If you write or read memoir, In the Body of the World will reshape what you think memoir can be or do.
A lot of my memoir clients are writing about sexual abuse. And there is an enormous need in our culture for people to clear their souls of the distress of invasion of their bodies when they were indefensible, dependent, and vulnerable. I hope that the cultural conversation that these stories are creating has the capacity to change the way children are treated in the future.
Is it no surprise to discover that Eve Ensler was molested? You can hear it in the coarseness of her voice and communication style. You can deduct it from what she focuses on in her writing.
But I was surprised by the volatility – in the sense not of flammability, but in the sense of mercurial complexity of the locus of her focus – in this book.
Her doctor tells her, “There is shadowing in various nodes and there is something in your liver.” Next paragraph: This is the worst day of my life. This is the day I am told I am going to die…. I know liver. Liver is it. I am a recovering alcoholic. I lived with a many-times-recovering alcoholic. He was one stop away from cirrhosis. I know about liver. Next paragraph: Then a calm comes over me, the same calm that used to descend as I approached a beating by my father…. strange clarity/foreboding that I would not live…. I talked about death all the time … “I have had a good life.” I said this so often my son talked to his shrink…who said something about me being traumatized, depressed and burned out by all the work I was doing in conflict zones. But I know things and I have sensed death in my body all year. I am not panicked…. I have had an extraordinary life. It is exactly the life I wanted. I have done what I wanted to do. I have seen the world. I have loved my son deeply, his children and my friends, and I have been loved.
This is the epitome of what she accomplishes in this memoir: being in many locations, situations, and perspectives at once. The running themes are her cancer and her work with Congolese women abused as the collateral damage of that war of resource greed. Through her own body, she knows the body of the world. The themes of family dysfunctionality, of love, of self-abuse, living with a body, success, and action in the world are all hung out wherever a branch sprouts to support them – often several branches to a paragraph.
This needs emphasis – that cycling through pieces of several concurrent stories paints a multi-layered picture of a life story. Not just in memoire; any story can be presented this way. The benefit: the reader is intensely engaged and paying close attention – and in the process is drawing the same conclusions that Ensler does: one life represents the life of the planet, so it worth inquiring into.
The danger of this structural method is that the reader can get lost. The spinning of the stories must balance the centrifugal force with enough cohesion to maintain the centripetal force. This delicate balance, when successful, is a joyous experience for the reader, because we ride the edge of a life, along with the person living it.
Ensler’s success in the writing process, I have no doubt, depended on a terrific editor whom she completely trusted. From experience with clients, I suspect that the first draft kept flopping to left and to right and occasionally even crash landed on the razor’s edge (ouch!) – an unfortunately apt metaphor for her content. Ensler thanks “Frances Coady, who edited this book with the care, devotion, and craft of a surgeon.” My suspicion is corroborated in those words.
Sample 1: Opening chapter, entitled “Divided”
A mother’s body against a child’s body makes a place. it says you are here. Without this body against your body there is no place. I envy people who miss their mother…. The absence of a body against my body created a gap, a hole, a hunger. This hunger determined my life.
I have been exiled from my body…. I have felt the Earth as my enemy…. I lived in the concrete city where I could not see the sky or sunset or stars. I moved at the pace of engines and it was faster than my own breath. [Has anyone captured our contemporary American life like that?] ….
A body pressed against your body is the beginning of a nest. I grew up not in a home but in a kind of free fall of anger and violence that led to a life of constant movement, of leaving and falling.…
For years I have been trying to find my way back to my body, and to the Earth…. Although I have felt pleasure in both the Earth and my body, it has been more as a visitor than as an inhabitant….
As I had no reference point for my body, I began to ask other women about their bodies, in particular their vaginas (as I sensed vaginas were important)…. As a result of me talking so much about vaginas, women started telling me stories about their bodies. I crisscrossed the Earth…hungry for the stories of other women who had experienced violence and suffering.
Sample 2: I found my way into rape refugee camps in Bosnia, wore a burqa into the Taliban’s Afghanistan, drove espresso-pumped through land-minded Kosovo. I had to see it, know it, touch it…. Maybe I was playing out my badness, or searching for my goodness, or getting closer and closer to the deepest inhumanity to try to understand how to survive the very worst we are capable of. Then I went to the Congo … in one breath the most grotesque acts of evil were countered with the deepest kindness. I had gone there. (only a space break to the next paragraph)
My stoma [she had a colostomy bag after the surgery; symbol of the hole from childhood, yes?] – my shit on the outside. There was no way to get used to that. So better outdo it…made me suddenly maternal…made me want to caress my own body and protect her and myself for perhaps the first time in my life.
Sample 3: From a chapter of one line questions titled, “How’d I get it?” [cancer]
“Was it tofu?
“Was it never having babies?
“Was it having an abortion and a miscarriage?
“Was it talking too much about vaginas?
“Was it worry every day for fifty-seven years that I wasn’t good enough?”
[Writer: has she captured your monkey mind precisely? Has she fully captured you?]
Sample 4: Chapter entitled “A Burning Meditation on Love
There is something about the exhaustion of being poisoned…. There is something about being clutched, clenched, chemoed that is so deeply strenuous and catastrophic that it takes you to a mystical place…inside the inside of the cavern that is your body, so deep inside that you scrape the bottom of the world. That is where I began this burning meditation on love.
I had been adored as a child and despised. I had been worshipped and desecrated. I knew nothing of love that was not based on conditions…certain unrealizable expectations.
Sample 5: Final chapter, entitled “Second Wind”
Be transparent as wind, be as possible and relentless and dangerous, be what moves things forward without needing to leave a mark. [How’s that for a smashing up ending?]
It is in the kaleidoscopic iteration of the several stories that the picture comes together of a life of survival, rectification, devotion, and service/action. A horrific and inspiring life. A life that knows the suffering of the world through having lived one corner of it. Knowing the world because my body is the microcosm of it.
If you haven’t read it yet, these passages are why I’m encouraging you to read Eve Ensler’s In the Body of the World.
A final thought for novelists: When you read memoirs, pay attention to the power of first person voice. I stress this because so many writers resist. Is that because they’ve taken too many writing classes?
Until next time, delight in the process.