As I settle into somewhat of a writing comfort zone after completing a creative writing degree, I find myself drawn to a form I never would have anticipated or thought to consider writing—the essay. Admittedly, I wasn’t aware of all the possibilities with regard to essay before I returned to school to pursue an MFA. I’d always thought of essays in the traditional sense of the formula: introduction of an idea, explanation of a claim, statement of facts or opinions to support the claim, conclusion repeating the main points and reinforcing the original claim. We all learned this formula in high school, and none of us could wait for the day we’d never have to use it again. As students, we were always so worried about adhering to the formula that we could not have cared less about the claim itself. And constructing the supporting arguments—well, that just became an exercise in creative deduction. Half of the time, even I didn’t know what I was talking about. I knew how to follow the formula, though, and that earned me a respectable grade more often than it did not.

Twenty years later I found myself in front of an audience, reading a passage to practice my oratory as part of the MFA requirement. I had chosen a five-minute excerpt from the previous semester’s nonfiction reading assignment—a piece with which I’d fallen instantly in transformative love—Jo Ann Beard’s The Fourth State of Matter. During my introduction I referred to the work as a story, not only because it featured an obvious beginning, middle, and end comprising the requisite narrative arc, but also because Beard’s piece was lyrical, character-driven, and emotionally hyper-stimulating. It was everything I thought a story should be. Barring a chronic absence of self-confidence, I would have been proud, borderline smug, to have performed my reading, having chosen from such an obviously worthy piece. As it was, I suspected (or rather hoped) the work was sufficiently acclaimed as to make it impossible for anyone, of decent intellect, to fault the choice.

The raw terror that clutched my heart during the reading loosened its hold as I returned to my seat. Lowering myself into the folding chair, I noticed a professor in front of me turn to offer what I thought would be words of comfort and/or congratulations at my having successfully read such a riveting piece of work. Still jittery from the public speaking experience, I anticipated the compliment by prematurely smiling as the words thank you formed on my lips.

“It’s an essay,” the professor said.

Descent halted, my rear end hovered an inch above the aluminum seat.

“You called it a story,” he finished, as I forced my now rigid body the rest of the way down into the chair.

Perhaps I nodded in agreement, smile still plastered to my face; tongue, having been stopped, in its part, from contributing to the words of thanks, perched lightly behind my two front teeth. By the time my confusion made its way from neurons, through synapses, and on to its facially expressed destination, the professor had already turned toward the front of the room and was actively absorbed in whatever the next student was reading.

I’ve grown to welcome these moments of discomfort in my life, but only in hindsight. I’m nowhere near the level of self-actualization it would take for me to recognize opportunity in such moments of extreme humiliation. Little did I know at the time that the comment would send me on an extended exploration of the varying styles, structures, and voices of essays.

I soon found myself plowing through works not only by Jo Ann Beard but also by George Orwell, Joan Didion, Virginia Woolf, David Sedaris, Abigail Thomas—there are too many to name. Though I now knew better, I could not stop thinking of these works in terms of story. What constitutes the difference? I obsessively wondered.

In their book Creating Nonfiction, Becky Bradway and Doug Hesse point out that narrative is “often the most important” (p. 39) organizational strategy for creative nonfiction and that “very often it (creative nonfiction) reads like a story” (p. 3). “Most creative nonfiction relies, almost inevitably, upon narrative. Narrative is story” (p. 41), Bradway and Hesse go so far as to proclaim, deepening the mystery entirely. If essays rely on story, I considered, why is the label separating the genres so important?

Determined to decipher this enigma, I attended the 2011 Association for Writers and Writing Professionals Conference, where I packed in as many sessions on essay as I could reasonably attend. During the panel presentation, “The Essayist in the 21st Century,” Robert Atwan pointed out that most people regard “essay” as “a four-letter word.” The comment struck a note in the recesses of my mind like a mallet hitting a xylophone bar. The moment he said it, I realized, so did I. Apparently, my junior-high-induced essay-equals-boring mental model had relegated essay, as an entire genre, to a dusty shelf in the back of a dark, moldy, subconscious closet where it had lived, neglected and alone, for twenty-some-odd years. Poor essay.

When I was twelve years old, I found a cat. More to the fact, a cat found me. She was black with orange spots and a checkerboard face; skinny and shy and at first appearance homely. She hung around the house until my parents were forced to acknowledge her presence in our lives. My first real pet. It didn’t matter that she had to live outside. I named her Gypsy and built her bed out of a cardboard box and a ratty old blanket—the only one my mother was willing to spare. I put the bed under a chair on the back porch where, less than a month later, Gypsy had her kittens. I watched those kittens emerge, and I sat on the porch with Gypsy on my lap as she fed those kittens every day until they went to live in different homes. The night the last of her babies were taken away, I stayed with Gypsy in the kitchen, crying desperately as she howled. The little stray cat that nobody else wanted pulled at my heart. I guess I’ve always been a sucker for the underappreciated.

With essays, I have to believe it’s a matter of semantics (and perhaps the same is true for strays). In reality, essays are diverse, entertaining, and rich with poignant potential. In the mental model remnants from early education, essays are formulaic, boring, and emotionally vacant. These are the models that pervade. I suppose, as writers, we could take the easy way out and label narrative essays as true stories. It wouldn’t be deceptive—not by definition that rings true to me—and it might bolster readership, which would be a win for everyone. But I suppose that wouldn’t be the point.

Those of us brave or curious or outright lost enough to re-enter the closet where our preconceptions lie might find ourselves dusting off the mental models, washing away the mold, and uncovering a treasure that will, forevermore, pull at our hearts. We will embrace the essays that find us, champion those that do not, and truly hope they all find homes.

Bradway, Becky, and Douglas Dean. Hesse. Creating Nonfiction: a Guide and Anthology. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. Print.

Kneeling between the leaders at the front of the lines, I watched my dad struggle to restrain Little Lefty as he clutched the chain around her neck and ran from the truck to the sled, where Nick waited to hook her up with the rest of the team. The usual frenzy ensued, fraught with jumping, howling, and nerve shredding cries that seemed more ghostly that canine. I was accustomed to this routine, having ridden with Nick several times that winter, but this would be my dad’s first dog-sled ride. He and my mother had flown in to visit for the first time since Nick and I moved from Pennsylvania to Utah six months earlier in pursuit of his dog mushing dream.

Since then, Nick had discovered trails on Strawberry Ridge where he now trained the dogs twice a week. From October through March, pristine snow blanketed miles of wilderness, which ranged in elevation from 8,000 to 9,500 feet. The trail Nick most often traveled wound through the Uinta National Forest, and the trees lining that trail often parted to reveal breathtaking views of the valley below. When we didn’t cross paths with snowmobiles, the silence of the ride transported me into a wonderland reminiscent of fairy-tales.

“Haaaa—aayke!” Nick yelled, and the dogs surged forward in concentrated, now silent, effort. As the sled pulled away with my dad in the cargo basket, leaving my mother and I in the echoing wake of their departure, I closed my eyes to imagine what he must be feeling. My own experiences had felt like gliding on a cloud in heaven by way of sled-dog drawn chariot. The most fascinating part, I noticed after a few rides, was the chain of events that occurred when one of the chariot-pulling dogs relieved him or herself mid-stride. I’d witness these proceedings from my privileged perspective as a passenger in the chariot. Nick would urge the dogs to keep on running, and they’d do just that with barely a blip in the motion as the droppings from one or another bounced off the snow and disappeared behind the sled. The entire display represented a natural wonder from which my fleeting worry about the trajectory of the bounce in relation to my position barely distracted. I was gliding on a cloud in heaven with nary engine sound nor fume. The sporadic puff of fecal odor could not disturb my inner peace. I did not know if Dad would share my fascination with the dogs’ secondary talent, but I surmised he’d reach transcendence either way. The gaping grin affixed to his face as they glided into the parking area validated that prediction.

