Lindsey Pharr, "Brave Person Drag": Identity, Consciousness, and the Power of the Cyclical in Gamebook-Formatted Memoir" (Assay 10.2)

ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
10.2

Lindsey Pharr

"Brave Person Drag":
Identity, Consciousness, and the Power of the Cyclical in Gamebook-Formatted Memoir

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.

Containing Multitudes

The fluidity of this borrowed form is due in part to the gamebook format’s use of second-person point of view. This form of second person, according to Siân Griffiths, “doesn’t try to recreate its reader…it does not care if you are not, in actual fact, a sea explorer or an astronaut or a cowboy. Rather, readers pour their personalities into these roles like water in a well-shaped jug” (3). Of course, in these works of memoir, the authors are never asking the reader to pretend to be an astronaut. They are, however, asking the reader to inhabit the role of the protagonist. And while this request is nothing new, in gamebook-formatted memoir the protagonist is more expansive than a character moving through a story. The protagonist is the narrator observing herself. Therefore, the role of protagonist refracts like light through a prism, taking on as many perspectives as ways that the narrator can see herself. Or the ways in which she wishes to be seen. Or as all the versions of herself she could have been or might yet be through making different choices. As Jamison writes, “each of these protagonists contains an array of potential destinies, rather than just one. Each holds the shadow selves of other lives she could have led” (15). This is familiar territory in memoir, a genre in which the author examines not only a period of her life but also who she was at the time, as seen through the lens of who she is now.

Everyone could have turned out a little—or a lot—differently if only slightly different choices were made, and each individual carries those alternate endings on their journey towards the grave. There is grief there, and shame and rage and regret. Utilizing CYOA format in memoir provides much needed space for the author to address these challenging emotions. The borrowed form acts as container, a shatter-proof glass box for narratives that otherwise might prove too overwhelming to get onto a blank page. In each of these works, the author uses this multiplicity to facilitate a desire that lies at the heart of writing: to uncover internal truth.

Elissa Washuta’s essay collection, White Magic, contains the hermit crab essay entitled “Oregon Trail II for Windows 95/98/ME & Macintosh: Challenge the Unpredictable Frontier.” The title is that of the updated version of the Oregon Trail computer game, the original version of which came out in 1977 as a text-based game and was re-released as a video game in 1985. The game was intended to be educational, with players leading their train of covered wagons from Missouri to Oregon in 1848 and meeting similar challenges to those who made the journey generations ago. Players must purchase supplies and livestock, trade for what they need, face snakebite and dysentery, all while navigating rugged terrain. While the borrowed form of the essay is that of the Oregon Trail computer game instead of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, it too follows gamebook format through its focus on choice. It also invokes a similar nostalgia for Gen X and Millenial readers, a nostalgia that the author deliberately subverts by using the computer game as a vessel for her examination of trauma, addiction, and marginalized identity.

In Washuta’s essay, several narrators speak simultaneously: the author’s childhood self, who encounters the Oregon Trail game for the first time; her twenty-something self, who embarks on a cross-country road trip toward her ancestral homeland; and her seven months sober self, who escapes into the computer game to keep from drinking. Meanwhile, her character within the game makes choices to advance along the trail. She delineates real life events and events that take place inside the game by describing them as “in the window” or “outside the window,” the window being the computer screen within which she plays the game as well the literal Microsoft operating system.

“Inside the window,” Washuta writes, “you change your mind and buy brandy, because, here, you are a white man. In this place that is both safe and unsafe, you can have all the brandy you want…outside the window, you’ve lost whiskey forever: you just passed the seven-months-sober mark” (174). The world within the window is a safe place for the narrator because it functions as a distraction to keep alcohol cravings at bay: “There are no bars within walking distance…while your body stays safe at home, you need to travel out of your isolation through this window” (177). It is safe because of “the white man’s mask” (176) she wears inside the game, and the world—inside and outside the window—is safer for those who have white faces.

The world inside the window is unsafe for the narrator because the Oregon Trail game is based on the version of events told by white settlers. That is to say, it is a glorification of the exploitation and genocide of Washuta’s ancestors: “This game was not made for you. The game was part of the project of whiteness” (195). The author is a Native woman with European ancestry who struggles with claiming her Native identity. Part of the attraction of the computer game is the possibility of finding glimpses of her ancestors, whose land the wagon trains were actively invading in 1848 when the game takes place: “You meet a Pawnee woman with long hair. She looks sort of like you do under the white man mask” (180). The narrator discusses the inaccessibility of this identity, which she sees as a binary for much of her life, “You once believed that there were two kinds of Indians: the real ones in buckskins who used every part of the buffalo and died before 1870, and the ones like you” (181). There is no option to roleplay as a Native in the Oregon Trail game, a setup all too similar to the conversion campaigns enforced by missionary settlers that “made Native converts pledge, ‘From this point on, I will be a white man’” (182).

