"Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember" Reading Response
Many a person in my life has told me not to 'overthink things.' When the same advice comes from multiple seemingly reliable sources, you tend to pay attention, and at least give it the ol' college try.
So far in life, I've explored many avenues to try to "get out of my head," to try and occupy "my heart space," and to try and "live an embodied life." I struggle with this daily. How to untangle my brain from my body? How to love myself and others without overthinking? Without overanalyzing? Without remembering? I ponder these questions while my cell phone lays open and ready to re-download the Headspace meditation app. I read books about these questions. I study quantum physics and underline passages about the possibilities of the creative mind and body. Still, not overthinking evades me.
It's no wonder then that by the end of Christine Hyung-Oak Lee's memoir, "Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember: The Stroke That Changed My Life," I couldn't stop thinking about our human hearts and minds, the dichotomy between them, and their inextricability from one another.
It makes a lot of sense that the book would align with these thoughts. The memoir is about an ischemic stroke that Hyung-Oak Lee experienced back in 2006 as a result of an undiagnosed hole in her heart. But along less anatomical lines, I'm thinking about the metaphorical hole in Hyung-Oak Lee's heart and her person that she endeavors to heal by writing this memoir. I'm thinking about how in that healing process she learns to forgive herself and others; how she takes readers on a journey into the brain to pinpoint where memory lives in a technical sense, but in a philosophical one discovers it hiding elsewhere. I'm also thinking about what it means to feel like a whole person, when we each carry around so many different holes.
As the author writes, "Trauma takes time to stare in the face. It was difficult to examine a pivotal thing that injured me, disturbed me, and changed me forever" (pg. 227) When writing about my own traumas, I often find it helpful to have a structure to build around, to hold up what I'm saying, and provide some relief from completely reliving it. Reading this piece with our craft class in mind, I observed the author using Vonnegut's "Slaughter House Five" as this kind of framework in her storytelling. She uses "Slaughter House Five" as a metaphor for her own experience of writing and healing, describing how Vonnegut outsourced his trauma to the main character of the book, Billy Pilgrim. "He created a character to embody his trauma and exorcised the darkness in that way... I too have created a character to embody the trauma. The person on these pages in the narrator Christine. And the person behind all this is me, Christine"(pg. 237). She even takes the classic Vonnegut phrase "So it goes" and uses it to punctuate certain thoughts and experiences. In this way, the author separates herself from the trauma of writing trauma, which I think is pretty brilliant. But how does she separate the audience from experiencing trauma while reading her work?
Reading about trauma can be pretty traumatizing. My experience reading this book was filled with triggers, being someone who experienced serious illness at a relatively young age and still struggles with hypochondriac tendencies. At times, the content is highly emotional. We get an intimate look at the author's pain as she describes her experience recovering from multiple catastrophic events, procedures, depressions (postpartum and otherwise) and divorce. However, just as the reader feels that she cannot take any more, the author expertly includes a relief valve in the form of some clean, compact medical information. Or she writes about a scientist who made some contribution to the field of neuroplasticity. Or she writes about a principle (like the 80/20 principle for example) that underlies a process in her healing.
There is so much balance and solace in the juxtaposition of this dry, technical exposition with the more personal essay type writing Hyung-Oak Lee employs at other junctures in the book. This switch off between styles also mirrors the switch off between the head and the heart that arose as I read. By the end it seemed apparent that to heal fully the author needed to make inquiries into both her heart and head spaces. It served me to think of the book in that way as I read it. It also felt good to be able to cling to some concrete markers and medical information when I was reading about the author's experience of recovery. Like a map, it showed me the topography of her healing, so I could navigate the chaos of it as a reader.
Another thing I appreciated was the way the author wrote about her close relationships and family. For instance with her father, I admired the way she was able to write about him with a balanced perspective. It's something that I struggle with, and seems to have a lot to do with timing and whether or not she had fully processed these events in her life.
My heart hurt when she talked about her father's constant comments about her weight. Despite how painful this was for her, she was somehow able to write about him with care and respect.
"My father commented on my weight -- while I lost twenty pounds the first year of recovery, I eventually gained it all back. And he made note of that.
I responded, 'Daddy? Am I perfect to you in every other way?'
'Yes,' he said.
'Then' I said, G*d had to be fair.'
My dad slapped his knee. 'Oh yeah! Fair. Fair!' And laughed. The topic never came up again" (pg. 173)
She does this again when she writes about her sexual assault and the experience of confronting her aggressor:
"Years later I will meet up with that same man to tell him I wrote an essay about him. I do not ask him for his permission. He is married with children and we have remained friendly through the years. He will say sorry. He will divulge his faults. He will say he was an alcoholic then. I will say we were different people then. I will quail when we hug" (pg. 232).
