Guilt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 85 of 99 · 20 per page

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Jie suggests we hang Ba by his feet, upside down, so that all his memories flee upstream and pool in his skull. We’d have to unscrew his head somehow. I tell her it doesn’t work that way, but Jie’s been taking anatomy lessons at the high school ten miles away, meaning she knows how to diagram a body, meaning she’s drawn me a penis with veins and everything, shown me a hole or two it could go in. She pulls down her pants so I can see. I ask her to show me where all my holes lead to, and she says if I dig into the dark between my legs, I’ll find a baby waiting to be plucked like a turnip. (Don’t worry, I didn’t scavenge for you. You were conceived the carnivore way.) Ma shaves soft wood from our birch tree and skunk-sprays the strips with perfume to make incense, burning it in bunches. The smoke keeps mosquitos from marrying all our blood. We pray to god and Guanyin, in that order. Pray for Ba’s gold to fall as rain or grow a hundred limbs and shudder out of the soil like metallic shrubbery. We consider other strategies: If we borrow a bulldozer, we can flip the whole yard like a penny. But we need our money for that, and our money is buried like a body. _ By the creek, Jie teaches me to read out of the Bible. We sit under a grove of trees belled with apples. The branches applaud in the wind and drop what they hold, concussing us with fist-hard fruit. Last week, rain rutted a hole in our roof and everything flooded, so we’re drying the Bible on a tree branch, its pages flapping like moths. I can pronounce only easy words, no proper names, no verbs. Jie says fluency is forgetting. Says I’ve got to un-name my mouth and crack my tongue like a whip. When I pronounce the word tongue with two syllables, Jie pushes me facedown into the mud. When I get up from the riverbank, I swallow the mud of my tongue. Jie says she once saw two girl ghosts kissing in the creek. I mishear her and think she means they were cleaning the creek. Why? I say. Jie says, Because a god made them want but didn’t give them a word for it. I think Ma is made that way too, unable to name her need.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Jie traces the shape of the crab with permanent marker and I fill it in. Orange first, then black for the shadowing. For practice, Jie and I spray-paint orange crabs all over the street, some of them lopsided or missing legs, some of them looking like stains. Sometime in the afternoon, while the sun is pearling the sweat on our skin, the spray-painted crabs stand up. They walk up and down the street on their half-assed legs, limping in circles and mincing the gravel. Jie and I run after them, flip them onto their backs so they’re clawing at air, cutting the clouds. There are two dozen in total, two dozen crabs we’ve drawn on the street and traced into meat. I say we should sell the crabs, but they’re too strange-limbed to be eaten, too botched to breed. Jie decides they’d make good pets, so we fill a garbage bag with hose-water and toss each of the crabs inside, knotting it at the neck. When the van’s painted, she drives away inside it, leaves me with the cans and brushes and stencils. The crabs awake in her passenger seat, pincers snipping holes in the plastic bag. When we boil them that night, their meat dissolves into salt-foam, and inside their bellies are baby teeth, all the teeth we lost and swallowed in the dark, afraid that Ma would see our parts coming loose and send us back to the factory. _ At home, Ma is asleep on a stool in the kitchen, her hands in the sink, her palms a litany of calluses. Alone on my mattress for the first time, I told the ceiling I’d leave Ma soon, find a man I can steer out of this city, a man who can snuff the sun out with his thumb. In the kitchen, I can hear Ma struggling to tug the thread of her breath up her throat. After breathing all the cleaning chemicals and the factory air, Ma’s lungs cringed to fists and beat at her ribs. When she needs someone to unsnag her breath, I fill a bowl with hot water and push her head an inch from the surface. The steam speaks for us. Her head bucks against my palm, but I press harder. Sometimes I want to sink her head into the water, remind her of the river, but I’m too afraid she’ll become a fish and wriggle out of my fingers. It’s more a punishment to keep her in this body, ache-lunged and coughing, skin worn thin as a lampshade.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  But everyone’s fine. We’re all doing okay. Hey, what happened to your hand?” “Are they here in Paris?” “I can tell you everyone’s safe and healthy. But beyond that—it’s not my place to tell you stuff. I’m lucky to be back in their lives. I’m lucky Claire allows that.” It was all Fiona hoped for, herself—to be allowed back in. She hadn’t messed up as badly as Kurt—she hadn’t been arrested, at least—but maybe she’d messed up for longer. And maybe it was harder to forgive your mother than a man. She’d always figured that her own failings would make more and more sense to Claire as she grew up—that an adult would understand an affair (such a garden-variety mistake!) in a way a child couldn’t have. Shouldn’t Claire know the messiness of the human heart by now? She had too many questions for Kurt, and no good starting point. And she couldn’t give away that she’d spied on him, been in this apartment yesterday. She said, “I understand you’re married.” He looked back and forth between Fiona and Jake, and then he said, “Yeah, she’s a good match. It’s healthy.” “Well, I’m happy for you. I’ve always wanted the best for you, and I just wish—” She wouldn’t be able to express how much fondness she’d always felt for him, or at least for his memory, at the same time that she loathed him with all her being for taking her daughter away. She said, “You’re clear of the, the group, right? The Hosanna people?” Kurt laughed. “You can call them a cult. That’s what they are. Yeah, I was happy to put an ocean between us.” “So you soured on them.” “Hey, can I get you a beer?” Fiona shook her head. “Can I get you a beer?” he said to Jake, and thank God Jake said no. He wouldn’t have looked nearly as effective with a bottle in his hand. Kurt got up and fetched himself one, sat back down. “She soured. I was never that big on them, but I was in love.” “How does being in love mean you have to join a cult?” “It was what she wanted! She—at the beginning, she cared more about them than about me, that was obvious. If I made her choose, I knew who she’d choose, and it wasn’t me.” Fiona glanced at Jake, but he was still just standing there. This made no sense. “You were the one who lived in Boulder,” Fiona said. “You were the one who—you found the cult.” “Nope. Nope, nope, nope. She met this guy in the kitchen of the restaurant where she was working, and at least I knew it wasn’t romantic, because he had this terrible skin and he was sort of emaciated, but he invited her out to a party at the compound, and she brought me along.

