Book Review: Mary Karr's _Lit_

It's ironic, or at least self reflexive, that I should come across and read Mary Carr's Lit, which chronicles, amongst other things, a sojourn in a mental hospital, while I was in such a place myself. I'm not dodging this issue, by the way: I just need to write a review of this book while it's still fresh in my head, having read its 385 pages over two days between groups and appointments and involuntary meds-induced naps and not having access to a copy of it for reference purposes.

Given those circumstances, this isn't going to be a review like reviews I submit to literary magazines. It'll be more of a quick-and-dirty. It's important for me to be reading memoirs like this, since memoir is going to be one component of my MFA thesis on which I'm embarking, and dealing with stories around health and soul-health is an important aspect of what will be memoir'd.

Lit is plastered with rave reviews, including one from no less than Michiko Kakutani on the front cover. Given this unanimous ecstasy, I was distinctly underwhelmed. In fairness, though, without that billing I wouldn't have been disappointed. The memoir is very readable, sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, reflective enough that it isn't just a me-me-me (although of course it is that too).

I learned both some how tos and some how not tos from reading this book. Number one: Get a better editor! Of course that's always my pet peeve; how many books have I read, sympathizing and loving the book, and thinking about every three minutes "Can I be your editor and have you do this again?" Seriously, though, throughout the book the use of em dashes and commas is so erratic and often so ill advised that where it doesn't actually distort the meaning (which it does) it often made my eyes hurt. This being the case, it's not surprising that the whole panoply of pet peeves is out in force, from gerund use to comma splices; from sentence structure to sequence of tenses.The word "scrim" appears thrice--too many for such a word. I saw the word "Ziploc" spelled three different ways; the name "Spencer" spelled differently twice in as many lines.

The latter leads me to the biggest how not to I learned from reading this. Karr uses present tense as her main narrative tense. It's been popular to do this, the last thirty years or so, to impart a sense of vividness and immediacy. I've always been suspicious of the device because I've always loved the richness of time relationships language offers us. How wonderful, for example, that the present perfect allows for us to be in a present state as a result of a past action (I have arrived~I came here and am here now). But in this book, the present tense for narrative really doesn't work. It's not just a matter of making the narrative feel one-dimensional, lacking time relationships. There are many sentences structured something like "A few days after the funeral, she is walking down the street..." This may not look too bad out of context, but the first part is past tense solidly, and the present tense right after can only be unnatural. I don't have examples from the text, but there were many that were jarring indeed.

Some of these jarring instances, however, were created by what's probably the biggest how to of the book for me, which is that Karr reflects as a present time writer on the narrative of her past and inserts these reflections into the narrative. Present time writer and past time experiencer really requires past tense narrative. However, these reflections are probably the most special thing in the book, especially when she gives glimpses of the process of writing the book: not wanting to spend too much time on an episode, wishing a character had signed off on her version of events, choosing a pseudonym or pseudonymous location for an event. These reflections show that the author has her reader in mind and understands what a reader might want to know about, but also is aware of herself both as writer and experiencer--her privacy and the ways in which she wishes to present information are part of the relevant material.

I haven't read Karr's two earlier memoirs--and what's up with THREE memoirs?? But I was at a disadvantage for it. In at least one place, Karr summarizes material from an earlier memoir, but even apart from that there were enough untied ends that it was clear that material presented elsewhere was being assumed. Editorial and present tense problems aside, this may be the biggest problem with the memoir: it doesn't stand alone. But calling this a problem may be simply a matter of perspective. What single work of any writer stands alone? I still wish there weren't so many untied ends, though. 

