Interview with Karen Brennan by Beth Alvarado
Gaps in the Telling:
A Conversation with Karen Brennan on Hybridity, Motherhood, Disability, and Class
……………………….“I fly back into those lost years and they cannot contain me. I am mid-flight,
……………………….inventing a fairy tale, while around me the world falls apart. The table is set
……………………….so carefully, forks on the left side, knives and spoons on the right, while not
……………………….so far away someone is in handcuffs and someone else is weeping
……………………….uncontrollably. Someone wearing a black hood is kneeling down. One hopes
……………………….God exists.”
This quote from Karen Brennan’s Television, a memoir (Four Way Books, March 2022) describes, at least for me, the impulse and aesthetic of the book. Brennan’s lyric voice, the empathy in her vision, and her uncanny humor have always been distinctive qualities of her writing. Television is her eighth book and second memoir. She has also published award-winning collections of poetry and short stories.
“Television,” the initial piece in the memoir, is about the first time Brennan’s family ever saw a TV. She writes, “I have no idea what we saw, what black and white image blinked stupidly across the screen and I was not impressed. . .” But to her mother and everyone else the sight was a “shock (I recall my mother shrieking) like seeing a chair fly across the room or a dish of apples suddenly begin to cough.”
Beth Alvarado:
This is such a brilliant beginning for the book, Karen. Not only does it situate us in the sensibility of the narrator, but it also ushers us into an era (and a memoir) where everything will become both unsettled and mediated.
Karen Brennan:
Television—as in the television—is not so much a theme in my book as an interminable background hum, the sound of the times. Before TV, my link to other perspectives and ideas had been books and now entered a peculiar, omnipresent present tense, dramatically initiated by television. That magical, almost inconceivable screen was the start of my evolution as a 20th century woman. I was lucky to exist in that first iteration—on the cusp between the slow, quiet, protective life of the neighborhoods and the trespassing of its comfort zones.
In the book, “television” became a sort of loose structural device, a way to mark the eras through which I lived. After the onset of television, our cultures, which had been specific and discreet, became entangled in the world, the news, the ideas of others. We became less ignorant, less innocent and with this came a certain responsibility. Our narrow points of view broadened, we were invited to choose sides, to develop opinions and points of view.
For example, unwittingly, I wondered at the underlying assumptions in a program such as “I Remember Mama.” The hardworking white immigrants as a model for American citizenship. Even then I sensed something false and irritating about this show. Tamed were the complexities, the unhappiness that resulted from poverty, the fraught relationships that beset immigrant families in their new environments, the prejudice against persons of color. All had been reimagined and sanitized for the wider TV audience. Or, as I said in a later piece on Fred’s patriarchal role in the Flintstones, “Television was teaching my kids what was what in the world.”
I hope that some of this thinking is suggested in my book which is nevertheless a memoir and not a cultural analysis. I leave a lot up to the readers’ imagination—thus the gaps in the telling…
Beth Alvarado:
I remember an earlier memoir you were working on which contained some of the material in Television, a memoir, and which you called The Granny Memoir. It was more narrative, more directly about your life. Why did you make the shift to this more indirect, “tell the truth but tell it slant” approach?
Karen Brennan:
I had intended, in the ill-fated Granny Memoir, to tell a particular story. But that story would not stay within the boundaries I had set for it. The narrative became messy, even chaotic. There was so much more to it, I realized.
The structure I chose for Television, a memoir allows me to say more even as I say less. By writing short prose pieces—some have even said “prose poems”—I am able to leap around in my life anecdotally, selectively, televisually, without the pressure of telling a more conventional story. In fact, as I assembled Television, the impulses behind The Granny Memoir vanished. As I lost interest in developing a particular story, I was relieved of the burden of a straightforward, more conventional narrative.
I wrote the first piece, “Television,” completely unaware that it would be the start of a new book, much less a memoir. Then it struck me that television, the phenom has marked time for all of us, albeit sporadically, among “programs,” and, for me, the experience of growing up in a time of huge cultural and technological changes. Likewise, the methodology for this book—the crafting of short “chapters”—mimics the experience of TV watching, the cuts and switchbacks, the different demands on attention.
The spaces between pieces become a part of the architecture of the book, inviting the reader to reflect and imagine, and finally link these stand-alone pieces. Those spaces—gaps, whatever you want to call them—are, for me, eloquent and essential. They orchestrate the readers’ experience, I like to think.
Beth Alvarado:
Granted, both fiction and nonfiction are imaginative reconstructions of reality, but I’m wondering if you consider Television, a memoir a hybrid work?
Karen Brennan:
One of the frustrations I have is with this book’s categorization as “nonfiction,” which suggests a type of realistic reportage, which Television is not. I think of it as a hybrid text. Such hybrid form combines genres—as in the lyric essay (of which there are a few in my book), or micro-memoirs that could just as easily be read as prose poems (of which there are many) and forays into fantastic fiction as metaphor (a couple of these are there, too). This is not to say that the pieces in Television are not real or true. But they are real and true in the way that any creative writing—be it fiction, poetry or creative nonfiction is real or true.
I would like to think that hybridity has political implications. The breaking of genre as it was famously linked to gender transgressions (rigidity in any form in opposition to fluidity) became for many of us a way to resist establishment/conventional points of view. The French feminists taught us that the way around patriarchal language, to avoid the trap of being written by what has already written us, is to go to the forms of language itself. Whether it is called telling it slant or making it new, it appeals to me as a way of being truthful to my own experiences and my own truth. But it mainly appeals to my nervous system, my way of taking in the world.
