Guest Post, Once Upon a Time, Recall

Laura Esther Wolfson

“All of my stories are true, but this one really happened.”

Anonymous

 

Laura Ester Wolfson bio pictureI’ve been spending a fair amount of time in the dementia ward of late. To get to where I’m going, I pass through the large common room, where some two dozen men and women sit at long tables, all alone, every single one of them, many slumped over, foreheads nearly grazing the formica. The sight makes me marvel at humans’ capacity to curve inward, forming thereby something infinite.

High up on the wall, images flicker. Something mid-century is playing on mute, starring a woman with broad shoulders and marcelled hair who is bantering, apparently, with some square-jawed man of few words. They’re in a dim, cramped office, playing at being reporters, probably, or maybe he’s a hard-boiled private investigator and she’s his glamorous, distraught client. They wave their cigarettes around. It is a scene—smoking indoors, for heaven’s sake—that is now the purest fiction.

In the room, a man points at me and says, “Hey, look, a muchacha!”

“A girl!” he then explains, though no one is paying attention. (I’m past 50, but if a man likes muchachas, he will see them everywhere.)

In the corner, a woman, her head crowned with white braids, calls out over and over, “Pomogeetye!” which is Russian for “Help!”

My knowledge of languages, which got me hired as a translator at a large international organization, is useful in this place, too. Each time I hear the woman with the braided crown—which is often, because she’s always calling out, every single time I come here, her powers of speech worn down to this nub of a single word that succinctly expresses all she has left to say—I think that I should go over and address her in her language, which I also speak, briefly breaking her isolation, or joining her in it. I see no sign that there is anyone else on the ward, resident, staff or visitor, who could do that.

 

I think now of a character in Un roman russe by Emmanuel Carrère. (In the English edition, three words have been added at the beginning of the title for some reason, expanding it to My Life is a Russian Novel.) The story is a true one, so the character is a person as well as a character, but the French are nonchalant about the non/fiction distinction, and so in France, Carrère is a novelist.

I don’t have the book at hand, and it’s been a while, so I’ll just recount it as I recall it. Feel free to fact-check, should the urge strike.

As World War II is coming to a close, a Hungarian prisoner of war washes up in a remote Soviet town. Because he speaks a language that no one in the vicinity can identify, let alone understand, and the townspeople conclude, not unreasonably, that he’s speaking gibberish, it follows that he ends up in an insane asylum. Where he remains for about half a century.

And maybe he actually is a touch insane, because during all of those decades surrounded by the Russian language, completely immersed, he learns not one single word, not one single expression—not ‘hello,’ not ‘thank you’ and not even ‘fuck your mother.’

I mention ‘fuck your mother’ because it’s nearly as frequent—in Russian, I mean—as ‘hello’ and ‘thank you,’ especially in god-forsaken provincial towns soaked in vodka and despair. You will say that this cannot be true, that no Chekhov character ever says “fuck your mother,” no matter how much despair is swirling about, but the reason for this omission should be blindingly clear: Chekhov wrote fiction.

At last the error somehow emerges, and our Magyar protagonist, no longer a prisoner of war, but of something else, is returned to what remains of his family, in Buda, or Pest, or perhaps further afield. Fanfare greets the prodigal son. Through an interpreter, an official Russian delegation that has traveled to Hungary to attend the welcome-home event proffers apologies for the lost decades.

The mayor gives a speech—in Hungarian, of course, which everyone there understands, not counting the Russians. It’s remarkable what a change of scene will do; restored to his native surroundings, the man is no longer a lunatic.

 

But if reading good books is supposed to make you a bigger, better person, then in my case it has failed; in the dementia ward, I do not cast off my disguise as a monolingual person—I do not step forward to speak Russian. If I were to approach the pomogeetye lady and address a few Russian words to her, she would surely cling to me and make impossible demands—I’ve experienced this with Russians who are not in dementia wards—taking me away from my mother, who I have come to see.

