Adrian Tomine’s Summer Blonde; or how everyone you will ever be romantically involved with is a creep

browsing through old book reviews, reposting and whatnot. continue.

As I read Summer Blonde earlier this week, my mind kept returning to something I had written a few months ago, Love Notebook #5. These lines specifically repeated themselves over and over again in my head:

This is a love story for the creeps and the stalkers and the freaks; for the people who call you 46 times in a row when you don’t pick up the first time; for the ones who convince you that it’s totally normal that they watch you sleep; for the people who think all your friends want to sleep with you; for the people who don’t know when to let go; for the people who delete all the photos of your exes from your computer when you’re not home; and for the people who will only know how to love in their own fucked up ways.

I loved you, too.

I know about creeps. We all do, really. At some point or another, we’ve been the creep or the creeped upon in a given situation. This is the common thread in Summer Blonde, that all of these characters, all of us really, are weirdos. They exist in isolated states whether they are involved romantically with another person or not. The comics are not only drawn subtly and in great detail but the stories are as nuanced yet realistic as the accompanying art. As in his acclaimed graphic novel Shortcomings, Tomine creates characters whose small worlds teem with the everyday insecurities and neuroses that are almost uncomfortably familiar for the reader. Tomine is successful as an artist because he is almost preternaturally aware of what people are thinking and doing behind closed doors.

Summer Blonde is a collection of four stories, each loosely linked to the other by the overwhelming feeling of awkwardness and loneliness that accompanies so many interactions between humans. The first story, “Alter Ego”, deals with Martin, a writer in his mid-twenties who has received a decent amount of praise for his first novel and is now unable to meet the deadline for his follow-up book. He is bored and distracted with his life when he receives a postcard from the girl he was in love with in high school and decides to track her down. The girl is long gone from his hometown by the time he comes around but Martin befriends her high school-aged sister and they begin a tenuous friendship as the rest of his relationships begin to crumble. “Alter Ego” is a study in getting the things you thought you wanted and then finding that you’re still not sure what you want. Martin feels like that friend who continually complains about his life but only so those around him can remind him of how lucky he is. With people like this, does that ever matter? Don’t they still find ways to see how awful their lives are regardless of reality?

Indeed, reality, or relative ideas of reality rather, is an idea that every character in Summer Blonde struggles to define and live in. The title story, “Summer Blonde”, centers around Neil, a lonely man who is jealous of his casanova neighbor, Carlo, and besotted with the Vanessa, the girl who works at the greeting card store he visits often. Neil is a nebbish in the classic sense and spends hours in therapy discussing his inability to have relationships with women and his awkward crush on Vanessa. His obsession with Vanessa grows when he sees that she is involved with Carlo. This leads Neil down a road where he becomes directly involved in Vanessa’s life in irreparable ways. Reality is not only an issue for Neil, who can only see himself as a guardian of sorts towards Vanessa, but for the other characters who delude themselves in their own perceptions of their romantic relationships. All involved are left to question whether they can ever really know the person they’re sleeping with any more than they know the person who stands next to them on the street.

Hillary Chan, a lonely, somewhat angry phone operator, is the focus of “Hawaiian Getaway”. She is fired for an error involving William Shatner (no lie) but doesn’t seem to really care. Now unemployed, she sits in her apartment all day, avoiding awkward phone conversations with her pushy mother and overachieving sister. She has little contact with the outside world and has difficulty connecting with other people. She begins to get her kicks by calling the pay phone on the street below her bedroom window when people pass, harassing and berating the people who answer. Hillary is unable to vent those frustrations towards the people in her life so she lets herself relieve her own anger by hiding behind the anonymity of a phone call. This feels familiar, not only the feelings of inadequacy and frustration with the direction your life is heading, but the feeling of needing to vent and finding yourself unable to to the people closest to you. Why else have humans kept journals for thousands of years? What about the internet, with its faceless barbs and bickering on message boards and the comment sections of websites and blogs? We all have mediums where we lash out without the repercussions of being known. Of course, the double edged sword of technology is that it’s now that much harder to remain faceless forever.