Their presence prevents me from knowing whether a lack I see in the storytelling would be solved by supplying it from an earlier memoir or if it really is missing. The problem is this: The memoir is dealing with Karr's finding sobriety after years of drunkenness and depression--specifically sobriety via Alcoholics Anonymous, with a kicking-and-screaming arrival at trust in a Higher Power which finally leads her to Catholicism. Now, the book contains plenty about the wretchedness of being a desperate addicted alcoholic trying to claw her way out of an unbearable life situation, but precious little depiction of the earlier phase where drinking alcohol provides a high, exhilaration, a sense of invincibility. Even the younger Mary is at best verklempt. And yet the exhilaration and fun and adventure is referred to as something lost. Except that alcoholism runs in her family and she has pain to get away from, I just didn't feel like I got to know enough about why she became dependent on alcohol in the first place.

If I were to be writing about agreeing to take meds to control bipolar mania, I would want to talk about how mania was making life unmanageable and leading to ever deepening depressions for sure, but I would also want to talk about the experience of the manic high and why it is so hard to give up.  

One last comment, which sort of fits under the information not disclosed rubric: Karr sure makes an awful lot of comments about weight and thinness. She even lists thinness as the number one reason for why she's not the most suffering of afflicted people--ahead of being white, intelligent, HIV-negative... She mentions her own weight going up and mostly down, repeatedly, and depicts herself denying herself food and forcing herself to exercise. The anorectic in the mental hospital is the only one referred to as beautiful, consistently.  So what next? A memoir about her eating disorder? Not meaning to be mean...but it seems like there's something there and she's playing it coy.

And now I'm going away to think more about why this was such a quick and easy and even compelling read for me, even though aspects of the crafting drove me crazy and I didn't especially care about the character. If I could figure that out, I'd really know something about the intangibles of good writing. Answers in the comments, please! (As well as please tell me what to do about the 13,907 comments waiting for me here, all of them likely spam save maybe a half dozen?!)

I love you

This time, two weeks since I posted. And the 4,395 tally for my comments folder is beyond my ken or forbearance. The real comments from real people are so precious I can't just delete everything, but that's some golden needles in an enormous haybarn.

Okay, start again. Welcome to my space! I'm so glad you stopped by. I love you.

What a wild and freewheeling time this is. On a genuinely hot day recently, I stood at a high window, enjoying the warmth, puzzled by a brownian dusting of snowflakes, where were they coming from, what were they portending (harbinging?). I stared for a while and eventually recognized they were seeds. Dandelion and other wind-borne seeds, lifting and dipping like the sparrow flight I keep coming back to in my writing.

Even the sparrow makes a difference when it falls.

I think it's a sparrow. What's fascinating to me is that when I first found it, splayed almost symmetrically between the two apple trees in the lush greenhouse here, I thought perhaps it had been laid there as a sacred act (also known as sacrifice). I thought it looked iridescent, the bluish under-feathers gleaming against the dun.

WARNING: If you are squeamish or easily grossed out, please scroll fast past the next picture. I'm sharing it to share my point that everything is beautiful and that life breeds life, spirit continues.
Come to find out, as I did with my bare left hand, approaching the corpse as gently as if to nudge a sleeper awake, this bird had been lying between the two trees for some time. As luminous as the feathers up top had appeared to me, in some sort of meta way, the underside was a teeming of a different ordering of ensoulment.
Scroll past if you're squeamish, and I'll leave space between, but please hear me on this, with William Blake:
EVERYTHING THAT LIVES IS HOLY.


















EVERYTHING THAT LIVES IS HOLY

One of the key pieces I'm working on for my thesis centers on Bede's allegory of a sparrow flying through a hall from the darkness before and back into darkness beyond, representing a human lifespan. Isn't it ironic, or bizarre, or freaky, or encouraging, or worrying, that I have just reconstructed a version of this allegory where the sparrow flies into a greenhouse, flies through, and finds no open end at the far side, slams into it, and falls down to become an offering to a pair of apple trees wed for life by their pollen, to become a nurse for life forms about whom we know so little but who have such vigor. Air to earth. And into the ground.



Yes. Rest there. But you'll be so busy, you soon won't remember the bird part of you that's doing the resting--the rest of you, the new, teeming part, will be so busy. The rest will take care of themselves. And your sweet dreamy rest will take care of itself.