 

Next, I pick my way through the jetsam piled up near the far end of the hall: a bed frame, a scale with a platform for weighing the wheelchair-bound, a stack of walkers, a few chairs, and I see now that there is a wheelchair stranded amidst the debris, and in it, a woman, who must have miscalculated the width of passage she needed to get through.

With some words intended to soothe, I pry her loose, turn her chair around and set her on another path I think should satisfy her equally well.

“Bastard!” she howls after me.

But I’m leaving the hallway now, and entering my mother’s room. Velcro screeches as I pull away the cloth barrier stretched across the doorframe. Placed there by the staff, the barrier has a big red stop sign on it, to deter those residents who have a tendency to wander.

The woman I freed from the debris is still cursing as I step inside.

 

I used to own a tattered paperback by Elie Wiesel called Legends of Our Time. Held together with a rubber band, it continually shed small scraps. The book had come to me in that state, I don’t remember how. When it became too dilapidated to keep, I relegated it to recycling, saving a single page from the introduction, a page that I sensed I would someday need.

On that page, which I keep attached to the refrigerator with a magnet, Wiesel refers to an old rabbi he’d known in the little Romanian town where they both lived, a town that was wiped off the map during World War II. Decades after the war, Wiesel, a New Yorker now, calls on the rabbi, who is ensconced in Tel Aviv. Nearly as old as time, and a man of God to boot, he is of course served up as some kind of sage.

Wiesel tells the old man that he’s become a writer.

“Is that all?” says the rabbi in reproachful disbelief.

Wiesel adds that he writes stories, true ones.

The rebbe asks, “About people you knew?”

Yes, about people he might have known.

“About things that happened?”

Yes, about things that happened or could have happened.

“But they did not?” presses the rebbe.

No, says Wiesel, not all of them did. In fact, some were invented from almost the beginning to almost the end.

“That means you’re writing lies!” says the rebbe.

Things aren’t so simple, says Wiesel. Some events do take place but are not true; others are true—although they never occurred.

 

She’s in palliative care, which is like hospice for people who aren’t dying yet. ‘Palliative care’ means they don’t make her do anything she doesn’t want to, so she gets to spend most of her time in her room, in bed, instead of at one of the formica tables by the TV, and when she’s not up to the ordeal of being put into clothes, she passes the day in a hospital gown.

She can no longer walk, or even stand. She has to be lifted into bed from the wheelchair and back again, and she sleeps almost all the time. She regularly forgets what a fork is for and that food is meant to be swallowed.

On her nightstand are a few books I brought in when she landed here, months ago: a volume of Thackeray, pages uncut, from the matched set she kept on top of her wardrobe, a spy novel about the French Resistance and a book on modern dance, with a chapter about a choreographer, largely forgotten now, who was her teacher and friend.  She doesn’t dip into the books at all.

The drawer of the nightstand is crammed with chocolate—bags, boxes and bars. The chocolates get unwrapped and popped into her mouth by whoever happens to be at her bedside at any given time.

The large window frames a stunning view of the Hudson and, on the other side, the Palisades, but she’s largely unaware. She has some vision left, but she never turns to the window—she’s always been averse to the sunlight—and she’s probably lost some ability to process shapes and colors into recognizable objects and landscapes.

In fact, when I put my face close to hers, smack in the middle of what ought to be her field of vision, I’m never sure she knows it’s me. It’s my voice she responds to, and my name.

“Hello, Ma! It’s Laura.”

Her face softens. A smile dawns.

“Hi there, baby girl,” she says to me.

 

Wiesel wrote something we call fiction, and he called it true. I write things that I remember, have seen or lived—I think. I’m not making it up, but I cannot swear that it all happened.