In terms of the question of where memory inhabits the body, we are told a great deal of medical information for where both short and long-term memory live in the brain. However, memory according to the author doesn't just live in the brain. As the she notes on pg. 213 while discussing the many stories that other people told her while she healed, "The stories people told me out of love, about love, went into my brain through my heart -- another way in which we are able to remember."
This book captured my heart and mind with a ton of grace. It had the sound medical structure, research, and literary backbone in the form of Vonnegut's "Slaughter House Five" to convince my brain and the emotion, intimacy and vulnerability to pull at my heart strings. I hope to experiment with some of things the author has done herein in my own writing and healing and am glad to have read this work.
So far in life, I've explored many avenues to try to "get out of my head," to try and occupy "my heart space," and to try and "live an embodied life." I struggle with this daily. How to untangle my brain from my body? How to love myself and others without overthinking? Without overanalyzing? Without remembering? I ponder these questions while my cell phone lays open and ready to re-download the Headspace meditation app. I read books about these questions. I study quantum physics and underline passages about the possibilities of the creative mind and body. Still, not overthinking evades me.
It's no wonder then that by the end of Christine Hyung-Oak Lee's memoir, "Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember: The Stroke That Changed My Life," I couldn't stop thinking about our human hearts and minds, the dichotomy between them, and their inextricability from one another.
It makes a lot of sense that the book would align with these thoughts. The memoir is about an ischemic stroke that Hyung-Oak Lee experienced back in 2006 as a result of an undiagnosed hole in her heart. But along less anatomical lines, I'm thinking about the metaphorical hole in Hyung-Oak Lee's heart and her person that she endeavors to heal by writing this memoir. I'm thinking about how in that healing process she learns to forgive herself and others; how she takes readers on a journey into the brain to pinpoint where memory lives in a technical sense, but in a philosophical one discovers it hiding elsewhere. I'm also thinking about what it means to feel like a whole person, when we each carry around so many different holes.
As the author writes, "Trauma takes time to stare in the face. It was difficult to examine a pivotal thing that injured me, disturbed me, and changed me forever" (pg. 227) When writing about my own traumas, I often find it helpful to have a structure to build around, to hold up what I'm saying, and provide some relief from completely reliving it. Reading this piece with our craft class in mind, I observed the author using Vonnegut's "Slaughter House Five" as this kind of framework in her storytelling. She uses "Slaughter House Five" as a metaphor for her own experience of writing and healing, describing how Vonnegut outsourced his trauma to the main character of the book, Billy Pilgrim. "He created a character to embody his trauma and exorcised the darkness in that way... I too have created a character to embody the trauma. The person on these pages in the narrator Christine. And the person behind all this is me, Christine"(pg. 237). She even takes the classic Vonnegut phrase "So it goes" and uses it to punctuate certain thoughts and experiences. In this way, the author separates herself from the trauma of writing trauma, which I think is pretty brilliant. But how does she separate the audience from experiencing trauma while reading her work?
Reading about trauma can be pretty traumatizing. My experience reading this book was filled with triggers, being someone who experienced serious illness at a relatively young age and still struggles with hypochondriac tendencies. At times, the content is highly emotional. We get an intimate look at the author's pain as she describes her experience recovering from multiple catastrophic events, procedures, depressions (postpartum and otherwise) and divorce. However, just as the reader feels that she cannot take any more, the author expertly includes a relief valve in the form of some clean, compact medical information. Or she writes about a scientist who made some contribution to the field of neuroplasticity. Or she writes about a principle (like the 80/20 principle for example) that underlies a process in her healing.
There is so much balance and solace in the juxtaposition of this dry, technical exposition with the more personal essay type writing Hyung-Oak Lee employs at other junctures in the book. This switch off between styles also mirrors the switch off between the head and the heart that arose as I read. By the end it seemed apparent that to heal fully the author needed to make inquiries into both her heart and head spaces. It served me to think of the book in that way as I read it. It also felt good to be able to cling to some concrete markers and medical information when I was reading about the author's experience of recovery. Like a map, it showed me the topography of her healing, so I could navigate the chaos of it as a reader.
Another thing I appreciated was the way the author wrote about her close relationships and family. For instance with her father, I admired the way she was able to write about him with a balanced perspective. It's something that I struggle with, and seems to have a lot to do with timing and whether or not she had fully processed these events in her life.
My heart hurt when she talked about her father's constant comments about her weight. Despite how painful this was for her, she was somehow able to write about him with care and respect.
"My father commented on my weight -- while I lost twenty pounds the first year of recovery, I eventually gained it all back. And he made note of that.
I responded, 'Daddy? Am I perfect to you in every other way?'
'Yes,' he said.
'Then' I said, G*d had to be fair.'
My dad slapped his knee. 'Oh yeah! Fair. Fair!' And laughed. The topic never came up again" (pg. 173)
She does this again when she writes about her sexual assault and the experience of confronting her aggressor:
"Years later I will meet up with that same man to tell him I wrote an essay about him. I do not ask him for his permission. He is married with children and we have remained friendly through the years. He will say sorry. He will divulge his faults. He will say he was an alcoholic then. I will say we were different people then. I will quail when we hug" (pg. 232).
In terms of the question of where memory inhabits the body, we are told a great deal of medical information for where both short and long-term memory live in the brain. However, memory according to the author doesn't just live in the brain. As the she notes on pg. 213 while discussing the many stories that other people told her while she healed, "The stories people told me out of love, about love, went into my brain through my heart -- another way in which we are able to remember."
This book captured my heart and mind with a ton of grace. It had the sound medical structure, research, and literary backbone in the form of Vonnegut's "Slaughter House Five" to convince my brain and the emotion, intimacy and vulnerability to pull at my heart strings. I hope to experiment with some of things the author has done herein in my own writing and healing and am glad to have read this work.
Lila,
ReplyDeleteI really appreciate your interpretation of Christine's work. It is cohesive and thoughtful. I admire your effectiveness in eloquently expressing specifically how you connected to Christine's experience, writing style and personal journey, while being candid about your own emotional responses both as a reader and writer.
I specifically enjoyed not only your insights into various methodologies that Christine used while writing about specific traumatic events, but also your considerations of protecting the reader who is experiencing this trauma with in the body of work.
thank you
I found it very interesting to read your take on how the author responds to trauma. I never thought about how the author may be protecting us from reading about trauma. I felt safely removed and not overly emotionally involved with the trauma of her stroke, the language came off as detached, which confused me. But your point about the author writing about trauma in a way that doesn't traumatize the read is an interpretation that is very much in line with the author's perspective.
ReplyDeleteI tried to imagine a version of this story in an emotionally written way, living through each moment of pain and disappointment. It would be a very heavy read and may not achieve what the author really wanted to communicate.
I liked how you pulled together the medical, philosophical, and literary motifs from this book and found ways to mix in both personal anecdote and writing techniques, all while answering the question of where memory inhabits.
ReplyDeleteLila,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your sincerity and for writing this response with an open heart. Your point about the "dry, technical exposition" as achieving "balance and solace" with the more personal aspects of the novel is very interesting to me. I agree that the interweaving of various sources creates a complex texture for the memoir. As Christine writes at one point, she had to become the expert of her own diagnosis - which meant not only engaging with the emotional and psychological consequences of her stroke, but also with the science of it. I hadn't considered that she might be doing this to lighten the book for her audience, or to create a balance between mind and heart, so thank you for offering this insight.
I wonder, however, whether these sections had to be quite so "dry" (a word you and I seem to be in agreement about!) to offer scientific background and to provide a shift in tone. I study somatics and trauma and am endlessly fascinated by how the brain works, but I did find these sections in the memoir to be didactic, rather than emotionally compelling. (Late in the book, she writes, "Remember implicit memory?" in reference to the earlier sections on memory, which made me feel like I was being quizzed, rather than invited into her world.) Another reason I struggled with these sections is because of the metaphors/images she used to break down the different kinds of memory - they felt random, or as if they were trying to be funny, for the sake of explaining something to the reader, rather than as core metaphors/images through which she viewed the world and which were central to the world of the novel. I guess that I believe that heart and the mind are not dichotomies and therefore, there can be heart in how we discuss the mind, especially in a memoir. And it doesn't have to be heavy, or climactic, or wrought -- just honest. To me, this is what writing from the body can accomplish.... This is an evolving thought, so I apologize for vagueness!
I found myself thinking a lot about one of my favorite memoirs, "The Two Kinds of Decay," by Sarah Manguso, which is about her experience of suffering/recovery from an undiagnosed illness in her early twenties. There is so much medical jargon in this book, but the book is fragmented into 1-2 page meditations that read like poems about a particular dimension/aspect of her experience. This approach rendered the science/medical world vivid and viscerally affecting - in my view, moreso than Tell Me Everything. I wonder whether you might enjoy -- and if you do end up reading, I'd love to talk with you about it! Happy to talk about all of the above, too, as someone who has struggled with chronic illness.
Great work! Blog of the week!
ReplyDeletee