INTERVIEWED BY CHRISTINE RICE
After reading Peggy Shinner’s You Feel So Mortal: Essays On The Body, my brain felt like it had been tipped upside down, emptied out, and filled back up again (in a good way). These essays made me look at what it means to be a woman (and a person) in new and startling ways. I envied her gorgeous use of language, her ability to challenge long-held beliefs, and to consistently balance on that tight wire between discovery and realization.
Shinner never failed to dissect messy subjects (including but not limited to women’s bodies, Leopold and Loeb, nose jobs, shoplifting, taxes, death, and Jewish feet), to dig around, to find the essay’s truth.
Her writing often made me uncomfortable (again, in a good way) because she challenges modern assumptions about feminism and gender and what it means to be a woman. Her structure and language and tone are spot on. She’s able to make fun of herself while always being respectful to other characters – dead or alive – in her life.
These essays expose a greater truth about the writer within the broader culture but never felt stuffy or formal. Most are hilarious. Some are hilarious and sad. All of them tackled issues I wanted to know more about.
In The Guardian, Sam Leith wrote about the trade industry’s dumbing down of nonfiction:
Amid the ambient wails of doom about the publishing industry, I’d like to enter a note of encouragement. The mainstream may be getting dumber by the day, but we are living in what looks like a golden age of publishing for, of all people, the university presses.
At the moment, I don’t think there’s a trade publishing house producing high-calibre, serious non-fiction of the quality and variety of Yale University Press; and snapping at its heels are Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, Cambridge and Chicago. As the literary editor of a middlebrow news magazine I’m finding ever more of the reviews I commission are from such presses.
Peggy Shinner’s You Feel So Mortal – published by University of Chicago Press – fits this ‘high-calibre’ bill.
CHRISTINE RICE: We read “Family Feet” in my creative nonfiction class and my students loved it. They laughed in all of the right places and commented on your humor but also the seemingly effortless way you wove research throughout the essay.
In “Family Feet,” as with all of your essays, you take these incredible risks – you fearlessly pair topics that seem so disparate. Can you talk about your research process? Can you talk about how one discovery leads to another, about how research opens up an essay, opens up the way you might have thought about where a particular essay was headed and then brings it all back together again?
PEGGY SHINNER: There’s always that time, starting on an essay, when I don’t know if it’s real or not. By real I mean does it have substance? Can it fly? I often cross over that threshold of uncertainty when the piece in question begins generating a set of questions. There’s some original premise, or more likely, a definitive but simultaneously unanchored starting point – I have flat feet, there’s a history of Jews being characterized and maligned as flat-footed, therefore I have Jewish feet – and then the questions begin to accrue. How should we understand Jewish flat-footedness? What are some of its personal and/or cultural consequences? Do all bodies arise out of history? How is the body – a woman’s body, a Jew’s body – both a personal and cultural artifact? The questions generate the research. The research generates more questions. The piece takes on life, lift. There’s an inherent tension between the content of the piece and the form of the piece. How much can the container hold? It seems like I’m always negotiating with the essay, trying to fill it to utter capacity but not really knowing what that capacity is. This means that sometimes I have to jettison some of the research I’ve done, or I discover holes and I have to go back and do more excavation; either way I’m mitering the whole thing together, as elegantly and comprehensively as I can. There’s the urge to create something shapely and there’s the urge to allow for disorder, disorder which invites deeper thought; how to work with both those impulses.
CR: Do you know where an essay will lead you when you begin? Or do you let the process inform the essay? It just seems like you are always open to being surprised by where the essay is heading. Your writing never seems preplanned or forced. Perhaps that’s what felt so right about these essays. They didn’t have chips on their shoulders. They didn’t have an agenda. They hacked away at accepted conclusions to find the truth.
