Some memoirs are less about the subject than about meeting the writer on the page. New York composer Joshua Cody’s [sic], ostensibly about being a young cancer patient, is one of those memoirs.
Cody writes that his book was intended ‘as a riposte to the literature of disease … pure dreck, pale pastel book after book on the shelves’. There’s nothing pastel about [sic], which is as much about art, mortality, creativity and the way we make our own lives as it is about illness. It’s also about a thirty-something man living in New York City: studying music, making films for fun, haunting his neighbourhood bar, recreationally using cocaine and having affairs with beautiful, slightly mad women. The result could easily be a tired cliché or a hot mess, but instead, it’s a vivid, intricately crafted meditation on a life interrupted by serious illness.
Cody says that studying music has given him a particular sensitivity to form. Indeed, the form of this memoir is both unusual and seductive. Though it follows the rough trajectory of its genre by beginning with diagnosis and ending with recovery, [sic] is refreshingly different from its shelfmates. While illness provides the frame of the memoir – a timeline and central reference point – its subject is wider and more ambitious.
Illness memoirs often attempt to answer the questions ‘what is it like?’, ‘how does it feel?’ and ‘what does it all mean?’. Cody answers these first two questions with a crisp starkness reminiscent of Helen Garner’s unflinching descriptions in The Spare Room. He describes sitting in a hospital room with fellow patients, all of them absorbing chemotherapy medication through drips in their arms:
there was something grotesque about it all as if everyone were sitting around … defecating while making affable conversation.
At one stage during his treatment, he comes close to dying. He describes the sensations and steps of his brush with death in such a way that he takes the reader to the brink of the experience, somehow avoiding both ghoulishness and sentiment. Cody’s word-pictures are keenly precise, carefully articulate about experiences that are difficult to articulate and impossible to imagine. He likens the experience of feeling his life ebb away to an intense discomfort:
There was above all the body, and the need to escape from it; and that need eclipsed all else. Biologists call this escape ‘death’.
That third question, ‘what does it all mean?’, is perhaps the most interesting of them all. Cody details the ‘three-act’ structure of most illness memoirs, of which he’s read many:
(1) diagnosis and (II) the discovery of how beautiful life actually is and how there’s more to it than my hedge fund job ever told me it was and look at how lovely this flower is and this butterfly and this herbal tea, and (III) recovery and a book deal and getting a little place in Vermont maybe.
He writes, almost angrily, that there is no intrinsic worth or meaning to his experience: ‘illness was not an opportunity for existential awakenings, it was the very opposite of beauty or grace’.
Yet it was, clearly, an impetus for sustained reflection. Cody asks ‘How do we position suffering in human life?’ He answers that while illness can be pinned to a specific time and place, humans are ‘all over the place and whenever time’. This idea, that illness doesn’t happen in isolation, but in the midst of all the other elements of a life, is central to the book and reflected in the form it takes.
The narrative often leaps about wildly, branching off from the central story to follow multiple peripheral associations, before returning to pick up on the progress of events. For example, midway through sitting in a doctor’s office, receiving a crucial update on the effectiveness of Cody’s treatment, we drift with him to muse on the writings of David Foster Wallace and Susan Sontag, the process of editing films and a lost-forever revisionist western silent film made by his ancestor – before returning to the scene, trying and utterly failing to focus on the doctor’s verdict, before taking off again. It takes nearly 13 pages before the reader is allowed to digest the doctor’s information: that the chemotherapy hasn’t worked and Cody will need brutal radiation therapy, which will take a year and involve hospitalisation and a bone marrow transplant.
This seemingly chaotic riffing brilliantly mirrors the mood of the narrative and the headspace of the narrator. It is impressionistic in a way that music (which Cody calls ‘the least representational of the arts’) often is. It’s not just content but form that veers and varies like this; some sections, where Cody is focused on his experience, are starkly evocative, resembling the ‘line of polished blocks’ he originally intended the book to be, with short, precisely carved sentences. Others times, his sentences are breathlessly, deliberately long – one even goes for roughly a page – reflecting an unmoored mind. The technique, which could go so wrong, works brilliantly, proving what a virtuoso writer Cody is. (Despite the fact he insists he’s ‘not really a writer [but] just writing this one thing and that’s it’.)
