Re-Narrating the Lives of Women by Jenessa Abrams

review of books by Megan Cummins and Annie Ernaux

If the Body Allows It
Megan Cummins
University of Nebraska Press, September 2020
$21.95; 270pp.
ISBN: 9781496222831

Happening
Annie Ernaux
Penguin Random House, May 2019
$12.95; 96pp.
ISBN: 9781609809485

In Michaela Coel’s groundbreaking television series, I May Destroy You, Coel stars as Arabella, a woman whose storyline—like her name—closely mirrors Coel’s own. In the late 2010s, while on deadline, Coel took a break to meet up with a friend and woke up several hours later to realize she’d been drugged and sexually assaulted by a stranger.

Stories of trauma are often framed by the dichotomy of victim and perpetrator. The suggestion is that the latter holds all the power. Coel’s decision to fictionalize her assault and to star in its reenactment upends that narrative. She subverts the story of violence done to her by asserting full creative control of the retelling. In this way, Coel ensures that her story will not be shaped or distorted to make viewers more comfortable—to placate audiences that have historically held power.

Women are bombarded with societal expectations that extend far beyond passing judgment on what we eat and influencing what we wear—those narratives are interwoven into law, shaping the choices we have, our ability or lack thereof to choose whether or not to start families, and whether or not we maintain ownership of our bodies. One way we can reclaim some of that power, at least on an individual level, is to become the narrators of our own stories.

A Public Space editor, Megan Cummins’ debut story collection, If the Body Allows It follows Marie, a woman with an autoimmune disorder who lives in a state of perpetual mourning for the loss of her father who succumbed to drug addiction. The book is also composed of the stories Marie writes, the ways she attempts to circumvent her pain. In this way, Marie is the orator of her life, employing fiction to alter the specifics: inserting characters with autoimmune diseases and addiction throughout, putting them in different clothes, assigning them different names, playing with the realities of their lives in an attempt to understand something about her own.

When asked about the character Marie in a recent interview with The Rumpus, Cummins, who like her protagonist, has Lupus and lost her father to addiction, said: “I wanted to play with the idea of the author-as-character-as-writer. . . . Marie is actually. . .  more of a doppelgänger for me than she is me. I wanted to see what I could learn about my experiences by giving them to someone else.” In doing so, Cummins gets to examine the irrevocable truths of her life: her health, her father’s death, her repeated healthcare injustices, and watch those truths play out differently.

In Part IV of If the Body Allows It, Marie, who has kept her illness a secret, is confronted by her lover after he finds a visit summary from her health insurance company:

……….I hold out my hand for the papers. [He] doesn’t give them back. He scans
……….the notes, my vitals, the long list of medications. . . .

……….“Give it back,” I say. “Ask me questions if you want, but give it back.”

Give it back. I couldn’t shake this refrain. I felt the vibration of Marie’s plea, of Cummins’ plea, begging to regain ownership of her body—the papers serving as a tangible manifestation of her pain. They were never meant for her lover’s hands. She had chosen not to give him access to them. So much of illness leaves us powerless. Asserting some control over the details of our suffering starts to dismantle that tyranny.

By creating the persona Marie, and several shadow versions of her, Cummins is effectively returning some power and authority to her life. The same week Amy Coney Barrett, who staunchly opposes reproductive rights and the Affordable Care Act, was nominated to the Supreme Court, I was introduced to Annie Ernaux’s memoir Happening about her illegal abortion in France in the 1960s. Happening is framed by Ernaux returning thirty-five years later to the alley where she received care­—in secret—from an off-duty paramedic to help end her pregnancy. The book is filled with journal entries Ernaux wrote at the time as well as parentheticals where the author interjects the text to reexamine her own memories. On the book’s final page, Ernaux writes, “I realized I had gone back. . . in the hope that something might happen to me.”

This sentiment is also played out fictionally at the end of If the Body Allows It, when Cummins’ protagonist, Marie, reads to an audience from her recently published book (a book presumably comprised of the stories in Cummins’ real-life collection). Marie looks out at the crowd in search of her long dead father and comes to the realization that “the longer [she] look[s] the less likely it seems that [she’ll] find him.”