Another marginalized identity that the narrator claims is that of a witch. Not witch as a term used to describe a practitioner of witchcraft, but witch as an identity, one gleaned from yet another window, the television: “you’ve come to believe you might be a witch like that one character on…a show you and Philip watch”, or from another window still: “the internet says hedge witches are real, and you haven’t told anyone, but you think you might be one” (179). This identity is much easier to assume than that of her indigenous ancestry; the sudden appearance of a FryDaddy after the narrator thinks of buying one is all the proof needed to believe that she is, in fact, a witch: “The choice is not to be a witch or not be a witch, not to believe in magic or to believe in reality, but to be an open door or a closed one” (180). The concept of identity presented in Washuta’s hermit crab essay is binary. You’re either a real witch or you’re not. This black-and-white thinking reflects the choices presented within the Oregon Trail game: Stop at the trading post or keep going. Ford the river or go the long way round. For Washuta, the world says you can be one thing or another, but not both: White or Native. Drunk or sober. Dead or alive.

Carmen Maria Machado’s book-length memoir, In the Dream House, is constructed of vignettes examining the author’s abuse at the hands of her queer partner. In the book’s prologue and at intervals throughout the rest of the text, Machado refers to the complicated views around domestic violence within the lesbian community and the absence of archival context available to her in the aftermath of her experience. The author explains that because she found so few archival examples of an experience resembling her own, she felt compelled to share hers through the broad spectrum of lenses she used to understand what happened to her. Each vignette looks at her abusive relationship through the worlds of art and literature— “Dream House as Spy Thriller,” “Dream House as Lesbian Pulp Novel,” “ Dream House as Bildungsroman”— using these borrowed forms as containers for emotionally volatile material. In the vignette entitled “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure®,” the spectrum of the protagonist’s identity is similarly limited to that in Washuta’s essay. But here the limitations reflect the slim options available to the protagonist within an abusive relationship. Machado gives readers the choices that were present for her as the victim of psychological abuse: apologize, explain, or stay silent. Machado uses the second person as an extension of a pattern established earlier in the memoir: that of alternating between first person and second person as she switches between Machado the author and Machado the victim. It is common practice in memoir to flow between past and present perspective as the author moves between recreating events and reflecting upon them. In her memoir, however, Machado marks these separate states by writing in either the first or second person. The first-person narrator is present Machado: the author, the survivor, the woman reflecting upon her experience and providing cultural context for it. The second-person narrator is past Machado: the victim, an aspect of the author’s traumatic memory given voice. In his essay “How Choose Your Own Adventure Continues to Show Up in Literary Fiction” David Schwartz writes, “multiplicity here allows Machado to showcase abuse’s chilling singularity” (8). His use of the term singularity regarding abuse can mean two very different things, both of which are stunningly applicable. One interpretation can be that abuse is a very specific situation, a peculiar one, a situation that is very different from any other someone may experience in their life. Another interpretation of singularity here can be taken from the realm of physics: a location found at the center of a black hole. From this angle, the reader is thrown into the author’s experience and given a bunch of non-options for escape. Inside that black hole, reality shrinks to a pinprick. A time, a world, a you outside of the abuse does not exist, has never existed, will never exist. This is one of the many reasons why it is so hard for survivors to leave a psychologically abusive partner. This narrowed sense of choice is ideally suited to exemplify the power of the cyclical in CYOA format, as we will explore later.

