Breast cancer, mon amour

Posted on February 19, 2011 by Kara Krauze

Larry with his mother Hilda, April 1937

The other day, about to enter the women’s locker room (a too-irregular occurrence), having dropped off my younger son at preschool, a sign caught my eye: “Coffee Talk”  Support Group for Women with Cancer.  I notice the sign each time I pass by its little corner.  It is well placed: seemingly innocuous, yet quite prominent, as women, many elderly, many with young children, shift from workout room foyer to swimming-pool-scented changing area.  I absorb the sign’s content—attend to it, I would say—almost unconsciously.  And in my memory the sign calls specifically for women with breast cancer.

But I have not had breast cancer; in this respect, I need no support.  Finally, it occurred to me to wonder why, then, I look at the announcement as though it holds information I should retain.  As though I need it—like some creased post-it list in my pocket—to remind me of something.  The memory dominoes tumbled, and rather quickly I saw the trail.

My father’s mother died of breast cancer the year before I was born.  Obviously, I never met her.  I make a point of noting this, because, it seems to me, there are people in our lives who take on special meaning, who enlarge themselves, especially because we have not met them.  I am thinking mostly of family members, those who perhaps we should have met, had a life taken what we consider its natural course.

Already my brain has flitted to the little groove, a tender spot in the back, where I wonder about my own boys and how they will know, how they will make sense of, their missing Granddad’s death.  Much as I might try to protect them, to eventually educate and explain, they will have to come to their own comprehension, will have to make their own sense of it.  This pains me, in a way remarkably like the original loss.  I don’t want them to know…to know what I have known, have had to see or think about (suicide is not a pretty business).  And yet, eventually, they will need to gain an understanding of what happened to my father, and it will be, in large part, my task to bring them to an acceptable place with it.  A place, this word is too trite, that will shift and shift again; probably when they least expect it.  (As it is unexpectedly doing for me right now.)

But back to this other loss, my grandmother, a loss not directly experienced by me and so more a source of romantic curiosity almost, rather than direct pain.  (Perhaps this is in fact how my children will experience my father’s absence; though, even so, I fear it is more fraught.)  Hildie, around whom there was not so much mystery as silence and a hint of idolatry, always intrigued me.  My father was estranged from his father.  My sister and I met him only once or twice—a fact that still stuns me when I encounter it again.  And so I struck up a sporadic correspondence with Grandpa Harry around age eight or nine.  He had very quickly remarried after his wife’s death, a source of contention for some of his four children, my father one of them.  For different reasons, mention of each of his parents brought about a certain gruffness in my father.  His mother’s absence pained him.  His father’s presence, also a sort of absence, pained him too.

At some point, I counted back from my birth to my grandmother’s death and realized that I must have been conceived within weeks, perhaps even days, of her passing.  I’m not especially superstitious; I don’t believe in reincarnation—although any reader here will have noted my fondness for coincidence, for a chance congruence of events—and so I did feel some sort of chill, a tingling wonderment at this timing.  My parents did not explicitly decide to have a child when Hilda died; but it occurs to me now that my father could, in part, have been influenced by his mother’s illness.  In any case, I sometimes do feel that there must be some part of her in me, more related to her absence than the obvious facts of genetics or heredity.  Some part of her, sometimes even evident in an expression—is it the eyes?—hers, my father’s, mine?—lives on, within me.  Relatives have remarked on this too.

For a while during my college years and into my twenties, and perhaps even into my early thirties (this time now seems distant, coming as it did pre-children—here I am again trying to integrate some younger self into my current self, as in my earlier post), I felt that I would at some point have to deal with breast cancer.  That my breasts, my body, held it in-waiting.  I’ve read enough accounts by children of breast cancer sufferers to understand that I am not unique in this sense of contagion; though perhaps the additional generation inserted between makes the feeling of foreboding rarer.  It must have been sometime during my first pregnancy that this feeling lifted; and if a fraction of it still lingers, it is pushed aside by the knowledge that I have my children—they cannot be withheld by disease—and also that I, like many suicide survivors (friends and family of—see my post on synchronicity for explanation of this confusing term), have some propensity to anticipate the possibility of ill-tidings, a habit which takes on different tones for different people.  At different times.  Now, I think I fear little for myself, but more for what could happen to those I love.  And yet I am aware of what resilience we hold in the face of the impossible.  When the impossible happens, it soon becomes what is; and life goes on.  Life goes on.