We entertained my parents through the rest of the week by treating them to an assortment of scenic attractions highlighting the glamour of Park City and rustic charm of surrounding areas, all the while touting the depth and range of our new homeland’s appeal. As we prepared dinner in the Harvest Gold kitchen of our rented mobile home the night before they were scheduled to fly back to Pennsylvania, Dad admitted that nothing matched the allure of the dog-sled ride. His words of confession, to those of us familiar with the feeling, were superfluous.

The next day, the mobile home fell silent in the absence of its guests, affording ample time to ruminate on the state of my affairs. In six months, I’d found neither cultural comfort zone nor social solidarity in Utah. This wasn’t something I had verbalized to my parents. At the age of twenty-eight, my relationship with them had yet to strike an emotionally supportive balance. Chemically induced clashes of will with my mother and note-card driven lectures by my father in response to any manner of irresponsible teenaged behavior (I tried most on for size) had driven me to silence through the better part of high school. It wasn’t until I left for college and found my confidence in academic success that we forged respectable relationship terms. This included conversation, albeit mostly intellectual. I knew they were not pleased about my choice to move with Nick, but eliciting further judgment through discussion seemed counterproductive. So I smiled while Nick and I showcased the area for my parents, and we talked about the high-desert weather that, we all agreed, seemed too perfect to be true.

That spring, Nick told me about his ideal scenario. “How great would it be to own land on Strawberry Ridge?” he’d say to me periodically. “I could build a house with a dog kennel, and run tours right out of the back yard.” Though certain the question was rhetorical, I could not stop myself from imagining such a home in a remote area of the wilderness with no one around but the dogs. The fantasy prompted me to mention once in casual conversation at work that I enjoyed the company of the sled dogs more than I did most people.

“Well, they don’t talk back,” one coworker quipped, leaving me spinning in rapid-reply impotence. Is she saying I lack tolerance for the beliefs and opinions of others because I enjoy the company of animals who can’t talk? I wondered after a moment. As the retaliation window slid shut in my stunned silence, I recalled other times I’d failed to trump someone’s jab with a clever response. My talent, to my life-long dismay, lay not in snappy comebacks, but in long-term analysis. I pondered the insults people hurled at me long after they’d hit their mark. This one, in particular, proved to be quite thought provoking.

One of Nick’s sled dogs had fallen ill earlier in the year. When I walked into the kennel on that Saturday afternoon, I saw the dog’s eyelids at half-mast and noted the way his once perky ears lay limp, now parallel to the ground. I watched his head hover at shoulder level as if his collar were loaded with lead, and I knew in an instant he was sick. He did not verbalize his feelings, but the message in his demeanor was clear. I knelt beside him, and he leaned his body into mine then gazed into my eyes. The English language would have served no better in communicating the desperation I recognized. Without words, that dog spoke to my heart, an epiphany destined to remain subconscious in the absence of my coworker’s remark.

My thought train continued on its tracks to consider the complex communication processes that took place within the canine pack. Sans human intervention, I’d seen the dogs quickly and innately find their positions to form a fully functional team. This amazing feat would not be possible without communication. As I’d never witnessed the formation or experienced the existence of a fully functional human team, it seemed to me that dogs communicated more effectively than people, “talking” notwithstanding.

Having arrived at this triumphant conclusion, I overcame the sting of my coworker’s comment. Shortly thereafter, I approached her with a graphic design idea. At the adjacent desk, I overheard Lena, another graphic designer, ask John, a member of the sales team, if he wore the “holey underwear,” and I turned my head in time to see John smirk in lieu of a reply.

“Wait a minute,” I said, abandoning one conversation to perform a hostile takeover of the other. “Why would anyone wear holey underwear?” I envisioned a one-piece cotton garment hanging in dilapidated rags off someone’s body.

“It’s a Mormon thing,” Lena replied. “John is a steak leader.” I briefly wondered what the role of “steak leader” might entail but felt the need to first attend to the holey underwear order of business. Did the Mormons consider holey underwear to be a sign of humility? I wondered. Did they have to wear the same underwear every day, until it became holey?

“But why does it have to be holey?” I continued after a thoughtful pause.

“I have no idea,” Lena said. “It’s just what they have to wear. It’s supposed to protect them I guess.”

“But how would something with holes in it protect anything?” I still didn’t get it. Lena burst into laughter.

“No, it isn’t holey! It’s holy—like blessed!” she said.

“Oh!” I forced a communal laugh rather than proceeding with questions about the steak leader position.

In time, the art of active listening, as opposed to blatant questioning, would enlighten me to the fact that the term “stake” referred to a division of the church and not, as I had surmised, a juicy slab of beef. When this information revealed itself, somewhere in the middle of a typical workday, a smile usurped my face. At the same time, I wondered if I’d ever relate to the people and customs in my new town.

This is home now, I thought, glancing at the phone on my desk. My smile faded as a lump swelled in my throat. Though I had no idea what I’d say, I felt the sudden urge to talk to my parents. Instead of picking up the receiver, I returned my gaze to the computer screen, where the clock in the menu bar displayed the time remaining in my workday. I hoped the Utah sunlight would persist long enough to afford a late afternoon visit with my surrogate family of sled dogs.

Credibility is one of the most important qualities of an effective memoir, yet sometimes the truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction. What happens when real-life events are truly unbelievable? The memoirist’s job is not only to infuse the essence of truth into those events that would otherwise be too outrageous to believe, but also to employ creative techniques that will enhance the emotional response to factual events.

One might be inclined to believe memoir has the advantage of genre in that simply labeling the work as nonfiction should imply the truth of it, but the line between fact and fiction can be tenuous. As fiction-writing techniques are often applied to create provocative and compelling nonfiction, the author of memoir must work even harder to achieve credibility, maintaining the factual elements while using creative techniques to increase the literary quality of the work.

Establishing and maintaining credibility in both the content and the narrator helps to win the reader’s trust and enhance the overall believability of the memoir, but trust is never a one-way street. In order for the work to be effective, the author must not only gain the trust of her readers, she must also express a level of trust, showing readers that she believes in their ability to enter her story and relate to the world she has re-created. In essence, the author of memoir builds the foundation of a bridge of trust by reaching out to the reader and relying on that reader to complete the bridge through personally relating to the story or otherwise participating in the interpretation of the events presented.

Some traditional and effective techniques that are often used to build trust and establish the credibility of the memoir’s narrator and content are self-reflection and commenting. An author, for example, can look back on the events she has described and reflect on their meaning or comment on their impact, a method which leaves little room for doubt or interpretation with regard to the author’s intended meaning. Through this method, the reader becomes more of a consumer than an active participant in the work. The role of the reader changes as the author of memoir employs alternative techniques to establish credibility and build trust—techniques that potentially push the limits of the nonfiction genre, while still hovering within the boundaries of truth. Such techniques include elements of the dramatic point of view, such as imbuing unspoken meaning in objective presentations of scenery, events, characters, and other descriptive details.

Objective description can allude to alternative meanings for a variety of elements, such as the mental and emotional states of characters or the emotional effects of specific events on the narrator. It is not necessary for the reader to have specific background information or other historical knowledge to interpret the implications of objective descriptions. The reader needs only her own set of personal experiences through which she may relate to the levels of possible meaning within the descriptive information presented by the author. In this way, the reader participates in the work by translating silence into meaning based on descriptive cues the author provides.

