READING 11 ︎︎︎ Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

Sometimes a sigh is just the expulsion of breath.

We argue a lot about tone, norms, rhythms. Our fights tend not to be about content, but about texture, format. “It’s the way you said ‘good morning’”. “It’s that you didn’t kiss me when you came into the room.”

I have a book called The Science of Tears, published in earnest, I think, in the 1990s. It is about the neuroscience of crying. I found it in a community library, and I took it. I still have it.

But I look out the window and I think — imagine the universe. Imagine a star being born. And here we are, arguing about the expulsion of breath. Imagine the vastness of it. Imagine the smallness.

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To write about others is to trespass. Even with care. Even with citation. And especially when the subject is dead.

Memoir pretends to center the subject but is often a dialogue — a way of locating the self through others. Mother, friend, child, lover, ghost. Memoir is a study in shadows: of being shaped by who stands beside you.

So what does it mean to write ethically in this form? 

I learned the term reciprocal autobiography, an approach to ethnographic resarch which centers fairness, exchange, and equality. Coined by folklorist E.J. Lawless, it is a feminist and collaboartive response to the anthropological fieldwork and research of the 1970s, which was often male-centric, hierarchical, and self-blind. An example of reciprocal autobiography: a Roma woman and an anthropologist undertook a cooperative biography project. Each wrote about the other, and themselves, their friendship, their process. The form attempted to settle the hierarchy of knowing / controlling /  exposing.  

But what if the person you are writing about is dead? I am working on a research project on Alice Neel, partly a project of self-understanding. How do I offer Alice reciprocity? What does it mean to give something to someone who can’t receive it? I pick at your flaws and disclose my own. I name your quiet cruelties and risk showing mine.

This is not a moral position so much as a structural one. A way of asking: if I turn the lens outward, what am I willing to show when it turns back? My failures? My doubts and addictions? And what of my husband, my children? Is their image mine to portray? To whom does a family’s story belong?

I lean over Alice’s life, lingering on her disaffection for her children, her losses, her mistakes. I pick at her like I’m looking for something. 

An essay can be a kind of offering. The practice is a form of self-audit. Here is the shape of my looking. Here is the cost.