on A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World by John Rember

John Rember’s essay collection is both delightful and depressing. The ten essays, each divided into ten segments (thus, the “hundred little pieces”), flesh out his perspective as our civilization and its natural environment crumbles. Humanity is the executioner and the victim, and Rember is one witness who offers his testimony on the “human-scale realities” of this global collapse. His conviction borne out in these linked essays—that we’re all doomed, and soon—is relentless. So is his dark humor, which, at times, is very funny. If we’re all gonna die before our time, we might as well die laughing.

In the essays, he examines his past—a ski patrol member at a resort, a college English professor, a survivor of severe depression—and his present—a retired, happily married, anxious, Costco shopper. Through it all, he’s been writing. To look backward and to look around now are equally valid; his main goal is to bear witness to the environmental evils we’ve inflicted on ourselves, and on a much smaller scale, to record some of the kindnesses we’re still capable of.

Readers may embrace or ignore his dire perspective on the end of the world—it’s hard to do either—yet it is easy to accept his invitation into his mind, to enjoy his insights and jokes, to share his scholarship, to laugh at his foibles and those he points out in others, and to despair with him at the mistakes humanity has made in its path towards self-destruction.

In the ninth essay, “the unconscious and the dead” (subtitled “The best classes always have somebody dying in them”), Rember writes about a student of his who chronicled his imminent death due to cancer. The student submitted an unfinished seventy-one-page essay, which Rember summarizes: “[I]t’s the account of an aware human being trying to stay aware in the face of malignancies.” In brief, that’s what Rember is doing in this collection.

The author is aware of the excesses of consumerism, of the depleted environment, of the “flaw” in our nature to prefer fiction over reality, of self-serving politicians, and of potentially violent survivalists, some of whom are his neighbors in the Sawtooth Valley of Idaho. He examines these malignancies throughout his book. For example, in the seventh essay, “eating with peter singer,” he considers the damage Utilitarianism, “the greatest good for the greatest number,” has caused. Singer is a bioethicist and moral philosopher who advocates that the wealthy are morally responsible to contribute a large portion of their wealth to the neediest. To what degree does Rember’s own actions adhere to Peter Singer’s argument?

In a simple trip to Costco, he imagines that purchasing a forty-dollar bottle of wine is the equivalent of withholding a forty-dollar donation from starving children, an ethical point that Singer believes Rember should realize. He also confronts his own sense of guilt. To have lived his privileged existence means that Rember is part of a system that often leads others to despair and unhappiness. Unfortunately, the only solution he offers to the dilemma of balancing one’s pleasure against the pain others feel is to not think about the problem. Not think about it too much, anyway, since a large portion of his essay deals with the guilt he feels in failing Singer’s moral imperative. Rember admits in so many words that he is not capable of contributing enough to charity. He implies that it’s a fault everyone suffers from; that is, it’s a fault of human nature.

“I’ve concluded,” he writes, “that doing the right thing and using my Costco card require that I not think about them at the same time. If I do, going to Costco becomes an exercise in pain and guilt, things I usually go to Costco to avoid.”

Rember is unflinchingly honest and expresses a guilt I share, perhaps, we all do. He does not proffer false hope or idealism while and his response is unfortunately conventional. It lies in “loving each other and treating the people we meet with such decency and kindness as we can.”

In other words, his response to global problems is narrowly local and disappointingly rooted in the present moment. It is kind to pour our friends another glass of wine from the bottle we bought at Costco. That act of kindness will gratify us and our guest. Being nice may alleviate our pain and guilt for a moment—we ought to be nice to one another as we swirl the Chardonnay down the tubes—but it really has nothing to do with the climate emergency and other impending disasters at all.

As I read through these essays, I hoped Rember would change his mind about all his doomsaying; if not, at least offer some hope that we can turn things around. He does neither. Part of me hoped his lucid writing, his jokes, his acknowledgment of our problems were partly solutions in themselves. If we celebrate our shared values and confirm our shared humanity, we might find a united front against these ills that plague us. But he won’t have any of it. In a few paragraphs near the end of the book, he admits as much:

   You might think I should be spending my time looking for solutions to ongoing extinctions. But looking for solutions where none exist is trivial in itself.

 

It’s more important to remain a careful and conscious witness to the good things humans still embody. Those are love, kindness, empathy, and caring. They don’t seem to work well at the scale of billions of people. They work better if you can exercise them when folks are over for dinner.

Focused on the microcosm, he sees no hope at all for the “billions” who must perish. In his sixth essay, “is civilization too dumb to live,” he provides a succinct diagnosis. This passage is typical of dozens like it throughout his book. It catalogs the problems and summarizes them, at the end, in a pointed, witty line or two:

   [W]e live on a planet that gravity has shaped into a sphere, and that sphere isn’t infinite. Our global civilization is running into limits on essential resources and other limits on where to put the garbage. These limits, when apprehended by brains formed by a quarter-million years of tribal living, spark tribal solutions: financial and political favoritism, scapegoating, appeals to the dark gods of vengeance, and a breakdown of civility between people who heretofore have tolerated each other.

 

In other words, people who seemed highly intelligent when our civilization was growing and thriving turn into morons when economies slow and threaten to go into reverse.

 

People who should know better put corporate profits above the health of children, support government shutdowns, and get in fistfights with former astronauts. Their kids have to sneak out of the house to get vaccinated. Whole swaths of the population, experiencing personal and familial and cognitive disaster long before the rest of us are aware it’s happening, vote for people who promise to raze once-venerated institutions to the ground rather than try to repair what’s broken.

 

A civilization going ka-ka in its own nest? An unwitting—by definition—conspiracy of morons? Believe me, it’s the simplest explanation.

Maybe, maybe not. Donald Trump’s administration as corrupt as the one he describes above was just voted out by a resounding majority. Rember may not see any hope in that, but the alternative, waiting for the next election cycle and expecting another destructive administration, is nothing more than surrender. Might as well reach for the wine.