Lawrence's first grandson

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How Madoff the younger became my kin

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Kara Krauze

Mark Madoff

When most people see the name Madoff, as I did this morning on the cover of today’s New York Times, they think of fraud and deception, perhaps psychopath comes to mind, the mind then flashing to aging widows cheated out of their retirement savings or wealthy families suddenly bereft of most of their wealth.  You think, liar, cheater, mastermind of deceit.  Sure, I think of all this too.  But, since December, first I think of a man, not much older than me, alone in his living room in the middle of the night.  I see him struggling—with a stool or chair, with a belt, with rope.  I see him struggling with the murky black muck of his mind.  I see him hanging from the ceiling.  A man with two young children and a wife.  I think of depression.  I think of desperation, dire straits, hopelessness.  I think of the two-year-old sleeping in the other room, a four-year-old with her mom down in Florida, but then I think again of the man alone with himself.

On December 11th of last year, Mark Madoff, Bernie Madoff’s eldest son, hung himself at home in his apartment in lower Manhattan.  More than thirty thousand people kill themselves each year in the United States.  For each suicide, between twelve and twenty-five more make an attempt.  But these are just numbers, and they are abstract for most of us.  I know that not everyone gets teary-eyed reading about Mark Madoff.  He is either no one to most of us, or he is Bernie Madoff’s son.

Depression is an isolating condition.  When a person needs others most—as succor and support, as a reminder of what is valuable in him/herself—the depressed individual is most likely to retreat, or even to obfuscate, hide in pleasantries or details, hide from himself, hide herself from the attention of family and friends.  We see this in Mark Madoff’s case too.

Maybe Mark Madoff’s wife could have delayed that trip to Florida, maybe his brother could have called him more, could have visited, maybe Mark’s friends could have probed more deeply: how was he doing? The pressure, the shame, was it too much?  Maybe Mark would not have died that weekend.  Maybe he would have lived, a shift in mood, a chance kindness, lifting him away from the intense desperation that drives a person to end his or her own life.  The act may seem impulsive, but it has been considered, considered again, left behind, only to erupt—the living-self dissuading the desperate-self, one winning, one losing, on each day, in each instance.

Suicide is never the fault of the ones who missed some clue, who avoided some phone call, who couldn’t be there at that precisely significant moment.  After all, each moment—every moment—is significant.  And yet suicide is preventable, depression is treatable.  This is the conundrum of suicide—something could have been done; nothing could have been done—and it is the burden received by family and friends left behind, sad and angry.  Not just angry at the world, but at the lost loved one.  How could he? The answer constantly shifting, a prism or crystal that refracts light in different directions, different hues, according to how and when you regard it.  It is painful to regard—the question, the death.  It reminds us of mortality, of sadness and helplessness—our own helplessness in the face of loss, the suicide’s in the face of emotional pain and a darkness in the soul.

This was not the post I planned for today.  Seeing the name Madoff again on the cover of the Times brought to the forefront of my mind what burbles beneath.  I think of Mark Madoff every week or so since his suicide on December 11th.  There are thousands of others I might have spent my thoughts on during that time, a few that I did.  But there he was, his story splashed across the front of the paper near year’s end, and so he stands in for so many other stories that I don’t know, that go unheard, but are deeply felt by those close to the person who has ended her own life.  Of course, in all of this, I am thinking of my own father too.

Lawrence Frye

It’s been more than sixteen years now since he shot himself.  I can’t imagine what my life would be like had he lived.  In fact, I think I have grown in ways I would not wish to relinquish.  We learn; we move on.  But I carry his story, his pain, in a pouch inside me.  Sometimes that pouch leaks; sometimes I open it up intentionally, needing to peek inside.  Memory is painful.  But memory is power too.

We can’t know everyone’s story.  We wouldn’t be able to bear the weight of them even.  But from each loss we learn not only more about the sadness in life—sadness that may be pulsing within those we know and care about—but also we learn of what we most cherish, what pleasure comes from being alive.

Here are the cookies I baked with my sons on Valentine’s Day.  The boys aren’t in the picture—but they are right here.

