BY ELIZABETH HALL
ELIZABETH HALL: Your new book Two Memoirs: An Auto+Biography tells the story of your mother’s life as well as your own. It begins with a confession disguised as a wish: “This is the truth. I hope.” You establish the narrator’s unreliableness on page one. You also include extensive footnotes that detail your mother’s side of the story, which enrich and often contradict your own version of events. At times Two Memoirs reads like a long, lyric letter addressed to your mother, an archive of all that happened between you. Other times, however, it felt as if you were writing not to her but away from her. In what ways is Two Memoirs about storytelling? Why did you include your mother’s perspective?
AMANDA MONTEI: The mother-daughter relationship really fascinates me: the daughter as simulacrum for the mother, the mother as a kind of broken promise to the daughter-- broken because motherhood is so illusory. Mothers are difficult for daughters because, whatever our level of intimacy with them, they teach us about the domestic scene and femininity, those types of violence, but also that curious mix of protest and real love found in each of her acts of care.
In A Dialogue on Love, Eve Sedgwick briefly writes about this, how the mother's ability to flourish requires an erasure of the daughter, a return to the pre-domestic scene. I think the daughter's ability to count herself as a subject, as something other than a reflection of her mother, also requires an erasure of the mother. There's a sense in which the daughter is constantly moving backward into her mother's past, her "archive" as you say, but then forward, into a zone without the mother. So I think the book is also an archive of the process of working out, or trying to work out, that complicated feminine temporality, and is also trying to deal with those violent gestures of erasure (which are further complicated by writing the mother).
My mother was obsessed with the past. She was always telling stories, always trying to get the past right, make it look more favorable, and I think that tendency plays into feminine temporality as well. Women have always been storytellers, and letter writers, preservers of memory, unpaid affective and material laborers, but in this way they've also always been manipulators of memory, the home, "truth"-makers. An approach to history and storytelling that is certain and linear is so masculine. There is definitely a sense of coming to terms with all that in the book-- I was writing towards and away from dominant modes of storytelling as well.
EH: It’s true what you said about women being the storytellers, the manipulators of memory. My mother preserved her past through willful omissions. She told no stories. I always wanted to know more about her childhood, and especially, the years she spent living with a cult. I didn’t know what info I would uncover, or how it would make me feel, but still, I was desperate to learn more.
Two Memoirs deftly charts this tension—the desire to know more about our mothers in the "pre domestic scene" while also struggling to accept what that knowledge means. While writing a memoir is certainly a gesture towards remembering, it also involves many acts of forgetting, of un-learning what we thought we knew. Was there anything you needed to forget or un-learn in order to write Two Memoirs?
AM: Our mothers are these abject figures that throw us in and out of our bodies, our selves, the order of things—that order of the body, the subject, memory, time, history, makes me wary now. So I suppose in a sense I had to un-learn a prior impulse towards order, toward uncovering as such. The autobiography is so pose-y. It says here is the truth, set in the right "order" (temporally, logically etc.), remember it. I think that’s partially why my mother’s photographs (which I include in the book) haunted me while writing. She always looked at images as proof, but I always saw the pose, the anxious or high or depressed woman’s expression hidden behind the wholesome smile.
Like pictures from childhood, mothers unravel and they unravel us. It's not just that we are trying to get back to that originary unity with the mother, our oneness with her, but also that for all their efforts to order us, they really undo us. I wanted this book to undo all those gestures towards preservation and remembering, but also show how my mother's memory work functioned as a way to stabilize an otherwise totally chaotic and sometimes horribly sad domestic scene. So maybe there's a sense of un-learning order as such but also of learning about how mothers create an alternative order, for the sake of preserving themselves or the family unit. Did you find this to be the case with your mother? That those willful omissions still amounted to another kind of reality, one she needed desperately in order to survive?