[sic] poses another question, one Cody believes occupied his father, a talented writer who never published: ‘what’s the proper position of art within a life?’ For Cody’s father, literature was central to his life in a personal rather than a public fashion; he passed his passion on to his son. Art and artists were part of the dialogue they shared, the common language they spoke: to the extent that after his father’s death, an annotated manuscript of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a gift from Cody to his father, is posthumously returned to him with a final letter. Their final dialogue happens through a book.
Similarly, Cody’s book – his conversation with the reader – is suffused with references to films and filmmakers, musicians, albums, poets. He compares his openness about his sexual encounters to Orson Welles’ repulsion at the idea of a ‘kiss and tell’; contrasts Mozart’s Don Giovanni with The Rolling Stones’ New York album Some Girls, and describes one girlfriend, in part, by saying:
her personal wardrobe and her apartment somehow reminded me of the fake white Christmas tree Ray Liotta brings home for the family after the 1978 Lufthansa heist portrayed in Goodfellas.
For Cody – and for many of us – the stories we consume become part of our own stories. Art is central to a life not only for those who create it, but for those of us who consume it, borrowing parts we find meaningful or significant and weaving them into a new whole.
The way we construct our lives, consciously assemble them out of a myriad of possible parts – both as we live them and as we tell them – is at the heart of Cody’s project. ‘I don’t know how many words I’ve said that I’ve forgotten and I don’t know how many of these were recorded,’ he writes, making concrete the fact that stories are chosen, truths are made. Those fragments we notice and record; they are the ones that become our narrative.
Review by Jo Case, senior writer/editor at the Wheeler Centre
Joshua Cody will be in conversation with Chris Flynn on Tuesday 15 May 2012. They are in a double bill with Jeffrey Eugenides (in conversation with Michael Williams). Tickets are $35 for the double bill. Book now.
We share five of our favourite links to news, reviews or articles that we’ve discovered over the past week.
Fans of Game of Thrones, the series based on George R.R. Martin’s novels, shouldn’t miss eyeballing the medieval feast staged to celebrate the DVD release. But they might want to miss out on actually eating it. Complete with bloodied pigs’ heads, ‘eyeballs’ and ‘dragon’s eggs’ drizzled with liquid gold, it’s a feast for the eyes, but not one that will necessarily work up an appetite.
‘Anything about chopping dudes up, I’m into that,’ says chef Grant King, who hopes to make Darth Vader in chocolate next.
Rachel Cusk’s latest memoir, Aftermath, about her separation from her husband of ten years, includes lines like, ‘My husband said he wanted half of everything, including the children. No, I said … They’re my children … They belong to me.’ Cusk caused a scandal – and spawned the ‘mummy memoir’ genre – with her brutally self-analytical memoir of early motherhood, A Life’s Work, in 2001. She sharply divided critics, who either loved or hated her for laying bare the dark side of motherhood. The Guardian says of Aftermath (April): ‘She has again mined her life and told of her experience of being a woman, in a Read the extract and make up your own mind.
Rachel Cusk: ‘If there is a disjuncture between how women live and how they actually feel – which to me there is, in motherhood and marriage – I will feel entitled to attempt to articulate it.’
Stephen Colbert is making bookish news this week, after a gag during a two-part interview with Maurice Sendak (which he began by saying ‘I don’t like children or books or children’s books’) has turned into a book deal. After pitching an idea for a sequel, While the Wild Things Are: Still Wildin’ (starring Vin Diesel), Colbert joked he was writing a picture-book-in-verse, I Am a Pole (and So Can You!) and read a preview aloud. Sendak, who told Colbert that most children’s books are ‘very bad’, admitted, ‘The sad thing is, I like it.’ So did Grand Central Publishing, who has signed him up, with a publication date of 8 May 2012. ‘It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to write a children’s book,’ said Colbert. ‘I hope the minutes you and your loved ones spend reading it are as fulfilling as the minutes I spent writing it.’
Stephen Colbert: ‘I don’t like children or books or children’s books’.
