Login
“You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love,” the artist Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary. How much trust and love we wrest from life and lavish upon life is largely a matter of how well we have befriended our existential loneliness — a fundamental fact of every human existence that coexists with our delicate interconnectedness, each a parallel dimension of our lived reality, each pulsating beneath our days.
In When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (public library) — her timeless field guide to transformation through difficult times — the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön explores what it takes to cultivate “a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness,” to transmute it into a different kind of “relaxing and cooling loneliness” that subverts our ordinary terror of the existential void.
She writes:
When we draw a line down the center of a page, we know who we are if we’re on the right side and who we are if we’re on the left side. But we don’t know who we are when we don’t put ourselves on either side. Then we just don’t know what to do. We just don’t know. We have no reference point, no hand to hold. At that point we can either freak out or settle in. Contentment is a synonym for loneliness, cool loneliness, settling down with cool loneliness. We give up believing that being able to escape our loneliness is going to bring any lasting happiness or joy or sense of well-being or courage or strength. Usually we have to give up this belief about a billion times, again and again making friends with our jumpiness and dread, doing the same old thing a billion times with awareness. Then without our even noticing, something begins to shift. We can just be lonely with no alternatives, content to be right here with the mood and texture of what’s happening.
In Buddhism, all suffering is a form of resistance to reality, a form of attachment to desires and ideas about how the world should be. By befriending our loneliness, we begin to meet reality on its own terms and to find contentment with the as-is nature of life, complete with all of its uncertainty. Chödrön writes:
We are fundamentally alone, and there is nothing anywhere to hold on to. Moreover, this is not a problem. In fact, it allows us to finally discover a completely unfabricated state of being. Our habitual assumptions — all our ideas about how things are — keep us from seeing anything in a fresh, open way… We don’t ultimately know anything. There’s no certainty about anything. This basic truth hurts, and we want to run away from it. But coming back and relaxing with something as familiar as loneliness is good discipline for realizing the profundity of the unresolved moments of our lives. We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness.
So faced, loneliness becomes a kind of mirror — one into which we must look with maximum compassion, one that beams back to us our greatest strength:
Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment. Cool loneliness doesn’t provide any resolution or give us ground under our feet. It challenges us to step into a world of no reference point without polarizing or solidifying. This is called the middle way, or the sacred path of the warrior.
Complement with Rachel Carson on the relationship between loneliness and creativity and Barry Lopez on the cure for our existential loneliness, then revisit poet May Sarton’s splendid century-old ode to the art of being contentedly alone.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
This was originally published at The Rumpus on November 17, 2020.
I Was on That Bullshit
June 10, 1998, I decided my father had abandoned me for the last time. My father didn’t attend my high school graduation and as far as I was concerned, he could fuck off forever.
That morning, I sat up front in the first two rows of graduates, a sea of purple caps with gold tassels. When my name was called, I walked across the stage and strained my eyes beyond the seats to find my family. I saw my Jama first, her wheelchair a great marker for finding everyone else. My mother, my sisters, my aunt, my cousins, and my uncle—my father’s brother. No sign of my father.
I went through the rest of the day feeling excited and proud but distracted, my father’s absence a sharp, jagged hangnail that snagged every moment of celebration. Fuck him. Forever.
I ignored my father for three hundred and eighty-seven days.
My Mama Was on That Bullshit
The summer of 1999, my mother asked me to drive my father to his court date. I didn’t want to do it and didn’t know why she was even getting involved, but whatever.
Navigating the afternoon of my father’s court date involved a special brand of mental gymnastics. I would look at and listen to and respond to everything and anything but him. I pulled up to the house my father lived in—a dingy white, wooden four-square house with a large porch that sat back from the street in a neighborhood some called “The Zone,” a shorthand for ‘The Twilight Zone.” I couldn’t help but watch him walk toward the car.
He looked terrible. Thin in the arms and shoulders and face, his stomach distended like he was six months pregnant, his eyes yellow and sunken. As he struggled down the cement steps of the rooming house, I struggled to find sympathy.
My father, looking a fucking mess, was probably just more drunk than I’d ever seen him, coming down off some week-long bender where he hadn’t eaten or drank any water. It had been a year since my graduation no-show, and in that run-down place he chose to live, it was no wonder he looked like shit.
Once we got to the courthouse, my mother asked me to come in with them. I didn’t want to, and I didn’t know why she bothered. My mother is the strongest woman I’ve ever known. The way she carried our family through all my father’s bullshit inspires me to push through when times are tough and has taught me to make sense of things when faced with chaos and uncertainty. That morning, I was confused. My mother had been so invested in finding her own happiness—seeing someone else, buying a new house—yet, here she was, once again, playing supportive wife.
