I'm thrilled to host Elizabeth Kadestsky. She is author of the memoir First There Is a Mountain, the short story collection The Poison that Purifies You, and the novella On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World. A professor of creative writing at Penn State and nonfiction editor at the New England Review, she is the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Program, MacDowell Colony, and Vermont Studio Center.
Thank you so much, Elizabeth!
One of the most moving sentences I’ve ever read is this:
Ghosts live with us. I think they do, too. And I think it isn’t, as Hollywood
would have you believe, the ghost who needs to move on to the light—it’s us.
Can you talk about that, please?
That is very kind, thank you. I love your way of putting
that—I hope to move on to the light some day. My book definitely proposes that
our ancestors hover about the periphery like ghosts. They shape our actions,
and we make unconscious decisions every day based on stories that have been
passed down for decades: stories that we have never interrogated or consciously
allowed into our worldviews. Stepping on to the light, for me, is recognizing
the presence of my ancestors in my subconscious—good and bad—and then making
conscious choices about the extent to which I allow their storylines to shape
my reality. This can be true for many people. Shame, in particular, seems to
get passed down unconsciously. I know that my mother was unfairly shamed as a
child, and that her irrational shame infected me. Another very simple example
of an unconscious ancestral narrative is that my Franco-American relatives can
be fatalistic about the prevalence of alcoholism and addiction “in our genes.”
Having read about genetic markers and the genetic markers for addiction
specifically, I don’t believe that this is an inevitability at all. I refuse to
give in to the idea that something so personal is fated and out of my control.
Ghosts also live with us in dreams, and perhaps it is
through these dreams that one can take further steps toward conscious living.
Dreams access that space where the dead and the living co-habit. My mother
fully occupies my dream life. When she had Alzheimer’s and was still alive, I
continually dreamed that a miracle cure had been discovered and she recovered.
After she died I continually dreamed that she was still alive. The dream self,
I guess, doesn’t adjust easily to bad news. Even eight years after her death,
my mother still appears in my dreams, but there is a greater sense that she has
moved “on to the light,” that she is no longer living. But perhaps this slow
coming to terms is also a version of my own moving into the light. My ghostly
dream mother is, perhaps, my spirit guide shepherding me toward greater
reconciliation. Sadly, though, the same rationalism that denies me the salve of
believing in an afterlife or reincarnation also insists that I sit with the
reality that I am mortal and that life is evanescent. Perhaps the light that
we, or I, must enter is the light that allows me to shed my fear of death after
seeing my mother move through the ghostly affect of Alzheimer’s to actual
death.
Thank you, again! I saw no way to tell my story in a linear
manner. Whenever I wrote about what was happening in the present—my mother’s
decline into Alzheimer’s and the many dramatic upheavals along the way—the past
would insert itself. Probably, my mind did this as a means of coping. The past
appeared in no particular order. The same would happen when I was writing about
the past—reflections on the present moment ordered themselves more by topic
than by timeline. The essay structure seemed the best way to allow an overlay
of time, memory, and mental states. My story, after all, was about occupying
liminal spaces. That slide between past and present that I was experiencing
while writing the book reflected my mother’s Alzheimer’s-ish reality, almost a
sleep walking. It also reflected my own nostalgic mind state, which cast an
unreal patina onto events from the past, recalled simultaneously in starkly
opposite, positive and negative, ways. I was also writing about drugs, my own
experiences in the past and my sister’s tendency to bend the facts or refuse to
stick to a hard and true sense of accountability when drugs were involved. My
reaction to the latter was to perform the metaphorical throwing up of hands—I
didn’t want to waste my time pursuing the truth when someone was artfully
constructing false narratives. The book, in a sense, also refuses to impose a
rigid sense of rationality. Locating a hard and fast truth when the markers are
so elusive is too difficult, and it doesn’t always lead to greater insights or
resolutions.
