One of my textbooks this semester is Words Overflown by Stars, a collection of craft essays by Vermont College MFA faculty. This week I contemplated Ellen Lesser’s essay “The Girl I Was, the Woman I Have Become: Fiction’s Reminiscent Narrators.” Specifically, she reflects on “the point in time from which the story gets told” and the purpose of placing a narrator in the present, reflecting on the past.
She argues that reminiscent narrators can bring tremendous power to a story when they are reconstructing (or deconstructing) their lives and identities from a later point in time. This examination of the past from the present also allows stories to point out the nonlinear relationship between past and present selves. Finally, reminiscent narrators can grant meaning or beauty to past moments for which the significance was not fully understood at the time. One example is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, in which “a man who all along has viewed his life one way now comes, through this act of remembering, to see it entirely differently.”
This essay paired well with Amy Tan’s MasterClass lecture about memory and imagination. I realized up to this point in my life, most of my fiction has been some form of revenge. Either I have been determined to unmask the dysfunction and misogyny in Mormonism (or my family), or I’ve wanted to write a revenge fantasy where a character (standing in for myself, of course) kills my abusive father or otherwise exacts some form of vengeance on the violent men I’ve known. Cathartic? Sure. But those have not been great pieces of work. They were self-indulgent—maybe necessary, but still.
Here’s what I think I’m discovering. The more complex and nuanced view that a writer adopts, the better that writer can become. There’s plenty to be angry about, but it’s also complicated. My father was at times a person capable of joy and play and happy spontaneity. He was also capable of astonishing cruelty, coercion, and violence. My mother could be judgmental, insulting, and even physically brutal. But she also yearned for connection, for the divine, and for respect. They were both lost souls. And it isn’t my job to forgive them, but perhaps I can forgive myself for clinging so long to a child’s view of them. All my family members could behave monstrously, unforgivably. But they were not monsters.
If fiction is, as Amy Tan says, “one of the best ways to get at truth,” then I have to commit to the truth, which is fraught and complicated and never easy. Reading Torrey Peters’ novel Detransition, Baby this week, however, has shown me exactly what it looks like when a writer is brave enough and strong enough to allow messy people to be messy. And Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida uses a retrospective narrator to emphasize the value and beauty of life, even as his character accepts that he has lost his. Both books give me hope. They show how rich and remarkable it is to simply live, wholeheartedly, and they achieve that through a willingness to let people be people (Peters) and to examine our lives through the wisdom of hindsight (Karunatilaka). So maybe, if we keep going, if we keep committing to understanding the past and ourselves—really understanding and not settling on just one version—we can get there, too.
***
Featured Photo by Singkham
The Trailer Park MFA 