During the hearing, my mother commented on how disoriented my father seemed, her face creased with concern. I shrugged. As my mother listened to my father, I listened to the judge. Apparently, my father had failed to appear for some other court date after a drunk driving arrest a couple months prior. He’d hit a light post and a parked car that had children in it. Because he was a repeat DWI/DUI offender, he was looking at jail time.
I knew it. Same bullshit.
I slid out of the gallery and walked into the hall. Standing firmly in my self-righteousness, I reasoned cutting him off had saved me, I was better for it, even. I wanted my mother to do the same. Be done. Cut the bullshit. I wanted her to be the strong woman I knew her to be. I wanted her to remember who the fuck she was.
My mother, worried and flustered, pushed open the court room door and found me in the hall.
“They’re calling an ambulance for your father. We need to meet him at the hospital.”
Doctors Be on That Bullshit
The doctor stood at the foot of my father’s hospital bed. I stood in the corner. My mother sat bedside. The doctor explained my father’s appearance—the bloated belly, the jaundice—and his demeanor—fatigue, disorientation—pointed to ascites, a common companion to liver disease, or cirrhosis, which affects alcoholics.
“Are you a heavy drinker, Mr. Wilson?” the doctor asked.
My father’s eyes rolled from the doctor to my mother, then to me.
My mother answered for my father. “He’s an alcoholic.”
“Recovered? Trying to quit?” the doctor pressed.
My father closed his eyes. “Trying to quit,” he said.
“I see,” the doctor said. He shook his head and whistled through his thin lips. “You’re going to have to try harder if you want to stick around.”
Try. Harder.
But then, the doctor looked at me and my mother, his tone changing. He launched into an explanation of alcoholism as a disease, pressing upon my father’s helplessness, his sickness, his need.
Try. Harder.
I had heard it all before. The Al-Anon and Alateen meetings my mother took me and my sister to as kids explained alcoholism the same way. I remember reading and rereading What’s “Drunk,” Mama?. I remember wishing it had more pictures. I remember wishing the pictures it did have weren’t sadly sketched drawings with squiggly lines and no colors. I remember wishing it didn’t use the word “sick” to mean arguing all the time, sleeping a lot, and breaking promises when I knew sick meant sneezing and coughing and sore throats.
Standing in the corner, I was that little girl again, rereading that same paragraph: “I guess Daddy is sick. He’s always drinking. Something is wrong with Mama, too! Mama is always crying or mad. It’s hard to understand. It mixes me up.” There were no pictures on that page. Only words. Sick, drinking, wrong, mad, cry, bad, wrong, angry.
Is being angry being sick, too?
Am I sick, too?
I looked around the room. My father’s eyes watered with apology. My mother’s jaw was tight with disappointment. The doctor glanced around at the three of us. He was the professional. He was supposed to have some answers. He offered none. Instead, he set a bomb of bullshit blame in the center of the room.
“If your father had been left alone for a few more days, he wouldn’t have made it,” he said holding his clipboard to his chest. Then he left without telling us how to get well.
Blackouts Are That Bullshit
In September 1998, I got blackout drunk for the first time. Even though I drank when sneaking into clubs—my older sister’s ID my passport to adventures in Bacardi Limón and Sprite, vodka-cranberry, and Captain and Coke—I had never blacked out, never drank so much I couldn’t remember the night. But the weekend after my eighteenth birthday, my mother, and the man she was seeing at the time, took me out for what was to be a grown-up evening of Milwaukee night life.
It began with a dinner cruise on the river. My mother, who didn’t know I was already regularly drinking with friends, told the bartender on the Edelweiss boat I was celebrating my twenty-first birthday. Because I was with two parental types, the cute bartender didn’t hesitate to keep my cup overflowing with a variety of cocktails. I don’t remember what we had for dinner or what the night felt like exactly, but I can imagine a cool breeze, the lights of riverfront bars and office buildings reflecting in the ink-black water mirroring the blanket of night overhead. I think there was dancing, the bartender snapping and twirling behind the bar each time I got a refill.
After the dinner cruise, we went to 1000 East, on Milwaukee’s east side. It was here I had Kamikaze shots, the bartender tall with broad shoulders and a small afro. We left the bar, and I remember flowers, a kaleidoscope of colors, red and blue and green and yellow. The window down, the air felt so good, everything felt so good.