~  See also “The legacy of suicide—Mark Madoff redux.”  ~

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The abandoned self, the integrated one – but isn’t homophobia gone?

Posted on February 13, 2011 by Kara Krauze

I am a believer in coincidence.  (See last week’s post, Synchronicity: coincidence, literature,  & suicide, or A brain of one’s own.)  By which I mean that life is filled with funny details that make patterns or bring things together—sometimes literally, like the randomness of making a new acquaintance (the coincidence of my mother and future stepfather being placed in the same row on a flight to San Francisco, she reading an article about leftist politics, he a union member of intellectual bent), or sometimes remaking an old acquaintance anew (finding that the daughter of one of my father’s former lovers had moved to the same city).  I seek out these patterns.  I’m pleased to find them, like discovering the picture in the Rorschach image.  As with the test, there is room for variety of interpretation.  Sometimes coincidence involves effort, sometimes it isn’t coincidence at all.  (I had been sending holiday cards to the mother of my age-peer, thus keeping us indirectly in touch; otherwise would I have learned of her daughter’s proximity?  If I lived in Dubuque, this might be a coincidence; but New York attracts thousands of new inhabitants each month.  This is part of what I love about the city: coincidence, happenstance, is embedded in its urbanity, its size, its depth of interests and peoples.)  Timing renders an event or piece of information more meaningful; we become more receptive.

And so, recently I received an invitation to an LGBT (and friends) cocktail reception.  Having gone to college at Vassar, and lived in NYC’s East Village in my twenties, such an event, or something similar, was once quite common.  But then I got married, had kids…and now going out at all, attending a reading or meeting a friend for a drink, is something quite sparkly, and though no longer as rare as an immaculate apartment, it’s still narrowly controlled—the range of my activities bound by children’s bedtimes and the shortness of the night’s sleep anticipated by said children’s risings.

Yes, my life has narrowed.  So I look forward to the cocktail party, figuring it will actually seem quite normal to me, perhaps a re-integration of some part of my younger adult self (still straight, but more diverse in social routines and schedule) with my ‘mommy-self.’  Sure, I used to go to bars where the gender of the customers and wait staff was ambiguous, used to have more friends and acquaintances who are gay or lesbian, and saw them more often.  Here, at the cocktail party, the other attendees will also be parents; I suspect our lives (narrowed, if in different ways, and broadened tremendously too by those clinging, loved and loving additions) will be more similar than not.  At least on the surface this must be true; but I am looking at things too simply.

But none of this is yet about coincidence, more about a remembering of youth, selves shed or integrated along the way.  Something that must have occurred to me shortly after receiving that invitation, though I can’t have thought of it so fully right away.

A few days later, my husband was wanting a book to read and had settled on The Believers by Zoe Heller, which I had read and enjoyed two years ago, and so I found myself in the midst of the hustle of morning departures, pulling out stacks of old magazines and occasional sections of newspaper in search of the book.  Like archaeological digging, he pointed out.  For I knew just where The Believers should be and what books it should be near; I must that winter have been writing not enough and reading more.  Alas, no book.  (It later turned up at my in-laws.  It turns out I hadn’t bought it for myself; I had borrowed it after giving it to my mother-in-law.  Memory may have wished it as my own, thought of myself as possessing it, having read it, but no.  Memory has desires and needs too.)  Anyway, what came down, tumbling in chaos onto the bed, where it lay until kids and husband were dispatched and I had returned, was an old Times Style Section, including the Modern Love column, a piece I always mean to read, but rarely get to.

Never mind that this one was from September, it was new to me, and the title, “The Anatomy of a Breakup,” by Gili Warsett sounded intriguing enough to at least begin to read.  And then here came a story of a young woman in a lesbian relationship going through her girlfriend’s gender transformation from woman to man.  Shifts in identity, removal of breasts, testosterone.  Gili Warsett described her loyalty, her love, and then her confusion as the relationship changed.  Though I am giving away too much here, do go and read the article; it is beautiful and moving, and I found myself close to tears by the end.  The relationship did not survive; and perhaps it wouldn’t have even with far fewer pressures, as so many loves of our twenties do not.  But Ms. Warsett probed so honestly the questions she posed to herself, first as she found peace and comfort in being mistaken for a straight couple, and then ultimately as she entered into a straight relationship.  She wanted to escape the fraught questions that had entered her life; she knows she is leaving something behind and is troubled by it.  Her probings are a reminder of how quickly, how easily, we come to accept the world we live in as ‘the world.’  How easy it is, even, to think that identity-struggles, that homophobia, have diminished almost to the point of invisibility—because things are better, because many people are more tolerant…but really because we retreat into the easy limits of our own daily lives.  Into what’s comfortable.

