November
When I was in Kindergarten, the local newspaper came to our classroom to write an article about how kids prepare for the holidays. We traced our hands on construction paper to make turkeys while they snapped some photos. This was 1987, small town Pennsylvania. I’m pretty sure the headline was something like “Talking Turkey with the Kindergarteners at Lionville.” The reporter asked each kid if they had any Thanksgiving traditions. So I told them that every Thanksgiving my family made applesauce. I gave them the recipe: take a bunch of apples, put them in a pot, add sugar and cinnamon, mash them up. I made the front page, a huge photo of five year old me wearing a bright yellow sweatshirt dress (god, I wish I had that dress in my size today) concentrating on my turkey hand art. My mother drove around town buying dozens and dozens of copies.
There was just one thing: my family had never made applesauce. I made the whole thing up.
When I was in my early twenties, I borrowed a book from the library about adult children of alcoholics. It was an eerie book, illustrating all sorts of behaviors and assumptions that I’d taken for granted for being part of the human experience. One of the characteristics of a child in an alcoholic family is to make things up. The pop psychology behind it is that if you’ve got an alcoholic reigning chaos in your home, but your parents are acting like everything is normal, then fabricated stories are fair game. Hadn’t everyone lied through their childhoods?
Here’s an example of the sort of denial I was often entrenched in. A few years ago at Thanksgiving, something caught on fire in the kitchen at my aunt’s house. When my young cousin ran into the living room to shout that the oven was on fire, my mother quipped, “No, it’s not.”
As a child, I sent poems to Highlights magazine every month. One night while I was taking a bath, I told my mother that my poem had gotten published, and that I’d seen the issue at our friends’ house that day. My mother, leaning on the doorframe as we talked, beamed at me.
“Honey, that’s fantastic!” she said. “I have to call Mrs. Mahoney right now!”
There was an icy stab of shame as my mother walked away. “Wait!” I cried. She poked her head in again. I sunk into the bath, wearing a sheepish grin. “I made it up,” I whispered.
“So your poem didn’t get published?”
I shook my head.
“Why would make that up?”
I shrugged, the air above the water cold on my shoulders. Lying had been advertised to me to as a sin that always lead to getting caught, but still, the fictional life I could craft for myself was so much more alluring than the life unspooling before me. Fantasy was my first addictive love.
I never made a conscious choice to shift from pure imagination to the emotional landscape of nonfiction. It might’ve happened in high school, when I filled journal upon journal about the girls I liked and the confusion I felt, all while desperately looking for those feelings reflected back to me in any queer book I could find, most of which were novels. In college, I wrote what I called short stories based on personal experience. It was always easier to tell the fiction of what had happened, to embellish and exaggerate. As I started going to toe to toe with literary nonfiction, I found that the art came from carefully combing through the facts, the feelings, cross referencing my memory against others’ memories. Nonfiction felt like an orchestra of choice, while fiction felt like a freedom of storytelling.
But then there’s the truth, always better, always richer than anything I could make up. Like this: last February I went to visit my father in Arizona. He’d recently retired out there, after more than a decade of renting a humble studio apartment from his friend in Pennsylvania. Entering his new home I was greeted by a museum of all the furniture and knick knacks from my childhood, unseen since my parents had divorced and my father had put it all in storage. “Is this our old microwave?” I asked. “Is that the lamp from the living room?” They were, as was the yellowed plastic spoon rest on the stove top, and the Corningware Butterfly Gold plates drying in the dish rack. The sudden nostalgia was jarring. My father, ever monk-like, insisted upon sleeping on the living room floor so I could have the bed. It was my parents’ bed, from when they were plural, married, people. The four poster bed frame was the same, right down to knob that had broken off of one of the posts, and the pennies my brother and I had crammed into the empty hole twenty years ago. There were two mugs in my father’s cabinet when I went to pour myself coffee in the morning. One was a mug with the name of the rehab facility where he’d gotten sober. The other was a chipped mug with an illustration of a house and the script Families Are Forever. “You can’t make this shit up,” I laughed. And it was true.
xo,
c
PS:
* November is jam packed with literary goodness. This Wednesday, November 4th I’m excited to be reading with Daniel José Older, Gleandaliz Camacho and Ennis Smith at HiFi Bar at 8PM. The evening is curated by the amazing Jenn Baker of the Minorities in Publishing podcast. I promise good stories, good company, and cupcakes. Also coming up: BinderCon is happening November 7th and 8th. I’m speaking on a panel called Writing the Rainbow at Book Riot Live on November 7th. And November 15th is the next Hustle event at WORD Brooklyn. C’mon out!
* Did I tell you that I interviewed Carrie Brownstein for Lambda Literary? Her memoir, Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl, is beyond fantastic.
* It’s pie season (okay, it’s always pie season, but now it’s like cozy Thanksgiving pie season). Here is my all time favorite pumpkin pie recipe, from City Bakery. It is literally the best.
* A friend posted this fantastic Jeanette Winterson essay on embracing and loving the dark of night that comes with winter.
I feel so compelled to tell you that while I started Kindergarten at Lionville Elemenatry, we soon moved from the three room cottage we rented from my father’s work to a row house a few towns away. So truly I went to Beaver Creek Elementary (real name, hand to god). At a wedding recently, I found out that the bride’s sister’s husband (bear with me) also went to Beaver Creek Elementary. We swapped ecstatic details about our childhoods back and forth.
“Do you remember the cut out painted tree in the lobby?” I asked.
“Yeah!”
“And do you remember the poem that was written on the tree?”
“Omg, yeah!”
“It was called Nature?”
“Yeah!”
I pointed a finger at myself proudly. “That was my poem.”
(He was sufficiently impressed.)