Episode 12: Roald Dahl's Boy and Autobiography

 

Biography is fascinating because: who cares? Who cares what happened in your life? 

It might be because you've done something interesting or terrible and we want to know how you got to that point. 

It might be because you lived through something major and cool or alarming and we want to know what it was like to be there.

It might just be because you're funny and tell about things nobody else would have paid attention to, but you make them cool and interesting. That's the only way my millions of words of blog will turn into a book so I hope this one flies.

With older autobiography, particularly diaries, I'm endlessly fascinated by the minutiae of daily life, but with modern biography, that's just not interesting to me at all. Excruciatingly boring, even, if the person is from the same culture as me. If not, tell me everything!

It might be because your work is cool and we're interested in how a person created such things. Why? To replicate that process, maybe? I don't know that that's possible or even why people read biography. 

I'm not really sure about biography at all, actually.

I just reread Roald Dahl's Boy so I've been thinking about how he approached autobiography. He says autobiography is full of boring details, so he just tells a few of the notable moments he remembers from his childhood. Excellent way to go about it! The stories are great. He goes: this was cool. This was terrible. Look at the crazy things these teachers did. Here's where my nose got cut off! Here's how we tortured our older sister's annoying boyfriend. Here's what we had for breakfast at our grandparents' house. It's all so interesting to me! I want to know everything!

Also he's probably responsible in part for my Norway obsession. You can't read that book and come away not thinking Norway is paradise, or was a hundred years ago, anyway. I mean, dour Calvinism aside. 

I'm not really here for facts so much as attitude and experiences, so for me it's autobiography yay, biography yawn. Diaries are especially good because they're not for an audience, so the truth is more likely to come out. Truth that is entirely subjective, of course, but it always is. 

Sometimes you have to come at the truth a little sideways. Or you might tell stories that you think are saying one thing, while they are saying something else entirely. There's also what's left out. 

I got the diaries of Pepys from the library, volumes 1-4 of 11. I was already sick and in a lot of pain from my legs I think due to a particular pair of boots that I had put my trust in but shouldn't have, plus a weird dude kept pestering me and I had to be rude to make him fuck off. I got the reference librarian to help me find them. He had never heard of Pepys. Lots of people have never heard of Pepys! It's okay!

Well, you can look him up in Wikipedia. Diarist! I think that sums it up. He lived through interesting times, as do we all. 

I have got to read all of the diaries of everyone ever. I love them so much. 

I probably have COVID based on having no sense of smell or taste suddenly, as of Friday afternoon, though it was waning in the morning when I went to Denny's and had flavorless eggs, pancakes, and sausage, along with flavorless coffee with flavorless vanilla creamer in it. Hmmmm. But it took making spinach dip and cutting up a whole flavorless scentless onion and five cloves of unsmellable garlic to clue me in. 

I kept putting cloves of garlic up to my nose and sniffing them. Nothing. Weird!

The spinach dip tasted like nothing at all but was cool and creamy so I ate it. 

I've been having a constant medium grade panic attack since Wednesday. I researched whether that's a thing with COVID and discovered: yes! Cytokines etc. I don't claim to know. But yes, it can definitely give you the major freakout. Phew! So that's what's going on. 

Wednesday I thought I was BAD and if I cleaned up my whole house I might escape RETRIBUTION. I fully panicked. Like hyperventilating and all. It has made it impossible to focus enough to record a podcast episode, not to mention that I'm super short of breath. 

Hang tight. I will get through it. 

It's very weird and gross to have food not taste like anything. I sniffed the bag of coffee and could distantly smell that. The bottle of iced tea tastes gross. Regular tea tastes just astringent. This has all been covered by everyone everywhere, huh? What a good example of experiences not being interesting to others despite being fascinating to myself.

However: in a month I won't really remember what this was like, not vividly, not with details, so it's great to write it down as an example of what I'm talking about. See what I'm doing here? Okay.