From opposite sides of the divide, Wiesel and I agree: stories live according to their own logic. They are ungovernable and uncategorizable, like schools of fish that sometimes unwittingly straddle international borders as they swim about, swishing their tails to and fro—to whom do they belong, those tranquil creatures of the sea? Turgid international treaties have been negotiated in the attempt to pin this down. Stories are also this way: blithely unaware, as they navigate the depths, of transgressing the boundaries that humans draw.

I am not a reporter, and I am not a chronicler, and I am not beholden to the facts, which are merely raw materials in a random heap. I am beholden to story, which is sculpted, intentional. I fashion aesthetic objects from found materials, not reports that say: here is what happened. In fact, the nature of what I write may depend on not being fact-checked. It may depend, to an extent, on the vagaries of memory, on misremembrance. The refractions of memory are part of the story.

While I do not think that my life story holds exceptional interest, I am more drawn to the lived than to the made up; more drawn to observing and shaping than to imagining and concocting; and more drawn to speaking in an authentic first person voice than in an imagined third that I myself don’t really believe.

On the one hand, an opera production with ruffled costumes, powdered wigs, abundant avoirdupois, scrims sliding on tracks at the flip of a switch, smoke machines, choruses, a corps de ballet, a pit orchestra and a plot that involves interlocking love triangles, multiple suicide pacts, cross-dressing, pilfered letters, goblets of poison and a masquerade ball followed by a duel at midnight. On the other hand, a lone chanteuse in a small circle of light surrounded by a larger circle of darkness, confiding ballads of heartbreak to a rapt room.

Oh, those made-up characters with lines of dialogue distributed among them and placed in their mouths, like coins under the tongues of dead Greeks, to pay their passage to the far shore; the creaking scenery and mechanisms of plot; the godlike omniscient third, godlike, alas, only within the confines of a single, small story—I just cannot work with these materials any more. As the world skids further and further off into the unbelievable, they are less and less convincing.

 

She never, ever talked about her life before motherhood. When I was a child, my attempts to find out about her past were efficiently shut down. I knew her as morose yet playful, and slashingly witty, so that on her lips, bile often blurred into hilarity, so long as it was not discharged in my direction. And then sometimes she was more slashing than witty (‘gasbag’ her preferred epithet for the longwinded professors who dominated my parents’ dinner parties).

She was a rigorous housekeeper, upholder of etiquette and reader of Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Nabokov, Mrs. Gaskell and both Trollopes, especially Frances. She never wore makeup, only lipstick (and that on rare occasions), but she was the Imelda Marcos of sweaters. An aficionado of the afternoon nap, upon rising she would quaff a tumbler of something grapey sloshed from a jug, then tap dance nimbly about the kitchen in little canvas shoes, a shirtwaist and a striped butcher’s apron—she had studied under Martha Graham, that I had gleaned, and she was a mean dancer, no matter the style—accompanied by the drone of Huntley and Brinkley and the sizzle of onions on the stove, crooning a ditty of her own invention—“Twinkletoes,” she called it.

Of her previous life I knew only the barest outlines. Now, though, she lives more in that past, gets lost in it, stuck amidst the clutter at the far end of the hall.

She often asks now about people long dead. Where is my mother? she demands. Why can’t I talk to her? she wants to know, her voice trembling slightly.

I remind her that my maternal grandmother—who we always thought she didn’t particularly care for, so why is she calling for her now?—departed this world in 1970.

“Of course!” She slaps her forehead. “I get mixed up about who’s alive and who’s dead.”

Then, “And what about my sisters? Are they alive?”

Dead, I tell her sadly.

“They died in a car accident, didn’t they?”

They died in bed, ten years apart.

She hesitates. But her need to know is greater than her embarrassment.

“And … what year is it now?”

As I get her unstuck and set her on another path, I see that barriers have fallen; I wander into rooms previously closed to me. I ask questions. It is my first opportunity to do so. Also, my last.