My next memory is being carried down the stairs to my room in the basement. After yanking my shirt off and peeling my skirt down my thighs, I collapsed on the bed. The next day, my mother said I had started undressing before her friend left the room. She said he called out to her to come help me as he stumbled out of the room and flipped the light off so he wouldn’t see anything. I spent most of the morning vomiting and trying to cobble together pieces of the night based on what my mother told me. Even though the bartender from the Edelweiss had left a message on the house phone, singing happy birthday with a show-tune flair and telling me how I’m a beautiful person and a dancing queen, I still couldn’t remember his face or his voice or his lips—my mother said he planted several kisses on my cheeks. “Your little gay boyfriend,” she called him, “couldn’t get enough of you!”
I smiled through the telling. I pictured myself—the confident, carefree me I knew I became when I drank—dancing and flirting and throwing my head back in laughter. I told my mother I didn’t remember much that happened that night, but I did remember how I felt. Good.
My mother made a face. “I bet you don’t feel good now,” she said. Her plan had been to make the moment teachable, to get me so drunk I’d get sick, so sick I wouldn’t want to drink again.
She didn’t know I was already drinking, that I had found a friend in the swirling, swaying, swimming delight of intoxication earlier than she could’ve ever imagined. She wanted to know if I’d be drinking like that again. “I know you miserable,” she said, obviously anticipating an answer that might be pledge, a response that might be promise, to never drink like that again.
“I had a blast last night.” I said. Through the blur of music and colors, winks and smiles, new people and places, I knew that at no point in the spin of lights and sounds and touch had I been sad. I knew I hadn’t thought about my promise-breaking father, nor had I felt the guilt of refusing to talk to him or see him. I knew I hadn’t thought about my boyfriend’s confusion when I dumped him for reasons I couldn’t put into words, nor had I acknowledged the increasing demands of caregiving as my grandmother’s stroke recovery stalled. I knew I hadn’t thought about the challenges of my first semester as a college student, all the white students looking at me in class but ignoring me on campus, the anvil of lust and confusion and need that hovered over my head with each visit to the Black Student Union lounge where beautiful, smart, confident women with smoldering molasses skin and their own apartments talked about pledging and midterms and internships while smiling at me and asking me about my major.
That night solidified what I knew to be true. Drinking to forget was a thing. Drinking to feel better worked. And drinking until the night blacked out meant I thought about nothing, feared nothing, needed nothing, and remembered nothing.
Drinking Culture Is That Bullshit
Ignoring my father through the summer of 1998 was easy and forgetting about him and my pain through my first blackout and my first semester of college was a breeze. Focused and determined to be better than my father, to be stronger than my mother, you couldn’t tell me shit.
Taking my father to his court date, seeing him sick, and knowing he almost died threatened to break that focus, that resolve. I didn’t want my father dead. I didn’t hate him as much as I blamed and judged him for being broken, for breaking our family. Recovered but still in custody of the court, I visited him at the hospital. Relief, shame, and guilt wrestled in my belly. In his hospital bed, thin and exhausted, he made promises like always—to be better, to stop drinking.
I wanted to believe him but didn’t know if I could. I wanted to forgive him but feared being hurt again. I shook that shit off though, and I remembered who the fuck I was.
I wouldn’t let myself get hurt again. This was his battle, not mine. He was on his way to jail to do his time, to pay for his recklessness. If my father made a change, great. If he didn’t, it meant he was weak, not me. It meant he was sick, not me.
I was fine. No one and nothing could hurt me.
I am not that little girl or that awkward teenager. I am a grown woman. I keep a bottle of Bacardi Limón in the freezer. I am in college. I am in control. I go to classes where no one speaks to me, but I’m here to learn, not make friends. I study and study but this shit still doesn’t make sense. I keep a bottle of Southern Comfort on top of the fridge. I hang out in the Black Student Union. I keep my crushes to myself. Adding vodka to wine coolers makes them taste better. I spend time with my grandmothers—caregiving for my Jama who never fully recovered from her stroke, loving up on my Granny who’s going to die soon. I mix Peach Schnapps in my orange juice to go with my breakfast. I check in on my sisters, but they’re not like I remember, or maybe it’s me. It’s never about me. Everybody else is changing. Everything is different. I stop mixing my Bacardi with Sprite. I tell my friends stories—entertaining, salacious stories that are a perfect mix of truth and lies. I go on dates like I’m supposed to. Red wine makes me feel sophisticated. I dance until I sweat because it makes me feel free. Rum punch is more refreshing than water. I have sex like I’m supposed to. I drink the last of his drink while he sleeps. I commit to nothing. I ask for nothing. I expect nothing. This makes me cool. This makes me popular. College is so much fun. Life is so much fun. Wray & Nephew warms from the inside out, even in the dead of winter. I don’t need no coat. I don’t need no sleep. I don’t need anyone.
