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uomo-accattivante · 3 years

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Excellent article about bringing a re-make of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage to fruition, and the twenty-year friendship that Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain share:

There were days on the shoot for “Scenes From a Marriage,” a five-episode limited series that premieres Sept. 12 on HBO, when Oscar Isaac resented the crew.

The problem wasn’t the crew members themselves, he told me on a video call in March. But the work required of him and his co-star, Jessica Chastain, was so unsparingly intimate — “And difficult!” Chastain added from a neighboring Zoom window — that every time a camera operator or a makeup artist appeared, it felt like an intrusion.

On his other projects, Isaac had felt comfortably distant from the characters and their circumstances — interplanetary intrigue, rogue A.I. But “Scenes” surveys monogamy and parenthood, familiar territory. Sometimes Isaac would film a bedtime scene with his onscreen child (Lily Jane) and then go home and tuck his own child into the same model of bed as the one used onset, accessorized with the same bunny lamp, and not know exactly where art ended and life began.

“It was just a lot,” he said.

Chastain agreed, though she put it more strongly. “I mean, I cried every day for four months,” she said.

Isaac, 42, and Chastain, 44, have known each other since their days at the Juilliard School. And they have channeled two decades of friendship, admiration and a shared and obsessional devotion to craft into what Michael Ellenberg, one of the series’s executive producers, called “five hours of naked, raw performance.” (That nudity is metaphorical, mostly.)

“For me it definitely felt incredibly personal,” Chastain said on the call in the spring, about a month after filming had ended. “That’s why I don’t know if I have another one like this in me. Yeah, I can’t decide that. I can’t even talk about it without. …” She turned away from the screen. (It was one of several times during the call that I felt as if I were intruding, too.)

The original “Scenes From a Marriage,” created by Ingmar Bergman, debuted on Swedish television in 1973. Bergman’s first television series, its six episodes trace the dissolution of a middle-class marriage. Starring Liv Ullmann, Bergman’s ex, it drew on his own past relationships, though not always directly.

“When it comes to Bergman, the relationship between autobiography and fiction is extremely complicated,” said Jan Holmberg, the chief executive of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation.

A sensation in Sweden, it was seen by most of the adult population. And yes, sure, correlation does not imply causation, but after its debut, Swedish divorce were rumored to have doubled. Holmberg remembers watching a rerun as a 10-year-old.

“It was a rude awakening to adult life,” he said.

The writer and director Hagai Levi saw it as a teenager, on Israeli public television, during a stint on a kibbutz. “I was shocked,” he said. The series taught him that a television series could be radical, that it could be art. When he created “BeTipul,” the Israeli precursor to “In Treatment,” he used “Scenes” as proof of the concept “that two people can talk for an hour and it can work,” Levi said. (Strangely, “Scenes” also inspired the prime-time soap “Dallas.”)

So when Daniel Bergman, Ingmar Bergman’s youngest son, approached Levi about a remake, he was immediately interested.

But the project languished, in part because loving a show isn’t reason enough to adapt it. Divorce is common now — in Sweden, and elsewhere — and the relationship politics of the original series, in which the male character deserts his wife and young children for an academic post, haven’t aged particularly well.

Then about two years ago, Levi had a revelation. He would swap the gender roles. A woman who leaves her marriage and child in pursuit of freedom (with a very hot Israeli entrepreneur in place of a visiting professorship) might still provoke conversation and interest.

So the Marianne and Johan of the original became Mira and Jonathan, with a Boston suburb (re-created in a warehouse just north of New York City), stepping in for the Stockholm of the original. Jonathan remains an academic though Mira, a lawyer in the original, is now a businesswoman who out-earns him.

Casting began in early 2020. After Isaac met with Levi, he wrote to Chastain to tell her about the project. She wasn’t available. The producers cast Michelle Williams. But the pandemic reshuffled everyone’s schedules. When production was ready to resume, Williams was no longer free. Chastain was. “That was for me the most amazing miracle,” Levi said.

