My grandparents founded the Matheny school for my uncle, who was born with cerebral palsy in 1941.  He had come into a world that was ill-equipped to accommodate children with special needs. So my grandfather obtained a GI loan to open a school for my uncle and other similarly afflicted kids. My mother grew up immersed in a therapeutic environment designed to bring my uncle and his peers to their fullest potential.

You cannot help but learn empathy when you grow up in a place like Matheny.  These are people who are profoundly affected by their disabilities, people for whom God-given intellectual and creative gifts are often eclipsed by the bodies they’ve received — people deserving of care and respect.  Certainly more care and respect than was given to the gentleman mocked by a certain person during his Presidential campaign.

I had to drive by the Trump International Golf Resort in Bedminster on my way to the Matheny event. I may or may not have flipped the bird as I sped by.

*

I’m working on a new project now — a story about someone in my family whom I have never met.

My mother was adopted, after have been born to an unwed girl in the early 1950s, when America was great. A girl who hid her pregnancy from her family so well that when she went into labor on a Saturday in late September, her mother telephoned the doctor for a house call to see why her daughter was having such a bellyache.

My mother entered the world prematurely — perhaps due to the girl’s corseting, or stress. Or both. The doctor delivered my mother and rushed her to the hospital, where she remained in an incubator for another month before the Matheny family took her home. The girl, who labored and writhed and cried out in pain as her body expelled her sin and the trees outside her window released their autumn leaves — the girl was left behind. She never saw my mother. The girl’s name was Ginger; she had once been a counselor at a Matheny summer camp.

*

I was a freshman in college when my mother began the search for her birth parents. She hired a private investigator, who helped her with the process of tracking down her roots. I have the artifacts of their work in my office — thick notebooks containing photographs and correspondence, certificates of birth, marriage and death.

I am working on that story now, but suffice it to say that the plot of Ginger’s story resembles gravity. Like a branch dropped from a tree into a river coursing by, dragged under bridges by the cold current and thrown against the jagged edges of rock until finally stopping dead in a silt-choked place.

The narrative we told ourselves once we learned the painful details of Ginger’s life focused on the blessings of adoption — thank God you were raised by someone else — and of course we were right to be grateful for my mother’s adoptive family. But we said this as if her birth mother had been the Titanic, as if the ensuing alcoholism and suspected abusive marriage and mental health issues were inevitable, and had nothing to do with the shunning or the trauma she endured.

We said this as if she’d been bad, like a bruised fruit instead of a person. Like she wasn’t the kind of person who had enough character to work with the disabled.

*

This project deviates from my usual environmental work, I know. But aside from the fact that this story is part of my own, I am interested in the circumstances surrounding my mother’s birth because I think Ginger’s story is emblematic of a larger thing.

What I mean to say is that I think the way society treats its women is connected to its propensity for violence,

… which is connected to oppression,

… which is connected to exploitation,

…which is connected to destruction.

There’s parallel refrain in the study of women and earth in our culture. A parallel refrain of consumption and control.

*

Look at how women and the environment were treated, for example, back when America was great. Or better yet, look at the current policy agenda of the Trump administration.

 *

During my weekend trip to New Jersey, I visited some of the places where Ginger had lived. I started with the house where my mother was born. It sits on a curved county road in an affluent part of the state, near a one-lane bridge that crosses the Lamington River. A place with historic farmlands and equestrian stables — not all that far from the Trump golf resort.

After I stopped to record my impressions of the place, I returned to my car and drove on, quickly passing a house owned by someone as offended by Trump as myself. Their yard was filled with protest signs: Hate Has No Home Here, Stand with the ACLU, Resist the Madness, Clinics Not Alleys.

Hours later, into upstate New York, I drove through the trailer park where Ginger had eventually settled after she left her husband. Then onto Newburgh, where she died all alone. Here, the storefronts of buildings were covered with plywood and corrugated metal, and the curbs of the streets were littered with trash.  Sidewalks were occupied by drifting, listless people — stereotypical urban decay, stereotypical human decline.

I hadn’t expected my heart to pound the way it did, hadn’t expected to hear my own heightened breath. But there I was in the car, anxious to turn around and head for home. I know my own privilege amplified my reaction to the final place where my biological grandmother lived. Or maybe it was the thought that she had likely been one of those aimless people smoking a cigarette in an alcove of an abandoned store.

All I know is that I fought hot, angry tears when I saw that car right in front of me a few miles down the road, as I made my way back to the highway — that red Chevy sedan with a Trump bumper sticker and another one that read: Stop Planned Parenthood Now.

*

The saddest part of the story is that she died all alone, that nobody came to claim her after she took her final breath.

 *

Last year in Indiana, then-Governor and Vice President-Elect Mike Pence signed a law requiring health care facilities to notify female patients who miscarry and undergo abortions in their care, that arrangements must be made for proper cremation or burial of “their baby.” Lawmakers in Ohio, South Carolina, and Mississippi have recently considered similar measures; those in Arkansas, Georgia, and Texas have already succeeded in codifying such policies into statute. Which means that, in many places, there is more concern for the dignity of fetal tissue than for someone like the invisible woman from which my mother and I came.

I am aware of the irony of my unwavering pro-choice position — my mother and I probably wouldn’t even exist if birth control had been widely available in the 1950s, or if accessible, legal abortion had been an option for Ginger back when America was great.

But I believe this woman’s life was wasted because she had wandered outside the lines. She endured what she endured because she didn’t have much choice. I believe that she was somebody, a real person who had once cared for others less fortunate than her. And I can’t help the expression of empathy that she has passed down in my DNA.

Photo Credit: Sal Pellingra/EyeEm/Getty Images

The post Empathy appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

In the MFA program, the essay is essential — the Swiss Army knife of form, empowering a writer to tackle all manner of subjects through all manner of style.  One can whittle and maim, uncork spirits or cut out a heart.  It is safe and unsafe, something with which you might even trust a child, but not without first explaining the danger of what can happen with its misuse.  For a creative nonfiction writer, the essay is a rite of passage, like the overnight field trip in the fifth grade — sleep-away camp, where you’re forced to confront and explore all the wonders and anxieties of your newly expanded world.

But in the literary marketplace, essay is the sweater vest, the SNL-spoof of NPR (Delicious Dish, anyone?).  At its best, it seems to be viewed as the narrow humor section of the bookstore, à la the great David Sedaris. At its worst: the faded, silk-flowered storefront in a dying Midwestern town.  No, we essayists are told, best to characterize your work as an autobiographical novel, a series of linked stories, or gonzo journalism if you can pull it off — something that might actually sell.

Except in recent months, I’ve noticed a change in the tide, or rather, what feels like a geologic shift: Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams is a summer blockbuster in both the independent and popular markets.  Her collection, featuring essays that examine human pain and how we handle one another’s pain, made its debut on the New York Times bestseller list (among other bestseller lists) this year, and has been noted by Poets & Writers, The New Yorker, and NPR as a book to watch out for — almost unheard of for this particular genre.

How has she done this?

Notwithstanding Jamison’s compelling topic, I think what we’re seeing is something bigger — something specific to the form.  Not just the essay, but the personal essay: the form that weaves personal narrative into its history and research and facts.  And personal story is the element with which Jamison has particular skill.  Her work speaks directly to us, bridges a connection through our shared vulnerabilities.  Like a camera in a documentary, she says: look at this person’s condition, now take a look at mine.  Feel what we feel, experience our stories, let them tingle with your own.  Then pull back and see how they fit the bigger puzzle.  In so doing, Jamison has made relevant our own little earthquakes.

Turns out our hunger for connection is greater than our desire to be entertained.

Or maybe it’s just our fatigue with the increasingly formulaic approach to literature.  Chick Lit.  Vampires.  50 Shades of Sex.  Maybe we are just weary from the staging that’s required of us in this reality TV culture: cultivating Twitter and Facebook perfection while our souls are tiring out.

Our souls are tiring out.

Jamison herself says, “When you write, you do the work of connecting that terrible privacy to everything beyond it.”  That’s the power of the personal essay: its careful reconstruction and examination, even wrestling of something studied to weave a complex tapestry of people and places and experiences and desires — the threads of which readers will recognize from their own lives.  Recognize and lean in, because something about it thrums.  Awakens a familiar smell.

With the arrival of The Empathy Exams, I dare say the anxiety I feel about calling myself an essayist — even to an agent — has subsided, perhaps even evolved into something more like pride.

photo credits:

The Empathy Exams book cover courtesy of NPR.org

Sweater vest nerd image courtesy of derfmagazine.com

Leslie Jamison headshot by Colleen Kinder, image courtesy of publishersweekly.com

The post Making Essay Cool: The Power of Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.