EH: Yes. Definitely. It took me many years to discover that those gaps, those willful omissions, told a story. I used to think that the only way to really “know” my mother was to uncover certain facts about her past. It was only later, when I tried to write about her, that I realized how misguided my search had been.
I've only written one piece about my mom, an essay about the week she spent with me in LA in 2011, her only visit to the city. I took her to a string of dive bars and asked her about her past. When I dropped her off at the airport, I was satisfied with all that I had learned about her. Three years passed. I began writing an essay about her because I missed her. In the mornings before work, I had taken to reading the diary entries I wrote during her visit. The entries no longer satisfied me. They told me nothing about the time we shared. Nothing of the experience of sitting across from her in a strip mall bar, nothing of walking down Sunset Boulevard arms linked, her first drive up the coast, glimpse of the Pacific. I wanted to remember these things. What I needed from the story had changed. The gaps, the fissures, began to intrigue me.
You wrote Two Memoirs over the course of several years. How did your relationship to the text evolve during that time? Can you talk a little about your editing process?
AM: I've always been fascinated by diaries as a particularly feminine form-- I know you have too. I think what's really interesting about what you say, though, is that diaries sort of failed us both! When I began this book my mother gave me her old diary entries, the ones she wrote when I was a teenager during her really dark days. She was always very interested in my writing about her, and maybe this was an effort to control some of the situation, but I found the diary entries mostly sparked memories of what she didn't see at that time, or didn't remember. I became endlessly fascinated with our present day conversations, the way my mother spoke about her past, her family history. It wasn't just the richness of her stories, her 'crazy' life, but the way she spoke. The way those words traveled between us.
Our own drive down the 405 on the Sepulveda Pass on our way to rehab, and the oddness and tension of our conversation that day—how much she wanted Burger King as a last hurrah, how I couldn’t bear to leave her there. But also the incredible humor in her voice in another car ride, years later, when she told me about her fake fur coat from Sears. Conversation is such a feminine form too--women are so artful in the way they talk about feelings, bodies, lives, loves, we have to be.
And those conversations are ALWAYS full of lies, right? We lie about to our daughters the same way we lie to our girlfriends. In an effort to offer each other something better. You know, women are haunted by lies. You of course make this explicit in I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris. So much of your book, of female sexuality in general, it seems, is about reckoning with the lie (not just, like, disproving it), don't you think?
EH: “Reckoning” is the right word. When I began the clit project, I didn’t know the through line. I simply set out to discover as much about the clit as possible. I soon became obsessed with research, spending hours holed up in bed with my books. At the time I was keening for a distraction as I was also dealing with the dissolution of my family. The research was pure pleasure—the pleasure of looking, sitting still, observing. No pressure to think or speak.
The earliest drafts were composed entirely of facts and quotes artfully arranged to expose the clit’s secret history. It took me several months to realize that I wasn’t just researching the clit; I was exploring my own anxieties about writing. Specifically, I was learning to give myself permission to do more than read, collect, curate. I was learning how to respond, that I might have something to say in the first place.
I’ve always been very intrigued by lies and people who love to lie. Anais Nin’s diaries were some of the first books I read. Nin was a notorious liar. Her diaries are full of deceit, secret liaisons, allusions to real and fake notebooks. Despite all the lies, Nin’s journals always felt very honest, and their honesty seemed to hinge not on the explicit descriptions of sex, or the poetic prose, but on the lies themselves. Lies are very revealing.
Lies offer us a way of re-imagining ourselves, of giving each other “something better,” as you said earlier. This seems especially the case when discussing sex. It’s hard to have honest conversations about sex, in part, because so many of us accept as a given the narrative that to be a healthy, whole woman you must know what you want, and more, how to get it. This narrative leaves little room for bad sex, much less curiosity or experimentation.
In much of your writing you reckon, in your own way, with these same issues. Throughout Two Memoirs you detail your early sexual experiences as well as your mother’s sex life. Why was it important for you to tell these stories?
AM: I do write about sexual experimentation (with women) and bad sex and violent sex (with men). In terms of sexual violence, it was important for me to account for the ways in which women are pulled into extremely abusive and damaging relationships and sexual experiences simply by virtue of their living as women in the world.
My mother and I both had periods in our lives when we gave ourselves to men simply because we ached so deeply for love and meaning. We are taught from such a young age that our bodies have no worth outside our vaginas (forget our wonderful clits!) and it becomes so painful for us navigate vulnerability and pleasure, particularly if life is crumbling in other ways.
I love Nin’s lies because they are such acts of care. Not to romanticize the affective work she does for male artists and thinkers, but I do think it’s important to recognize how lying and withholding and fabricating are significant and laborious acts of care.
Nin has some interesting thoughts about motherhood too. I think her description of her own abortion is one of the most beautiful moments of motherhood I have read in modernist literature. For her, giving up the child to the ‘paradise of nonbeing’ is the ultimate act of care and leads her to a spiritual awakening. I love the way she unyokes abortion and trauma. This makes me think of your book, and the way you synthesize the history of trauma and pleasure that surrounds the clitoris. Is there a connection between that confluence of pain and joy in writing? Are you working on anything now? Are your anxieties about writing the same or did writing your book shift them?
EH: The passage you describe as “a beautiful moment of motherhood” has likewise been described by Deirdre Bair, one of Nin’s most cited biographers, as a “confused collection of excuses” and “a portrait of monstrous egotism and selfishness, horrifying in its callous indifference.” It’s not entirely clear if what Bair finds so horrifying is the abortion itself or the way Nin writes about it. Bair seems to want Nin to suffer in a more visible, visceral way. Bair tells us Nin was “chipper” and “cheerfully writing” on the day of her surgery and that she “seems to have considered it nothing more than an experience she could write about.”
Bair’s characterization reveals a lot about her own beliefs about women’s bodies and what it means to be a “mother.” For instance, Bair is miffed when Nin describes the forthcoming publication of Henry Miller’s book as “the birth which is of greater interest to me.” Bair’s commentary ultimately underscores just how transgressive Nin’s writing was and still is.
In Nin’s writing (and my own) there is definitely a confluence of pain and joy. I’ve always admired her ability to write herself up and out of any experience, no matter how depressing or degrading. I’ve learned so much from her.
I love what you said about withholding and fabricating being significant acts of care. I’ll try to keep that in mind as I write my next project—a series of essays about my cross-country search to learn more about my family’s membership in a religious cult. What projects are you working on?
AM: Right now I’m working on a book-length poem/novel in poems that I began while I was reading a lot of Notley and thinking about the feminine epic and narrative poetry. I’m finding that, now that I’ve had a child, and now that I have endured 42 hours of childbirth (!), it’s becoming more about motherhood, birth and death. Always I return to the mother! But when I began the project I was driven by an interest in failure and feminine temporality.
How aging and the movement through time is always linked to loss and dissatisfaction for women. So I think it makes sense to end this project with childbirth, which is the most incredible experience of temporality I have ever encountered, one full of loss and mourning and uncertainty about the body, but also ecstasy, power, and an unfathomable love.
Elizabeth Hall is the author of the chapbook Two Essays (eohippus labs) and the book I HAVE DEVOTED MY LIFE TO THE CLITORIS (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2016). Her work has been published in Black Warrior Review, BOMB, Denver Quarterly, Two Serious Ladies, and elsewhere.
Amanda Montei is currently a PhD student at SUNY at Buffalo. She is the co-founder of Bon Aire Projects, a press that publishes collaborative poetry and connects otherwise divergent aesthetic communities. She also edits the literary journal P-QUEUE. Her poetry manuscript The Failure Age was a semi-finalist for the 11th annual Slope Editions Book Prize, and was published as a chapbook by Bloof Books in 2014. She is the co-author, with Jon Rutzmoser, of Dinner Poems.