Likewise, in Dana Schwartz’s memoir Choose Your Own Disaster, the options presented to readers are the same ones that were available to the memoirist at the time of the experience she describes. The memoir focuses on the author’s young adulthood as an over-achieving twenty-something navigating a maze of mental health crises and relationship struggles. Schwartz combines gamebook format with that of a personality quiz ala Cosmopolitan or Buzzfeed—the type of quiz that assigns personality types synonymous with characters from popular TV shows, pet breeds, or even Starbucks drinks. In the chapter entitled “Which Lord of the Rings Character Are You Based on your Eating Disorder?” Schwartz uses borrowed forms to highlight not only her struggle with self-perception as a young adult but also the cyclical pattern inherent to bulimia. “To you, food will always be a costume. You will never be a Thin Person” (53). In disguising the “I” as “you,” Schwartz invites the reader to inhabit her experience: “You are trapped and trapped for life because you are a woman in the world in 2018 and your brain is already wired against you, polluted with expectations and temptations and dozens of versions of yourself following you like ghosts, dragging you into immobility” (53). Here the options are narrowed dramatically, an irony given the CYOA format. While the narrator’s position as a young, well-educated, upper middle-class American seems like one with limitless possibilities, her experience is that of being stuck between the rock and a hard place of astronomical expectations and self-sabotage.

Such a bleak outlook, however, fails to limit the parade of personas the protagonist tries on and discards throughout the rest of the chapter, all of which are drawn straight from pop culture. She sees herself inhabiting Lord of the Rings characters through her eating disorder, cycling from a svelte but starving elf to a bingeing hobbit who gobbles eight meals a day to the red-eyed and retching Bulimia Gollum. The author leans heavily on cultural references--Sex and the City, Marvel comics, dating apps—to keep her second person point of view relatable. For the reader, Schwartz’s use of the second person feels like that of CYOA:

You didn’t necessarily identify with the unnamed ‘you’ who starred in each book. It was more that each protagonist offered you an alternative to yourself, or forty alternatives to yourself. The second person was less like a mirror and more like a costume. Reading these books wasn’t about the pleasure of ‘relatability’ but about something oppositethe pleasures of distortion, recklessness, and multiplicity. (Jamison 13)

It is this heady combo of “distortion, recklessness, and multiplicity” as well as the search for social media validation that leads Schwartz to create the fictional Twitter account That Guy in Your MFA. The Twitter account goes viral, and “you gorge yourself on praise” (59). Here is the language of bulimia sneaking its way into the narrator’s assumption of another identity, showing the insidiousness of the condition. The effect is an uncomfortable one, full of foreboding and helplessness, as we anticipate the inevitable self-loathing and purge to follow. Through the many personas that the narrator tries on only to discard like shed skins, some things never change.

Schwartz combines the forms of personality quiz and CYOA at a pivotal point in the chapter, a crossroads at which she stands newly medicated and in recovery: “You don’t cry anymore, but you don’t feel like yourself anymore either. So start again. Start from infancy, get better, and rebuild an identity for yourself.” The author then offers two choices of personality in gamebook format, “What is your identity going to be? A. The coquette…turn to page 81… B. The adventurer…turn to page 90” (80). By choosing the latter, the reader is allowed to exit the chapter and move through the rest of the memoir. The first option leads the reader on to a doomed affair that ends with the directions to turn back to the beginning of the chapter and back into the vicious cycle of the author’s eating disorder.

Schwartz’s employment of the personality quiz not only adds to the pop culture relatability of her memoir but also takes the mirror-like quality inherent to CYOA format and has the narrator begin a dialogue with her own reflection. In an article published in The Atlantic about personality tests, Paul Bisceglio writes that a personality quiz “doesn’t show you as you really are, but rather helps you articulate who you know yourself to be” (7). As the narrator embarks on the doomed affair that ends this chapter, she constantly uses TV and film characters to justify her actions, “Carrie Bradshaw was in love with Mr. Big when he was married. Perhaps you’re just the complicated anti-heroine of your own life,” (84) and to explain to herself what she’s doing while in this dissociated state. “You make your way through the lobby, telling yourself to feel like Julia Roberts alongside Richard Gere in Runaway Bride and not Julia Roberts alongside Richard Gere in Pretty Woman” (88). This tension between real and imagined self-image gets at the heart of much of the anxieties explored in this chapter of Schwartz’s memoir.

Speaking of anxiety, Paul Crenshaw’s essay “Choose Your Own Adventure for ‘80s Kids” draws from the experience of growing up in the American suburbs during the 1980s to highlight the reach of media’s influence and the ways in which parents project their own fears onto their children. These fears are based solely on threats found on television shows and the nightly news—quicksand, nuclear war, Satanic cults—and these real and imagined scenarios blend together in the protagonists’ kid brain: “You can only think that the men on TV always made it out but you aren’t a man on TV so why didn’t your mother warn you?” (8).

