Leaving Brooklyn

The confusion is that I seem to have grown up into someone who could not have been me as a child. Yet in the telling the girl grows to sound more and more like the woman I became. The voice overcomes her. The real girl with her layers concealing me becomes more elusive the more I tell. She has been superseded, but I am sure she existed. As I try to find her in me, I keep finding me in her. (Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Leaving Brooklyn, p.45)

It calls itself a novel but has the tone of a memoir, as her other books do, which is what makes them so convincing and compelling, and it clearly is infused with the stuff of autobiography. If it were packaged as nonfiction, Leaving Brooklyn could be read as a first-person treatise on the distance between the narrator's voice and the author's voice, or better yet between the eye of the subject and the eye of the author. A Portrait of the Artist as an Adolescent Girl, complete with expanding self-consciousness about the local particulars and an expanding consciousness of the universals embedded there. Besides, I love the way she puts together a paragraph.

Without going all avant guardian postmodern on us, Schwartz seems to be saying that to write anything is to distort, remake, and reshape the "original" material, whatever that is. Not that she's the first to make this point, but it comes across as honestly as possible in the nitty-gritty details of growing up in New York during the McCarthy Era. In her self-deprecating way, Schwartz makes fun of her middle-class existence while trying to get to the bottom of its predicament and tell the truth, which turns out to be not so simple a task.

Perhaps I haven't succeeded in finding the girl I was, but only in fabricating the girl I might have been, would have liked to be, looking backwards from the woman I have become....The very notion is an Escher construction: I am not a sheltered child but a grown-up version of a child who never was. And maybe I am this way because she never was, couldn't be. And yet it feels so real. If it wasn't a memory to begin with, it has become one now....No longer a case of double vision, but of two separate eyes whose separate visions - what happened and what might have happened - come together in what we call the past, which we see with hindsight.
Memory is revision. I have just destroyed another piece of my past, to tell a story. (Schwartz, p. 146)

One of the things I like about blogging is the chance to create an account (of anything, a bike ride, a bad public policy, a dream) that is as true as I can make it by intentionally selecting the salient bits of facts, without the clutter that would make it incomprehensibly complete. It's mostly editing. And it's a test of whether I can still recognize the characters on the page as the ones I knew in the caverns of memory. And don't give me that old "subjective" interpretation of "objective" truth malarky. But that's another story for another blog post which I'm not up to right now.

Meanwhile: Happy birthday to Edgar Allan Poe. A man who knew a good story when he lived one.