The Wrong Way to Save Your Life
Page 23
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Advance Praise for The Wrong Way to Save Your Life
“Reading this book is like listening to stories from a wise, compassionate, and irrepressibly funny friend—one who allows her empathy to fill every unflinching tale about how fear both plagues and saves us. Whether she’s writing about gun laws, a bear attack, or postpartum depression, Stielstra’s clear voice calls for us to stay awake, and to pay attention.”
—Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Border of Paradise
Praise for Once I Was Cool
“In Once I Was Cool, Megan Stielstra is warm and open and wise. Whether she’s writing about the complex loneliness of early motherhood or failing to rise to the occasion or find the right language while living abroad, Stielstra is a masterful essayist. From the first page to the last, she demonstrates a graceful understanding of the power of storytelling. What she’s truly offering with her words is the grandest of gifts.”
—Roxane Gay, author of An Untamed State
“Stielstra’s Once I Was Cool isn’t just edgy, funny, surprising, a ricochet of wow. It’s practically actionable. The words reach out from the page. They direct us to look, to think, to ask.”
—Chicago Tribune
“That is Stielstra’s talent: her ability to create experiences. Every narrative seemed to pick itself up off the page and turn itself into a performance before my eyes. The numerous asides, amendments, and annotations force the reader to see and hear her work, not just read it. Ekphrasis (visual description) at its best, there is no contemporary author more vivid in description that Megan Stielstra.”
—Chicagoist
“America’s next great essayist is Megan Stielstra.”
—Joyland
Praise for Everyone Remain Calm
“Stielstra—collector, curator, and facilitator of so many stories—also writes beautifully and kinetically. Her work possesses a rare aural quality, no doubt the result of so much time on stage, or even in front of a classroom . . . in Everyone Remain Calm she gleefully tests the boundaries of the short-story form.”
—Time Out Chicago
“A daring and inventive debut.”
—Collagist
“Her theatrical performances are intense, composed of a powerful cadence of speech and strong storytelling you won’t find anywhere else. Somehow she has bottled the presence of her performances and sprinkled a little bit on each story contained within Everyone Remain Calm.”
—CBS Chicago, “Best New Chicago Books”
“[Stielstra] has a profound understanding of where we all go in our minds, and the unique ability to turn it into a story that sounds like your new best friend is telling it to you.”
—Elizabeth Crane, author of We Only Know So Much
“A trickster constantly unpacking and upending what is meant by ‘fiction,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘storytelling,’ Stielstra has ultimately created a charming style wholly her own.”
—Gina Frangello, author of A Life in Men and Slut Lullabies
Also by Megan Stielstra
Once I Was Cool
Everyone Remain Calm
Copyright
Some of the essays in this book originally appeared, in slightly different forms, in the following publications: "The Wrong Way to Save Your Life," New York Times; "Stand Here to Save Lives," Guernica; "F," Midnight Breakfast; "The Buildup To and Takeaway From," Soulmate 101 and Other Essays on Love and Sex and The Butter; and excerpts from "twenty" and "forty" in Great Lakes Review, Chicago Artists Resource, and Writer, with Kids.
the wrong way to save your life. Copyright © 2017 by Megan Stielstra. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Cover design by Joanne O’Neill
Cover photograph by Garry Gay / Alamy Stock Photo
Digital Edition August 2017 ISBN: 978–0–06–242921–6
Print ISBN: 978–0–06–242920–9
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON M4W 1A8, Canada
www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand
Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive
Rosedale 0632
Auckland, New Zealand
www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF, UK
www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
www.harpercollins.com
* “The Counted,” The Guardian, accessed July 5, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/series/counted-us-police-killings
* He also had every Masters of the Universe action figure including Rattlor and Two Bad and Zoar the fighting falcon, however—and this is very important—he did not have Castle Grayskull. So one time he and his friends told me I couldn’t play with them because I was a girl and Masters of the Universe were for boys and I went home crying and told my parents, and even though money was tight, even though they weren’t fans of Barbie-type plastic toys, even though they believed in solving problems with logic and discussion (“Use your head,” they’d say, “your words”), we went straight to Kmart and bought Teela and Evil-Lyn and the Sorceress. (Where are their pants? I wondered. Aren’t they cold?) And—the icing on my six-year-old fuck you cake—that ginormous plastic castle.
I was hot shit on the block, I tell you what.
Know what else? I shared.
* Shane Tritsch, “Why Is Illinois So Corrupt?” Chicago magazine, December 9, 2010, http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/December-2010/Why-Is-Illinois-So-Corrupt-Local-Government-Experts-Explain/
* I would later learn that this activity was a variation on “the Spectrum” as developed by Guillermo Gomez Pena and Roberto Sifuentes and explained in their wonderful book Exercises for Rebel Artists: Radical Performance Pedagogy.
* Marisa Kabas, “We Asked Men How They Learned about Sexual Consent,” Fusion, June 13, 2016, http://fusion.net/story/313091/how-men-learn-about-sexual-consent
* Katie J. M. Baker, “Here Is the Powerful Letter the Stanford Victim Read Aloud to Her Attacker,” BuzzFeed, June, 3, 2016, https.//www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/heres-the-powerful-letter-the-stanford-victim-read-to-her-ra?utm_term=.fw4oDwverv#.wnnwVxgMyg
* Also legal:
The guns used to kill forty-nine queer people of color in Orlando.
The guns used to kill fourteen people at a holiday party in San Bernardino.
The guns used to kill nine people at Umpqua Community College in Oregon.
The gun used to kill nine black worshippers at AME Church in Charleston.
The gun used to kill four students in a high school cafeteria in Marysville.
The gun used to kill three people at Fort Hood.
The gun used to kill twelve people at the Washington Navy Yard.
The guns used to kill twenty-six people, mostly children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Even the guns being used in record violence in my beautiful, complicated city of Chicago
were purchased legally in states with less regulation: Indiana, mostly, but also Mississippi, Wisconsin, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Ohio, Texas, Florida, Michigan, Iowa, Alabama, and others.
* I’d like to thank that bouncer. I know it’s not necessary; he was doing his job, doing the right thing, and taking care of each other should be the default. But as I look back down the line of my life at the moments when I was the most afraid or the most alone or closer to the ledge than any of us are safe to be, it was always kindness that brought me back.
* Years later, reading Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks, I would find this passage, unwrapping it like a gift:
“In my classrooms, I do not expect students to take any risks that I would not take, to share in any way I would not share. When professors bring narratives of their experiences into classroom discussions it eliminates the possibility that we can function as all-knowing, silent interrogators. It is often productive if professors take the first risk, linking confessional narratives to academic discussions so as to show how experience can illuminate and enhance our understanding of academic materials. But most professors must practice being vulnerable in the classroom, being wholly present in mind, body, and spirit.”
* I copied this list after class and found it, years later, while working on this book. Hence:
Dear Present and Future Personal Essayists (and writers of all genres and artists of all genres and human beings, period): Be specific in your journal. Names, places, weather, dialogue, sounds, smells. Later you’ll be grateful you had such foresight. I pulled extensively from past journals for these essays, and there were many, many times that forty-year-old me had no idea what twenty-something me was referring to, especially in the passages about love. I’d be all: i love this person so muuuuuch i’ll love them foreeeeeever they don’t love me baaaaaaaaack i might diiiiiieeeeeeee.
Now I’m like, who the hell was I talking about?
* Yes. Have fun!
* Yes. Be safe!
* I do not advocate writing drunk. If you must, please clean it up before you turn it into your editor and/or professor.
* I do not advocate writing drunk. One time I was at a bachelorette party and I wore very tight jeans with one back pocket full of cash for strippers—Zorro was my favorite—and in the other pocket I kept the notes I took to write about Zorro later. When I woke up the morning after, I first had to wait until my eyeballs stopped vibrating. Then, coffee. Then, I wandered around till I found my pants: one pocket full of bills, the other, empty, which meant that I’d put notes instead of dollars into Zorro’s G-string. I have since mythologized those notes to Pulitzer-winning heights and deeply regret their loss.
As I see it, this anecdote holds the following morals:
1) I owe Zorro. Stories don’t pay rent. And hey, while we’re on this subject:
A) Pay service workers. Gratitude doesn’t pay rent.
B) Pay interns. Experience doesn’t pay rent.
C) Pay writers. Exposure doesn’t pay rent.
D) Pay everybody on time. Rent is due right now.
2) Take notes in a dedicated place, not on the backs of individual order slips that you stash somewhere for later and subsequently lose forever. We need those notes. We need those memories. We need those versions of ourselves. Per Didion: “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
* That’s my boy.
* Now I lick imaginary lasers like Kate McKinnon aka Holtzmann in the reboot.
* In the absence of any knowledge of The Fabulous 40s, I apparently substituted the Nylons for this particular fantasy, a group that my high school choir friends and I adored. I’d forgotten about them until this very moment, pushed out of my memory from years of dating boys in indie rock bands, boys who scoffed at my love of PJ Harvey, boys who saw my copy of Jagged Little Pill and asked why the fuck was I listening to her, boys who would’ve most certainly ridiculed my love of a cappella. And if they didn’t like my music, they wouldn’t like me, right? Right? If there are any young women reading this and those above sentences sound familiar, if you’re hiding parts of yourself to look cool or make someone love you, please repeat after me: fuck that noise. You are perfect. You matter. Hold on to what you love, the songs and books and style and obsessions and causes and questions that make you you. Find people who love these things, too. When you get lost, they’ll help you find your way back to yourself.
* My friend Bobby works with storytellers in their seventies and eighties in senior living facilities around Chicago. Recently, they told him they don’t like the word “senior.” Bobby asked them what they’d prefer and they said “third-ager,” which I believe comes from the French: teenage, middle age, third age.