Wondering what to read this year? Readings’ Martin Shaw has asked a handful of Australian writers to share the books they’re most looking forward to in 2012 for a series of posts for Kill Your Darlings. Nam Le is looking forward to new books from Chloe Hooper, Hilary Mantel and Richard Ford – and the second novel from Rachel Kushner. And there were multiple mentions of Texts in the City host Ruby Murray’s first novel, Running Dogs (Scribe, May) and Paddy O’Reilly’s Fine Colour of Rust (Harper Collins, March), which will be released simultaneously in Australia and the UK. Israeli comic short-story writer Etgar Keret, who will be appearing at the Wheeler Centre next month, also earned a nod for his new collection Suddenly a Knock at the Door, which got a rave review in last weekend’s Australian.
Etgar Keret: The Australian says, ‘There is method in Keret’s madness, and genius, too.’
In the lead-up to this week’s Oscars, the Independent talked to five novelists about their books’ transitions from page to screen. Kaui Hurt Hemmings, author of The Descendants, said director Alexander Payne ‘met my whole family, and they all ended up being in the movie’. He said, ‘Almost every line of dialogue was right out of the book, every sequence, the music I’d mentioned, the clothes they wore, the places they went to.’ Lionel Shriver thinks Lynne Ramsay’s movie of We Need to Talk About Kevin is ‘rather wonderful’, though ‘the movie does lean towards Kevin being evil from birth, whereas that’s more up for grabs in the novel’. Fay Weldon, however, enjoyed the money for the rights to her book The Life and Loves of a She Devil, but says the movie (starring Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep) ‘missed the point entirely’. She’d still do it again, though.
‘I still see myself as a struggling writer,’ says Kaui Hurt Hemmings, author of The Descendants
(Click to watch video.)
Emma Forrest’s career as a writer almost predates her adolescence. She’s toured with pop bands, written a column in the Times, published several books including three novels, and dated stars of stage and screen. She’s also struggled with debilitating mental illness. This is how she described her descent into madness in a 2008 Guardian article advising sympathy for Britney Spears:
“I was 22 in 2000, living in New York on contract to this newspaper and about to have my first book hit the shelves … Beginning as writer’s block, [the psychosis] evolved into a profound self-loathing made visible around my studio apartment by a knee-deep mess of newspapers, magazines, books, clothes … It starts to be a psychotic break when one moves from depression to being afraid of opening the refrigerator because the monster that yells, ‘Zool!’ at Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters might be there. But I didn’t see how crazy that was … By the end of 2000, I was self mutilating a few times a week and having four scaldingly hot baths a day, trying to feel something and trying to make the hours pass, like Britney, driving in circles, padding out her days.”
After a serious suicide attempt, Forrest ended up in hospital, where her illness stabilised. Her path back to wellness began following her return to New York, when she began seeing her psychiatrist, whom she refers to as Dr R. In her memoir of the time, Your Voice in My Head, Dr R looms as a large, beneficent presence. In her words, he helped Forrest “fall out of love with madness”. In her memoir, Forrest writes about Dr R’s unexpected death, and having to learn to be happy on her own. Nowadays, Forrest is a screenwriter based in Los Angeles.
Here’s Emma Forrest on Radio National’s Book Show, and here’s a review of Your Voice in My Head in the Guardian and another in The Awl.
In a New York Times article titled ‘The Problem with Memoir’, Neil Genzlinger revisits the genre in his review of 4 new memoirs, including Johanna Adorjan’s An Exclusive Love.
Genzlinger outlines 4 rules of thumb for would-be memoirists: (1) “That you had parents and a childhood does not of itself qualify you to write a memoir.” (2) “No one wants to relive your misery.” (3) “If you’re jumping on a bandwagon, make sure you have better credentials than the people already on it.” (4) “If you still must write a memoir, consider making yourself the least important character in it.”
The article has prompted replies from McNally Jackson and this from Scribner: “For every three mediocre memoirs Genzlinger could pull off the shelves, there are three brilliant, moving, and transcendent works he could have found, too.”
Memoirists of note appearing soon at the Wheeler Centre include Benjamin Law, John Wood, Michael McGirr, Kate Holden and Raimond Gaita.
What do you think? Post a comment below and join the conversation.
Meet Sebastian. He doesn’t talk much. In fact he hasn’t spoken since we met. The strong silent type, Sebastian has a round head and lean flanks. He hails from Sweden, along with Gilbert, who lives in my dining room.
We also have an L-shaped couch called Karlstad and a blond coffee table named Ramvik. To complete the family there is Benno the bookcase, a desk named Galant and nest of shelves in the garden shed called Gorm.