 

On this particular day, we’re talking about my Aunt Bea and her boyfriend Ed, who were an item in high school, during the Great Depression. (Bea was the oldest of the three sisters, my mother the youngest by many years, and, for a long, long time now, the only one still alive.)

“He was called Ed, but his real name was Isidore,” recalls my mother.  “I mean, you can give your child a Jewish name, but does it have to be that Jewish?”

She chuckles.

“The whole family loved Ed; he charmed us all. And, oh! He and his brothers were so handsome, they could all have gone straight to Hollywood.”

“Why did Aunt Bea break up with him?”

She looks at me in astonishment. This all happened decades before I was born, but it’s clear what she’s thinking: you mean you don’t know?

“Oh, she dumped him when she met Paul.” That would be my Uncle Paul, whom Aunt Bea later married.

“And then she went back and forth between them for a while. Whenever she was on the outs with Paul, she’d take up with Ed again, and then she’d go back to Paul. She used poor Ed terribly. Oh, the sweet young men who got mixed up with my sister Bea!”

Mirth bursts out of her again.

“Ed eventually married Viola, who was the director of a puppet theater.”

I’m trying to memorize every word, but she’s going very fast. I can’t retain it all.

“And then, years later, after Ed and Viola split, Ed got pally with Esther…”

Esther was the middle sister, glamorous yet earthy, a divorcée when that was still a pretty louche thing to be. Her I do remember—this was long, long ago—waving a cigarette around: outdoors, indoors, in bed, at all hours, in the shower, her back to the spray as she reached around the curtain to where an ashtray teetered on the edge of the sink.

“Ed used to drop by and visit Esther sometimes, in her apartment. Remember that view of Lake Michigan from the balcony?”

I do remember, very well. I used to strap on my roller skates, tighten them with the key, skate to the end of the block, then let the wind off the lake push me back up the street to where the liveried doorman stood, smiling benevolently.

But I’m trying not to breathe or make a sound. Keep going, Ma, I think. Just keep going.

“And one day, Ed and Esther fell into bed!”

My mother, talking about sex?  About someone she was close to, having sex? Talking about it in a light-hearted tone? What is happening in the world?

“Afterward,” she presses forward, and it occurs to me that she’s racing to entrust the story to me before she loses it forever, “Ed came stumbling out of the bedroom, tucking in his shirttails and exclaiming,  ‘I fell in love with the wrong sister!’”

I can see Ed, whom I never actually met, gorgeous in a fortyish way. So clearly do I see Ed, in fact, that at first I think my mother must have been sitting right there in Esther’s living room when he emerged from the bedroom, bowled over by midlife sexual revelation. Otherwise, how could she tell it so vividly?

Eventually, I will realize that no, she’s simply repeating the story as she heard it from Esther. Esther would never have seduced her older sister’s old boyfriend, or anyone else, with her younger sister, or anyone else, sitting in the next room. Of course not. But she wasn’t above bragging about taking a man to bed and making his toes curl with delight, especially if said man was her big sister’s old flame and the audience for her story was her baby sister, who was by then, I’m guessing, a grown-up, married lady.

 

I rush home to broadcast the tale of Ed and Esther. Family and close friends are delighted. My father claims a vague memory of it, but no one else in the family has ever heard the story.

To think that this might have been lost. As so much is.

 

Once upon a time, before Oprah, recall, nobody got all worked up about the whole fact/fiction distinction—except maybe ancient, very literal-minded rabbis.

Take Marcel Proust, a novelist who named his first-person narrator Marcel and based the eponymous Swann on an actual art connoisseur and collector, the scion of a Jewish merchant dynasty with branches in Paris, Vienna and Odessa.

Or novelist Thomas Wolfe, largely forgotten now, except as a character in a movie starring a fearsomely miscast Nicole Kidman as his zaftig, dark-haired mistress. Wolfe changed all the names, but still he couldn’t go home again, because the folks back home were personally acquainted with and recognized the characters who peopled his books, each and every one: the alcoholic doctor; the grasping woman speculating in real estate; her semi-estranged husband the semi-crazed stonecutter, also alcoholic; the stonecutter’s stone angel; the idlers at the soda fountain; the part-time prostitutes of Niggertown, as the wrong side of the tracks was then known.