The final story in the collection moves from the awkward world of twenty-somethings to the truly tragic realm that is high school. “Bomb Scare” centers around Scotty, a lonely high schooler who has one friend, Alex, who is constantly tortured at school for possibly being gay. Scotty’s friendship with Alex ends as Scotty tries to befriend Cammie, a girl who is only well liked because of her sexual willingness. Scotty turns his back on Alex in order to impress Cammie only to find that he doesn’t really know that he wants to be close to anyone. This story seemed to be the most painful, perhaps because high school, while different for everyone, is such a singular experiment in not only hurting each other but ourselves. It feels as if we are going through the motions of being almost adult while blindfolded, having no idea how to go about the simple things.

This is a collection of stories for the voyeur in all of us. Tomine is a master at creating the most relatable and alienating images of loneliness in comics, literature in general even, these days. This of course comes back down to perception: what are we supposed to be looking at or for? Reading this gives you the feeling of looking through your lover’s drawers when he or she isn’t home. You’re expecting to find something you don’t want to see but then you find something else entirely and you’re never sure how to feel about it. This of course makes you as much of a weirdo as the significant other you were suspicious of. Welcome to the club; nothing but love can turn you into a total creep.

Whip It (2009)

My first piece on Whip It (which some of you may have read a few months ago) is up at A Bright Wall in a Dark Room today. Thanks to everyone who has been reading and who is newly reading!

brightwalldarkroom:

WHIP IT REAL GOOD

by Anais Escobar

Recently, I sat in a theater for #4 on my list of favorite afternoon activities (the top three being sex, napping, and reading a book, in no particular order), watching a movie. I let the rollicking fun that is Whip It wash over me and I soon realized two things as I tapped my boots against the empty seat in front of me:

1. I can relate too much to this movie.

2. Why aren’t more women seeing this?

I went into Whip It expecting about two hours of a fun time, girls being rowdy, skates, pop music. I did not expect to leave thinking about underlying issues days later. As you might have heard by this point in time, Whip It, based on the novel Derby Girl by Shauna Cross, centers around Bliss Cavendar, an awkward teenage girl in small town Texas who is going through the motions in local beauty pageants in order to please her domineering mother. Bliss finds her own footing, literally as well as figuratively, in the world of women’s roller derby. She tries out on a whim and makes the team, her small frame ideal for the speed required to weave through packs of shoving, hip-checking women on skates. Bliss becomes comfortable in her own skin as she navigates that common, difficult part of growing up where you try to reconcile your chosen family and life with the one that you are born into.

I thought a lot about my mother during the movie. I felt like I was watching her as I watched Bliss squirm at the pageant dress fittings. My mom used to be a lot like Bliss’s mom, Brooke; she was a former dancer and beauty pageant contestant who wanted nothing more than for me to follow in her footsteps and make it big in the way that stars used to in the Golden Age of Hollywood. I was tiny when she discovered that I had a natural talent for singing and a fondness for my ballet classes - and she pounced on it. From the age of two on, I spent any time I was not in school at any kind of lesson you can imagine: ballet, tap, jazz, acting for the stage, commercial acting, singing, violin, piano. I thought I was happy at the time because God knows it’s good to see your mom beam at your accomplishments, but really, I wanted to do anything but the things I did every day after school.

I didn’t really do anything about these feelings until I was older. I was involved in this whole world, training and dancing with a ballet company until the age of 15 when my parents’ divorce finally gave me the out I needed to escape these things. Without these extracurricular activities, I remained the perfect child with straight A’s and never got into too much trouble, but I was still uncomfortable in my own skin. It wasn’t until I went away to college at 18 - and then took time off of school for two years - that I really began doing the things I liked, pursuing the things that I had kept myself from doing for fear of upsetting my mom. By almost 21, things had changed as a result of how much I had grown.

