There’s still time to sign up for my self-guided course “Approaching Mystery: Writing Flash Memoir about Wonder and the Unexplained.” Students go through the material as a group on the Wet Ink online platform. The course opens June 17th, and the cost is $50.
There’s also still space in the two-part “Hybrid Forms and (Re)Imagined Spaces” workshop taking place over Zoom on June 1st and June 8th! Paid subscribers to this newsletter receive a discount.
Details for both are here.
It’s strange how many people we are at various points throughout our lives, but also all at once— here in this moment— all the selves existing one on top of each other like gauzy layers, a scrim of selves we look through.
The “all the selves at once” idea is one I’ve read in various places. The first time I remember encountering it was in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, when Esperanza becomes sad and suddenly feels all her ages at once. (I would quote it, but I can’t find my copy!) Recently the memoirist Abigail Thomas put up a public post on Facebook that contains a similar moment. The post reads like one of her beautiful pieces from Safekeeping, a favorite book of mine, and as of this writing it has 651 “likes.” Here’s part of it:
I haven’t been in this park [Washington Square] since the sixties. New York was a different city back then, we all seemed to know each other, and you could live on next to nothing. My salary was 100 dollars a week. My little apartment on West 12th Street was 143 dollars a month. Today you couldn’t rent an empty kitchen drawer for that. Everyone I knew was broke, but we didn’t know it yet, and together we felt like family.
Different city, different times, it’s no surprise I must have been a different person. So as I sit here, thinking about the young woman I was, I can almost see her, sitting barefoot on the rim of the fountain while her kids play in the water, a young woman who had fled a bad marriage, hungry for everything she didn’t yet know, willing to sleep with any man who could fog a mirror, a naive young woman who believed in a different future for this country. I know what her life was like, thrilling and dangerously out of control, but knowing and feeling are different.
I want to be her again, just for a moment, just while I sit here, wild and foolish and full of hope. But at 82, I have become a sequence of nesting dolls, and she is now too small, buried too deep. And it’s time to head back to the hotel, check out, and drive home.
Somehow I keep getting tripped up on on my “selves” lately, both the various roles I currently play and all the past selves bubbling under the surface. My mother self and my writer self are tugging in different directions. The poet and essayist in me aren’t speaking to each other. And my earlier academic self is smirking with disapproval in the corner. Meanwhile a younger version of myself just wants to lie around and watch episodes of My So-Called Life. And then I find myself thinking about all of Claire Danes’s selves. Her 14 year-old self who was taught to make out by 21 year-old Jared Leto for their kissing scenes— ! The Danes who then grew up to break my heart as Rachel Fleishman in Fleishman Is in Trouble. (That series, by the way, is based on a novel by Taffy Brodesser-Akner and is a deft bait-and-switch. It starts out being about Rachel’s husband Toby, but ends up being about the female characters. It’s worth watching for Claire Danes’s performance, even if you started it and couldn’t stand Toby at first. So, that’s a further complication to our “selves”: Who we appear to be depending on the perspective from which our narrative is seen and told.)
So here’s a prompt: Write about one or two of your earlier “selves.” Which have come to mind lately? What scenes are you in when you think of these versions of yourself? How close or far away does that feel from you today? Is there anything you wish you could say to that former self?
You might also want to check out this recent post by Abigal Thomas on the Brevity blog, “I Wanted to Be a Writer.”