In the town where I grew up, the Confederate flag is pasted on pick-up trucks and still flies at the county fair.  My mother and stepfather have friends who won’t go to that fair, who can’t, as a family, as a couple, because they are both men.  How enlightened the town seemed to have become when I met them at the farmers’ market, when I saw their son playing, learned of hopes for a second child to join them.  Yes, things had changed since my childhood, grown more open, and the outer world has come in—organic greens and coffee shops—but some of this is still the comfortable surface, easy on the eyes and brain.  It frightens and saddens me to think about that fair, a place where my children can go, while others’ would be safer staying home.  How comfortable is that?

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“Sex in Mommyville”—oh, Russia—oh, Polish soup

Posted on February 11, 2011 by Kara Krauze

A few weeks ago I saw Anna Fishbeyn’s wonderful one-woman show—yes, that’s the title, Sex in Mommyville.  Anna immigrated to the States from Russia at age eleven—this is more than just background; it informs the show in the best possible ways, giving her an insider-outsider perspective, and filling the piece with engaging specifics.  Anna does a fantastic job pulling together all of the competing demands on a mother’s time…work, kids!, baby crying, family-at-large, messy house, personal fulfillment?!, a clean household?, husband…just to name a few—with humor, insight, and a probing feminist spin that reminds you why you care about gender issues (why they matter) without beating anyone over the head, more like a feather tickle to the ribs, and a nice drink.

My husband loved the performance too.  It’s so much more fun to see someone else’s trials played out as entertainment—knowing they’re also yours—than to just drone through your own.  Another waking child!  Another too-short night!  Work thoughts and work deadlines!  Whence the adult time?!  When do you just burrow into the pillow hoping for sleep?  Anna’s show makes exhaustion and interrupted adult time fun, and, not surprisingly, her heightened portrayal of practically-live-in Russian parents helping, interfering, helping, interfering is wonderfully rendered.  We know what a sucker I am for anything Russian—but even if you’re not, it’s fun to see one’s own crazy, hectic life twisted around just a bit—freshened up, as it were, and given a social commentary to boot—and made into a riveting performance.

Anna’s website (sexinmommyville.com) shares the beginning of her novel (The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield—hopefully coming soon…) drawing the compelling and hilarious, trials of casual adultery in 1970s Russia from a sharp-eyed child’s perspective.  As a once-child who spent some time in the midst of the American variety, I’d say Russia sounds like more fun.  This is part of what I love of Russian-ness, this sharp, semi-tragic, yet bemused look at reality—bemused, but not irony-laden.  One can have feeling and still appreciate the absurdity of a situation.  There is something particularly Eastern European about this….  Certainly it has to do with the double-life necessitated by such intensive state control of individual decisions, thoughts, possibilities…and yet some part of it predates Stalin, predates communism.

Ritual comes to mind, the importance of ritual, the significance given to it…like a cup of soup, a dish that sometimes feels fetishized in my part-Polish household.  I’ve come to accept this, and, still, sometimes I am completely mystified by it.  Why is a meal not complete without soup?  It fills you up too soon, it keeps the children—who seldom do more than touch it, quite literally—from the part of the meal that will satisfy them, will keep them relatively calm and focused for the next five to twenty minutes….  But, yes, soup, soup!  Anna plays with this too in her show; her grandmother’s soup, the precious elixir for children that requires a mother’s full day at the stove to prepare it.  Me, I’ll take a stew (or the weekly pot of cheesy pasta that keeps my two-year-old nourished)—throw it all in, only one pot to clean, only one dish per eater.  I am constantly imagining the day with no dishes, the dinner with no dishes.  Rather like imagining an uninterrupted and full night’s sleep, or sex without wondering what child will emerge, and when.

