Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2018. 152 pages. $16.95.
In Jenny Boully’s The Book of Beginnings and Endings (2007), she offers readers just that—alternating beginnings and endings from “hypothetical books.” She juxtaposes beginnings and endings with different stories, which leaves the reader wondering how the mismatched pair fits together and what comes in between. Boully “felt that the middle was nonsensical[, that] the middle was all but a dream[, and that] middles were only about the despair of the ending.” In this book and in The Body: An Essay (2007), a text comprised solely of footnotes, Boully asks her readers to fill in absences, but in Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life, her most recent book, which is ostensibly about the craft of writing, Boully explicitly focuses on and celebrates what comprises the middle.
In Betwixt-and-Between, Boully addresses the impulse to write, hers as well as others’. It’s “[t]he brittle nature of things that makes us love them and wish to preserve them,” Boully writes, as well as our “continual desire to make manifest something known, to somehow be a part of it.” But she also questions this act of preservation, and more specifically, the desire to make the preserved accessible to others. “Why . . . do I carry the hope that a reader will find this essay?” Boully asks. “Why should I long for my words to have longevity? Perhaps I believe that by building this monument of remembrance I can propel myself into the future and make it so that I truly exist.”
Intrinsic to the act of preservation is memory, and by extension what constitutes truth, which Boully returns to again and again in these essays. “At what point does the living turn into its own memorial?” Boully asks. “At what point does life transform into words, full of verb tenses, written on sheets of paper?” To preserve is risky in multiple ways, Boully points out. Our containers have become increasingly smaller—“the most compressed form achievable”—and so by shrinking memories into increasingly smaller files, “we may eventually, however inadvertently, erase the very information we are striving to preserve” or else render it “inaccessible.” “[I]n other words,” Boully suggests, “[memories] will exist as myth, ghostly, in the realm of the afterlife.”
Preserving memory is also risky because of what the act of remembering does to the lived event, especially when details are lost. “[M]emory fails [and] gives way to self-made omissions,” she notes, a problem writers such as Virginia Woolf have faced. Despite a memory’s vividness, Woolf acknowledges that “memory supplies what [she] ha[s] forgotten” and that it can be “more convenient artistically” to shape memory in a way that may not be strictly faithful to the truth. Similar to those of Woolf, there are vivid moments that Boully “approach[es] again joyfully and, like looking at snapshots of a past trip, nostalgically relive[s] what [she] lived so wondrously before.” But these memories are incomplete, and she asks, “What then of all the plot in between I have honestly forgotten?” Here is where Boully grapples with the intersection of memory and imagination. “If you want to make a scene, know that your memory will forever be creating one for you,” Boully cautions. “In any event, it will make for a better-written version—all the possibilities and outcomes still intact, with you forever thinking, Well, what if I had done this or that?” In acknowledging that memory fudges, sensationalizes, and inherently alters the lived event, Boully puts herself in conversation with writers like Patricia Hampl, who writes in The Need to Say It, “I had come to accept the inevitable tangle of memory and imagination.” Betwixt-and-Between self-consciously demonstrates this tango since she is not afraid to reveal memory’s omissions, fabricating details or inviting readers to do so themselves.
Love, like memory, is another central motif of these essays, since for Boully, love so often parallels the writing life, which leads to similar end goals. “In writing, too,” Boully points out, “there exists the struggle with sincerity and wanting someone to love me.” Just as we primp and struggle to appear attractive for a lover, “so too do we, as writers, want to present ourselves to our readers at our very best,” Boully notes. But writing, as with relationships, Boully goes on to say, is seldom so polished, especially if it’s authentic, engaging, and has any degree of depth to it. “[P]erhaps we get caught unawares,” she suggests, “our ragged, disheveled, unsure, untidy, and ugly selves are what make someone else love us, for in writing there is always, inevitably, the ugly.” Here, again, Boully joins a conversation; she reminds one of Mary Karr’s observation that in memoir one must expose “the beautiful and the beastly” parts of ourselves in order to be both believable and enticing to the reader.
As in the past, Boully continues to frustrate and be frustrated by genre, which connects to her frustration about being asked to identify her ethnicity since she is mixed race. “I have never felt anything other than whole,” Boully writes, but this doesn’t stop people from trying to parse her, and her writing, into one race or one genre. “It seems to me that the inability to accept a mixed piece of writing is akin to literary discrimination,” Boully asserts. She goes on to ask, “Isn’t having to choose, being forced to choose, also essentially an act of bias?” Boully resists being constrained. “Do I bend genre? Or does genre bend me?” she wonders. “I think it’s the latter. I have always been the same person.” This book stays true to her genre-bucking tradition rather than manifesting as a dry, textbook-like rendition of how to write like the ones she chaffed against when she was younger.
Boully feels the world deeply and understands its liminal natural—the betwixt-and-between of it. In her descriptions of the writing life, which are mostly essays about her life since “writing should be [your] life,” as she tells her students, Boully captures this shifting, hard to pin down world in her characteristic poetic prose that keeps readers swirling. She disrupts the conventional wisdom of writing about emotional events from a distance, suggesting instead to write in their wake: “I should do better to face the storm unprepared and deal with the aftermath—writing that is distraught, malformed, imperfect, ugly, unsuited, soiled, ruined, lost, and irrecoverable.” As Boully goes on to say, writing “isn’t about what you are supposed to do but rather what you want to do.” So she makes up tenses, writes about dreams, elides middles, evades categorization—in short, here, as elsewhere, she does what she wants, beautifully.