For the memoirist, objective presentation through craft elements usually associated with the dramatic point of view becomes a critical tool for character development due to the inherently limited perspective of the narrator. Using this technique, the memoirist may develop characters through dialogue and physical description, as well as through implied meaning within descriptions of events, setting, and abstract concepts. The methods different authors use to imply multiple levels of meaning vary, as I will show by examining the use of this technique in the works of five authors whose memoirs feature very different styles: Dorothy Allison, Mary Karr, David Sedaris, Abigail Thomas, and Jeannette Walls.

Regardless of style, the author’s use of implied meaning through objective presentation of details can give the reader a larger role in the emotional and intellectual interpretation of the work, thereby acting as a vehicle of trust. Crucial to the success of such a technique, however, is the foundational requirement of credibility. When examining the function and importance of credibility, we see that persona serves as a driving force that can be used to establish credibility and begin the crucial task of building the bridge of trust.

Though there are many sides to any one story, for the memoirist there is only one—that which is told from the perspective of the narrator. It is to this narrator the memoirist must remain true. In her book The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, Vivian Gornick defines persona as a voice inside the writer who tells the story from the appropriate perspective. Gornick states,

In nonfiction, the writer has only the singular self to work with. So it is the other in oneself that the writer must seek and find to create movement, achieve a dynamic. Inevitably, the piece builds only when the narrator is involved not in confession but in this kind of self-investigation, the kind that means to provide motion, purpose and dramatic tension. 1

Though Gornick states that the author of memoir “has only the singular self to work with,” the differences between the person living through the events of the story and the person telling the story cannot be ignored. It is, for example, quite common for a significant amount of time to pass before an author will write about traumatic or otherwise formative events through which she has lived. During that time, an essential transformation takes place. The author’s perspective shifts, allowing her to see the events of the past through a very different lens. It is through this shift that the persona is born. The persona represents a combination of the person who experienced the events and the person who, at a later point in time, recounts the events for the reader. The resulting narrator becomes a combination of these selves, providing the reader with a privileged perspective that would not otherwise be possible. Persona, essentially, provides the reader with a view of the story from two perspectives at once. The narrator of combined perspectives is able to interpret the events in a relatable way for the reader by providing privileged information about the events as they occur—information that only a person looking back on the events could know or otherwise understand.

In her memoir Safekeeping, Abigail Thomas illustrates this privileged perspective in a less traditional, while somewhat more obvious way than many other authors choose to employ. Thomas presents one view of herself in her youth and another view of herself in later years, sometimes writing in the third person as she looks back on the events of her past. The book evolves through constant comparisons of these selves, revealing a surprising disparity between the two. Of her younger self, Thomas writes, “She was afraid that there was no herself, that somehow she had gotten into this body, but she was too small for it, tiny. She was fooling people who thought she was real, and here.” 2 Looking back as a grandmother, Thomas can see what she couldn’t see when she was younger. “She was like the eye of a hurricane, high wind and water all around. She would (if she could) put her arm around the girl she’d been and try to tell her Take it easy, but the girl would not have listened. The girl had no receptors for Take it easy.” 3

Regardless of whether the memoir is written in first, second, third person, or any combination thereof, it is the persona of the narrator that drives the memoir, steering everything from style to language to tone to structure from a particular perspective. Once this perspective is established, the author is free to apply more creative elements of craft to continue building the work. But in order to stay true to the nonfiction genre, certain restrictions apply.

Though persona can transcend the boundaries of time, it remains one person’s perspective or set of perspectives, and therefore, by its very nature, it is limited. One of the first methods an author can use to establish and maintain the credibility of the narrator is to stay true to the persona of the work. When telling the events of a story as they were experienced by the narrator when she was a child, for example, as Jeannette Walls does in her memoir The Glass Castle, it is important to use simple language and a child-like voice. Walls writes, “Mom also believed in letting nature take its course. She refused to kill the flies that always filled the house; she said they were nature’s food for the birds and lizards. And the birds and lizards were food for the cats.” 4

Because a child would not know every word or description an author must use to accurately tell her story, the combined perspectives become crucial. But the author does not have to place both perspectives at the forefront, as Abigail Thomas did in the previous example. When recounting the events as they were experienced by a child, the author can use techniques that significantly minimize the presence of the older and wiser perspective, to the extent of making it seem nonexistent. The tone, style, and voice can do enough to effectively establish the appropriate persona in situations where using complex sentences that would be unlikely to emerge from the mind of a child would threaten to crack the foundation of the world the author is trying to re-create through the eyes of that child.

This technique of emphasizing one or multiple perspectives throughout the work can help the reader relate not only to the child who actually lived through the events, but also to the adult that child eventually became. This is the privileged perspective through which the reader can get to know the narrator on a deeper and more personal level. In this way, the privileged perspective offered through persona helps to build trust in the narrator as a credible storyteller.

Similarly, in presenting these views of the narrator from multiple perspectives, the author essentially bares her soul for the reader to interpret, analyze, and inevitably judge. This conscious act of exposure represents an immense gesture of trust on the author’s part—trust which also contributes to the bridge the author extends to the reader as an invitation into the story and, ultimately, into her life.

A significant challenge for the memoirist with regard to credibility involves character development. It is difficult, for example, for the memoirist to credibly enter the mind of a character other than herself. Therefore in memoir, implied meaning through the objective presentation of details becomes a useful tool in developing layered characters while still remaining true to the nonfiction genre. Memoirists, in fact, must rely on the use of this technique for character development because they cannot, to any significant extent, know the unspoken thoughts of another character. And what an author of nonfiction does not know, she cannot relate to the reader without risking the credibility of her work.

One way the memoirist can describe a character’s thoughts is by repeating things that character has said in the past. Jeannette Walls executes this technique in her memoir, The Glass Castle. Throughout the memoir, Walls’s mother freely expresses her unique thoughts on raising children. Walls writes, “She felt it was good for kids to do what they wanted because they learned a lot from their mistakes.” 5 Because Walls is telling the story from the child’s point of view, the reader naturally presumes that this assertion originated from her mother. The reader intuitively understands that a child of the narrator’s age would not have the interpretive skills necessary to deduce such a claim based only on her mother’s actions. Therefore, she must be repeating her mother’s words.

Though Walls refrains from commenting on the long-term, or even the short-term effects of such a philosophy, the reader learns some crucial information about both the mother and the narrator in this short sentence. Not only does the reader recognize the lack of a basic protective instinct in the mother, as well as the fact that the child is left to fend for herself, but she also begins to wonder about the extent of the neglect—a curiosity which compels her to continue turning the pages of the book.

In another passage, Walls recalls and repeats in the child-like perspective of the narrator, her father’s colorful language. “But he assured us that as long as he was around, we wouldn’t have to defend ourselves, because, by God, anyone who so much as laid a finger on any of Rex Walls’s children was going to get their butts kicked so hard that you could read Dad’s shoe size on their ass cheeks.” 6 Such an account, told in the child’s own version of her father’s language, maintains the credibility of persona while adding to the depth of the father’s already eccentric character.

Many authors use both detailed description and dialogue to illustrate the internal and external qualities of their main characters. Through some examples, we can see the differing effects of using only description, using only dialogue, or using a combination of both to develop characters.