I remember coming home for the holidays just before my 21st birthday and my mom seeing the tattoos I had accumulated in the time I’d been away from home. I sat and explained each one to her and she sort of nodded quietly. We sat for a long time at my grandma’s kitchen table and didn’t say anything. She looked at my crossed legs in my knee length skirt, a big scar from a cycling accident still pink and raised moving in front of her eyes as I shook one Chuck-shod foot. My hair was shoulder length (no longer the fauxhawk she had despised) but messy and curly, my bangs falling into my eyes, smudged with black eyeliner. My fingernails were painted hot pink but I knew they were shorter than she would have liked.

“Are you happy?” She asked and looked at me, the lines on her face doing nothing but enhancing her beautiful face.

“What do you mean?” I wondered where this was going. My mom had never been one to ask a simple question.

“You’re just different than I expected you to turn out, I guess. You were a very girly little girl.”

“I still am, Mommy. I’m still girly in a lot of ways but I’m also just more myself. It’s hard to be yourself when you’re a kid.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She was defensive instantly. She never liked to hear about the things I didn’t like about my childhood.

“I liked the things I did during my childhood. Maybe I would have chosen different things but I think they sort of shaped who I am now. I guess they sort of helped me figure out the things I do like.” I sat back and tried to gauge her reaction.

“Yeah, I suppose.” She lifted her face to look at me closely. “You’re the prettiest girl in the world, Anaïs. I just want you to be happy.”

I knew she meant it and still does. I know that no matter how much she wishes that I hadn’t gotten tattoos and that I had really wanted to go to law school and that I wouldn’t have wanted to do so many of the things I’ve done, she is still my biggest fan in every area of my life. She has started to see that, despite the fact that she brought me into this world, I have my own life to create as I go along, making my own errors.

I don’t have kids, I don’t really hope to have them for a while, but I’ve learned a lot just from being my mother’s only child. I think there’s a point where a parent sees that their child has grown into whoever he or she is going to be and from then on, all they can do is hope that they’ve done the best they can for that kid. It’s like that moment when your mom or dad lets go of the handlebars and lets you ride your bike on your own, for better or for worse. There are moments like this in Whip It between Bliss and Brooke where you can see that despite their differences, they truly love and respect one another for the women they are. You don’t have to be a carbon copy of your mom to make her proud; you just have to honor and remember the work she put into raising you with every choice you make later on along the line.

While many movies struggle to portray interesting, strong, flawed women, Whip It has several ladies who fit this description. The roller derby ladies in this movie are fierce, tough athletes of different sizes and shapes, something refreshing from the majority of movies released. Kristen Wiig shines as Maggie Mayhem, team captain of the Hurl Scouts and mother figure to young Bliss. Far from the wackier characters she usually plays on SNL, Wiig gives a subtle yet fun performance in this film, a voice of reason in the mess Bliss finds herself in as she tries to balance her newfound passion with her past.

As Iron Maven, Juliette Lewis plays Bliss’s roller derby rival mostly for laughs, causing trouble between the roller derby teams and generally sporting a bad attitude. Yet we see her vulnerable at one point in the film, as she tells Bliss her real age and how she had found the one thing in her life she was good at late in life. There is a real feeling of the dedication these women have to this misunderstood sport that runs through the film. It’s an area of their lives far from their day jobs and responsibilities that allows them to shine and really have something that is their own.

One of the most refreshing things about Whip It was the fact that it was a story about a girl, about women. There was part of the plot that focused on Bliss’s romantic entanglement with a young musician she meets but this is neither the focus nor the grand resolution at the end of the film. Rather, Whip It focuses on Bliss finding her own identity and her own “tribe”, as director Drew Barrymore described. The fact that I have to think of who would be in my tribe of female friends makes me wonder at how deeply rooted this female socialization of competition lies.

I’m not saying Whip It is the best movie I’ve ever seen because it’s definitely not. To me, it was more than just fun but for many this movie will be just that, a while of fun. So I wonder again to myself, why aren’t more women seeing this movie?Why is it that women will turn out in droves and pay money to see the same insipid recycled romantic comedy again and again but won’t go see a movie made by women for women? I have to wonder if it’s because of the way we’re socialized growing up. We’re taught to view women as competition for everything whether it’s romantically or careerwise or just socially. Growing up suspicious of other women, we look at each other as fellow competitors in a race but for what? Do we all have the same end goal? I can’t imagine that this is true for all women so I wonder where the support is for each other. I wonder about my own female friends in this regard and wonder why it seems we talk about men so often. Are we guilty of this even when mostly self aware? Even comfortable in my own skin and questioning the ideas of femininity of past generations, it’s so easy to fall into the catty patterns women think are part of being female. Why aren’t we more proud of each other?