• From The Art of Memoir

  in the old days long after their former companions have sallied forth into tidy forgetfulness or private versions of personal history in which they star as heroes. Kathryn Harrison was inwardly scalded into writing one of the bravest memoirs in recent memory, only to be blistered by the press for it. (No man I can think of ever took such a public butt- whipping.*) What sin did she commit? In The Kiss, she breaks a universal cultural taboo—at age twenty, she’s seduced by her long- lost preacher father, entering into what she calls an affair with him. In choosing to digest fully her fractured past, Harrison was possessed of a gnawing hunger for clarity. Because she paid such a high price for exposing said past—the ad hominem attacks on her remain the nastiest I’ve ever seen—her complex motivations warrant a look. I posit that her reasons are identical to those of long-venerated memoir masters like Richard Wright, Mary McCarthy, and Vladimir Nabokov—to get the story right. Like some of us, Harrison at first set out to tell her story in fiction, books she’d later rue as untrue and feel honor-bound to correct. Before The Kiss, the subject of incest insinuated itself—“it kept intruding”— into her first three novels. But she particularly hated how, in her first, she located the daughter squarely among the innocent. I wrote The Kiss in many ways as a response to my own first novel, Thicker Than Water, which was held to be autobiographical. The woman in the story, Isabel, has an affair with her father, but Isabel was younger than I was at the time. She was more passive, sweeter, more of a victim. When I finished that book I wanted to disown it. I felt I had betrayed my own history. I was dishonest in a way that has been inordinately painful to me over the years. Fiction, rather than bringing events into sharper focus for Harrison, had blurred them further. She was driven to make it right— not squinting-through-your-eyes-looking-through-your-fingers right, but right as only ruthless scrutiny can make it.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  * THIS IS HARDCORE. IS IT CANNIBALISM IF YOU EAT YOUR SISTER WHO’S ANOTHER SPECIES? CAN HUNGER BE INHERITED? I HOPE YOU’RE NOT PLANNING ON EATING ANYONE SOMEDAY. THOUGH IS THERE A CHOICE IN WHAT YOU HUNT—WHAT HUNTS YOU? —BENDAUGHTERParable of the Pirate [image file=image_rsrc1SC.jpg] On our last week of school before summer, Ben and I fed her birdcage to the holes. She said the last letter felt incomplete, and we needed to metabolize metal this time. Metal, she told me, could be melted down into water, and the holes were always thirsting. We believed there were three letters, one for each daughter my Ama had left behind. All losses come in threes, Ben said, and I thought of my mother’s three toes in the cookie tin. When we lowered the cage into the 口, it took an hour for the hole to heal around it. Beneath the dirt, we heard the high whine of bars being wrenched, teethed apart, scoured of rust. I was worried about the shadow-bird suffocating while it was buried so far beneath the sky, but Ben said it was worth killing what was inside. We’d already sacrificed an entire goose. I told her not to remind me: These letters had too many casualties already. The 口 didn’t open for four days, and I told Ben to be patient: Metal was metabolized more slowly than meat. Ben said I should tell the holes a story: They’d open their ears to listen, and then we could reach into them and search. But I said I didn’t have any stories, especially if they were about Ama. She was the voice and I was the ear. Then tell one of your ama’s stories, Ben said. Every other night, my mother used the new landline to call Agong, but Ama was the one who picked up. Agong’s mind had unmarried all its memories, and sometimes he called to tell us the Japanese were invading and we should all find a well to hide in. The nights Ama made him sleep on the sidewalk, he’d duck under a chili bush and slug into the soil, awaiting whatever army was morning.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My mother was always covering up our crimes: Once, when a candied shrimp slipped out of my mouth and stained the carpet, she threw a napkin on it so my father wouldn’t see. When I was asleep, she bleached the sauce out of the carpet, though the bleach sucked it out too well and left the spot brighter, too white, a spotlight where my stain had been. _ While she cooked, my mother told stories she claimed were from the Bible, though I could never find them later in any translation. When my father told my mother to teach us a mainlander story, the one she told was Meng Jiang Nu, the girl born from a gourd. The story begins with two families on neighboring estates, one known for its fruit and the other for its flowers. Between their yards was a gourd tree, its trunk so wide even the wind could not wrap around it. The tree’s roots lived on the Meng family’s land, but most of its branches—including the branch with the largest gourd, so gold it blinded birds that flew past—crossed over into the Jiang family’s yard. While the Meng and Jiang families argued every day over the ownership of that gold gourd, it grew to the size of an infant, juice-bloated and so tender it bled in the breeze. When it fell at last, the rind split open to reveal a child, a daughter. They wept at the miracle. The Meng family insisted on naming her Meng Nu, while the Jiang family wanted to name her Jiang Nu. The girl starved for two days as the families argued, before someone said that the girl would die before they ever decided. So they named her Meng Jiang Nu, daughter of both families, daughter of two bloods. This story is wrong, I told my mother. If she was really a daughter, neither family would want her. She couldn’t be milked until she was a mother, couldn’t be bartered until she was a bride. My mother never finished the story. I never asked if she had wanted me, if I was the kind of daughter who doubled as a battleground, who was fought over. Later, my mother would say, Remember, it wasn’t the girl they were fighting over. It was the gourd. Maybe, when the gourd split open, they wept not to celebrate her birth but to grieve their lost gold. They cursed gravity as thievery. I remembered watching families in restaurants fighting to pay a bill, and maybe that was what Meng and Jiang were fighting over: a bill they were too proud to let the other take. To say a daughter is a debt they could afford to pay. _

