Collections: Riddles

"One morning we will unwind from each other's bodies for the last time, unaware that one of us is falling faster than the other."

"'The last time I saw my father,' we will begin wanting to call forth some significant moment. "The last time I saw my father..." And then, because simple truth compels us forward, "He was wiping off the windshield." Or "he was rinsing out his coffee cup." Nothing much. No matter. Emily Dickinson heard a fly buzz. Finally it is the small things that break us."

--Rebecca McClanahan, The Riddle Song and Other Remeberings

Earlier this week I finished Rebecca McClanahan's collection of essays that she introduces by writing, "The same questions keep asking themselves." I admit, part of the reason I'm obsessively reading "collections" is to figure out how to create one. The same questions pester me until I think I've answered it four billion times. Like anything with marriage, family, home, and even more specific: pregnancy and place--will my thesis read like a ride with hiccups? Will it be the same idea revisited, revisited, revisited, until my reader is nauseated?

McClanahan's collection relies more on memoir than I write, but it's delightful. The beauty of her language and thoughts allow her to drift into primarily personal experience without needing any justification. (Do we need any justification? I'm preparing to teach a personal writing class and I bring up justification? What do I expect? Absolution? The idea that someone might care about my personal life made public seems selfish--but some argue that writing is a particularly selfish act. Montaigne believed that one could not know the world beyond the self, that the self enabled compassion for the reality beyond us. I try to cling to that, even in my insecure moments). Basically, I loved the book with its essays on relationships, birth, death, belonging--are these what all questions are whittled down to? Perhaps. Why not examine the world as an individual from birth to death, wondering wandering to belong to and for something/one?

I should write a full-out review of the book, so I'm letting it process a bit more before analysis. Read it, you'll enjoy it.