Her memoir of that experience,“Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy,”published in 2000, was praised by critics and won her fans for its unflinching honesty and aseptic prose, free from the maudlin melodrama that has suffused so many recent memoirs. Her second memoir,“Are You Happy? A Childhood Remembered,”published in 2006— again to some critical success— described her 1950s childhood, deeply enmeshed in the lives of her alcoholic mother and autocratic father, yet simultaneously estranged from them. (A 2009 novel, a satire set in academia, received mixed reviews.)
So readers might be eager for“Book of Days,” in which Gordon explores her preferred form— not memoir, but personal essay— nor does it hurt thatPhillip Lopate,il miglior fabbroof the art, gives his rousing approval in the introduction.
Many of the essays, including the one that prompted the book“Mockingbird Years,” have been previously published, but not all. She writes with a stringent delicacy about sickness and marriage in“Fantastic Voyage,” one of the more polished pieces in the collection. Her husband’s routinecolonoscopyfills her with a curious mortal dread, inspiring both waiting-roomanxiety— what if he has some terriblecancer?— and then an egocentric reverie: Will she get to play the part of the martyred caretaker? How will she face the“dire glamour” of a life-changing diagnosis?
(The sickness-as-glamour leitmotif runs through Gordon’s work. She writes in the essay“Mockingbird Years” that going to Austen Riggs as a teenager would not only make her college-bound friend jealous but was“the fulfillment of an adolescent fantasy. The status of mental patient would invest me with significance.”)
In“Fantastic Voyage,” she writes, tartly and honestly, that she is deeply envious of her husband’s organized mind, his promptly scheduled medical exams and command over the minutiae of life she can never seem to control.“He was the one who had made himself pure and ready, while last night’s furtively eaten supper of leftovers rotted invisibly in my own unexamined colon. He was the one who would walk into the waters ofanesthesiathis morning; he was the one who would emerge on the other side while I remained in this anteroom, fully dressed and conscious, a fugitive from medical justice.” The fantastic voyage, of course, is not the colonoscopy but their 30-year marriage, which she describes as combative but sustainable:“We’re like two boxers who have fought so many rounds together that we’ve decided to forgo the late ones in favor of an extended, exhausted clinch.” It’s a funny and brutal moment of self-recognition.
Gordon dissects female friendship, femininity and feminism, and the changing state of marriage, in“The Most Responsible Girl.” Sometimes the writing is fresh and amusingly self-lacerating— she writes of getting into“male-pattern trouble”— and sometimes it’s distressingly academic. Marriage has changed over the last few decades, certainly, but I am not sure if writing that“the hierarchical rolebound form which found its origins in the division of labor has now been replaced by the companionate egalitarian dyad” is the most inviting way to put it.
In“Here Again,” Gordon describes her 25th or so visit to a meeting of the American Philosophical Association, as companion to her husband. (He is George Sher, a former chairman of the philosophy department atRice University.) Anyone who has spent time at an academic conference recognizes this scene: having to spend“a bleary interval at avegansteam-table restaurant where I sat opposite a graduate student who spoke at length about her five-year plan to penetrate the upper echelons of the administration at some northwestern Florida university.” Some of her best passages linger on mortality. She describes the shock of seeing people only once a year, who have“tumbled abruptly into a new category of age.” One elderly visitor at the convention is so brittle her colleagues, upon greeting her, will not actually touch her, but give air kisses and pretend pats around her shoulders, offering an“airy substitute for human contact: the idea of an embrace.”
But Gordon meanders. Sitting in on a colloquium about mental disorders— something she knows a bit about— she throws up her hands and writes that she is helpless to form a coherent narrative:“Instead, I’ll simply transcribe my notes.” Sample:“Visual system is modular. Mind is not. Central nonmodular STUFF WE CARE ABOUT.” This makes for a page of— well, calling it filler seems a bit forgiving. Isn’t her mandate as an essayist to take the stuff of life and form a narrative, a thought, a juicy little bit for the reader? I felt neglected by these dreary excursions into her notebook.
The title essay is a strange kind of apologia for her previous work, a description of how she was lured by New York publishing types into writing memoirs instead of collections of personal essays. A New York editor with“a voice like sun-softened caramel” called her after reading the essay“Mockingbird Years” in a literary journal.“His voice evoked a feeling I hadn’t had in many, many years— the sense of submitting, with token resistance, to a stranger’s seduction.” He seduced, an agent was hired, an auction conducted, and Gordon suffered misgivings as she wrote the book, believing she had made a Faustian pact with the publisher.
Gordon raises the flag of cultural fatigue against the memoir and questions the essential honesty of memoir-writing.“I regret having written‘Mockingbird Years’— the memoir, that is, not the essay. Perhaps I should say I regret its dishonesty.” The dishonesty inherent in memoir, she argues, is that an entire life cannot be contained in one book, and so the writer is forced to follow only one story line: Me and drugs, me and my dysfunctional family, me and mydepression, me and myeating disorder.
The publishers forced her, she writes, to create a narrative arc to bolster her original personal essay— and that necessitated that her book become not the full story of her life but what Lopate suggests in his introduction is the predictable contemporary memoir, a by-now threadbare template of dissolution, struggle and (cue sunlight parting the clouds) requisite redemption.“Preferably,” Lopate writes, the story should be“one revolving around addiction, abuse, poverty or some other nasty problem whose overcoming will yield the desired triumph-of-the-human-spirit results.” Lopate writes that Gordon“tells ruefully the tale of how she was seduced, not once but twice, to write and publish memoirs, instead of being allowed to bring out a collection of personal essays.” This all sounds a bitungrateful. I can practically hear the rooms full of M.F.A. students shrieking, Please don’t throw me in the brier patch! Please, we want a phone call from that editor with the voice like sun-softened caramel!
No one will take Gordon to task as a writer for her memoir-regret. She didn’t actually make anything up; she told no outright lies.“It was no sin against literature to write as if the story of my life in therapy had been the story of my life,” she writes.“But I think it may have amounted to a sin against myself, or a sin against my life, or— more accurately yet— a sin against the true story of my life, the one I can never tell and never know.” But no memoirist worth his madeleine could possibly pack an entire life’s worth of meaning into anything less than a seven-volume work. I’m not sure I could read seven volumes about Gordon’s life. But a fewessays? Yes.
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