ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
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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. In the original Choose Your Own Adventure books, Montgomery wove in a sense of altered consciousness infused with “plenty of stoned-in-a-dorm-room epiphanies: ‘You are and you have been a part of everything, always. The beginning is the end’” (Jamison 12). CYOA format, from its very inception, welcomes these types of metaphysical ruminations. Utilizing gamebook format in memoir allows the author to explore existential rabbit-holes that could feel out of place if not contained within such a “low-brow” format. Washuta writes about healing intergenerational trauma through playing a computer game. Schwartz dons and sheds personas like a drag performer with multiple costume changes. Crenshaw’s protagonist imagines what it would feel like to be trapped inside an acid trip. At one point, Machado compares her toxic relationship to a stoner comedy. The precedence of the fantastical and the downright weird in Choose Your Own Adventure books paved the way for memoirists to include transcendent, even multifarious views of their own experiences. It’s the elasticity of this container that allows the narrator to usher in the collective. In other words, in making room for the weird we make room for each other. The metafictional aspect within Machado’s memoir—that is, the pages in which the author accuses the reader of cheating—are reminiscent of the Choose Your Own Adventure book entitled Inside UFO 54-40, in which readers can only reach Ulta, the planet of paradise, by breaking the rules of gamebook format. The pages where Ulta is to be found are a liminal space, a place where magic happens. For Machado, this liminal space is where one pulls back the curtain to reveal the psychological mechanics of abuse. Leaving one’s abuser may feel as possible as flying to another planet, but gamebook format is a place where either can happen. By telling her story of psychological abuse in gamebook format—where the second person point of view pulls the reader in so close that the narrator’s thoughts become their own and the non-linear structure keeps the action immediate and unpredictable—Machado takes the singularity of the experience and brings it into the collective. She turns a hidden pain into a witnessed one. David Schwartz concludes his essay on a metaphysical note, stating that works written in gamebook format “prime us to pay attention to interconnection” (10). By placing their narratives in this borrowed form, memoirists put the reader into an active, participatory role. In his author’s note in CRAFT Literary, Crenshaw writes about the participatory nature of the essay’s origin: This essay started with a tweet. One night I was thinking about how many movies and TV shows of the 70s and 80s had someone sinking in quicksand. The response to my tweet showed me that lots of other people noticed it as well, which led to a tweet about all the other things we were scared of growing up in the 80s. In the thread, the same things kept coming up again and again, as if all of us, even though we lived in different parts of the country, were one collective consciousness. The thing is, there was a kind of collective consciousness, in the sense that Reagan-era media was heavily invested in spreading its own version of conservative beliefs and conformist values. News outlets were limited in pre-cable, pre-Internet America, and while news traveled more slowly than it does today, urban legends grew in its megalithic shadow like wildfire. Beyond the paranoia-fueled scenarios in Crenshaw’s essay—kidnappers in white vans, razorblade-filled candy apples, Satanists, acid rain—lies a common fear of adolescence: Will I turn into my parents? And under that, an even more universal fear: Will I always be afraid?
Crenshaw moves into a different, more transcendent sense of the collective at the end of his essay by shifting from second person singular to first person plural. This “we” not only signals a break from the cyclical pattern of hiding from various dangers but invokes a note of hopefulness, a sign that the reader is not alone in their fear. This “we” transcends the personal and moves toward the universal. It also signals the narrative’s exit, which ends with an imperative “now go the next page, whatever that is” (20). This recognition of one’s place within the collective is the destination and the starting point for another adventure. For Washuta, “your destination is a time when you felt wonder” (186). If every CYOA ending is also a beginning, then by ending their narratives on a universal note these authors have primed the reader to see that his next adventure needn’t be a solo journey.
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Lindsey Pharr lives and writes in the mountains outside of Asheville, North Carolina. Her work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing an MFA in creative nonfiction through the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, KY. Find out more at www.lindsey-pharr.com or follow Lindsey on Instagram and Twitter @lindsey_a_pharr.
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