And here I thought I would end, but that soup, that soup, it’s sticking in my mind.  The mythical bowl of warm nourishment that begins the meal.  I think it must remind my father-in-law of childhood.  My own too-brief time with his mother, my husband’s babcia, calls to mind bowls of soup, the steadfastness with which she carried those bowls (in Warsaw) from kitchen to dining room, her hand shaking, and yet never losing its cargo.  This is how a meal begins: slowly, with thought, the stomach warming to its coming treats, the mind, the table’s guests, warming to each other, opening up to the discussions that will follow.  In fact, this is what I try to find when we light candles for Shabbat, that moment of calm, the welcoming of our time at the table.  And, amazingly, the boys always seem just a little more mellow, a little more discursive, on those evenings.  We each find, or remember, the rituals that help us keep what we need.

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Memory as moving target

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Kara Krauze

Memory is intrusive.  And I am constantly surprised by it.  Even the bad memories, perhaps especially the bad ones, are interesting.  Brain food.

As you’ve read here before, I think of memory as a frequency (a channel), something we have tuned in—consciously or not—or something we want to tune out.  Do you want to remember how your ex used to roll his eyes when you made a bad joke—when you see your husband grimace at the same thing?  Or how your mother’s voice snapped when you and your brother got too loud—and then there you are, your voice raised just a little too much at your own kids or your partner…and you hear your mother’s voice, thirty years ago, but it’s coming out of your mouth?  Then again, maybe you do want to remember.  You can’t have the present without the past.  How boring it would be if everything had gone without a hitch.  (Think of The Truman Show, all bland, perky, and bright—not for me.  Sure, ease is nice, but so is something to think about, chew over, reconcile or solve.)

One way or another, my father’s suicide—what preceded it, what came after—interplays with most of my memories.  As anyone intimate with suicide knows, whether the act is a surprise or not, it re-casts event after event, memory after memory.  And suicide is not unique in this.

Find out about a lover’s affair, about a friend’s divorce, any sudden change or loss, and you wonder about what detail or secret, what mystery you missed.  The life is rewritten; you want to read it again, look for subtext, or even figure out a way to write it over.  But where would you start?

This is one of the questions COUNTRIES OF LOST THINGS circles around.  Francesca wonders, if my parents might divorce, what does that mean about their marriage, what does it mean about mine?  She follows Dani, trying to figure out answers to a question she hasn’t even found.  Hasn’t yet translated—from urge or feeling into words. David is doing the same thing as he longs for lost ancestors, mourns his mother in a new way, but why?  Because he has a new son?  Because he is trying to figure out what the half-fictional character in his new book has lost?  He doesn’t know.  People are driven by unanalyzed needs, by longing (for what’s gone, for what awaits), by selfishness, by love, by curiosity, by memory.  By fate too?  Or is fate just coincidence in a different guise?  By all of it—a wonderful, wondrous mess.

Really, each day is a new start of sorts.  But then, being human, we look for all of the starts that came before, and the paths that took us from there to here, and then from here to there.

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Synchronicity: coincidence, literature, & suicide, or A brain of one’s own

Posted on February 5, 2011 by Kara Krauze

This past November, I was fortunate to attend a fantastic conference (clmp’s Literary Writers’ Conference) hosted at The New School, where I heard the poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi speak (and others too; more on that another time).  I had been thinking about starting a blog for going on a year, but the details from the panel pushed me forward to the next step, fuelled by something Calvocoressi said: “The internet is where you can create a space where people can watch you think.”

Funny what passing remark can give you one of those ah-ha moments.  I have little idea who out there will want to watch me think, time will tell—but god I miss it!  Thinking, watching myself think, creating a space that brings together the interests that sometimes seem disparate but are in fact interlinked, intertangled, constantly erupting.

Calvocoressi had hit upon one of the things I was trying to figure out how to build: a space, a metaphoric room, so to speak, where my brain could roam and expand.  But not only that, a place where that thinking could enter the world (that weird amorphous cyber-world) and perhaps connect with someone else.  Without ever knowing each other, without ever speaking ourselves, at least not in that moment where words are being read on a page (imbibed even), we are creating one kind of community.  Words, language, make the connections (intellectual, emotional) for us.