Isaac and Chastain met in the early 2000s at Juilliard. He was in his first year; she, in her third. He first saw her in a scene from a classical tragedy, slapping men in the face as Helen of Troy. He was friendly with her then-boyfriend, and they soon became friends themselves, bonding through the shared trauma of an acting curriculum designed to break its students down and then build them back up again. Isaac remembered her as “a real force of nature and solid, completely solid, with an incredible amount of integrity,” he said.

In the next window, Chastain blushed. “He was super talented,” she said. “But talented in a way that wasn’t expected, that’s challenging and pushing against constructs and ideas.” She introduced him to her manager, and they celebrated each other’s early successes and went to each other’s premieres. (A few of those photos are used in “Scenes From a Marriage” as set dressing.)

In 2013, Chastain was cast in J.C. Chandor’s “A Most Violent Year,”opposite Javier Bardem. When Bardem dropped out, Chastain campaigned for Isaac to have the role. Weeks before shooting, they began to meet, fleshing out the back story of their characters — a husband and wife trying to corner the heating oil market in 1981 New York — the details of the marriage, business, life.

It was their first time working together, and each felt a bond that went deeper than a parallel education and approach. “Something connects us that’s stronger than any ideas of character or story or any of that,” Isaac said. “There’s something else that’s more about like, a shared existence.”

Chandor noticed how they would support each other on set, and challenge each other, too, giving each other the freedom to take the characters’ relationship to dark and dangerous places. “They have this innate trust with each other,” Chandor said.

That trust eliminated the need for actorly tricks or shortcuts, in part because they know each other’s tricks too well. Their motto, Isaac said, was, “Let’s figure this [expletive] out together and see what’s the most honest thing we can do.”

Moni Yakim, Juilliard’s celebrated movement instructor, has followed their careers closely and he noted what he called the “magnetism and spiritual connection” that they suggested onscreen in the film.

“It’s a kind of chemistry,” Yakim said. “They can read each other’s mind and you as an audience, you can sense it.”

Telepathy takes work. When they knew that shooting “Scenes From a Marriage” could begin, Chastain bought a copy of “All About Us,” a guided journal for couples, and filled in her sections in character as Mira. Isaac brought it home and showed it to his wife, the filmmaker Elvira Lind.

“She was like, ‘You finally found your match,’” Isaac recalled. “’Someone that is as big of a nerd as you are.’”

The actors rehearsed, with Levi and on their own, talking their way through each long scene, helping each other through the anguished parts. When production had to halt for two weeks, they rehearsed then, too.

Watching these actors work reminded Amy Herzog, a writer and executive producer on the series, of race horses in full gallop. “These are two people who have so much training and skill,” she said. “Because it’s an athletic feat, what they were being asked to do.”

But training and skill and the “All About Us” book hadn’t really prepared them for the emotional impact of actually shooting “Scenes From a Marriage.” Both actors normally compartmentalize when they work, putting up psychic partitions between their roles and themselves. But this time, the partitions weren’t up to code.

“I knew I was in trouble the very first week,” Chastain said.

She couldn’t hide how the scripts affected her, especially from someone who knows her as well as Isaac does. “I just felt so exposed,” she said. “This to me, more than anything I’ve ever worked on, was definitely the most open I’ve ever been.”

“It felt so dangerous,” she said.

I visited the set in February (after multiple Covid-19 tests and health screenings) during a final day of filming. It was the quietest set I had ever seen: The atmosphere was subdued, reverent almost, a crew and a studio space stripped down to only what two actors would need to do the most passionate and demanding work of their careers.

Isaac didn’t know if he would watch the completed series. “It really is the first time ever, where I’ve done something where I’m totally fine never seeing this thing,” he said. “Because I’ve really lived through it. And in some ways I don’t want whatever they decide to put together to change my experience of it, which was just so intense.”