Crenshaw plays with the format’s intrinsic element of risk and turns each choice into a dead end, twisting the freedom found in CYOA into a nightmare of paranoia and helplessness and echoing Leslie Jamison’s observation that, when reading Choose Your Own Adventure books, “You let yourself make reckless choices that ran counter to your intuitions in every imaginable way” (13). In Crenshaw’s essay, it is a reckless thing to even walk down a neighborhood street. Parental fear blows worst-case scenarios into urban legends, fueled by the paranoia that seemed to poison the air of suburban America in the 1980s. ‘80s kids were warned of razor blades tucked inside Halloween candy, of Satanic cults conducting rituals in basements, of pushers selling drugs on the playground. Nationwide D.A.R.E programs warned that any amount of any drug would ruin your life forever while McGruff the Crime Dog urged watchers of Saturday morning cartoons to “take a bite out of crime” by not talking to strangers.

Crenshaw presents these scenarios as the only adventures that can be chosen. If the ‘80s kid protagonist walks home alone, a man in a white van will follow. If the protagonist runs away from the man in the white van into the woods, quicksand awaits. Is it safer to stay at home, “where it is somewhat safe, if cold and lonely and full of some emotion you can’t explain?” (12). If the reader chooses to go outside, external horrors mirror personal enlightenment:

So you unlock the front door and walk out into the world, assuring yourself you’ll never become your parents…you’ll never fear everything you can’t control. You can only try to bring some small light to this world, and it is with this realization, this sudden glow inside you, that you see a brief white light bloom on the horizon and missiles begin to streak skyward, as everyone always said they would. (13)

It’s quite fatalistic, and Crenshaw’s use of CYOA format provides deliberate contrast to the horrifying nature of the adventures from which the reader can choose. If the protagonist decides to avoid nuclear fallout and thwart kidnappers by staying inside on a Saturday and playing Dungeons and Dragons with friends, a different sort of internal shift occurs: “…some arcane symbol in some ancient dungeon corrupts your characters. It takes a few weeks, but this anger, this corruption, is like acid. Or quicksand dragging you down. A year later you’re in a Satanic cult, because that’s what Dungeons and Dragons did to kids in the ‘80s.” (17). Crenshaw’s phrasing here, his equation of anger to corruption, points to some dormant internal flaw that existed at the core of the protagonist prior to playing the game. This narrative path, one in which the danger is a threat to the protagonist’s sense of self rather than physical body, echoes the horror of Dana Schwartz’s eating disorder, “you are transformed in the night like Dr. Jekyll into everything you wish you weren’t: out of control, unhealthy, indulgent, fat” (66) or in Washuta’s chilling examination of the trauma she’s inherited from her white ancestors: “violence has no homeland: you pick it up like a pox and carry it” (185), or Machado-as-author, popping up in the liminal spaces of the text to channel her abuser by berating the reader, “What kind of person are you? Are you a monster? You might be a monster” (165). Here the leap into multiplicity carries with it a core belief that you are somehow wrong, that some inherent corruption follows the narrator no matter what adventure they choose. As Crenshaw puts it, “none of us escape from who we once were” (20). This belief becomes a potential impetus for cyclical patterns, because, in Washuta’s words, “you’re not ready to stop trying to suck the poison out of yourself” (198). At the core of every compulsion to repeat lies a deep-seated desire for a different ending: This time, I’ll only have two drinks. If he hits me again, I’m leaving. If I were a better person, this wouldn’t be happening.

Déjà Vu All Over Again

It is very human to circle back, to go over the same old ground, to ruminate. We wish, like Emily Dickinson, to “dwell in Possibility.” What could have happened if I’d done things differently? Who would I be today if I’d made different choices? Memoir is a perambulation of memory—a careful circling of a certain territory to determine its boundaries, to investigate the ways in which this patch of ground butts up against the next. Memory is not linear, it is associative. To blatantly mix metaphors: if memoir is a quilt constructed of the fragments of memory, then, like most quilts, those fragments will be arranged in patterns.

Gamebook format works particularly well in memoir because of its cyclical nature. CYOA’s nonlinear narrative, along with its use of present tense, allows for the possibility of more than one outcome to every decision, more than one self to exist at a time. If the character makes the wrong choice within the Oregon Trail computer game, he dies and the game is over. But another game is waiting, and, as these authors show us in through their experimentations with borrowed form, you can start over any time. While we can usually trace back how we got from point A to point B, this tracing does little to prevent us from finding ourselves yet again at point B after having started out heading in a completely different direction, as David Schwartz, professor of Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati writes, “books built for interactivity are less about the linearity of story and more about the power of the cyclical” (10). This power of the cyclical is especially relevant to experiences of addiction and trauma as they relate the individual and the collective.