I was not an earnest networker at the LWC conference—as for many people, networking doesn’t come automatically to me; it takes work—and during those two days in November I observed and listened more than I spoke, and yet the combined dialogues, some silent, some not, expanded my community—my sense of community—tremendously.  As a writer, as a parent who is home quite a lot with young children, even as a suicide survivor (a term that deserves explanation: i.e. a relative, or close friend, of someone who has killed her/himself) much of my life is somewhat solo.  I hesitate to use the word isolated or lonely; after all, I often see quite a few people in a day, share tidbits, greetings, commiserations, with them, and with my husband at day’s end.  But much of my intellectual life goes on in my head.  There is too little time to sit, share, discourse about much beyond the events of the day, big or small.

Our time is fractured, in the workplace, at home, most of it accounted for.  Increasingly the screen, surfing this or that, is a space of private oasis.  I have ambivalent feelings about this.  And yet, as a writer and reader, also someone contemplating different kinds of community, I have been, in part, won over.

A review in the January 23rd NYTBR hits precisely this point.  While the book itself (Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, by Sherry Turkle) looks interesting, it is the review I want to engage with here.  The reviewer, Jonah Lehrer sums up,

“We are so eager to take sides on technology, to describe the Web in utopian or dystopian terms, but maybe that’s the problem.  In the end, it’s just another tool, an accessory that allows us to do what we’ve always done: interact with one other.  The form of these interactions is always changing.  But the conversation remains.”

Here we have a new form of doing something old, and yet so important: the foundation of who we are and how we bond.  Interact with one other, the review says; and this is exactly right, and, too, we want to interact with one another.

Bounce again (note the use of the word coincidence at the beginning of this post).  This past weekend, about the time I was reading that already week old book review, I came across a compendium of short pieces in the literary journal Pen America (Issue #13: Lovers,© 2010)—writers riffing on their favorite authors, a wonderful selection.  In one of them (“Are You My Mother?”), Elissa Schappell writes,

“I confess that I am often frustrated by the notion that it’s impossible for a woman to be a wife and mother and first-rate writer.  That any female artist who hopes to ever be as highly regarded as her male counterparts should start packing for Bellevue.  That any woman who chooses her children’s company—nay, relishes it—is a sap who has consigned her Nobel dreams to the scrap heap.  It is in these moments I need Dawn Powell the most.

“The depression that sent [Virginia] Woolf into the river and sent [Dorothy] Parker to an overdose seemed to send Dawn Powell to the typewriter.”

More community, squared and then some, found in the written word: book, journal, web….  (Check out Elissa Schappell’s first novel, the linked stories, Use Me—it looks great.  Perhaps a to-read list is called for here soon….)

Re-bounce.  Adjoining Pen America on my short stack at the NYC Union Square Barnes & Noble café was TLR: The Literary Review (Fall 2010)—focused on mothers!  The “Conversation,” which I quickly turned to (quickly as in sparked-by-interest and quickly as in not-much-more-time-until-kids-need-me): Ceridwen Morris and Jenny Offill, “Is There Anything Literary About Motherhood?” (Yes, yes, yes! Though sometimes buried….)  The conversation is interesting and nuanced; so many expectations and preconceptions attach to motherhood, and it is so easy to get buried in minutia (home with kids, or working and then home-to-kids): so many details! new worries, abrupt shifts in plan.  The dross that pulls one away from thought…from even finishing a thought!  And now here I am off on the mama-riff, which I hadn’t intended to do, when what I really wanted to land on was communities and coincidence.

Coincidence: we find things in pairs, in threes, in droves.  Once our eye catches on something, it finds the same glint there and there, and elsewhere.  And so, here was Jenny Offill talking about her daughter getting a bit older and…

“[M]y ideal of what life should be has changed.  It’s no longer that I’m off working alone in some perfect space.  My ideal now is that I’m sitting around the table with six fascinating people, and we’re talking while our kids are running around behind us, old enough to play together.”

Some conversations we do indeed have better, they grow deeper, when other things might demand more of our attention (those playing kids).  And some can only be had, can only be deepened, when the adult mind can play (uninterrupted by a call for a snack, a skinned knee)…whether with others, or by one’s self.  The company of one’s self is a wonderful thing to cherish too.  (I wonder if Francesca—COUNTRIES OF LOST THINGS—could have used more of this, or perhaps she sought it too much, in the wrong places.)

