artifacts

I like what the columnist in the link had to say about Freygate.

Been working tonight on the preface to the Strega's Story, which (for now) begins with the line, "In 1988, when I was a grown woman, every artifact of my childhood vanished without a trace." I'll probably change that line, but that's the gist of the preface.

I go on to tell the story of how this happened, and how completely, so much so that my two sisters each had one childhood picture of themselves, and I had none (they only had these because they had taken them upon moving out. I had never thought to take anything, having other things on my mind in my early twenties than the preservation of family history). It's refreshing to take a minute in this book and write in the voice of myself as a full adult who sees her life from a larger perspective. This is probably the most emotional part of the book for me, harder than describing my grandfather's suicide (the writing of which put me back into therapy).

Still, it's not the literal, fixed-in-mortar truth--it turns out there were some far-flung relatives who had a few photographs; these were sent to us in the 1990s, and my father found a few more when he moved. But most of it was lost in the wake of my mother's drinking and the utter collapse of her life, like a house of cards. The gold snake necklace that belonged to Mamma Nonna is in my sister's possession, but she had been given it as a graduation present. My cousin Denise, when I entered graduate school, brought me something priceless--a little shamrock pin that had been my grandmother's (almost a four-leaf clover, but not quite). I have one more thing that is priceless, that I don't even know how my sister got ahold of--a gold watch belonging to my grandmother, one that looks like a pocketwatch but attaches to a lapel. i have it in front of me right now; the hands of this watch are so delicate that it looks like they were breathed into existence. So the vanishment I write about could be disproved as a fiction--but I didn't know in 1988 that I would find even the small handful of things I do have (and of course, I intend to write in the preface about the things that I was unbelievably lucky to find again).

I think ultimately that the process of piecing together my grandmother's life (and the lives of all the other women in the family) has been like gluing back together a china vase from a thousand fragments. If I write about other things in my life beyond childhood, I have the gift of 20+ years of personal journals to look at and keep my memory refreshed (what a trip to read these)! But there are no such diaries from my childhood. I was glad when one of my relatives wrote me and confirmed that Mamma Nonna was a strong and wonderful matriarch, that her husband and my grandfather were "pompous asses," and that my Nonni was exactly as I remember her, too. Any of the oddities of my book have been an attempt to draw close to these women, even to the point of taking on their voices to speak what I can only guess is some version of a truth about their lives (these long narratives do contain the stories I was told about them). I think, too, that I have been trying to piece together my Nonni's life because she, of all these women, is the one I miss the most and whose "face" I try to see again and again in these pages.

Obviously, the media scandal du jour and discussions about memoir make me consider the weird twists and turns of my own book. Which shelf it ultimately sits on in a bookstore is irrelevant to me (except, of course, if an agent and publisher and I all ultimately come to the conclusion that I had to exercise too much creativity in the memoir's writing--I'm thinking specifically of the parts where the women narrate their stories--and everyone feels it would better serve as autobiographical fiction)--but I do know that I tried to draw closer to the truth when I wrote this book, and I am glad of that, because I found deeper truths and connections underlying these women's lives that intersect with my own. Still, these truths are my own suppositions, ultimately--I would have given a lot to know what their own perspectives on their lives were. During the writing of this bit tonight, I stopped and opened the back of Nonni's watch, as I have done a hundred times, seeking a clue that isn't there; I even opened the front to see if anything was hidden inside--yet there's nothing, just a hieroglyph of scratches and dents. So I just keep on building this book out of what I have. As I say at the end of the preface, "the rest is ash."