Year: 2010

I’ve been sorting through old files and found all manner of oddity, including but not limited to any email sent or received since 1993; full backups of every website I have ever designed or administered; and the contents of the computer stolen from my house a decade or so ago. The lost manuscript? Several other books I have elected not to publish? The controversies and hatred that destroyed the magazine? Photographs of hundreds of people in various stages of embarrassing development and fashion?

I have it all, sitting right here in front of me.

Of course I’m not going to look at any of these things. My archives serve no clear purpose, except to clutter.

Though I have been reading old journal entries to piece together an essay on topics that have faded in memory. In 2003 I was apparently obsessing about not just my wardrobe but more pertinently, the ethics of narrative nonfiction. I was worried that publishing the stories eventually collected as Lessons in Taxidermy was somehow “wrong” – though I could not quite identify the nature of the crime.

The concerns centered on the notion that I had a clear understanding of the facts (what happened) and an imperfect grasp of the importance (why it happened, or what it means).

Looking back, the real danger appears to be that I was convinced of my own indifference to how other people feel about the events described. Feelings are sticky, sloppy, annoying. Someone hit you upside the head with a plank? I only want to know how many stitches you needed, not what you think about the scar.

Well, it was a good theory.

I thought – and still believe – that telling the truth, no matter how hard or frightening, is mandatory. When I published the book I was also young (or stupid) enough to think that truth was somehow illuminating – that incurable pain could be relieved with sufficient doses of honesty.

I was wrong.

While assembling the stories I was cautious, using only the elements beyond dispute. Everything in the book (aside from names) can be proved. I have the records. It all happened, exactly as stated. If you refer to witness accounts, medical files, or any other source, you will find that I did not elaborate, embroider, create.

Instead, I edited – leaving out years, events, people, and always, feelings. The most bitter fight I had with my publisher concerned a profound lack of adjectives.

At the time I was fixated on the question of who owned the story – my story. My body. My life. This is a reasonable line to follow; the problem is that a life is not a singular experience. People are entwined with each other. I may have been lonely, but I was not alone.

Somewhere underneath the burbling about ethics I was scared that I would hurt someone by telling the truth – but I didn’t let myself examine that problem.

Hurt? Try taunt. Torment. Enrage. Words like “destroy” might be too harsh, but several important friendships ended, whether I wanted them to or not. Other relationships changed in traumatic ways. There was no reconciliation, no redemption, no reunion.

I accumulated positive reviews and lost friends. I wrote something down, guaranteeing I could never speak of it again.

Would it have been easier to keep the secrets? No. But this does not change the fact that I hurt people.

It doesn’t matter if they hurt me first.

Since 2003 my circumstances have changed dramatically. This life is factually better than that life. So why am I still thinking about these things? Why do I spend a significant amount of each day fretting about purely speculative concerns?

Because I know a couple of stories, and the urge to tell is more compelling than the fear of retribution.

When my beloved junkie auntie died my mother turned to me and said Now you can write anything you want about the family.

I didn’t believe her, but I suspect it was meant as an assignment.

My agent and my children urge me to write the stories as fiction, but I retort that I have no imagination. My job would be so much easier if I did – but for whatever reason, I seem to be stuck with facts.

Right now the question is not whether I will write the stories; it is, rather, whether I will allow them to be published.

James has been a close friend since we were sixteen or so, sharing everything imaginable as we ran away toward an obscure future. For twenty years we talked or exchanged letters every single day, and when I asked his advice in 2003 he said:

You are stuck on truth, which is real philosophy of the ethical moral variety. Fiction is something else, namely, the ontological, metaphysical sort of contemplation and assuming. Somehow I do not think you are about possibilities. Rather this other sort of wisdom: action and experience. You really care about remembering what happened; to the point of ruinous arguments over events. The problem is, though you often do not let on, you also worry, quite deeply, about what other people might think or feel about what happened. There is always doubt, and in that doubt, there are feelings – yours and theirs. And at the end of the day, regardless of what happens, you want people to feel alright. You want people to be better. That is your conflict. It is maybe also the point of your writing. 

