What is the date you began writing this memoir and the date when you completed the memoir? I wrote Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing as a single, long essay arranged into five parts/sections. The impetus to write this book came about truing a panel at AWP in Chicago in the spring of 2012 – early March, I believe. IT’s strange because I don’t remember the subject of the panel now, just the feeling of inspiration I often have while sitting in the audience listening to other writers talk and read their work.
This was a time of significant uncertainty, followed by a major transition in my life, as I was interviewing for academic positions during that AWP- one of which was the position I was ultimately offered, which I happily accepted, and where I am now in my tenth year of teaching – here in the undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs at Florida International University in Miami.
https://case.fiu.edu/english/mfa-creative-writing/
While I worked on this book I completed my job search, made campus visits, and then my partner Angie and I moved in August of that year from our home in Louisville, Kentucky, to Dania Beach, Florida.
Julie and wife Angie at the Rainbow 5K in Wilton Manors. Copyright by Julie Marie Wade.
I remember finishing the book draft in October of 2012 on a long weekend when Angie had flown back to Louisville to visit family. Our neighbors called me over to see the monkeys in their backyard – monkeys that come up from the mangroves to nibble on their garden. I’m always excited to see these monkeys, but this was the first time I got to see them in in person after hearing all the lore. Afterwards, I remember Cindy and John asking me what I was going to do that afternoon, and said, “I’m going to finish my book.” So I walked back across the street, with that imminent culmination at hand, that good, tingling feeling, and finished it.
Julie Marie Wade in 2012. Credit Kim Striegel. Copyright by Julie Marie Wade.
Where did you do most of your writing for this memoir? And please describe in detail. This memoir was written in intense bursts, every time I had a spare 20 minutes, a spare hour, or the rare luxury of a longer interval. I wrote during panels at AWP and in my Chicago hotel room. I wrote in our apartment in Louisville, often in the early morning dark, watching school buses pass by on Ellison Avenue. (Bottom Left) I wrote in the Bingham Poetry Room at the University of Louisville campus library, surrounded by tall shelves, each one filled with poetry volumes, which felt auspicious to me- the poets presiding over my lyric essay work. Also, almost no one ever came into that room, so it was quiet, peaceful, a studding kind of calm. (I was finishing my PhD at U of L and teaching undergraduate courses during spring semester and the first summer term of 2012.). When we moved, I wrote in our pink stucco house in South Florida, looking down at the magnolia tree in the front yard and sometimes sitting on the screened porch out back with herons and iguanas ambling past. (Bottom Right)
What were your writing habits while writing this memoir- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? I wrote when I could, whenever and wherever I could. In the early morning, there was always coffee, and sometimes later in day, too. I never write to music, perhaps because I am trying so hard to hear the music in my own head – to learn to make that music with language as my instrument. I don’t mind ambient noise, though, yet no quiet is too quiet either.
The book began in a composition notebook. I wrote by hand because at the time, I didn’t’ travel with a laptop, and I never brought a computer with me to school. I still write much by hand and then transfer to the computer later. If I’m at home, I usually compose on the computer, but I always keep a notebook close if I’m heading out into the world somewhere. If I have to wait in a line or at a drawbridge – anywhere in my car – a notebook always come s in handy. And I have been known to sit in my car a long time finishing a page, a paragraph, a sentence before going inside.
Writing first thing in the morning is wonderful for me, as someone who naturally wakes early, but it isn’t possible very day. Sometimes there are time-sensitive things to attend to first, and so the writing has to be saved until later in the day. The key, for me, is to treat writing always as the reward and never as the chore. When or where or how I get to write is less important than remembering that writing is something I get to do, not something I have to do. (In another sense, of courses, it’s something I have to do – something I feel compelled to do. But I never want to confuse writing with a mere task, let alone a burden.)
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. A lot of writing for me is about discovering what I want to say and then refining that articulation. Before this memoir was titled Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, I was working with the title The Hourglass: Meditations on the Body. I thought about how hourglasses are multi-valent symbols – in one sense, used to represent time, and in another sense, used to represent a particular form of female embodiment, e.g. “the hourglass figure,” which is often associated with female beauty. My thinking was that the singular hourglass united the project as one book-length essay, and the five parts/sections comprised the “meditations.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hourglass_figure
http://lava360.com/the-best-hourglass-shape-bodies-of-all-time/
These give parts/sections are quite long. The first four range in length from about 8000-10,000 words, and then the final part/section is 15, 000 words. I remember working on the second section and realizing I was approaching an ending. As is often the case, I didn’t quite realize what was going to emerge. In this second section, which might also be seen as a free-standing essay or a chapter of the larger book, I was using a pattern where I alternated between standard typeface for predominantly narrative scenes written in the first-person point of view. (Pretty typical for memoir or self-referential work.) But after each of these scenes, I included an italicized, reflective passage, only about a paragraph long and these passages were written in the second person. The idea was that I needed to step outside of myself to examine the scene I had just written – the memory I had dramatize don the page – and to consider how I was thinking and feeling at the time, what I was learning about my particular embodiment.
https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/imaginary-friends
The second essay/chapter had begun to probe early awareness of sexual identity and sexual difference. I had certainly written about my sexuality many times before, but this time felt different. I included my imaginary sister Kellie in the story, who was someone I talked to as I was growing up and, by virtue of the fact that she was a figment rather than a real person, she was sometimes the only person I felt I could truly confide in. I knew Kellie couldn’t’ betray my secrets. Here’s the passage, which appears on pages 54-57 of the published volume:
My mother kneels beside the bathtub and turns the hourglass upside down. “This is how long you have before I come back to wash your hair.” I sit on the toilet seat cozy with my legs crossed, my body hunched around a towel.
“So are you going to get into the tub, or aren’t you?” She tests the water with her elbow like I am still a baby, then turns to look at me with one of her most formidable (f-o-r-m-i-d-a-b-l-e) scowls.
“I will,” I say—“after you go.”
There is always this stand-off between us now, my blue eyes and her blue eyes locked together in a masterful vise.
“Whatever you’re hiding,” she snaps, “I’m going to find out anyway. Privacy is just as impermanent as anything else.”
My mother regards me once more, shakes her head, then slams the door on her way into the hall.
Slowly, I unravel the coil of my torso and descend into the bubbly heat. Beneath the crumple of my clothes, I reach down and find my father’s tin of Barbasol and one of his thin, terse razors purchased at the Dollar Store. Through the wall, I can hear them both, my parents, washing dishes and sweeping the kitchen floor. It is my mother who complains, my father who concurs, and I can hear this without knowing the actual words they speak. There is a rhythm to these after-dinner conversations which I keep time to; I hardly need the hourglass at all.
“So, you’re really going to do it?” Kellie asks, taking my place on the toilet seat.
“Yup.” I push my heels into the tiled wall and raise my legs up out of the water. I begin to coat them in shaving cream while my sister watches. I don’t mind if she sees, and I know she will never tell our mother.
“Don’t you wish you had some instructions?” Kellie inquires. “I’m sure we could find some—in a book somewhere.”
“How hard can it be?” I retort. “Really stupid girls at school shave their legs every day, and I’m already reading at an adult level.”
“I doubt one has much to do with the other.” Leave it to Kellie to start sounding like a professor at just this moment. Sometimes I can barely stand her—my sister, that hopeless pontificator (p-o-n-t-i-f-i-c-a-t-o-r).
“I don’t want to discuss it,” I tell her. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“What?”
I slide the plastic safety from the razor and watch it float away on the foam. “Marilyn Munster.”
“OK. Why her?”
“Well, I think about her a lot.” Kellie frowns at me. “Not that way. I think about how her aunt and uncle—they loved her, but they couldn’t see her, not for who she really was. They just thought she was an ugly, hopeless freak.” The razor makes a funny sound against my skin, like the one-armed paper cutter at school slicing through a stack of dittoes—one perfectly Xeroxed (X-e-r-o-x-e-d) ream. “But we, the audience—we know she isn’t that at all. We know that, when it comes right down to it, they’re the ugly, hopeless freaks.”
“That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”
“Don’t get me wrong. I like Lily and Herman as much as the next person does, but they’re the ones who aren’t normal. They just think it’s Marilyn who isn’t.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Kellie wants to know.
“Perception,” I say. “The truth has more to do with who’s watching than with what’s real.”
For a moment, I feel proud of myself, proud of my big mind and my long legs in their state of transformation. I swoon with pride, leaning back against the soft shell pillow, watching the hair disappear from my legs. Then, suddenly, I feel the razor stick. I see the blood beginning to gush out into the water before I feel the sting, which is before I see the piece of flesh caught in the razor’s teeth, the divot I’ve cut out of my skin.
The pain is sharp and of a high frequency like someone striking a key at the very top of a piano. I try to wrap a wash cloth around the wound, but the blood keeps seeping through, and I am wincing and writhing with only one smooth leg, the other wet with matted gold hairs.
Kellie is silent, and soon my mother’s hand is on the knob, the door creaking open. “Time’s up!” she calls, and sure enough, the hourglass sits helpless on the ledge, its belly full of bright white sand.
*
There were moments in your early life when you had intended to be a better sort of girl. At the very least, a different sort of girl from the girl you had become. Only some of it was physical. You could tell yourself all you wanted about that other world where families like the Munsters lived. In that world, on Mockingbird Lane, everyone drove hearses and kept gargoyles in their living rooms. They all had acne and wore glasses and left perspiration circles in their clothes as a matter of course. Their legs were scarred from shaving accidents, which everyone considered a rite of passage. In your heart, though, you knew it wasn’t true. The Munsters were one of a kind, and they were the wrong kind; it was only their oblivion that kept them safe, and you had lost yours the way you had lost every last one of your baby teeth. The new teeth were not deciduous. There would never be another chance. This was hard to admit, but you had to: You were not even Marilyn Munster, misplaced and misjudged, long-suffering in your loneliness and perfect beauty. Everyone had been right about you all along. You bite your tongue and clamp it tight to hold back tears.
You are the monster in your own closet.
Can you describe the emotional process of writing about this ONE MEMORY? What stunned me, though, wasn’t the process of dramatizing the scene in the bathtub. It was writing the final, italicized passage of the essay. I had the sensation that my hands could barely keep up with my mind. I was writing as fast as I could, almost in a trance all the while wondering what I was going to say next. How would I draw this moment, this memory, to a conclusion? Then, the last line appeared on the screen: “You are the monster in your own closet.” That was it. That was really how I felt at that time in my life, capture din a single sentence with a single image. It was as if I had to write the previous 8800 words of this section/essay/chapter just to arrive at the eight words I ultimately needed to say.
Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? I don’t recall making any alterations to this section of the. Ook at all, and I don’t believe my editors at The Ohio State University Press requested any revisions either. Sometimes the writing gains its own momentum and takes you precisely where you need to go. When I’m very lucky, the first attempt at articulation is actually the clearest.