So I need to go through that absolutely massive block of text, truly millions of words, and pull out the interesting pieces. I don't think it tells a story, which bothers me as a novelist. But it does tell a life story and that's something, surely, depending on whether that life interests anyone. I think if it's the story of how someone got to be the writer they turned into, that could be very cool. Story of becoming! My favorite! Which would mean going back to get even earlier journals and finding the writing days there. 

I love Roald Dahl's story about how he started writing. He had lunch with an editor who basically said: give us the events but give us all the sensory details, what you saw, smelled, felt, heard. And go!

But that's not actually how he started writing. He says in Boy that he was required to write a letter home every single Sunday. He kept up the practice his entire life, writing home to his mother, who kept every single letter. So he had an incredible resource for writing autobiography, yes, but also he had all that incredible practice. Practice matters! Sometimes I message three people about something and watch how my way of telling that thing gets better each time, more vivid, more concise, funnier, improving every possible way. Which is why rewriting matters, obviously! But also it's practice in how to phrase things. 

Sensory details. The Olympics are on! I'm watching women's soccer, France vs. Canada. I expect France to win but it's been very equal. I gave the dog a bath before the game, then weeded the wildly overgrown garden while she dried off in the sun. I'm eating Tostitos and drinking that bottled iced tea because salt and sugar are things I can taste, just not flavor. 

Why in the world would that be? Why can't I SMELL anything? Not even wet dog! Or her shampoo! Not food, not fresh-cut grass, not tea. I love tea so much but it's just not there. The dog's food smells like chocolate to me. (It isn't, I promise!) I want to make chocolate chip cookies but a friend said not to bother as the smell is a major part of the appeal.  

The windows are open and the sun is shining in. The dog keeps lying on the blue bench under the windows to dry in the sun. I put the pink fleece on the giant ottoman so wet dog doesn't become a feature of the atmosphere, presuming my sense of smell returns, which it had best. 

Do tortilla chips ever taste like anything? Is there actually a flavor to them? I can't think what it is. Sticking with the crunchy foods. Celery, carrots, tortilla chips. Though I have cherries and lettuce in the fridge. 

Promise me the ongoing constant panic attack will go away. 

Editing that massive blog is going to be a work of CHAGRIN but also I find a lot of things in it extremely funny and want to share them. And unlike in real life, I get to leave out the boring or stupid parts. I suppose everyone who assembles an autobiography takes out anything that makes them look bad. I probably didn't write it in there in the first place. But if I go to the journals, I can do a very fun thing where I have two versions of the same event. That's worth doing, huh? 

SO MUCH WORK. But it feels a little like my containers of quilting fabric. Make it into a quilt! Go go go!

Walking around the biography section of the bookstore, I kept seeing biographies of people I'd met, which made the whole thing seem much more plausible. They're just people. I'm just people. I realize there's a logic gap there, but so what? It works. Turn it into books. Do your thing. 

All you really have to do is do your thing. 

Cobalt blue sugar bowl and creamer I had forgotten existed, surely packed away in the basement somewhere, plus of course bonus Eleanor content and slightly too much table.

Episode 11: Glory O'Brien's History of the Future

Yes! Fantastic! A book everyone should read. 

Get it!

 

 

 

The WORST, an upcoming short story collection

I'm putting together a collection of short stories I wrote (as assigned in my MFA) about my abusive mother.

It's so weird to read all these autobiographical novels about bad mothers and think...that's it? That's what you are so upset about?

Also they got the good titles first. Like I'm Glad My Mother Is Dead. That's a killer title. That poor girl, though. Okay, she really went through it. But I got furious at Crying in H Mart because the author was clearly not self-aware enough to be writing that book. And was also clearly trying to spin things to sound like less of a dick to her mom.

It's never going to come across great when you're a dick to anyone in autobiography. 

My stories were extremely rough to read. It was horrible being under her control, especially before I went to school. The stories where I was very young made tears pour down my face. I remember all this so vividly, but what's weird is a lot of it is much less vivid than it was in 2017 when I wrote all of these things. Writing them out changes your memories and puts them into boxes in your brain. 

