Another way I thought about it was trying to discover a syntax that would embody perceptions, thoughts, and feelings as they unfolded moment by moment; that is, trying to dramatize the mind in motion as opposed to the mind at rest.
Probably my need to tell her story in minutely registered particulars was my way of keeping my ma near me. There were times when the process of writing grew so intense, when I was so absorbed in rendering her exact facial expressions or the subtle intonations of her voice, that I could almost fool myself into thinking that she hadn’t really died, but had crossed over in my words and come back to me.
As to my adult understanding of her need for wigs and nice clothes, I’m sure that some of it was to give herself an air of authority; but more importantly, I think coming to school in different hairdos every day was a way to separate herself from the other teachers, as if to say:
I know that you know I’m wearing a wig, but it’s a sign of my profound difference from who you are as Mormons and who I am as an independent, free-thinking, free-wheeling teacher. Yes, I’m going to dress more or less appropriately—but my constantly changing hairdo will keep all of you off-balance so that you can never quite nail me down!
And since my ma’s mother was a hairdresser until she got married, it was a family legacy that you aspired to not only sartorial distinction, but to a unique way of doing your “chevelure.”
Rail: On page forty-one, you shift to second person to describe what it took for your mom’s family to survive the Dust Bowl. How did the idea for this POV shift come about?
Sleigh: Well, I hate to sound like a copycat, but I lifted that from Handke. He recounts his mother’s upbringing in second person so that the “you” becomes representative of an entire generation of women like his mother—and, incidentally, my mother.
The two of them were exact contemporaries, both born in the early 1920s. And though one was Austrian and the other American, they’d both been raised as farm girls in desperately poor circumstances. As you may remember from the book, my ma’s first house was a sod house excavated from the prairie, meaning that she was literally dirt poor; while Handke’s mother’s people were one step removed from the poverty of serfdom. American or Austrian, they grew up under the thumb of their own local versions of peasant culture, always at the mercy of hunger, weather, pests, and equally noxious landlords, bailiffs, and debt.
Along with this came the village expectations and strictures to which women were especially subjected: as I write in the book, you took care of your younger brothers and sisters, you cooked and cleaned, and when you weren’t cooking and cleaning or caring for children, you worked in the fields. Your life from childhood to adulthood was work-work-work to exhaustion, produce your own children who wore you out even more, and if you reached old age: debility, sickness, death.
That there was value in such a life Handke clearly understood. But the cost to a soul like his mother, an iconoclast to her bones, was profound. Likewise, I felt my mother was a kindred spirit to Handke’s mother: both women of great intelligence who “refused to tame their own selves to fit in,” as one of my mother’s former students once put it.
The second person not only helped me get the proper distance from my mother as a subject, but allowed me to show how she was representative of a certain generation of isolated, rural farm women.
Rail: I’ve been calling this a hybrid memoir because you blend a few forms of art—specifically, prose, poetry and photography. How did you decide on where you placed your family photos, your poems, and your mother’s diary entries?
Sleigh: I’d written poems about my mother over the years, so as I wrote out the story, I’d punctuate it with a poem. But I’d also saved hundreds of old photographs, so when the publisher asked if I’d like to include some, I was delighted. The design team came up with a special font for my ma’s handwriting in her journal entries that I included. They dedicate a separate page to each entry, and in the overall design they give each of these elements their due weight. It’s a beautifully produced book, but even more than that, a book whose presentation adds to the experience of reading it.
Roland Barthes wrote a book I love about photography, Camera Lucida. But he wasn’t talking about art photography so much as family photographs. He focuses on one particular picture of his mother, now dead, and homes in on what he calls the punctum: the point, the unexpected detail that pierces or wounds the viewer. The book purports to be a treatise on photography, but it’s as much an elegy for his mother. I was also drawing on W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, in which photographs occur at crucial moments. But I was nervous about including them: everybody does it nowadays and it’s become a cliché. And there’s only one Sebald and one Barthes!
But the photographs themselves helped me get over my reluctance: some detail would catch my eye, and I’d feel that sudden wounding—say, my mother poking her head out of a window at high school and sticking her tongue out at the photographer. It’s humorous, of course, but also defiant and brave. And now that she’s dead, I find that picture heartbreaking. So, the photographs have a talismanic quality about them and seem to sum up a whole epoch in her life.
As to the placement of both poems and photographs, I’d written a long poem about Iraq and modeled it on the haibun, a form invented by Matsuo Basho, the seventeenth century Japanese poet who wrote Narrow Road to the Interior. It’s a travelogue in which the poet tells about his adventures and the people he meets. And then he sums up the event with a haiku before going to the next town, temple, or shrine. I thought of the pictures and poems as haiku-like moments marking off the ongoing arc of the story.
The strange thing about the book is that I wrote it to keep my mother near me. But now that it’s finished, I sometimes feel as if I’ve lost her a second time. I think of the book as a collaboration between us, not only because of her journal entries, but because her speaking voice—down-home, salty, skeptical, always eloquent—enters the book at so many crucial moments. And that conversation continues in my head. So maybe she’s still with me. And maybe it’s foolish to think that just because she’s died, our relationship ended or will stop evolving.