Writing Is My Drink (26 page)

that I didn’t have a dad who saw me more than once a year, and

when he did, he greeted me with a casualness that suggested I

was a distant relative. Everyone’s shame starts somewhere, and

mine started with being the dadless girl, no man’s special one.

My adult life’s shame has been that I’ve been the special one to

too many men, that I often picked the wrong partners, and that

I’ve felt like I’m missing the mysterious and essential X factor

that makes a relationship endure. Obviously, the child’s shame

and the adult’s shame are connected, but in its grasp, the logic

of our shame’s origin is of little or no consolation; in the end, we just feel the erosion from the two rivers that have come together

to form one.

My shame about my relationship history has kept me out of

some important conversations and at one time made me believe

there was something essential y flawed about me, something

to which I had best not draw too much attention. Tracing this

back, I can see that it forced me to miss out on closeness, as I was convinced I wasn’t as good or as worthy as some of my friends

and acquaintances. Keeping my distance was supposed to pro-

tect me from judgment. At a distance, I hoped I would appear as

more together than I actual y was.

But, for better or for worse,
King-Size
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and
forced me out of hiding. Even though most people in the Western world did
not
read this book about my divorce, it felt to me as if they had, which meant I could no longer cling to

the delusion that people think I have it together. My sense of

my social self abruptly changed. There were many moments of

awkwardness (including a number of radio interviews in which

I was asked to reenact blow by blow the moments that led up to

my divorce) as well as clumsy conversations with acquaintances

who’d share what point they’d read up to (“Oh, you’re just getting

back to get together with your childhood sweetheart!).

Overal , the impact of talking about my divorce publicly

was sort of a shock therapy that rearranged the molecules in the

place where my shame is stored. The shame that I was a relation-

ship mess case began to diminish, and in what felt like irony to

me, this allowed me to feel more connected to more people. I

had to admit that my loss looked much like that of others, that

my mistakes weren’t
that
special, that my shame was, in fact, sadly ordinary. I might still consider myself an outsider, but now

I was suddenly aware of how very few of us consider ourselves

insiders
. Alienation, it turns out, is the new black.

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Try This

1. Write for ten minutes on whatever comes to mind when you

read this quote from Brené Brown: “The one thing that keeps

us out of connection is our fear that we’re not worthy of love

and belonging.”

2. List times when you felt ashamed. This is an amazing source

of material. If you want to write and publish memoir, go to

the shame memories. A beautiful example of memoir mate-

rial that can come from a personal hall of shame is Lynda

Barry’s
One Hundred Demons
, one of my all-time favorite

books.

3. Pick one of these moments of shame and write it up as a

scene, ideal y with spoken dialogue, internal dialogue, and

descriptions.

4. Repeat step three as often as you can stand it. It’s real y excru-ciating at times, I know, but this is where the gold is.

5. Divide your list into Childhood Shame and Adult Shame.

What do these lists have in common? How do they differ?

That dividing line might just offer the entrance into your

memoir material.

6. Brown refers to truly connected and fulfilled individuals

who are willing to be vulnerable, imperfect, and authentic

as “the Wholehearted.” Who are the Wholehearted in your

life? Even if you just know them from a distance, add them

to your list.

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7. Write for ten minutes about one of these wholehearted peo-

ple. Maybe you’ll write a profile of this person or maybe a

scene portraying an interaction you had with them in which

they revealed their “wholehearted” nature and also their own

shame.

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14

someone Loses something

“Writing is an act of curiosity, of generosity, rather than one of

selfishness,” Ken Foster says in the introduction to
The KGB Bar
Reader.
“Contrary to what we’ve been taught, there may be just one universal story: Someone loses something.”

Someone loses something.

The first time I read this sentence, I was floored by the

economy with which it encapsulates the driving force behind

the bulk of literature of the past, present, and undoubtedly

the future. Most of our stories
are
about loss. Some stories are about finding something after loss, but still Lost trumps

Found every time. It’s loss we want to know about; it’s loss we

must learn to endure. As readers, we want to know how the

narrator will find her way again after loss. As writers, loss can

propel us toward the page, often to write with uncharacteristic

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abandon. In the rush to get our feelings to the page, we forget

ourselves.

It had been the sting of grief that prompted me to take

notes in the first days of my marriage’s dissolution. Besides

my aforementioned bad attitude toward life and publishing,

grief fueled my fire as I wrote the early pages of
How to Sleep
Alone in a King-Size Bed
. It felt like my misery had to go
somewhere
, and I was already making full use (okay, more than ful use) of any friend and family member willing to listen to my

misery. I used writing as a means to work through my grief,

in part, because I had already established writing as a way to

spin meaning out of inchoate suffering. Because in this case

I wasn’t worried about the end product, I wrote with a rare

recklessness. I enjoyed writing then as one enjoys lying down

when one is exhausted—because it brings relief. And because

I wasn’t focused on an audience or the writing’s “marketabil-

ity,” those early notes held something raw and powerful, which

compelled me to keep writing.