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Kurt stood. He stretched and put his palm flat on the ceiling. He said, “I can’t judge, but one of the first things she ever told me, in Boulder, was that the day she was born was the worst day of your life. She told me you said that to her.” “That’s not true.” Was it possible that this was the stone in Claire’s shoe? That it wasn’t about Fiona’s affair, the divorce, at all? Her hand was throbbing, taking all the ache that should have been in her head, her gut. “She grew up knowing she’d ruined your life,” Kurt said. “What do you think that does to a person?” Fiona stood, too, and Jake took a step into the room, like he was getting ready to dive between them. “First of all, I never said that to her. It was something Damian told her, in the middle of the divorce, to poison her against me. Second, yes, that was one of the worst days of my life, although lord knows I’ve had lots of them, but it had nothing to do with Claire. This isn’t some huge secret. It was a terrible day, a shitshow. That doesn’t mean I didn’t want her, and it didn’t change the way I raised her.” “Hey. I’m not saying—I remember that day too. I was—” “You don’t think that’s more than a little fucked up, that you remember the day your girlfriend was born?” “She’s not my girlfriend.” He held his hands up, an unattackable Buddha. “I’m trying to help you out here. You want to make things right with her, this is the swamp you have to wade through, okay? Claire is—she’s not a happy person. I don’t think she’d ever have been happy, no matter what you did. It’s like bad astrology or something. She’s just a fundamentally angry human. You weren’t a bad mother.” But why did it hurt so much, if it wasn’t true? “Listen, I need to ask you to get out of here before my wife gets home. She’s not a fan of the Claire drama.” “Does she know Claire?” Fiona said. Kurt opened his mouth but then stopped. He’d caught her trick. She said, “Can you at least pass a message on?” He shook his head slowly. She had fully expected him to say yes. “I’m barely in her good graces. I bring this to her, and maybe she takes it out on me. If she finds out I talked to you, let you in . . .” Jake said, “What about an email address?” Fiona didn’t mind him talking; it was time to team up. Kurt went to the door, opened it for them, though Fiona didn’t move. “Here’s what I can give you: Everyone’s okay, everyone’s safe. You want to leave me your number?

