General

“The Unknown Woman of the Seine” is one of those images, one of those phrases, one of those characters you can go most of your life never encountering – or never noticing, at least – until you do, and once you do, you start seeing her everywhere.

Hers is the tale – or two tales really – the first about the young woman whose body washed up on the banks of the Seine some time in the late 1880s, was taken to the city morgue, publicly displayed, never claimed, but whose face bore such a lovely and beatific expression that a caste was made – and this becomes the second tale: of the plaster mask that went from being an artist’s study tool to a poet’s muse, to the subject of short stories, novels, movies, and photographic essays, before eventually winding up as the template for the first CPR dummy, Resusci Anne, thus rounding these two narratives into a singular, circular whole – of the drowning victim whose surviving image served to teach us all how to save each other from, among other things, drowning.

For me, the discovery of this diptych – of woman and mask – took place about a decade ago, maybe a year or so before I started writing the book, which I did for the same reason I write any book: because my mind keeps returning to it, and to the questions it poses. In this case (and assuming any part of the origin story is true), what life could account for the expression we encounter on that mask? Maybe more to the point, what death?

Without entering too much into process, research followed. And surmise. Certain resemblances asserted themselves, and by their lead, the beginnings of an answer started to take shape around other secondary questions having to do with the acute effects of longstanding physical and psychological trauma, the Sino-French War, the recurrence of certain specific bodhisattvas, the annals of 19th century French (and Swiss) crime, the fin-de-siecle anti-absinthe movement, and the World’s Fair of 1889, of course, whose final three days serve as the story’s squarest frame.

Inevitably, as I grew more familiar with the history, the place, and the various available characters, the book began to take on the romantic, ornate, gas-lit atmosphere of its setting. At the same time, however, and just as inevitably, I became aware that my actual storyline – that is, the investigation into the life and death of the Unknown Woman — was leading me down some very dark alleys, and that lurking in the shadows of this world were more sinister elements, specific exhibits of racism and acts of violence that were as grotesque and disturbing as anything the human imagination could conjure. Only they were true, indelibly etched into the record of the period.

I cannot say that this dissuaded me. For a writer, the knowledge that your present course is liable, at certain turns, to shock the conscience of an empathetic reader isn’t necessarily bad news. It means you may be on to something, in fact, and especially these days, when the ways we talk about our deepest communal faults and fault-lines have begun to feel so pitched and so prescribed, there’s value, I believe, to opening the mind’s eye and seeing these demons in action. And in effect. That’s what novels do.

So I proceeded, aware however that certain crucial questions were out in the open now, and would hover for the remainder of my effort – questions not just about how I should address the more upsetting features of this landscape, but about whether I should. And why.

Now in addition to being a writer, I am also a teacher, which means that I currently find myself in a moment of upheaval, wrought by the confluence of a technological revolution and a socio-political reckoning that calls upon us – happily and necessarily – to revisit the most basic questions about what we think we’re doing, which in my case means teaching literature. In the brave new world of boundless bandwidth and vanishing attention spans, what does it even mean to be a reader, or ‘culturally literate’? Is this an idea we want to preserve? Is reading novels, say, a behavior we want to continue encouraging? And if the answer is yes, then on what basis do I choose to model that behavior on this book here as opposed to that one there?

I’d like to think that all English teachers are wrestling with such questions, and I expect that our answers will vary, depending upon the paths that led us to the classroom, and the paths that led our students there as well. Obviously. But for me, and for now, my own answer to that last question in particular – what makes me most excited to share a text with my students, and to read it with them – is this, and if this sheds light on my creative m.o. or why I feel not just emboldened but obliged to take the hazardous trail when it presents itself…fine.

First, I should admit that I’ve never considered it to be the purpose of a novel – or a song, a painting, or any work of art for that matter – to offer remedies, solutions, or instructions. I’m aware of the counterarguments, but it’s my experience that ideology flattens art, and I’m not interested in agendas. I can get those easily enough online. When I smell one in something someone has created, my tendency is to think it kinda stinks.

What doesn’t stink – what stays fresh, that is, and what I, therefore, trust in most — is the Particular. The Singular. The One-and-Only-ness of whatever the writer has set their sights on. And that quality can apply to any aspect of the work – to the situation, a feeling, or to a character, of course – that’s always the best. The effect is the same no matter where you find it, though, and harkens to the old idea that the more precise the detail – or focus of our attention — the more universal the resonance will be. So it doesn’t matter that I’m reading about a Chinese farmer in a rice field 2500 years ago. If the language captures that moment, the moment will capture me, and in so doing, expose all those boundaries that supposedly divide that farmer and me for what they are: the real fiction.