I’m fine. Nothing and no one can hurt me.
Daddy Issues Are That Bullshit
Weeks before my high school graduation, my father said to me, “if your mother’s friend is going, I’m not coming.”
My mother’s “friend,” who had been a regular feature in my life throughout much of high school and had helped with my senior-year expenses no less, told me he wouldn’t come to graduation if it meant my father wouldn’t attend. I told him he shouldn’t have to do that, but he insisted. He didn’t come to graduation but came to the graduation party at the house when it was clear my father would be a no-show.
I tried to make light of it all, my father’s absence at graduation and the party, but it hurt me. I wanted him there. I wanted him to be there for me, to celebrate with me.
But it wasn’t about me, and maybe it never was and never would be.
The first couple times my parents separated, seeing my father was always hit or miss. He would make plans with me and my sister, fun shit like car shows and movie dates, trips to the Lake front or the park—he was still driving then—only to cancel them when he extended the invitation to our mother, and she declined. I remember the punch of those cancellations, right in the center of me, the anger and disappointment, thinking he missed us, he wanted to see us, only to be proved wrong by his drunken call thirty minutes after he was supposed to pick us up, or worse, his no-call/no-show.
Forget all that, though. I’ve dealt with all that. My father’s no-calls/no-shows were in the past. My graduation heartbreak was in the past, my father’s near-death experience was in the past. Ignoring him was childish and weak. I was better than that. Stronger and more in control, I knew how to manage my interactions with my father in a way that wouldn’t get me hurt.
While he served time in Milwaukee County House of Corrections, I wrote him letters—mostly encouraging him to stay positive, reminding him of good times, and sharing a few details about my life. I wrote him two or three times before he finally wrote me back.
April 18, 2000
Dear Sher’ree,
Just a few lines to let you know that I’m doing fine. I’m sorry that I forgot to answer your letter. But I thought I wrote you last.
I hope that you got the apartment you wanted. I know you will make it out there on your own. Then mom can rent me your room (smile). Tell her that. She will get a kick out of that. I would be with her any way I can.
I am really going to make a big change for myself and you girls. I am really learning the meaning of missing you. I’m sorry for the lost time. I knew we can’t make it up, but we can try to love and trust each other again. Well, kiss everyone for me & put in a few words to mom.
Send me another picture of yourself. That last one of you and your sister was too dark.
Love always,
Dad
I answered the letter, sent more pictures, but after his last reply I didn’t write back again.
June 1, 2000
Dear Sher’ree,
I hope this letter will find you doing fine. Just a few lines to let you know that I am doing fine.
I was glad to receive your letter. You always make me feel good. Well, I have three more months to go. I hope I will be able to find me a good job, so I can help my family in the future.
I hope that things can be worked out between me & ma. It’s been a long time and I am ready to start being the man I know I can be.
I know you will make it in school. You always find a way. You are very lucky to have a mother like you do. All three of you girls mean the world to me. I know you find it hard to believe at times. But I need and love you very much.
That was a very nice camping trip. Are you sure I didn’t catch a fish? “smile.”
Well, kiss your sister and mama for me. Let them know that I really care. I don’t know about your big sister, but I guess she will come around sooner or lately. I also love her deeply and wish the best for her.
Tell your mother that she is getting a little slow in answering my letters. Tell her to give up some of the pictures, like now.
Love always,
Daddy
Something about the letters sounded like a song I’d heard before, reminded me of a book I’d read. Same old promises, same old, “Is your mama coming? Put your mama on the phone.”
I saw what I wanted to see. I saw “I’ll be there for you, if your mama is there for me.”
I refused to be moved, and that is not how you spell my name.
Mommy Issues Are That Bullshit
My mother tells me a story about a dude she knew when she was in her twenties. They called him Harry Hippie and his mission was “to get people wasted.” He wore a military-style coat and came through parties with a fringed satchel bag full of drugs and “equipment.” One time, he brought out a retooled gas mask for smoking weed, something like a wearable bong that engulfed your face in smoke. My mother admits to trying a few things, but she quickly follows with anecdotes about how she “doesn’t like” particular types of highs and how she never got addicted to anything because she’s always had a strong mind.
My mother quit smoking cold turkey every time she got pregnant and quit for good when carrying my younger sister. My mother was especially careful about us never seeing her drunk. I knew my mother drank, but her drinking was different than my father’s. My mother’s drinking was about fun. My mother’s drinking never ostracized or demeaned her. My mother’s drinking never meant destruction. I remember my mother giggly and loving. I remember my mother dancing. When I remember my father’s drinking, I remember terrifying car rides where he would drift in the lane and clip boulevard partitions. I remember him passed out and drooling. I remember him stabbing at furniture and throwing things. I remember him yelling. I remember him leaving.