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I admit to putting it there: I pulled the river through you like string through a bead into the mouth-hole out the asshole my life threaded through yours *1 YOU LUCKED OUT. A TIGER TAIL IS SO MUCH COOLER THAN BEING A FISH. I KNOW YOU’RE AFRAID OF IT, BUT I’D MUCH RATHER BE FEARED THAN FEASTED ON. —BEN *2 小鬼 , I WOULD STAY AWAY FROM WATER IF I WERE YOU. —BEN GRANDMOTHER Letter II: In which the clouds are eaten Dear second daughter, When you were born you laughed instead of crying. It impressed me.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  GRANDMOTHER Letter V: In which I name you Dear final daughter, You married a man the opposite of your father but I need to say all men are synonyms none the word you’re looking for when your husband went to the mainland you asked if you should have followed him I followed your father to this country & now I wear a diaper once I brought a piglet into my wedding bed tucked it between my legs & let your Ba fuck that instead I wanted to be the only one inside my body the piglet gave birth later to a litter of grenades each with a girl face I pulled their pins threw them into the river one by one rending the water into rain I see the zhongyi once a month & I pay him in memories my only currency once when you were little I said you could love your father or your mother but you had to pick one the one you love is your leash the other is a house you burn down you never told me what you chose but I know myself to fend off ash I tied the river in my hair like a ribbon I told you a lie there is no choice you have no father but me *1 the one you call Ba is not yours I conceived you with the river *2 I mothered & fathered you both the Ba you love better than me never sired you I milked you from the mountain Papakwaka I never named you answered to a whistle the same sound summoning dogs every neighborhood bitch born stray when you were born I was dry nursed you on a bitch’s teat you slept knotting your arms so tight they never learned how to be straight. I stood you against a wall for posture but you can’t train a spine to disobey itself I am sending all these letters separately but know I wrote this one first. To my last my not-son my knot daughter. You born with your legs tied together trussed like a pig in the tissue of me birds circled your cry your namelessness: there are certain gods nameless true I didn’t name you isn’t that a form of divinity?

• From The Art of Memoir

  scent of what I was born to tell. Even trying to use pseudonyms messed with my head something awful. Some inner corrector kept saying, But that’s not John, it’s Bob. So in rough drafts, I had to work with real names, which got changed in a global search-and- replace only at the end. One reason I send manuscripts out to friends and family in advance is: I often barely believe myself, for I grew up suspicious of my own perceptions. Plus my kinfolk had changed their stories so many times, I was hoping their signing off on pages would finally end my own lifetime’s speculation. Long ago, when I was younger and broker and looked easier to boss around, a publishing executive tried to nudge me into inventing a scene in my first book when I say good-bye to my mother. “The reader has to know how that went down at that moment. . . .” But I remembered zip about the scene and wound up guessing about it instead: Mother must have squawked about our leaving. She would have yelled or wept or folded up drunk and sulking. I recall no such scene. . . . The French doors on that scene never swung open. . . . Mother herself was clipped from my memory. She did promise vaguely to come for us soon, but I can’t exactly hear her saying that. And here’s the kicker: I’d now guess that she felt liberated once we left—such is the nature of time reversing an opinion. When I was younger and Mother alive, we both found it easier to pretend she’d fought for us. But I never actually saw Mother fighting for our company—she always much preferred the wild freedom of solitude. Were I starting the book over, I’d guess she didn’t mind our absence overmuch. Though The Liars’ Club rang true to me when I wrote it, from this juncture it seems to have sprung from a state of loving delusion about my family. In those days, I still enjoyed a child’s desperate tendency to put sparkles on my whole tribe. Were I writing that story today, I’d be less generous to them while perhaps shining more empathy on my younger self. Whether age has granted me more wholesome care for the girl I was, or whether life’s ravages have

• From Bestiary (2020)

