Roam If You Want To...Week 8

Methland Elegy, JD Salinger and Without Wings, Without Wheels

My stuck song syndrome this week is Roam by the B-52s. It took me the better part of a day to figure out what I was hearing. And I didn’t know why it was in my head, but we’ll get to that…

Roam if you want to
Without wings, without wheels
Roam if you want to
Roam around the world
Roam if you want to
Without anything but the love we feel

Women Talking

So at least a couple of friends — Oonagh and Stephanie — have talked to me about books covering places where there’s a whole lot of “deaths of despair”. That is, deaths due to drug addiction, alcoholism, drug/alcohol use, violence, suicide and unusual chaos. I would also add mental/physical health issues that could be avoided or ameliorated if not for poverty and all the issues previously mentioned. Books such as: Methland (my hometown features prominently in this one!), Hillbilly Elegy and, most recently, Monica Potts’ The Forgotten Girls. The books are basically about being white, poor and from rural places or small towns with a high degree of, well, despair.

They are excellent reads — or so my husband and friends tell me. I have avoided the books and I guess it’s because I’ve convinced myself I don’t need to read something I’ve lived through. In the early 1990s my father died of alcoholism and my older sister Sherri died in a senseless car accident at age 29 — no seatbelt, if you can believe it!— leaving behind her 8yo son whose father (her ex) was in prison for meth-related charges; In 2007, my brother Don died from poorly controlled epilepsy and hard drinking (probably drugs too) and in 2008 my oldest half brother Gary, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in his early twenties, was found dead alone in his apartment — the result of a cocktail of prescription and other drugs. I’ve known neighbors, other relatives and high school friends, including the whip-smart, funny, adorable captain of my varsity cheerleading squad — accepted into a great engineering school — get derailed and wind up homeless drug addicts. Or dead.

Monica Potts went back to her hometown in Arkansas and wrote using the story of her childhood friend Darci, whose life was hijacked by early pregnancy, crystal meth etc while Potts’ life flourished at Bryn Mawr and elsewhere.

My hat is off to anyone who can do this! I was floored by the deaths of my people. And, as the saying goes, the worst things in life and the best things in life are impossible to write about. (I did actually attempt a couple of essays many years later. You can read this one that appeared in Barrelhouse.) But there’s more.

Anne Case and Angus Deaton are the originators of the term “deaths of despair.” It stems from some of their research, which was published in 2015 and I’ve been following all along. (Note: there’s also newer research pointing out that deaths of despair are rising — perhaps even higher — for people of color.)

For me, early on I realized something about my own writing inclinations. I am most interested in how people survive and realize joy even in the midst of some of the most difficult circumstance. Am I haunted by my siblings’ deaths of despair? Yes, but I’m more haunted by their lives of despair.

And yet every time I write — and I’ve had assignments where I’m interviewing people battling all kinds of hellacious diseases and other obstacles — I’m looking for the life. I’m looking for the way they are making meaning out of their lives and the way they are being fearless. Because I think that’s the best I can contribute as a writer.

Salinger (sorry, I know he’s problematic)

I have many reasons behind my writing philosophy. I’ll get into some aspects in the weeks to come but right now I’ll just throw out a couple of thoughts. First, JD Salinger. Of course, there’s the atrocity of the iconic novelist seducing and abusing a too young Joyce Maynard, which is reprehensible. Yet I’ve gleaned some wisdom from these writers. I recall reading that Maynard was assigned to cover a beauty pageant and Salinger’s advice to her was invaluable: don’t wield a poison pen — that is, never write in a condescending way about a people or place. It’s too easy to do that.

Many years ago I had a small assignment to write a travel story about Iowa City. When I met my high school friend for lunch (he’s an attorney in Iowa City) one thing he said is “Don't just make fun of us.” That was a simple statement that I doubt he even remembers saying, but it totally stuck with me. People from what some people call the middle of nowhere — there are nowhere places in California too! — are weary of this treatment. Even now in so-called Methland I see signs of life and renewal and fighting back against despair. I think that’s a story, too.

Also involving Salinger… My 12yo and I finished Catcher in the Rye together recently. At the end of the book the narrator, Holden Caulfield, who over the course of the story we come to understand is grief stricken over the death of his young brother, says “Don’t ever tell anyone anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” I will cop to this. It was even difficult for me to write this simple post today! I resist the subject of my father and siblings because when I talk about them I miss them.

Dept. of Complaints

A last word — kind of a complaint — possibly about The Forgotten Girls. The NYT review says this:

Potts blames a variety of systemic failings for Darci’s fate: gender violence, poor health care, a depressed rural economy and rampant underemployment. But she is at her most persuasive when she describes how religious fundamentalism — nearly every family she knew growing up attended church — marginalizes women, filtering into local policy in such a way that it becomes “less a personal belief system than a tool for social control.”

But then it says that Potts also ascribes Darci’s downfall to her mother not being strict enough. It rankled me when I read that: if you’re going to argue that there’s a system that disempowers women, why would you then blame the disempowered mother? Wouldn’t Darci’s mom also be a victim of the system? So I guess I am going to have to read the book to fully understand.

Without Wings, Without Wheels

I have not said nearly everything I want to say on this subject, but enough is enough for now. Except that I want to tell you that Roam is really about death, despite sounding like joy. It was written after the death from HIV/AIDS of one of the B-52 bandmates and it’s about his soul being free. I didn’t know that until I looked it up yesterday and yet it was that song stuck in my head this week.

Fly the great big sky
See the great big sea
Kick through continents
Busting boundaries
Take it hip to hip, rocket through the wilderness
Around the world the trip begins with a kiss

Roam if you want to
Roam around the world
Roam if you want to
Without wings, without wheels
Roam if you want to
Roam around the world
Roam if you want to
Without anything but the love we feel

Next week there will be advice from My Friend Mary. If you have a problem you want solved, let me know!