AURELIA, AURÉLIA
A Memoir
By Kathryn Davis
108 pages. Graywolf Press. $15.
There are memoirs through which you study the information of an individual’s life, after which there are memoirs through which you’re a chip implanted within the writer’s mind. Within the case of Kathryn Davis’s memoir, you’re a chip. “Aurelia, Aurélia” is just 108 pages lengthy, and a thriller presents itself: How might a lot consciousness be packed into such a small object?
Davis’s eight novels bear little relationship to something that is perhaps lassoed into the class of “up to date fiction,” and “Aurelia, Aurélia” — her first work of nonfiction — can also be an outlier. It’s like a kind of distant locations populated by landrace natural world that exist nowhere else on earth.
The topic is the dying of Davis’s husband, Eric, from most cancers. Whereas Eric is dying, the 2 spend their mornings aspect by aspect in mattress. At some point Eric enumerates the entire cash and energy the couple has put into their home — the stone partitions, the beech tree out entrance, his full assortment of Rex Stout detective novels on the cabinets — and poses a query: In any case this work, how might he dream of leaving? That, after all, is one everlasting anguish of foretold deaths. Why now?
Samuel Johnson wrote that “the secure and basic antidote in opposition to sorrow is employment,” a sentiment that may underpin the whole style of grief memoirs. Nevertheless it’s price noting that he got here to this suggestion solely after rejecting two frequent strategies of dealing with grief. The primary, Johnson wrote, was forcing oneself into “scenes of merriment.” (This echoes the axiomatic courting recommendation that one of the best ways to recover from a breakup is to start out courting somebody new.)
The second technique Johnson dismissed was that of vicarious wallowing — of making an attempt to dampen one’s personal ache by specializing in different individuals who had it worse. For Johnson, the primary technique failed as a result of it sucks (not his actual phrases), and the second as a result of it might worsen the affliction it aimed to deal with. The closest factor to a treatment, he wrote, was movement.
And so, to jot down. The “plot” of Davis’s life and Eric’s dying unfolds in time-shifting episodes. One second we’re on a bus subsequent to the writer in highschool, heading house from a category journey to the Cloisters in New York. Then, a long time later, we’re studying the newspaper with Eric. After which again to 1956, when Davis’s father has given her a shiny I LIKE IKE sticker, which she adheres to the highest drawer of her maple dresser, in direct violation of the household’s no-stickers-on-furniture rule.
What connects these vignettes? They’re proof of Davis’s behavior of vigilance. On the college bus she analyzed the senseless chatter of classmates, her thoughts racing from James Bond to the Holy Ghost. In mattress with Eric she didn’t merely gaze out the window however positioned patterns in bits of sky framed by branches. The I LIKE IKE sticker was her scouting companion as she monitored the evening sky for planes that may bomb the household house.
Credit score…Anne Davis
On the age of seven, Davis got here down with pleurisy and spent a month in mattress. Her mom learn Hans Christian Andersen tales as a vaporizer despatched puffs of yellow steam into the sickroom. The fairy tales affirmed Davis’s sense of mortality to such a level that she skilled the phantasm of getting composed them herself: “I didn’t suppose they’d been written for me, Andersen having ‘had me in thoughts,’ or that they conveyed my view of issues with uncommon precision — no, once I heard these tales I used to be infused with that shiver of ecstasy that’s an unmistakable symptom of the inventive act.”
In a guide about dying, it’s not shocking that Davis is fixated on metamorphoses and thresholds. She trains her deal with “ghost-moments”: the moment an individual steps off the sting of a cliff earlier than she hits the bottom, or the break up second between opening a door and coming into a room. She’s within the bardo and within the musical “Brigadoon”; in the truth that it took Flaubert three days to jot down a easy transition; within the “typically all however inaudible transit” from one tonal temper to a different in Beethoven’s bagatelles.
She additionally chronicles the knotty contradiction of grief, a type of struggling each distinctive and banal — banal within the sense that grief occurs on a regular basis and to everybody. For Davis, one severance follows the subsequent. In her childhood there have been two goldfish, Potato and Carrot, who “dedicated suicide” collectively by leaping out of the bowl that Davis positioned on a windowsill. There was the day when Davis’s father took her right down to the cellar, fetched a gun and made his daughter promise to place him out of his distress if “at any time sooner or later he misplaced all his colleges.”
Davis just isn’t an individual to sentimentalize a physique’s expiration, whether or not goldfish or human. Or, certainly, worm: In highschool biology, she and different college students dissected a liver fluke, slicing the pinnacle in half with a razor till two new heads fashioned. The experiment was supposed to finish there, however Davis saved going till her creature sprouted eight heads. (Then it died.)
Recounting the worm surgical procedure results in a meditation on the phrase “fluke” — from the Greek for “flooring,” Davis’s trainer informed the category. But additionally within the sense of an opportunity incidence: “a fortunate shot in billiards, a sudden gust of wind.” It was a fluke, Davis writes, that she married a person seven years youthful than she was, the identical age distinction because the one between his personal dad and mom.
Historically a memoirist’s activity is to assemble the flukes of her life and marshal them into one thing resembling a narrative. However Davis has a unique mission in thoughts. She has written a memoir that mimics the atemporal high quality of the episodes that give which means to life. “Aurelia, Aurélia” doesn’t take care of the constraints of melody, however is nonetheless an entrancing tune.