Decades ago, I knew a woman who was from the same town as Wolfe. When Look Homeward, Angel came out, she told me, her parents penciled in the real names in the margins of their copy. Then someone borrowed the book and didn’t return it, so you can add that to the list of things that never made it home again.

Anyone who knows me (and many who do not) can identify my writing as sculpted from the unadulterated raw stuff of my biography, but the end product is actually more like that game Three Truths and a Lie: most of it’s true, I mean, ‘true’ as in ‘happened’ (pace Wiesel), but there’s some other stuff that creeps in, and after a while, I’m not always sure which is which.

I don’t quite know how that other stuff gets in, because it occurs in the white heat of creation, and little of what goes on in there survives in conscious memory. I start describing, in great detail, something I don’t remember all that well, and I go on, and on, losing track of time, growing short of breath—I get whipped up, the scene becomes overlaid with more and more detail that surges up from god knows where, and this is some of the best writing that I do.

That said, the section above, about the dementia ward, contains not a grain of the invented. It’s all real. Oh, except that the muchacha incident and the woman getting caught in the debris in her wheelchair did not in fact happen on the same day—I combined them, for maximum narrative density. Does that minor change make it fiction? Or is it still nonfiction, but a kind of unethical nonfiction?

It’s a mosaic; it’s a medley; it’s a mash-up.

 

I don’t worry too much. It’s writing; it’s a story, not reportage; not news, fake or otherwise.  It’s mine; I wrote it; call it what you like, as long as reading it lifts you, however briefly, above the quotidian—or plunges you into it more deeply.

(Filmmaker Chantal Ackerman, who made both documentaries and feature films and believed that each genre contains elements of the other, said, “Once you frame the shot, it’s fiction.” This from a documentary about her work.)

The part about the pomogeetye lady is real, though, because that happens every single time. It happened on the muchacha day, and it happened on the wheelchair-getting-stuck day, and it happens on every other day as well. But lots of other things happened on all of those days, some that I cut or omitted, and many that simply washed through the memory sieve, floated downstream into increasingly murky waters and came gently to rest in the silt.

 

The following week, my mission is to find out more.

“Mom, remember that story you told me about Ed? In Esther’s apartment?”

“Ed who?”

I remind her about Isidore, known as Ed; his movie-star handsome brothers; Viola and the puppet theatre; Esther; the view of the lake; Ed stumbling out of the bedroom tucking in his shirt.

She looks at me blankly.

There’s a pause. Then, she stretches luxuriously as after a long nap and says, “I really must pull myself together one of these days and get over to the library.”  It’s six months since she was last off the ward, one halcyon October afternoon when she allowed me to wheel her down to the river’s edge.

Why the library, why now?

I wait.

“I need to lay my hands on a copy of Tales from Shakespeare, by Charles Lamb,” she says.

“How come?”

“I’ve been trying and trying,” she says with a weary air, “to remember the story lines of Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Can you tell me what happens in those plays?”

I regard her blankly.

Romeo and Juliet I could recount, maybe. Hamlet, in a pinch. But there would definitely be some gaps.

 

Guest Post, Laura Esther Wolfson: After the Autobiography

Best American EssaysFirst I fled writing; then writing fled me. For many decades, we were like the lovers in Eugene Onegin: never in love at the same time.

Well, okay: things are still a bit rocky.

I have this notion that most writers my age (pushing fifty) have a few books out, but maybe that’s because the writers with the books are the writers I’ve heard of. Whereas I have a dozen magazine credits, a few honorable mentions and several “notable” listings in Best American Essays. And that’s it.

