books

Last summer, at BlogHer, I saw Stacy Morrison across the room.  She was getting ready to sign copies of her new memoir, Falling Apart in One Piece.  She looked happy, masterful, confident, and I remember thinking: she seems really cool.  Little did I know.  She is definitely cool!  And I adored her memoir,  Falling Apart in One Piece, which I read last week and loved.  I wept, I laughed, I underlined, I read aloud to my husband, I tweeted quotes.  Generally, I did all the things I do when a book truly speaks to me.  And this one did.

Falling Apart in One Piece is, at first glance, a memoir about divorce, but I think its message is also much more broadly relevant.  Essentially, the book is about what happens when life doesn’t turn out the way you planned and expected, and about how thoroughly that reckoning can dismantle your sense of self.  I certainly have been through these choppy waters myself, as have most of the people I know.  The triggers and circumstances that lead us into the rapids differ for each of us, but I think there is tremendous universality in the lessons.  This is the power of Morrison’s book.

Falling Apart in One Piece begins with a relatively brief description of Morrison’s childhood.  Her portrayal of her mother moved me the most.  “I thought she possessed magic, even though she also carried so much sadness,” she says, brilliantly evoking the woman whose strong pull on her continues into her adulthood.  Perhaps in response to her mother’s sadness, Morrison develops a “big personality” and a strong instinct for being in control.  She describes falling in love with her husband, Chris, and the authenticity of their feelings comes through vividly.  She lets down her guard for Chris, calling him  “the person who knew the scared, sad girl who lived inside me that I didn’t let anyone see.”  They marry young and, in many ways, grow up together.  Despite Morrison’s stubborn independence, it is clear that Chris and she are utterly intertwined.

It is only when their marriage ruptures that we see the extent to which Morrison’s sense of self was also intertwined with Chris.  The part of Falling Apart in One Piece that traces Morrison and her husband’s stop-and-start, stuttering efforts to save their marriage are among the most humane and realistic descriptions of an adult relationship I’ve ever read.  We see how deeply they love each other, but we also see the deep grooves they’ve each worn into each other.  Falling Apart in One Piece reminds us that deep love and lots of effort is not always enough to save a relationship.

That sounds cynical and depressing, but this memoir is absolutely neither of those things.  There is a deep and abiding optimism at the heart of Morrison’s story (in fact “one optimist’s journey through the hell of divorce” is the book’s subtitle).  Certainly, though, we watch her fall apart completely, a collapse that was triggered by having to let go of the way she thought her life was going to be, and by learning that the person who had defined her for so many years was not only gone but also, possibly, wrong about her in essential ways.  She has to learn to trust her own voice in her head rather than hearing Chris’s.

Even in the darkest months of her life, the times when she is least sure of anything, Morrison has moments of startling peace and, even, joy.

As I looked at the mosaic floor my son was joyously dancing on, I was reminded that what you see in your life isn’t one thing one picture, one thought.  Life is a thousand little pieces, sliding and moving, like bits of glass in a kaleidoscope.  You may get a moment of suddenly taking in a pattern whole, and then it’s gone again in a flash, changing, shifting into something else.

Morrison also shares scenes of emotional disintegration that took my breath away their intimacy and their familiarity.  She lies on the floor of her kitchen, weeping, “in full submission, a circumstance I had spent my whole life furiously fighting to avoid,”  forced to stare her own fragility and fear directly in the face.  Morrison endures sieges from both rain and fire that are biblical in nature and scale.  The metaphor is impossible to avoid: every single atom in the universe seems to have joined in the chorus telling her that she is not in control.

Morrison’s indomitable spirit carries her through these disasters and keeps her moving forward.  As her son grows into a cheerful toddler he, too, begins to act as a cord tugging her forward, out of her sadness and fear, into the moment that is right at her feet.  She finally sells the house with the flooded basement and the memories of her marriage ending, and moves to a new apartment and a new life.  She tiptoes onto firmer land, begins to realize that the negative way that Chris (and, importantly, she) saw herself at the end of her marriage is not, in fact, the ultimate judgment on her character, starts to see the potential of a family configured differently than she had imagined.  Even so, the waves of sadness and difficulty continue.

I needed to continue to find the way to make peace with the challenges of the way every day contained a little sad and a little good, the way grief was a constant undercurrent to my moving-forward life.

I need to write these lines on an index card and put them above my desk (right next to Wendell Berry’s The Real Work).  This is the work of my life right now.  Morrison goes on to reflect on her flooded basement, noting “I realized now that my soul had been carved deep to take in life’s water,” and I gasped, thinking of my own reflections on how my propensity for great sorrow and hurt is inextricably correlated to my immense capacity for wonder and joy.  Yes, yes, yes.

Even as she moves forward in her life, settling into new patterns and rhythms, Morrison finds herself occasionally blindsided with grief, shocked with a sadness she thought she had processed and moved past.  She expresses frustration that she is not “finished with this crushing grief” yet, describes with resigned awareness “this continually appearing astonishment that life could hurt so much and that I could be so unprotected.” Morrison’s refusal to wrap her story up in a neat happy-ever-after ending is part of what I love best about this memoir: it is honest, and real, in its description of grief’s winding course, in its assertion that a human being growing into herself is a decidedly non-linear enterprise.