PS: Hacking away, yes. Sometimes I think of the process like sculpture, and there are two images that I often entertain. In one, the essay is encased in a block of ice, as if it already exists, and I have to hack away at the ice until the essay emerges. In a way, I’m freeing or releasing it; it’s entrapped. In the other, I’m working with a piece of stone, let’s say – a lump, a blob, something completely inchoate – and I keep chipping away until a shape begins to form, and then chip, carve, chisel some more until, in its newly finished state, the essay lives. My words are imprecise because I don’t know a thing about sculpture, but the feeling with this image is that there’s nothing there until I make it. I’m finding it and making it at the same time.
As for where I start… With sound. I hear a sentence, which has to feel like all its parts are properly and felicitously aligned. Diction, syntax, rhythm. The trajectory of what’s to follow may be unclear – most often it is – but the sound has captured something. And then I’m off and running. An example of this is the opening of “Debutante, Dowager, Beggar.” For a long time I tried to write this essay, an essay about the complexities of posture, but I couldn’t get past the myriad tiresome variations of, “Poor me, I have bad posture.” The essay stalled for years. Then one day, when I went back to it, this sentence landed in my ears: I was a Dr. Spock baby. And from there I could go on. Some internal work had been proceeding, and this sentence was the overt evidence.
CR: As I mentioned, your writing feels as if you are discovering something about yourself (and the world) in the moment. As a reader, I found the storytelling beautiful and fascinating (while realizing, as a writer, that this kind of revelation is difficult to achieve). In “Pocketing,” for example, you pick apart the act of shoplifting and its historical connection to female sexuality.
At the end of “Pocketing” you write, after an acquaintance comments that everyone shoplifted…
I felt a jolt of surprise, almost of chagrin, as if I’d been taken down a notch or two – as if some hidden core of self-exceptionalizing had unwittingly been revealed – before being swept up by the easy candor of her comments and the details, much more remarkable than mine, of her own rowdy exploits.
So, I’m reading the last few pages of that essay and thinking that I’d heard of the relationship between shoplifting and women’s sexual desire, etc., and thinking how asinine that was but I would be hard pressed to form that as a narrative. Does that make sense? You are able to take these accepted ‘conclusions’ and turn them upside down, reassess them, make the reader see things differently.
Essayists do this all of the time but you approach the task so respectfully. You never call out the failings of others, only yourself (and perhaps your reactions to the failings of others).
This intimacy sets up a relationship with the reader. I ended up trusting you after the first few sentences of the collection. She is the expert, I thought.
Are you aware of this audience/writer relationship as you write? Did your tone ever shift during drafts? What did you learn about this audience/writer connection while writing these essays?
PS: Thank you. I’m not an expert but I’m trying to give everything I know at a particular point in time. It may be that it’s never enough!
I don’t really think about audience. I don’t even know how to conceive of it. It’s so amorphous and abstract. I try to be attuned, as Charles D’Ambrosio said, to the demands of the work and the demands of the language, which are inseparable. D’Ambrosio talks about how he’s so focused on getting things right that the self falls away, and I would add that the audience falls away as well. I’m trying to maintain an intimacy with the language itself.
CR: In “The Fitting(s)” you tackle this notion of tradition and the loss of tradition (along with self-image, faith, being a good daughter, being orphaned, you revisit throughout the collection – always in new and startling ways).
In my Michigan hometown, we had a ‘foundation’ store, too. It was exactly the way you described it. These women knew their stuff.
What draws you to patterns and traditions or the breaking of patterns and traditions?
PS: I’m not very ritualistic. I’m not interested in enshrining my past, but there are patterns embedded in who I am. “The Fitting(s)” explores one of them – the coming together of bras, breasts, the body, my mother. That felt potent to me, personally and culturally. I could untie that knot. I could begin to know my mother more, or anew, for one thing. I could try to understand how so much of this was about the cultural experience of being Jewish, being a consumer, a woman of course, having my body both cared for and commodified.
