Somehow Form a Family
By Tony Earley
Shannon Ravenel/Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 192 pages, $22.95
A Sabbath Life: One Woman’s Search for Wholeness
By Kathleen Hirsch
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 226 pages, $24
The personal essay, according to fiction writer Tony Earley, “is the story of how somebody starts out at one place and ends up at another, making himself up as he goes.” It’s the genre of desire and dreams, assumption and presumption, a “counterintuitive proposition,” in which the essayist “attempts to illuminate universal human truths by talking about himself.” Delicate, vulnerable, easily corruptible, it is as much about the shadows as it is about the light.
Nevertheless, some writers do manage to wrestle the personal essay to the ground, and Earley is most assuredly in that mix. The distinguished novelist who most recently brought us “Jim the Boy,” Earley is graced with a prose style that is at once original and plain-spoken, with stories that feel thankfully familiar and always, coyly, strange. “Somehow Form a Family,” a new essay collection drawn from works published in Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Oxford American and elsewhere, recounts devastations of the lesser and grander varieties, “true stories” whose endings are not always the ones Earley the fiction writer might have whipped up for himself. The majority of the pieces retrace his childhood years in rural North Carolina: when TV was a stand-in for life itself, when deer-hunting dreams got extinguished by the cold, when church elicited terror as well as disgust.
Deceptively simple and straightforward, consistently modest, absent all blundering pride, Earley’s essays are virtuously patient tales in which details are planted like seeds in long, exacting rows, only to yield wild profusions of fabulous color, revelation, truth.
The essay “Hallway,” for example, appears at first to be little more than a portrait of a place where a family came together and broke apart. It’s a series of vignettes — about a sister’s colic and a visiting Bible salesman, about familial disappointments and accidentally cocked guns — and yet it somehow cumulatively, powerfully rises to the terrible haunt of regret.
“I wish that with these words I could turn the hallway into perfect metaphor, an incantation that would restore everyone who ever walked its length to the person they wanted most in the best heart to be,” Earley writes toward the essay’s conclusion, “but the fact is that the hallway is simply a space forty-one feet long, nine feet, two inches high, and just over six feet wide, through which my family has traveled for eighty-four years.”
With “The Quare Gene,” Earley proves the mettle of his intellect, the scholarship that undergirds his homey style. Again the piece presents itself as an exercise in David Sedaris-style wit, opening, as it does, with this cataloging of authorial tastes:
“I do not like, have never liked, nor expect to like, watermelon. For the record, I consider this a private, dietary preference, not a political choice, neither sign of failing character, nor renunciation of southern citizenship. I simply do not like watermelon. Nor, for that matter, grits, blackberries, cantaloupe, buttermilk, okra, baked sweet potatoes, rhubarb, or collard greens. Particularly collard greens. I don’t even like to look at collard greens.”
All of which makes Earley “quare” in his grandmother’s estimation, just one among many strange, marvelous words with which this Appalachian man grew up.
Soon enough, of course, “The Quare Gene” has been slyly transmuted into a reflection on language, culture and responsibility. “Words and blood are the double helix that connect us to our past,” Earley writes, and his carefully wrought essay masterfully convinces us of this fact as it tours through old dictionaries and remembered dining-room conversations, as it weighs the work of Horace Kephart, the librarian and “compulsive listmaker” (and a great-grandfather of this reviewer) who left his wife and six children to go to North Carolina in 1904 to study the history and culture of the southern Appalachians. Earley no longer speaks the way his grandmother spoke. He is in danger of losing the “small comfort of shared history.” “The Quare Gene” is a poignant reminder of the fast-escaping past. Its quietness screams through our hearts.
Authenticity is the hardest end to achieve in any kind of writing. It is a particular challenge when the work at hand is supposed to be born of the truth. And yet, with Earley, we feel harbored in, safe in his world of words, convinced by the many lessons of his peculiar, personal stories. He doesn’t write to shock or embarrass, to boast or instruct; he doesn’t trumpet his tales, he merely tells them. He layers the universal into every particular line but leaves the discovery of connections up to us.
If the personal essay is, in fact, “the story of how somebody starts out at one place and ends up at another,” it should come as no surprise that the genre often veers toward the inspirational, or the self-help. One story of recovery standing in for every story of recovery. One map of change suggesting so many routes of possibility. With “A Sabbath Life: One Woman’s Search for Wholeness,” author Kathleen Hirsch presents her own story of transformation as a template that others might follow.
By her own accounting, Hirsch is “[a] graduate of a Seven Sisters college, with an advanced degree from an Ivy League university,” a fiercely independent feminist and journalist whose “first book was published to favorable reviews,” who was “invited on speaking tours, television talk shows, panels,” and who has been living a life of professional satisfactions.
Crisis, however, has set in. A new book project is stalled. The body is tired. The marriage is “settled.” The home is without a child. Stealing away to an old friend’s farmhouse for a time, Hirsch is suddenly able to name what it is that has gone missing. “I need to be vulnerable, to feel again the sensation of susceptible awe, the redemptive quality of beauty, the joy of simply being alive.”
“A Sabbath Life,” then, is a story of awakening: the story of a garden planted, a son conceived and born, a burgeoning newness of purpose, a journey into a gentler community of creativity and friendship. It is about peeling back to find the core. About laying one’s defenses down.
But it is also about something so much more, about Hirsch’s ambition for all women of her era, about her faith that her own journey will inspire journeys everywhere. “I need a new language, one that arises from the silence of the heart,” she writes about herself. Others, she suggests, are in need of that new language too:
“How do women find the right way to be silent, to stand still? In so masterfully filling the script of our times–achievement, autonomy, power, voice–how many of us left our true inner silence at the stage door or back in the rehearsal rooms of our youth? What calls to us from the silence that we have not heard for longer than we care to remember?”
Structurally and stylistically, “A Sabbath Life” is a pastiche of fragments: italicized dreams, unprocessed diary entries, deflated feminist polemics, gardening notes, capitalized talk about the Self, summaries of journalism projects, old and new, small, scattered stories. It is a book whose very making is deliberately transparent on the page as, early on, Hirsch doesn’t have the language she is looking for and says so:
“I write: Where is the self that lies buried beneath two decades of ambition and professional habit?
“I cross out. Begin again.”
Later, reading through her recent journals, she is pleased with the new language that is evolving and concludes–in one of many passages that still hint a bit too strongly at all the old ambitions, the needy ego–that she must tell us so:
“It is an assemblage of soul moments, a narrative of a woman’s life written from an interior point of view, each as they would have been dreamed at the moment of living them.
“I am quite moved by what I have done. It is strange, but it is also beautiful. In it I can see that, at the deepest levels, the mother wisdom, the sister wisdom, never entirely abandoned me.”
Ultimately, Hirsch does find what she is looking for. She finds joy in her garden and in the wonder of her son, joy in well-made soup stocks and neighborhood meals. She discovers that finally knowing ourselves and our talents “allows us true freedom, the freedom to passionately render ourselves in the moment, without the earlier anxieties and fears of diminishment that bedevil our less developed selves.”
Still, while there is much to praise about the gentler, quieter life that Hirsch has found a way to create for and give to herself, “A Sabbath Life” might have been more successful if its author had focused on the inspirational elements of her personal story, rather than insisting that they speak for everyone. The personal essay is, as Earley says, a “counterintuitive proposition.” It’s a balancing act, a pact of sorts, between what the writer needs to say and how the reader is moved to listen.