Rember doesn’t engage with opposing or alternative viewpoints; he doesn’t examine science, not really; he doesn’t offer solutions beyond being nice to others. So why read such a depressing book? Because Rember has a lot to share. His voice is personal, confidential, trustworthy. He writes with humor and with compassion. He’s thoughtful, intelligent, and despite his gloom, he’s good company most of the time. Here he writes with dry humor about consumerism and greed as embodied by the Costco (again) in Boise, Idaho. This is another of his searing catalogs, recognizable and funny:

I’ve just come back from a trip to the Boise Costco, and from the healthy sizes of the humans in its aisles, it will be a long time before starvation will trump ethics in my neck of the woods. But something is trumping ethics, there in those crowded aisles of leather furniture, foreign cheeses, plastic-wrapped animal parts, Vietnamese sweatshop clothing, cell phones, giant flat TVs, motor oil and tires, patio furniture, five-bladed razor cartridges, vitamin supplements, bulk coffee, southern-hemisphere fruits and vegetables, robot-created oil paintings of blue-eyed, blond Jesuses—the carts carrying this stuff leave every Costco big box in a steady stream.

When he’s not arguing, his mode is narrative; he avoids lyric prose. His topic is too serious. But he often reflects feeling and insight. Here, in the final essay, “the way we live now, again,” he offers advice on depression:

   Depression nearly killed me once, and it’s killed friends and neighbors and people I went to school with. The only thing that saved me was the knowledge that at some point my life had ceased to be my own property and had become the property of the people who loved me. It takes time to understand that distinction, and you can’t understand it at all if nobody loves you.

 

Although there’s not enough love in the world, chances are that somebody loves you, and you shouldn’t decide to kill yourself without consulting the person or persons doing the loving. The voice of your depression is going to tell you that they don’t love you, but you should ask them if that’s true. If they say they love you, believe them and stay alive for them.

Still, this is a gloomy book: Immediately after this passage, Rember wheels right back into his dire predictions. He compares our civilization to a depressed person, hopelessly suicidal. Later in this chapter, he writes, “I think we’ve got ten more years of history before we run out.” Unfortunately, his book came out in 2020, and I imagine he wrote this passage the year before that, so we may have, by his calculation, only eight years left. So be it.

As a witness to our final days, he sees it all, and then some. You don’t have to buy his argument. The book has enough humor and insight to make it worth a read, though maybe not a reread since the remainder of our time is too short.

A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World by John Rember

My mind and my writing style do not function in a linear manner. Instead, both leap from moment to moment associatively. I’d already written a memoir, Anthropologies, a collection of short vignettes, almost prose poems, arranged to recreate the associative movement of the mind as it remembers. In fact, for me, that was what the memoir was about: the act of remembering was much more important to me than what I was remembering. The book worked, I think, because the vignettes resonated with one another and they accrued meaning. There was a through-line. The reader never sank into one episode for long and instead could hold several in her mind at once. The reader—at least this is what I hoped—could construct a narrative as she read, just as we do in remembering.

But most of the essays in Anxious Attachments were longer segmented narratives—several had begun with moments in the earlier book, moments that could not be contained within the formal constraints I had set up. Although there were thematic connections among the essays, each had its own topical focus, each its own set of constraints, and each its own self-referentiality.

One agent also felt that there was no “aboutness” to my essay collection—except that many were about taking care of other human beings, the dying and the newly born, in moments of extremis. That seemed pretty “about” to me; in fact, I gratefully used it as a guiding principle during revision. This is where the expertise of Christine Stroud, the editor at Autumn House Press, the book’s eventual publisher, helped me shape the collection. First, with a central thematic thread in mind about life and death, we cut a few essays, I wrote a few new ones, we reorganized the order of the essays, and then I revised several of them to pare down details that might detract from the main themes of anxiety and devotion.

Although the essays were still about various topics, these main themes were now in higher relief: They tied the essays together, increased their resonance, and suggested a narrative arc of sorts—although I would not say that a narrative through-line emerged. Also, some essays were formally different from others, either in structure or style, partly because the essays had been written over many years. I liked these stylistic variations and so, for the most part, as long as the voice was consistent and the essays riffed on the central themes, I decided to keep the formal idiosyncrasies.

I came up with a couple statements that crystallized an overall theme. “These essays are about the opposite poles of life—birth and death—about the struggle of caring for premature infants and of tending to the dying.” And: “These essays vividly recreate moments from the forty years of our marriage and tell a larger narrative about the power of love to revise who we are, what we believe, and what our stories are.”

After I handed the final manuscript off to Christine, I read I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell, a book marketed as a memoir. Because each of O’Farrell’s chapters could stand on its own and because the book is not a long-form narrative, I started to think of it as a collection of essays or as a phrase currently in vogue, memoir in essays. Whether that is what the author intended, in reading it, I saw what agents might have wanted from me. O’Farrell’s was a moving and well-written book with a clear and easily identifiable “aboutness,” one that requires not even a full sentence but can be summed up in a phrase: the author’s “seventeen brushes with death.”

O’Farrell’s events span at least forty years, from her childhood through her adolescence and into middle-age; they end with a life-threatening ailment her daughter suffers. The essays—I will call the chapters “essays” and, in fact, a few were first published as such—are self-contained, not arranged in chronological order, although each is clearly placed in time so there’s never any chronological confusion. The narrative arc in each essay rises, almost as it might in a novel, the genre O’Farrell most often writes—although, as I said, there is no narrative arc to the book itself.

For me, though, there is too much structural consistency from essay to essay in I Am, I Am, I Am. In most, the moment of the close encounter with death, whether by illness or accident or a predatory male, comes very near the beginning, the essay then flashes back to what has led to this moment, then comes to a resolution. As much as I admired everything else about the book—the vivid prose, the ways characters were developed and events rendered, the emotional insights—this structural consistency began to feel not only predictable but also as if O’Farrell censored herself from following digressions or making larger connections. Only in the last two longer essays, “Cerebellum (1980)” and “Daughter (The present day),” did she take advantage of the things I love most about the essay form—its elasticity and riffing on associative thought.