Beth Alvarado:
“What has already written us” makes me think about the challenges of writing about being a mother—we’ve often talked about the ways that motherhood is policed even more heavily now than when we were young! I keep thinking about “Motherhood,” where you write: “Having four kids in five years was very tiring. Every day I took a long nap as chaos raged around me. My visiting cousin observed that my children ran around naked while I read French poetry. . .”
Karen Brennan:
Having had four kids, how could not motherhood be a great theme in my life? And how could I not write about it? My kids were great, a rag tag group, noisy and irritating. I loved them madly, they were my anchor.
At the same time, I was compelled to do other things—write, think, engage. These wayward tugs on my attention left me feeling that I was not doing a very good job as a mother. Because our script—the motherhood script—is a powerful one.
These days, we seem to be losing the fight for our own bodies. Wasn’t there a senator recently who compared us to sea-turtles, the argument being that we liberals will fight to preserve the eggs of sea-turtles but not our own eggs? So even today we are being written as vessels, slow moving and helpless, carrying valuable cargo over which we have no control.
It is with great difficulty that we ignore our preordained roles as self-sacrificing—literally the sacrifice of not only our bodies, but our very selves, our dreams, wishes, aspirations. To do so is selfish, unworthy and wrong—or so we are told.
And yet… I would say motherhood for those who choose it is immensely satisfying. My children—now all grown up—are the great loves of my life.
Beth Alvarado:
You have written so movingly about your youngest, who suffered serious disabilities from her head injury all those years ago in a motorcycle accident. Writing about her disabilities and your mother’s from polio must be so difficult emotionally, and yet disability, illness, these are also important parts of most of our lives.
Karen Brennan:
Our family’s life has been plagued by wheelchairs—my mother’s 56 years as a result of polio and then Rachel’s 25 years since her brain injury. What’s awful has been to witness their suffering. Why them? Their suffering is unimaginable—my beautiful and kind mother spending year after year in her wheelchair, one usable hand at her disposal; and my sweet daughter Rachel, also with one good left hand and paralyzed legs, and living in a facility because of her severe mood disorder. So I am intimate with disability and yet I have no great insight into it as a cultural issue. Perhaps I’m too close to it. I know that when Rachel lived with me, we often had to negotiate sidewalks that were not ADA compliant and that, in my mother’s day, there was no ADA at all (my mother drove her electric wheelchair on the street; mercifully, we lived in a small town).
I think, probably, there is still a tendency to ignore the disabled, to look away. Or to look more aggressively as a sort of correction to the compulsion to look away. I remember people talking to me instead of my mother as I pushed her in her manual wheelchair, as if she were not there at all. Rachel is too noisy to be ignored. When I push her, she is the one who engages—I am the one who’s not there (at times, inwardly laughing or cringing at her hilarious disinhibitions).
It seems the world has made some progress in regard to the disabled—at least, as far as the laws are concerned. Had my mother lived in a different era, she might have been a great success. My daughter with her more debilitating injury (mind as well as body) will always be at a loss. I still hope for some kind of miracle surgery or drug. . . There are millions like Rachel who suffer. And those like me who stand by, helpless to make their lives better.
Beth Alvarado:
Television, like a novel, makes disability issues “visible” through its use of details, and it obliquely critiques class in the same way. The fact that your grandparents “lived in a mansion with many servants,” for instance, and that the “kitchen staff” prepared and assembled all of the ingredients that your grandmother then tossed together and called her “Special German Potato Salad” —such a succinct way of commenting not only on class and labor, but also on your own privilege as a child. Later, you write about struggling to get off of Public Assistance when you were a young mother. . .
Karen Brennan:
I don’t want to seem dismissive or ungrateful for the privileges that I was given; I had all the material advantages and I’d be mistaken if I believed they did not only make my life easier, but allowed me to become who I am, to receive an education, to write books, to teach. At a certain point, though, it occurred to me that I was granted these advantages for no reason and that others were deprived of them often in order that I might receive them.
Because of my mother’s disability, we had many workers in our home—cooks, and caregivers and laundresses and gardeners. I could not help but notice the differences in our situations—at night, those who didn’t sleep in the “maid’s room”—tiny, dark, off the kitchen and dominated by a narrow iron bed—went home to an entirely different reality. (At my grandparents’, there were “servants’ quarters,” and even writing those words makes me cringe.) I remember being aware of these differences at a very young age and feeling the first stirrings of unworthiness and guilt. Why them and not me?
When I became poor as a single mother, I carried my class along with me. I was never really hopeless—just slumming, an upper middle class voyeuristic white girl after all. I’m grateful for the experience because it taught me something about privation. What it didn’t crush was my optimism, which was not temperament so much as another endowment of class.
Like many, I wish the world was fairer. I wish democracy was a real thing. I wish no one had to suffer.
Interview with Karen Brennan, author of Television, a memoir (Four Way Press, 2022) as well as seven other books, including one other memoir, three collections of short stories and three of poetry, several of them award-winning.
Interview by: Beth Alvarado who is the author of Anxious Attachments, winner of the 2020 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, and Jillian in the Borderlands: A Cycle of Rather Dark Tales, as well as two earlier books.
5 October 2022
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