Lisa Van Orman Hadley’s stories have most recently appeared or are forthcoming in Epoch, New England Review, The Collagist and Knee-Jerk. She was the recipient of the Larry Levis Post-Graduate Fellowship and a Money for Women/Barbara Deming scholarship. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her four-eyed husband, two-eyed twins and one-eyed cat. She is writing a novel-in-stories.
Her essay, "Making Sandwiches with My Father," appeared in Issue Fifty-Two of The Collagist.
Here, Lisa Van Orman Hadley talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about concision, chronology, and writing about family.
What can you tell us about the origins of this essay (how/why/when you began to write the first draft or to conceive the initial idea)?
Several years ago, as an undergrad, I read Will Baker’s essay, “My Children Explain the Big Issues.” It was the first time I had ever seen creative nonfiction written in vignettes instead of a straightforward narrative. I liked the playfulness of the form and how much work the title did. I remembered that Will Baker essay years later as I sat down to write “Making Sandwiches with My Father.” My dad had just been diagnosed with dementia (we were still a couple of years away from the official diagnosis of Alzheimer’s). An alternative to the traditional narrative seemed like a way for me to create distance from a situation that was still raw and unfolding. The title (I think I came up with the title first or, at least, very early on) provided a theme to vary on and allowed me to explore different facets of my relationship with my father without being tethered to a traditional narrative.
How did you decide to use the present tense in these vignettes from your past? (What’s the effect you hope to achieve by choosing present over past tense?)
My husband makes fun of me because I often confuse the words “yesterday” and “tomorrow” when I’m talking. So, for example, I’ll say, “Tomorrow I went to Walden Pond” or “Yesterday is supposed to be a beautiful day.” I like to say it’s because I’m omnipresent, but really there just seems to be a glitch in the part of my brain that processes chronology. I seem to function best in the present tense. In this particular story the present tense helped transport me back into the scenes I was writing about and get closer to the emotions I felt at the time. Obviously I wasn’t writing this story as my father and I were making sandwiches. I am not that good at multi-tasking. But I was writing it before his disease was labeled as Alzheimer’s – before I knew what the trajectory of that specific disease looks like. It still felt like I was very much in the middle of the story. The disease itself was unfolding in the present tense and, along with it, the question of what my relationship with my father would be like going forward. I hoped that the present tense would bring the reader in closer to all that as well.
Concision is an important aspect of this essay. All four sections are quite brief—the shortest contains only two paragraphs—and yet each one carries a great deal of emotional weight. How difficult was it to render so many aspects (characters, narrative, setting, dialogue, reflection, theming) in such tight spaces? In writing and revising this and other works, what strategies do you have for overcoming such a challenge?
My tendency is to write too little instead of too much. I cannot for the life of me seem to write a story that is more than ten or twenty pages long. When I can contain a story in a small space it feels much easier to tame it. Concision is actually liberating for me; fewer words are less intimidating. If I’m having a hard time figuring out what to do with a word, sentence, paragraph, I just cut it and move on. More often than not, I’ll realize that part wasn’t necessary to the story and that it was actually clutter. Clutter isn’t necessarily junk. You can have a pile of really fancy, expensive clutter but the excess makes it so you can’t appreciate each individual thing. I try not to be a hoarder in my stories. My mom used to have a saying on the fridge that said something along the lines of, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” I think the same could probably be said of a story. If it isn’t moving the story forward or isn’t truly beautiful (or, I would add, funny), maybe it doesn’t belong. On the flip side, though, sometimes I get rid of too much or have too little there to begin with. That is a problem, too. In those cases, I have to go back in and add more material to make the story more emotionally resonant. The first draft of this story was shorter than the final draft. My MFA supervisor suggested that it needed a little something more at the end so I added the part about sitting on the bus and looking at the dirt under my fingernails. The story felt more whole after that.
In section three, you wrote: “I want to blister with tears, want to sob into my freezing cold hands for her. But I don’t. I guess my father and I are the same that way.” Your essay addresses a common theme among nonfiction writing and in our lives: the ways in which we come to resemble our parents, whether we mean to or not. Can you offer some insight into what made you want to write about this subject, as well as what it means to participate in a tradition of examining oneself through the lens of family?
I wanted to show how my family didn’t talk to each other about emotional or intimate things. I never even told my parents that I started my period. Surprise, Mom and Dad! My dad has always been a very “doing” kind of person. He doesn’t say a lot but he’s always making or fixing or cleaning something. The sandwiches became a symbol of how he would respond to (and/or avoid) situations by making something instead of talking. I guess in a way the act of writing this story was kind of a manifestation of how I’ve come to resemble my parents. Instead of talking about the dementia with my dad, I sat down and wrote an essay about it.
To address the question about examining oneself through the lens of family: Writing about family is hard. These are people I really care about and I don’t want to hurt or upset them. At the same time though, perfect people make for kind of boring characters. Flawed people are more loveable. What I’ve found is that it’s almost impossible to write a story when I’m worrying about how my family will respond to it. It’s paralyzing. I have to try to put all that aside while I’m writing the first draft and just put it all out there. If something needs to be taken out in later drafts because it’s not worth the heartache to family or self, fine. But you can’t worry about it in the beginning. It also helps that my dad will never read this story. If he were able to read it, I hope he would be okay with the way I portrayed him. I like to think he would.
What writing projects are you working on now?
I’m finishing up an autobiographical novel-in-stories called Irreversible Things. The title story is written in reverse chronological order. It’s about my neighbor who was murdered on the side of my house when I was seven years old. “Making Sandwiches” is also in there. Some of the stories are really short. A couple of them are only one sentence. Some are written from a child’s perspective and some are written from an adult’s perspective. Some of them are true and some of them are not-as-true.
What have you read recently that you want to recommend?
I recently finished Lydia Davis’s new book of stories, Can’t and Won’t. The stories are told in such a simple and often jokey way, but they are full of emotional weight. There’s a great story where the narrator watches a couple of cows and describes what they do day after day. It is delightfully mundane. But to be honest, I mostly read picture books these days. I’ve read the book Doctor De Soto to my two-year-old twins, Lars and Maud, four times today and it’s only one in the afternoon. One picture book I really like is Henri’s Walk to Paris. I like the way the text interacts with the pictures. I do wish adult fiction had more pictures. I just picked up a memoir by illustrator and fabric designer Heather Ross called, How to Catch a Frog and other stories of family, love, dysfunction, survival, and DIY. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s full of charming illustrations and how-tos for building things like beanpole teepees and bird nests, and making paper flowers and cream of broccoli soup. Speaking of which, I also really enjoy reading cookbooks from cover-to-cover (and looking at the pictures). Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi is my current favorite. The pan-fried couscous with tomato and onion on page 129 is delicious. Also the pasta recipe with Greek yogurt, feta peas and pine nuts on page 111 and the hummus on page 114.