this woman’s work

And I was reading Patricia Hampl and it made me think about something I’ve learned in the past year.

I’ve always brought way way way too much into my essays. One of my big jobs as a writer is learning how to cut the hell out of things and focus. I hear Steve Martin in my head, “Let’s get small!” When Becca would edit me she would often say, “You’ve got three essays here. You could go this way or that way or this other way but you can’t do all three; you have to decide which one you’re writing.”

And this was confusing to me because one of my great gifts (curses sometimes but you know, most times it’s a gift) is that I see webs connecting everything to everything. I get so greedy for all of these ideas that I’m grasping for that I forget that it makes for a lousy essay because I have no point. So one of the things I’ve been trying to do in the past year is to get small — to get more tightly focused. To trust that a single idea can be enough to illuminate an essay.

It’s not that I get rid of all the ideas — I just throw out the ones that don’t serve the main point.

Ok, so I was in the bathtub when I was thinking about this because now when I read I do something I should’ve learned to do a long time ago, especially considering that I spent three years as an English major — I think about what I’m reading. Most of the time I read in a big gulp but it’s been kind of recently that I realized that a good book (or essay or short story) defies gulping. A good book (or essay or short story) gets better if I don’t binge on it. It’s not a matter of reading more slowly; it’s a matter of savoring what I read.

So. Anyway. I’ve become a better reader because I want to be a better writer. And that’s been helping. But that’s not what I was thinking about in the bathtub.

Actually what I was thinking about was how pleased I continue to be with that Textured essay because I think I finally did something I’d been trying to do for a long time with it. One of the things that helped me figure out how to write that essay was A Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay by Brenda Miller. Now I have to tell you that I don’t really love that essay so much as a reader because I think it’s simplistic but reading it was a help. What Ms. Miller does is show how to braid an essay the way you braid challah and in the essay she explicitly does this. She takes three ideas: making challah, writing a braided essay, and — something else. I don’t remember and I can’t find my copy of the book. (Maybe it’s upstairs? Hmmm.) Anyway, she writes it in a stark braided pattern and her ideas are different enough that it stays segregated even as it becomes a single essay, just like the strands of dough form a single loaf of challah. It’s a useful essay. But to do it just like that kinda seemed like cheating to me. Like making a regular piece of work look arty, you know?

Still, it was very useful because I read that essay while I was trying to figure out how the hell Sallis Tisdale wrote her sublime The Weight that Women Carry, which is much more complex. And I started to see — just a glimmer — of how a person could do that. (Tisdale’s essay is the pinnacle of essay excellence to me — I can just hope to touch the hem of her skirts someday.)

So the Textured piece was the first time where I felt like I pulled this off and pulled it off deliberately. See, I knew the essay was about two things: it’s about me struggling to understand what my obligations are to Madison within the context of my experience as a white woman and it’s about the context in which Madison will experience her hair as a black woman.* For my context, I wanted to write about my friends’ comments and convey my insecurity and lack of personal support and for Madison’s context, I wanted to talk about the historical/cultural background of African American hair care. But I wanted to keep it a very small essay and so I didn’t want to go too deep into that. I wanted to keep it small and home-y and personal and not have it be a big lecture about hair.

The essay really started to work for me when I hit on using actually doing Madison’s hair as the central image. Once I figured that out, I knew it was going to come together. I chose to do that because that would cement that this isn’t theory for me, to sort of head off debate and make people feel … more generous to the ideas in the essay. I also wanted to show that caring for Madison’s hair is something loving in a literal way. And finally I wanted to demystify her hair care while also using some jargon to showcase the complexities.

Now if you go and look at that essay you’ll see that every single paragraph speaks to at least one of those three things: doing Madison’s hair, the context of my experience, the bigger context of her cultural history/mores.

I’m thinking about this today because I’ve felt so frustrated with this next essay I’m working on and then I remembered that I have to get small and then when I’ve shrunk it down I’ll know what to put in and what to leave out and it’ll be ok. And I got so excited when I came up with a start and finish to it (while reading Blue Arabesque) that I jumped out of the bathtub, hastily got dressed and ran down here to type it all out in a fit of water-logged optimism.

* There was a line that stated this literally but it didn’t work. But it was about seeing a white guy at my synagogue with hair the texture of Madison’s and suddenly understanding that it wasn’t about the texture of her hair — and no, I didn’t choose the title — it was about the color of her skin. People sometimes make a small fuss about how Madison’s hair isn’t truly “black” because her curls are looser but see, she has brown skin and that’s what dictates the mores for the state of her hair.

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