When Memories Meet Words: A Conversation about Writing Memoir
Here’s Looking at Me: Lessons in Memoir from Self-Portraiture
After
1.
They’d spent the evening roaming from bar to bar to hear his musician friends play. His wife, her friend, was there too. First here, then there, then a short stumble down the road to the next place. She made him laugh with risqué lines about how the waitress was coming on to him. His musician friends laughed too. “Hey, can you fit these beers in your bag? We don’t have any at home,” he said, as they got ready to leave the bar. And she did, the scent of foamy hops filling the car as they all headed back to his house, where they downed the now-warm beer and laughed until past 3 a.m. She crawled into his daughter’s bed, the girl away for the weekend.
She woke to see him sitting on the side of her bed, his hand stroking her leg and inching toward her crotch. She was groggy, still drunk. “She’s just across the hall,” she said quietly, referring to his wife, her friend. “We can’t,” she murmured. He shrugged and went away. At dawn she called a cab, counting the change in her wallet and hoping she’d have enough to get home. Halfway there, she made the driver stop. She was mortified to be that girl, the one with her head hanging out a cab door vomiting into the gutter, the one that married men propositioned. She didn’t have enough money for a tip.
After, she was embarrassed because she must have done something to encourage him. She never told his wife. After, she smiled and made jokes with him. She was friendly to him on the phone. She couldn’t meet his eyes when he stared at her.
2.
He fondled and fingered and squeezed and hurt her. He held her, pants down, in front of a mirror so that he could look at them both, sharing the excitement with himself. She looked away. She was eight. He was a teenager.
After, she didn’t tell anyone, not for years. When he saw her, he’d go out of his way to speak to her, to stare her down, to keep her in her place. After, thirty years after, she heard he would be visiting their hometown at the same time as her planned vacation. She cancelled her ticket home.
3.
He hit her, drunk and angry and…drunk and angry. The doctor saw the bruises down her back where he’d kicked her. But it was the 1970s, so the doctor took her at her word when she said she’d fallen down some stairs. She made plans to leave him, to enrol their daughter in school in Montreal, their others grown and gone. But then she didn’t. He mostly stopped drinking. We think he stopped hitting.
After, years after, they celebrated their 50 years of wedded success with a party at the church hall.
4.
She leaned over him, bending forward to kiss him goodbye as he sat in his armchair, her sister—his wife of decades—at the door behind them. He reached up and grabbed her breast, meeting her startled eyes, daring her to say something. She didn’t.
The next week they were at a family party at a cottage. He sat inside while the others were outside. She went in to get a coffee. “Come here,” he said. She stepped closer, but not too close. “Come closer,” he said.
“I’m close enough,” she replied.
“I can hardly hear you. Come closer,” he said.
“I’ll speak up,” she said. “What do you want?”
“I want to eat you out,” he said.
“Fuck off, you pervert,” she said. After, she joined the others outside, but didn’t say anything to anyone. She didn’t want to ruin the party.
After, a day after, she told her sister what had happened. They agreed it must be the beginning of dementia. Her sister asked her husband if he remembered doing it. He said no, that they should tell the doctor because he didn’t want to embarrass himself. But there was no dementia. Later he told people she was a lying whore.
5.
She met him for supper. They’d found each other online. When she sat down the first thing he said was “You’re not as pretty as your photo.” Surprised, she tried to explain why her photo might not look as she did that night. He spent the evening talking about his “projects.” One was a thousand-page single-spaced lesbian vampire novel. “You should read it!” he said.
After…well, she’d stayed for dinner, after, hadn’t she? She paid her half of the bill. And she wondered for a long time if she were as pretty as her photo. Lots of times, she thought she wasn’t.
6.
She sent him texts and emails throughout the day, tempting recipes from which to choose his evening meal. This complicated dish or that tasty repast? When they dined, he’d rate her efforts. She never got more than a six out of ten. “If only you were a better cook,” he said. “If only you ate less,” he said. “If only you weighed less,” he said. “You could be a pretty girl.”
After, she’d try harder, trying to please his perfectionist’s palate, trying to be less of what he didn’t like and more of what she wasn’t. Until she saw him from the streetcar, temple to temple with another woman, laughing as they strode towards his apartment. And still, for a time after, she wondered what she had done wrong to lose him.
7.
She went back to his home with him after a first date. As they kissed, he slapped her, three times. Later he choked her until she couldn’t breathe.
After, she sent him flirtatious emails. A handwritten note saying she loved his hands. After, years after, when she heard he’d done it to others, she filed a complaint with the police. She was cross-examined on the stand, his lawyer pointing to the inconsistency between what she said he’d done and what she’d done after.
