Vanishing Points: Memoirs of Loss and Renewal
Lynn Z. Bloom
10.2
Imagine the unimaginable. Vacation day, summertime at the beach, begins in its usual rhythm, the sun rising, waking up gradually to waves whispering in the distance. Listening to familiar gulls and insects, Martin’s casual snoring, my own drowsiness distracted by faint pangs of hunger, workaday to-do lists are supplanted by alternatives as deliciously sculpted as a bento box of sushi, fresh from the sea. Falling back to a half-sleep, hugging Martin’s warm nakedness, I hear the waves’ susurrus change to a growl, lower and louder, closing in. Eyes opening now as “waves not receding or dissolving. Closer now. Brown and gray. Brown or gray. Waves rushing”—Hokusai’s Great Wave but darker—“closer, closer. . . . All these waves now, charging, churning. Suddenly furious. Suddenly menacing” (5) and we are swept away. The beloved dies, the storyteller survives in this tsunami of grief. Click here to continue reading.
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"Brave Person Drag": Identity, Consciousness, and the Power of the Cyclical in Gamebook-Formatted Memoir
Lindsey Pharr
10.2
In her New Yorker essay “The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure Books” Leslie Jamison describes her own childhood experience reading the books as “wearing brave-person drag” (13). While drag usually experiments with gender, the works explored in this essay do not. Rather, these works reflect the universality inherent to RuPaul’s signature phrase: “We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag.” Every day, we define ourselves through the choices we make, in the ways we show up, as whatever version of ourselves the moment calls for. In these memoirs, CYOA format allows for the exploration one might even say performance of alternate versions of persona free of the constraints of the first-person point of view and linear time.
The recent appearance of memoir in the Choose Your Own Adventure books’ format, (referred to interchangeably as CYOA or gamebook format) has the potential to take a gimmick and elevate it to great emotional relevance in the same way that drag performance uses stylized persona to inhabit an internal truth. In the hands of Paul Crenshaw, Carmen Maria Machado, Dana Schwartz, and Elissa Washuta, the format’s unique combination of nonlinear narrative structure, present tense, and the second-person point of view packs quite the punch. This combination enables these talented memoirists to address subjects that transcend their individual experiences, including a fluid sense of identity, the cyclical patterns of abuse and addiction, and the expanded sense of consciousness within which these narratives take place. Click here to continue reading. |