I know this is selective memory, but it feels entirely true. Where my father’s drinking was about weakness, my mother’s drinking was about strength, about control.
I wanted my drinking to be like my mother’s drinking and not my father’s. The times my drinking led to anger, to sadness, to hurting people and hurting myself, I descended into a shame like I’d never felt. Most times, blackouts hid the most painful parts, but the shame was always the same. Another morning of weak-ass apologies and bottomless guilt. Then, hair of the dog to stop the pounding in my head, to steady the churning in my belly, to make anecdotes of the recklessness, to make fun of the loss of control.
I remember my mother and father arguing once. My father denied saying some hurtful things to my mother, and she pressed him. He finally said if he did say those things, he didn’t remember and didn’t mean it. My mother wouldn’t accept it, didn’t accept it. A drunk mind speaks a sober heart, but most importantly, my mother pointed out that she drinks and had been drunk before, but she can remember what she does and what she says. My mother has always been strong in mind.
I never told my mother how much I drank. I never shared with her how often I blacked out, how often I woke up wrapped in shame. Part of me figured she wouldn’t understand, but mostly, I knew this was my problem and not hers. She was strong, and I was being weak. I had to be stronger in mind.
Therapy Is That Bullshit
Every time I see my therapist, I expect to come out of our session fixed. I talk about my father. I talk about my mother. I talk about myself. She asks questions I have difficulty answering because they push me to think about experiences, my family, and myself in ways that go beyond broken or fixed, weak or strong, good or bad. I answer, “I don’t know” a lot. When I do share something, it feels like whining, like brooding, like bullshit.
I tell her this. That it’s all bullshit.
But she makes me share it anyway, and for the first time in my life, I’m talking about it instead of drinking about it. I’m finding a softness, a stretch and bend, a vulnerability in the narratives and beliefs I thought were as solid and necessary as bones. But there is flesh here. And muscle. And skin. And hearts that need and scream and harm but also give and whisper and comfort. I’m learning my father is more than one thing, my mother is more than one thing, I am more than one thing, we are all more than one thing.
We are flawed and perfect. We are the light after the blackout. We are all doing the best we can, and now have the chance to be better.
***
Rumpus original art by Isis Davis-Marks.
***
Author’s note: names have been changed to protect identities.
***
Voices on Addiction is a column devoted to true personal narratives of addiction, curated by Kelly Thompson, and authored by the spectrum of individuals affected by this illness. Through these essays, interviews, and book reviews we hope—in the words of Rebecca Solnit—to break the story by breaking the status quo of addiction: the shame, stigma, and hopelessness, and the lies and myths that surround it. Sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, adult children, extended family members, spouses, friends, employers or employees, boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbors, victims of crimes, and those who’ve committed crimes as addicts, and the personnel who often serve them, nurses, doctors, social workers, therapists, prison guards, police officers, policy makers and, of course, addicts themselves: Voices on Addiction will feature your stories. Because the story of addiction impacts us all. It’s time we break it. Submit here.
Article tags
Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail programs. We’ve got one program for adults and another for kids ages 6-12. Next month, subscribers will be receiving letters from Matthew Salesses and Anuradha Bhowmik, and Eleanor Glewwe and Lee Edward Födi, respectively.
Anuradha Bhowmik is a Bangladeshi-American poet and writer from South Jersey. She is the 2021 winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for her first collection Brown Girl Chromatography, published by Pitt Poetry Series. Bhowmik is a Kundiman Fellow and a 2018 AWP Intro Journals Project Winner in Poetry. Her poetry and prose have appeared in POETRY, The Sun, Quarterly West, Nashville Review, Indiana Review, The Offing, Bayou Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, Zone 3, The Normal School, Copper Nickel, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. She can be found at anuradhabhowmik.com. Anaradha writes to us about seeking happiness in an unhappy world.
Matthew Salesses is the author of four novels, most recently The Sense of Wonder, and a book about writing and teaching writing, Craft in the Real World. He writes to us poignantly about feeling love after loss.
Eleanor Glewwe was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Minnesota. She plays the cello and once braved a snowstorm to perform in a chamber music competition. At Swarthmore College, she studied linguistics, French, and Chinese and worked in the music library, shelving composers’ biographies and binding scores with a needle and thread. She is the author of the middle grade fantasy novel Sparkers and its companion Wildings, both from Viking Children’s Books. In addition to being a writer, Eleanor is a folk dancer and a shape note singer. She now lives in Iowa, where she teaches linguistics at Grinnell College. Eleanor’s letter is all about musical instruments!
