“I love it when you talk about your family.”
A close friend said this to me over coffee a few weeks ago. Then again, maybe “said” isn’t the best word for how the sentiment landed. At the moment, it was more like she unleashed this statement on my mind. A jarring wake-up call, delivered in the mildest way imaginable. Afterwards, she turned her attention to the condensation dripping down the side of her iced latte.
“Bah! I hope this doesn’t leave rings on the table.”
I didn’t think it would, since some kind of glossy sealant covered the fixture, and I told her so. But my mind was still stuck on her comment, like the hem of a dress snagged on a stray nail.
I love it when you talk about your family.
It’s a pretty benign thing to say. A normal part of a normal conversation. Not earth-shattering in any way, even if it felt a bit cataclysmic. At the time, I wasn’t sure why the remark caused me to pause.
In hindsight, I think my surprise came from the fact that I hadn’t meant to talk about my family. I didn’t even realize I was doing it. Not until she pointed it out, anyway. How in the world does that happen? Even as an adult, the people who raised me still somehow manage to slip out of my mouth. At twenty-two, I’ve entered into a shaky sort of independence, but that doesn’t seem to matter. My family’s quirks and eccentricities still rise to the surface of my life. Even when I don’t want them to.
My family also slips into my writing. Probably more often than I’d like to admit. In a roundabout way, I’ve been writing about them for quite some time. Not exactly, of course. No short story could ever nail down the peculiarities of all the crazies who contributed to my gene pool. Human beings are simply too dynamic. If I sat down to chronicle my family dynamics, I wouldn’t get very far, because those people would shift and squirm with every new word I put on the page. Literature, for all its strengths, cannot capture the ways that a real person changes each day. We’re always shedding skin cells and losing hair. Moving toward or away from some new ideology. Evolving, even if we don’t know it.
But even so, in my short stories, some characters cast shadows that look a bit like well-known and well-loved family members. Not exactly, of course. Never exactly. The real and imagined just share a similar silhouette. This is especially the case in “Nana Faye.” In this story, a granddaughter watches the way her grandmother grieves. It’s an odd grief. A grief that only finds comfort in the constant tweaking of details. The old woman tends to the coffin that encases a loved one’s body. She applies artificial color to a dead woman’s cheeks. In doing these things, she seeks to find some sort of outlet for unused love. A residual, but never dwindling affection that will, unfortunately, go unclaimed now that her sister has died. But it has to go somewhere. It’s a love that demands some sort of expression, even if the desired recipient no longer breathes.
In the past, I thought of writing as the ultimate act of self-expression. A field where independence reigned supreme, full of mighty individuals putting thoughts on the page. And maybe it is, for some people. On most days, I sit on the other end of the spectrum. I find myself jotting down ideas because I need a way to catalog my love for the world.
For me, writing provides a space to dwell on details. I find a way to cherish the tiny rocks that cover parking lots and the cold, fragrant air of department stores by scribbling descriptions of them. In a similar way, writing helps me find a place to put my love for people. Like Nana Faye, I’ve found that it’s gotta go somewhere, so I put affection on the page. There, I can fiddle with and fuss over the shadows of loved ones before they’re lost to me forever.
I know it’s coming. A time when I won’t be able to flutter over them anymore. A time when I won’t be able to worry over the details of the world anymore. And so, on some days, my writing seems driven by a strange, premature sort of grief.
Do all writers coexist with this feeling? In her thoughts on the subject, Joan Didion once described keepers of private notebooks as “children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss” (102). On select days, I think I might carry this affliction. Not all the time, of course. But in stories like “Nana Faye,” I can see myself trying to get a jump on coming grief. I can see myself grappling with a presentiment of loss. A feeling that comes too early, but won’t fall away when I point to the time and insist that it’s mistaken.
The people who always manage to slip out of my mouth won’t last forever. And the world, with all its beauty, won’t always be mine for the describing. So I write. When the presentiment of loss becomes too much to handle, I churn out sentences that will never quite capture this life but still give me the illusion that I’m putting my affection in the right place. Although writing can serve many purposes, for me, it’s a place to lovingly shuffle details and rearrange images until some small imitation of life emerges. In front of a blank page, I can try to get as close to the world as possible. Within this space, I can try to get the world just right, before it’s gone.
*****
Work Cited
Didion, Joan. “On Keeping a Notebook.” We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction, Knopf, 2006, pp. 101-108.
