Sea Changes

Directions to Myself: A Memoir of Four Years by Heidi Julavits; Hogarth, 304 pp., $27

In his 1949 book of comparative mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell argued that while the archetypal man’s journey is physical and outward, that of the woman is domestic and inward. Apart from the painfully reductive nature of this idea, what most annoyed me about the book was not so much Campbell’s distinction between genders but the implication that a journey inward is inherently less dangerous, less difficult, or less societally significant than a journey outward. In her new book, Heidi Julavits, a writer and a founding editor of The Believer magazine, rewrites that myth. Directions to Myself is about finding a way home in every sense of the word—and what it means to navigate there, not as Odysseus returning to Ithaca but as ordinary parents, teachers, writers, friends, and neighbors.

Julavits and her family split their time between school years in Manhattan and summers in Maine, and in Directions to Myself, she is concerned with finding a home in both landscapes. Each of the book’s sections opens with hand-drawn maps of places important to Julavitz—among them Small Point Harbor, Maine; Julavits’s childhood neighborhood in nearby Portland; and the neighborhood where she works and lives near New York’s Columbia University—complete with annotations like “do not climb” and “watch for broken glass.” The narrative moves associatively, rather than chronologically, through four years of Julavits’s life, documenting the effects of aging, shifting friendships, professional highs and lows, and the internal conflict she faces in preparing her children to go out into a world that feels increasingly destabilized.

Julavits’s central interest in geography is rooted in how our ability to navigate change allows us to feel at home, even if “home” is not a fixed place or concept. Realizing how she’s re-created the patterns of her childhood—moving to Maine, owning a sailboat—for her own family, Julavits writes, “Home is still defined by me as where I grew up, more or less, and so we bought this house, thus repeating the mistake of my parents, conscripting our children to spend summer vacations in a vessel that fills with water from below.” When she confesses that “as confusing and shameful as it is to be a homesick adult, homesickness becomes its own home after a while,” she is writing as much about the physical as she is about a period of her life that has slipped out of reach. “The older I get,” she goes on, “the more I understand [homesickness] as love that’s too big and has always been too big for one body to manage. That love is unbearable only when I’m not with the people who inspired it”—for Julavits, those people are her parents, her friends, and most of all, her children.

In a scene she returns to throughout the book, Julavits is approached by a famous writer who smugly “announc[es] that writers should never have children because each child represents a book the writer will not write.” Julavits offers a hypothetical retort: if she were his accountant, she’d ask him to run the numbers. Why is it children that this man sees as the primary impediment to his genius when bathing, eating, sleeping also must pull him away from his prolific and brilliant output?

And yet, Julavits acknowledges that she too sometimes falls prey to this belief. “For this reason, I kept my first pregnancy a secret,” she writes.” I’m ashamed now that I did this, even while I had what seemed like valid reasons at the time. … I didn’t want anyone to think I wasn’t serious about my career. If I were to visit a life accountant, my spreadsheet might reveal the following. … I have experienced the unceasing pressure of proving that, by having a child I’ve cost myself nothing, and this has cost me.”

As Julavits charts her journey through early motherhood, it becomes clear that having children has cost her something, in the way that any kind of care is inseparable from loss. When she spends a night laboring with and delivering her second child, a son, in her Manhattan apartment, Julavits evokes the language of Campbell’s hero’s journey and its cycle of departure and return with a gift:

People have been dying in childbirth for a thousand years and labor unites us. With my daughter, during the twenty-seven hours we lived between worlds, I felt more connected, as the pain swelled and ebbed, withdrew and revisited, to this lineage of strangers than I did to the human inside me that I hoped would choose life, and let me keep mine…I’m more confident, this time, that I’ll survive the trip. But she will never again be the only person with whom I’ve traveled through in-between places. And I’ll be bringing someone back.

Campbell, too, saw the abyss in childbirth—in part because of the very real potential for physical death—but Julavits seems to be alluding to a much less literal and much more ordinary death: having a child means losing the self who did not know the all-consuming love of motherhood. During labor, Julavits observes, “each completed orbit on this clock thins and thins the membrane covering the abyss where the self is annihilated and becomes the ghostly bridge connecting life with life.”

One afternoon, back on the ocean in Maine near where her son nearly drowned the previous summer, Julavits sees that he has grown increasingly independent. She guides her son, in a boat tethered to her own, as he makes his way through the same water she once navigated on long summer trips with her own parents. Recalling the night they spent together on that ghostly bridge of labor, Julavits writes: “I walked for longer than a day; I traveled a measurable distance through time and space to give birth to him.” Now, though, she is traveling a different bridge—the passage between her son’s childhood and adulthood. “I’ve been prepared for this day,” she explains, evoking the umbilical rope that connects their two boats: “His growing up is unfathomable to me, even as I can precisely mark the distance. My son is two fathoms away. He is three fathoms. He is four, seven, ten. As the tide rises and the beach shrinks, I start to lay the rope on the sand. I re-create the path the two of us took together before his cord was cut and our individual expeditions began.”

Directions to Myself is a book of dualities—about motherhood and childhood, birth and death, career and family, middle age and youth, the external and the internal. Even stylistically, it’s simultaneously serious and tender. Home, split both by time (childhood and adulthood) and place (Manhattan and Maine) is the book’s central duality—and it is Julavits’s ability to craft a cohesive narrative as she wanders through them that makes the memoir so striking.

By the book’s end, it seems that the real difference between the archetypal hero’s journey and the one that Julavits describes is that the latter is one on which all of us will embark—a natural consequence of caring deeply about our children, our work, and the landscapes we call home.