Sometimes unarticulated grief stays lodged in us for a long

time—a piece of shrapnel buried between bone and flesh—until

it is jarred free. That’s what happened to me. In 1988, when I

was twenty-six, I went with my parents on one of my dad’s busi-

ness trips to Japan. He had a ton of frequent-flier miles, so the

thinking was that it was “free” to take me, and of course I’d want

to go to Japan, right? In my student/waitressing life, I barely

had money to go home for visits, let alone foreign travel, so it

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seemed like I should go anywhere I was taken. Despite all this,

however, part of me recognized that not all trips to Japan are

created equal and that traveling with my parents would probably

never be my first pick.

My family had a long-standing friendship with a woman

named Yoko who had a sort of finishing school for young Japa-

nese adults. We met Yoko through some mutual friends in Van-

couver who’d once lived in Japan. Each summer she would bring

a group of these students to Vancouver and we would help en-

tertain them. Probably anyone in any culture would feel some

need for reciprocity because of that, but add in a traditional

Japanese sensibility and the feeling of this woman’s perceived

indebtedness to us was palpable. During our ten days in Tokyo

we were constantly in the custody of one or more of Yoko’s con-

nections, people who showed us the best of Tokyo’s
yakatoriya
s, night clubs, and Rodeo Drive?type shopping. Much sushi was

eaten; much sake was consumed; a lot of broken English was

spoken. We sat around low tables in homes crowded with fam-

ily, ancient art, and modern electronics. We had no free will of

our own and no longer expected to consider our own wants and

desires for the duration of our stay in Japan.

I quickly fell into the role of sullen ingrate. Despite the

amazing opportunity, I was miserable, as I sometimes am when

any reasonable person, it seems, would be happy. I was a broke

twenty-six-year-old on a trip with my parents. I hadn’t lived at

home since I was seventeen and was loath now to play the role

of child in my parents’
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
marriage.

Traveling in Japan was not like traveling in Europe, where I

might’ve struck out on my own and maybe figured out the lan-

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guage and how to get home if I got lost. A swirl of fast moving

trains, kanji, and a catacomb of identical-looking streets, Tokyo

defied comprehension. If I had become accidental y detached

from my parents, I would have likely wandered those streets for

eternity.

Also, there was something about Japan and its flossy

gloss that made me feel dowdy in a way that I never did in

San Francisco. One day my escort from Yoko’s entourage was

a tiny woman my age in a Chanel suit. She said she worked for

CNN as a reporter. At age twenty-seven? Was that
possible
?

As she dragged me through Tokyo’s glitzy shopping district,

I marveled at the disparity between our levels of worldly ac-

complishment and prestige and wondered how one might take

a weekday off from CNN to play tour guide for an awkward

American. As much as I told myself, You’re in Japan! This is a

great opportunity! I longed for my little broke life in San Fran-

cisco, to be my own autonomous waitress/grad student self

rather than a toddler leashed to my parents and Yoko’s entou-

rage.

One day at the end of the trip, I was signed up for a day

of sightseeing in two nearby towns with a group of well-healed

middle-aged Japanese women. The good news was my parents

weren’t coming, so I could at least semi-pretend that I was an

autonomous adult. (Besides, I’d much rather be with matronly

types than a hotshot my own age in a Chanel suit). Maybe they’d

take care of me, I half imagined, and they did. This group of four

women in their forties took on the job of mothering me that day,

asking at appropriate intervals if I was hungry, tired, or thirsty, searching through their little dictionaries and then asking me

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pertinent but not probing questions about my life in San Fran-

cisco. Unlike the sullen CNN reporter, these women were prone

to fits of laughter and seemed genuinely thrilled to have me as

their charge for the day.

We took the train to Yokohama and Kamakura, two neigh-

boring towns an hour or so from Tokyo. As soon as we arrived,

I fell in love with Kamakura, a maze of tree-lined streets and old

temples and shrines. It was what I’d imagined Japan to be. We

walked all around the town, snapping photos and chatting. Then

we walked by a temple with open sliding doors. A young Japa-

nese woman in a skirt and sweater kneeled on the hardwood

floor. Suddenly, as we passed, she doubled over and let out a

howl. A few feet from her, a Buddhist priest in a gray robe spoke

to her in a low tone. I was startled by the rawness of her sorrow.

Startled but also magnetized. Sensing my reaction, one of my

escorts whispered, “She’s lost her son, it sounds like.”

“Lost?”

“He died.”

I looked away from the woman on the floor, not wanting

to intrude on her grief. But the honesty of that grief had cut

through my center, and as we continued to tour around the

town, the primal sound of her sorrow echoed in my head.

After lunch, we arrived at another temple. We walked up

a long gravel path lined with hundreds of small stone statues

of baby Buddhas with brightly colored bibs tied around their

necks. The plastic bibs were incongruous with the stone of the

Buddhas and the temple setting.

“What are these?” I asked one of my guides.

“These are called
jizo
s. They’re for the babies who’ve died.”

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