Final bounce!  Yes, I’ve gone on too long today.  But I need to circle back to where this post began.  With Gabrielle Calvocoressi.  With poetry (wonderful sanctuary!).  With coincidence. So, after I met Gabrielle at that conference, I bought her most recent collection¸ Apocalyptic Swing—wonderful, captivating and intriguing, accessible and yet mysterious, the way the best poetry can be—and, of course, I looked for her on the web.  (Check out http://therumpus.net/author/gabrielle-calvocoressi/.)  Boom, first real hit was a short piece she wrote for The Washington Post at the beginning of the year, and a poem.  First line of the essay:

“In the spring of my 13th year, my mother took her life.”

More sadness in the world; and another compatriot.  Once you see something, a new word, an idea, a new book, suddenly it pops up everywhere.  It is a magnet.  We are magnetic. Making connections through communities (virtual, real), and seeing the connections around us—illumination, a flash bulb—life grows deeper. This sounds like a sad note to end on, but it’s not.   Check out Gabrielle’s essay and poem:  Poet’s Choice: ‘Temple Beth Israel’.

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A walk through Grand Central

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Kara Krauze

Back in the early Naughties (I love having an excuse to use that ridiculous term, and then I hate the fact I’ve stooped to use it), I was walking through Grand Central, with all its crazy bustle, when I caught sight of a woman who shared some physical features with my husband’s ex-girlfriend, a woman I had only seen in photos.  How interesting! I thought.  There is X!  Or, really, more like how interesting it would be if in fact that were X…and I wished I could follow her.  Who was she?  What was her life like?  What an adventure it would be to find out!  (What an adventure, really, to slip into anyone’s life, trail them, slide into and around their thoughts—rather like reading, rather like writing.)

And thus a novel was born.  A quiet, rather slow birth.  The idea sat in my head for a while, even a year (memory failing me here), then a few pages sat on my computer—I remember a visit to Grand Central at night, illicit it seemed, by myself when I was pregnant with my first child, scoping, thinking, imagining a character who would follow her husband’s ex-girlfriend, imagining the girlfriend (Russian), her allure, imagining the husband (a writer)—another ten pages joined it…until a few months after that (years having passed), in a burst of baby-fueled desperation three-hundred pages flew out of me (no, not as effortlessly as that sounds, but it was a trance-like period, eating, sleeping, walking, nursing, writing…I dreamed of them, Francesca, Aleksandra Danilovna “Dani”, David, and Viktor and Gill, the sculptors who tried to express what they and the others desired, what Dani and the others had lost)…as my little guy grew from fifteen months to a year and a half.  I had set aside my previous novel, its revisions cantankerous, and here was my new paramour, COUNTRIES OF LOST THINGS.

Naptime!  What a boon!  In the morning, I often pulled into a coffee shop, holding my breath, lest my son wake (nightmare of nightmares, a too-early-roused child!), and wrote in longhand.  In the afternoon, back home, he slept again, perhaps having seen a friend in between, or not (each other’s company enough).  The apartment was silent; I transcribed or wrote, the dip in and out of this other world hasty and deep, the pressure enchanting, as consuming as love, as motherhood.

But here was a place for my brain to roam, my young son a still-willing accomplice (mostly) on long walks, on excursions further afield.  We explored together, each of us half-blind to what the other saw.  He, of course, doesn’t remember that time, our burgeoning conversations, my monologues, his hungry eyes, ears, smiles.  And yet I know the memories are in him, like sunken treasure.  Not all memory is conscious and aware; some is like the cement in the foundation of who we are: stuck to the bricks, holding the bricks together.

With COUNTRIES OF LOST THINGS, I started out with a narrator for whom the past mattered not at all.  Certainly she had lived—but her previous marriage, childhood, these were stories and events that were finished.  Alas, both Francesca and her creator found out how wrong she was!  Francesca’s own history, a dead half-sister, her parents’ marriage and the divorce upon which it was founded, creep into her present life.  She resists, meanwhile watching her husband succumb, succumbing herself—to his past.  Chasing Dani, chasing David and who he used to be.  And, most of all, chasing herself.

