Memoir in the moment: live blogging Jeannette Walls talk 1/26/2009
Written by Joe Lucia as real-time response to Jeannette Walls talk: ******************************************************************* What follows are some quick notes that follow along with Jeannette’s talk in the Pavilion on Monday, January 26, 2009. Some more structured reflections on her visit and One Book will follow in the next couple of days. She starts fast, with an anecdote about "living in Pennsylvania," when the family car broke down on the way through the state and they spent several nights here. Just like the book, which opens with that image of a homeless woman, her mother, rooting through a trash bin in Manhattan. She then recounts her shame at seeing her mother and avoiding her in that moment. But when several days later Walls encounters her mother again, her mother counsels her to "tell the truth" about her life. She confesses that the ongoing shame about her past made her life seem a sham. The power of secrets. The difficulty of breaking through to tell the whole story, unvarnished. If she could make a rich kid understand the shame at poverty, that would make the book worth it. Also, the hope that the book might help others who grew up like her face & accept face their lives. A story shared with her by a teacher about a boy who hated books but loved Glass Castle as a "fine white trash story." That is why we share our stories -- to know our commonalities – she aspires to reveal some of those commonalities for her readers. The truth is a liquid, not a solid. To tell our stories, we need to discover our truths. So when her father "gives her" the planet Venus high up in the desert sky for Christmas, it was at once a great gift and a meaningless gesture -- a wonderful act of imagination and an act of desperation because he had nothing else to give. The Glass Castle -- her father's image -- represents a hope and a dream for the future. Hunting for the old demon Jeannette imagined under her bed -- facing it as if it was real and chasing it away through an equal and opposite act of imagination, that was to discover the strength of truth. In Amazon review of GC, she encountered comments from a reviewer named Becky, who was one of the people who had taunted Jeannette when she was growing up in West Virginia. Becky faces up to her demons and demonstrates a kind of powerful moral self-redemption. Back in WV, Sam the "bad kid" was destined to turn out "bad" because he was never given the gift of love by his parents, which, poor as they were, the Walls kids received from their parents. At a certain point, pragmatism takes over -- acceptance is far more useful than bitterness & anger when it comes to dealing with harsh experiences. The first seventeen years of her life were an Outward Bound experience. "Rich people need to pay for their hardships." Parents in taking away obstacles took away the gift of learning to navigate those obstacles. Anecdote of snooty question in the WV cafe from the snooty New Yorker. She asks the waitress about the special of the day on the menu, which says it's "fish." Jeannette asks, "What is the fish" -- waitress answers, "it's an animal what swims in the water," teaching by implication that the snootiness was empty, proved nothing but a lack of empathy. Jeannette admits that she still hasn't come to terms with everything in her past. Her mom can still embarrass her. When she goes to Oprah interview with her mother, her Mom has a steak from the hotel room service meal in her purse. Her mother denies having been homeless because even when she was living under the George Washington Bridge for six weeks, that was her home. Mom says "things always work out in the end." Jeannette says, "what if they don't" & her mom answers, "that means you haven't reached the end yet." The gift from her mom through this was a sense of optimism. After food and shelter, the most important human need is for dignity. This is what her mom seeks in her insistence upon finding the good inside of even the most absurdly difficult circumstances. Mom taught her "how to fall" and to see in it a gift. Because of her experiences growing up, Jeannette knows the different between luxuries & necessities -- how little we really need to survive. Don't ever apologize for your scars. Those scars make you interesting. They are marks of your strength -- they provide texture. Smooth is boring. Don't ever think that texture makes you less of a person. Just tell the truth & don't worry what anyone else is going to think of it. "How could you possibly forgive your parents?" "The one person I had to forgive was myself." "Secrets are like vampires. They thrive in darkness & suck the life out of you. Once exposed to live they vanish." You've created that monster. Confront it. It might turn out to be tour best friend.
Posted at 03:40PM Jan 27, 2009 by Catherine Kolongowski in General | Post a Comment
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