Damn.

Anais Escobar is a writer and she tumbls here.

Adrian Tomine’s Summer Blonde; or how everyone you will ever be romantically involved with is a creep

As I read Summer Blonde earlier this week, my mind kept returning to something I had written a few months ago, Love Notebook #5. These lines specifically repeated themselves over and over again in my head:

This is a love story for the creeps and the stalkers and the freaks; for the people who call you 46 times in a row when you don’t pick up the first time; for the ones who convince you that it’s totally normal that they watch you sleep; for the people who think all your friends want to sleep with you; for the people who don’t know when to let go; for the people who delete all the photos of your exes from your computer when you’re not home; and for the people who will only know how to love in their own fucked up ways.

I loved you, too.

I know about creeps. We all do, really. At some point or another, we’ve been the creep or the creeped upon in a given situation. This is the common thread in Summer Blonde, that all of these characters, all of us really, are weirdos. They exist in isolated states whether they are involved romantically with another person or not. The comics are not only drawn subtly and in great detail but the stories are as nuanced yet realistic as the accompanying art. As in his acclaimed graphic novel Shortcomings, Tomine creates characters whose small worlds teem with the everyday insecurities and neuroses that are almost uncomfortably familiar for the reader. Tomine is successful as an artist because he is almost preternaturally aware of what people are thinking and doing behind closed doors.

Summer Blonde is a collection of four stories, each loosely linked to the other by the overwhelming feeling of awkwardness and loneliness that accompanies so many interactions between humans. The first story, “Alter Ego”, deals with Martin, a writer in his mid-twenties who has received a decent amount of praise for his first novel and is now unable to meet the deadline for his follow-up book. He is bored and distracted with his life when he receives a postcard from the girl he was in love with in high school and decides to track her down. The girl is long gone from his hometown by the time he comes around but Martin befriends her high school-aged sister and they begin a tenuous friendship as the rest of his relationships begin to crumble. “Alter Ego” is a study in getting the things you thought you wanted and then finding that you’re still not sure what you want. Martin feels like that friend who continually complains about his life but only so those around him can remind him of how lucky he is. With people like this, does that ever matter? Don’t they still find ways to see how awful their lives are regardless of reality?

Indeed, reality, or relative ideas of reality rather, is an idea that every character in Summer Blonde struggles to define and live in. The title story, “Summer Blonde”, centers around Neil, a lonely man who is jealous of his casanova neighbor, Carlo, and besotted with the Vanessa, the girl who works at the greeting card store he visits often. Neil is a nebbish in the classic sense and spends hours in therapy discussing his inability to have relationships with women and his awkward crush on Vanessa. His obsession with Vanessa grows when he sees that she is involved with Carlo. This leads Neil down a road where he becomes directly involved in Vanessa’s life in irreparable ways. Reality is not only an issue for Neil, who can only see himself as a guardian of sorts towards Vanessa, but for the other characters who delude themselves in their own perceptions of their romantic relationships. All involved are left to question whether they can ever really know the person they’re sleeping with any more than they know the person who stands next to them on the street.

Hillary Chan, a lonely, somewhat angry phone operator, is the focus of “Hawaiian Getaway”. She is fired for an error involving William Shatner (no lie) but doesn’t seem to really care. Now unemployed, she sits in her apartment all day, avoiding awkward phone conversations with her pushy mother and overachieving sister. She has little contact with the outside world and has difficulty connecting with other people. She begins to get her kicks by calling the pay phone on the street below her bedroom window when people pass, harassing and berating the people who answer. Hillary is unable to vent those frustrations towards the people in her life so she lets herself relieve her own anger by hiding behind the anonymity of a phone call. This feels familiar, not only the feelings of inadequacy and frustration with the direction your life is heading, but the feeling of needing to vent and finding yourself unable to to the people closest to you. Why else have humans kept journals for thousands of years? What about the internet, with its faceless barbs and bickering on message boards and the comment sections of websites and blogs? We all have mediums where we lash out without the repercussions of being known. Of course, the double edged sword of technology is that it’s now that much harder to remain faceless forever.

