When I was nineteen, I began to get it a little: my obsession with vulnerability, and how powerful vulnerability could be. And because I was living in Hawaii with no family, and no supervision, and had money and a fake I.D., I worked my newly discovered power. I hadn’t begun to deal with the shame or the guilt, and I certainly hadn’t started to trace my impulse back into my childhood, or tried to understand its roots or its intensity, I just got laid a lot. Nobody said masochist, and nobody had to. I didn’t even think that word. Not until much later.
Maybe, at times, when I was alone, I might have worried about where my behavior fell on the “normal spectrum.” Did everybody do this? Did everybody need this? But how could I possibly have judged what was normal? I’d been raised by conservative Christians who believed there’d been a Garden of Eden with a scheming snake and a couple of naked suckers. Hell, sometimes I believed it too. I just tried not to dwell on a god who wanted me ignorant, and had a creepy vindictive streak.
In fact, I tried not to consider any of it. The girls, or the boys, the methods, or the bruises, and certainly not the discomfort. I mean, I’d discovered a power hadn’t I? How could I be afraid when I was so powerful?
Just before my twenty-first birthday, I moved back to the mainland, and the grief began. I foreswore women, sex, myself. Some abstentions lasted longer than others. Twenty-three, in a fiction workshop with some deeply talented and intimidating writers, I thought about masochism, and working in the belly of planes at UPS, and the hot Latin professor, and I wrote a short story of bruises and failure and love.
(Let’s call this part one. Clearly I have a lot to say on the subject, and will come to it again. So to speak.)
Do you think you would be as good a writer without the scars?
Thanks for that. My experiences led to my subject choices, and influenced my voice, but I think the way the writer sees is more formative than experience. (I recognize the trouble with this argument: vision is under the influence of experience too, isn’t it? I only know that I’ve always been the observer, the narrator, the witness.) Without my particular past, I’d just have different stories to tell.
Of course. But we’ll never know if they would be as interesting.
A Field Guide to Deception has a different vantage on grief/tragedy/sex/family, and the manuscript I’m working on now is the closest I’ve ever come to my own past. I keep wondering if my work isn’t really about longing.
I think creativity is about longing. That’s one of my favorite words. That which is not and, we feel, needs to be.
I cannot seem to write about my mother. Oh, well, I do. It’s just not very good; it’s entirely unsatisfying. The events surrounding her death are my scars.
But writing is a shot at redemption, isn’t it? Maybe we need to feel as though we deserve that to begin the process.
That word redemption has gotten to me this week. It’s applicable in a way that I wasn’t entirely prepared for, and that I haven’t considered in years.