At a reading recently, the emcee was introducing me, and when he got to that part about the honorable mentions and the BAE “notables,” he laughed heartily and said I put him in mind of Susan Lucci.

“Who’s that?” I whispered to the woman sitting next to me, and learned, just as I rose to approach the podium, that I was being compared to a soap opera actress. A soap opera actress who, I discovered later on Google, was an Emmy nominee for Outstanding Lead Actress (daytime television category) for 18 years running before she finally won.

Each year, I attend a conference for “emerging literary writers,” held in New York City, where I live, and each year, I note the dearth of attendees my age. There are the twenty-somethings, with their freshly minted MFAs, and then there are the retirees: recently released from their day jobs, with little time remaining, turning their attention, at last, to the dream deferred. I conclude that most of my contemporaries who might conceivably be in the target group for this conference have either made it, and are thus no longer emerging, or else they have given up, and are thus no longer writers.

***

Things actually got off to a promising start. I was in the third grade when my teacher said: class, write your autobiography. Mine spilled across 34 pages; I was an eight-year-old with a past.

As the youngest child, you see, I was greeted at birth by my elders’ stories from the Great Before, their tellers eager for new audiences. So, in they went, those stories, almost as if they were my own, along with incidents at which I was present, I’m told, if too young to remember.

For example, I was just months old when we left California for the northeast, but the autobiography tells of trips to Pacific beaches, and there’s something about a lemon tree in the yard whose yield was so bountiful that we gave bagfuls of fruit away to the neighbors, as well as mention of an orange tree that produced one single piece of fruit and then died. And the Watts riots figured in, especially the buildings of South Central LA that burned as my mother labored and gave birth. And then I have emerged and she holds me gently on her shoulder, and watches, through the hospital window, the smoke furling upward, losing itself in the clouds.

Overlapping with and succeeding these pre-memories were pages and pages about things I did remember. On a family trip to Europe when I was six, I was parked somewhere while everybody else visited Anne Frank House in Amsterdam (I hadn’t yet had Bergen-Belsen explained to me), but I remember my brother plunging into a very narrow canal in that city, breaking through a solid surface of scum. (Someone dared him to jump across, and, long-legged, he inexplicably fell short.) In Florence, I remember only the hotel, where my brother and sister languished with the chicken pox. I stayed in with them, as I’d just had it and was immune. Meanwhile, our parents climbed to the top of the Duomo and visited the Uffizi Gallery: when would they have another chance? they reasoned. Of Brussels I have no memories at all, but for a long time a souvenir doll from Belgium sat on my dresser, wearing a billowing dress of magenta velvet and bent over a miniature device for making lace.

About actually writing that autobiography, I don’t remember anything, but late one afternoon I realized I’d left my life story on a tray in the school cafeteria at lunchtime, then placed it on the conveyor that bore the vile-smelling leftovers away into the kitchen. Back to school I raced, and with help from the lunchroom ladies working late to make our next day’s meal, who took my loss to heart as if it were their own, although I now think that probably there were among them some who could not read, I found my pages at the bottom of a massive gray dumpster, underneath a smallish portion of mashed potatoes, stained but legible.

My mother, a crack typist, cranked the whole thing through her Olivetti, the carriage return dinging impossibly fast as she went. She used carbon paper and sent copies to her sisters. The mail started pouring in.

“I’m a writer, like you, no better, only a little bit older, which simply means a bit more experienced,” wrote somebody Aunt Esther knew through her job as a fundraiser for the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. A rabbi, the man sent a copy of his book Choose Life, a compilation of sayings from Hillel, Maimonides and other sages. I understood that he hadn’t actually written this work himself, and thought of him as something of an imposter, but I appreciated his gift nonetheless, and especially the note.

“If you add to your autobiography a little bit each year until you’re twenty,” wrote someone else Aunt Esther knew, a newspaperman, “maybe it will include a love affair or two.”