After. People were surprised by what she did after.
Confidence Game
An attractive twenty-eight-year-old in a woollen coat a bit too heavy for the April weather walks into a pub in Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood. He takes a seat just a few stools away from the only other patron at the bar, a forty-one-year-old regular with a doctorate in science, and the two start chatting. The younger man says he’s new in town — a mathematician working for Goldman Sachs, in the process of buying a $750,000 home nearby. But his wallet, passport, and laptop were stolen a few days before at Starbucks. As they head outside for a smoke, the stranger asks for a couple of hundred bucks to tide him over; a career scammer, he makes off with $460. By the time Simon Gann was arrested last summer, he’d racked up fourteen fraud charges, following a familiar grifters’ pattern, but with a final touch one can imagine eliciting an admiring smile down at the con artists’ clubhouse: often, he claimed to have Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) usually associated with social awkwardness, exceptional intelligence, and an inability to deceive others.
Gann’s pretense puts him in the company of another, more illustrious (and less felonious) group. Musician Gary Numan, BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen, economics Nobel laureate Vernon Smith, surfer Clay Marzo — all are part of a growing list of successful individuals who’ve stepped forward to say they, too, are Aspies (the preferred short form of the label for those with Asperger’s). But why? Perhaps it’s because few disorders are associated with such an outwardly favourable mix of symptoms, providing the suggestion of genius alongside a built-in excuse for behaviour most would view as narcissistic, tedious, or rude. One can’t help but wonder whether some, at least, are conning themselves into believing that their social failures have a genetic cause.
Before the HBO biopic about ASD advocate Dr. Temple Grandin, the Aspergian Dr. Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory, and John Elder Robison’s memoir Look Me in the Eye (but a year after Mark Haddon used a “savant” as his protagonist in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), comedian Dan Aykroyd admitted to having mild Asperger’s to National Public Radio Fresh Air host Terry Gross in a 2004 radio interview. “I can’t tell if you’re kidding or not,” said the usually unflappable host, after Aykroyd added that his mild symptoms are now mostly limited to an obsessive fascination with the police, and a need to carry a badge at all times, because without one “I feel naked.” He’d been diagnosed as a child in the early ’60s, he said — though Asperger’s wasn’t listed in the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases, used in Canada, until 1992.
In fact, while children with Asperger’s are now typically diagnosed between the ages of five and eight, many adults were misdiagnosed with other psychiatric disorders or labelled as juvenile delinquents for apparent anti-social behaviour, or simply stumbled along feeling out of step with the society around them. For a lucky few, their obsessive interests led them to excel in their chosen fields, and that success in turn allowed them greater leeway for their social quirks: the eccentric professor, the nerdy computer whiz, the ill-tempered musical genius. Meanwhile, as the diagnosis gained prominence, so too did the Internet, and with it widespread access to self-diagnostic tools like the Autism-Spectrum Quotient or AQ test, developed at Cambridge University’s Autism Research Centre by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen (cousin of comedian Sacha Baron Cohen).
“I’m going to get into trouble for saying this,” says Anthony Easton, a twenty-nine-year-old University of Toronto graduate student who was diagnosed with Asperger’s fifteen years ago (when treatment included having hula hoops suspended around his teenage frame to teach him the concept of personal space). A member of various ASD social groups, he has observed that “often the basis for self-diagnosis starts with ‘I have no social skills.’ Well, you have no fucking social skills because you play fourteen hours of World of Warcraft a day!”
“just because you’re Aspie doesn’t mean you’re not an asshole.”
But there’s a flip side to facile self-diagnosis, says Elesia Ashkenazy, a board member with the US-based Autistic Self Advocacy Network: adults who can’t get a medical diagnosis because they’ve managed to “compensate” for their Asperger’s symptoms and so no longer fit the diagnostic criteria. “People are punished for learning to pass,” she says. Now even those diagnostic criteria are up for debate. The committee charged with revising the American Psychiatric Association’s widely referenced Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is considering eliminating Asperger’s as a distinct disorder and officially pulling it under the ASD label.
Diagnostically, this is exactly the kind of muddle that tends to irritate precision-oriented Aspies. What if some people who claim to have Asperger’s really don’t? Perhaps it doesn’t matter, says Ashkenazy, if along the way the misdiagnosed find support and connection with a group that welcomes them — especially if the larger community considers their behaviour socially dysfunctional. “There are people who are suffering because they don’t have a diagnosis,” says Easton, softer now. “They don’t understand why they are how they are — people who can’t hold down jobs, can’t maintain relationships. These things are real, and they ruin lives.”