The cameras captured that intensity. Though Chastain isn’t Mira and Isaac isn’t Jonathan, each drew on personal experience — their parents’ marriages, past relationships — in ways they never had. Sometimes work on the show felt like acting, and sometimes the work wasn’t even conscious. There’s a scene in the harrowing fourth episode in which they both lie crumpled on the floor, an identical stress vein bulging in each forehead.

“It’s my go-to move, the throbbing forehead vein,” Isaac said on a follow-up video call last month. Chastain riffed on the joke: “That was our third year at Juilliard, the throb.”

By then, it had been five months since the shoot wrapped. Life had returned to something like normal. Jokes were possible again. Both of them seemed looser, more relaxed. (Isaac had already poured himself one tequila shot and was ready for another.) No one cried.

Chastain had watched the show with her husband. And Isaac, despite his initial reluctance, had watched it, too. It didn’t seem to have changed his experience.

“I’ve never done anything like it,” he said. “And I can’t imagine doing anything like it again.”

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#oscar isaac #jessica chastain #scenes from a marriage #hagai levi #michelle williams #elvira lind #behind the scenes #article

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angrylizardjacket · 5 years

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self-same mettle

Summary: "I love my sister more than anything in this life; I will choose her happiness over mine every time."

A/N: BIG WARNING; August Reid, who you may remember from the main story, child groom tw, though nothing comes of it he's still creepy and predatory. Okay so I just wanted to write a little something from Oscar's perspective in the High School AU. Let me know what you think!!

{AYDTD}

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Oscar's always been a romantic at heart, always wanted to be the star of his own Mills and Boone novel ever since he was sixteen and found his mother's stash while hunting for Christmas presents. It had been painfully straight, right when he'd been discovering the delightful world of loving men, but he was invested enough in the romance that he didn't care.

In 2017, at the tender age of 19, he discovers the author Chuck Tingle, and despite the fact that he's technically now a literature student, this ridiculous, gay erotica makes his heart happy in ways he can't quite articulate.

The point is, he knows August Reid, because he's his dad's drinking buddy and fellow professor, but Oscar doesn't think of him much until he takes the man's class. Ash, who's fifteen and who spends weekends at the local art gallery down the road, has always been far more artistically minded, Oscar's always been more drawn to words, but he takes August's Art History class on a whim.

There's a certain draw to the whole teacher/student fantasy, and August looks kind of like an older Richard Madden, still angular and defined, but greying at the temples, the prelude to an extraordinary silver fox. So Oscar let's himself daydream, and take the follow up class, and look forward to the weekends where his dad's friends would come over to smoke cigars and play cards. August Reid was nothing if not polite, always smiling and kind and happy to see Oscar, answer his questions. Oscar knew he was married, thinks he probably has a kid, and so he was happy to keep his daydreams to himself. He thinks there's something romantic about quietly unrequited love.

However, it takes a year, once Ash has matured more, not a lot, but enough to catch August's interest, for the rose-coloured glasses to be ripped off. August takes an interest in her; when he and the rest of their father's colleagues came over, he would make a point to stop and check in with Ash, encourage her interest in Art, both physical and theoretical, and even suggest research for her, or upcoming exhibits he thought she might like. It's harmless, at first.

Talk of art turns to compliments, her taste in things, her outfits, how she wears her hair, the colour of her eyes. Ash seems to start looking forward to his visits, and something about it doesn't sit right with Oscar.

"He's just, Oz he's so cool," she was smiling, blushing a little; she had a crush, it was plain as the nose on her face, "and he said he could get us tickets to the Renaissance exhibit in Glasgow next month, how awesome is that?"

August starts calling her Miss Ashley, a joke that started since she still had a habit of calling him Mr Reid - because she's a fucking highschooler, it's how she's been taught to address teachers - Ash delights in it, straightens her posture a little when he says it. August makes a habit of petting her head fondly when she does. It makes Oscar's stomach turn just a little. August shouldn't be looking at his little sister like that, she's just a child.

Their father seems blind to it, tells Oscar 'don't be ridiculous, he's just being kind' and when he goes to mum, she just brushes him off, insisting that August is lovely, that he's so in love with his wife, and that Ash is just excited to have someone who understood her.