  She stood up and tugged her own ear, checking to see if we were dream-speaking. Steaming her hands over the bowl of water, she said, You’re not listening. The steam opened her fists like flowers. The story about the women, she said, was a story about choice. How we had one. How we chose to be dead in our own bodies than alive without our language. I chose you, my mother said, but it was like a channel had changed too quickly, one image unable to fade while the other overlapped it, contaminating all the colors, one story told as two. I was still thinking of the women who harnessed gravity with their hair, braids knotted to branches. The braids must still be there, still growing after the bodies were cut down. Braids vining down to the ground, growing so long they became some species of snake that strangles its prey. When I asked what she meant by choosing, my mother said, This family. I started it to save me. I asked her why she couldn’t go back for Agong. Just for him, I said. No one else. She still called daily to ask if Agong was wearing pants, even when Ama didn’t pick up. I knew she wanted to dress him herself, to fill her clothes with his body. I got out, my mother said, as if a family were a fire. I chose your father over my father. My father, who was not here. My father, who once bought me a popsicle at a zoo while I watched a monkey try to eat a broken bottle someone had hurtled into the enclosure. I wanted to say she’d made the wrong choice, but that would mean reversing my own body, returning to water inside her. My mother opened the window above the sink. She was trying not to look at me, but her shadow acted as her opposite, circling me on the floor. Do you know what it means to leave something? she said. The air outside was too bright to breathe, dyed by with moon. To give birth to yourself again and again? To lock yourself out of your life? I said we could knock. We could knock on Ama’s door, and ask her to give up Agong. I’d keep my hand over my tail as we walked in, ready to draw it like a hilt. Reaching up, I touched my fingers to her cheek, but she shook them off like flies. I walked around her and shut the window above the sink, relieving the window of its duty to breathe. Ma, I said, and she shook her head, said that was what she called her mother and I should never let that sound out of my mouth. Let’s go now, I said, whispering as if Ama could hear us from another city. Let’s bring him home and you’ll be happy again.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I felt around the bottom again and withdrew a bracelet with bone beads, then a plastic spoon, then a penny. I raked the soil with my fingers until I was slit by something: a page. Tugging it loose from the soil, I slid it out and held it with the tips of my fingers. On both sides it was blank, white as the soil. For you to write back to me, Ama said. I dropped it back into the hole. I said I would never. She smiled, half her teeth missing, places for morning to pour into her mouth. She said the letters were meant for anyone listening, and I was the one who had been translating. I was the one who wanted to witness. I thought of everything I’d fed to the holes: Dayi’s goose, Ben’s birdcage, my tail. While Ama watched me, I thought of kidnapping the rest of her teeth, holding them hostage in my mouth. She’d have to beg me to return them to her, give her back the ability to speak. You’ll write back. I know you will. I said no, I didn’t have the history to forgive her, and Ama said, I never wanted you to forgive me. Weren’t you reading? Behind her, the garden hose spewed into the soil. She kneeled in the white, held out her palms. She said she must have dreamt of growing a tail just like this when she was a girl, but sometimes a wound skips a generation or two, appearing again in the body that is most ready to wield it. I said I never wanted to wield anything ever again, that I had seen Agong’s chest branded by me. You’ll write back, Ama said. Not because you’ve forgiven me, but because I will never hate you for what you’ve done. Because I’m the only one who knows what you’re capable of. She bowed her head like a knight in a fairy tale, all parody, and at the nape of her neck, there was a cowlick the same size and shape of my mother’s. It was like seeing again a species of bird you thought went extinct: I couldn’t stop myself from cooing down at it, petting it. With the tip of my soiled thumb, I touched the spot where her hair grew circular like my mother’s, the tip of the strand chasing its own root. I stirred the cowlick with my thumb and told her this was what my mother did before I fell asleep: She traversed my hairline with her finger, renaming my widow’s peak Papakwaka, every part of me a creation story.