I’m quoting from memory because, cleaning out my desk on a visit home from college, I tossed those precious letters. My mother, generally not at all the type to go through her children’s wastebaskets, rescued them, but then they disappeared again. I must have tossed them again, and if she re-rescued them, I must have tossed them a third time—the urge to declutter was powerful.

Decluttering: this may be why I write—to free myself of the detritus and salvage it by shaping it into something that is just barely usable, like a hippie jewelry designer who turns empty soup cans into hoop earrings. For every loss, I write something, and for the big ones, two pieces, or more.

But, oh, they come so slowly, just one or two a year, and that’s only since I’ve hit my stride, within the last decade. I console myself that if I write two a year for thirty years, that will, in the end, amount to a hefty output. But if I could choose only one quality as a writer, I would ask to be prolific.

If I were prolific, everything else would take care of itself: for the more I wrote, the more my writing would improve. Look at Balzac, who, it is said, wrote eighteen hours a day, and achieved both quantity and quality. Prominently displayed in the Paris museum that was his home is the coffeepot he claimed made it all possible. In the end, some say, it was the coffee (dozens of cups a day) that killed him.

***

After the autobiography, I went into decline as a writer.

Here, a few snapshots from my writing life across the decades:

A notebook. On page one, a story begins, scrawled in my third-grade hand. It cuts out mid-sentence. Then, this:

“Dear Aunt Esther, I’m giving you this notebook. Because writing is just too hard. Happy birthday.”

Followed by dozens of blank pages.

I don’t know what Aunt Esther, dead these fifteen years, made of this hand-me-up, or if she wondered why I chose to bestow the notebook on her rather than on anybody else. (The answer: her birthday was looming.) She wrote only the occasional letter or list, but until her last days, she loved to tell stories, seated on her gold-and-brown striped plush sofa in some kind of silky loungewear, pleated, her legs curled beneath her and a tumbler of vodka at her elbow, neat, regularly replenished from some hidden source.

Near the end of her life, the notebook, still blank except for that first page, somehow found its way back to me. I take this to mean that I am supposed to continue, hardships notwithstanding.

Yet, over the years, I have let so many comments lead me astray, dropped by people who had no idea I would take them seriously. A weary bohemian who’d been married to some number of writers and found them difficult companions, said, “Better a good typist than a bad writer.” The snappy wording seduced me, as did the implied refusal to suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. Or was I merely seizing on an excuse not to do the work? Whatever the case, it was a turn of phrase that cost me a few years—years when I could have been working to become a less bad writer. Probably my typing would have improved in that time, too.

I am a polytheist; my gods—books and those who beget them. But even studying and talking literature with fellow-acolytes has slowed me down at times. There was the Latin professor with the Welsh accent, excited almost to the point of derangement about his discovery of hidden meanings in the work of the ancients that he was certain no scholar or translator had fully mined. On and on he went for semester after semester (I was rapt and kept signing up) about layered significances and intricate wordplay. (Ovid was his favorite, but he also loved Juvenal, Catullus and Horace.) No modern could fully grasp these complex works, he said. I believe he numbered himself among the benighted.

“I can never write that way,” I thought, and for another few years did not write any way at all.

And there was my uncle, the leading independent bookseller in the state of Wyoming, until the chain stores did him in, and holder of a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Chicago (though my cousin suspects he never actually completed the degree). He’d read War and Peace six times, he told me several times, and he quoted long passages from Hamlet. (Come to think of it, it was always the same passage.) He declared that he never read anything written after 1900, because nothing worth reading had been written since then. (Not Proust? I think now—not Virginia Woolf? Was this self-imposed limitation of his really something to brag about? And how, without reading any of it, could he know that none of it was worth reading?) But back then, it was for me but a small step from his assertion to the conclusion that everything that would ever be worth reading had already been written, and long ago.