Lee Edward Födi is an author, illustrator, and specialized arts educator—or, as he likes to think of himself, a daydreaming expert. His books include Spell Sweeper, The Secret of Zoone and The Guardians of Zoone. During his free time, he’s a traveler, adventurer, and maker of dragon eggs. He especially love to visit exotic places where he can lose himself (sometimes literally!) in tombs, mazes, castles, and crypts. He lives in Vancouver with his wife and son. Lee Edward Födi writes to us about how growing up on a farm helped him become a writer.
***
Destructive desire, a brother so psychically contaminated by his twin sister’s sexual life it’s as though her actions are his, a mother who inflames the mutual enmity between her children, social codes as rigid as they are ambiguous: Strange Loops, the second novel by Canadian author Liz Harmer, has the intensity and drive of classic tragedy. The book opens with the main character, Francine—a thirty-three-year-old mother of two, a wife and teacher pursuing a PhD—having an illicit affair with a former student who just turned eighteen. From there, her life unravels with inevitability so fixed it feels damned, as she casts back to the events that led her to this point. Strange Loops offers a complex, ethically tangled engagement with the reckonings of “me-too.”
Harmer is also a widely published, internationally award-winning essayist and poet, writing about madness, motherhood, religion, and obsession. Her debut novel, The Amateurs, was a finalist for the Amazon First Book Award and has been optioned by Riddle Films. I love her bold, intimate work for how it combines an interest in overwhelming, seemingly unassimilable passions with the intellectual effort to make sense of them.
We have been friends for a decade and spoke over Zoom about tragedy, taboo, unmediated experience, and how we perceive the sexuality of teenage girls.
***
The Rumpus: Strange Loops explores the relationship between desire and subjectivity. What interests you about this subject?
Liz Harmer: Two huge things happened to me when I was quite young: I went mad, and I fell in love, in relatively swift succession. I emerged from the hospital at eighteen, and by twenty-two I was married to my first love. These things, of course, formed me, and I’m glad for both. But, for me, the feeling that Anne Carson describes in Eros the Bittersweet—that erotic love can feel like you are finally connecting with the truest truth there is, peering straight down into time, finally seeing clearly—is a kind of common madness. What interested me is how much these peak experiences lead us to compose ourselves, invent a reality to suit the new situation, and also, can cause us to do great harm. When we think we are seeing most clearly, we see most poorly.
Rumpus: You’ve said that Loops might be a polarizing novel. Why do you say that?
Harmer: One concern I have is that it indulges a kind of melodrama. It’s unapologetically melodramatic and larger than life in a way that is not cool. Part of me worries about that being off-putting or seeming unintentional. I’ve also had a few reactions from people in workshops that made me believe we’re pretty confused about what we think a protagonist means. Is a protagonist the endorsement of the author? This character, Francine, who I’m obviously very interested in and fond of, and who is difficult, fascinating, and intense, is making very poor moral decisions and missing something crucial about her own life. But my answer to the problem of likeability has always been that what’s “likeable” isn’t the same as what’s nice or palatable. That what we—what I—really crave is a protagonist that surprises me.
Rumpus: We think of our culture here in the contemporary West as “permissive” but within the first few pages of Loops you approach the limits of what is permissible and take us into our taboos. What draws you to the forbidden?
Harmer: Yes, we are permissive about some things, and punitive about others, and my long training in the religious community that raised me, also raised me to ask why. As a teenager, I was constantly demanding that my elders tell me exactly why and for what theological reason sex outside of marriage was wrong. Here it says that Jesus will forgive us anything, that we can’t help sinning (even a lustful thought is as bad as adultery), and here it says we shouldn’t get married, and here are a bunch of God’s favorite adulterers. So, I am in the habit of looking at the rules and taboos and trying to ask what their basis is.
When I started to present parts of this novel in workshop, people had very different reactions to the content. One person told me she would never read a novel about a woman taking advantage of a student like this—it was too far (and I understood this, because I found Lolita mostly painful to read)—and then an older man who read it seemed to see that Francine at seventeen trying to seduce her thirty-something youth pastor was in total control. He said the man “didn’t stand a chance.” To me, both of these reactions were revealing. Our taboos and our reactions to the crossing of those taboos shows us something about our deepest beliefs about gender, about sex, about power, etc.
Rumpus: When you said people might find this “not cool,” I wondered, what’s “cool”?