My father and I shared a life around baseball. Playing 16-inch softball, going to Cub games although he was a Sox fan and we only went to Wrigley Field because we lived on the North Side and Wrigley was closer. But even at Wrigley he would listen to the Sox on his transistor, that was his team. We’d bring pastrami sandwiches, pickles, sour tomatoes, peaches, nectarines; it was kind of an orgy of stuffing yourself. Excess seemed to be part of it. And boredom too, depending on what was happening in the game. And I would love to go back to this in some way, as a daughter and a lover of baseball, but I haven’t figured out yet what there is to say beyond elegy, a love song to my father. And much of You Feel So Mortal is that anyway.
CR: Our culture seems to demand immediate reactions and responses. The essay form shifts the reader into a different gear. It makes us consider a different narrative by laying out history and precedent and fact. I found the essays about your family particularly moving (most of Part II): “Leopold and Shinner,” “Tax Time,” “Mood Medicine,” “Intimate Possessions,” “Postmortem.” Those essays killed me.
How are you able to see the people you love so clearly? I noticed that these essays were written over fifteen years (is that right?). What role does time play in getting to ‘the bone’ (as one of my teachers referred to the truth)?
PS: When I was taking care of my great aunt, I said to a friend, in a moment of rare lucidity, that sometimes the best thing we can do for someone we care about is to accept their version of reality. Who can do that all the time? But that was a task I set for myself in these essays. To try to see my parents’ reality, for instance, my great aunt’s, and my own as well. And let the versions exist side by side, if I could. To not have them duel, to try not to win, to not succumb to righteousness. Always to interrogate myself. Always there are shortcomings. Sometimes I’m too treacly, too earnest, or too evasive. But I try to root it out. If I can’t get to the truth, at least I can cut out the lies. Time is a factor because time is distance. The stakes change over time. The stakes are with the writing.
CR: There’s this quote by Flannery O’Connor…
A story is a complete dramatic action – and in good stories, the characters are shown through the action and the action is controlled through the characters, and the result of this is meaning that derives from the whole presented experience.
That quote could easily be applied to essays, too, though, right? There are themes but, in the end, it’s all about meaning. The essay form demands that the writer fit actual events into a narrative and in the end, come to a universal truth. In some ways, a personal essayist’s job seems more difficult than a fiction writer’s job. You write both fiction and creative nonfiction, right? What is particularly challenging about the essay form?
PS: The part of that quote that resonates with me the most is the last clause, meaning derived from the whole experience. The reason I turned to the essay is that I had something to say that couldn’t be accommodated any other way. The first essay I wrote in the book was “The Knife” – my experience with knives derived from my martial arts practice – and I knew I needed a form that would allow the full expanse of imagination: story, cultural commentary, reflection, rumination, purposeful digression. There’s a freedom to the essay, you can keep pushing against its perceived boundaries. It’s malleable and generous, and its capaciousness allows you to take big leaps. It challenges you too: how far out can you go before you have to rein the material back in again? Phillip Lopate talks about the essay as a form that allows you to see the mind in motion, “a live, candid mind thinking on the page.” That’s it, I think. The intellectual thrill of it.
CR: The essay form exposes the writer in dramatic ways. Any interesting stories about reactions to your work?
PS: At a reading someone asked me about self-exposure, if it was difficult to have my flaws so starkly revealed. I was taken aback for a moment, for my apparent transparency, and because I had never once felt uncomfortable. At the time I said something about doing what the text required, about being fully committed to the incident or idea at hand, and although that’s true, Charles D’Ambrosio comments about how the self functions in an essay have since helped elucidate this for me. He says that the writing self, in the act of composition at least, isn’t necessarily personal, that what seems “confessional” to a reader is just an arrangements of facts, a sequence of life unfolding, like being right-handed, for example. He talks about this self as a perspective, an angle of vision, “a questioning presence.” When things are going well, the actual self recedes, and the self that remains, the writing self, represented by the “I” on the page, while offering an “intimate register” of thoughts and feelings, is in its way impersonal. This is how it feels to me too. An alchemy of intimacy and distance.