He is one of the people who stopped talking to me after the book was published. He had valid reasons (though it is unlikely he remembers the precipitating event), and his life has been improved by my absence.

Facts do not extinguish feelings. They just help us decide what to do next.

Just in case anyone missed the point, I have a career. My job is portable in the sense that I can ‘work’ just about anywhere, but I am compensated for that work in traditional ways. If I freelance an article or sell a book in one country, but live in another, there are complications both in getting paid and in paying taxes for the work.

One simple example: to receive money you need a bank account. To get a bank account you need proof of residency – a visa, a permanent address. Banks and governments frown on efforts to move money across borders without sufficient documentation.

I dwelled in the United Kingdom for five excessively long years before I was able to get a bank account. I still have no pension or investments of any variety, and affordable home ownership is out of reach. Yet my savings account is clogged up with cash. Why? Because the passport and residency documents you possess actually matter. This is not a principle, this is pure pragmatism.

This is the subtext to a secret plan that has been afoot for about a year: Byron was offered a fancy job with a Prestigious Institute (PI for simplicity). When he first outlined the plan of accepting the job, one of my main objections was the portability or lack thereof for my career.

What is the provision in Germany for self-employed people, writers, artists, freelancers? How would I (or could I) enter whatever they call their social security system – pay taxes, accumulate pensions, acquire health insurance, etc.?

The answer: not easily, if at all.

That answer is not acceptable.

Rummaging for a solution, one of the representatives of PI suggested that the institute provide me with a cover story – a nominal fake job and salary as… something or other… so I could access the benefits system.

Excuse me?

I am not chattel.

I am also not young, naive, or stupid.

While I can be flexible about where I work or live, I am not willing to compromise about other issues.

I am an adult with a well-established career. It was already a massive compromise to even consider moving to a remote German town, then start the laborious process of rebuilding my professional contacts.

It is offensive to an intolerable degree to suggest I accept any further level of degradation, for any reason. To serve the career of another person?

In a word, no.

And everyone should feel relieved that my rage is limited to typing the above paragraphs.

I had to stop watching the news as I keep expecting Cameron and Clegg to gel up, fade to Top of the Pops, and burst into a duet of ‘Love of the Common People.’

That precious little premature infant I coddled and carried for years is now… five foot eleven! He has started to tousle my hair and call me Baby!

Oh, the horror – it won’t be long now before he is fully grown and launched, and then what will I do? I’ve been a mother as long as I have been an adult. I’m not equipped with other factory settings.

Speaking of, his sister came to visit, dragging her boyfriend along to enjoy the hospitality of this spacious (and rather surreal) cottage. There is plenty of space- six bedrooms – and the place gradually filled.

Alessandro is considering a move from NYC to the UK and is crashing in my London studio, but he popped over to say hello. Angela, Bjorn, and baby Tor (originally known via Sweden) arrived from Bath.

It was all rather jolly; I can see the benefits of possessing a house, if I could keep it full of friends and family.

In the midst of the festivities I convinced a coterie to come along on an adventure…. the Steam Rally at Didcot!

Recently I was reading a mystery novel (perhaps an Amanda Cross?) in which a character says that anyone who lives in Oxford, no matter how short the sojourn, feels compelled to write a book about it…. whereas nobody feels that way about Cambridge, no matter how long the retreat.

My visit thus far confirms this observation.

Oxford, for whatever reason, truly does have a kind of near mystical appeal. Dreaming spires and all that. How? Why? I do not know.

The only fact I can cite is that I have never dined in college during six years in Cambridge. But last night in Oxford I was seated next to the president at high table in the richest college in the entire world – and he found my scathing commentary amusing.

Later I was taken on a midnight tour of the fellows library, where I handled manuscripts older than my homeland.

The Ashmolean, Pitt Rivers, Maison Blanc cupcakes, the Angel & Greyhound meadow, meandering along the banks of the Cherwell. Picnics on Will & Lyra’s bench, with students wearing togas punting past, and a wild fox scampering at my feet.

My lodgings are in a seventeenth century house with St. John’s at the back and St. Giles to the front. How could a city be more seductive?

The only real problem is my persistent desire to be elsewhere.