• From The Art of Memoir

  I don’t want the responsibility of perhaps misremembering them. 4.Blurring details of somebody’s appearance for the sake of their privacy. I’ve done this many times for minor characters—a mayor, say. But for the neighborhood rapist in Liar’s Club, I didn’t want folks in my hometown to mistakenly blame one of the local delinquents. I gave the culprit braces, which nobody in our neighborhood had, and changed a few other things. With Lit, I hoped my ex-husband would vet the manuscript pages, but when I spoke to him in advance, he claimed to prefer being blurry. 5.Moving back and forth through time when appropriate and giving info you didn’t have at the time, which breaks point of view. (If your next-door neighbor turned out to be, say, Ted Bundy, you might mention that in parentheses because you know the reader would care to know.) It’s still apparent when I do this that I speak from another time. 6.Telescoping time: “Seventeen years later, Daddy had a stroke. . . .” Or using one episode to stand for all of seventh grade. The action points for a given period represent it wholesale. I skip dull parts. 7.Shaping a narrative. Of course, the minute you write about one thing instead of another, you’ve begun to leave stuff out, which you could argue is falsifying. What was major to you might have been a blip on somebody else’s radar. 8.Stopping to describe something in the midst of a heated scene, when I probably didn’t observe it consciously at that instant. This is perhaps the biggest lie I ever tell. I do so because I am constantly trying to re-create the carnal world as I lived it, so I keep concocting an experience for a reader. I have taken that liberty, but because I’m Catholic, I feel guilty about it. 9.Temporarily changing something to protect a friend at her request. My friend Meredith had been a habitué of asylums, but she still didn’t want me to publish a school scene of her razoring at her wrist, because it would torment her aging mother. She agreed to let a mutual friend stand in for her, so the suicidal friend is Stacy in the first edition and Meredith in later ones. 10.Recounting old fantasies. My inner life is much bigger than my outer life. And some fantasies from the past seem gaudily true. ’Course, I say they’re only fancies, not fact. In Liars’ Club I also made up two of the tall tales, which are meant to be bullshit anyway. 11.Putting in scenes I didn’t witness but only heard about—though I admit as much. From Lit: “So vivid is the story of mother’s final drunk with Harold—so painterly in its grotesque detail—that I take the liberty of recounting it as if I were there, for a good story told often enough puts you in rooms never occupied.” 12.Vis-à-vis interpretation: be generous and fair when you can; when you can’t, admit your disaffinity. My general idea is to keep the focus on myself and my own struggles, not speculate on other people’s motives, and not concoct events and characters out of whole cloth.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Where my tail had raked him, a stripe of skin reared up on his chest, a dark jelly of blood beneath it. He arched his back, pressing the burn on his chest to the dark. My mother kneeled in front of me, caging her body over his, blocking him from me. My tail had mistranslated everything I’d told it. I’d wanted Ama’s wrists, wanted to break all the bones inside them. I tried to tell this to my mother, but she was bowed over Agong. She kneeled over him and spat on his chest, slicking the burn, trying to put out the pain. My tail was curdled stiff, lagging behind me while I tried to move closer, apologize. You hurt him, my mother said, speaking to the burn on his chest, ruby with her spit. I crawled forward to them, towing my tail behind me in the dark. It felt heavier, a moon tethered to the end of it. — Ama took my tail in her hands, tugged on it like a leash. I tried to keep crawling, to reach my mother huddling with her back to me, but Ama jerked me back. She could steer me with it, drag me out to the yard and bury me anywhere. When I told her to let go, she yanked back again, ripping out wisps of my fur. She sneezed, batting at the strands like dust. Pulling once on my tail, she brought me to my feet. See, Ama said. We’re the same beast. Ama stroked my tail-tip with her thumb. Bent her head and sniffed it. She asked if I knew the story of Hu Gu Po, a story about the cost of having a body . The cost was butchery. She said there were no tigers on her island and there had never been. The story had been born somewhere else, brought over by men and stuffed into the bellies of women who didn’t want it. The women gave birth anyway, to daughters that did not resemble them. — When I gave birth to my first daughter, Ama said, I saw her face and it was a soldier’s. No one in her tribe had ever seen a tiger, and when Ama first heard the story, she imagined that it walked upright. She imagined its skin was made of two textures: The orange stripes were fire and the black stripes were river, canceling out into smoke. My tail twitched out of her hands, singed by the heat of her palms. I was the beast she’d imagined: tail stubbly as a beard, my shadow big as a soldier’s. You have the blood of soldiers and slaughterers. You think you’re a different story from me? she said. I stood hunched, my tail so heavy I forgot how I’d ever been able to stand against gravity.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  After that night by the river, Dayi checked her belly hourly, tapping it like a melon, not sure what she was listening for. The rest of that summer, Terracotta spent more hours with his father in the churchyard, building birdhouses everyone thought were bird traps. When the priests realized the locals had been stealing eggs and hatchlings from the nests and eating them, they dismantled each house. Terracotta grew two feet in one summer. In another year, he would grow a beard. Cheek-rash began to spread among the local girls, until almost every one of Dayi’s schoolmates wore the same pattern of redness on their faces, necks, inner thighs. When Dayi was midwife to one of Terracotta’s bastards, she waited for the mother to fall asleep before bringing the child to her breast, pretending it was hers. The baby responded to every sound but its name, turning its head to birdcall, the telephone, rain. I was born with a red birthmark draped over my belly like lacework. Dayi called this karma, said my skin was her punishment for that day by the river. Dayi promised she’d pay to have it removed when I turned fifteen, no matter how expensive it would be. She said it was a price she’d been waiting to pay. _ Dayi was fathered by a ghost. None of us had ever met Ama’s first husband. We knew his punishment but not his crime: He was in prison for five years before he strangled himself with a shoelace, knotting it like a bow tie beneath the apple-core of his throat. My brother said the crime must have been something violent, like setting someone on fire or smuggling bombs up his sleeves. But my mother said he was just another accused Communist, that the police threw his body into a river with the shoelace still noosed around his neck, which is why no one in this family was allowed to wear anything with laces. You’ll summon his spirit through your shoes, my mother said. She was a self-appointed shoe surgeon, snipping through our sneaker laces with kitchen shears, taping them where they’d once been tied. Just in case he came to me in ghost form, I wore a pair of scissors on a string around my neck. I wanted to be the one to cut his throat free of its shoelace, the knot he pulled tight while gagging against it, his tongue exiting his mouth as steam.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  But I’d been bought off cheap: a rabbit-fur coat and the stolen fork of a baby devil had shoved Daddy clear from my mind. By the time Mother started keeping company with a cowboy from the stable, a fellow named Ray who had the small and peglike teeth of a rabbit, I’d stopped riding Big Enough. Colorado and the horses took Daddy Away. I vowed to prove myself worthy of his return through deprivation, thereby luring him back. So I spent my days reading and trying to write poetry, which I did in the cool comfort of the Christian Science Reading Room. Here’s a bona fide excerpt: Grandma used to wear a scarf Upon her silvery head. I thought that she would wear it Till she rolled over dead One afternoon I’d nodded off over my volume of e. e. cummings and been poked awake with a pointy finger-bone by the readingroom matron, who suggested that I wobble myself home to nap. And it was there I found Mother, shirtless, lying flat on the floor before the fireplace with old Ray astraddle her like she was a pony he was fixing to break. He was kneading her shoulder muscles. His cowboy hat sat perched on the sofa back, and his brown hair looked specially greasy and mashed down. In fact, his hat had left a dent all the way around his skull as if it had a flip top. I stared at him, my copy of cummings clutched to my chest. Of course, Ray leapt upright. He was grossly bowlegged. (In Leechfield parlance, he couldn’t trap a hog in a ditch.) Meanwhile, Mother patted her hand around till she laid hold to her bra, which she demurely slipped under her torso and hooked in back with one sure hand, still facedown the whole time. Ray said, Well, hello there, Slow Poke. His voice was loud and rusty. And I corrected him right off: “Pokey,” I said without blinking. “My daddy calls me Pokey, not Slow Poke. Slo-Poke is a brown sucker you buy that breaks your teeth.” Mother pulled her shirt over her head and said she was glad I’d come home for lunch for a change. That lie wounded me worse than the shirtless fact of my mother stretched half-naked under a cowboy. She wasn’t one bit glad to see me. Ray quit his stable-hand’s job the next week, disappearing for parts unknown. His leaving was coincident with Mother’s solo trip to Mexico. “Acapulco, here I come,” she’d said, promising to buy us both sombreros. But when Mother returned from that trip to pick us up (we’d been staying with the stable master’s family for pay) the man who stood from the car was distinctly not Ray. He was too tall and lanky and black-haired. I was walking two lathered horses around the corral at the time, and the sight of that male figure by the car made something quicken in me.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I reeled the tail up from between my legs and held it between our bellies, both of us grinding hard against it. It hurt, but it was a hurt that harmonized with my hunger, with the hum of my backmost teeth. I could feel her through my tail, the fur frizzing with our friction, and I knew I couldn’t be undaughtered from it. Behind us, on the sofa, Agong was breathing loud as a beehive, though we still didn’t know how to smoke the sickness out of him. Maybe he would never remember our names, never fish our faces out of whatever water he’d dropped us into, but it was safer that way, safer that I couldn’t save him: He was preserved in the brine of his boyhood, before bullets, before he knew what he was capable of killing. When his hands have forgotten how to hold things, to make a fist, to clean a gun or wipe his own ass, we draw faces on all his fingers and say: These are your family, the ones killed in the war, your mother on your thumb and your father on your forefinger, and now they are with you every time you lift your hand, now they are walking on wind, now they can never be taken from you. _ My mother said that when Agong was a boy—I imagined it was so long ago that knees didn’t have the technology to bend—Agong helped the men drill wells into the wetlands and drag the saltwater out in buckets. Dogs and oxen ran into the bog and buckled, their bones broken into song. The deer sank so deep only their antlers jutted out of the ground like velvet saplings. Agong scoured our walls for salt, shucking away the plaster with his nails. When he found my mother’s salt bowl in a cabinet next to the sink, he pickled his palms in it. One night when he was asleep on the sofa, I spooned salt onto his face, his neck, his belly button. He shrilled with pain when I sprinkled his bed sores, each one as big and pink as a slice of baloney. In the morning, when my mother saw what I’d done, she propped him up in the yard and rinsed him off with the hose. I said salt would preserve him like jerky, drying his flesh to threads. But my mother said if I ever did that again she’d pickle my feet and feed them back to me. When he was my size, Agong sanded salt into blocks and shipped them down the river.