I was not a perfect child, goodness knows, but I wasn't a dick to her. Well, she was far too scary, for one thing. She did not want a second girl (she told me) because if I'd been a boy she would have been done having kids. So it's my fault she had to have a third one to get my brother. Great! She hated me from the moment I was born, neglected me as a baby (she also told me this, that she forgot about me for a lot of the day), beat the shit out of me all the time, blamed me for everything anyone did, and made a scapegoat out of me my whole life. GOOD TIMES.

Anyway the stories are a huge bummer in that sense, but OMG so great in other senses, because I went to various genres to write that kid out of that situation. Consider "The Demon's Daughter," a classic fantasy, where a sorceress named Dagmar gets summoned by a demon to take care of this human baby the demon has. Difficulties ensue! There is a priest who keeps quitting priesting! There is an excellent doe goat!

"The Demon's Daughter" is great. 

I have to rewrite this story where Alison Bechdel showed up at my terrible job totally unexpectedly and lit a fire under me to get out of a truly awful situation. 

I found a list of things I'd forgotten about, reactions people had when my fiance and I told them we were engaged. Both mothers were very upset about it and extremely rude. Like, there are social conventions about these things. You don't turn your back and wash dishes, which is what both of them did. Isn't that amazing? Again, I'd forgotten all these things. That story was always going to end that way. I suppose it could go in the book somehow if I worked it up into an actual story.

Going through all of my old short stories was an Education, capital E. I only wrote them during my MFA. One was afterward, I guess, the one called "Seventeen, Ten, Three, and One Day." It's so good. At least, it's important to me in a lot of huge ways. It's about rescuing your younger selves. 

So I have to rewrite the Alison one and maybe work up the terrible things she said to me one (there's another document full in addition to the fiance one). Like for example saying to someone on the phone IN MY PRESENCE that all of her children were happily married and had good jobs. I was in the room. I was not married and did not have a good job.

Ohhhhh maybe I should talk about Ancestry and getting final DNA proof that I'm related to her. For reasons like that one just mentioned, I was positive most of my life that I wasn't her child. One, she hated me and hit me every day. Two, she treated me differently from my siblings. Three, I almost never got clothes that were new to me, always hand-me-downs or thrift store finds, while the others got new. Four, all my children are happily married and have good jobs. Five, see my collected works on bad parenting, and this story collection when it comes out. 

Six, I held out the hope for so long, until this year, that I had a real mother out there somewhere who would be so happy to see me, something my mother never was--when I came to visit, she would say nothing, or just, "Oh, it's you," never eye contact, and pay attention to the dog instead. She hated the very sight of me. She hated the sight of any of my possessions, even, and used to destroy them all the time. I don't think I've ever seen anyone so committed to hating someone as her. When she was forced by convention to give gifts, they were singularly inappropriate. Knitted things were always miles too small. Like literally four sizes too small. It's amazing.

This imaginary mother would look like me, would be happy to see me, would be interested in what I was doing, would be happy when I succeeded, would like the things I said and the things I made. She'd be proud of me. She wouldn't be perfect, of course! Maybe she'd have my short temper and ADHD. Maybe she just forgot where she left me! No, that's a joke. Maybe she was super young when she had me and gave me up for adoption. I want to know everything about her! What are you into? What do you like? What is your family like? Can I meet them? Do they look like me? Do they want me in their family, I hope so much?

It was awful to lose that hope. But what are you gonna do?

It's boring, right? I'm sure my friends are sick of it. Oh, she hated you, so what. Well, you have to deal with the fallout from that in so many different ways when someone who's supposed to be your main source of support and affection gives you negative one hundred of both of those. Like it drove her insane when I succeeded at something. It enraged her when I was happy. She would find me happily playing or reading and start screaming at me about something, didn't matter what. She got furious when I failed at something, because it made her look bad, and furious when I succeeded, because she didn't want me to be happy or proud of myself. You simply can't spend a lot of your life around someone who hates to see you happy without being affected by it. 

