David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

All of which further inclines me to believe that he was abused and that I’m going to hear about it, but this information is withheld, and he segues into a retelling of his entire seminarian career, beginning with his earliest, uncontrollable desire to enter the seminary because of his mortifying fear of girls and all things sexual, and his assessment that, as a result, “there was something deeply wrong” with him. The first several chapters revolve around Moody’s unrelenting emphasis on how troubled he was as a child, how disturbed he is as an adult, and how traumatizing the intervening years were. Further, and perhaps most important, he describes how difficult it is for him to recall these memories, both emotionally and physically: “Memory isn’t a resurrector of past reality so much as it is a storyteller.” His wife asks him (about the manuscript I’m reading) whether he’s writing memoir or fiction, and he responds that he’s “still thinking about it.”

At this point, I believe that (1) I’m going to read the story of how Moody was molested by a priest at seminary, and (2) I’m going to have no way of knowing how much of what follows is “true.” As Moody’s story of adolescent angst unfolds, the feeling of impending molestation hovers—not on the page, but in my mind—over every encounter Moody has with a Father, every time he’s alone in a room with one. Whenever one of his classmates has a nervous breakdown or mysteriously decides to drop out and go home, I assume abuse is the root cause, but Moody doesn’t speculate. Where’s the trauma? The devastation? The “rotting pier” upon which the adult Moody’s family and marriage are to be just “barnacles”?

I’m relieved, sort of, when Moody says that his seminary is shutting down. I realize that he isn’t going to be molested there. The school closes, Moody goes home, and trauma is spared. To my dismay, I learn that Moody is going to transfer to another seminary—St. Anthony’s Franciscan, which proves to be far different from the previous one. Suddenly, the chapters are numbered in Roman numerals. I meet Father Mario, the consummate disciplinarian (he’s still alive; google him). Signs of sexual abuse abound, from kids being mysteriously summoned during class to audible screams coming from Mario’s office. And after several tortured months of enduring true Catholic discipline, Moody is kicked out for giving a homily about the hypocrisy of the institution of confession.

Moody escapes unscathed. Finally, though, near the end of the book, Moody satiates my curiosity—really, my anxiety, my fascination. He reveals his dark secret, but it becomes immediately obvious that the event he describes is a fabrication. And Moody doesn’t disguise it: the very next passage begins, “Novelists get a free ride, presenting fact as fiction and taking undeserved credit for creativity when they’ve simply taken down what reality dictated to them. But let a nonfiction writer try to present fiction as fact for the noble cause of inspiring and uplifting the reader, and he ends up crucified on Oprah .” (Sing it, Fred!) The real source of Moody’s shame, I learn, is that the signs of abuse were all around him but he didn’t do anything about it. “This is what I can’t get over: the shame over my complicity in that series of monstrous crimes.”

The book concludes with Moody’s revisiting St. Anthony’s with a friend, who shoots a photo of Moody comically trying to pry apart the bars of a gate. The concluding sentences: “We entitled it ‘Prisoner of Memory.’ Then we got the hell out of there.”

Prisoner of memory. Moody’s book is what I had in mind when I wrote my harrumphing letter to the editor of The New York Review of Books: “ Pace Lorrie Moore’s mention of my book Reality Hunger in her review of three memoirs, Reality Hunger is neither an ‘anti-novel jihad’ (Geoff Dyer’s jocular reference in his generous discussion of my book in The Guardian ) nor a brief for the memoir. It is instead an argument for the poetic essay and the book-length essay—in particular, work that takes the potential banality of nonfiction (the literalness of ‘facts,’ ‘truth,’ ‘reality’), turns that banality inside out, and thereby makes nonfiction a staging area for the investigation of any claim of facts and truth, an extremely rich theater for investigating the most serious epistemological and existential questions: What’s ‘true’? What’s knowledge? What’s ‘fact’? What’s memory? What’s self? What’s other? I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.”

Real life

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE came to like country music by imagining that the singer of each song was actually singing about him/herself. Many country songs were thus transfigured for Wallace into the battle of a self against itself. When Patsy Cline sings “I’m crazy for loving you,” it’s a statement of self-loathing. Hank Williams’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart” is self-indictment. Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” Willie Nelson’s “You Were Always on My Mind.” Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Come On, Come On.” Garth Brooks’s “I’ve Got Friends in Low Places.”

Kurt Cobain wore a T-shirt with the album cover of “outsider” musician Daniel Johnston’s Hi, How Are You? on it. It’s as if Johnston—bipolar, schizophrenic—has found a way to hot-wire his feelings directly into his tape recorder. He presents zero façade, only the inscape of his tortured self. The music, raw beyond raw, is the very definition of lo-fi. Emerson: “The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when all your arrows are spent.” Johnston never had any arrows to begin with. He has always had only himself and a microphone.

In “River,” “Blue,” and “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” Joni Mitchell opens a map of pain, regret, and an ego trying to stitch itself back together. She wrote these songs while traveling in Europe after a bad breakup with Graham Nash. The nakedness also manifests itself in her stark instrumentation. Blue is the sound of Mitchell healing, though there are still signs of blood in the wounds.

On an orange Post-it note attached to the upper right corner of my computer screen is Denis Johnson’s admittedly melodramatic advice Write yourself naked, from exile, and in blood .

Negotiating against ourselves

TWO OF THE ACTORS John Cameron Mitchell auditioned for his film Shortbus were boyfriends. Mitchell suggested that they improvise: meeting for the first time, one is a former child star doing research to play a prostitute in a TV movie, and the other is a real prostitute. One person’s goal is to find out how to play this role, and the other person’s goal is to have sex. The improv was going well (one actor was talking about his child stardom, and the other was portraying a drug-addicted street hustler), and Mitchell thought the scene might actually become sexual. They were friends of Mitchell’s, but he nevertheless found it nerve-racking—just the two of them and him in a room. The two friends did indeed start having sex, and Mitchell quickly grew bored, because the goal had been reached. Sex in and of itself wasn’t interesting to Mitchell, or, rather, “for porn, good sex might be interesting to watch because you can project stuff onto it, but what I was looking for in this film was bad sex, because it’s revealing and funny. So I whispered to one of them, ‘You need to come as soon as possible.’ And to the other I said, ‘If he touches your left nipple, think of your mother.’ And then I said, ‘Continue.’ ”