• From The Art of Memoir

  In Night, concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel perhaps suffers as much from his own guilt about how he treated his dying father as he does from the depredations the Nazis inflict. While the sick old man in his death throes calls the author’s name, the young man stays away, begrudging his father those agonized cries, which eventually draw the blows of the SS: “I shall never forgive myself. His last word had been my name. A summons. I had not responded.” Yes, the camp and its tortures overwhelm Wiesel, but this internal conflict deepens the story. So it’s odd to me that in later editions of the book, Wiesel cut the passage, claiming it was “Too personal, too private, perhaps . . .” The need to rout out my own inner demons is why I always start off fumbling through my own recollections. Only later, after several drafts do I engage in “research” by visiting old haunts and passing my manuscript around. The memories I’ve gnawed on and rehearsed are the ones most key to what’s eating me up, and only those can help me to find a book’s shape. Reading George Orwell’s masterful essay “Shooting an Elephant”—for my purposes a mini memoir—you see two halves of a man colliding. He doesn’t try to justify his own actions in putting down a pricey animal in Burma as a British police officer during the Raj. He’s not yet the political lefty who’ll fight in the Spanish Civil War and pen 1984, but serving overseas, he’s started to sour on imperialism, and to empathize for the people he’s paid to repress. On the other hand, the populace baits and torments him—they’re an obvious external enemy: “In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life I have been important enough for this to happen to me.” But the inner struggle that shapes the piece is how that hatred begins to warp his insides. Orwell’s own malice eats him up, so that he writes of the mocking young monks who languish on the streets and tea bars to tease him, “[I] thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts.” If you haven’t read the piece, it follows a simple thread. An elephant in rut goes mad and kills a coolie. But by the time the crowd has jeered and cajoled Orwell into rushing to the scene, the

