AURELIA, AURÉLIA
A Memoir
By Kathryn Davis
108 pages. Graywolf Press. $15.
There are memoirs wherein you study the details of an individual’s life, after which there are memoirs wherein you’re a chip implanted within the writer’s mind. Within the case of Kathryn Davis’s memoir, you’re a chip. “Aurelia, Aurélia” is just 108 pages lengthy, and a thriller presents itself: How might a lot consciousness be packed into such a small object?
Davis’s eight novels bear little relationship to something that may be lassoed into the class of “modern fiction,” and “Aurelia, Aurélia” — her first work of nonfiction — can also be an outlier. It’s like a kind of distant locations populated by landrace natural world that exist nowhere else on earth.
The topic is the demise of Davis’s husband, Eric, from most cancers. Whereas Eric is dying, the 2 spend their mornings aspect by aspect in mattress. Sooner or later Eric enumerates all the cash and energy the couple has put into their home — the stone partitions, the beech tree out entrance, his full assortment of Rex Stout detective novels on the cabinets — and poses a query: In any case this work, how might he dream of leaving? That, after all, is one everlasting anguish of foretold deaths. Why now?
Samuel Johnson wrote that “the protected and basic antidote towards sorrow is employment,” a sentiment which may underpin your entire style of grief memoirs. But it surely’s price noting that he got here to this suggestion solely after rejecting two widespread strategies of dealing with grief. The primary, Johnson wrote, was forcing oneself into “scenes of merriment.” (This echoes the axiomatic relationship recommendation that the easiest way to recover from a breakup is to begin relationship somebody new.)
The second technique Johnson dismissed was that of vicarious wallowing — of making an attempt to dampen one’s personal ache by specializing in different individuals who had it worse. For Johnson, the primary technique failed as a result of it sucks (not his precise phrases), and the second as a result of it might worsen the affliction it aimed to deal with. The closest factor to a treatment, he wrote, was movement.
And so, to put in writing. The “plot” of Davis’s life and Eric’s demise unfolds in time-shifting episodes. One second we’re on a bus subsequent to the writer in highschool, heading residence from a category journey to the Cloisters in New York. Then, a long time later, we’re studying the newspaper with Eric. After which again to 1956, when Davis’s father has given her a shiny I LIKE IKE sticker, which she adheres to the highest drawer of her maple dresser, in direct violation of the household’s no-stickers-on-furniture rule.
What connects these vignettes? They’re proof of Davis’s behavior of vigilance. On the varsity bus she analyzed the senseless chatter of classmates, her thoughts racing from James Bond to the Holy Ghost. In mattress with Eric she didn’t merely gaze out the window however positioned patterns in bits of sky framed by branches. The I LIKE IKE sticker was her scouting companion as she monitored the night time sky for planes which may bomb the household residence.
On the age of seven, Davis got here down with pleurisy and spent a month in mattress. Her mom learn Hans Christian Andersen tales as a vaporizer despatched puffs of yellow steam into the sickroom. The fairy tales affirmed Davis’s sense of mortality to such a level that she skilled the phantasm of getting composed them herself: “I didn’t assume they’d been written for me, Andersen having ‘had me in thoughts,’ or that they conveyed my view of issues with uncommon precision — no, once I heard these tales I used to be infused with that shiver of ecstasy that’s an unmistakable symptom of the inventive act.”
In a ebook about demise, it’s not stunning that Davis is fixated on metamorphoses and thresholds. She trains her give attention to “ghost-moments”: the moment an individual steps off the sting of a cliff earlier than she hits the bottom, or the break up second between opening a door and getting into a room. She’s within the bardo and within the musical “Brigadoon”; in the truth that it took Flaubert three days to put in writing a easy transition; within the “usually all however inaudible transit” from one tonal temper to a different in Beethoven’s bagatelles.
She additionally chronicles the knotty contradiction of grief, a type of struggling each distinctive and banal — banal within the sense that grief occurs on a regular basis and to everybody. For Davis, one severance follows the subsequent. In her childhood there have been two goldfish, Potato and Carrot, who “dedicated suicide” collectively by leaping out of the bowl that Davis positioned on a windowsill. There was the day when Davis’s father took her right down to the cellar, fetched a gun and made his daughter promise to place him out of his distress if “at any time sooner or later he misplaced all his schools.”
Davis just isn’t an individual to sentimentalize a physique’s expiration, whether or not goldfish or human. Or, certainly, worm: In highschool biology, she and different college students dissected a liver fluke, slicing the top in half with a razor till two new heads shaped. The experiment was supposed to finish there, however Davis stored going till her creature sprouted eight heads. (Then it died.)
Recounting the worm surgical procedure results in a meditation on the phrase “fluke” — from the Greek for “flooring,” Davis’s trainer informed the category. But additionally within the sense of an opportunity incidence: “a fortunate shot in billiards, a sudden gust of wind.” It was a fluke, Davis writes, that she married a person seven years youthful than she was, the identical age distinction because the one between his personal dad and mom.
Historically a memoirist’s job is to collect the flukes of her life and marshal them into one thing resembling a narrative. However Davis has a distinct mission in thoughts. She has written a memoir that mimics the atemporal high quality of the episodes that give which means to life. “Aurelia, Aurélia” doesn’t look after the constraints of melody, however is nonetheless an entrancing tune.
