down a ramp. I learned almost nothing.

In other words, this one is a bit messy and convoluted, a messay if ever there was one.

——

So I’ve been reading about time, and in particular about different theories of time, inspired by this very simple post on NPR. And reading about time has got me thinking about memoir. Specifically, why we write memoir. And how memoir functions in the world, for both the writer and reader.

Maybe you’re familiar with the idea of world lines. This one is new to me. Basically, from what I can tell, a world line is the four-dimensional path of an object through space and time. So for example, the computer I’m typing on is three-dimensional. It’s about an inch high, fourteen inches wide, and ten inches deep. The fourth dimension is its existence in a given moment of time. So the moment I bought this computer, it was one distinct four-dimensional object. It had height, width, depth and time (the single moment I opened the box, for example). At the present moment, despite having the same three-dimensional qualities, it is not the same computer. For one, between then and now, Roscoe’s wagging tail has caused a bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale to spill its contents across the keyboard and down onto the logic board. Miraculously, the computer still functions, but as the genius at the Apple shop told me, the computer will never be the same. The computer itself changes, as we humans do, over time. So you can think of the computer as having a unique fourth dimension in each subsequent moment.

The world line idea suggests that time is not linear, but it is in fact just a series of distinct four-dimensional objects that all exist simultaneously. It is only our perception of time that is linear. This is just a theory of course, and there are others out there, but it’s interesting one: that the universe could be made up of an infinite number of four-dimensional objects. You could take each moment of the computer’s existence (and, if you want to get complicated, of the existence of each of its components as raw materials) and pile them up like sand. Continue reading →

breaking up or breaking down

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The belief that love is a force beyond our control—that it can be as capricious and devastating as the weather—is so common that it’s built into our language. Love sick. Love struck. We can’t speak about romantic love without using the vocabulary of illness and aggression. Sure, it’s occasionally like a summer’s day, but more often love burns or conquers; it sweeps us off our feet. Lovers collide or are torn apart. Hearts ache and then break. Even smitten comes from smite, a blow from an angry god. And Cupid may be chubby and rosy but he still assaults us with arrows.

“Love is smoke raised with the fume of sighs,” says Romeo, the archetypal Western lover. It is “a madness most discreet/ A choking gall and a preserving sweet.” Whether we are seized, crushed, or captured, falling or afflicted, love happens to us. We are practically powerless, weak-kneed and nauseous, drooling at love’s mercy—or this is what the metaphors we’ve created for love imply.

But before we blame metaphors, it’s worth noting that recent research shows that love causes real pain. Ethan Kross’s fMRI scans showed that the same parts of the brain were activated during social rejection (thinking about a recent break up) and during physical pain. In other words, a broken heart feels a lot like a broken arm. Kross argues that we ought to be a little more sensitive to the pains of those suffering from heartache. (Ahem, college dorm-mates: my “Sarah McLachlan phase” now has scientific backing.)

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the body snatchers

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When I was twelve or thirteen, we got cable TV for the first time. Our house was up on a hill, bordered on three sides by cow or tobacco fields. When we first moved in, it was far enough from the road that the cable company wouldn’t foot the bill of putting in an underground connection. And my parents were not willing to pay the cost of installing cable, much less a satellite dish.

But then another family built a house beside ours and I guess that was enough to change the cable company’s mind. There was money to be made. So we got cable and, along with it, HBO. We didn’t pay for HBO, but we got it somehow. And in 1994 having HBO was a major middle-school status symbol, so I watched it all the time, if for no other reason than to be able to say at the lunch table, “So I was watching HBO yesterday, but then my dad made me go outside to see if the groundhog he shot from the upstairs window was dead or not.” (This is something my dad did actually try to make my sister and me do. But only once, because he hadn’t yet learned that such a request would make his adolescent daughters burst into panicked tears.)

For six months I watched the same movies over and over and the one I remember the best was the 1993 movie Body Snatchers. It was scary enough that I wouldn’t watch it right before bed, but on a Saturday afternoon, I’d put down whatever book I was reading and tune right in. I didn’t know then that the movie was based on a book, or perhaps more accurately, that the movie was a remake of two other movies (1956, 1978) that were based on a book by Jack Finney. In this particular version, the main character is a teenager, Marti, who begins to discover that everyone on the military base where she lives with her family is slowly being possessed by a race of pod people. This is most horrifyingly conveyed when Marti’s step-brother sees his mother’s body disintegrate as her pod-replacement steps from the bedroom closet. I vividly remember her naked body: half in shadow, half in light, beautiful but no longer human.

I haven’t exactly forgotten this movie, but I also haven’t given it much thought in intervening years. That is until I read a great article about the original Finney novel on NPR yesterday. And, to get back around to this idea of love stories, it got me thinking about love. Maureen Corrigan writes:

Like so many other great genre writers […] Finney had a knack for unearthing shallowly buried psychological anxieties. People we love can change, Invasion of the Body Snatchers tells us, and sometimes that change is terrifying.