In writing these two books, both Cummins and Ernaux seek a sense of closure. Both search for a way to lessen their hurt and to have a formal account of their traumas told in a manner that reflects the truth of their experiences—not the truth of the dominant narrative assigned to them.

Both books feature abortions, Ernaux’s being the center of the text and Marie’s as the inversion of the promise in If the Body Allows It’s first sentence: “The doctor looks at me and says—no fuss, no apology—that someone like me should never be pregnant.” Marie’s not sure she wants to have children, but the doctor’s dismissal of the possibility effectively makes the choice for her.

In the coming weeks, the Supreme Court will hear yet another case challenging reproductive rights, this time with a solidified conservative majority. Currently, twenty-one states have laws in place that can be used to restrict the legality of abortion. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, reproductive rights would be protected in fewer than half the states in this country.

In Happening, Ernaux details the entirety of her abortion journey: every futile doctor’s appointment, every covert plea to friends and strangers, every graphic stage of her efforts to end her pregnancy. After describing a failed attempt to perform a self-administered abortion by inserting a knitting needle into her vagina, Ernaux writes:

……….I realize this account may exasperate or repel some… I believe that any experience…
……….has the inalienable right to be chronicled. There is no such thing as a lesser truth.
……….Moreover, if I failed to go through with this undertaking, I would be guilty of silencing
……….the lives of women and condoning a world governed by male supremacy.

As Ernaux notes, the act of chronicling the events of her illegal abortion serves as a subversion of male dominancy. Read in contemporary America, this deeply graphic account of a life-threatening self-administered abortion forces its readers to consider the fate for millions of childbearing Americans should abortion access be further dismantled.

Marie’s abortion comes at the end of If the Body Allows It and is communicated with calculated distance in the span of a single sentence, “I got pregnant and decided to end the pregnancy.” Few details of the procedure are shared with the reader, except the fact that before learning she was pregnant, Marie relocated to New York because her New Jersey-based healthcare provider—the only firm in the state that covered her Lupus medication—went bankrupt. While wrestling with the decision of whether or not to move, Marie calls her mother and says: “I mean, it’s not a lifesaving drug… It just improves my quality of life.” Her mother responds, “Can I ask what you see is the difference?”

This question is one that millions of Americans will soon face as access to affordable healthcare is yet another right at stake. What does the word lifesaving really mean? Taken literally, lifesaving is an action or process that saves a person’s life. But this doesn’t account for suffering. It fails to take into consideration the profundity of pain. This distinction is often at the fore of the abortion debate. Activists of the pro-life position posit that only one life is actually at stake when a healthy childbearing person chooses to have an abortion. They consider the developing fetus’ life above and instead of the life of the person who is pregnant.

In I May Destroy You, after Arabella reports her assault to the police she’s given a thorough medical examination. In Britain, where I May Destroy You is set, the healthcare of all citizens is covered by the National Health Service (NHS). While private healthcare exists, very few residents use it as the state-funded provider is free and coverage is expansive. According to a 2017 Reuters report, if this assault had happened in the United States, Arabella, and her real-life counterpart Coel, who both work in creative fields—notoriously lacking in traditional health coverage—would have had to pay an average of $950 with insurance or $6,737 without insurance if they sought medical care.

To revisit the question: What’s the difference between something lifesaving and something that improves the quality of one’s life?

Cummins, Coel, and Ernaux all explore what it means to be a women in medical spaces. What it means for their accounts to be questioned and deemed unreliable, what it means to be dismissed, to be presumed unstable. Women across the world have to face these barriers when their suffering is invisible—as is often the case with autoimmune disorders—when they wish to retain ownership of their bodies—as is the case with unwanted pregnancies—and when they have been sexually violated and are trying to prevent future women from experiencing the same pain.

In America, according to a 2015 report by the National Institute of Justice, there is a backlog of roughly 400,000 untested rape kits. By re-narrating their experiences and discarding the dominant ways of thinking bestowed upon them, Cummins, Coel, and Ernaux free themselves from the notion of victimhood. Their art serves as a testament of what can be when women are given the opportunity to tell their own stories.

Jenessa Abrams is a writer, literary translator and practitioner of Narrative Medicine. Her fiction, literary criticism, and creative non-fiction has appeared in publications such as The Atlantic, Tin House, Guernica, The Rumpus, BOMB Magazine, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Currently, she teaches writing in the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University.