"A little schoolgirl crush is harmless, Oscar, dear; weren't you singing his praises not too long ago?" It's meant with a wink and a nudge, like perhaps Oscar's jealous, but his mother can be so dense; it's not the same at all. He's an adult, and Ash is a child, and yet he's not the one August is giving leering looks to when he thinks no-one's looking.

It's not that their parents don't love them, it's just that they don't particularly care. They're trapped in a loveless marriage, too self absorbed to care about those that can take care of themselves.

So Oscar takes it upon himself.

Oscar's never understood art like he's understood literature, never been able to make it make sense in the same way, but that doesn't matter. The point is, on Sundays, when his father's colleagues come over for tea and cigars and cards, Oscar's started taking Ash to art galleries across the country.

"But August is-"

"It's the impressionists, Ash," Oscar takes her hand with a grin, practically begging her, "come on they have the Water Lilies," he enthuses, and Ash's expression softens.

"I do love the Water Lilies."

Because he can't tell her what he's really doing, because she's sixteen and thinks she knows everything and the idea of telling her that August has any sort of feelings towards her, even if he explains why that's creepy and wrong, is probably the worst thing he can do to discourage her. So he distracts her, and is careful to never mention him if he can help it, or steer the conversation away if she brings him up.

She's his best friend. She's always been his best friend, but in an abstract, sibling sort of way, but it doesn't take long for the two of them to become legitimate best friends. He listens to all the drama of her highschool career, and her ideas for sculptures, and anything else she wants to talk about, and in turn he tells her about whatever he's reading that week, whatever poetry ideas he's been riffing with lately, and complains about pretty straight boys in his lectures.

Oscar may be a poet, but neither he nor Ash could hold a tune to save their lives, and so of course they sing along to Ash's Spotify playlists at the top of their lungs whenever they're driving. There's three weeks where she plays the Hamilton cast recording on repeat, and Oscar finds himself muttering it under his breath in class.

He works nights, and Saturdays, to afford all these day trips, and his family think he's so diligent, studying and working so hard, and on his day off he spends it with Ash. He keeps local for a few weeks, a few months actually, and surprises her with a trip to the West End for Christmas.

She talks about August less and less as time goes on. Though she does ask about it, in a roundabout way.

"Why're you spending so much time with me?"

They're having lunch in the park across from a gallery somewhere in Ireland. Oscar packed jam sandwiches.

"I don't understand this art shit like you do, but it's good to find inspiration from all mediums, you know?" Oscar smiles, takes a big bite of his sandwich, and watches Ash wrinkle her nose.

"You sound so pretentious," she snorted, shaking her head, "but whatever, I'm not gonna complain, you're the one paying."

"And I like spending time with you, biscuit." His voice turned overly sappy, as did his grin, "I love you." Oscar reached out and ruffled her hair, and Ash squawked, batting his hand away.

"I love you too, ya muppet, but if you wanna hang out we can just do something lowkey, or like, close to home."

She takes him at his word, which is good because he's being honest, but she seems content with their routine. Sometimes they go bowling, or to the library, sometimes they go op shopping, or to the movies, but they never miss a week.

She's his cheerleader at poetry readings, his tour guide at art galleries, and his favourite person at all times. His father's a literature professor who stopped truly engaging with her about her love of art once he stopped understanding her, and his mother was a Type A accountant who was just disappointed she wasn't interested in something employable. So Oscar was her cheerleader at art competitors, her enthusiastic student at art galleries, and ends up being her best friend and quietly, her favourite family member.

August asks about her, according to their father, but Ash's brief infatuation with him seems to have died down.

"Do you have a problem with me, Oscar?" August asks almost a month after Oscar's started spending Sundays with Ash, and maybe their father's told August what's happening, maybe he's noticed Oscar glaring at him whenever he saw the professor, but either way, he's so painfully kind when he asks that it's a dead giveaway; August knows something's wrong.