When a character is presented through description of both external and internal qualities, the effect is equivalent to watching someone from afar—seeing the actions and learning about that character in a second-hand manner based on the narrator’s memories. In his memoir, Naked, David Sedaris exemplifies this effect. He writes, “My mother had always been willing to try anything. Had there been an Eskimo restaurant, she would have been happy to crawl into the igloo and eat raw seal with her bare hands. …” 7 He also paints a vivid picture of his father by describing his defining characteristics. “When arguing, it was always his tactic to deny the validity of our requests. If you wanted, say, a stack of pancakes, he would tell you not that you couldn’t have them but that you never really wanted them in the first place.” 8 Though in our minds, we can see the characters go through the actions Sedaris presents, however outrageous those actions may be, and we can practically hear some version of the conversation between Sedaris and his father, we are still watching and listening from afar. We do not yet feel like we know these characters on a personal level.

An effective descriptive technique used by Mary Karr in her memoir, The Liar’s Club is that of revealing habitual or otherwise repeated actions of a character. She says, “Pressing Mother for details of her past always led to eye-rolling and aspirin-taking and long afternoon naps.” 9 This description not only presents a vivid picture in the reader’s mind, but it also likely inspires the reader to form an opinion as to why such behavior is taking place. The mother obviously does not like to talk about her past. And her extreme reaction to any mention of it implies that something meaningful and unpleasant has likely taken place at a previous time in her life. Through this brief but poignant description, Karr piques the reader’s curiosity with the implication of her mother’s mysterious past.

In The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls uses a combination of describing her father’s actions and recalling his words. She writes, “Dad was so sure a posse of federal investigators was on our trail that he smoked his unfiltered cigarettes from the wrong end. That way, he explained, he burned up the brand name, and if the people who were tracking us looked in his ashtray, they’d find unidentifiable butts instead of Pall Malls that could be traced to him.” 10 The remembered dialogue gives the reader a little more information than the description alone, helping the reader get to know this character on more of a psychological level.

When a character is presented through direct dialogue, the reader enters the character’s mind, learning about the psychology behind that character’s behavior. The effect is more personal and feels more like a first-hand encounter. Sedaris, for example, illustrates his mother in this way through the sarcasm in her dialogue.

“I’m guessing you’re here about the head-shaking, am I right?” she’d shout. “That’s my boy, all right, no flies on him.” She suggested my teachers interpret my jerking head as a nod of agreement. “That’s what I do, and now I’ve got him washing the dishes for the next five years. I ask, he yanks his head, and it’s settled. Do me a favor, though, and just don’t hold him after five o’clock. I need him at home to straighten up and make the beds before his father gets home.” 11

After hearing her speak, we can relate to this character on a more personal level. We feel like we know her just a little bit better than we did when we watched her crawl into the igloo to eat the raw seal with her bare hands.

But the picture is not complete until a character is presented through both dialogue and description. Adding a brief dialogue to the previous description of Sedaris’s father changes the effect to provide the reader with both primary and secondary information and to help solidify her understanding of the character. “If you wanted, say, a stack of pancakes, he would tell you not that you couldn’t have them but that you never really wanted them in the first place. ‘I know what I want’ was always met with ‘No you don’t.’” 12 The reader now has a voice to go with the picture that Sedaris has presented of his father.

For the memoirist, objectivity is almost required in the combination of description and dialogue for credible character development. This style invites the reader to participate in the action of the story and draw her own conclusions about its meaning. We can see this effect in Naked when Sedaris paints a particularly vivid picture of his father during their family’s stay at a hotel for his sister’s wedding. “‘What more do you want out of a hotel?’ he shouted, stepping out onto the patio in his underpants.” 13 Sedaris has married dialogue with just enough description for the reader to latch onto and finish building the character in her own mind. Here, we can see that with a little help from the reader, the character can come to life.

Mary Karr also masters this technique in her memoir The Liar’s Club. The tenderness that the narrator’s father feels for her is masterfully revealed in one short sentence after she has hidden herself in his luggage the morning he is slated to leave his family in Colorado, seemingly forever. “‘Get outa there, Pokey,’ he said, drawing the zipper down to my belly button. ‘God sakes, you’ll break a fella’s heart.’” 14

While implied meaning through the objective presentation of details seems to be intrinsic to character development in memoir, especially through the use of dialogue, it can also be applied to many other elements of craft through the metaphorical language used to illustrate not only characters but also events, settings, and abstract concepts, to the effect of helping to engage the reader in the deeper meaning of the work.

In The Liar’s Club, Mary Karr deftly reveals her mother’s character through language that can be interpreted as a direct reflection of her unstable mental state. Karr writes, “Her cheekbones winged out, and her eyes were the flawed green of cracked marbles.” 15

For Jeannette Walls in The Glass Castle, fire represents the perils the narrator will face in her life, a life which often seems to teeter on the edge of danger. She writes,

Then he pointed to the top of the fire, where the snapping yellow flames dissolved into an invisible shimmery heat that made the desert beyond seem to waver, like a mirage. Dad told us that zone was known in physics as the boundary between turbulence and order. 16

Through this language, Walls invites the reader to make the connections between the basic states of fire and turbulence and her life as she recounts it, to the effect of engaging the reader in the interpretation of the work for its duration.

She describes the events of her childhood using the primary perspective of herself as a child growing up in the circumstances described. The understated tone reflects the child narrator’s naiveté, which slowly evolves into understanding as she matures. Walls does not self-reflect, nor does she comment on how she felt about the events of her childhood. She simply tells the story in chronological order, sticking only to those events that were formative to her development.

From the beginning, the children in this family are treated like adults with parents who never allow them to believe in Santa Claus and who always put their own needs first. Walls writes,

Mom explained that since only she and Dad could fit in the front of the U-Haul, Lori, Brian, Maureen, and I were in for a treat: We got to ride in the back. It would be fun, she said, a real adventure, but there wouldn’t be any light, so we would have to use all our resources to entertain one another. Plus we were not allowed to talk. Since it was illegal to ride in the back, anyone who heard us might call the cops. Mom told us the trip would be about fourteen hours if we took the highway, but we should tack on another couple of hours because we might make some scenic detours. 17

Though Walls never explains how this and other events made her feel, the reader certainly experiences emotions as a result of reading these passages. Suggestion practically screams throughout all the lines of this passage, but the true emotional catalyst lies in the word “scenic.” In no way could anything be considered “scenic” from the perspective of the children who are relegated to darkness in the back of a windowless U-Haul. In the voice of child-like innocence that directly contrasts with the nature of the astounding events presented, Walls clobbers the reader over the head with the reality of the situation.

It is likely that the emotions evoked as a result of reading such passages are of a similar nature to those which the author intended the reader to feel, if indeed, the author did intend to evoke particular emotions. But perhaps, in relaying the events without commenting, Walls wanted each reader to experience the personal emotions that naturally came as a result of reading the account—emotions that would be unique to the individual, based on her background, personality, experiences, and a host of other qualities that distinguish us, each from the other.

At one point, the narrator describes an event that occurred after her parents had spent the better part of a hot, desert afternoon in a bar while the children waited for them in the car. “Dad was driving and smoking with one hand and holding a brown bottle of beer with the other.” She continues, “Just then we took a sharp turn over some railroad tracks, the door flew open, and I tumbled out of the car.” 18 Each reader will experience her own set of emotions about the fact that the father was drinking and driving, and whether or not this led to the child falling out of the car, and what it all means in the grand scheme, all of which Walls seems content to let us figure out for ourselves.