Here's just a taste of what it destroys: confidence, sense of security, ability to ask for help, ability to attach to anyone without terror they'll bail. Ability to approach any given human and feel like they will be nice instead of vicious. I expect vicious. So I don't approach. It's great. Wait, no, it's all terrible. 

Look at the upside: independence, extreme capability and competence on my own, which comes with the ability to tackle any task on my own, including ludicrous ones I never should have done, like driving myself to the hospital with a dislocated shoulder (luckily it was the left) and moving a queen mattress up a flight of stairs using a comealong winch attached to a chinup bar. 

Anyway look forward to a short story collection called The WORST. And another one called Normal People, Weird Stories. It should be two separate collections, really. But one has five stories and one has three. I thought there were so many more! There are some EXCELLENT stories in there, like "Marla Said," which I adore. The weird stories are always my favorite. I was astonished to find all these stories about normal people in real life. Ew. 

There's a great normal people one about my horrible job with the woman who made me change my name because it was the same as hers, then rejected my middle name also because it was her daughter's. She was the center of the world, see. So that's where I got the name Emma. She was a controlling nightmare to work with, but not even within light years of my mom, so I kind of just accepted the situation, until the explosion at the end, and afterward, looking back, I wondered what on earth I was doing putting up with this complete lunatic.

I like that story a lot too. But I have to change the names to protect the exceedingly guilty. 

What do we do with the terrible people in the world? It's a question worth asking. Most people end up working with someone awful at some point, someone who treats people terribly and pushes every button and does not want you to be happy.

I remember the day I realized my mom did not want me to be happy. That's really something, isn't it? With anyone, of course. Seeing my first string quartet performed in public, in the big foyer in front of the gym at my high school, sent her into a white hot fury, such that she lost control of herself and started screaming at me in a crowded gathering and my dad had to take her outside. My Finnish brother was such a voice of sanity in all this, my whole senior year. "There's something wrong with her," he would say. "That's not normal." You have no idea how much a calm, sensible, objective Scandinavian point of view helped me in my last year in that living hell. She stopped screaming if he intervened. Also she stopped hitting when he was around. Win!

Saved by a Finn. I should write *that* story. And really should have left and never, ever gone back. You're allowed to leave when people are horrible to you! Pack your things and leave! It's all right! That is the moral of the story, truly. 

I know, I said in the Matilda episode that often you just can't. But knowing you can and should get the hell away from what's hurting you is a huge part of the battle. 

Episode 10: Matilda

https://www.emmaburns.org/sacred-cheese-of-life-podcast/xi10otjy6gwtora43y8jiducelslwt

Forgot!

Look, I can forget where I was going and why I was going there between the office and the kitchen, so all this leaving the house and doing things has seriously interfered with my concentration. Or improved it? Hard to say.

Matilda is just fascinating, though. I almost can't get over how much this little chapter book does. Though I was also just thinking about Where the Wild Things Are and how that book is much, much bigger on the inside. It keeps on giving the longer you study it. 

Which incidentally was a truly boneheaded definition of literature I heard once: it keeps giving when you study it. Hi. That is true about EVERYTHING. 

Back to my ranty feelings about high and low art and genre bigotry.

Here, think about a play. Literature, right? (Don't get me started by arguing which ones are and which ones aren't.) If you film a play does it stop being literature? Obviously not. Take one of those one-camera BBC recordings of plays from the 70s. That's still the play. Formatting aside, a television show is a play that is filmed. Look, we have to be logical here. 

What they're saying is they don't respect some genres, to which of course we can say shut up, because there is actually no way to dig into that and find anything but BIGOTRY. There is good and bad writing within every genre, even by those people's definitions. 

I suppose my next topic has to be: what makes good writing? It's extremely individual. So the question has to be: what do you think is good writing? My opinion doesn't make something good or bad just because my job is to study all this. 

Read, watch, listen to whatever the hell you want. Be happy. Live long and prosper.