Writing a Scene of Solitude

I was reading an essay about teaching creative non-fiction in Creative Non-Fiction Magazine a couple of months ago (I know, I know, we gaze so studiously at our own navels, writers), and came across a reference to Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter.” The reference was matter of fact, sort of assuming that if you were reading CNF magazine, you’ve of course read The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard. I hadn’t. (I’m no stranger to not having read the thing everyone is supposed to have read–I’ve read a lot of things, but I also was a shitty student with a disjointed education and am the sort of person who doesn’t keep reading a book if it doesn’t call to me from across the room. I’m an abandoner. I haven’t read Moby Dick. I read part of The Great Gatsby because I had Saturday detention and the nearest locker that I had the combination to was my friend Sopa’s and that’s what her class was reading [though not her, obviously, because the book was left in her locker for the weekend]. I have read every single Pearl Buck book ever, I’m pretty sure, and anything Sandra Cisneros ever wrote, and ask me anything about Arundhati Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri and Jeanette Winterson). Anyway, I am starting to teach a course on Creative Non-Fiction/Memoir and when The Boys of My Youth was referenced, I knew I needed it. Sometimes you do.

And it was fucking amazing. All day I dreamed of coming home to sit on the couch and read it, and I exclaimed to myself out loud as I read it. I read bits of it out loud to whoever was near, though they maybe couldn’t care less. It was funny and heartbreaking and self-referential in this really stunning clever way. She kept punching me in the gut with surprises. Her fucking timing. I have a dear writer friend coming out to visit next month and I sent a copy of the book to her so that she could read it and the two of us could gush and exclaim over it and take it apart like watchmakers. You should order it too. Here’s an excerpt one of the essays (a hard to read one, certainly–her husband’s left her, the dog is dying, there are squirrels, there is violence). You can read the whole essay, entitled “The Fourth State of Matter” over at The New Yorker’s website, unless you’ve already used up all of your New Yorker articles (I haven’t this month, and every month when I discover that, I’m pretty stoked until I very quickly do).

I’ve called in tired to work. It’s mid-morning and I’m shuffling around in my long underwear, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. The whole house is bathed in sunlight and the faint odor of used diapers. The dogs are being mild-mannered and charming; I nudge the collie with my foot.

“Wake up and smell zee bacons,” I say. She lifts her nose groggily and falls back asleep. I get ready for the office.

“I’m leaving and I’m never coming back,” I say while putting on my coat. I use my mother’s aggrieved, underappreciated tone. The little brown dog transfers her gaze from me to the table, the last place she remembers seeing toast. The Labrador, who understands English, begins howling miserably. She wins the toast sweepstakes and is chewing loudly when I leave, the little dog barking ferociously at her.

See? She has this great voice. She gives us the sense that she’s telling us everything the way she’d tell it to herself (which is, of course, not telling us everything at all). Your prompt is to write a scene (not a whole story, but a scene) of your time semi-alone or with a nonverbal other person–could be a baby, an animal, or as Beard does in one heartbreaking essay about her mother, could be someone you’ve cared for–while you’re assigning them voice, guessing what they think, recording their actions. Something has to happen in the scene, but it need not be anything major. Here what happens is that the narrator gets ready and leaves the house. But she’s paid attention to the details and shown us who she is. Ah, let’s pay attention to who we are when we think no one is looking. Because of course someone is looking. That someone is the most important someone: us. All the love, dearies.