There is so much in this memoir about not just the need to
forgive or forget or move on, at least, but to also remember. Part of your book
deals with your mother’s Alzheimer’s and about reconstructing a past. I think a
lot about how the brain doesn’t really differentiate between what really
happened and what someone is hypnotized into believing happened, so that makes
it seem as if our memories are indeed fluid. Would you agree? And how do think
that helps us (or hinders us) in living our lives?
Memory is our own endless stream of fake news, isn’t it? I
read somewhere that dysfunctional families create false mythologies in the same
manner that cults do. The cult member accepts a tinged version of reality set
forth by a charismatic leader. The isolation and interiority of the group
ensures a lack of input from outside, such that the accepted truth is never
challenged or subjected to outside corroboration. When a member does allow the
entry of an external world view, that person is banished. In this way, group
think perseveres.
My grandmother’s alcoholism created dysfunction in my family
that rippled out through generations; with it came many false narratives. One
was a false accusation against my mother that shaped my mother’s life thereafter,
and subsequently shaped my own. Unspoken family secrets are the closest
equivalent of group think. Since they are unspoken, they can never be
challenged, and at a certain point many of the players forget what, exactly,
they even were. All that is left behind is a residue of bad feeling, like that
Victorian idea of the ghostly froth that seeped from the mouths of the living
dead, the ectoplasm.
This residual memory of an unnamed transgression certainly
happened with my mother. By the time she had Alzheimer’s, she had no
recollection of the false accusation against her. I believe that through years
of shame and denial she’d expunged it from conscious thought even by the time I
was an adult, when I first began to sense that it existed. So, for me, unearthing
the secret, and speaking it, was an important part of my refusal to forget.
Once the accusation was spoken, anyone could see that it was ludicrous. By that
point, my mother was in a state where memory and imagination were nearly the
same thing, and in my family, I think, there was always that tendency to
conflate the imagination with the real anyway. My mother told me the New York
Times was “full of lies” when I brought it come as part of a high school
English assignment. Choosing journalism as my first career was my next act of
rebellion against this family mindset.
Nevertheless, I think that if someone can reconceive a
painful history in such a way as to make it meaningful and to point a way
forward and away from darkness, be it though nostalgia or recasting the story
of one’s own life, by all means they—we—should.
Tell us about your writing process, rituals, planning or not
planning, number of cups of coffee you have to have, and more.
I don’t sit down at the desk until at least a full paragraph
has taken form in my mind: I’m a firm believer in that “eureka moment”—that
one’s best ideas will come when one is in a relaxed and slightly distracted
mind state. Nothing is worse for the imagination than staring down that blank
page. If I’m lucky, the paragraph takes form when I’m in a position to record
it into an audio note or jot it down, because that way, I can inscribe it in my
memory. When I’m ready to create the actual written record, I often don’t go
back to the original note—having recorded it is enough. Then, once I have a
piece of writing started—be it something new or a chapter or scene from
something in progress—I carry it around with me in multiple forms, and I more
or less compulsively read and re read it, making edits in my head that, once again,
I don’t always write down right away. I’ll often have a version on my phone as
well as a printed version in my purse. I then become extremely annoying to all
the people around me because I can’t think about anything else, and I will
constantly pull out any one of the extant versions of the work in progress to
keep adding to it and refining it. Once I have something started, I am working
on it pretty much 24 hours a day, including in dreams, until it’s done.
What’s obsessing you now and why?
What question didn’t I ask that I should have?
Something about posterity and publishing, perhaps? Now that
I am finally publishing this book, I am thinking a lot about what it means to
put it out in the world, especially since it exonerates my mother for something
that I wish she could have forgiven herself for during her life. Publishing a
book causes one to spend a lot of time hoping for it to get attention and
comparing it to how much attention other books have received. So, I am trying
to keep hold of the fact that the simple act of publishing this book
accomplishes so much of what I initially hoped for, ending, as it were, a cycle
of secrets and lies.
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