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When Good Pain Turns Into Bad Pain

When I was a high-school runner in the late 1990s, slogans such as Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body decorated the T-shirts sold at our championship races. Once, on the bus to the Connecticut state meet, my coach, who was legendary for the decades of New England titles he’d won, told us the story of an athlete collapsing on the course and crawling across the finish line. The coach visited him in the hospital afterward, he assured us; he had “a policy” to do so. That enough athletes needed medical attention for my coach to have a personal creed about it didn’t strike me as dark. I was caught up in the story’s message about determination and sacrifice—and inspired to run hard enough that I myself might end up in the hospital.

During the years I was dreaming of martyrdom, the future national champion Lauren Fleshman was a high-school athlete as well, on her way to becoming one of the most accomplished American distance runners in history. I knew her name from issues of Race Results Weekly, and I liked her because of her genuine smile and uncovered freckles. I also liked that her legs looked strong and her cheeks full—traits we shared. I’d heard mine referenced with undisguised surprise many times: You don’t look like a runner.

Those comments exemplified the culture of girls’ sports at the time. I was embarrassed that I’d never lost my period, and I saw injuries not as signs of long-term damage or even as short-term limitations but as badges of tenacity and toughness. In 1996, Fleshman and I both watched 18-year-old Kerri Strug land her gold-medal-clinching vault on her already badly sprained ankle at the Atlanta Olympics, and we saw her coach carry her, childlike and unable to walk, away. For an athlete, this sort of pain, as Fleshman writes in her new memoir, Good for a Girl, was simply “what it took to be beloved.”

Fleshman went on to win five NCAA Division I titles at Stanford; I went on to barely make varsity at my Division III college. Still, Good for a Girl feels deeply familiar. It is in part a memoir of Fleshman’s failures and successes, but it’s also a call to action for the coaches, parents, and young women of future athletic generations. Fleshman argues convincingly that it’s essential for the sports world to disentangle physical suffering from self-worth. In 288 funny, honest, and sometimes-wrenching pages, she makes clear that empowering girls to better understand the need for balance between pain and elite performance is not only the ethical thing to do—it’s essential to their health and career longevity.

[Read: Female athletes need to see puberty as a power, not a weakness]

Fleshman writes about the out-of-body sensation of maximum effort in a way that no other author I’ve encountered has managed. She recalls the experience of being “in that part of the race where the pain accumulates and bulges and threatens to spill over at any moment,” and the pride of discovering a “new level” of hurt before asking herself if she could persist just “a little longer.” This kind of instant-to-instant self-evaluation and motivation is crucial in high-level athletic performance, but it also poses a dilemma. It’s easy for athletes to confuse the confidence and power that come from the ability to temporarily push through for the type of self-erasure that might lead to injury.

Personally, I mixed up the two for years. When I eventually did collapse in college, just shy of the finish line in a championship 10,000-meter race, I ended up in a medical tent instead of a hospital. It was not until I told this story, which still inspired in me a strange pride almost two decades later, that I realized that my race had literally been a failure. I had not finished.   

Fleshman has plainly reconsidered the role of pain and overexertion in sports too. In parts, her book is dedicated to outlining what she sees as necessary reforms, such as policies that “specifically protect the health of the female body in sport … [including] formal certification to work with female athletes that mandate[s] education in female physiology, puberty, breast development, [and] menstrual health.” She is clear in her belief both that young women need more women coaches and that merely having a woman on a coaching staff is not an inoculation against a system that ignores the needs of girls and women at great cost.

[Read: Learning to run without headphones]

One of the most prevalent and dangerous ways sports culture deprioritizes athletes’ wellness is by willfully overlooking, or even outright encouraging, disordered eating, Fleshman writes. I saw and experienced this firsthand: Friends—ones who ran for female coaches—were publicly weighed or asked to write down and scrutinize everything they ate in a day. Even on my college team, where my coach never commented on size, the glorification of thinness was everywhere. Once, I heard another coach praise an athlete for looking as though she’d lost “a pound or a pound and a half.” Like Fleshman, I often felt defensive and ashamed of being told I looked “healthy,” because “healthy was code for fat; fit was the compliment everyone valued most,” she writes. I’d figured if I wasn’t the fittest, I could be the toughest, or the most willing to endure a certain kind of agony.

Despite my adult perspective and the wisdom of Fleshman’s book, untangling the relationship between pain and athletic success is complex. I’ve read before that recovery from eating disorders can be complicated by the impossibility of going cold turkey, as with a substance addiction—we all need to have a relationship of some kind with food, after all. And maybe there’s something of this in the relationship that serious athletes must develop with pain. Where is the line between willingness to be in discomfort and eagerness to be in it? What separates the decision to hang on in the final minutes of a race and what Fleshman calls “a culture of compliance [that] leads to disassociation from yourself, from your body’s signals of hunger, fatigue, and pain”?

[Read: The dark pageant of the NFL]

Becoming a runner changed my life because it made me understand that I could do hard things. I think I’d have been a determined and stubborn person no matter what passion I fell into, but my achievements felt so concrete out on the track. Running additionally paved a way into some of the greatest friendships of my life. Although much of distance training is solitary, there’s an intimacy unlike any other I’ve known in matching a companion stride for stride in the late stages of a daunting workout or long, hilly run. Some of the magic of running friendships no doubt comes from the fraught role of suffering in the sport: We have shared the vulnerable experience of pushing our body to its limit, often in a very public way, and sometimes coming up short.

Fleshman eventually learned that any “pursuit of excellence had to center … moments of joy, or it wasn’t worth doing,” she writes. For me, running has been a gift not because of the ways its culture has so often glorified suffering but in spite of it. Competing and coaching have taught me that a certain kind of pain is inevitable in order to succeed as an elite athlete, but we ought not chase it. Instead, we should run toward the delight.