Listening to these old men hold forth, I accepted their notion of a canon with a hard finish, like polished rock: an unsurpassable past. Now, however, I see literature as a garden, or a forest, something forever growing, where there is always room to add something, provided it is wonderful, or at least fascinating, a space to try and fail and try again. It cannot ever be closed off and declared completed because one of the things it does is try to make sense of its time in the language of that time, something that, by definition, no past work can do.

Many of the books on my parents’ shelves were elegantly bound, their authors renowned. Those matching sets (Dickens, Dinesen, Disraeli, Dos Passos come to mind, and I think also of three black volumes that slid snugly into a black box, spines stamped in silver, but the title and author escape me now); the fine single volumes (Mallarmé, Mann, Mansfield, Melville); and the mid-century $1.25 paperbacks with the lurid covers that overpromised (Salinger, Sartre, Solzhenitsyn, Steinbeck), already in a state of advanced crumble when I was still a mid-century child—had they really started out as messy piles of pages, their authors mere dreaming scribblers, laughed at by their families and neighbors? I could not grasp it. I found intolerable the chaos of creation, the constant shadow of failure, the lack of résumé and affiliation that dog the obscure wordsmith.

Life slipped past, and just about everything that could slow me down, did. A fabricator and inventor of stories I am not and never will be, and though Laura Ingalls Wilder was an early mainstay (I thought our shared first name was a fantastic coincidence), I still didn’t get that you could write the seen, the heard and the lived, transcribe all that and then arrange. It was the old story: the primacy of the novel. I thought you had to make stuff up; I thought it all had to be fictional and fabulous. That wasn’t my thing; ergo, I would never be a writer.

My studies and work trajectory tell the story. Warily, we circled each other, writing and I. First, the undergraduate degree: literature, Russian literature, plus the language, my attempt to burrow partway through the canon without relying on somebody’s translation. Next, years spent working in distant parts, speaking other languages, for the same reasons that aspiring young writers in times gone by (men, always men) used to go seafaring, ride the rails, work construction or get themselves jobs on oil rigs: to see the world and build up a fund of stories to draw on forever after. (The “Maxim Gorky/Jack London thing” is how I think of this.) Occasionally, I tried to pin experience to paper, but still a step or two away from writing, I earned my living as a translator. Next, I dabbled in journalism. I was edging closer, but struggling still to keep things sensible: just the facts, who/what/where/when, inverted pyramid, writing for pay.

***

My regular job grew less absorbing, as regular jobs will do in mid-life, and at last I took to turning off the phone evenings and weekends and sitting for hours on the sofa with my laptop open before me. Sculpted, spangled narratives based on recollection were what emerged, plus mounds upon mounds of scrap. Selection, arrangement, tricks of memory, and some embellishment make categorization difficult: fiction? memoir? The stuff I squeeze out (how I wish I could replace “squeeze” with “churn”) is too close to each to be either.

What I write mostly happened, but some of it I make up (at least, I think I do), knitting together the “true” part and the embroidery part, and despite all of the needlework that’s gone into it, it’s seamless—as in, there is no hope of my remembering what actually happened and what didn’t, if anyone should ever ask. The main thing is not what’s real or not-real. We are not talking authorized biography here, but a wrought object, fashioned from found materials.

Sometimes, people try to confuse me with the facts. My mother, for example. “That book you mentioned in your last piece?” she’ll say. “It didn’t belong to my sister Esther. I was the one who bought it.”

She’s right, of course. She’s right, because she’s the last one standing; there is no one left on earth who can dispute her account. But by the time she tells me this, the thing is already in print, since I know better than to show her an advance copy. Even if I could change it, though, I might not. Because the thing is, it’s mine.

“Ma,” I say. “Feel free to write your own version.”

She makes a face. She doesn’t like it when I say that. Neither would I, if the roles were reversed. But I mean it. And, come to think of it, I have surely gotten some facts muddled in these pages, too. So, you too, reader, whoever and wherever you are, you too: feel free to write your own version.