I think she nails it here. It’s terrifying to see someone you love become cold, unrecognizable, without affect. Maybe it’s the product of dementia or illness or alcoholism, but, as Corrigan goes on to point out, it also happens in love. People who bring us unbearable joy can, without warning or explanation, become distant and strange. They look like the people we have always known, but they are not. They are doubles, aliens, immune to our heartache and petty human desire.

I remember once saying to my mother as she was putting her make up on, “You and Dad would never get divorced.” It was a statement hiding a question. “I don’t know,” she’d said, casually applying mascara. “Sometimes people fall out of love.” I think I argued with her that day. Sure people could fall out of love, but she and my father weren’t those people. They wouldn’t. But we are all those people.

I like writing and reading nonfiction because, when it’s done well, there’s a sense of intimacy with another living person. There’s an authenticity, a pliable realness, that fiction can’t quite touch. But I love fiction for it’s ability to reach under our skin and tweak a nerve, giving rise to a response that we can’t–or haven’t yet–put into words. I think in love, this pod person embodies our deepest fears. We invest ourselves in someone while not knowing, or being able to control, whether the person we love will always be the version of themselves that we fell in love with. Or if they might simply decide one day we are not what they wanted after all. And sometimes it’s this risk that makes love seem like it might not be worth the trouble.

the right choice

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When I was home in Virginia two years ago, my dad and I were driving around town when we drove past my friend Mitt’s* house. After his mom died and his dad remarried and moved to another town, Mitt ended up moving back into the house he grew up in. Later he bought the house from his dad, and then his long-term, out-of-town girlfriend moved in.

I asked my dad if he’d heard whether Mitt had gotten engaged yet. Marriage not only seemed like the next logical step, but like something Mitt would be good at. He’s someone people describe as “a good guy,” the kind of person everyone just likes. Because he’s friendly, uncomplicated, easy to be around. He’s kind of like my dad, actually, and maybe that’s why I can so easily imagine him married, settled and happy.

But my dad said no, Mitt was not engaged. And I made some comment about how the one time I met Nancy, I thought she was a real keeper.

“Well, what I want to know,” my dad said, “is when Reg** is going to ask you a very important question.”

This was a conversational detour I’d totally failed to see coming. My parents had never asked about me marrying Reg. And, because they’d never asked, I’d kind of assumed they were quietly waiting for things to fizzle out between us.

“Um. I hope it’s not too soon,” I said without thinking, “because I’m not sure how I’d answer any very important questions right now.”

Dad kept his eyes on the road. Then he said, “Well, honey, I’m sure you’ll make the right choice.”

And this, I think, is the problem. The idea that there is a right choice to be made about a relationship also implies that there are wrong choices, which suggests that one could make a very serious mistake with her life, which can make a person a bit panicked about love. But my dad is someone who has always inhabited a world of moral clarity. Almost anything can be labeled as right or wrong. The problem is that he’s not the only one who talks about love this way. We all do it.

the messay: a question of genre

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Reading Brevity’s blog this afternoon has gotten me thinking about genre. Often when I tell people I’m writing a book on love stories they look at me with interest and say, “You’re writing a novel that’s a love story?”

I usually respond by explaining that, no, I’m writing a nonfiction book about love stories. But this description does not make a particularly snappy elevator pitch. Sometimes I say, “I’m writing a book-length essay on love stories,” or “My book is part memoir, part research, part family mythology.” Sometimes I wish I was writing a novel just so I would have the language to describe what I’m doing. But what I’m doing doesn’t seem to have a sufficient genre descriptor. Calling it a book-length essay allows for the wandering approach that Scott Russel Sanders famously called “chasing mental rabbits.” But it’s ultimately unproductive because, frankly, most people don’t know enough about the essay as literary form for a book-length essay to sound remotely interesting. On day one of teaching the personal essay to my undergraduates, I spend a lot of time distinguishing it from the academic essay–a genre they seem to either tolerate or loathe.

But memoir isn’t quite the right word either. My experiences happen to be a convenient starting point for talking about love stories. But in the book I also want to re-imagine the stories I’ve spent my life hearing: my parents’ and grandparents’ love stories, things I could not possibly remember. Annie Dillard says, “A memoir is any account, usually in the first person, of incidents that happened a while ago.” But what if those incidents happened before I was born?

And where does research fit into all of this? Some of the tools I’ve been using to explore the topic include the things scholars, philosophers, and friends have to say about love and love stories. And when I actually publish this thing, in what part of the bookstore or library might it reside? I find myself in a weird, nameless gray area.

But luckily, if that’s the right word, lots of other books fall into a similarly ambiguous space. A few that come to mind right away are: Lauren Slater’s Lying, Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Dave Eggers’ What is the What, Richard McCann’s Mother of Sorrows, Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name, even Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. We don’t have adequate generic words for books like these much less a designated bookstore shelf. All are narrative. All are intensely personal. All are imaginative. But all are distinctly unwieldy creatures when it comes to genre.

So should we coin the messay? The novoir? When we discuss this in class, many of my students are comfortable with blending truth and fiction or research and narrative. To them, a good story is often just that. But I worry about orphan books that so easily find themselves in genre limbo, mostly because I’m aware that that’s exactly what I’m writing.