memoirs: body and mind

"confrontations with a body of memory"

Note that these all books include descriptions of physical abuse, sexual assault and other trauma.

Today we’re visiting the shadow realm with a few memoirs written by women dealing with intense challenges. To me, there is a sort of honor and privilege in reading these sorts of memoirs. Bearing witness to someone’s deeply personal revelations of suffering feels miraculous. Miraculous that these women lived through what they have, miraculous that they’ve processed enough to write it down and miraculous that they’ve chosen to share such immense vulnerability with the world. It feels trite to say they’ve ‘overcome’ their trauma like some sort of corny inspirational poster, but they certainly have each done admirable inner work to survive and share extraordinary circumstances many, many times over.

All three of these are stories of women going through physically, mentally and emotionally traumatic experiences and are brilliantly written with stunning levels of emotional honesty and skill. Expertly crafted, they overflow with tension, wonder, awe and consistently induce a myriad of emotions: shock, horror, anger, bewilderment and hope to name just a few. I was completely and utterly absorbed in each one and for a long while after.

If you are in a place to enter the shadow side of life, open up one of these but take your time and let these women sit with you for a few beats.

Run Towards the Danger by Sarah Polley

Sarah Polley takes readers through her fascinating life in a series of essays, from her time as a child actress to her experience with a traumatic brain injury and the seemingly upside down prescription for recovery. This advice is the framework for the memoir: to get stronger one cannot hide, cower and avoid. Instead, the way to retrain, fortify and grow is to “run towards the danger” enveloping it as a part of the whole of life.

This one is brave and radically self-reflective. I remember Polley from the Anne of Green Gables spin-off show, Road to Avonlea; her massive eyes, white-blond hair and pinafore dresses. How disheartening and maddening to learn what she was going through behind the scenes. She shares her experience with acting, parental abandonment, assault, childbirth complications and the most visceral essay describes her years long concussive episode, its debilitating effect on her entire wellbeing and how she eventually healed. These essays explore our relationship to memory, what it feels like in the body and how fallible, yet formative, it can be as it touches so many aspects of one’s self. Her writing is superb; extremely emotive with terrific storytelling finesse. Understandable since she is an acclaimed director and won a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for the exquisitely brutal Women Talking, which I encourage everyone to watch.

I can already sense how I will feel when I remember it years from now. I’m nostalgic for the present, mourning its passing even as it happens.

…

The past was affecting how I moved through the world, while present life was affecting how the past moved through me.

Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford

Lacy Crawford was sexually assaulted by two students while attending a New England boarding school which, obviously, forever impacted her life. Crawford shares the story of her assault, its far reaching consequences and the betrayal of discovering the ongoing cover-up by the school and the adults meant to protect her. The book explores her memories surrounding the attack along with her adult realizations as she uncovers more and more evidence that was ignored or buried over the years for her case and others. This is another all too common story of an institution prizing and protecting itself over children told in a heartbreakingly personal voice.

This is excruciating, powerful and infuriating. I listened to it as an audiobook¹ and the feeling of an author reading out some of their most agonizing experiences directly into your ears was jarring, gut wrenching and precious. I recommend it if you are up for that. It is beautifully written and often uses stark, simple language to express the banality of darkness that punches home its severity.

I was the first to arrive at a rented Oregon beach house and listened to the final portion of its 11 hour runtime while organizing groceries for my soon-to-arrive family. Once I reached “the end”, I simply stared out at the waves attempting to grasp, to appreciate all that Crawford had shared. I felt her story seep into my body and mind. Should you read this one, leave some time for digesting it afterwards. It is one of those books that you just need to sit with.

It’s so simple, what happened at St. Paul’s. It happens all the time. First, they refused to believe me. Then they shamed me. Then they silenced me. On balance, if this is a girl’s trajectory from dignity to disappearance, I say it is better to be a slut than to be silent. I believe, in fact, that the slur slut carries within it, Trojan-horse style, silence as its true intent. That the opposite of slut is not virtue but voice.

Educated by Tara Westover

Tara Westover grew up in very rural Idaho to extremist parents who were against hospitals, education, most of modern society and were ready at any moment for doomsday or a government invasion. She began to teach herself and found solace and power in knowledge, eventually attending Brigham Young University, Harvard and Cambridge. Her new understanding put her at dangerous odds with her family and they demanded she choose between her self and her loved ones.

Having read this one many years ago now, the two things that stuck with me most were the constant, severe physical injuries suffered by the author and her family, and the sharp writing talent Westover displays on every page. She shares horrifyingly violent events (the stuff of nightmares) and her own fragile state and self is often stripped bare, at times overwhelmingly so. I remember feeling voyeuristic, wanting the author to keep something back for just herself. A real survival story: surviving the survivalists. I loved that the theme of education is the light in the darkness; education resulting not only from books and studying, but the creation of understanding one’s own body and mind and selfhood.

Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind.

I know, my eyes glaze over these “leave a comment” buttons too, but if you’ve read one of these or have one to add to this list

1. get your audiobooks from libro.fm to support bookstores