The final story in the collection moves from the awkward world of twenty-somethings to the truly tragic realm that is high school. “Bomb Scare” centers around Scotty, a lonely high schooler who has one friend, Alex, who is constantly tortured at school for possibly being gay. Scotty’s friendship with Alex ends as Scotty tries to befriend Cammie, a girl who is only well liked because of her sexual willingness. Scotty turns his back on Alex in order to impress Cammie only to find that he doesn’t really know that he wants to be close to anyone. This story seemed to be the most painful, perhaps because high school, while different for everyone, is such a singular experiment in not only hurting each other but ourselves. It feels as if we are going through the motions of being almost adult while blindfolded, having no idea how to go about the simple things.

This is a collection of stories for the voyeur in all of us. Tomine is a master at creating the most relatable and alienating images of loneliness in comics, literature in general even, these days. This of course comes back down to perception: what are we supposed to be looking at or for? Reading this gives you the feeling of looking through your lover’s drawers when he or she isn’t home. You’re expecting to find something you don’t want to see but then you find something else entirely and you’re never sure how to feel about it. This of course makes you as much of a weirdo as the significant other you were suspicious of. Welcome to the club; nothing but love can turn you into a total creep.

I am the love killer; or what happens when you read Anne Sexton when you are young

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

-Anne Sexton

To those who don’t live there, Florida appears to have one season: brutal, unending summer. While this is somewhat accurate, those of us who have spent at least a whole year in Florida know that there is a distinct summer here and she is a cruel mistress. It was the hottest June of my life the summer I turned seventeen and a half. I had grown awkwardly into my skin, my bones slowly breaking down and growing again, the alien hips and breasts taking up room beneath my sunburned skin. I had gotten highlights sometime in the spring, blonde streaks throughout my dark hair, the touch up sessions leading to an entirely dark blonde head of hair, lightened eyebrows. I didn’t want to be myself so I figured this person would do for the time being.

I had passed my driver’s license test in May and I drove my dad’s old Land Cruiser all over the city that summer. My family still owned their condo on the beach, where Fort Lauderdale and Pompano Beach met, and as soon as school let out in early June, I spent the summer lazying around, making chicken burritos and forgetting to put on sunscreen. I called my family almost every day to say hi but I spent most of those days alone, not seeing anyone, not my friends, not the man I had started seeing. I packed lightly for this time, only bringing the things I thought I’d get use out of: two white bikinis, a small bottle of yellow nail polish, a pair of brown Havianas, a crocheted taupe sundress that my great-grandmother had made for me, three empty journals, a few pens with blue ink, and a dogeared copy of The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton.

I always spent the school year volunteering at the local library, where I did little work but lots of reading. Towards the end of the school year, a tall slender librarian who I had spoken to maybe twice caught me reading The Bell Jar behind a cart of non-fiction books one day and squinted at me.

“You should really read Anne Sexton if you like Plath,” she said, before turning on her heel and walking away.

I skimmed through Live or Die in the poetry section and was intrigued by Anne and her metaphors. I bought a copy of The Complete Poems the next day so I could write in it and fold the pages to my heart’s content. With that, Anne and I headed to the Atlantic shore for three months.

The volumes in Complete Poems are set up in chronological order and I started at the beginning of the tome in order to get to know Anne. The front cover has her sitting on the floor, short pants, white buttoned shirt, casual sandals. Her face is open and earnest, her long fingers and toes relaxed as she stares into the camera. The introduction by her dear friend and fellow poet Maxine Kumin gives insight into the tumultuous Anne Sexton of legend. Her work is described by her contemporaries as powerful and female, a standout against the rest of her fellow confessional poets. Kumin details Anne’s battles with mental illness and her struggle to maintain control of her mind through her art. Before reading many of her poems, I had a feel for the kind of woman Anne Sexton was: difficult, anxious, haunted, passionate, glamorous, dramatic, courageous. She wasn’t the staid poetess of past eras, she was a flesh and blood person. I felt a kinship from one stormy mind to another.

