SD: I love and admire these essays, Peggy. You move unapologetically and intelligently
through so much history that is at once cultural, generational, familial, and
personal that I’m moved to say it should be required reading in high school, in
undergraduate programs, in MFA Creative Nonfiction workshops, in community
centers and religious centers of every stripe and creed, in retirement
villages. Yes, required. Please temper my enthusiasm or agree with me
by talking a bit about the reasons you wrote these essays, how body became the
organizing principle, and the readers you wrote them for.
PS: Thanks so much for your generous comments, Steve. The first essay I wrote for the book was “The
Knife.” I had been a practicing martial
artist for many years and in my training we were learning to use a knife. It was a practice knife, wooden or rubber,
not a real knife with a sharpened blade.
The purpose of training with a knife was to learn to defend against it,
but of course, in order to learn defense, we had to learn offense. And I found it disconcerting to aim a knife
at someone and stab or slash them. I
thought I might have something to say about this. At the time I experienced this not so much as
an idea but a weighted pressure. This
pressure would yield something. The next
essay was about autopsies. My father had
had one, at my authorization, and I had long been uneasy about it. What did
it mean to cut the body open? So then I
had knives and autopsies and it didn’t take much to see a connection between
the two: the vulnerability of the body. The body under duress. It was at that point I understood that I was
writing a book about the body, that the essays would largely fall under that
rubric.
SD: In the back of the book, the acknowledgments, you thank
Rosellen Brown and Nora Dvosin for helping you with the ordering of the
essays. Would you talk about that
process from your initial ideas about ordering through their efforts to the
final line-up of essays? What did you
learn?
PS: Well right off I wanted to create a dialogue between my
personal experience, which for me was only a starting point, and the larger
world. The body is intimate, yes, we all
live uniquely in it, but it’s cultural and historical too. For better or worse, history has weighed in
on our bodies and we carry those determinations with us. “Family Feet” seemed like a good place to
begin that dialogue. I have flat
feet. My father had flat feet. What does that mean? Jews, it turns out, have long been thought to
have flat feet. Like many racialized
constructs, this one may have started out with a kernel of truth and then the
truth gets distorted. Jews make poor
soldiers, bad athletes. Some unknown
person identified and then taunted my mother and I as Jews on an
escalator. How? Why?
That was the conversation I was interested in having: looking at the
place of collision between the personal and the global. It’s a very fertile place. And from there, with encouragement and input
from trusted readers, I considered rhythm and trajectory. The cadence between the essays. This is like a snowball going down a hill, if
you will, building momentum. So the
question became: how to best build that momentum, how to have the themes accrue
meaning and weight. The essays seem to
fall into two broad categories: my body, female, Jewish, martial artist,
daughter, lesbian; and the bodies I came from, parents, lineage, cultural
forebears; and I tried to use those two constructs as broad organizing
principles.
SD: When I read a contemporary’s work, I want to pick up a
trick or two. One trick I’ve picked up
from you is the condensed historical or cultural list. They appear at different points in the
book. “Berenice’s Hair” opens strongly
with such a list and in fact is a quartet of lists. Each sentence of the first list signals a
different people’s reverence and rules about a woman’s hair. I like the writerly dismount at the end of
that paragraph when you give two sentences to one example and switch the
emphasis from the culture (Egyptian) to a particular woman (Berenice). I like also that after the paragraph break,
you go right back to the list and the same patterning, this time ending on two
particular, more recent examples, Yoko One and Princess Diana. Would you talk about your use of the list,
how you came to the practice, when you employ it, why, and the research that
goes into the construction of a list?
PS: Someone recently called You
Feel So Mortal an “anatomical memoir,” and although the book is not a
memoir, there’s something about the phrase that resonates. It is, in a way, a catalogue of the body, an
anatomy, albeit an incomplete one—feet, noses, breasts, hair, posture, the mind
itself—and very much a list in and of itself.
I like the lushness of lists, I like to combine the
exuberant and the spare. To pull out the
thread as far as I can. Lists have no
end, you can go on forever; on the other hand, you can’t go on forever because
every element has to do its job, strike a new or slightly altered note. “Berenice’s Hair,” a condensed history of
women and hair, is the ultimate list.
It’s divided into sections and each section has a loose theme: hair as a
force of creation and destruction; hair as a lifecycle marker; the mandate to
cover and the consequences of cutting one’s hair; hair and standards of
beauty. The list as a way of making the
unruly ruly. It connects the seemingly
disparate.
SD: For this reader,
if the focus of the seven essays that compose Part One is the body (feet,
posture, breasts, nose job, etc.), the focus of the five essays that compose
Part Two is love filtered through understanding and forgiveness. And there’s much, it seems, to forgive: your
mother, your father, your great-aunt, your partner Ann, Jewish culture with its
many laws and allowances, yourself. Is
that an accurate reading of the cumulative effect of the essays.
PS: Love filtered through understanding and forgiveness? Yes, I think it is. With the emphasis on understanding. Forgiveness comes after that. The key for me is asking questions,
identifying the right ones to ask. Why
was I uneasy about my father’s autopsy, for instance? Because early on I understood that I had been
asking the wrong question. I wanted to
know why he died. Well, he had a stroke
on the Dan Ryan expressway and he died four weeks later. There was no medical mystery. What I really wanted to know was: why did he
have to die? Why does anyone have to die? And because, in my confusion, I asked the
wrong question, I directed it to the wrong source. I directed it to the gods of medicine rather
than to the gods of fate. It was an
existential question, not a medical one.
Once I understood that, I could let go of some my uneasiness about his
autopsy.
SD: What question did
I not ask that you expected or that I should have asked?
PS: This isn’t a question as much as a declaration. I love working in the essay form. It’s capacious, elastic; it holds so much. I think of Virginia Woolf, her fiction
actually, although she was a great essayist too. Her work was so layered; any given moment
contained multiple moments, multiple threads.
Exteriority and interiority bound together. She eschewed linearity because linearity
didn’t capture her sense of reality. We
are not linear individuals. We are not
discrete. History is not discrete. One person, one action, one moment is linked
to another. What are the
connections? That’s what I try and do in
the essay. See what each thought holds,
what it contains. Push the boundaries of
the container, stretch it as much as possible.
Honor digression, which is the recognition that each thing has the
potential to contain another thing.
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