Machado’s “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure®” provides an excellent example of the cyclical nature of trauma by using CYOA format to highlight the protagonist’s distinct lack of choice. Or rather, no matter which choice she makes, the protagonist finds herself back at the opening sequence. Hers is a nightmarish world that stands in stark contrast to the agency provided by other examples of CYOA format. Schwartz notes that in Machado’s deft hands, “Loops here are of interest: make a certain choice, and you find yourself reading the same page later. Your choices then highlight the experience of not having a choice” (8). If the reader refuses to do what they’re told, defiantly turning the pages one by one, following the straight line rather than the loop, the author is there, waiting. On one page, the author is a bully, her abuser’s words coming through her, “Here you are, on a page where you shouldn’t be. Does that make you feel good, that you cheated to be here? What kind of a person are you?” (165). The reader is instructed to turn back to the beginning. If the reader keeps going, snipping the looped threads one by one, they encounter the author again. This time she praises the reader, “You flipped here because you got sick of the cycle. You wanted to get out. You’re smarter than me” (167). On another, the voice is one of exasperation, “Don’t you get it? All of this shit already happened, and you can’t make it not happen, no matter what you do” (170).

With this approach, Machado viscerally exposes the reader to how it feels to experience psychological abuse. By shifting from vitriol to praise to shame, abusers keep victims disoriented and emotionally dependent, a state of mind that instills “a kind of incoherent desperation zipping through your skull” (164). A dream sequence gives the only reprieve that was available to the author while she was experiencing abuse: to sleep or to dream. As dreams end in waking, the reader finds themselves once again presented with the opening scene, “You don’t remember ever going from awake to afraid so quickly” and a slim variety of options. If the reader decides to apologize to or reason with their partner, they must return to the beginning and re-enter the cycle of abuse. However, near the end of the chapter Machado gives the reader a third, wildly fantastic option: flight. If the reader opts to “tear through the house like it’s Pamplona…drive away with a theatrical squeal of the tires, never to return again”, then they meet the author on the next page for one final time. This time, the author acknowledges that running away was never really an option, just a fantasy. “We can pretend” she writes, sounding like an indulgent parent. The section’s conclusion, “I’ll give it to you, just this once”, carries the chill ring of a tyrant in a benevolent mood (175). Trauma is a cyclical thing, a patterned thing. It repeats itself. Traumatic memories superimpose themselves onto the present in the form of flashbacks. In her article, “Reconstructing Blank Spots and Smudges: How Postmodern Moves Imitate Memory in Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club”, Kate Dusto quotes Frederic Jameson when she examines the inherent postmodernism of traumatic memory’s ability to cause “the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents”. This is why gamebook format lends itself so well to trauma narratives: it directly mirrors what trauma does to the narrative itself.

Washuta creates a container strong enough to hold not only her own trauma but also that of her ancestors, weaving the presence of her mother’s people into the narrative of the Oregon Trail game: “Someone on the internet said if you heal yourself you heal your ancestors…how would that work? You want to think time is not linear and all of you are alive at once. But even games have been training you to see your life as a quest, trail, or narrative” (194). The tension here between the narrator’s intuition and her “training” not only represents tension between nonlinear and linear concepts of time, but also between indigeneity and colonialism. She is trying to get beyond the black-and-white thinking we examined earlier. She is trying to hold space for more: more than one identity, more than having to choose one or the other outcome. To hold space for being both/and: white and Native, a sober alcoholic. Washuta attempts to reconcile this tension by returning to the computer game again and again.

Part of the cyclical nature of the Oregon Trail computer game is its presentation of the same options in different scenarios. What was the correct choice last time might be the wrong one this time, and just because you forded the last river just fine doesn’t mean you should ford every river you meet. While Schwartz takes a self-deprecating and humorous look at the often-disastrous choices she’s made in her young adult life, Washuta’s choices feel much more loaded because she carries the weight of her ancestral line with her. She is reckoning with inter-generational trauma, an experience that is about as cyclical and non-linear as you can get. In a shocking example of non-linear time, the ancestral fishing village of Celilo, which was in reality destroyed by the construction of the Dalles Dam in the 1950s, exists intact within the computer game just as it stood in 1848. For the narrator, this is “the kind of miracle that feels like a backhand” (188). Inside the computer game, Celilo, once the oldest continuously inhabited human settlement in North America, exists as untouched as a fly in amber. But her ancestors in the village remain inaccessible to her as she moves through the game in the assigned role of a white settler. This miracle is only to be witnessed from a distance and through the eyes of those who will ultimately destroy it.