I woke every morning and went down to the sand, full of milky coffee, my teeth freshly brushed. I sat on a towel, my toes pressing into the sand as I diligently read all the poems in that book. Like most reading Sexton for the first time, I loved “Her Kind” and “Music Swims Back To Me”, the classics. I went for a swim whenever the noon sun began to burn my shoulders, my arms and legs pushing me away from shore as I floated and became one with the waves. I came back to my towel to get dry, the water turning into salt crystals on my skin as I continued to read. I rested on my side when I read the first poem of the book that really struck me in the gut, “Young”.

A thousand doors ago
when I was a lonely kid
in a big house with four
garages and it was summer
as long as I could remember,
I lay on the lawn at night,
clover wrinkling over me,
the wise stars bedding over me,
my mother’s window a funnel
of yellow heat running out,
my father’s window, half shut,
an eye where sleepers pass,
and the boards of the house
were smooth and white as wax
and probably a million leaves
sailed on their strange stalks
as the crickets ticked together
and I, in my brand new body,
which was not a woman’s yet,
told the stars my questions
and thought God could really see
the heat and the painted light,
elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.

I felt the familiarity of my own childhood and growing up, the pure sensation of having every sense overwhelmed with memory. I had been constantly reading since I was two years old but I hadn’t felt pangs like these in quite a while, if ever; I had recognized myself as human before in literature and the written word but never so strongly as a woman, with all of the uncertainty that came with my new body and feelings. I devoured the book, poems about abortion and heartbreak and children. I took notes in my journal and wrote down my thoughts for the days and weeks that followed. I reread the poems I liked most and wrote my own verses in smeared blue ink. I began to look at myself in the mirror more often, letting my eyes learn my new body and not feel ashamed of it.

Sometime in July I went to the drugstore and bought a box of hair dye in my natural color. I took it back to the condo and dyed my long bleached hair in the bathtub, dabbing some dye on my eyebrows for good measure. I washed it out thirty minutes later and saw a version of me familiar yet new, a change from the girl who sat at the edge of the sink minutes before. I was aglow with a confidence I barely knew. I called the man who had taken me to dinner early in the summer, who I had ignored for weeks, and asked him to come over. He drove over after dinner and we sat on the balcony, the night balmy with an ocean breeze. I wore a swimsuit as I did permanently then, my legs tucked under the skirt of my dress as he talked. My head filled with words but not his, just line after line of New England imagery. I finally looked at him as he placed one hand on my tan foot.

“Your hair looks good dark like that,” he said, his thumb stroking the smooth yellow nail polish I had been applying and reapplying on my toes all summer.

“It’s my natural color.” I carefully gazed at his broad forehead as he looked at my eyes.

He leaned forward and pressed his mouth against mine. I felt his hand grip my foot as my lips parted, my eyes closing. We kissed in the space between our chairs as the moon reflected off our skin, the same words filling my head as his tongue filled my mouth.

Oh then
I stood up in my gold skin
and I beat down the psalms
and I beat down the clothes
and you undid the bridle
and you undid the reins
and I undid the buttons,
the bones, the confusions,
the New England postcards,
the January ten o’clock night,
and we rose up like wheat,
acre after acre of gold,
and we harvested,
we harvested.

That man ended, that summer ended, that time ended. My Anne Sexton fever cooled but never entirely died. I always leafed through the folded pages of Complete Poems, perusing the retold fairy tales in Transformations now and then. I didn’t think about Anne Sexton too much until I was 20, having lost that confidence of almost 18, depressed and exhausted in therapy. Once a week I stared at my psychologist’s face as it contorted into what I assume she thought a calming expression was. I watched her ask the questions that you’re supposed to ask 20-year-olds with the old ennui, the sounds from her mouth swirling around my head.