In some ways, I think the memoir in essays is a mythical creature. But, for comparison’s sake, I’m calling I Am I Am I Am a memoir in essays—because the “aboutness” is autobiographical and because without an over-arching narrative its thematic emphasis nevertheless unifies the various stand-alone parts.

Maybe we need a better term than memoir in essays. Maybe the term is merely for marketing and too broad as a definition. Maybe finer distinctions will lead to new terms, especially if those terms are descriptive or generative, rather than proscriptive. Like the essay form itself, the essay collection, in several distinctively diverse and recent books, is fastly evolving with subtle differences, resisting a singular form.

Essay Cycles

I needed to start somewhere, so I began with a term of my own, essay cycle: a collection of essays, closely related to one another, whether by topic or theme or formal qualities. For instance, with fiction, if someone said, “This is a short story cycle,” rather than a collection of stories or a novel, we understand that the stories, according to Wikipedia, are “specifically composed and arranged with the goal of creating an enhanced or different experience when reading the group as a whole as opposed to its individual parts.” We do not expect a unifying narrative or even, necessarily, a focus on any one character or any one place. Instead, we would expect a collection of stories where characters and themes recurred and resonated with one another.

Using fiction, consider the differences between Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a story-cycle, thematically unified by the individual soldier’s burden, where characters and locales and even formal qualities of each story vary, and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, where the stories in the collection are united by place, recurring characters, and formal consistency. The range is ample, allowing for all sorts of variations.

So, taking a cue from fiction, what happens when the “aboutness” of the essay collection is not strictly autobiographical and when events or circumstances of the author’s life are used to ground her inquiry and reflect on larger social, political, and cultural domains? This is where the term essay cycle might be a more useful descriptor—useful to a writer in-process as well as to the publishing industry. As someone who teaches nonfiction at the graduate level, I often ask students to discuss their theses-in-process: Are you thinking that this will be a collection of essays of various topics and formal qualities or a sustained project? To help, I use essay cycle to indicate a collection that is guided by a central line of inquiry and where there is some formal consistency among the essays.

Since these are the qualities that Christine asked me to emphasize in the revision of Anxious Attachments—to create thematic and formal consistency—I decided to read (or reread) recent essay collections with this hypothesis in mind. I concluded that Lacy M. Johnson’s The Reckonings and Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias are clear examples of essay cycles.

In these books, the essays are thematically connected, although the topics of the essays may vary. Also, in each, there is a structural or formal consistency among the essays themselves that makes the collection cohesive, makes the reader feel that the writer may have intended a sustained inquiry into the subject.

In The Reckonings, the impetus for Johnson’s inquiry is grounded in the first essay. In it, she recounts how she is asked, often by women, what should happen to her former boyfriend who abused and tried to kill her before escaping justice by fleeing to Brazil, a dark tale she explored in her brilliant memoir, The Other Side. Some women assume she wants retribution or revenge; however, she says, “I want a long line of reckonings. I want the truth told back to us. I want the lies laid bare.” In other words, instead of retribution, she wants a reckoning to bring about cultural and political change. Her desire for truth-telling extends, in other essays, to related topics: whiteness, the penal system, environmental degradation. But the central theme is to explore revenge, retaliation, and justice as reckonings in different contexts.

Diagramming Johnson’s book, I see its development as horizontal and Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias as vertical. In other words, if we use the metaphor of “mapping,” Johnson’s book describes the “lay of the land” as far as the theme of reckoning Wang’s is like a vertical mining of schizophrenia. Wang travels, ever more deeply and narrowly, from the first researched essay on medical definitions to more personal essays about the ways her own diagnoses have manifested and morphed throughout her life to the final essay on the spiritual dimensions of illness. Using her own life and experiences as starting point and frame, Wang gives us a deeper understanding of the complexities of mental illness, of the complications of its treatments, and of the ways mental and physical illnesses are connected. In the end, she questions the ways Western culture defines the mind/body split.

In Johnson and Wang, the individual essays are fairly straightforward segmented narratives, although variations exist so that none feels predictable. The differences in essay structure may arise from purpose: neither author uses the essay to tell a narrative in the way that O’Farrell does. Rather, each employs narrative as one way of grounding her exploration in the personal. Both incorporate research and references to other texts, rather than relying solely on their own experiences.

This method of cycling out of and back into the narrator’s experiences makes their books feel as personal or memoir-like as they feel reflective and, frankly, essayistic, allowing thought to unfold on the page—the self as camera lens, the writer’s life as springboard into larger social and political dimensions so she can comment on tensions of the outer and inner realms.

Finally, the arrangement of the essays in these two collections is worth considering. Whether we get a horizontal, “lay of the land” arrangement, as in Johnson’s book, or a vertical “mining,” as in Wang’s, both deepen our understanding of the subject at hand. I like the idea of some kind of spatial arrangement that is not dependent on the linearity of chronology or on developing a long-form narrative, which may imply cause/effect relationships and may limit their design and oversimplify their purpose.

Mere Essay Collections

Heidi Czerwiec’s book Fluid States begins with “Decants,” a series of lyrical essays about perfume and desire. The language itself is a kind of “per fume,” which means “through smoke,” in that language conceals as much as it reveals, emphatic teasing. Fragrance is fluid like identity; prose flows into poetry. In the next part of the book, though, there are six essays of varying lengths, forms, and topics—short essays about everyday life, for instance canning tomatoes or crafting an essay, and a long essay about being harassed after reporting armed men on campus. These varying lengths and topics threw me at first. After the chapbook-length first section on perfume, it seemed like the book was two different books. My discovery of this dissonance, in fact, was one impetus for writing this essay. But why did it throw me?

Whenever we experience dissonance in literature, I’ve told students, we ask ourselves: Is the dissonance coming from an aspect of the text or from our own assumptions, perhaps a misreading? Czerwiec is a provocative and skilled writer. She divided the book into three parts and seems to have arranged the pieces deliberately. Why was it the formal inconsistencies—rather than the topical, although there were both—that threw me? Especially when I had argued for formal variations in my own collection.