While the narrator fruitlessly searches for her ancestors within the game, they are waiting to be found in a much more immediate location, one from which Washuta has found herself separated through trauma and addiction: her body. She sees them in her reflection: “The ancestors are in the beautiful wagon of your body, your eyes like a rifle, your lean hips like a horse” (194). The body she inherited from her ancestors is a place where the past and present coexist, albeit in pain. Her struggle with alcoholism took its toll, leaving her “tethered to the toilet bowl, wed to caustic drink” (178). She lists gallbladder failure, ovarian cysts and an inflamed stomach as ailments and her ancestors’ demise as “more than half a century of skin turning to sores, necks snapped by rope, blood pouring from bullet holes” (196). Her history as a rape survivor further drives the narrator away from her body and into dissociation, away from the “beautiful wagon” full of pain and into the disembodied world of the computer game.

Part of the horror of the cyclical is the dissociation inherent to the second-person point of view. In Hugh Ryan’s essay “The Postmodern Memoir” he states confidently that “alienation from the self is the primal drive of authors who use the second- or third-person in their memoirs” (3). He goes on to say that “experimental—and especially nonlinear—forms are often associated with writers whose lives are disastrous” (6). I doubt that any of these writers would beg to differ. Dissociation within these pages is a recurrent theme. Machado writes “you have voided your body so many times by now that it is force of habit, reflexive as a sigh” (171). The best one can hope for in recovery from bulimia, at least for Dana Schwartz, is that “sometimes you allow yourself to forget you have a body at all” (54). Sobriety for Washuta is “watching your brain do the same thing over and over, which is scan itself for the flaw that is going to kill you” (177). This self-alienation exists on a spectrum with the ouroboros of addiction at one end, what Dana Schwartz describes as a “a desperate, skin-tingling itch, a melody one note short of completion…like water swirling a drain” (62) and transcendence at the other, a sense of “everything outside the small rooms of time we walk around in” (Crenshaw, 18-19). At one end, the point of view is hyper-focused on the self while at the other end the big picture zooms out to psychedelic proportions. This spectrum is due in part to the gamebook’s combined use of second person point of view and nonlinear narrative structure.

Conclusions

While the recent appearance of gamebook format in memoir may be the natural result of the Choose Your Own Adventure books’ popularity during the childhoods of many Gen X and Millenial writers, its place within the genre is one full of possibility. Personal narratives of addiction and trauma especially have much to gain by borrowing the form. By allowing multiple realities to coexist and ultimately offering a way out of painful cycles by lifting the focus from the self towards a bigger picture, gamebook format stands as a powerful vehicle for transformational narratives. Drag, after all, is a type of transformation. It is a way of seeing the world through different eyes—a transcendence of self through the vehicle of otherness. This otherness doesn’t always come from the world outside either, although walking a mile in someone else’s shoes does wonders for broadening one’s perspective. This otherness is also to be found within, in the stories that may feel scary to tell, in the cut-off parts of ourselves, in the hidden futures waiting for us to let go of the shell that no longer fits.

Is this putting too much pressure on a format that began as Reagan Era pulp fiction intended for children? Perhaps. But as Griffiths posits in her discussion of the second-person point of view, “the you creates a common space where forgiveness is possible” (7). Gamebook format takes memoir’s intrinsically mirror-like quality and turns that mirror outward towards the reader. David Schwartz writes that the current intersection of CYOA format and memoir is only natural in a world where technology allows for simultaneous and multiple points of view as we share our every thought with literally everyone (3). When viewed through this lens, a format that could be dismissed as a nostalgic gimmick becomes an increasingly relevant opportunity for healing and transcendence.

Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited.

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.

Ashley Anderson
Teaching Experimental Structures through Objects and John McPhee's "The Search for Marvin Gardens"
Assay 5.2 (Spring 2019)

Derek Hinckley
Fun Home:
Change and Tradition in Graphic Memoir
Assay 1.1 (Fall 2014)

Return to 10.2

Return to Articles