"Stay the fuck away from my sister," Oscar, kind-faced, bright eyed Oscar, snarls. He's 6'3" and never more thankful for his height as he towers over August.

"I'm simply showing an interest in her, she's an art enthusiast, I'm an art professor, don't worry-"

"I don't give a shit; look like the innocent flower but be the fucking serpent under it, right?"

"I don't understand what you mean? Does your father know you feel this way? Does Ash?" And it doesn't sound like a threat, it sounds like a very genuine question, but Oscar wants nothing more than to punch him in his stupid, angular nose.

"Does your wife know you spend weekends ogling underage girls?" Oscar fires back, and August's expression sours considerably, his mouth closed in a tight, humourless line. "Yeah, dad knows, not that he gives a shit," Oscar sneered, "but if you go near my sixteen year old sister again, you smarmy creepy -" his voice dropped very low, expression dark, his hands balling into fists by his side.

"If your father's not bothered by it I don't see why you should be, I haven't done anything wrong, but you're throwing around some serious implications here," August gives a blithe smile, "Ash is an incredible young woman I'm simply encouraging her passion."

"August Reid, I need you to know that I'm not threatening you," Oscar said calmly, "I'm promising you; I'll fucking kill you."

And maybe he doesn't believe Oscar would legitimately harm him, but he sees it's not a fight he's going to win. August leaves Ash well enough alone after that.

At the start of their Summer break, before Ash is due to start her second last year of high school, their father gets a job in England, their mother gets an excuse to leave her loveless marriage, and Ash and Oscar get a choice. Oscar knows without even having to ask that Ash will stick with him. He also knows that in two years, if she's still here, she'll end up studying under August and his father's other creepily complicit friends. Oscar's playing the long game to keep his sister safe when he announces he'll be going to England with their dad.

He lies, says he doesn't mind transferring courses and maybe retaking some classes at this new university, makes sure he's nothing but positive when he talks about the move, and Ash, add expected, joins him. It hurts to leave the life he's building himself, but he knows it's what's best for Ash.

Adjusting to a new life is difficult, and some weeks they don't end up spending Sunday together. Oscar let's himself relax, takes time for himself, and starts to build new relationships, new connections in this new situation he's found himself in.

Here, he didn't have to worry about Ash so much. She was still his best friend, but now she could just be a teenager without a creepy professor leering at her and grooming her. Though quietly, Oscar was just glad she still wanted to spend time with him; she still goes to his poetry readings, still wants to go on day trips with him, and she's starting to get to know his new friends little by little.

Meeting Freddie is like getting hit by a freight train; they're both taking a Creative Industries subject as an elective, and they get partnered together. Freddie is intense and warm in equal measure, a lover of cats judging by the pins on his bag, he's always drawing or doodling something on his notebook, and he writes songs. Oscar adores him from the moment he meets him. He's always busy, always on the move or at band practice, but he seems to like Oscar well enough, so the two of them start having lunch together a few times a week.

Freddie thinks Oscar's selfless when he learns about everything that had happened back in Scotland.

"Picking up and moving your whole life just to make sure she's safe," Freddie shakes his head, "you're a Saint, you know that?"

"She's my sister, I couldn't not do it," Oscar laughs a little self consciously, but Freddie just seemed endeared.

They're messaging almost every day. Freddie sends draft song lyrics and selfies with his cats and Oscar will send bits of poems and shitty angled selfies or photos taken by Ash. They both live busy lives, but they keep up with each other without even trying.

[I've got a cat named Oscar, you know?]

[I didn't actually. You really like me well enough to name a cat after me 😂😜]

[har har I've known the cat longer. sorry to disappoint. 😘]

He's so caught up in his new life and his new friends, and Ash seems so happy with her new school, especially their art program, that it takes Oscar a while to realise how painfully lonely Ash was. She's always been introverted, always focused more on her projects than on the people around her, but when Oscar realises that person she talks most about is her physics tutor, it hits him that she doesn't actually have any friends her own age here. She likes his friends well enough, one even got her a fake ID if she might ever need it, but she had none of her own.