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I hated myself for saying it - but thought, too, How Kitty will laugh at this, when I tell her!I had forgotten what early hours they all kept. The cousins left at ten; at half-past everybody else started yawning. Davy saw Rhoda home, and Alice bade the rest of us good-night. Father rose and stretched, then came to me and put his arm about my neck. ‘It’s been a treat for us, Nance, to have you home again - and you grown into such a beauty!’Then Mother smiled at me - the first real smile that I had seen upon her face that day; and I knew then how really glad I was to be at home, amongst them all.But the gladness didn’t last long. In a few minutes more I said my own good-nights, and found myself alone, at last, with Alice, in our - her - room. She was in bed, but the lamp was still high, and her eyes were open. I did not undress, but stood with my back to the door, quite still, until she looked at me.‘I’m sorry about the hat,’ she said.‘It doesn’t matter.’ I stepped to the chair by the fireplace, and began to unbutton my boots.‘You shouldn’t have spent so much,’ she went on.I pulled a face: ‘I wish I hadn’t.’ I stepped out of the shoes, kicked them to one side, and started on the hooks of my dress. She had closed her eyes, and seemed disinclined to say anything else. I slowed my hand, and looked at her.‘Your letter,’ I said, ‘was horrible.’‘I don’t want to talk about any of that,’ she answered quickly, turning away. ‘I told you what I think. I haven’t changed.’‘Neither have I.’ I tugged harder at the hooks and stepped free of the dress, then slung it over the back of the chair. I felt peevish and not at all tired. I went to one of my bags and got out a cigarette, and when I struck the match to light it Alice raised her head. I shrugged: ‘Another nasty little habit Kitty taught me.’ I sounded just like some hard-faced bitch of a ballet-girl.I took off the rest of my clothes, then pulled my night-gown over my head - then remembered my hair. I could not sleep with the plait still fastened to me. I glanced towards Alice again - she had paled at my words, but still watched - then pulled at the hairpins until the chignon came loose. From the corner of my eye I saw her mouth fall open.

• From The Art of Memoir

  ground down my heart so I’m more self-centered, I can’t say. Am I healthily less codependent or a bigger bitch? You could argue either way. Although I’d fix a wrong date or point of fact for the book to correct it as written record, I couldn’t alter any major take on the past without redoing the whole tome. The self who penned that book formed the filter for those events. I didn’t fabricate stuff, but today, other scenes I’d add might tell a less forgiving story. Which brings me to the wellsprings where a writer’s biggest “lies” bubble up—interpretation. I still try to err on the side of generosity toward any character. Like I mention Mother throwing my birthday lasagna at my daddy in one of the zillion fights that felt like my fault, but I also mention her cleaning it up after he was gone and lighting candles on a German chocolate cake—a scene that, if left out, would’ve skewed her into seeming worse than she in fact was. Anne Fadiman writes about a nineteenth-century sailor who comes home to a starving family at Christmas with a bushel of oranges. He locks himself in a room and devours them solo while his kids scratch at the door. He’s an asshole, right? Until you learn he had scurvy. Metaphorically speaking, I always make room for any evidence of scurvy in my characters, any mitigating ailments. In my last memoir, I couldn’t report a malicious quip from my ex-husband without mentioning that he never spoke to me that way. Maybe that’s why it stayed carved in my psyche: it was out of character. A writer whose point of view was closer inside the past might only concentrate on feeling wounded by the insult without tacking on that fact, because it could jar the reader from the instant. Mostly, I try to keep the focus on myself and my own peccadilloes. For the record, here are the liberties I’ve used, which all seem fairly common now: 1.Re-creating dialogue. I’ve often said, “The conversation went something like this,” but most readers presume as much. Also, by not using quotation marks in later books, I seek to keep the reader more “inside” my experience—the subjective nature eschews the standards of history, I think. 2.Changing names to protect the innocent. Most of my friends had a hoot choosing their pseudonyms. 3.Altering the name of the town. Most minor characters like the sheriff and school principal I don’t bother to track down. They might be dead, but if they are alive,