My grandmother is still ailing, my aunt and cousin are dead. I can’t go home to help, or for the funerals, because my passport is needed in a faraway office while a bureaucrat considers the viability of my citizenship application. This is my choice, even if I am fated to forever wonder if the compromise is worth the pain.

I walk the streets, and wander through the colleges, in a state of melancholy amazement.

Grief makes even the most alluring adventure seem drab, and guess where I am? Oxford.

Think Cambridge, except the people dress a little bit better.

I am being quite stern and refraining from judgment of this town, since I am in mourning and all of my thoughts about life in general shift with each new death in the family.

However, a few observations: the only thing worse than a Leonard Cohen song? A Leonard Cohen song performed by a British busker. The only thing worse than posh academic Ladychat? Posh academic Ladychat about babies. Ick.

I am at least entertained by the hung parliament and formation of a coalition government. Parliamentary process is so fascinating.

The election, my confusion about where to live, and a separate yet undefined sense of unease conspired to wake me over and over again until I gave up just after dawn and checked my messages.

My mother had emailed to say Christopher is dead.

He was only eight years older than me. We grew up in the same place, raised by the same people. All the cousins were granted a nearly identical set of skills and talents, raw intelligence and curiosity. The only true difference between us? I had a mother who used her fierce love to protect me, body and soul. The others were not so lucky.

I went to college. Chris went to jail.

The last time I saw him was at Mary’s funeral. He told me that he was proud of me for getting out. I told him I was proud of him for holding on.

I’m sitting in a boutique hotel in a posh resort town in a country with a social welfare system. Chris died of treatable illnesses in a shack in a ravine, without even electricity to light his last hours.

Money might not buy happiness, but it can purchase food, shelter, and healthcare. I had to leave our home to find safety. He never had the chance.

I am filled with rage and horror and there is absolutely nothing to do.

I wish, oh how I wish, that things could have been different for all of us.

RIP Christopher. I wish there had been more time for you.

Continuing the marginally obsessive search for a new place to live, I ventured forth to look at Bath and Bristol again. The trip fell on the same day as the general election – fortuitously, because I would have otherwise missed the television coverage of the returns.

The whole event was baffling on many levels, though my kid objected to nonstop viewing of the motley and bizarre collection of “celebrities” chatting on a boat on the Thames. We switched erratically between news and entertainment, and discovered that Flight of Chonchords is excellent – who knew!

During commercial breaks I texted with Iain and read the hilarious twitter posts from my pal Michael Moran in the Times office.

Somewhere around three in the morning I gave up trying to understand which party had won, or indeed, what result would be more desirable.

I drifted into a fitful sleep, determined above all else that from this day forward I will be able to vote in the country where I live.

As the UK election looms, anti-immigration fervor is all over the news.

I am an immigrant. I bring my skills, my taxable income, my genius husband and dazzling children. I want to work and contribute to a society that is fair and equitable. I want to make a home.

I have done this at great personal cost. My relatives are dying, and because I am applying for citizenship in the UK, I can’t go home for the funerals.

Remember that when you cast your ballot. The immigrant of your imagination? It is me.

RIP Maryann – sister, wife, aunt, cousin, mother, grandmother, friend. We will miss you.

I have been inundated by ferocious waves of grief because I can’t be there for my grandmother, her mind gone now, all feuds and judgments erased.

She is no longer the person I knew, the authority I hated and adored in equal measure. I’m not trying to impress her, or rebel against the Lavender way; those concerns died with my grandfather. I still disagree with the choices they made, but I also understand the gift they gave me.

I grew up in opposition to them, and that made me.

But none of that matters any longer. All I can think of right now is how she held me and danced, in that house on the cliff over the bay, singing along to Shirley Temple songs on the record player.

I just heard that my grandmother has been airlifted to Harborview with a broken neck. Nobody knows how the injury happened; it seems that she was alone in her room at the nursing home, but she can’t recall.

My mother also reports that her aunt has started hospice care.

I am frantic with anxiety, and there is absolutely nothing useful to do. I am left with the poor substitute of a symbol: bouquets of roses ordered in haste from a great distance.

Transcontinental tears make no difference whatsoever.