I underlined furiously in the last couple of chapters of Falling Apart in One Piece, finding many beautiful reflections on life that rang inside my chest like a deep gong.  I can’t possibly share them all, so I will close with my favorite.  I urge you to read this book.  Morrison’s memoir is beautifully written and powerfully captures what I believe is a fundamental task of growing up as human beings: letting go of what we thought it was going to be in order to embrace what is.  What Morrison realized, and shares gorgeously, is that between the letting go and the embrace is a freefall, both liberating and terrifying.  I am living in that freefall right now, experiencing its wild freedoms and overwhelming fearsomeness on a daily basis.

That I believe in the power of love.  That I believe that life is worth living.  That I believe it is just as likely that there is something good, something amazing, waiting for me around life’s next corner as it is that there is something terrible.  I expect some of both, frankly.

Also, check out Stacy’s fabulous blog, Filling In the Blanks, which has swiftly risen to the top of my daily reads.

I admit that I didn’t even know who Patti Smith was when I picked up her memoir Just Kids.  Well, I did, but I was wrong: I thought she was the lead singer of the Pretenders.  I had heard of Robert Mapplethorpe, though I didn’t know much beyond the controversy that I vaguely recall from my childhood.  I was entirely unprepared for the rich gorgeousness of Smith’s prose:  Just Kids is really an extended prose poem, a lamentation for the man who was the “artist of her life,” an elegy for a singular and undefinable friendship.

Smith and Mapplethorpe meet twice by accident and then, a third time, after which they are basically never apart again.  They embark on a passionate love affair, defined by each of their individual and collective awakenings as artists.  It’s clear that each recognizes in the other a kindred spirit; Smith writes that they were both “inflicted with a vague internal restlessness.”  They live together in a series of Brooklyn apartments, exploring each other, their artistic sensibilities, and the riotously flowering reality of New York in the late 60s and early 70s.

Smith describes these years in a series of vivid images.  I was reminded over and over again, from the opening pages of this glorious book, that Smith is first and foremost a poet.  The Persian necklace that both treasure, the apartment with blood on the walls, the day that Mapplethorpe papers their bedroom in mylar, the decision they make regularly between buying art supplies and eating lunch.  These moments glow in my memory like polished beads, both beautiful on their own and essential to the jewelry as a whole.  One of my favorite images is that in those early years Smith and Mapplethorpe couldn’t afford two museum tickets, so often one of them would go through a museum and rush out to share it with the other, all, a tumble of bright stories and observations.

Over the years Smith and Mapplethorpe move together and apart, in and out of romantic relationship, but their bond endures.  Smith says, “Both of us had given ourselves to others.  We vacillated and lost everyone, but we had found one another again.”  Their essential union, one that springs from a place far beyond traditional relationship, continues to grow and is when intimacy accessories like this great rabbit vibrator can be used to enjoy tne relationship even more.  When Mapplethorpe says to his spirit twin, “nobody sees like we do, Patti,” we begin to understand the source of their bond.

As Smith and Mapplethorpe grow in both skill and renown as artists, they become enmeshed in New York’s creative community.  Mapplethorpe begins to take his own photographs, as Smith had long urged him to do.  And she becomes his favorite model.  The book is filled with images, both personal photographs and examples of Mapplethorpe’s work.  It is particularly powerful to see the visceral evidence of how Mapplethorpe saw Smith.  She says, “he saw in me more than I could see in myself,” and describes that even now, looking back at his pictures of her, “I never me.  I see us.”

Just Kids traces the way that Smith and Mapplethorpe’s “undefinable devotion” twines through their lives, the central, animating relationship of each.  Their relationship with each other is like its own beating heart, a presence greater than either of them is alone.  As the book closes, Smith gets married and has children while Robert is diagnosed with AIDS.  As we read about Smith’s commitment to another man, it remains apparent that Mapplethorpe continues to be the most vital person in her life.  Their first visit after his diagnosis, when Smith is pregnant, is both powerful and prescient.  As Smith says, “he was carrying death within him and I was carrying life.  We were both aware of that, I know.”

Just Kids is an extraordinary book, gorgeously written and pulsing with the incandescent intensity of a unique relationship.  I read the last lines of Smith’s story with tears streaming down my cheeks:

We were Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world.  There were temptations and witches and demons we never dreamed of and there was splendor we only partially imagined.  No one could speak for these two young people nor tell with any truth of their days and nights together.  Only Robert and I could tell it.  Our story, as he called it. And, having gone, he left the task to me to tell it to you.

As you know, I like to read.  As you also know, the stack below my bedside table haunts me, reminding me that I will never, ever live as long as I need to read everything I want to read.  Still I’m always adding to it.  I find myself going through seasons with my reading, though they don’t necessarily follow the calendar.  Last summer I read only US Weekly and poetry; I just could not bear to read a real book.  I’m not sure why.  I read lots of memoir and then I crave fiction.  Etc.  I’m always, always looking for recommendations from others.

My friend Kristen from Motherese yesterday asked for summer reading suggestions.  It made me think I would like to hear from you all, as well, as to what you’re reading and planning to in this season that often offers more wide open space to sink into books.  As for me, I recently read J. Courtney Sullivan’s Maine, which I loved, and Annie Dillard’s Tickets For a Prayer Wheel, characteristically full of grace and thought-provoking imagery.  I am now reading Stacy Morrison’s Falling Apart in One Piece.  I’m furiously underlining and finding myself looking up from the book, gulping, relating to so much of what she writes.  Next up, in no order yet, are Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Jack Kornfield’s The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace, and Andre Agassi’s Open.  I’m also in a big Wendell Berry phase and am finding myself drawn to his poetry right now.

I’m eager to hear what you are reading, and what you plan to read this summer?