Revisiting Eucalyptus.

Eucalyptus, by Murray Bail, was one of the first books I encountered as an “adult writer.” By adult writer, I mean a 17- or 18-year-old, newly arrived at a fancy-dancy liberal arts school to pursue writing. It struck me, like a bell in a tower, back then, and ever since I’ve taken many an opportunity to thrust it on other readers—some of whom returned the copy to me with lukewarm response. As it always goes with the books one loves, the lukewarmness is hard to understand. So, having recovered the book somewhat recently after it took a few year sojourn away from me on a different friend’s shelf, I decided to revisit Eucalyptus through thirteen-year-older eyes and see if I was unfairly preaching the novel’s merits through the haze of years and very fond memories of the class in which I read it.

But no, I was right. The novel still rang bell-like through my heart and mind. Foremost, it is because it is a love story. One maybe learns more and ultimately even is more moved by a non-love story (broken hearts, broken relationships, murder, mayhem, etc.), but when we’re talking simple pleasure, is there any better than reading a love story? Eucalyptus spins the same kind of bittersweet aching mood as did The Time Traveler's Wife. Second, the novel explores every acre of its rural outback place, showing reader and prospective writer how intimately it is possible to know a place, how valuable and worthy of attention down to the most minute detail that place is. Third, there is Murray Bail’s embrace of learning. Because no matter how Australian he is, no matter how long in the outback, no matter how much he likes trees, I simply do not believe that the breadth of knowledge he presents in the book was entirely intuitive. The book feels like exuberant proof that one can teach oneself to become an expert. There’s the experimental format, using trees and tree facts to brace the narrative, using the story-within-a-story loom to further weave the reader so thickly in. There’s the simplicity—this is just a courtship, just a love story, it’s not going to change the world or shake up your worldview necessarily. There’s the nod to Sherazade—the need to spin a web of words around another, as if life depended on it. I sort of love those last two points because they acknowledge that not every story needs or wants to be a game changer.

What the years have afforded me, though, is the objective distance to see, finally, how the novel might not affect everyone in the same way. Some might say it begins strangely or proceeds oddly. That the opening few chapters distance reader from the story in that they meditate on trees, nature, how to begin a story. That, even, those first few chapters are like the knotted fringe at the edge of a shawl or blanket when the reader longs from the start to be thickly knitted into story. That, for readers weaned on action movies and the quick pacing of J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer, etc., man, this has got to be one of the slowest paced books ever.

Sometimes a reader can read and wonder who this disembodied narrator is and why they know what they know; sometimes the experimental format will fray faster at the edges; sometimes a novel will have nothing to do with 9/11 or terrorism or war or the Middle East or modernity or technology or the distances between us. Sometimes—wonderful, wonderful times—nothing matters as much as the storytelling.

The trouble with finishing a coming-of-age novel, I think, is when do we ever.

There’s something ashift lately, the air hums with it. It could be fall—or, where I am, Indian summer. It’s the kind of thing that prompts change. I will move to another city! I will finally admit this between us is over! I will go out and not come home until I have met someone I didn’t know before! I will apply to graduate school, apply to a new job, apply myself. I will start a novel, a road trip, the process of adopting children, tracking my ovulation, a diet, a retirement account.

Writes the anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom (Johnston et al. forthcoming), “Like tomorrow, happiness never arrives—for the starting point of every story is that you are without it.”

For me, this restlessness has taken the shape variously of: I will move to a more urban part of the bay, something that feels more like a city than a suburb. I will move somewhere much, much cheaper. I will move into a house, one with multiple bedrooms and bathrooms, a washer/dryer and dishwasher, a yard, an outdoor fricken fireplace, while we’re at it. I will move into a space that will make me feel that it is home. I will think I should become a homeowner. I will check tiny apartment listings in the city and sprawling homes all over the bay and with conflicted longing all over the state of Hawai'i as well. I will have our credit check run for an absolutely ridiculous state-of-the-art, four-bedroom townhouse in the Oakland Hills; then another way out in Pittsburgh. So far, Pittsburgh will be the only one we can afford so I will pretend for a little while that I could do it… see myself walking the dog, someday pushing a stroller, walking in circles and circles around a subdivision in a pastel velour sweat suit like an outtake from Desperate Housewives. Like such isolation, such waiting for that honey-I’m-hooome even though holding while I wait a full-time job and thus a network of my own, such lack of independence and ability to explore multiple other worlds wouldn’t make me want to scratch off my own skin from the inside out.

Of course, what’s in the air has manifested in my desire for movement. What else would it do? It has been a year.

But the other way it manifested today, strangely, was that it made me want to uncover my novel-in-progress, dust off the accumulation of three years’ shelf time (well, thirteen total), and get back to work. At this point, I know those characters better than some of my family members. I understand their motivations. I’ve let them all talk, even the most minor of characters. The problem is, as it always has been, shape. I have two full drafts of the same novel—or perhaps I have two novels with the same characters?—but in any case one is from the 1^st person POV of a single character, and the other is a sprawling multivocal account. The former attempts to cover just twelve years; the latter reaches much further in time, both forward and back.