Harmer: Maybe detached, ironic? There’s very little opportunity to have distance in this novel. But I’ve always been interested in the idea that there might be some experiences that are unmediated. This could mean being overwhelmed by art or the sublime; it could mean an experience of madness where you’re approaching something that you can no longer think through fast enough to mediate. Not wanting to have a persona, wanting to be a self that’s really there—this is an old-fashioned desire.
Rumpus: How do you get at unmediated experience in a medium?
Harmer: This is the puzzle I was facing. When I wrote this, I was writing in such a way that I was trying to access something I wasn’t intellectually in control of, which is the closest you can get in a medium to getting at something unmediated. I think I was trying to do something like automatic writing. I was trying to be guided by something that wasn’t clear to me and then in the editing process, to fix it up. I want this novel to feel like there’s less of a gap between the thing and the comprehension of the thing.
Rumpus: Can you talk about the structure you chose?
Harmer: In the first pass I was conjuring feelings and figuring out what was happening. But then when I went back, at a certain point I realized that the novel had three separate time periods and two separate narrative centers and was jumping between loops. I took each section, I made this nerdy infographic where I figured out the number of pages that were devoted to each loop, and tried to balance them out more. There’s a seventeen-years-ago loop where young Francine is having an affair with an older pastor, a present loop where she’s having an affair with her former student, and a section from in-between, where Francine’s family gathers at their country home and have a catastrophic fight during a tornado. At some point, I realized that while the first two loops drove the plot forward to its conclusion, the third didn’t. Instead, the energy of that section is like a tornado—it spirals down in. It doesn’t go forward—it goes deep. This was a very pleasing discovery to me. I placed the tornado loop in the mathematical centre of the novel, which felt like a sinkhole into which all the other events are tumbling. It’s very pleasing to me when the structure of a novel can reflect its themes and content.
Rumpus: Why is it pleasing when form and content mirror each other?
Harmer: Maybe it gets at a very deep pleasure of containment, like being swaddled. Maybe it’s like having a body instead of floating off into space.
My grade three teacher for some reason let me put on plays and cast all my classmates in them. The first play I put on was an adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood. When we got to the final scene, all the actors were so excited to be acting that we just kept going with no script. Eventually the teacher had to stop us and say this is enough. I think about this moment a lot. You just want to keep playing, you want to give your characters more things to say and do, but then you lose the thread completely and there’s no coherent story. I’ve written six novels and published two. The difference between a novel I can finish and one I can’t finish is the presence or absence of a shapely “container,” I call it.
Rumpus: I’ve often thought that we give teenage boys the grace of seeing their sexual advances and expressions as awkward or messy. With girls, we tend to give them this first-degree level of intention when it comes to their sexuality. Of course, teenagers want to be seen as sexual beings, but I think we see girls as more controlled than they are. When young Francine pursues an older authority figure, how responsible is she for this relationship?
Harmer: Francine is this very gifted young person who wants to think she’s in control and older than she is and is treated as though she’s older, which was also my experience as a kid. I think it’s a damaging thing we do to girls. We’re provoked by their sexuality and then our provocation is ascribed to them.
As a teenager, Francine takes this epic pilgrimage to throw herself at this older pastor. She’s determined to go down this path. But there are moments here, which, to me, are the saddest, darkest parts of the novel, where she’s alone in this house with him, trying to conjure up the feeling of wanting to throw herself into this thing, but she starts to feel afraid. Afterwards, she’s shaken up. She goes home weeping, and she thinks it’s because she’s in love. But I think there’s more going on there. This is Francine putting herself in a vulnerable position and then trying to be strong enough to withstand what has hurt her. She wants to see herself as older than her years, and the adults in her life also want to see her that way because then they don’t need to be responsible for her. She’s left to believe that she did this to herself and to this older man. She believes he was a victim to her desire.
Rumpus: Then Francine is the older teacher having an affair with a recent student. Were you thinking of trauma and its repetitions?
Harmer: I wasn’t thinking about it at all because I was trying to write in this immediate way. Later, I discovered that she believes she had been the villain when she was young, and her re-enactment is clearly an attempt to understand what motivated the pastor. So yes, unconsciously on my part and on Francine’s part, this is about trauma, but I wasn’t trying to offer a clear explanation for her behaviour.
I went through something traumatic when I was young and I didn’t acknowledge this to myself until about two years ago. I was so unwilling to accept that I wasn’t in control of what had happened to me and to see that I had been damaged by this experience that I was resistant to the idea of trauma. And I guess I was afraid to write a trauma plot because, you know, we’re “on the other side of the trauma plot.” But discovering that you have symptoms of PTSD twenty years after something happened and that for all that time you did not know that about yourself makes you ask: How many other things do I not understand about my own experience?