I suppose my question to myself, for years now, has been how does past loss, grief, intersect with living a contented life in the present?  Acknowledge the past, but don’t be consumed by it, a balancing act.  I waited years after my father’s death to even display a picture of him, as though his pain were still toxic, contagious, my own hurt still raw.  Now the photo remains a constant, changing rooms, shifting from one bookshelf to another, but offering a steady gaze—his, and mine in return.  My children talk about him, ask about him.  Some questions are simple, others more probing and fraught: How did Granddad Frye die?  Ah—more to explain and explore there, saved for another day….

Posted in COUNTRIES OF LOST THINGS, Memory, Motherhood, Russia, Suicide, Writing & Reading | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Welcome to triple decaf ~ the memory channel

Posted on January 30, 2011 by Kara Krauze



Let’s start with what you’ll find here…

Thoughts on memory—a lot—many personal, some general.  Mostly with a literary or psychological bent, with history, politics, current events insinuating themselves too.

A channel is a tunnel, a passageway.  It’s also a frequency—thoughts or events to be tuned in to, or to be tuned out.  For me, memory is fascinating, the way some small event, thought, gesture or phrase from the past erupts into what we’re engaging in right now.  Similarly, the way a large event—an amorphous, ever-spreading memory—can jump in and shape something in the present anew.  (More on one of my own formative events—suicide—in a moment.)

Thoughts on writing, both fiction and memoir.

Thoughts on Russia, a country I spent less than six months in, but a place, people, that compelled me enough to lead me to learn the language, to study in Moscow…that compels me enough, even now, that it informs much of what I’m writing in the last few years.  I’ve lost most of my Russian language abilities—rusty with disuse—and I have little time to properly follow Russian politics, but my Russian soul (the Russian word душа, dooshá, is so much fuller) lingers, embedded in who I am and what engages me.  The novel I’m revising now—COUNTRIES OF LOST THINGS—dances with some of this infatuation, this Russian beauty and mystery.

Bosnia, too.  The war there took place during my late college years and early adulthood.  The senselessness of it, the tragedy of being bystanders to genocide in Europe (elsewhere too), again, left a profound effect.  You may find some writings from a novel engaged with the Yugoslav war of the early 1990s—DOWN THE STREET A BUILDING BURNED—here later.

Motherhood….  I have two young children and, not surprisingly, almost everything I do (even a good portion of what I think!) is affected by them.  Almost every day, I find myself reshaped by them—like challenging yoga poses, invigorating, exciting, immensely difficult at times too.

Ok, so, I warned you…suicide.  My kids (family life), memory, coincidence, Eastern Europe, the shadow of the Holocaust, and suicide—the bundle of sticks I’m bringing to the bonfire (plus, surely, a few others).

My father, a professor, shot himself when I was twenty-three.  It was not a surprise—it was a huge surprise!  It was a shock that left me numb for several years (and that made me numb for years prior).  The news—current events, literary events—touches on or announces suicide with more frequency (according to my radar anyway) than it used to.  This is good.  A silence, secrecy, too easily accrues to the word, to the act and its after-effects.  This is a place where I’ll riff on my own thoughts about the subject—and I welcome perspectives from others out there, including, please, any interesting news or books I might be missing (remember, two small children! too little sleep!).

Finally, why on earth triple decaf?  My daily addiction, indulgence, is a decaf cappuccino, three shots.  It’s a relatively small thing, a punctuation mark of sorts, that gives me tremendous pleasure—both calms and activates me.  The way a cigarette used to years (and years) ago.  And it symbolizes for me two traits (neither of which I’m especially pleased about, but there they are, embedded)—caution and excess.  Really, must I continue to drink decaf?  I’ve finished my five-year-plus stint of attempted pregnancy, pregnancy, and breast feeding….  But I drink so much coffee (not just that cappuccino), that I can’t possibly go back to full caffeine.  I would surely end up making mental charts of which cup should be the full joe and which water-processed out (or chlorine-processed or whatever horribly unhealthy chemical they use).  Too much attention to beverages—and too much nervous energy.  More energy I’d love (where, oh where…?!), but not the nervous, spiking up-and-down sort—so, caution (take a moment, think it over).  And excess!  Over-think, over-plan—striving to do more, better—jump on in…otherwise, how would we ever get anything done?!

Tune in for more….

Posted in COUNTRIES OF LOST THINGS, Memory, Motherhood, Russia, Suicide, Welcome!, Writing & Reading | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments