famesick, restraint, chihuahuas, mothers
I also share a love of special needs tiny dogs with Lena Dunham and this is Twig, today suited up for Berghain, but really just more bloodwork and antibiotics at the vet.
I’m in the time where my book is done and it will be another five-ish months before it is in the world in September. I keep reading and seeing things that make me wish I didn’t edit out so many stories. Two years ago at a writing residency, my first ever, I cut an entire relationship. A relationship that I thought was going to last and didn’t. A deep heart chamber kind of love. It felt empowering to take it out at the time, this is a book about different kinds of mothering after all and that was a way to take care of myself. I remember walking with a writer friend in Provincetown and telling her my working title at the time- a different one, but it still had the word mother in it- and me saying I don’t know, it’s a lot. And she said yes it is, to own the world’s hatred at that word. Yes. The unsexiness we are taught to connect to it. Another friend said I would not pick up that book if I saw that title. We all have a mother. Even if we never knew her. We came from a womb. Someone birthed us. And as much as this book is about the events and circumstances that let me to have a child, it is mostly about all the ways I was a mother before being one, and all the ways I searched for and found mother figures in my life, how much I wanted to be mothered, how we all do, and how we learn to care for ourselves. Sometimes through our own children. I remember being on an airplane once with my infant son and a man (ofc) said, does he cry a lot? And I wanted to punch him in the fucking face. Naturally the best retort came to me later, I’m not sure sir, did you cry alot?
A thing I heard from early readers was that there was too much illness in my book. Of course I know that just because it happened doesn’t mean it has to be in the book or that it even needs to be written. Yet the feeling when I heard those words, was yes, yes there was too much fucking illness in my life. And so I cut it all out except one of the big ones, a diagnosis, a poetic only in retrospect, an interstellar lung cluster fuck. I am reading The Big M anthology edited by Lidia Yuknavitch about menopause and just finished Lena Dunham’s heroic memoir Famesick. I am feeling solidarity with her health journey, and thinking about the brutality- an over used yet apt word- of going through early menopause with a toddler after years of pain and cysts and endometriosis excision surgery and an appendectomy and the removal of my fallopian tubes and one ovary. All of which I had to pay for out of pocket and travel to Maine for because insurance only covers a treatment that does not actually resolve endometriosis. All taken out of my book. Another reader said, I’m not so interested when you talk about your body. I am so grateful Lena wrote her story and kept the illness in. That she wrote about her body even though we are taught to believe the world does not want to hear about our bodies. And that Lena Dunham proves this theory wrong when her book is #1 on the NYT list!!! What a favor she has done for all of us. I am thinking about how she must hear from thousands of women about their health struggles and how overwhelming this must be. How I bet she hopes folks will talk to her about the book and the writing and not just their bodies, even though she has paved the way.
I find myself thinking about restraint. About how all the writers I admire use it. Even Lena writing all about her body uses it. Her writing is measured, moving, heartbreaking, vulnerable, and she holds herself accountable. That she takes her time with her sentences. That you feel while reading that every experience shared and the folks she writers about was meticulously considered. There is nothing messy about it. I’m thinking about how the things you leave out are just as important as what you put in. I am thinking about how in her book she writes about how leaving the story of her friendship with Jenni Konnor out would have felt dishonest. About how she overshares with Bruce Springsteen he tells her it’s okay to have secrets that she keeps out of her memoir. Another writer friend with many brilliant books told me that when they see their books in a bookshop they want to rip out pages and stuff new ones in.
In my book, Mother Is a Place, I write about being misdiagnosed, about doctors not listening, about the world telling you that you are fine, or crazy, or hysterical, when you know that your body is sounding an alarm. That is there. And there are so many more times that this happened, and continues to happen. Especially for women, for people of color, for uninsured folks.
I am trusting there is another place for the stories that I cut out. Like the time I got a parasite called cryptosporidium after taking my son to a farm to hold baby goats. A misdiagnosis from a GI doctor that had a literal mountain of Mountain Dew behind her desk in her office.