Odd, too, that I'm so totally unsqueamish, especially considering that I'm about the last person you'd want around in an emergency. But when it's 'gross' stuff (except vomit), I'm your girl. One year in college, there was an outbreak of horribly wounded hedgehogs, still alive but actively being taken over, evidently had been side-sliced by a weed-whacker or something. Neighbors would come find me if they found one and ask me to deal with it because they just couldn't. I stockpiled small boxes and walked many poor hedgehogs to the vet to be euthanized, having done what I could for them first.

If everything that lives is holy, and everything that exists metamorphoses...I can lie on my back in the middle of the driveway and listen to stacked layers of birdsong and feel the crosshairs of the universe shift away from me awhile. Feels good.

Ooh--my final challenge just as I write this: I can hear a rodent gnawing in my room, very close to me! I can't find it--I have no sense of directional hearing so I can't tell where it is. Let's keep that unsqueamish face on...

Psychiatrists as Pieces of Toast?

Well, what am I going to say? Why has it taken me a whole week to write a post? The weather has been unremittingly gorgeous, and I have been unremittingly tired. And busy. And tired. Just finished a whole bunch of editing and am excited to be writing more, thinking about my thesis! I'm excited for the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference, which starts this coming Friday. The keynote speaker is someone I've dearly wanted to meet and know for years now. We would have so much to talk about; I so hope I do get to talk with her.

Almost more importantly, I'm excited I get to go at all.

This time last year, I was at Foie Gras Farm, and I was missing the conference I'd been so looking forward. to. Yes, it's been over a year. And obviously I'm doing at least somewhat better, since I'm here. But how much better are we all doing? I was "inside" a couple weeks ago on the actual anniversary of going down to AZ. Several of my cohorts have gone back inside. The person with whom I've kept the most in touch was doing extremely badly last time we talked and is no longer answering her phone, which is pretty darn scary.

(And not too long ago at all, I was walking on this lake with the dogs.) How I'm doing with the food thing is much much better than last year. Maybe that's not always saying a whole lot but really, it is. I've become expert at showing the weight they want to see but have been 'rumbled' on that a couple times in the Place of No Shoelaces where you don't get to be in charge of preparing for the scale.My lithium levels are good, so I maintain (ha!) that my weight is fine.

And now, I'm about to make a gluten and animal-product-containing analogy. Stand by, and see if you can see these little fish in the unfrozen lake.

Imagine five toast "soldiers" off the same piece of bread dipped into runny egg yolk. If they all get soggy at the same rate, it wouldn't be surprising, right? Now imagine five "toast" soldiers from five different kinds of bread--white bread, wholegrain bread, sprouted multigrain bread, gluten free bread, manna bread, dipped into the runny egg yolk. If these ones all get soggy at the same rate, it might say something objective about the specific viscosity of the yolk, right?

Okay. If you have a mole on your back and five different dermatologists in different places and with different characters say it's a melanoma, would you be inclined to believe them? Are they five different kinds of bread or from a single slice?

Now. If you have certain mental health issues and five different psychiatrists say you need to be taking a certain class of medication in addition to what you're taking already, would you be inclined to believe them? Are they soldiers all from one piece of toast, or might they differ with their respective age, gender, location, training, approach?

I've had the same strong recommendation from five psychs now. Maybe six. With support from other kinds of practitioners too. I would much rather not add a medication and I would much rather not add this class. But then I remember I was against going on lithium, and it's been a godsend. But I wasn't already on other meds then. Okay, actually I was. Still. Why is it different when five dermatologists or surgeons or oncologists tell you the same thing on the one hand and when it's to do with your mental health on the other?

Since mental health issues are now known to have physiological components that can be seen on brain scans and verified in terms of chemistry, many doctors and therapists are encouraging people to think of treatment for these conditions as analogous to treatment for asthma or diabetes or cancer or other chronic health conditions. The fact that there's a continuum from migraines to bipolar to schizophrenia to epilepsy in terms of commonly used medications, the difference only being in the dosage, also strongly suggests the reality and commonality of these conditions. I have to keep telling myself this; the "it's all in your head" story is so strongly ingrained.

With all these conditions also, the meds don't carry all the weight. With all these conditions, whether they're perceived as primarily mental or primarily physiological, it's important to take care of things like diet and exercise, good relationships, a healthy spiritual practice, and other nurturing and healing ways of being. She says.

That said, sometimes in order to be able to do that, you need help getting your chemistry into that space.

I haven't decided to go on this medication for sure. But I do have a prescription. And I do think these advisers come from different pieces of toast; they're not all cut from the same slice. It's been a long time since I've gone on a medication and been in a position to blog about it. If I do go on it, I might just share, if it sounds like something interesting. Wanna see what happens?

Getting the Word(s) Out; A Plea; A Blessing

Getting the word out--OKAY--I'm at the point of begging for help now. The WHOLE POINT of switching my blog to wordpress was so that my responses to comments would go automatically to commenters. I believe that still isn't happening. I believe there's some setting I have to tweak somewhere, or some plugin I need to install (as if I know what I'm talking about) in order to make that happen. Please and thank you.

I really really really want to make that happen. And I haven't been able to find out how. Please please please help???

Getting the words out--Lesson of the week: going to a coffee shop to write because you're living too far from home to go back between commitments in town can actually result in some successful creative writing. Some very rewarding creative writing. If you know what you want to write and are disciplined about the internet. Even if random friendly guys start chatting to you, wondering why you are using two notebooks and your computer to write, what you are writing, who you are, etc., etc. Even though you don't (think you) like to have music in the background and start to get irritated by the time "The Day the Music Died" comes around the third time and the Beatles come to dominate with their catchy lyrics and sticking tunes. Somehow, all those distractions may be lesser than the distractions of working at home, since the latter demand action from you and the former are peripheral.

A Blessing--I'm in Anchorage again, less than a week after I bounced back down from the place of no shoelaces. I've had to tell my psych about my experience and have stirred up all the pain around the traumatic elements. So I want to tell one of the unexpected blessings that happened in the middle of it all. For some of the time I was in there, I was on "one on ones," which means you're watched by a dedicated person at all times. Great for an understaffed unit, especially as I wasn't the only one. The person on duty was changed regularly. One night I woke suddenly, as I often do, swung over the side of the bed, feet on the ground, before I was even awake. In the armchair blocking the open door was a staff member I hadn't seen since my last time in there. I said what I thought was his name, hesitantly, and he smiled and complimented me for remembering his name. After a bit he said, "You know, it's funny but you came back to my mind lately, and I've been praying for you." I thanked him and said it meant a lot. He told me he was going to be off duty for the next several days, so we wished each other well. I supposed I should try to sleep some more. I didn't see him again.

So, Where Was I?

Ooh, that's a multiply-entendred question/title!

The important thing is I'm back, in the flesh at least. Also gradually spiriting into the flesh, or fleshing out the spirit, or something like that. I have this persistent image of a rigid container with a flexible liner, perhaps to hold water. All the water has drained out, so the flexible liner has collapsed. My spirit is the flexible liner (although the rigid shell of my body has undergone some abrading also). Or, the rigid container is the room into which I've moved, already populated by the books and ornaments and papers of another writer, liver of an active life, participant in the very building of the house. My possessions are a flexible liner superimposed on the room and its paraphernalia, presenting a temporary home for my person, who is a Picasso-painting dot down in the bottom corner. Or, the shape of the 24-hour day (setting aside the concertina of Alaska's light and dark) is the rigid container; the daily schedule I've been urged to create and adhere to is the flexible/variegated liner to contain my wayward self.

