Banal and Proud of It

Today I read a review of Michael Chabon's new chronicle of fatherhood, Manhood for Amateurs. The reviewer, John Rodwan, Jr., was not particularly kind to Chabon:

"Perhaps another English poet better captures the problem with Chabon. When he writes, in a poem about how parents damage children, “don’t have any kids yourself,” Philip Larkin gives general advice, applicable to anyone. But Chabon’s essays suggest it has special relevance for writers, since having children evidently can reduce a witty and clever novelist into someone who finds the unexceptional mesmerizing and the most faded clichés vivid, someone who relentlessly ponders the everyday parental concerns that are wearyingly banal to everyone else – someone, in other words, who assumes others find his family as interesting as he does (always a fatal assumption)." (from open Letters Monthly)

These assessments did not sit well with me. In part, this is because I know I am guilty of the same thing. This blog is for you, of course, an audience who hopefully will (someday) find the banal details of your childhood interesting. But it is also for me, as I try to learn how to jump the wake on the twin water skis of motherhood and writerhood; and let me tell you, it is no easy feat.

I don't usually write nonfiction and I don't write about myself especially. In poems, the speaker and I are usually half a world and three shots of tequila away from one another. I love persona poems because they announce to the reader, in clear and patient terms, that the writer is definitely not the I. And why, why do I avoid being myself when I write? There are many reasons. First and foremost, the writing generally turns to crap as soon as I let myself (as myself) come waltzing through the door. I no longer have any sense of which details are pointed, telling, necessary and which are just there because they are there, uninvented, in my memory. If I were to render the story of today into a confessional poem entitled "Mommy Had a Crabby Sunday," would the red velvet bow on your sleeper be a revealing detail or a boring detail? I don't know. I only know that it was there.

It's also difficult to tell whether a nonfiction piece has emotional resonance because of the writing or because it happened to me and so I vividly remember just how lonely I felt when the Navy Seal turned his back to me and would not touch my bare skin after sex. I wrote a lot of confessional poems as a young adult and thought they were exceptionally moving. And they were. To me. Not so much to others.

So now I live on the other side of things. Convinced I am boring and have nothing to say, I write to inhabit the skins of prostitutes and beet farmers and apostles, people who might prove to be vivid and exceptional.

Of course, at some level, the writer is always in the character or persona. There is no total separation; sometimes, there is not nearly as much as the writer would like to believe. I like the unknown. I like not knowing the way a poem will end, how it will turn, what image will scoot to center stage. I like discovering who a character is, like watching her reach for the shell encrusted knife or the tumbler with purple wax around the rim; I like watching him doggy paddle across the pool, keeping the red curls of a clown wig just barely out of the water. I like the unexpected unfolding always before me. When I write something "true," nothing miraculous occurs.

Next semester, I will tell my students that the surprise is in the revelation, in the discovering meaning where you thought there was none or discovering less meaning where you thought there was a gold nugget of insight.

The review bothered me because I feel the faded cliches and the banality here, too; I know I am guilty. But there is something about parenthood that makes me want to utter these cliches, that makes me want to share the most banal details.

To be a parent is, in part, to lose perspective entirely. It is to let bias consume you.

Thisbe, you are the most perfect creature on the earth. I believe this with the entirety of my being. And the fact that Michael Chabon or I (not that Michael Chabon and I have anything in common except, apparently, children) cannot write about our children with needle-nosed accuracy is part of the characters we have become. The banality and cliches are part of the truth.