Walls’s method of understated storytelling works exceptionally well for this piece, in which embellished language or further explanation might actually distract from the raw force of the events. Walls trusts the reader to form her own conclusions about the characters and events, and she trusts that those conclusions will evoke whatever emotions the reader feels, which allow her to relate to the story in her own way. She expertly uses reticence to evoke emotions, rarely ever commenting on her feelings even when the reader knows she must have been hurting, both emotionally and physically. This is apparent in a scene which takes place soon after the narrator enters a new school in the town to which her family has relocated. Walls writes,

I tried to get up, but all three girls started kicking me. I rolled away into a puddle, shouting for them to quit and hitting back at the feet coming at me from all sides. The other girls had closed in a circle around us and none of the teachers could see what was going on. There was no stopping those girls until they’d had their fill. 19

In addition to events, setting provides an effective host for layered meanings implied through the language and imagery that are used to describe it. In The Liar’s Club, for example, Mary Karr sets the scene of her hometown of Leechfield, Texas in such a way as to make the reader practically gasp for air. She writes,

The whole town sat at a semitropical latitude just spitting distance from the Gulf. It sat in a swamp, three feet below sea level at its highest point, and was crawled through by two rivers. Any hole you dug, no matter how shallow, magically filled up with brackish water. 20

Here, the term “spitting distance” implies that one might actually be inclined to spit on the town. The fact that the town “sat in a swamp,” as opposed to being built on a swamp, implies a fixed, sedentary, and generally stuck state of existence. If that wasn’t enough to describe the desperate state of affairs, the town “was crawled through by two rivers.” With the simple, past tense verb and passive voice, “was crawled,” takes the power of action away from the town and puts it in the clutches of the two intruding rivers that are taking their slow, sweet time “crawling” through the hopeless town—a town that is clearly a victim of its own location and thereby powerless to improve its situation. The reader can’t help but feel for the child narrator, whose state of existence must be reflected by the town that is practically drowning and in which she has no choice but to live.

Karr goes a step further. “I later learned that Leechfield at that time was the manufacturing site for Agent Orange, which surprised me not one bit.” 21 Somehow, the narrator retains a feeling of tenderness for the town, a feeling which the reader is inclined to believe reflects the narrator’s own feelings of self-worth as a child. “It was stuff like that that’d break your heart about Leechfield, what Daddy meant when he said the town was too ugly not to love.” 22

Similarly, Jeannette Walls buries the real meaning beneath her surface description of setting in The Glass Castle to foreshadow the impending state of her life affairs when her family moves back to her father’s hometown. She writes,

Finally, we entered hill country, climbing higher and deeper into the Appalachian Mountains, stopping from time to time to let the Oldsmobile catch its breath on the steep, twisting roads. It was November. The leaves had turned brown and were falling from the trees, and a cold mist shrouded the hillsides. There were streams and creeks everywhere, instead of the irrigation ditches you saw out west, and the air felt different. It was very still, heavier and thicker, and somehow darker. For some reason, it made us all grow quiet. 23

The immediate effect of this description of setting on the reader is a feeling of gut-sinking doom and gloom, which turns out to be a direct reflection on the world that the narrator is about to enter in the new town.

In addition to objective descriptions of setting, abstractions can serve as effective mechanisms to engage readers on a more personal level by providing concepts or ideas to which readers can assign meaning based on their own experiences. It is through this vehicle that Mary Karr reveals her most horrific revelations in The Liar’s Club. She writes, “Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in its most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.” 24 By anthropomorphizing suffering, Karr provides a mechanism by which each reader can create her own mental picture of family members, childhood bullies, strangers or other people who caused or otherwise represent suffering to her. In this way, Karr’s abstraction provides a vehicle for the reader’s personalization.

Throughout her memoir, Karr alternates between narrative and explanatory styles, inserting reflection where it fits and using abstract concepts to evoke emotion through universal experiences, thereby adding another layer of meaning for the reader to ponder. “When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out.” 25 Here, Karr broadens the arena for interpretation by presenting the concept of memory blocking as a basic function of the human mind. The reader can relate to Karr’s experience by associating her own experiences with this universal defense mechanism, and, in this way, can relate to Karr’s experience without having gone through the exact same set of events.

At one point, Karr writes in the second person about unfathomable episodes as if they were common events that are universally experienced by all. Though, in this case, most readers will not have experienced that which the narrator lives through, her style compels us to empathize. We empathize with this child narrator to whom such egregious injustices represent the norm.

On the night the sheriff came to our house and Mother was adjudged more or less permanently Nervous, I didn’t yet understand the word. I had only a vague tight panic in the pit of my stomach, the one you get when your parents are nowhere in sight and probably don’t even know who has a hold of you or where you’ll wind up spending the night. 26

In her memoir Safekeeping, Abigail Thomas proves to be a master of suggestion, using universal concepts about emotional growth to which many readers can relate on a personal level. The depth and breadth of meaning that Thomas succeeds in squeezing into so few words seems impossible. A single vignette can span decades, and the reader never feels like anything was left out. Thomas chooses just the right moments to highlight in ways that render the intended meaning unavoidable. Rather than steering clear of commenting, she dives right in to explain how she felt as a young woman versus how she feels now. She writes, “I’m remembering when the baby in my arms was my daughter, when it was all still to come. So many things did not go as I would have wished. There is so much I can’t undo.” 27 If the story were more narrative, this method may not be as effective, but in its current structure of vignettes that are strategically and meaningfully but not chronologically placed, the two points of view add to the complexity and depth of the work.

Writing at the heart of things, the way Thomas does in Safekeeping, depicts the times in life that stand out as snapshots of realization—past moments in which something substantial happened or changed. These are the moments Thomas captures, almost magically, in Safekeeping.

She looks out her window, uptown, at the water towers, at the squares of light in other windows. Where a man she hadn’t met back then, a man she was about to meet, a man whom she would love and hate and love again, a man with whom she would spend the next thirty years, give or take, has died. 28

By using simple, accessible language and brevity to get to the heart of complex, universal themes of love and loss and emotional growth, Thomas reaches out to the core of human nature with concepts to which all people can relate.

In Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, Dorothy Allison breaks up her memoir with brief but valuable flashes of wisdom gleaned over years of learning the hard way. She writes, “Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.” 29 These abstract statements are pregnant with unspoken meaning that the reader can interpret and to which she can relate using her own mental models, knowledge, or personal experiences.

Hidden between the lines of this memoir is much more than meets the eye. While Allison writes of the horrific abuse she endured as a child, she does not describe the events as they occurred—rather, she declares them, as if to reaffirm them for herself while telling her story to the reader. “The man raped me. It’s the truth. It’s a fact. I was five, and he was eight months married to my mother.” 30 From there, she only alludes to the fact that the abuse was ongoing. The reader must make the connections of another, deeper story, based on Allison’s style, tone, language, allusions, and explanations.

Allison’s story is largely declarative, and as such, she explicitly states that a deeper meaning lies beneath the words on the pages of her book. In doing so, she alludes to the importance of that “silent” meaning. Allison writes,

Behind the story I tell is the one I don’t. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear. Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence. 31

Allison boldly declares the fact that significant meaning bubbles beneath the surface of her silence and, in doing so, brings to light the importance of engaging the reader by allowing her to interpret that meaning. By trusting the reader with that job, the author forges the bridge of trust and provides a mechanism by which the reader can contribute to the construction by deciphering the many layers of meaning that comprise each memoir. With readers participating in the process, the levels of meaning expand to indeterminate proportions, as each reading by each reader evokes different sets of emotions and unveils alternative emotional connections. This act of trust on the author’s part elicits the trust of all readers whose hearts are filled by the silence that seeps between the lines and fills the space behind the words on the pages of every memoir.

Notes

1. Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: the Art of Personal Narrative (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), p. 35.