Rumpus: Is that what a “strange loop” is?
Harmer: The title Strange Loops comes from this book I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter, which is a very tender piece of personal, philosophical writing because it’s about his wife’s death and the belief he came to about consciousness and how intermixed our minds are with others. When someone we know well dies, things you love about them live on in your consciousness. So, there’s a sense in which we humans create each other’s consciousnesses. We’re part of a complex system of feedback loops where we take something in, put it back out, etc., and that’s how you create a self. I was thinking about Strange Loops as about creation of a self through others. To me, the main strange loop in the book is between Francine and her twin brother, Philip. They’re so entangled with each other that it’s not clear where one ends and the other begins. They’re like the snake that eats its own tail, or like the staircase that seems like it’s going up but it’s going down. He can’t bear what she’s done as though it’s happened to him.
Rumpus: In a number of essays you’ve written about coming from a Dutch Calvinist Reformed background and the way this impacted your sexuality as a young person. Here you gave Francine and Philip a liberal, secular household. How were you thinking about this obsession with female sexuality but without those traditional overdeterminations?
Harmer: Well, the sections in the past, set during Francine and Philip’s teenage years, take place in the late ‘90s. Even outside of my own stultified, confused sexual education, which was extremely misogynist and sex-negative—the messages were “don’t get pregnant.” “don’t be a slut,” “just get married and go away”—I was thinking of people like Monica Lewinsky and how she had been defamed and villainized even though she was so young, and he was…the fucking president. Our whole cultural attitude at that time was misogynist in a way I hope has changed a little bit, for my own kids.
I felt very unsafe about sex as a young person because, talking about the responsibilities we give to girls, I felt like I was responsible for the effect I was having on other people. For me, one of the grand ironies of my sheltered childhood going to a Christian school was that in order to attend this very conservative school on the other side of the city, I had to take an hour of city buses through the heart of downtown Hamilton. I’d get off downtown and wait for my next bus in front of a strip club. Men were everywhere, and they all thought I was twenty, not fourteen. I had a lot of negative encounters. So, I had a confusing inside/outside perspective on sexuality.
I’d internalized some misogyny but was very interested in rebelling against that so was reading second wave feminism and stuff about sex positivity. I was trying to talk a big game about being open-minded about sex in a context that was completely unwilling to entertain that. I was annoying and provocative to everybody all the time. Even at seventeen, Francine is not coy about her sexuality, and I think it was an intellectual position for her. She is trying on an intellectual position, as I was at that age.
But I also have compassion for Philip. He’s desperate for a meaning greater than his own reality, he’s going through his existential crisis that we do as teens, and he becomes interested in religion as something that will give him that meaning. I made his parents secular, but in a sense, this is a devotion to atheism that I’ve always found similar to being Christian. Even though the family in this novel comes from a different cultural background than my own—they’re also from a higher class than I’m from—I actually feel that psychologically they’re very similar to the more dogmatic, conservative figures I’ve known so well.
Rumpus: The book feels boldly tragic. Is this bucking a trend or are there contemporary works that inspired you?
Harmer: Do you remember The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides? In the press for that I remember Eugenides saying the 19th-century marriage plot no longer has force because domesticity is no longer a place of high stakes for, say, women. We have divorce laws. We have bank accounts. We can own property. But love and domesticity have been places in my own life of high drama and struggle. The minute I was facing my own divorce, I realized how much traditional gender roles had really infected my own life in ways both subtle and very obvious, and so The Marriage Plot inspired me only insofar as it irritated me.
After I wrote Loops I read Querelle of Roberval by Kevin Lambert (the English translation is by Donald Winkler), which is based on Greek tragedy. It’s written in a way that you don’t have anyone to root for, and instead of God or Fate being the inescapable problem that causes the problem for the individual, it’s capitalism. I’m very compelled by the idea that tragedy as a form offers us evidence that there are things beyond our control, yet that we must bear the terrible consequences of these forces we can’t do anything to subdue. This is coming from my deep Calvinist roots, but what tragedy offers is a reminder that you are not your own. A great modern piety is that we believe in our own agency and we believe in our own freedom and we believe that we can make rational decisions.
I think I’m drawn, in most of the art I love, to the kind of ordinary darkness that everyone experiences: that every one of us, no matter what we might aspire to, is capable of failing to do what’s right, and that failure, no matter how we might explain it to ourselves, no matter how sorry we might be, could have catastrophic consequences anyway. This to me feels like the tragedy of the human condition, and it also feels like the source of some of the most beautiful, terrifying stories people have made.
***
Author photo by Scott Nichols
FreshRSS