"How was school?" They've been here for about three months, and finally things have maybe started to look up.

"Fine; we're starting sculpture making in art," Ash said offhandedly, rolling her eyes; she already spent time outside of school making sculptures, the idea of being graded on it now seemed trivial, "this one dumbass spent like twenty minutes negotiating with a teacher about whether he can also make a second sculpture for fun." Ash's voice was flat, unimpressed.

"Sounds like someone you'd get along with-"

"He wants to make a dick."

Dick Sculpture Guy turns to Fucking Roger, and Oscar starts to hear more about him, because Roger's always seemingly causing a scene and Ash is endlessly annoyed with him, though she once let it slip that she thinks he's rather hot, and Oscar, though he's never brought it up, will never forget it.

Until he gets a call on Friday afternoon, from Ash, in tears, asking him to come to the school.

She's surrounded by the pieces of her broken major work when he arrives, and there's a tall, dark haired guy checking up on her. This is Brian, the tutor he's heard so much about. He's thankful, but comforting Ash is his first priority.

Brian leaves, and together the siblings piece together her work. The school gets locked at five, and they're there until the very last minutes. Once the bust is sitting up on one of the desks at the edge of the room, Ash sniffles only a little bit.

"I'll paint the cracks gold."

"Kintsugi," Oscar adds, nodding sagely and Ash actually beams at him, "see, I listen to you, biscuit."

He suggests they go to Freddie's gig to take her mind off of it, though it's also because she's been asking to meet Freddie for a while now, but he's always been busy. However, things don't go as planned when not only is Ash's tutor part of the band, but Fucking Roger is too. Fucking Roger who's sculpture exploding made Ash cry.

Ash is adamant she's going to kill him. Oscar doesn't stop her. She disappears around the end of the bar after Roger, while the rest of the band - Freddie, Brian, and some kid called John - hang back.

Ash decidedly doesn't kill Roger, and actually ends up enjoying her night, which Oscar's glad for. That being said, he's a little bit distracted; he's quickly discovering that Brian might be the loveliest person he'd ever met. Brian's an astrophysics student, a guitarist, a tutor, and he took the time to check up on Ash; Oscar hasn't been seriously romantically interested in anyone since high school, and he's only met Brian today, but damn if there wasn't definitely a crush forming.

They play good music, and Ash seems to have a good time, and he tells himself that that's all that matters.

Days go by, weeks go by, the siblings keep going to Queen's gig's, and Fucking Roger turns to just Roger. Oscar messages Brian and Freddie that Ash might have a crush and Freddie sends back a wheezed voice message saying that Roger probably does too, but that he's stubborn as hell and would never be the first to admit it. Something warms in Oscar's heart at that. Slowly but surely, between Roger and John, Ash is finally making friends her own age.

Ash deserves a normal-ish crush on a normal-ish boy, and Oscar will do anything to encourage that crush. So they go to gigs, and Oscar wiggles his eyebrows at her when Roger's got an arm around her between sets, and Ash turns as red as her hair. But Brian's got a hand on his thigh where they're sitting near the door, and it feels weirdly normal, and kind of the best.

To see Ash smiling and happy, everything was worth it. It's all worked out, though he knows he'll never stop worrying about her, not that he'd want to.

#borhap #roger taylor #roger taylor x oc #brian may #brian may x oc #queen #aydtd #the angry lizard writes #child grooming tw

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refusemyreality-blog · 7 years

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The Word of the Year

To start this is not a false story. It’s fake. 2017 allows me to repurpose this word. Here’s why I will:

For four years, I’ve been interviewing my sister while she was living and dying with cancer. She died on my birthday 2017.

She permitted me to write about what we talked about. Ostensibly, I have her husband’s permission. But what she really wanted me to write about was her life so her two children would know her and remember her.