But I’ll go a step further and admit that my favorite of these moments, the ones that really make me sit up in my chair, or maybe even put the book down and take a quick walk of gratitude – are those in which an author manages not only to distill the essence of the thing, but the antidote as well.

What do I mean?

I mean that passage where, even as the protagonist appears to be having their grand epiphany – is actually pronouncing the truth inside their head (and an admirable truth at that!) – the author manages to tilt it just a fraction, just enough to let us see that this too is vanity, of course, it is (e.g., Tolstoy, Woolf). Equally, as stirring is the lunatic’s street corner rant, which for all its frustrating loops and arbitrary digressions still glimmers with moments of divine light. This makes me very happy (e.g., Nizami, Nijinsky, Morrison, Kanye). That glance in the mirror reveals the villainy of the hero or the heroism of the villain. Anything, really, that challenges or confounds the reader’s reflex to make an easy sense of what just happened or to relax into obvious assumption about who’s reliable and who isn’t, or what the moral of this story surely must be (e.g., Shakespeare). I like a good kōan. I like the parable that makes no sense (e.g., Buddha, Jesus). I like the composer who, having written the most beautiful melody he can think of, can’t resist smearing it just a little with his thumb (e.g., Prokofiev, Waits). Or that author who for some reason saves her clearest, tenderest prose for the most gruesome image in the book (e.g., Allende).

These are my heroes, my mentors and masters, who teach me not to be so quick, or ever to think I know. All meaning is a double-edged sword. Ego cloaks itself in noble deeds every day. The lotus grows from garbage heaps. And literature is never more vital – or more consoling, it seems to me – than when it reminds us of this, the gorgeous moral ambiguity of human being.

Do I say all this to suggest that The Unknown Woman of the Seine actually achieves such an effect? Or to justify the paths I finally chose in trying to solve the mystery of that young woman’s face? Hardly. Not my place. Not my interest really. But I will happily admit that this is why I read; this is why I teach; and that by implication, sure, this is why I write.

 

Crying in the Park, Climbing in the Window: Two images helped me imagine the story of a woman scientist

 

When I was a young woman trying to figure out how to be a mother and a writer, I read an interview with cosmologist Vera Rubin. In 1951, after completing a master’s degree in astronomy, Rubin moved to a new city because of her husband’s job, giving up her studies to care for her newborn son. It was a hard time. She loved her baby, but she was lonely. She missed science.

Rubin’s lifeline was the Astrophysical Journal. When it came in the mail, she would take it to the park, pushing her son in his baby carriage, then sit on a bench and read it, weeping.

Eventually, Rubin figured out how to get herself into a PhD program. Twenty years after that, she discovered that the universe largely consists of dark matter, an insight that transformed our understanding of the cosmos. Ultimately, Rubin had a successful and celebrated career. But the image of the young mother with the baby carriage reading an astrophysics journal through her tears remains burned into my mind.

*          *          *

When I was a kid, I wasn’t interested in science. My father, a molecular biologist, would sometimes take me to his lab on Saturdays. Mostly I played with the paper clips in his desk. Other times he would take me into our Maryland woods and show me butterflies, wildflowers, and the dam a pair of beavers built across our stream one year. I would lag behind, impatient to be back inside: to trade the palpable world for the imaginary ones inside books.

Nonetheless, scientists interested me. Or maybe it was the idea of scientists: how they burrowed underneath the skin of the world to find out how it worked. Their seriousness of purpose stirred me. I read the books my father had read as a boy that had helped inspire his interest in science—Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith and Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters—and came away with a romantic notion of a Life Dedicated to Truth. But in high school science classes, as in the woods, my mind often drifted.

In college, I met a boy who loved stars. We got married when he was in astronomy graduate school, and suddenly there I was, surrounded by scientists again! I had never wondered why so few of my father’s colleagues were women, but now I was struck by the fact that my husband’s classmates and professors were almost all men. What was up with that?

Of course, women have long faced obstacles in many professions, but there is something particularly galling about antagonism to women in a calling that’s supposed to be about objectivity and the pursuit of truth.

It’s also interesting. It occurred to me that the travails of a woman scientist might be good fodder for a novel. I started reading, trying to see what I could learn.