I don’t speak Swedish. Apart from the words our language has pinched – like ombudsman and smorgasbord – I’m mute as Sebastian. Yet all this time, living among the IKEA colony we call a home, I’d presumed Ramvik was a word meaning modular couch with puffy armrests in Stockholm.
And Florö was Swedish for a queen-size bedframe made of particle board and steel rods. Turns out Floro is really a herring town in western Norway, just like Trondheim, the sister bed in the catalogue, is a seat of learning five hours north of Oslo.
There’s a system lurking behind these IKEA names, though the logic is harder to grasp than a clammy Allen key. Benno and Gorm, say, are both Swedish boys, as is Gilbert the chair and Sebastian the adjustable stool. Meanwhile Lusy Bloom (a cushion) and Alvine Snurr (a throw rug) are two Nordic lasses.
Lakes and rivers (like Apskar and Toftbo) belong in the bathroom, being a wash basin and cotton mat respectively. Swedish islands occupy the patio as furniture. While Finnish towns are interior tables, and Danish ones, carpet.
Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, created this quirky naming system to offset his own dyslexia, goes the popular theory. Far better to link a low table to Ramvik, a small dairy town on the Baltic, rather than dabble in the typical coding claptrap of CQ41-209TX, which happens to be a laptop at Harvey Norman.
Nouns and adjectives also rate as chattels in the IKEA catalogue. Doll-house items are listed under Duktig, which means well-behaved. While Luftig, an exhaust fan, translates as airy. Mind you, the tactic can backfire when some names are exported.
Already in Australia we changed the Jerker work station into a seemlier Fredrik, just as Berliners balked at buying a double bunk for kids called Gutvik, since it meant good bonk in German, not bunk. And what odds do you give Lyckhem, an occasional table meaning bliss, on surviving innuendo?
But soon enough we’ll all be yapping makeshift Swedish. As IKEA flotsam populates our homes, we won’t blink twice to hear our host remark, ‘Hey Trish, why not grab that extra Gilbert near the Expedit and slide it under the Helsinki.’
David Astle is a cruciverbalist and author of Puzzled: Secrets And Clues From A Life Lost In Words.
The US military is red-faced over a Pentagon campaign to buy up a controversial memoir about operations in Afghanistan, according to Aol News.
Retired Lt Colonel Anthony Shaffer wrote the catchily titled Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan – and the Path to Victory based on his service in Afghanistan. He never expected it to be an instant bestseller with the Pentagon purchasing the entire print run of 10,000 books.
While the book was submitted to be cleared by the Department of Defense, the book seemed have gotten lost within the system and now the Pentagon is buying back. Shaffer famously spoke out about how the government ignored pre-September 11 warnings of extremist activity, so the Operation Dark Heart’s content promises to be explosive. But with review copies and advances already released several copies of the book are already seeing the light of day. The Huffington Post reports a copy on eBay going for just over US$2,000.
Shaffer’s attorney, Mark Zaid, sees the Pentagon’s actions as huge publicity for a book that would have been largely ignored. Zaid said without the pulping, “fewer people would have read the book, and most of those people would have been inside the government, or people who already knew this stuff. Now, the government has highlighted that there’s something in this book that everyone wants to see.”
Ian Brown wrote about his son’s struggle with an orphan syndrome for Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, but also included some emotional video footage of his son Walker watching him play guitar and trying to understand the world.
Brown struggles to create routine for his son in the chaos of what he describes as “cardio-facio-cutaneous syndrome, a technical name for a mash of symptoms”. The routine helps to keeps Walker relaxed but it is also the routine that “makes the eight years [of caring for Walker] seem longer, until afterward, when because of the routine the years seem to have evaporated.”
It’s a story told with great honesty as Brown and his wife struggle to keep their son at home rather than surrendering to care and try to find other parents coping with children with similar syndromes. Most of all, Brown’s isolation was compounded by the lack of people to empathise with. “There wasn’t even anyone to compare him to. His illness… afflicted about 100 people. But they were scattered at random in Australia, Denmark, Britain, Japan, the United States.”
The Observer publishes an extract from Patti Smith's new memoir, Just Kids.
Patti Smith's Just Kids: Harper Collins
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