It sounds like a flip-flop, but Easton argues that there’s a more nuanced way to look at it. “Sometimes I piss people off because I mean to piss them off,” he says, “and sometimes I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing and I provoke by accident. But people assume that it’s one or the other, that I’m always provocative, or it’s all because of the Asperger’s.” The problem, he believes, is our human tendency to attribute behaviour to a single cause. Is it possible there’s a bit of the con in all of us? Easton smiles. “As my friend Ray says, just because you’re Aspie doesn’t mean you’re not an asshole.”
Single is the New Married
“Why are people afraid of being alone?” It’s a question 42-year-old Dave Atkinson of Port Credit raises when he’s asked why he’s unmarried and childless.
It’s rare that Atkinson gets explicitly challenged on his marital and parental status. But come February, with Valentine’s Day and Family Day packed into the shortest month of the year, it’s tough for those who are single or childless to avoid the message that they’ve missed the boat.
And that’s ironic, given the demographic shifts of the last few decades. Those shifts are influencing consumption patterns, healthcare issues, our collective environmental impact and other social issues—but are largely being ignored as we continue to focus firmly on family and kids, says Bella DePaulo, a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of Singled Out: How singles are stereotyped, stigmatized and ignored but still live happily ever after (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007) and Single With Attitude: Not your typical take on health and happiness, love and money, marriage and friendship (CreateSpace, 2009). “Singles are no longer marking time until the day they become unsingle,” says DePaulo. “They’re pursuing their passions, nurturing friendships and creating nets of people they care about and who care about them.”
And while February’s holidays may be sending the message that kids and marriage are the norm, for more and more Canadians, they aren’t. The shifts crystallized for the first time in 2006 when according to Canadian census data 51.5% of people over age 15 were unmarried, the first time unmarried people outnumbered the wedded since the census began in 1871. That same census signaled a second turning point: for the first time since 1871, there were also more families without children at home (42.7%) than those with (41.4%).
The numbers aren’t quite as straightforward as they first look. For instance, not all of those unmarried Canadians are single—the number includes those living common law. And that “households without children” number captures empty nesters whose children simply don’t live under the same roof.
I never played with baby dolls. I played with Barbie dolls, and they had very interesting careers and very interesting sex lives, but they didn’t have children.
But the number of truly single households is growing, with 30% of Canadian households occupied by singles, a number expected to hit almost 40% by 2026. And Canada isn’t alone in that change: around the world, the percentage of one-person households is on the rise, expected to grow at almost twice the rate of average population growth over the next decade, according to global market research company Euromonitor International.
At the same time, childlessness is growing as well: in the early 1970s, figures from the US and other developed countries showed that about 1 in 10 women over the age of 40 had never borne a child. Today that proportion—in the US, Canada and a number of other developed countries—sits at 1 in 5. It’s a shift driven by both expanding economic and birth control choices for women and more recently amplified by a change in what researchers have dubbed “transition timing.” With more young people delaying leaving the family home, they’re also putting off having children of their own—and the longer they leave it, the less likely some of them are to ever have kids.
“I never played with baby dolls. I played with Barbie dolls, and they had very interesting careers and very interesting sex lives, but they didn’t have children,” says Diane Forrest, a financial services communications specialist in her early 50s. “I just don’t think that instinct is very well developed in me, and I think that’s true of a lot of people.” Forrest is happy to be of a generation where her choices about marriage and children were within her control. For her, that choice meant no kids but does include a long-term boyfriend—and separate residences. She lives near the Don Valley while he lives near High Park. “We’re the first generation of women who really, really had choices,” she says. “There were a lot of obstacles, but basically we could do what we wanted and I was very conscious of that growing up.”
Part of that awareness was driven by the examples she saw around her. Her grandmother “was a terrible mother—she should have been a professor of theology or something like that, there was no way she wanted to have kids and probably not a husband either, but what else was she to do? Those were the only choice available.” Forrest’s sister Sue, 10 years her senior, was living the life of a carefree 20-something, traveling the world and teaching. And Forrest’s family had always maintained connections with a number of never-married aunts—“a long line of spinster school teachers” she laughs—who seemed quite happy.
But still, that cliché of a childless life being an empty one is hard to shake. “ Sometimes when I’m reading obituaries and I read about a childless, unmarried woman, I think ‘Oh my god, that’s so sad,’” says Forrest. “And then I think ‘Wait a minute, that’s me!’”
