Was he unmistakably cool and making me cool by association? And false association at that, because I lied and told the other kids that was my dad who owned the pool. My story was corroborated when I was able to get whatever I wanted for free from the snack bar. The truth was, he was my sister’s dad. Although we shared a mom, we did not share him. My father was my mom’s second husband and my sister’s stepdad, but this man who owned the pool I sometimes got to attend with my sister was nothing to me. Technically I was nothing to him. Somehow that created the aura of sophistication around him. I liked that he had little if any interest in me and owed me nothing. Was he complicated, or was he merely a narcissistic deadbeat who cheated on our mom and left her while she was pregnant with his twins?
Recently, my sister was visiting me, and we were discussing some of our shared childhood experiences. In some ways, it was almost as though they weren’t shared at all, such was the severity of the distinction between our remembered versions of things. Of course, and not surprisingly, one example was that she had a whole different experience of her dad at that pool than I did. She was embarrassed and didn’t want anyone to know she was the daughter of the pool’s manager (so he had not been the owner of the pool after all). When she heard I bragged to the other kids that I was his daughter to hopefully appear cool, she laughed.
This example is one of obvious subjective and relative truth, which categorizes most, if not all of the experience of reality. Knowing my sister’s version of the truth changes the texture of my memory. It’s partly my collective memories that construct the lens through which I view the world. By sharing our subjective truths, and by having a receptive and open mind, the very reality of our shared world shifts, if slightly.
This lens is also powered by the books I’ve read. Lidia Yuknavitch, one of my favorite writers, uses magical realism both in her fiction and nonfiction to convey deep truth. In two of my favorites of her books, Book of Joan and The Chronology of Water, the body is both a symbolic and transformative site. In Book of Joan, people communicate by carving stories and memories into their very skin. In The Chronology of Water, Yuknavitch treats the body as a landscape for transformation. Its experiences — sexuality, birth, death, swimming — are the points at which the physical merges with the mystical and otherworldly, like a liquid dissolving a solid.
The first time I met Lidia in person, I was attending a workshop she gave. It was just before my second novel, Like Wings, Your Hands, was to be released. I gave her a copy of my book as a gift, not expecting that she would actually read it. The second day of the workshop, she walked in bleary-eyed and tired and approached me straightaway. “I was up all night reading your novel,” she said, “I couldn’t put it down.”
To describe how it feels to have your literary hero so dramatically demonstrate mutual admiration for your own work is like describing the precise mood of a beam of light through moving, deep water in the middle of the vast ocean — it’s not easy. But to experience it is to be filled and emptied simultaneously, such that if you dropped dead the very next moment, life was won.
In the intervening years since that first encounter, I have made an ongoing mentor of Lidia and have witnessed in her the most generous spirit. Not only has she taught me how to be a better writer and literary citizen, but she has helped me to mature. And she did it with so few words. A couple of pivotal moments come to mind.
The first was when she read an early draft of my essay posted to this series earlier this month, Cosmetic Surgery Regrets, A Decisive Paradox. In the feedback session with the group after, she asked a simple yet profound question: “What’s bad about fat?” The volumes, no, libraries of meaning inherent in these words contained the gist, which is that the object of fat has no inherent value, it has no good or bad, it has only what I subjectively interpret it to be. And do I want to unconsciously assign it the value that the heteronormative, male supremacist, misogynistic culture that bred me programmed me to assign it like an automaton? Or do I want to drop that machinery and see it for what it is? And assess it from a deeply personal and organic place?
Another time was after she read a draft of another essay in which I expressed my fears about long term romantic relationships and what happens in them. I had included stories about what happened in my longest couple of relationships, which were four years in duration. She laughed and said, “Four years? I think that was my shortest relationship.” This gift of perception helped me see that I have no earthly idea what happens in long term romantic relationships, because I’ve never participated in one. So yes, Lidia Yuknavitch is a favorite writer, a mentor, a sage, a guru, and — wow, what an honor it is to claim this — a friend.
This kind of treasured friendship reminds us to stand firm in our truth. And that maybe truth is more than subjective or objective. Maybe truth is fluid, just as time and memory are fluid in The Chronology of Water, nonlinear events emerge and recede like waves, distorting the traditional chronicle of a life narrative. This approach to time mirrors in the author’s approach to reality, where past and present intermingle in ways that both defy and uphold conventional logic.
For example, I have sometimes experienced magic in my subjective reality. And if I include those phenomena in a story I tell, it’s called magical realism. Because visible little girls don’t make friends with invisible little boys in objective reality. Because memory is unreliable. Because, if you ask each person involved in that true story their accounting of it, you will get as many entirely different stories. To me, it was visible. It was simply real
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