Who Will Drink My Tears?
I’ve been re-reading The Faraway Nearby by the remarkable Rebecca Solnit. The first time I read my now dog-eared copy was four years ago when I became fascinated with the idea of writing personal nonfiction, especially memoir. I picked it up and put it down several times before I was able to settle in and focus. Quite honestly, I was intimidated by what I considered to be complex sentences and looping thought processes that made me read slowly. I found myself stopping to absorb her meanings, to read between the lines and finally, to marvel at the multiple threads she unspools to tell this story of her mother’s demise into Alzheimer’s. Except, it’s not only about that. There are stories nestled within stories with multiple meanings: one or more truths which may be disguised by untruths; the now and the then; isolation and interconnectedness.
At the bottom of the first page begins a ticker about an Amazonian moth that drinks the tears of sleeping birds, and is refreshed. The bird sleeps on, unaware.
This book was born from a fecundity of apricots in a pile on her bedroom floor. The ripening fruit was an inheritance from her mother’s yard as she moved into an assisted living facility and the house emptied and sold. I expected to read about their relationship, of mother and daughter and the binds that needed to be sorted through as well as the fruit. And I suppose it is, but in (what I now know to be) her typical fashion, she gives us so much more: in tales from near and far, from the past and the future, in order to come back to the remains of the apricots doled out in thimblefuls of golden liqueur many years later.
I thought of Joan Didion while I was reading and remembered a quote I borrowed a sentence from: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.”
When I quoted Didion, I only grabbed the first sentence. Now I know it is the last sentence that I need to remember. I think Ms. Solnit would agree, and approve. I will add this to the story I’m writing, if only to absolve myself of perhaps writing an untruth, wittingly or not. As I continue to struggle with the book I’m writing about my German family and a long held paternity secret now revealed (and marveled at to the point of mundanity), I finally have some insight as to why I struggle. Why sometimes I wish to burn three years of words I at first wrote feverishly and then rewrote again and again, only to decide, again, that my words are not the best representation of the story I wish to tell, this story within a story within a story.
On page 246, Ms. Solnit writes: “The present rearranges the past. We never tell the whole story because a life isn’t a story; it’s a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.”
Ah ha. I haven’t found the perfect constellations to string together, yet, for these “Russian doll” stories I am writing in order to present them in the most truthful way possible. In order to do right by everyone whose stories these are. To write the most “workable of the multiple choices.” Will I know when I do?
The ticker on the very last page asks us “who drinks your tears, who has your wings, who hears your story?”
