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Since finishing Otherland earlier in the year, I have thought a lot about how to describe it to my friends in Russia and Ukraine who wouldn’t be able to read the book in English. They have been wondering for a while what the whole thing is about and they are counting on a real answer from me, not some pithy one-liner or a spruced-up sales blurb. This is what I wrote to two of them (loosely translated back in English) several days ago: What is the book about, you ask.
It is about the lives of our generation split in half by our country’s self-immolation;
About how in the late 1980s and early 1990s our compatriots said more goodbyes than in the entire post-war history;
About mothers and daughters and the special kind of sleep on overnight trains;
About how money in the post-Soviet States became the force of Nature;
About history never feeling like an abstraction where we come from;
About going back with teenage daughter to the country of my birth and, at more than one point, feeling that I have irretrievably lost them both;
About how people who have endured the most are often the least cynical of us all;
About Moscow Metro (before the most recent suicide bombings);
About how more often than not media in the West does not have a clue;
About women being the immeasurably stronger sex;
About never falling out of love with St Petersburg;
About memory and the Holocaust;
About my mum and her gloriously misspent youth;
About how I didn’t want to be ironic anymore in writing about either of my homes;
About the shock of seeing a fat woman in a bra on the balcony of my family’s old apartment walking around as if she owns the place (she does);
About my friends (you guys) and just what it took for us to return to each other;
About how knowing that you could not enter the same river twice should not stop us from trying.
This is not the full answer, of course, but it is a beginning. Still working on translating the title, don’t like my chances though. See you later and thank you. M.
And finally to finish this thread up:
Australian historian and writer Inga Clendinnen (who I consistently admire and consistently disagree with but not this time) writes with a moving admiration about Hilary Mantel’s memoir Giving up the Ghost and her refusal to be reconciled with the injustices of the world, particularly those visited upon children, ‘whose dignity and intelligence are routinely insulted’.
When Mantel says in her memoir that she simply was not being ‘suited to being a child’, Clendinnen jumps in, ‘I doubt that anyone is suited to being small, powerless and ignored, especially at the time when, being all character and no experience, we have to learn to survive in a world run by unpredictable and wholly disingenuous giants.’
Books, that draw on real children’s experiences and stories, can be yet another one of those dirty games played by ‘wholly disingenuous giants’, but they can also make children and young adults less small, powerless and ignored. Children’s dignity and intelligence are an essential part of who they are, just as much as their vulnerability and dependency. Good stories can respect that. What’s more, good stories can make us see that as if for the first time.
More on the subject of mixing non-fiction and your children:
When writer Jonathan Myerson came to the defense of his wife Julie Myerson, who was hounded by critics and the public for writing about their teenage son’s drug addiction, he wrote, ‘There is a glass-fronted box in the corner of every writer’s room, protecting the real lives of their children: Smash Only In Case Of Emergency.’
A story of their son’s cannabis addiction and the impact it had on their family was, Jonathan argued, just that case of emergency. To which one of the bloggers replied (not without a point) that if your child is not injecting heroine in his eyeballs, it ain’t emergency, just a heady cocktail of middle-class exhibitionism and dysfunction. I am not of the heroine-in-the-eyeballs school, but I do not stand shoulder to shoulder with Jonathan and his glass-fronted box.
To me ‘smash only in case of emergency’ rule suggests that – warning: a mixed metaphor! – children are flowers in a garden of life, extra-fragile and extra-thin-stemmed. We (the parents etc) are the solemn gardeners, whose duty it is to keep the icy winds, hail and too much sunshine away from the garden (as well as, of course, battling all kinds of weeds and insects). You get the picture. My sense is that Jonathan Myerson is being too precious and not so much about children, but about parents and our fabled gardening skills.