2. Abigail Thomas, Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life (New York: Anchor, 2001), p. 64.

3. Ibid., p. 41.

4. Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle: a Memoir (New York: Scribner, 2006), p. 64.

5. Ibid., p. 59.

6. Ibid., p. 24.

7. David Sedaris, Naked (New York: Back Bay, 1998), p. 246.

8. Ibid., p. 245.

9. Mary Karr, The Liars’ Club: a Memoir (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 12.

10. Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle: a Memoir (New York: Scribner, 2006), p. 19.

11. David Sedaris, Naked (New York: Back Bay, 1998), p. 16.

12. Ibid., p. 245.

13. Ibid., p. 244.

14. Mary Karr, The Liars’ Club: a Memoir (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 193.

15. Ibid., p. 41.

16. Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle: a Memoir (New York: Scribner, 2006), p. 61.

17. Ibid., p. 48.

18. Ibid., p. 30.

19. Ibid., p. 139.

20. Mary Karr, The Liars’ Club: a Memoir (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 23.

21. Ibid., pp. 33-34.

22. Ibid., p. 34.

23. Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle: a Memoir (New York: Scribner, 2006), p. 130.

24. Mary Karr, The Liars’ Club: a Memoir (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 49.

25. Ibid., p. 9.

26. Ibid., p. 7.

27. Abigail Thomas, Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life (New York: Anchor, 2001), p. 175.

28. Ibid., p. 37.

29. Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (New York: Plume, 1996), p. 7.

30. Ibid., p. 39.

31. Ibid., p. 39.

I declared a red alert for puppy arrival to all my colleagues and supervisors. Tracy looked like she had swallowed a beach ball. I’d worked at the publishing company for more than a year, and historical eyewitness accounts of the owners ogling and fawning over the kittens and critters other staff brought in by the basketful assured me of their comparable respect for the significance of my first litter of puppies. This was the second position I’d held since Nick and I had moved from Pennsylvania to Utah almost two years prior in pursuit of his passion for sled-dog racing. When he called the office on a Friday afternoon to tell me Tracy was in labor and had already given birth to her third puppy, I leapt out of my chair and ran in circles repeating “The puppies are coming!” before sprinting to the time clock and yelling in the direction of the raised eyebrows behind me as I flew out the door, “I have to go! The puppies are coming!”

I arrived at the kennel as Tracy gave birth to her fifth puppy, and she showed no signs of slowing down. Nick, who had been monitoring the proceedings for several hours, relinquished his post to look for a cardboard box, so he could transport the puppies across the street. They’d live in the shelter of our garage with Tracy until they were weaned and old enough to move into the kennel. He’d purchased a plastic kiddie pool for their enclosure and lined it with blankets for warmth. The pool awaited their arrival in the garage that day as I sat before Tracy, mesmerized by the surprisingly gory show. Tracy’s instincts served her well as puppies continued to emerge. When Nick returned with the box, she was up to number eight.

“Isn’t she done yet?” he asked.

“Apparently not,” I said.

“Oh my god!” he laughed, and I realized he’d just gained an entire team of sled dogs.

“Poor Tracy,” I said. Her eyes had assumed a wild cast, desperate as she was to finish this job. With her snout saturated in blood, she struggled to clean the puppies that pushed forth with each contraction. Nick and I stared at the untouched sac beside her, trying to determine if it was a puppy or afterbirth. When she got around to working on it, the sac revealed a puppy.

“Do you think they’ll all survive?” I asked, worried for the first time since Nick had told me about the pregnancy.

“I doubt it,” Nick said. “I’ve never seen a dog have this many puppies. She probably won’t have enough nipples to feed them all.”

The words unlatched a portal to the past, and I saw myself at eight years old, standing beside my mother at the porcelain sink in our kitchen. “I’m going to have puppies instead of babies when I grow up,” I told her.

An “old soul” is how my mother sometimes referred to me, saying I knew things I shouldn’t have known at my age. It’s possible, at the time, she believed me. In the twenty years that followed, my conviction receded, pushing the prognostic declaration into the pits of my subconscious until this moment. Sitting 2,000 miles across the country from my mother, I now watched as that childhood prediction unfolded in the form of my boyfriend’s dog mushing dream come true.

“You can do it, Tracy,” I said quietly. She looked at me with a vacant gaze and continued her work. Tiny wet puppies of various colors squirmed around her. At last, she hit the magic number and was finished. We sat in silence as she stretched out to feed all ten of her offspring. They looked like piglets with their eyes sealed shut and their ears barely perceptible on their heads. They inched forward on round bellies with rubbery legs paddling toward their mother.

“Nick,” I said, craning my neck toward the puppies, “it looks like they’re all feeding.” He leaned above Tracy, and reached in to separate the puppies.

“Wow,” he said. “She’s got that crazy long torso.”

“Do you think she can do it?” I looked at him.

“We’ll have to wait and see, sweetie.” Tracy lifted her head at the sounds of our voices, her eyes now steady and clear. She shifted her gaze from Nick to me then lay her head back down with a sigh. Nick put his arm around me, and we watched his sled team continue to nurse.

When we’re all finished with the orange wedges, she cuts another orange in half and smashes each half, one at a time down into the glass juicer. She pours the juice through the strainer that sits on top of my glass. Before she hands it to me, I watch her squeeze two drops of her diabetic sweetener into the juice and stir it in. I take the juice to the kitchen table, where I sit and wait for my Pepperidge Farm toast. I can’t resist taking one tiny sip of juice before my toast arrives. The extra sweetness of the juice stays in my mouth even after I’ve swallowed.

When my toast is ready, Grammie tops it with thick pats of real butter, cuts it diagonally the way I like it, and places it on the table in front of me. The toast is golden brown, and the butter is still melting on top. I quickly take a bite, sinking my teeth into the warm pat of butter, and Grammie smiles at me before turning back to the sink to clean up.

When I was growing up, butter was a staple ingredient to my grandma’s cooking. Of course I didn’t realize until much later, when I asked Grandma to share some of her recipes, that entire sticks of butter, or what Grandma referred to as “oleo,” had been melted into the saucepan to ensure sufficient lubrication and flavor-infusion for the rigatoni sauce or the oven-roasted chicken or the succulent meat stuffing she always made for Thanksgiving dinner.

Upon spending the night at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, I’d awake to the sounds and smells of a well-used kitchen—the gentle scrape of a fork against the bottom of a cast-iron skillet as Grandma swirled a thick pat of butter in preparation for the eggs; the whistle of the aluminum tea kettle and subsequent waft of coffee (Grandma always used instant); and the nutty aroma of the butter as it sizzled to a golden-brown hue.

By the time I got downstairs, Grandpa would already be sitting at the red-trimmed aluminum kitchen table reading his morning newspaper, coffee steaming in the cup in front of him. In the middle of the table would be a stick of butter and a tube of saltine crackers. Since I was too young to enter the refrigerator by myself (something to this day I hesitate to do in that house, as a result of those childhood rules), Grandma would get me a small glass of apricot juice.

Sometimes Grandpa would acknowledge my presence with a “Hullo Susie.” I never knew if he was teasing or if he simply didn’t know my name. Most times, his attention remained focused on the newspaper. One thing I was permitted to do was butter my own saltine crackers. At the time it didn’t occur to me to wonder why, for every other meal, there was fresh Italian bread from Joey’s bakery when, for breakfast, we ate only saltine crackers. The buttered crackers were my favorite part—well, the butter itself was my favorite part—and I would have been much more generous with it had Grandma and Grandpa not been there to covertly supervise from the corners of their respective eyes.

