Out of all the specific memories you write about in this memoir, which ONE MEMORY was the most emotional for you to write about? And can you share that specific excerpt with us here. The excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer, and please provide page numbers as reference. The Big Hurt has a lot of predation and sexual violence in it. Writing any of those scenes was really difficult. But the chapter called “Santa Fe, Colorado, and Utah, Summer 1979” that begins on page 142 was one of the most technically difficult and finely-woven pieces in the book. I wanted not to just describe sexual assault, but the state of mind I was in that allowed me to think what was happening was okay.
In this chapter I am fifteen years old and on summer break from my boarding school, where I have had a tough year. Instead of bringing me home, my parents sent me to a wilderness program for teens called “Infinite Odyssey.” The program featured a “solo” — kids were dropped off alone in the woods for three days with nothing but their sleeping bag, some trail mix, and their journals. We were supposed to turn inward and have some kind of deep, spiritual confrontation with the Self. But I had no interest in confronting myself, so I snuck a copy of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” in my sleeping bag, and thank God, because it rained for three days and my soul was too dark to search all alone in the woods. So I just cocooned in my bag and read and re-read that novel.
I was, as most kids at that age are, trying to piece together my sexual self. I was habitually preyed-upon by older men beginning at age 12, and I wanted to understand the stakes of sex: what it meant, how to do it, how to feel about it, how to be an adult, sexual woman, even though I was just a horned-out kid reading what I had hoped was a dirty book in the woods. But D.H. Lawrence’s portrayal of sex was oddly dry and confusing to me.
A few days later our group is kayaking down the Green River, helmed by a guy named Keith, who worked for a local kayaking outfitter in Moab. In the scene, we camp on the river and there is a miraculous hatching of Mayflies, and the air is filled with tiny moths. The synchronicity of the Mayflies made me feel like I was witnessing something almost sacred and I slipped into a kind of spiritual ecstasy, reminiscent of a scene in Lady Chatterley’s Loverwhen Mellors shows her some pheasant chicks.
The chapter from there swerves between real events that were happening to me, and quotations from and reflections on the book. The novel provides a kind of emotional buffer for me as later in the scene, Keith rapes me in his tent.
What do you want the reader to takes from this excerpt? This was hard stuff to parse and take my reader through. I wanted the reader to understand that this was a girl desperately trying to craft a coherent romantic cosmology that would protect her as she was being raped and abandoned by older, predatory men.
Right: Erika Schickel’s office. Credit and Copyright by Erika Schickel
Also, I was a kid who was essentially abandoned by her family, which was the deeper hurt I was protecting myself against by forming inappropriate attachments with men in the first place. This romantic version of myself would keep me safe from confronting that essential loneliness. How to get all of this across without spelling it out for the reader, is always the question I struggle with. I am always trying to do two things in a scene: advance the story (physically or emotionally) and get my reader to have either a feeling, or a sense-making experience from the scene that deepens their understanding of the protagonist and/or the situation.
Sense-making is tricky stuff if, like me, you abhor telling your reader how to think. It’s a subtle manipulation and by using Lady Chatterley’s Lover as a kind of philosophical armature for the story, I was free to flesh out the details of the experience with very immediate imagery, while also communicating the extreme disassociation I was experiencing during the rape. Added bonus: I got D.H. Lawrence to work with me to get my point across.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._H._Lawrence
The arc of this chapter goes from high to low. My character starts out feeling powerful after her successful solo and then shooting some rapids. I was a girl falling in love with the world and all its magic and sensuality, and then this asshole, Keith, came and literally smashed it all at the end with his paddle. I wanted my reader to feel the sting of that betrayal and understand that the danger for me was never being alone in the woods, it was being in the world with other people.
Erika Schickel is the author of the forthcoming, The Big Hurt (Hachette, 2021) and You’re Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom (Kensington Books, 2007). Her essays, book reviews, and reporting have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The LA Weekly, LA City Beat, Salon, Ravishly, Tin House, Bust Magazine, The LA Review of Books among others. Theatrically-trained, Erika has worked in film and television for thirty years both on-camera, and off as a voice-over artist. She has also written and performed a number of one-woman shows and a radio play for the LA Theatre Works series: The Play’s the Thing.
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