There is a lot of Billie and no conceivable emergency in Otherland, neither real nor made-up. And yes, of course, I did feel torn about putting so much of my daughter in the book. One time I got particularly worried so I sat Billie down and said, ‘I will read you again the worst, the most unflattering and the most exposing bits, listen attentively and if there is anything in there that should not be in the book, tell me and I will get rid of it straight away’. When I finished reading, Billie looked at me and said (I reproduce her words here verbatim), ‘It’s all true, mum, put it in’.
My teenage daughter Billie is one of the main characters in Otherland and all through the book she gets to address readers directly via her diary entries reproduced au naturale minus the spell-check (including the entry, in which Billie suggests that she prefers cleaning ‘cow droppings for a year’ than following me on whatever it is that I do in Moscow), all of which brings me to the vexed question of mixing (writer’s own) children and non-fiction.
In a review of Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs – a book, in which much of the author’s exquisite literary energy is poured into reflecting on fatherhood (Chabon is a father of four) – fellow writer David Kamp celebrates Chabon’s ‘admirable restraint in not pimping out his children, in not giving away too much of their lives, their trials and their cute utterances’. Kamp calls the whole trials-tribulations-and-cute-utterances-of-my-children genre that Chabon masterfully evades “dadxploitation”.
After reading the review, I googled Kamp, laughed (Kamp’s ‘inordinately delineated neuroses of the overexamined life’ is pure brilliance) and came to the conclusion that if I had to be guided by the ‘admirable restraint’ in writing about Billie and our trip, I’d rather not write about her at all.
There is a lot of Billie in the book but she is not there for random moments of poignancy or cuteness, or as her mother’s Sancho Panza – the teenage everygirl.
Her voice, her experiences, her fight for autonomy, things that get to her, things that leave her cold – they are all part of the singular story of the second-generation homecoming. Both of us wanted to tell that story because for many mothers and daughters understanding each other requires that kind of travel, those kinds of distances covered between what was and what is, between here and there.
If ‘admirable restraint’ is that threshold, which we cross against our better judgment straight into the land of ‘pimping out our children’, then most of the really important, urgent, honest, difficult things about parents and children do not ever get written about. We have to be guided by something else, but what is that something else?
So far I have come up with truthfulness and love locked into each other, staring each down, letting sparks fly back and forth.
I have been really taken by what writer Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in a recent New Yorker essay: ‘memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of literary family’.
Mendelsohn compared memoir to a drunken guest at a large gathering. Embarrassing, loud, prone to spilling drinks and other people’s secrets, the guest is cursed with a desperate and, it seems, little-justified need to be the centre of attention. In the interest of disclosure, I must tell you that to date Mendelsohn has written two books in that “so-much-more-than-simply-a-memoir” genre – The Elusive Embrace on identity and desire (haven’t read it) and Lost on looking for members of his family who perished in the Holocaust (a masterpiece).
My third book Otherland is, in many ways, a memoir. It is precisely that kind of a rambling, carpet-staining clown that Mendelsohn evokes. I love the restraint and sobriety of reportage and the exacting dignity of great books of history, and I recognise that they make perhaps for better, more considerate, more adult guests. Yet, at the same time, I am desperately fond – both as a reader and a writer – of the unsteady legs, the sweeping hand gestures and the wildly fluctuating voice of memoir (and so is D. Mendelsohn btw). At (metaphorical) gatherings I tend to gravitate to precisely this kind of high-maintenance, indecorous guests – defenseless to the point of comical in their pursuit of genuine warmth and of moments of real, non-sanitised human contact. Mendelsohn’s Lost is an altogether different creature though, nothing unsteady about it. No one in English can do these virtuoso page-long sentences like he does: Mendelsohn is like a singer, who in one musical phrase, without stopping for a breath, can take us from peace to war, from a small pebble outside the window to the outer rings of Saturn (yes, I am thinking about the German writer W.G. Sebald and what he could do in one sentence…).
Anyway, I was initially uneasy about Otherland being seen as a memoir, but after reading Mendelsohn’s essay I kind of like it. I am in a good company after all.
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