For Dave Atkinson, his single childless status is driven less by an explicit decision to avoid kids and marriage and more by a decision in favour of a life structured around travel. For the last two decades, Atkinson has spent half the year working in Canada and the other half traveling the globe. It’s not a life that makes long-term relationships easy. It’s also not a life of luxury: he operates a one-man window and eavestrough cleaning company six months of the year, working 12-hour days and living in a modestly furnished bachelor apartment. Then, come winter, he packs a 28-litre backpack—“basically the size of a child’s school backpack”—and heads to sunnier climates.
And when someone suggests that his lifestyle might be, well, selfish? “Selfish means you’re doing something for your benefit to the detriment of others. If I choose not to have kids, that’s not about being selfish, it’s just about being a realist. I like ‘em but I don’t want them,” says Atkinson. “It’s more self-absorbed than selfish really. But I make no apologies for it.”
Not all childless singles are quite as secure in voicing their status, though, says DePaulo, despite research showing that more than half of all singles are not looking to embark on a committed relationship. “Single people who really like their lives feel reluctant to say so because they’re wary of getting the response that ‘you’re fooling yourself’ or ‘there’s something wrong with you,’” she says. “So they moderate their response: they say they’re not looking right now because that’s more socially acceptable. And when people don’t say they like being single, it makes other people reluctant to say they like being single.”
It doesn’t help, she says, that anti-single stereotypes are so prevalent that coupled friends and family routinely suggest that singles “must have issues” if they say they’re single and happy. “Can you imagine saying to a married person [who says they’re happy], ‘What’s wrong with you? Why are you so dependent?’”
The stereotypes differ slightly by gender, says DePaulo. For women, you’re either a promiscuous party girl who no-one will marry or a pathetic sad sack who can’t get a date. If you’re male, single and childless, you’re either a hopeless slob living in your parents’ basement, a closeted homosexual or a suspicious potential child predator.
A 2008 study by the U.S. Pew Research Center demonstrated the strength of those stereotypes. In testing voting patterns, the study presented voters with four potential candidates: a woman with children and one without, and a man with children and one without. The man without children scored the fewest votes, the man with children the most (the women were tied in the middle).
Those stereotypes can be more deadly as well. DePaulo cites a US study of healthcare workers that found singles admitted to hospital received lower quality care than patients surrounded by family, with workers admitting that they presumed that the singles weren’t worthy of the same level of care because they weren’t surrounded by loved ones.
DePaulo also points out that singles generally don’t get access to the “piñata of benefits” that come with being coupled. Their health insurance and pension benefits offer fewer options than those available to couples—they can’t opt-in non-spouses for insurance coverage and their pensions revert to the state or company pension plan when they die rather than being assumed by a designated beneficiary. They can pay higher prices to travel alone—or even to socialize closer to home. “A couple coming to dinner brings a bottle of wine,” says DePaulo. “A single person doesn’t get to bring half a bottle.”
Fortunately for singles, there is an upside: they also tend to have more wealth, especially if they’re childless. According to a 2009 study of older Americans, unmarried childless men have as much as one-third more wealth than their peers, while unmarried childless women were one-third more wealthy than unmarried mothers.
While the cost of singlehood can be irritating for singles, it’s both a boost to the economy and a potential problem for the environment. According to a 2007 report by Euromonitor International, the rise in single-person households has pushed up the purchase of homes by singles along with the consumption of appliances, electronic goods and in-home entertainment. At the same time, though, those single households take up more space per capita and consume more energy and resources than shared households. A 2006 study of UK single households found that one-person households consume 38% more products, 42% more packaging, 55% more electricity and 61% more gas per capita than four-person households.
Still, the full impact of a shift toward singlehood may be yet to be felt, says DePaulo, as these new generations of singles move into old age. It’s something Dave Atkinson and Diane Forrest are already planning for. Atkinson is socking away savings so that he can purchase a small rural property for his time in Canada, though he hopes to keep traveling beyond Canada’s borders for as long as possible. Forrest says she’s conscious of keeping younger friends in her life and jokes that she’s making sure she’s “nice to my nephew’s wife, since she’ll likely be the one choosing what nursing home I end up in.”
But she’s also got something else in mind: “I have a couple of friends who are in a similar situation to me and we’re talking about what we call the Old Broad’s Home,” she says. “The idea is that we’ll buy a fourplex and get some university student to live in the basement and plow the snow and stuff like that. And if we have guys at the time, we might let them come along too.”
“People are making plans that centre on the people who are important to them,” says DePaulo, “to move to the same city or the same neighbourhood or to share a big house. We’re seeing more experiments in living. It’s hard to track, but it’s there.”
And maybe, by then, February’s celebrations of lovers and families will be joined by a third—this one focused on friends.
Listen to the radio documentary Tina Pittaway and I did on singles at http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/shift/2010/12/24/single-file-1/