Where was I...The "place of no shoelaces" was perplexing this time. The familiar faces were a comfort in most cases. Two staff members I hadn't met before were problems for me--and vice versa, I'm sure, but some of what I received at their hands was horrendous/abusive and wrong. Inconsistency, too, in much of the actual treatment information, and outright misrepresentation of several things in my discharge notes. Even with my level of education and reasoning skills, I am/was fragmented enough that I had to assemble this inconsistency and misrepresentation from my own fragmented consciousness. Piece by piece in my notebook, writing helped me to understand what I hadn't in a conversation, or to juxtapose what was said at one time and another and cognize the shortfall. Imagine how someone with less education and reasoning habitus, a non-writer--i.e. a typical patient in that institution--would cope with these treatment issues. As is probably obvious, it's unclear to me how much detail I'm comfortable sharing on this. Trying not to get myself started, or I'll go on for hours and cry, and it might be inappropriate. But I'm troubled.

Where was I with summer? This past week up in Anchorage was the warmest I've known AK to be. Close to 80 degrees! We were let out in the courtyard as much as possible--lovely. When I left, the house looked like this:

a week later, all the snow is gone. We're going to plant potatoes! Yes, it's June...

And where was I with unpacking and that creation of a flexible but strong container for myself up here? Tormented by feeling I should shed more stuff, of course. There's a whole post to be written on the fallacy of economies of scale, a lesson I keep having to relearn. But I'm also finding ways to be okay with having "stuff" through innovative storage. The main thing I have a lot of is books. I am looking into more reliance on electronics but the fact remains that I love books. I'm a classical scholar, after all. And an MFA student, not to be forgotten. Times in the past I've moved and let all my books go, there have been those that are irreplaceable and many that I've missed. So, I present: moving-boxes that double as shelving!

This isn't all of them (two bigger boxes on the floor, and maybe a box-worth more still at the cabin), and I haven't by any stretch finished organizing them. I won't be able to alphabetize; it'll have to be by size. And the stacking of boxes definitely needs more thought. Probably to go on my schedule as fun activity that's also productive.

So. I've missed y'all and I've missed this blog, as disconnected from it as I may have seemed. How precious it was to find comments from dear friends amid the 90-ish spam comments I waded through before writing this post. Precious to see your names there; precious to read your thoughts and advice.

Love and words...

Bouncing, Committal-- => Committed?

I still have Georgia On My Mind, and backed up in my backed up mental list of posts. Back in Alaska; back in Homer, moving, and tonight, back in a certain Homer institution in which I've spent quite a bit of time this year, most probably headed back up the road to spend some more time in another. 

After the lushness of Georgia, to contemplate the excitement of first nettles is a sharp transition. The pushkis (cow parsnip) are innocuous-looking little umbellifers now--but try pulling one up and see the enormous root wad undergirding even just a little dicot; and they'll already give you a skin rash, too, as they'll be even gladder to do when they're eight feet high and legion. The moose, poor gaunt twig-browsers, on their knees tearing up mouthfuls of green grass, grazing in gratitude, praying.

That this scrubby green is so amazing, Rite of Spring, pushing, teeming, will be rife and rank and over-all and rapidly soon. Despite the fact it's another crappy spring, rainy, gray, cold, and everyone's gasping for summer to come. It snowed last weekend, for goodness sake! That said, higher up the hill, like where I'm living now, the snow lingers. Here's a shot of the property where I have a room in the owner's house.

See that little pole in the foreground? Bird houses. She feeds birds and they come. They sing and they show themselves, their bright bodies, their feathers. My room is in the downstairs part of the house, unfortunately dark, but the one window gives out to ground level, its bottom just below my eye level, and there are often small song sparrows grubbing about down there on the ground; I think I saw a boreal chickadee too.

So. Transition. And apparently I don't deal with it entirely well. So look at me getting myself committed again, and on a holiday weekend again (last time was over Christmas/New Years) although this time I wasn't even aware it was Memorial Day Weekend. I'm not feeling good physically either--out of it and dangerous. When I come around, I'll be putting serious thoughts and intentions into how to manage all this better. To live with transition as I live in transition and to find stability within that wobble.