I couldn’t articulate to my parents what was wrong with me and so I sat in front of this woman as she tried to help me shake the depression that kept me in bed in the same clothes for days at a time and then sent me on road trips where I drove without a destination or even a map, picking locations based on which road sign seemed most appealing. I could feel myself floating away, the heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach not enough to keep me in my day to day life. I felt my mind working as ever but I couldn’t make breakfast or go to class or keep a lunch date; I forgot how to be a normal person, how to live amongst people and so I forgot how to feel much of anything. I stopped going to therapy and learned the walls of my apartment by sight and touch.

I went home and napped, rather, slept for hours at a time, missing entire days and nights at times. I hadn’t read a book in months but one night, close to sunrise actually, I pulled The Complete Poems off my bookshelf. I leafed through Live or Die , focusing on the last lines of “Live”, scanning them with my tired eyes again.

So I say Live
and turn my shadow three times round
to feed our puppies as they come,
the eight Dalmatians we didn’t drown,
despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy!
Despite the pails of water that waited,
to drown them, to pull them down like stones,
they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue
and fumbling for the tiny tits.
Just last week, eight Dalmatians,
3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood
each
like a
birch tree.
I promise to love more if they come,
because in spite of cruelty
and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens,
I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann.
The poison just didn’t take.
So I won’t hang around in my hospital shift,
repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun,
the dream, the excitable gift.

It wasn’t one moment, or word, or even that poem. Maybe it was that entire night of reading how I used to and losing myself in something other than my own mind. I went to bed as the sun was rising and felt my eyelashes flutter against my cheeks as I drifted to sleep. I read Sexton religiously and began reading the other things I had loved before I was depressed and new things as well: Vonnegut, Borges, Kafka, Bachelard, Hemingway, Tom Robbins, graphic novels, McCarthy, O’Connor. Sexton was foremost in my mind as I put pen to paper, my fingers to my keyboard, and began to write again. It physically hurt to write even simple thoughts, I felt as if I was expelling something inside me. I could feel everything inside me leaving my body as it hit the page, contained in sentences and paragraphs and pages rather than breaking me from the inside. I haven’t stopped writing since then, it has become a source of revelation, a painful joy as I ache and part with the things I feel and am aware of.

On an October afternoon in 1974, Anne Sexton came home from lunch with her friend Maxine Kumin and put on her mother’s old fur coat. Having locked herself in the garage, she sat in her car and started the engine, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning at age 45. Anne Sexton wrote for almost twenty years, joining a poetry workshop at her psychiatrist’s suggestion after her first manic episode in 1954. She published several collections of poetry, wrote a play, and won a Pulitzer Prize for 1967’s Live or Die. Writing kept her alive for almost twenty years as she struggled with mental illness; poetry became her refuge, her outlet, and she flourished as she battled, growing with each line of verse written.

When I first read Sexton’s poetry, I recognized the pain instantly. I knew the dark place where these words had taken shape and I was drawn in by this raw power. Sexton’s work walks a fine line between the unbearable pain of the world and the exquisite joy that comes from the feeling of knowing you are alive. In the darkest of her poems, Sexton exudes a life force that is blinding. Anne Sexton lived her life till it burst at the seams. Her mind and her words were too much for this world, much like her fellow confessional poets; Robert Lowell literally clutching his seizing heart in a taxicab in New York City, Sylvia Plath sealing herself away from her children as she took her own life. Sexton’s words breathe on the page, gasping for more air as they shout to the reader. Her words live even now the way she did: grasping, fighting, beaming with an honesty that is refreshing and astounding today as I write myself, yearning for that kind of truth and awareness in my work. I want to feel my bones and breath in every phrase, see my fingerprints on the words I write. I want to write as I live, fully or not at all.

When a life is over,
the one you were living for,
where do you go?

I’ll work nights.
I’ll dance in the city.
I’ll wear red for a burning.
I’ll look at the Charles very carefully,
weraing its long legs of neon.
And the cars will go by.
The cars will go by.
And there’ll be no scream
from the lady in the red dress
dancing on her own Ellis Island,
who turns in circles,
dancing alone
as the cars go by.

-Anne Sexton