Heidi Julavits knows where she’s going in DIRECTIONS TO MYSELF: A Four Year Memoir (Hogarth, 287 pp., $27), or at least she has to believe she does. In this story of parenting and coping, there can be little room for doubt, unless, of course, it makes for good writing. Julavits’ young son faces what she calls “the end times of his youth” — her eldest is already a teenager — and over the course of windy Maine summers and tumultuous school years, she documents their relationship from one part of life to the other. Raising a boy in today’s American climate takes much more than uncomfortable growing pains into account: a sexual assault case plays out in the background of Julavit’s educational life, her son learns what “slut” means, she regales her family with scary stories from her past, including an attempted murder victim who stumbled bloodied onto the porch of her childhood.
Though thematically knotty, Julavits’ writing is a life raft: elegant without sentimentality. “My past has unfortunately turned out to be a finite fossil fuel,” she writes after her children ask for a “true” story from her life. “I have already looted and burned all the resources. The only solution is to retell the same stories, but each time with more detail, making them more and more true in theory.”
Her prose is backed by a sharp sense of humour. She describes how her son’s video game console moved into his bedroom, “which has effectively become his office.” He has an office chair. He wears headphones with a microphone and sounds like a stockbroker.” Despite her annoyance at his shouted stream of gun making and trading with friends, “At least he says please and thank you.”
‘Directions to Myself’ isn’t so much a memoir of parenting as more of a memoir of developing a personality: As Julavits’ son stretches into puberty, so does her own childhood, the fog evoking hazy memories and a creaky old boat called Second Chance.
Self-history takes on a different context in Amelia Possanza’s debut, LESBIAN LOVE STORY: A Memoir in Archives (Catapult, 276 pp., $27). Possanza searches for herself through lesbian history, from Sappho to Sarah Schulman, eager and longing for a lens through which to see herself. “I craved more than simple stereotypes,” she writes. “More moments of private intimacy and public recognition. More reflections that made my own image visible. Simply put, I wanted more lesbians.”
Possanza collects — her term — mostly lesbians from 20th century America and connects the stories of the golfer Babe Didrikson with those of the writer and activist Gloria Anzaldúa. “All of their stories are largely true,” Possanza writes. Yet she bridged the gap between the historical and the memoir by “inventing entire scenes, moments that are absent and inaccessible, the very ones I long for.” She provides a key to the distinction through her book’s formatting: verifiable moments and quotes are in italics, while imagined moments are in Roman letters and present tense. “Historical accuracy and rigor would have only excluded us from the story.” It’s true: the quote-unquote canon of Western history is mostly formed by white male cis historians.
Possanza stirs up butterflies after a first kiss and awkward flirting; she describes the relationship between male impersonator Rusty Brown and her lover Terry as a “post-war U-Haul.” She covers, “I don’t have a degree in history, but I have gained experience, and that should make me as qualified as the scholars who have gone before me.” The more time she spends covering her base, the harder it is to see what’s under her feet. That’s a shame, because Possanza tells compelling, loving stories of lesbians who weren’t yet “lesbians” as we’ve come to know them. “The heavy label was often put on their names and stories by outsiders who viewed them through a glass. (I offer it to them as if they were looking in a mirror),” she specifies. If only she would get out of the way.
For Scottish comedian Fern Brady, self-discovery comes in the form of a diagnosis of autism in her memoir STRONG FEMALE CHARACTER (Harmony, 287 pp., $25). For years she had struggled: with school, with dating, with social interactions, with breakdowns. Years of her adolescence passed among doctors and psychologists looking for a way to live. “Growing up, I was repeatedly told I was very, very smart, but also very, very bad — and yet none of my parents understood why I now enjoyed doing a job where people alternately applauded me or booed,” she writes.
“The public perception of autistics is so heavily based on the stereotype of men who like trains or science that many women overlook the diagnosis and are instead viewed as studious,” Brady explains. Her young life ricochets between intensive self-guided studies – she taught herself Danish at the age of 8 – and frantic scrambling. She’s in school, she’s out of school, she’s in a psychiatric ward, she’s back in school. She is a natural humorist and learns that no darkness can hold her back for long. Her becoming a stand-up comedian is the most natural outcome. “The comedy circuit was a place where I immediately felt comfortable. The feeling of being around people who were more mentally ill than not was immensely comforting.
Brady endures an arrest, a violent assault, an on-and-off stripping career during her tenure as a college student. “I looked for homeless shelters in Edinburgh, but all I could find was a shelter for homeless dogs,” she writes of a particularly difficult period following her parents’ divorce. “Strong Female Character” is a testament to Brady’s quality of that character, her tenacity in the face of a world not yet ready to struggle with whatever she brings to it. Her memoir is not a journey of self-improvement: There is no concrete, happy ending outside of her eventual diagnosis. “The more I ‘came out’ as autistic or half-masked, the less I rebelled against my strange attitude or voice; and the more I stood up for myself, the calmer I felt,” she explains. It’s not so much a conclusion as a roadmap to the next place, and then the next.
Fran Hoepfner writes the newsletter Fran Magazine.