Any advice?

Getting Found From the Woods, or Back On Meds

Okay! As promised, here's the story about my adventure in the woods--was it really just yesterday? It really was. Time is doing strange things here. I seem to say that a lot. 

Something else I hear myself say a lot is how much I love being in the woods: being surrounded by trees, the way the light dapples and refracts (that word again). Well. I learned some lessons in the woods yesterday, both about being in the woods and, because I can't help it, metaphorically.

I went to Sandy Creek Park, which is a pretty, nicely kept park that appears self-contained. There is a lake with a bridge over it, a beach, children's play areas; over the bridge, some camping areas and some trails around the lake. Had I turned left on the lakeshore trail, I would have made a gentle sweep around the park area. I turned right. I hadn't paid attention to know that in that direction, the lake went off way past the boundaries of the park, almost out of sight, not self-contained at all.

I learned yesterday that being in thick woods for several hours with no clearing becomes claustrophobic. I really was a tunneling worm, although for extra dimension, a little bridge was where I rejected that paragraph of a book review I was writing in my head, and that upward draw was where I composed those nice sentences for the next essay, so that the sentences will always be colored by that part of the trail and, if I hike the trail again, various sections of it will be redolent of whatever sentences I was working on there.

Even so, after a while I was suffocating and really wanted a clearing. After longer, I was tired and ready to be done. Remember, I started the day so tired I could barely get myself out of bed. I kept going and kept going, thinking "it's a lake; surely I'll get back to where I started eventually!" Or at least to another exit from it and a trail back through the park.

When I was sooo ready to be done, I found this big, beautiful bridge. Perfect timing! This was obviously going to take me to a grand exit. 

Wrong. It led to a disused trail and a locked cattle gate. I climbed over the gate into a cul-de-sac with a mixture of grand houses and trailer homes. I asked some folks who'd just pulled in to their property where I was and how to get back to the park. They said I'd have to go back the way I came, several miles--safer than going along the highway. It was 6 pm at this point and I'm not in AK now with 20-hour days! I mentioned that, and they said I had at least a couple hours of daylight. It's much darker in the woods, I almost wailed. Yes, fair point, it is., they said. They absolutely did not want to help me out, even by talking to me. 

So, the best I could do was plan to go back the way I'd come as near to running as possible on my tired, blistered feet. Yes, I cried. I put a sad text on Facebook but more importantly, texted my friend with whom I'm staying to let her know I'd no idea when I'd be home. She called back immediately to say get back out to the road, find out where you are, and I'll come pick you up and take you back to the car. Wow, really? Wow. Okay, then. 

This time, though, I got a different answer from the cul-de-sac. A couple just heading out on their own walk saw me, asked if I'd come from the trail, and said of course they'd take me to my car! Apparently it wasn't the first time they'd rescued a lost crepuscular hiker who faced dashing back through the woods for miles. And it was a long way. Several minutes down the highway. I am so grateful to that couple. They were unconditional warmth and kindness.

So, obviously, the first lesson learned is "Look where you're headed for." Don't assume the lake is commensurate with the park. I had hiked almost halfway around it, seven or eight miles, but that left probably another ten. 

But the second lesson has to do with the two different cul-de-sac encounters. After that last excursion off my meds, I was describing to my psychiatrist how blessedly soon after getting back on them I resanified. "You're so lucky," she said. For many people, the meds don't work so quickly after those sins of omission and sometimes don't work as well forever after. Then she looked me in the eye and held the contact. "Don't take it for granted," she said. Similarly, I have blundered off road or off trail or on unknown trail so often all my life. Somehow or another, I've been rescued, picked up, brought to safety. Last night, though, for some time it looked like my only option was hike back the way I came, in darkness, with no guarantee I'd be able to follow the trail let alone notice the side-trail up to the parking lot. Don't take it for granted that I'll be rescued. But do be grateful that I'm so lucky.

Does it resonate?