There are lots of compelling (infuriating!) stories about women scientists who struggled because of men. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s discovery of what stars are made of was initially disbelieved, and the man who discouraged her from publishing her result was later widely credited for the breakthrough. Rosalind Franklin’s x-ray photograph of DNA was used without her knowledge by the men who later won the Nobel Prize for solving the molecule’s structure. These women, and others like them, overcame many obstacles to bring us truth from the far reaches of the galaxy and from inside our infinitesimal cells. How did they do it? What sustained them?

One morning, reading the New York Times, I encountered the obituary of a geneticist I had never heard of, Barbara McClintock (1902-1992). One paragraph in particular caught my attention:

Modern genetics has known no figure quite like Dr. McClintock, who worked alone and chose not to publish some of her revolutionary observations for years, explaining later that she thought no one would accept the findings. She never gave lectures, as most scientists do to build their careers. Instead, until her last days, she worked in her laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor twelve hours a day, six days a week. Until 1986, she did not have a telephone, requesting that anyone who wanted to talk to her write a letter instead.

I clipped the obit and put it in a file. I didn’t think I knew enough yet to write that story—not enough about novels or science or life. That would take a couple of decades.

*          *          *

In 2014, I finally felt ready. To prepare to write the novel, I did a lot of research about McClintock. I read biographies, had conversations with scientists (including my dad), and visited archives. One moment from her life particularly stood out to me: as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, McClintock once climbed into her office through the window because she’d forgotten her key. Somebody saw her do it, and she got in trouble, apparently because it was considered unladylike.

I could see the scene so vividly: a slight, strong woman clambering up a stone wall on (perhaps) an early Sunday morning. Tackling the problem at hand in an effective, unconventional way! That scene was one of the first I wrote. During revision, though, I realized I had to cut the whole Missouri section. That was okay (you always have to cut), but I hated losing that scene.

A few drafts later, I decided to begin the book with the main character wandering the streets of Ithaca, New York, late at night after an ill-conceived and alcohol-fueled kiss with her housemate, another girl. Where would she go at such an hour? I followed her across campus as she tried various locked doors, lugging her heavy suitcase and her shame.

When she got to the biology building, its door was locked too. She looked up to the classroom where her bio lab met, and I thought: What if the window were slightly open? What if she decided to climb up? Transformed, the anecdote from Missouri became just the tool I needed. (The metaphoric overtones—that a woman may need to find an unconventional way into a male-dominated field—did not occur to me until later.)

In the course of writing a novel, it’s often some indelible picture stuck in your head that gets you going, or that helps you through a dark wood when you’re stuck. The woman climbing in through the window helped me solve a problem and gave me an opening chapter. But it was the image of the young mother reading the physics journal and weeping that started me on the journey. I could not have written In the Field without both of them.

In February of this year, a doctor I’d gone to see about a painful, swollen knee told me some unpleasant news:  the problem was arthritis and would be with me for good. She said I could begin work to ease the pain and to keep possession of my biological knees, in a number of ways, but the most important one—she was not unkind, saying this—was that I needed to lose weight, and keep it off.. Like a lot of people, I’d been eating too much while isolated during the COVID epidemic, and I hadn’t been a small person to start with. I nodded, looked in the proverbial mirror, and got started on a course of dieting and physical therapy.

Now, in July 2021, I’m down thirty-five pounds and am on track to lose another twenty by the time I turn 50 in November. My knee feels better.

Nevertheless, I am cautious about optimism. About assuming I’ve fixed what ails me. I’ve been here before, and I know myself a little too well.

In 1999 I was twenty-seven years old. In October of that year, I lost my first wife, Joellen, to bone cancer. When she died I was very heavy—280 pounds or thereabouts. (I’m 6’4”, and had grown up skinny; in my twenties, however, after my metabolism slowed to a crawl, I never learned to change my eating habits, and when Joellen grew sicker and sicker, I was in no state of mind to stop eating for comfort.)  A little over a year after Joellen died—a year I spent monomaniacally working out and dieting—I had lost nearly 80 pounds.

A success story, right? Not really. By 2006 I’d gained a lot of it back. Disgusted with myself, I joined a gym and lost 45 pounds. I slowly gained it back. In 2012-13, I learned how to count calories with an app on my phone, and I put 1400 miles on a road bike, and I lost 40 pounds. And then I slowly gained it back.

And so on, and so on.

I calculate that in the last two decades, I’ve lost around 250 pounds of aggregate weight. I weigh less than that at the time of this writing—around 239 or so. I sometimes marvel that I have gained and lost an entire other large human being’s worth of weight. A whole other me, consumed and then gone.