As I commenced buttering, Grandma would crack an egg directly into the skillet, stir it with the fork, and flavor it generously with salt as it flash fried in about thirty seconds. The number of crackers you got to eat with your egg was the number you were able to butter in the amount of time it took Grandma to cook the egg. Sometimes though, you’d make it to the kitchen table early enough to butter more crackers than could reasonably be eaten with the egg. Those days resulted in coffee soup.

After Grandma would slide the egg onto my plate, she’d fix me my own cup of coffee, rich with milk and plenty of sugar, the way children drank it, I supposed. By the time I finished my egg, the coffee would be cool enough to sip. At that point Grandpa would fold up his newspaper, prepare some crackers of his own, glance at my plate, and proceed to crumble his stack of buttered saltine crackers into his mug of instant coffee. I did the same.

I’m not sure it’s possible to describe the taste of coffee soup—rich with butter, savory with saltine crackers, and sweet with sugared coffee that, in my case, had been diluted with milk. As the butter melted, the oil would rise to the top of the mug. The crackers, saturated by the hot liquid, softened immediately, and if you didn’t eat the concoction quickly enough, they would form a sludgepile at the bottom of your mug. But you always ate it quickly, while the coffee was still warm and the crackers retained a measure of texture.

The passing of Grandpa saw an end to my coffee soup days, but the memory remains. Somewhere in time, a little girl sits at a table with her grandpa. In the last few moments of the early morning, they sit in silence spooning sweet, buttery coffee soup, while the grandma bustles around the kitchen preparing all for whatever the day may bring.

Four months after moving in to the run-down mobile home, I still hadn’t gotten used to the popping pinion in the woodburner, the sinking floor underneath that woodburner, or the whistling winds that sometimes pushed the battered old trailer to the brink of impending flight. In a strange way, these things that threatened our world actually brought Nick and I closer. We were in this struggle together, I often reminded myself—the young couple starting a fresh new life. Things would get better. And our bond would be stronger for all that we’d gone through. We’d look back on these times with fond memories. The fact that were starting at the extreme bottom made it all the more romantic, I thought. The trailer was just a starting point. A decidedly unfortunate starting point.

But for all the frights, frustrations, and inconveniences that loomed over us in the makeshift living quarters, there was one paramount saving grace that even I couldn’t deny—a grace that transcended anything built by human hands. And all Nick or I had to do to access that grace was walk outside. Across the street from our less-than-regal mobile home was a majestic wilderness. In addition to having unobstructed views of the second highest peak in Utah—Mount Timpanogos—we lived on Soldier Hollow road. By that time, Soldier Hollow had already been designated as the venue for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games biathlon event. Between our trailer and the Soldier Hollow future Olympic venue was a right-hand turn that lead to the most scenic drive of my life. I can’t count the number of times that fall we drove up the road that led to Cascade Springs, continuing through the Alpine Loop Scenic Byway to witness the shock of flaming colors as we wound through the switchback crack of a road nestled in the towering folds of deciduous-blanketed Wasatch mountains. But Cascade Springs road was impassable in winter. And that made it a perfectly acceptable, though treacherously steep, sled dog training track.

The first time Nick took me on a dog-sled ride I almost chickened out before he even had all the dogs hooked up to the sled. It was ten o’clock at night. The moonlight radiated off the snow, illuminating the world around us in a mystical glow. The dogs went crazy.

Nick’s handmade wooden racing sled was approximately six feet in length, crafted with long, slender strips of White Ash that Nick had glued and clamped to the perfect specifications before securing each with hand-tied knots of the strongest fishing line he could find. With a forward thrusting brush bow that mirrored the curve of the upright drive bow, this sled was as graceful as it was sleek. In the center of the sled, sitting delicately atop the six-foot long runners, was the basket—traditionally built to hold supplies, untraditionally built to hold me. Nick had lined the sled with thick blankets, topped with a sleeping bag, which he unzipped in preparation for our quick takeoff. He would drive, standing up at the back of the sled. I would ride, all snug inside the blankets in the cargo basket.

Nick set the claw brake and, for extra security, dug the snow hook deep into the snow behind the sled before instructing me on how it was all going to happen. He would hook the two leaders up first, Drizzle and Simba. I was to stand up front with them, holding the line between them and making sure they didn’t get tangled as he hooked up the other dogs, one by one.

Got it, I thought, no problem. I took my position at the front of the lines, only then noticing how long the lines actually were. The lead dogs, I realized, would be a good twenty feet from the front of the sled. As I was considering the implications of such long lines, Nick came running toward me with a frantic Drizzle beside him. He had to hold her up by the chain so that her two front feet didn’t touch the ground. Otherwise, he would have had no chance of keeping a hold on this dog that was bred to run. Even with Nick’s restraints, Drizzle plunged forward on her hind legs in giant leaps, and I realized that if her two front feet were to make contact with the ground, that dog would be gone in a flash to anywhere. I was beginning to get nervous.

Once Drizzle was hooked up to the line, she plunged forward in a frenzy, jerking the sled off its runners behind her.

“Hold her!” Nick yelled, as he ran like crazy back to get another dog. I tried my best to hold Drizzle by the shoulders and convince her to contain her mania. Next came Simba, our gentle black giant whose only previous mission in life seemed to be that of sweetly pining for as much attention as he could get. I wasn’t worried about Simba, until I saw the look in his wildly possessed eyes. Somehow, the Simba that Nick attached to the line next to Drizzle seemed to be inhabited by the spirit of a dog I hadn’t yet met. One that I probably wouldn’t have cared to, given a choice. While Drizzle had only partially accommodated my firm directive of settling down, Simba would have none of it. The sixty-pound wad of muscle lunged forward with all his might, and out of his throat came blood-curdling sounds that didn’t seem natural. A cross between a howling bellow and an agonized wail launched with every thrusting lunge. The little wooden sled dangled on the end of the flailing lines, and my blankets went asunder in the jumble.

“HOLD HIM!” Nick shouted as he approached the next set of lines with Lefty. By that time, I was as frantic as the dogs were, yelling back at them and forcing my arms between the two leaders as they barked and screeched and yowled in my ears. The mind-numbing ruckus only got worse as more dogs took their places in line.

I have one job, I told myself, to keep the leaders untangled and steady. At one point I thought Lefty and Whitey seemed to be on the opposite sides of where they’d started. Nick must have noticed at the same time and came forward to untangle them. As I watched Nick fling little Lefty over the line and back into position, I saw Swede jump straight up in the air and land on Mufasa. Both dogs started jumping, and lines twisted everywhere. Nick continued up and down the line of dogs, fixing the tangles and adjusting positions. The dogs seemed determined to raise the dead with their heart-pumping uproar.

I have one job, I kept telling myself. My breath was now coming in short gasps. My heart felt like a hummingbird’s, ready to explode. One job, I thought.

“Come on, come on, get in the sled!” Nick shouted from the helm. I released my hold on Simba and ran like crazy, jumping into the sled and falling clumsily into the cushion of blankets just as the hook came loose.

“HAaaaa-Ayyyyke!” Nick shouted.

Whoooshhhh! We were off like an arrow into the night, and absolute silence echoed in my ears.

Shhhhhhhh, Shhhhhhhhh, Shhhhhhhhh . . . Nick’s delicate wooden sled glided over the snow like a ballerina on her stage.

“Wow,” I whispered.

“Cover up,” Nick said, reaching down to pull the sleeping bag around me. I adjusted my position after having fallen so haphazardly into the sled. I pulled my hat over my ears and snuggled down into the blankets, drinking in the silent beauty of the winter night. As the dogs slowed to pace, a light snow began to fall.