Curiously enough [INSERT HEAVY SARCASM], I began writing the 1^st-person,twelve-year one when I was about eighteen and couldn’t see much further than a few years in front of my face. I was in the midst of writing the second, multivocal account when I entered grad school at age 28, with college and spectacularly failed romances and friendships behind me, with a certain yearning to and resignation that I’d never move home, with those relationships that had endured and my lovely marriage tucked safely in my arms. The difference between the two full drafts and the draft I sense is ahead reveals not only how much the story has grown but, too, how much I have. It meant the characters cut along their own dotted lines and peeled themselves out of the molds into which I’d fit them and then forced me to see them in 3-D. It meant the novel grew stronger, for which I am grateful, but this brings me to my point: When does the madness STOP?!

I’m not asking how do you end a story or a novel. (I sometimes, erringly and without great consistency, have managed to do that.) I’m questioning how the writer of a coming-of-age novel—especially the kind that, in essence, has grown up with you, not that your stand-in is necessarily the narrator or even a main character but, rather, that every character contains pieces of you, like in the dream theory where everyone is you—how this writer manages to find the other end of the rainbow, locates the arc, understands how to be done when she herself is still growing.

I’ve come to two novel finishes, and I’ve come of many ages. But I’m under no illusion that the work is done. I am 31. I am a work-from-home editor and writer. On a good day, I reverse the order of those roles. My social network is made up more and more of the cords and cables that connect Internet to computer to fingers to heart and brain. Sometimes all week I hear only the sound of my dog’s bark, my husband’s voice, the murmur of neighbors’ voices in the courtyard, my mother on the phone for two hours on Sundays. Too often I spend hours online watching the lives of others scroll by—not exactly full of envy, or at least not always, but certainly curiosity. What is it like to be her or him? Living in an owned home with a lush yard on a small island, or that tiny rented apartment smack in the middle of that big city? What’s it like to be a real estate agent, a biologist, a teacher, an advertising exec, an engineer, a dancer, a model, a singer, a baker, a choral conductor? What’s it like to put on clothes and go to a Job every day? What’s it like to earn enough money? Is there ever enough, or does everyone feel some variation of the same panic I do? What’s it like to have dated more, married later or earlier, had kids much earlier, never left home, never moved back again any closer to home? What’s it like to be a mother or to have had a father? What’s it like to be anyone but me, not because being me is so miserable but because I am curious? And because what is that but the writer’s job in a nutshell: to keep trying to answer that question of a hundred not-yous? It is to start out with the idea of a person—even a caricature at times—and through the drafting come to know that person as one knows the self and to invariably endow them with bits of dialogue overheard, with loved ones’ quirks, with the intimacies of one’s own person such as stories behind scars, placement of moles, insecurities, irrational fears and irrational loves.

I ask over and again what is it like to be you because I don’t even know with any consistency what it is like to be me. I can’t always recall faithfully my past and I never have enough of an idea about my future.

So maybe I am asking how one ends a story after all.

Perhaps there is no secret. Perhaps you just put foot in front of foot, draft in front of draft, until a day when something’s ashift in the air again.

---

REFERENCE CITED

Johnston, Barbara Rose, Elizabeth Colson, Dean Falk, Graham St. John, John H. Bodley, Bonnie J. McCay, Alaka Wali, Carolyn Nordstrom, and Susan Slyomovics

Forthcoming/2012 Vital Topics Forum: On Happiness. American Anthropologist 114(1)/March 2012.

Drunken Boat #14 is live!

I'm thrilled to share that "The Shape Love Takes" found a home with Drunken Boat in their second edition of the fantastic /slant/sex/ folio (issue #14). I am honored to be a part of such a great folio and among such incredible artists, which I am discovering one by one. I'll leave you with the words of one, Melissa Febos, who, in "Manginalogues," writes, "We just want to feel less alone in the world, and to make honest work. All of us. I have spent my life running towards all that was strange and scary and intoxicating, trying to prove my invincibility and finding my humanity instead." It's a wonderful sentiment that draws together the diversity of the folio and, indeed, the whole Drunken Boat issue.

It's also a reminder of why some of us write at all and an offering of my tiptoeing attempts to find reentry into this space. As Febos suggests, we write to feel less alone, to be honest, to tell truths. We often fight our own egos to do so: that desire to present a shiny and admirable surface to the world. And sometimes it is in our fumbling attempts to show the shiny that we are at our most flawed, our most human. So I spent the better part of two years very publicly flailing my way through miscarriage and fertility treatments. So an anonymous troll shined a diamond-hard light on this, providing a million reasons I should, in essence, get over myself. So I stopped writing publicly and drew inward. So I slowly came to see those hurtful and hard statements as what they were: proof of someone else's vulnerability as well as perhaps a glimmer of another truth--that as publicly as I had mourned, I was still carrying a lot of anger and anxiety around. Am I cured? No. Do I feel this to be my space as safely as I did before? No. But I am reminded that I don't write so I can sit alone, reading my own words and having my own thoughts, I do so to be in conversation with others. A wonderful reminder to be given, and another reason to be thankful to Drunken Boat.