Maybe I had simply come to expect essay collections to be essay cycles, sustained inquiries like Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land, which uses segmented narratives to explore her relationship as a white woman to questions about race. Perhaps it was formal and topical cohesiveness that agents wanted in my own collection when they asked for a memoir in essays. I wonder what is gained and what is lost when a writer chooses to be formally and topically consistent?

Maybe Czerwiec wanted to challenge notions of consistency. After all, in one of my favorite essay collections, Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, there is a range of forms: Sloan fashions innovative playlists and reviews; she essays about her family and teaching; she creates collages that triangulate art/place/event. With collage, Sloan often juxtaposes materials that are “unlike” one another; she might use associative leaps instead of transitions, leaving gaps for the reader to enter. Just as in visual art, the form creates a spatial, textured arrangement, and encourages readers to see connections for themselves. This form is especially effective in investigations where the material is politically laden or emotionally heavy, where the writer wants us to experience fragmentation or disturbance, and where coherence is an illusion or a lie.

For instance, in the essay “Gray’s Anatomy,” Sloan triangulates her experiences with her own musculature, specifically that of her neck, with Basquiat’s anatomical fascination with the body and his repeated paintings of skulls, with the death of Freddie Gray, whose spine was 80 percent severed at the neck while in police custody. These collaged elements, some from her personal experience, lead her to questions: “What is it that these men and women, masked, robed, or uniformed, seek to find when they smash the faces of our brothers and our fathers? Does some secret pleasure unfurl itself when they go repeatedly—systematically—for our necks? It is as if what is broken there holds a secret symbolism.” Because the collaged form has provoked us to see these connections for ourselves, the questions—and the insights—reverberate viscerally.

The logical arrangement of Sloan’s essays in the collection seems to mirror the logic of collaging within the essays themselves. For instance, essays are juxtaposed next to essays that they are “unlike” in form. Instead of a part of the book, containing all the essays that triangulate art/place/event, these are placed throughout the book to balance the overall load. An essay that combines Hockney’s paintings/L.A./Rodney King is next to a lyrical essay about a woman losing her son, which is next to a playlist in honor of Sloan’s father’s birthday, which is next to a segmented narrative about teaching, which is next to a collaged essay about opera/Detroit/Sloan’s ride-along with her white cousin who is a police officer. The effect is to create depth and texture.

On the cover, the essayist Kiese Laymon praises the book as “an otherworldly meditation on the elasticity of memory, the liveliness of blackness, and possibilities of the essay.” I agree. With Sloan’s creative range of form and subject matter, we see a resistance to categories while she is also craftily employing them.

When I thought about the variety of topics and the more straightforward voice in the second part of Czerwiec’s book, I felt an intimacy many writers seldom achieve. I felt grounded in her everyday life as if I had come to experience her concerns as a mother, a teacher, a writer, a citizen in a democracy gone undemocratic. Just as this section played with various forms and topics, it also increased the emotional range of the book. It was by turns funny, angry, tender, sarcastic, contemplative. In the third section of the book, Czerwiec expands explicitly into political and environmental realms. The essay collection is cone-shaped: in the beginning, we are at a single point, lying in bed, “wrist pressed to nose;” in the middle we are musing on aspects of her daily life; and in the end, we are floating above our polluted earth, above Chernobyl, above Fukushima, untethered.

In re-reading Czerwiec’s Fluid States and Sloan’s Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, I saw distinct advantages to collections in which writers explore various topics and explore the various possibilities of how the essays might work together. As such, these collections attempt to enact the variety of their subject matter. And, just as the essay is expansive within itself when it encourages writer and reader to make connections among things that might seem, on the surface, disparate, so then is a collection of such essays also expansive when it experiments with its own literary form, creating an organic and self-reflective work of art.

Book-Length Essays

On the cover of Chelsea Biondolillo’s book, just below the title, The Skinned Bird, we see the word “Essays,” but at the bottom of the cover, in her blurb, Lidia Yuknavitch uses the words “poetry,” “prose,” and “stories,” a clue to how expansive the essay form can be. And yet, in this age of hybridity, why do these labels matter except as conventions and constraints to follow, to push against, or to break?

When I first read The Skinned Bird, I thought of it as a memoir in essays, even though each was formally different. But now I wonder whether calling it a book-length essay is more accurate. For one thing, Biondolillo does not place her memories at the center of the book, in the way we might expect in a memoir. In fact, sometimes she goes to great lengths not to reveal herself, as in “The Story You Never Tell,” where she places large photographs of seashells in the center of each page to hide the text. In many essays, there is an interplay between text and image, including photographs and charts. I was going to say the visuals are woven in, but inserted may be more apt since woven in suggests they are a seamless part of the cloth, which is not always the case nor the intention.

Biondolillo uses the first essay, “Critical Learning Period,” to delineate her inquiry and so to teach her reader how to read the book. In it, she explains the organization of her project: “Song birds . . . with fixed song repertoires learn to sing in four steps. The steps are studied, in part, because many linguists believe that these same four steps describe human language acquisition.” We understand, from the very beginning, then, that there is a reason the book is in four parts and that the through-line will be the journey from silence (or being/feeling silenced) to vocalized expression.

The essay “PHRENOLOGY // an attempt” to talk about pain and the attraction to or necessity of pain is especially layered, emblematic of her impulse to collage fragments into a larger whole. This essay, I think, comes closest to defining the central inquiry in the book, which is why I’d call The Skinned Bird a book-length essay: We need all the essays, as fragmented and jarring as some may be, to understand what she is struggling to express about herself and why she needs to use prose, poetry, image, and “found” artifacts to do so. In fact, the book might be “about” the conflict between our desire to speak and our fear of doing so, between our fragmented, often painful, realities and the effort it takes to crystalize a song about them.

All the Fierce Tethers by Lia Purpura also examines our connection to and disconnection from the world. Some of the essays in the book are short, a page or so, and some longer, but all are meditative and, as one reads, the philosophical meaning of the whole accrues from its parts. In the title essay, Purpura watches people, their daily routines, the work they do; she imagines the doorknobs they touch as well as the wooden spoons, worn smooth through generations. “All the fierce tethers to all the fierce moments—they matter, to the pinpoint I’ve become. That’s the dizzying thing—how the vastness of my singular life does not set me faceless in the ranks of billions, except that it does. I am perfectly speck-like.” But being speck-like does not render her insignificant. She quotes John Donne: “All things that are, are equally removed from being nothing.”

There is nothing romanticized, nothing anthropomorphic, nothing comforting in this vision: To be fully present in the moment, fully aware of the precariousness of life, the smallness of one’s own life, is holy. Although she does not use that word, her encounter with a crepe myrtle in the final essay may say otherwise: “I stopped and looked, I heard just my own breathing . . . [The tree was] a presence so insistently here . . . while I really wasn’t anywhere. / The tree in its quiet unspecialized me,” the essay’s speaker, “dissolved by a tree.” It is in “relation” to the tree that she feels her own mortality and, perhaps, immortality: “The emptying out of the form I knew as myself, the bright indifference of the tree, was shattering.” The tree is central; she is not.

Human life is fleeting, precarious. But such precariousness is everything, especially to the contemporary essayist. Recognizing it is a spiritual and a political act. After all, thinking of ourselves as central has brought us to this point where we can “never mind” all the destruction we have wrought—and so, thinking of this, we are brought back to the beginning of Purpura’s book, in its portrayal of our lack of mindfulness. There is a way, because her essays are so closely linked in content and form, that we should consider it a book-length essay, like Maggie Nelson’s Bluets—both inquires so sustained and fluid that to stop reading feels disorienting as if you’ve been interrupted in the middle of a train of thought.

Why Be Categorical

It is not my wont to be definitive. This piece really is an essai, an attempt, an inquiry into a serendipitous sampling: six books that happened to come out as recently as my own and read against the backdrop of the work of three writers I often turn to while writing: Eula Biss, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, and Maggie Nelson.

I love essays in all their permutations however we decide to collect them and whatever we come to call them: memoir in essays, essay cycle, essay collection, book-length-essay. When writers use these terms descriptively, they are useful in figuring out how the parts relate to one another and to the whole book. Questions to help figure out the form: How capacious do I want the project to be? To what extent is it grounded in my life? Are there various topics or only one line of inquiry? What are the over-arching themes? What formal choices am I making and how do they affect the cohesiveness of any collection I might write? And, finally, why and how and to what extent is consistency and cohesiveness a primary value?

With Anxious Attachments, where I wrote essay by essay over a period of years, these questions became useful only after I had a set of essays and wanted to shape them into a book. Now that I am beginning to write essays again, I’m envisioning a more sustained project—an essay cycle—where, because of the current pandemic, I am traveling in memory to places I’ve already been and doing some research into the art and history of those places. I find in every essay I write an escape from Covid-19 and our current political conflicts as well as a reflection on those very things I wish to escape. It is also becoming clear to me that the essays I am writing are shifting in response to their particular needs rather than conforming to any initial formal or topical constraints I had set up. For instance, some new pieces are more narrative and some more collaged; some are more about my own memories and some more about the art and history of a place.

As my writing evolves with each essay, so do my intentions in regard to shaping a new book. While I want this book to be a sustained inquiry, I also want to give each essay the room it needs to find its own voice. I’m also interested in process, in the ways that the present conditions of my life, while I’m writing essays, influence their evolving form. If an essay is, as many describe, “the mind on the page,” then an essay collection is the mind over a period of time in conversation with a topic or an array of topics on the page. At its best, a collection does what all of these books I’ve examined do: it helps us “re-see” the world as it exists and, therefore, imagine how it might be otherwise.

on As You Were by David Tromblay 

[CW: sexual assault, violence, animal abuse]

Extreme. That’s one way to describe David Tromblay’s As You Were. Another way is horrific. A memoir that speaks to American Indian art, culture, history, and tradition, is not this one. Instead, Tromblay’s is a discovery of self only after he has lived to tell the tale, centering his trauma and survival as explicit indicators of his character. What we find in Tromblay’s work is an unchecked family trauma with its Chippewa heritage, tradition, and history as counterpoint to severe child abuse: His character is purified by outlasting his abuse. The brutal beatings, burnings, and neglect as well as his subsequent psychological wounds are not that uncommon. Children are at-risk to any number of horrors that happen at home—a gauge of a broken society rather than an indictment of family. The book, however, is Tromblay’s effort to break from the abuse, to inflict none of the same abuses on his own family, and to discover the healing aspects of his Native community. Those things are what makes this story unique.

The miracle here is that he survives the beatings of his childhood at all and forges his own way despite the terror of his upbringing. I found myself thinking throughout As You Were that it is by miracle, and miracle alone, that Tromblay does not die.

There’s no telling how it began, or what made you weaponize a squirt gun, or how Glen let you pull the trigger on his Super Soaker and shoot a stream of ammonia into the nest, the stream they followed back to you, the source of the assault. Still, pain has a way of beginning a story in a fog, and maybe becomes the mortar the other—known—details are stacked upon.

There are too many maybes that come before when Dad hammers his fist down on top of your skull, slamming your knees into the floor where the cabin meets the screened-in front porch. Your face and chest slap against the floor, too. You never saw it coming, so maybe Dad was standing behind you when he hit you.

Tromblay presents As You Were in second-person and in present tense; he recounts episodes of stunning and incomprehensibly abusive treatment between father and son, and grandmother and grandson, with little remove. When Debbie, Tromblay’s sister, attempts to intervene, her attempt is met with brutality that equals his.

And with dog in hand, yelping for someone to help, Dad belches out, “Get out from under that bed, little girl.”

For him, there is no counting to ten, or even three. He doesn’t do all that. Instead, he flings the tiny teacup poodle against the far wall of the trailer’s back bedroom. It lets out one final yelp while falling to the floor, where the rest of its breath leaves its lungs. Or maybe it yelps while flying through the air, toward the wall.

Tromblay finds solace only when he goes numb or blank: following a beating with a wire hanger and locked in Grandma Audrey’s closet (not the first or last wire hanger beating and not the first or last time Tromblay is locked in Grandma Audrey’s closet) or during the multiple times he slips from consciousness as his father beats him with fists or bat. One afternoon, Tromblay is raped by his father’s cousin, and we, like Tromblay, understand that there is no escaping this hell.

When his weight lifts off you, your privates and belly are wet, warm, sticky, stinking. What he left behind pools in your belly button. He rises to his knees, leaving you covered in his sweat and shadow. He warns you he could flip you over and give you AIDS. You don’t know what it means. Only that it’s bad. So bad you remember hearing how Aunt Bobbie’s brother-in-law got it and jumped off the Bong Bridge to die less painlessly.

Before you say one thing, he looks down and says, “See? You liked it,” and reminds you of how you could’ve stayed at Grandma Audrey’s cabin.

Tromblay’s account shifts in time between his childhood at Fond du Lac Reservation to his early days in boot camp as a private in the Armed Forces. Time shifts from one chapter to the next, seemingly haphazard as memory does while theme builds on theme and increases in intensity chapter by chapter. What is constant is the present-tense insistence on you, which blurs the line between reader and narrator, situates the reader as the receiver of these injustices alongside Tromblay, and invites a visceral response.

Grandma makes you take a seat on the top step, and she shaves it all off. But Grandpa Bub has had these clippers put away since before they were married, since before she makes him go to Cliff’s Barber Shop, since before he began to comb it all to the back and have her cut it with a pair of old kitchen scissors she keeps in the junk drawer.

Regardless of how the clippers are rusted and dulled with age, you have to sit there while she runs the blade through your hair so fast you think she’s trying to get it done before the commercial break ends. It sounds the same as when Grandpa runs the lawnmower over the gravel driveway at the cabin. You duck the same too, except it’s not because you’re afraid of a flying rock, but because some of the hair is coming out by the root.

Structurally speaking, As You Were is nearly perfect. On occasion, typographic experimentation illustrates the frightening conditions.

“WHAT THE HELL IS THAT NOISE?”

“Falling

Down

The stairs,

What’s

It

Sound

Like?”

Dzanc Books neatly summarizes As You Were as a coming-of-age story, “echoing from within the aftershocks set off by the American Indian boarding schools, fanned by the flames of nearly fifteen years of service in the Armed Forces, exposing a series of inescapable prisons and the invisible scars of attempted erasure.” Coming-of-age as a characterization is much too simplistic. Tromblay grapples with the devastation of his own internal landscape and his role as a veteran, Native American, and father. We learn that though Tromblay escapes abuse in 1992, its impact permeates his being.

There’s one pill, four times a day, to keep your mood stable. No more explosions. No more manic episodes. No more fight or flight or freeze. When the gel cap explodes, when its contents creep back up your esophagus, its acidity flashes you back to taste the CLP [cleaner, lubricant, and preserve] left on your tonsils—right before you remembered it’s got to come straight up from under the jaw and back behind your eyeballs on its way to the top of your skull, unless you’d like some CAN [Cardiovascular Autonomic Neuropathologist] at the vet’s home to wipe your ass for the rest of your life. And then you lost your nerve, again, and slid the safety back on.

How do readers move past the exploitative idea that we are doing no more than consuming the atrocities that befall Tromblay and so many children like him? Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) might give us a clue.

Sontag sets out to answer a question posed by Virginia Woolf in her 1938 book-length essay, Three Guineas: “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” Tromblay explores a similar question: How are we to break a cycle of violence when society is shaped and scarred by violence?

Commodities are not a raw material or primary agricultural product that can be bought and sold, such as copper or coffee. Commodities are why you stand in line at the community center on the first Saturday of every month. There you receive blocks of pasteurized cheddar cheese product that comes in the same sort of flimsy cardboard box the government uses for clips of M16 ammunition.

In Tromblay’s memoir, we are not simply reading a documentarian’s true-crime account or viewing a photojournalist’s wartime image. The memoir itself is an act of revolution and ownership, creating something out of torturous experiences. The memoir forces us to confront experiences we may share with Tromblay so that we might heal our wounds too.

In a few short paragraphs of a final chapter, Tromblay attends a powwow, converses with an Ojibwe warrior elder, and begins to write among other Native storytellers in Santa Fe. It is in this period of transition and self-discovery as a Chippewa that the book neatly closes and indicates the beginning of the author’s healing in a way that war, therapy, and pharmaceutical drugs could not help.

As You Were by David Tromblay

on Delusions of Grandeur: American Essays by Joey Franklin

“Certainly, I am as inclined as anyone to run away from uncomfortable truths, but for too long, delusional thinking has been killing us softly, one narcissistic fairy tale at a time.”

Joey Franklin reveals this startling observation in the introduction to Delusions of Grandeur, ten reflective essays with expansive endnotes and sources. Franklin, the author of another University of Nebraska collection, My Wife Wants You to Know I’m Happily Married, is the father of three boys and is about to turn forty. He has challenges teaching his children how to become good men while he struggles with more global concerns such as social injustice, the meaning of life, and the American mythologies we impart to our children. In the book’s first essay, “Toy Soldiers,” Franklin poses an interesting premise.

Imagine, for instance, if my boys opened a new pack of little green army men, and along with the grenade-throwing captain, the brave scout, the determined rifle man, and that obedient private there were also shell-shocked troops curled up in the fetal position, soldiers laid in hospital beds nursing amputations, maybe a soldier back home waiting on the phone with the VA, one in civilian clothes trying to find work and struggling to relate to his family, one contemplating a bottle of pills, or the end of his rifle.

Growing up during the Vietnam War, I feared for my brother, friends, and classmates who faced the threat of being drafted. Some veterans had already returned home to a country that despised them, as if the recruits had caused the conflict themselves. The aftermaths of war are ugly, and Franklin rightly wants these real outcomes to be questioned as part of our culture’s children’s games that glorify war.

Franklin demonstrates his gift of storytelling when he switches writing styles, and adopts from a more lyrical approach in an essay about an embarrassed boy who loved a fat girl in the brief essay “Girl Fight.” Or, despised her, depending on the moment. As painful as first loves often are, Franklin employs the use of a refrain to lighten the mood, “we got to talking about girls, as boys do,” “my secret had gotten out that day, as secrets do,” “I knew that insult would hang in the air, as insults do.” This technique conjures an image of a storytelling circle where the seated listeners chime in during the chorus. Placement of this essay about Franklin’s own childhood is juxtaposed against his concerns for how his boys are being influenced, creating a nostalgic mood for simpler times and lost innocence.

In the essay “Good Enough,” Franklin uses a numbered form to present a collage of ideas unified by their exploration of “good” as it pertains to the English language, human behavior, religious pursuits, biases, and personal development. Using the revelatory notion that a Good Samaritan isn’t good based on action alone, but for having stopped to help in the first place, Franklin supposes that being good is not solely defined by action but includes motivation. On good grammar, Franklin tells us that the rules of language should be considered a baseline for creativity and expansion.

And the artists who’ve created our finest works of literature figured out long ago what our contemporary linguists are only, in this century, finally emphasizing–that good language makes its own rules. Sure, there are foundational principles—essential grammars that make language recognizable and reproducible—but these are merely foundations to build on.

And, on good parenting, Franklin admits to looking like a good example versus actually being one.

I’m pushing forty now, which means I should have all kinds of insight and maturity about oversimplified notions of goodness, but, as it is, the universe has blessed me with children, which is another way of saying the universe isn’t done proving I’m a hypocrite.

Franklin later admits impatience for his boys to develop their own “ethical backbones.” After wishing them to grow up in a hurry, he realizes that time will allow the process to happen with or without, and despite his meddling.

By the fourth essay in the book, I realized, this was not simply a meditation on uncomfortable truths and mythic delusions. It was also, at times, an insightful demonstration of the craft of writing personal essays, experimenting with form, tone, and structure, and providing guideposts for other writers when crafting their work artistically. Many essays open with a compelling scene followed by background information before the heart of the story appears. The essays often revisit the initial scene after Franklin creates or fashions a larger context and conveys a meaningful, sometimes unexpected message.

At the conclusion of each essay, I felt satisfied, even enlightened, as when a teacher shares a piece of hard-earned wisdom. For instance, I’ll never think about homelessness in the same way after reading Franklin’s essay, “Not in My Backyard.” In it, a homeless couple is brought to life with faces and names as he realizes how difficult it is for them to learn basic urban survival skills, that is, if they had a home, to clean it, take the trash out, make dinner. About a man who lives just outside his backyard, Franklin asks, “Were we anything more than just another house of ‘haves’ laughing on the other side of the fence?”

Midway through the book, the significance of race on America’s often delusion-minded culture becomes clear in “White Trash.” Franklin explores the American Dream of upward class mobility available only to those with the access and connections to make the climb.

The dilemma reveals a troubling contradiction—the American Dream promises that you and I can, through hard work and determination, improve our social standing; but then it simultaneously reassures us that our social standing doesn’t matter in the first place. The truth, of course, is that all of us are, to a greater or lesser extent at the mercy of where we came from, who are parents were, and what society thinks those facts say about our potential. . . . The American economy has always left someone behind, and the rest of us benefit from the notion that the poor have only themselves to blame.

Franklin transports us from his poor upbringing when his mother illegally dumped their weekly trash in an office dumpster to her current well-appointed home near Salt Lake City with an Impressionist style cityscape hanging above the fireplace. At first glance, the painting is a tribute to the immigrant’s dream of success in America. Upon closer inspection, a homeless camp is tucked into the shrubbery, the truth in plain sight. But you have to look closely to see it. While some prosper, others nearby face a daily struggle to survive.

Franklin tackles other moving topics with candid personal narrative in Delusions of Grandeur. These include God, nakedness (“The Full Montaigne”), white privilege, revelatory experiences he had as a Mormon missionary, and social injustice. Franklin’s prose is accessible and evocative. One fine example is the essay, composed in fragments, about Trayvon Martin, “Worry Lines.”

In it, Franklin observes the acute differences of raising a Black son in America versus raising a white son. It starts with Nolan, Franklin’s middle child, questioning the worry lines on his father’s face. The story segues to someone else’s son, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin killed while walking home from a convenience store in the rain, wearing a hoodie. The white man who shot him worried Martin was a threat. Martin’s parents had worried about their son, too. Advice they gave about racial confrontations was to “eliminate yourself from the equation.” Possible ways include backing down, humbling, appeasing, fleeing. By alternating Trayvon’s story and Franklin’s story of raising three boys, the author effectively captures the disparity in the two circumstances and the different scales of worry.

The book represents the struggle of humankind across many miles and varied cultures, from a college student donating blood plasma in Ohio to the “joyful” aftermath of a tsunami in Japan, which gave one impacted family unexpected optimism. Franklin’s keen powers of observation uncover parallels in his life, perhaps in all of our lives, opening deep layers of meaning and connection. Still, at the core is the heartfelt conflicts of a man approaching middle-age, trying to be a good father in twenty-first century America.

Delusions of Grandeur: American Essays by Joey Franklin

on A Fish Growing Lungs: Essays by Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn

At the heart of Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn’s impressive debut is the moment when, after being found by her mother in a state of distress, she winds up, at eighteen, in a locked hospital ward and is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. As the reality of the doctor’s pronouncement sinks in, Sawchyn begins to consider what it means for her future:

Unhinging from my body—manifested in a mood that swung down then back up, hanging, mid-air, like Wile E. Coyote just before he realizes he’s gone off a cliff—was part of my body, my biology, and something to endure or manage with a lifetime of medication and behavior modification and therapy.

In the case of mental illness, a diagnosis is often a life sentence, and throughout this collection of twelve linked essays, Sawchyn considers the profound effects of being deemed “ill” in a highly normative culture. Her story is complicated by the fact that, seven years after that first hospital visit, she weans herself off her psych meds and confirms what she suspected all along—that she was misdiagnosed, a remarkably common mistake in the highly subjective field of mental health care. “When withdrawal ended,” she tells us, “I remained myself, both feet mostly on solid earth, having gained silent passage back into the kingdom of the well.”

A Fish Growing Lungs brings to mind Susanna Kaysen’s classic memoir, Girl, Interrupted, where the author writes of her own misdiagnosis, and the nearly two years she spent in a mental institution. Both books highlight how certain behaviors—underage drinking, drugs, multiple sex partners—are much more likely to be deemed “abnormal” when the offender is a young woman. “The easiest explanation for a girl like me, wild wild wild, was illness,” Sawchyn tells us, pointing out how our culture punishes girls for unbecoming behavior, and “dictates . . . that mad women be locked away.” Part of the danger of such a diagnosis is that it immediately makes the patient an unreliable narrator, unable to advocate for herself. “Once considered of unsound mind,” Sawchyn says, “all protestations to the contrary are further evidence of delusion.”

Though her former doctors may have questioned her trustworthiness, Sawchyn’s readers should have no such concerns. She is a highly likeable, piercingly honest narrator of her own story, unafraid to shine light on her worst moments, or to celebrate her best. One of the collection’s most memorable essays, “Notes from the Cliff Face,” weaves together Sawchyn’s experience hiking up a mountain in Shenandoah National Park (for which she is ill-prepared), with her story of addiction and recovery. The cliffs here are both beautiful and dangerous, featuring “the kind of sucker-punch scenery on which this country was founded,” and serve as an apt backdrop for Sawchyn’s mediations on the years she spent “toeing the line between interesting and ruinous.”

In lesser hands, this mountain-as-metaphor strategy might seem forced, but here the forward momentum of the climb provides a stark contrast with the stagnancy of the addict. When the essay digresses into vivid descriptions of how cocaine looked, smelled, and tasted in different parts of the country, we see that where another person might note the variations in culture or geography, for Sawchyn’s younger self, everything beyond the drug itself has become nearly irrelevant. She writes convincingly about the bitter resilience of the addict, about hitting rock bottom then finding the obscene drive to go even lower. “Sometimes, what looks like a bottom drops out,” she says, “and a person finds herself crawling along cool white tiles with bloodstains in the grout toward more.” She finally reaches the mountain’s summit, but knows that in recovery there is no such apex, only “a slow and uninteresting process that’s consisted of abstinence, critical self-reflection, begrudging acceptance, and restraint.” It is a testament to her writing that she manages to make the tedious process of recovery as interesting as the coke binges and other assorted dramas of her youth.

A Fish Growing Lungs contains harrowing and thoughtful essays about love and sex, writing and healing, nonsuicidal self-injury, and Sawchyn’s sometimes difficult relationship with her family. One thing that ties the collection together, in regard to her family, is the idea of displacement. The daughter of a Chinese-Malaysian mother and Ukrainian father, Sawchyn tells us that since her parents are the only interracial couple on either side of the family, her relatives never quite embrace her as they might another niece or cousin or granddaughter. “I have always felt out of place where I believed I should belong,” she says, a feeling she can never quite shake.

Sawchyn’s relationship with her parents is further complicated by the fact that “family history” is a strong indicator for both mental illness and substance abuse, and she finds herself combing through photographs, “trying to trace [her] wounds back to a single point of origin.” At one point, she asks a therapist, half-jokingly, if she can blame all her troubles on her parents. The therapist points out that even if she could, it wouldn’t be helpful: “You still have to fix it.”

The narrator’s parents and relatives are just a few of the cast of characters who populate the collection, and Sawchyn has a wonderful knack for describing the people around her. Of her Ukrainian grandmother, she writes, “She reminded me of a Midwestern spring—surprisingly gentle and then cold and storming.” Elsewhere, she describes a friend as “the only one of us who can actually execute a dance move.” The narrator watches as the woman “dips . . . bends, smiles contentedly at her own movements like a cat curled in a patch of warm laundry.” These characters—boyfriends, relatives, therapists, recovering addicts, loyal friends—are not simply here as background scenery. Sawchyn understands that our personalities cannot be disentangled from our cultural and social networks and can never be examined strictly on their own. And she believes that “it is through our relationships with others that we best come to know ourselves.”

Some of the essays here experiment with invented or unusual forms—“Wellness Index” is an abecedarian that carries us from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to ziprasidone while “Withdrawal” takes the form of a psychiatrist’s notes (with occasional and often sarcastic asides from the author). These offer a more distanced (and possibly more objective) view of the narrator, but I prefer when Sawchyn speaks more directly. Her voice is intimate, candid, witty, brainy, and utterly compelling, and I think most readers will want to hear as much of it as she can offer.

The book begins with an epigraph from Joan Didion, who says that “we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we once were, whether we find them attractive company or not.” At times Sawchyn resists this notion, expressing reservations about examining our former selves too deeply. After returning to college after a stint in rehab, she encounters a classmate who says addiction stories are “expected” and “overdone,” and finds herself nodding in enthusiastic agreement. “What I lacked in self-confidence, I made up for with the earnest desire to pretend like the person I was never existed.”

But in the end, Sawchyn acknowledges the power of remembering (and recording) the past. She argues that self-examination is important, but so are moments of letting go. Where she once turned to drugs for this kind of mental oblivion, she now flails around the dancefloor, or holds a demanding yoga pose on the sidewalk alongside a busy street.

Her pursuit of these two complimentary states have served Sawchyn well as a writer, and her vivid descriptions, perfectly rendered characters, deep intelligence, and hard-won wisdom make it clear that this collection is our introduction to an important new voice in contemporary nonfiction. Addicts, she says, “must tell ourselves our addiction will not swallow us. We must tell many smaller lies in service of this larger one.” It is a great boon to readers that in A Fish Growing Lungs, Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn has chosen instead to tell the truth.

A Fish Growing Lungs: Essays by Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn