Intolerant Nuns, Sudden Illiteracy and a Man Passed Out on the Baggage Carousel
I wrote a memoir and accidentally resurrected my worst self
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My younger self refused to wear the cap. But of course she did.
Sorry I didn’t message back. I’ve been living almost exclusively in the past for the last six months. At least that’s what I’ve told friends and family whose attempts to reach me have been colliding against a brick wall with the meaty thud of a misdirected seagull. I’ve been just here the whole time. You can see me if you look. But not really. I’ve been somewhere else entirely. Actually, I have been hunched inside the aqueous chill of an Irish church in 2001, wondering whether God exists as the incantation of a disinterested priest is carried over the pews and through the Frankincense-spiced gloom. I’ve been circling the baggage carousel at Shannon airport in the mid-nineties, where my father is lying, passed-out and whisky-drunk, having just arrived home from three particularly suspicious months ‘working’ in Moscow. Airport security have found our house phone number in his wallet and called my mother to come and get him. ‘I will not’, she replies, weary of being married to unclaimed baggage.
I’ve been walking through the crowd of excited American tourists and affluent students beneath Trinity College Dublin’s famed Front Arch once again for the very first time, utterly unprepared for the environment that awaits me within. I’ve been sitting in its Ussher library a year after that, watching words scuttle across the page like skeletal black insects until I understand with rising liquid panic that I’ve lost the ability to read and realise that my grandmother’s madness – that dark, genetic destiny – has finally found me even here in this ridiculously sheltered place. It bleeds out like a blot of ink spreading through the dry fibres of a page. An image of my future is emerging like fate.
So I’m sorry I didn’t message back. I’ve been living in the past, where reception is poor and we haven’t yet anticipated those charts that suggest anxiety rapidly increases with the invention of social media. I’ve been trapped in the past, really, and surprised by how much of it was ‘just here’. In full view of anyone who cares to look despite the fact that I had until recently been living a life that felt in so many ways disconnected from it. I’ve been thinking about my father, who I so rarely think about. Contemplating how he ended up on that carousel. I’ve been caught in the grim hilarity of it. The delightful awful image of a drunk, crumpled man on a circuitous route to nowhere in the most liminal place you could think of. As a metaphor for commitment phobia it’s slightly on the nose. The kind of thing that, as a writer, you’d edit out for believability. I’ve been thinking about learning to read all over again. How it took more than a year before the words would stay still, and another again before I could read a book for recreation. How I didn’t know who I was when I couldn’t perform academically. How the words took me with them when they left.
I’ve been back in the classroom with the nuns who teach me to be so quiet and small that only God would notice me, and trudging to school through the fog in a jacket that never feels up to the cold. This, I’ve found, is one interesting outcome of having finished writing a book that is so heavily rooted in my own experience. A book that looks at the labels through and in which we so often seek the sense of meaning required to generate momentum and purpose, without which a day is tough to get through, let alone a lifetime. The writing process has dug up a lot of that old stuff. Placed me precisely back where I expended all my energy seeking escape, like a panicked, angry pigeon trapped inside a sealed room, flapping and shitting and crashing theatrically into things as it throws its soft little body against every obstacle.
The writing process has summoned forth memories so deeply buried that I had forgotten forgetting them. The result, as you might imagine, has been weird. Feeling weird. A shocking reacquaintance with versions of myself I hardly recognise mediated by the needling awareness that each of these selves is inevitably a misrepresentation, no matter how true they may feel, or how they may visit upon my present with the flushed prickle of a slapped cheek. Writing the book, I have been suddenly and arbitrarily lifted from the present and landed heavily into moments I’ve already lived through, dragging in with me all of the stories I’ve built since. Tracking the present back through them like mud dried into well-travelled boots. Stories about how the world works. How people work. Stories about who I am.
The thing about memory is that each time you lean, straining, to the back of its cupboard and pull out something rough and dusty – something that might either warm your heart or embed the ragged lance of an unanticipated splinter deep in the tender place beneath a fingernail – you change the event you are remembering. It’s damaged in the handling. You strain each memory through the experiences you have had and the presumptions you have made since the thing occurred and you see what you want to see. For me, the result of retreading that ground in order to write the book has been some unanticipated discomfort. A sense of being suspended between times and selves. It has felt as much a process of unmaking as making, and now I am looking about in an attempt to discern what the present looks like.
When a book is written and the substantive edits have been made, it goes through a copy edit. During this process, a copy editor – invariably a person who is obsessively committed to the English language, which is exactly how they should be – will point out every mistake of grammar, spelling and clunky expression. Every shoddy mixed metaphor and tired repetition, cliché and overzealous comma. Every confused semicolon. It’s an enormously important part of the writing process, allowing a writer to see beyond their own tired familiarity with the manuscript to gain a valuable sense of how it’s reading from someone with no emotional attachment to the work.
In more than one place, I was surprised to see that the person copy editing the book had left a note suggesting that I was treating my younger self with unkindness. ‘Be kind’, the second such note said. ‘Why?’ I thought, irked by the instruction and considering why it might be that a person should consider kindness a good in itself. The intent behind the kindness matters, surely. What looks like kindness can be something else with a kind-looking hat on. It can be pity. It can be enabling. When directed toward oneself, kindness can be something more like self-indulgence, justification of bad behaviour, or a failure to prod the uncomfortable places.
Perhaps I’ve grown irritated by that younger self, who I unintentionally resurrected in some form through writing the book. For months, she has followed too closely behind my shoulder with her grating certainty and her bleak outlook. The chip on her shoulder that sits no less jaggedly on my own. I’ve felt her breath on the back of my neck despite the great distance that stretches between us. I’ve absorbed her impatience and her frustration and her raging hunger for change. I’ve grown weary of her company and find myself wondering when she will take it upon herself to fuck off back where she came from. When she will leave me in peace here in Australia, so very far in every conceivable sense from where I started.
Perhaps when the book is published, her ghost will be exorcised and she’ll stop trailing about after me, hoping someone will ask her about the tattered copy of whatever book she has in her bag this week, stop hoping someone will come forth to acknowledge her specialness and lift her out of her life. Exasperated by the lack of privacy, I wheel irritably round to face her every once in a while, to shout at her that she’ll have to lift herself out and there’s really no other way through, but when I turn, she isn’t there. No matter which way I look, she’s always just behind me. I don’t know if it’s kindness she needs or a hard shove.
So looking forward to reading the book!
Laura, this piece brought me to tears of joy and relatability. Thank you for your beautiful soul and magic way with words.