The night she died it became clear I had to limit, maybe even stop, writing publicly about my dying sister and about burying her, unless I wanted to lose members of my family. Writing about trauma and family stuff uncovers all the unhealed soul wounds we carry from growing up.

So while I was fulfilling promises that I made to her, to bury her and write about her, inasmuch as her husband and kids benefited, it all cracked open.

My birthday weekend, I executed what had started two years earlier. I buried her. That is to say, I carried out her burial plans, which I’d helped her talk about with all those who thought a natural burial was weird. A few weeks before I’d helped her husband pick a plot and negotiate as a natural a burial as a poor family can afford -- still cheaper than cremation, btw.-- I ordered her plain wood coffin. My husband and I transported it across state lines the Friday before Halloween. (Drive the speed limit, hubby. The police will never believe this is not a colossal prank.) I helped obtain and file the death certificate. I orchestrated washing and wrapping and preparing her body.

I could not have done that alone. I had my husband, her husband, some siblings. We took heat for this burial.

This is like “Weekend at Bernie’s” dripped off a couple of tongues with a condescending tone. Don’t you get the insult, the para-language inflected. My bro-in-law shrugged it off. He’d just lost his wife. He didn’t need to “baromet” the implied “this is tacky and low-class.” So I took the brunt of it because I was the face of the process.

Burying someone green and inexpensive is “not natural” by our family’s new upper middle class standards. It’s not what we do... any more. We clawed our way out of the trailer park. We can pay for someone else to do it. Proper middle class people snot through boxes of tissue and “celebrate life.” We pretend that is an universal, classy approach to death.. Until we all evolve to immolate our bodies and then strap our children with what to do with the ashes. That’s the new middle class way.

It’s hard to admit you grew up trailer trash when now you rub elbows with the hoity-toity classes in the capital, in your company, in your church, at your alma mater or with your administrators.

“Fake” took on a new meaning in 2017. According to NPR (losing you there, aren’t I? Dead give-away that I’m not a good tumblr.), “fake” now means “I refuse your reality.”

The lines in most memoirs risk bleeding truth and “fakeness.” Memoirists should aim to true, but anyone can reject that reality.

I tried writing true this year, but it hurt people I love. They needed to refuse my reality, because, hey, I was writing about our dead sister and how we grew up living trailers, wearing hand-me-downs while eating home-grown or donated food. We have some family secrets and a fundy religious background that is a bit whack-a-do.

But what is truth when it comes to one person’s memory? When Pam Houston (see the book Cowboys Are My Weakness) taught my non-fiction workshop, she defended the deliberate and accidental alteration of details in memoir for the purpose of story telling. My ethical side, which thinks it’s godlike and sits like a ten pound gargoyle on my shoulder, wanted to gnash her up and spit her out.

I want to write the real me, as Mary Karr praises in The Art of Memoir. But the real me fits this description (that Mary wrote of me, because she is psychic or intuitive though we haven’t met yet.)

Unless you’re a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen.

The conflict between my writing and my disposition leave me with these choices: Quit writing to placate the objections. (This would be to lie about who I am what gives me life.) Write on and piss them off. Or go under a pen name and work this shit out until I have achieved another principles of Karr’s, which is to say I should be curious, exploring my inner mind, my doubts, my failings, interpretations through what happened. This is more about sorting my junk out than dishing on others.

This story is truth from inside my guts: subjective, limited. You’ll get my version vetted by those who know me enough to call my crap if I make stuff up or remember it badly. Sorry for the warped version of fact checking.

I think it’ll be fair to allow my snarkiness through. On the surface, I’m judgmental and super-righteous. My kids tell me “Yeah, mom, we know, you did all the things right.” What they don’t know, what others don’t remember is that I’m paralyzed at the thought of being judgy, wrong, unkind or a stumbling block. At least, the penitent in me is. Like I said, the superficial, immediate and reactionary me is not. She’s usually riffing on the room and deliberately warps the events with voice to make someone snort their drink through their nose. Later she wonders why she said that and if people think she’s mean.

So, here begins the story of ...

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