When I lost 80 pounds, that terrible year after my first wife’s passing, I did it out of desperation and fear. My wife had met and fallen in love with me when I was smaller, and I figured I’d need to be small to meet and ever be loved by someone else. In 2001, when I weighed 205 pounds, I started dating again, and I convinced myself I’d been right: I needed a “normal” body in order not to be lonely. I was exorbitantly proud of myself for having done this. I bought into the notion that losing weight was a heroic thing to have done—an act of steely will, and not a reaction to grief. A fundamental change of self subsumed within the physical transformation.

And if I took that to be true, then, when I gained the weight back, well—wasn’t that a sign of weakness? Of failure? (Never mind that in that same span of twenty years I married again; I began and maintained a writing career; I became a professor and earned tenure and founded an MFA program and saw many students of mine succeed. I was loved and had friends. Yet all that while, I was judging myself, alternately growing and shrinking, stuffing myself and starving in what seemed like a never-ending cycle.)

In 2017-18, finally, I began thinking differently about this cycle, and these emotions. That was, not uncoincidentally when I began writing the novella “Big Guy,” which anchors my story collection You Would Have Told Me Not To. I am not someone who believes that writing fiction is automatically therapeutic. I am someone who writes in order to think about complicated ideas, to see how imagined people might succeed or fail at the trials which have so bedeviled me and others. Maybe that I was thinking differently brought “Big Guy” into being, or maybe that I started writing it caused me to think differently. Both are likely true.

The novella isn’t about me—I write fiction, and “Big Guy,” and all the other stories in You Would Have Told Me Not To, are about made-up people. But Doug, the protagonist of “Big Guy,” could fairly be described as an alternate me, someone I could have been. The version of me who chose to become a high school English teacher, maybe, instead of going to graduate school (twice!) to study creative writing. (Or maybe he’s the aggregate me—the other person’s worth of weight I’ve gained and lost.) This man, Doug, decides, in the wake of a sudden and painful divorce, that he needs to lose 100 pounds in order to be happy, to be loved. He sets about doing it. He thinks that if his body is healthy, all the rest of him will be too.

(A spoiler that really isn’t: he’s mistaken.)

 

I didn’t know I was writing a story collection until I was halfway through “Big Guy.” I realized, writing it, that the novella was going to be about some of the same ideas that concern several short stories I’d already written, most of them between 2015-2019. That means almost all of this book was written after the election of Donald Trump; and written during the #metoo movement, which showed me that I (and every other man trying to pay attention) knew a lot less about what the women in my life have suffered than I’d ever supposed. The stories I was writing, I saw, were largely about the type of men who cause that suffering, and the fallout from their choices. And maybe I could shape them all together into a book.

Not all of these ideas were new. I’m the son of a violent alcoholic, himself the son of a violent alcoholic. I grew up knowing that my dad’s ideas about masculinity weren’t the ones I wanted to uphold. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to be a different sort of man, and in many ways, I have succeeded, and my earlier fiction reflects that thinking.

But the last few years have caused me to rethink everything. I’m nearly fifty, as I’ve said. Old enough to have succeeded, but also to have failed, a lot…and I’ve been writing about failure, too. About trying to change, and not changing. About how—for instance—the way I think about my body, and other’s bodies, has everything to do with the ways I’ve been getting my thinking about masculinity wrong. That these ways of thinking don’t exist in a vacuum. That our interior struggles, even if they seem minor, can often cause major exterior harm.

The finished collection ended up full of stories about couples, men,and women trying to navigate that harm. Several of them are still trying to reckon with past mistakes, to figure out whether they have changed, or ever can. A violent day laborer, willingly staying out of the eyes of society, meets a man who might be his illegitimate son. A privileged college boy spends a summer cheating on his absent girlfriend, while in thrall to a rich lothario who visits the mountain resort where he works. A woman has to reckon with her complex feelings about her adult son—and the son’s father—in the wake of the son being shot outside a bar. The last story I wrote for the book, finished around one minute before my editor Joe Olshan’s deadline, is about a woman who encounters, by chance, a man she’d hoped never to see again: her alcoholic, abusive ex-husband, now apparently sober and reformed, and engaged to be married again. He’s changed, he says—everyone says. So has she. And yet her hurt remains.

Can we change? I wrote “Big Guy,” learned a great deal, and then ate myself into the doctor’s office again. I write this post aware of the irony. But I also write it in the spirit of optimism, the same way I wrote the stories in the collection. Change, growth, reconciliation, forgiveness—these are hard to accomplish and getting harder. Nevertheless, they are what we all have to undergo.

I wrote this book believing—and believing still—that