“What do you think?” Nick eventually asked. He couldn’t see the tears in my eyes.

“Unreal,” I said.

“Yeah,” he replied.

The ride lasted for about an hour. We went part of the way up Cascade Springs road before turning around for the descent. It was a hairy turnaround in the middle of the night on a narrow road, but by that time, a kind of absurd tranquility had infiltrated my body and soul and we could probably have launched right over the side of that mountain before anything shook me up again. The dogs seemed to have found their balance as well, never again fidgeting or making a sound after the initial disarray. This was a team in harmony, I realized, not caring that I had no earthly idea as to how it had all come together.

The next day I was still in a daze from the dog-sledding experience. I made us a big brunch of fried potatoes, toast, and eggs—mine over-easy and Nick’s sunny-side up, the way he liked them. We sat at the table in contented silence.

“Hey,” I said, finally shattering our morning reverie as something popped into my head from the night before. “You never said ‘Mush.’”

“Huh?” Nick looked up from dipping his toast into the sunny part of his egg.

“Mush,” I repeated. “You’re supposed to say mush when you mush dogs. You never said it.”

“Nobody says mush,” he informed me. “The dogs wouldn’t even know what to do. You may as well say banana,” he smiled.

“What?” I couldn’t believe it. “Then why is it called dog mushing?”

“I have no idea,” he said. “I’ve never heard anyone say mush in all the years I’ve run dogs. The word is completely meaningless,” he said, and he pushed his plate away, the whites of his eggs still completely intact with the indentation of a perfect round circle where the sun used to be.

~~

For almost two years, I felt the bag in my pocket, and, though its presence undoubtedly registered in my mind, rather than extract the bag and place it in the garbage, I nestled it securely back into the pocket where it seemed to belong. This morning when I touch the bag, I pull it from the pocket, and I feel something akin to surprise. What is it still doing there? I wonder.

Before the kidney failure and resulting fight for my dog’s life, I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, throughout which Didion examines her emotions and behavior after the sudden death of her husband in much the same way an entomologist might examine a newly discovered butterfly specimen. Though sentiment surely lives and breathes beneath the surface, only the facts are displayed. Throughout the reading and long after, one image hovered off the page and returned to me periodically. The image of her husband’s shoes. Looking at the plastic bag in my hand, the image returns to me now.

I could not give away the rest of his shoes.
I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need his shoes if he was to return.
The recognition of this thought by no means eradicated the thought.
I have still not tried to determine (say, by giving away the shoes) if the thought has lost its power.

Didion does not comment on her feelings about the fact that the shoes remain, nor about the reasons why they might. In this scientific exploration of emotionally generated behavior, the facts are the facts. Perhaps it’s the lack of sentiment that inspired me to wonder what comforted Didion about the shoes. Was it really for comfort that she kept them?

Thinking of the bag in my coat pocket, I realize that, while comfort surely contributed to the duration of its stay, the primary reason the bag remained was no different than its original purpose—to clean up after my dog during our frequent walks. To this day, I am prepared.

I am reminded of my uncle’s funeral, which took place three years after the car accident that claimed my younger cousin’s life. She was two weeks away from her college graduation. On the night of my uncle’s viewing, that cousin’s parents welcomed my family to stay in their home. I slept on the pullout sofa downstairs; my parents occupied the spare room; and my brother and sister-in-law stayed in my cousin’s old bedroom. The room had been cleaned, the bed made up for guests, but the arrangement, it seemed, remained just as their daughter had left it. A pair of jeans hung over the back of a chair. Pencils and notebooks lay scattered on the desk. By all appearances, my cousin could return at any moment and pick up where she left off.

Was it a shrine? My brother wondered. I think (just now) perhaps it was not. How would she feel, my cousin’s parents may have wondered, to return to a rearranged room—clothes and projects not where she’d left them? Her parents, by my interpretation, were prepared for her return.

It’s the same with the shoes. The same with the plastic bag. Why those items? The answer doesn’t matter.

What matters is that you think they will return. You think someday, in some shape or form, they’ll migrate back to you—re-enter your physical orbit. You’ll recognize them when they do, you are sure, in whatever shape or form they’ve taken. You’ll embrace them then. So you wait. You are prepared.

As I place the bag back into the pocket of my coat and walk out the door on my way to work, I wonder, did Joan Didion ever part with her husband’s shoes?

Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. 1st ed. New York: Vintage, 2007.

Part 1: Sick
Part 2: A History of Anxiety
Part 3: Stomach Virus
Part 4: Specter
Part 5: Dignity
Part 6: Pride
Part 7: Tests
Part 8: Rare Disease
Part 9: Diagnosis
Conclusion: A Note on Celiac Disease

It has been nine years since my diagnosis, and I am still learning. I am sure I will never stop. I consider myself lucky in that, after all I went through, I was diagnosed with a condition that is controllable. Celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder in which the small intestine is destroyed when gluten is ingested, thereby impairing the body’s ability to digest food and absorb nutrients. Gluten is a protein found in many grains, including wheat, barley, and rye. These ingredients are hidden in more common foods than anyone who isn’t forced to think about such things would imagine, including soups and broth, seasonings, marinades, and a host of processed food ingredients. Celiac disease can be triggered by stress, a viral infection, or any life-altering event. Symptoms mirror those of many other illnesses and include diarrhea, gas, bloating, lethargy, weakness, malnutrition, anemia, and quite a few more, many of which are caused by complications from the persistence of other symptoms. Though it is often misdiagnosed and even more often undiagnosed, celiac disease is not rare.

It is now estimated that 1 in every 100 people in the United States has celiac disease. An astounding 97% of those people are undiagnosed (p. 3 Green, Jones). In their book Celiac Disease A Hidden Epidemic, Peter H.R. Green, M.D. and Rory Jones point out that “Celiac disease is the most common—and one of the most under-diagnosed—hereditary autoimmune conditions in the United States today. It is as common as hereditary high cholesterol.” Although celiac disease has been widely recognized in Europe for many years, it has, in America, been deemed as rare—a puzzling conclusion considering the high ratio of Americans who hail from European descent.

I constantly read updates on celiac disease research, and it is finally gaining recognition in this country by both the food and the medical industries. Nine years ago, when I lay in that hospital bed listening to the doctor explain how rare celiac disease was, I believed him. Since then, I’ve learned a few things, including the fact that celiac disease is much more prevalent than was once thought. I know full well that the amount of gluten necessary to cause a negative reaction is unknown; that trace amounts of contaminants must be avoided; and that the problems caused by this disease are internal and potentially not even perceivable. Still, I sat in silent awe five years after my diagnosis as my new doctor explained that a certain medication probably didn’t contain “enough” gluten to cause a reaction.

Celiac disease is not rare. I will repeat this as many times as is necessary for the rest of my life. At the time I was diagnosed, it was simply not well accepted by the American medical profession. That is changing.

Green H.R., Peter, M.D. and Jones, Rory. Celiac Disease A Hidden Epidemic. 1st ed.
New York: HarperCollins, 2006.

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I hope you enjoyed reading “My Rare Disease,” though by now, we all know this disease is not rare. Dire need for better awareness and understanding persist. Please consider making a donation to one of the many organizations that are now striving to perform research and offer education regarding celiac disease and gluten intolerance. Thank you for participating in this journey. Mush!

National Foundation for Celiac Awareness

Celiac Disease Foundation

Celiac Sprue Association

University of Maryland Center for Celiac Research

University of Chicago Celiac Disease Center

Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University