Violation Read online

  Praise for Sallie Tisdale

  A Buddhist woman who’s written about porn. Do you really need another reason to read her?

  JULIA LIPSCOMB, Inlander

  Violation: Collected Essays

  Sallie Tisdale’s Violation is a writer’s bible and a reader’s best friend. Bold and wise, galvanizing and grounding, Tisdale’s essays are propulsive and frightening in their poignance and content. This is the essay collection you’ll want to have with you on that hypothetical desert island.

  CHLOE CALDWELL, author of Legs Get Led Astray and Women

  Sallie Tisdale possesses one of the most companionable and inquisitive voices in contemporary American nonfiction. She is guided by a restless, humane intelligence. And her range! Who else can write about Moray eels and obscene phone calls, about the harrowing work of firefighters and the dreamy effects of laughing gas, all the while unearthing the deeper meanings of the world around us? Mortality, desire, love, loss: these are Tisdale’s underlying subjects, and in Violation, she brings them to life with bracing clarity and unfailing insight.

  BERNARD COOPER, author of The Bill From My Father

  Sallie Tisdale is the real thing, a writer who thinks like a philosopher, observes like a journalist, and sings on the page like a poet; in other words, the consummate and perfect essayist. She knocked my socks off when I first discovered her decades ago, and now, reading this collection, I realize I haven’t found them since. Violation contains important work from an important writer. I’m so glad it’s out in the world.

  MEGHAN DAUM, author of The Unspeakable: and Other Subjects of Discussion

  That Sallie Tisdale’s a treasure comes as no secret to lovers of the essay, and yet this happy gathering that spans the decades is revelatory, a fascinating look at the epic wanderings of a life mapped by curiosity. Here we get elephants and houseflies, diets and fires, birth and the debris of death, all the mixed and messy vitality of family life. We travel far and we travel wide, but in the end we circle home to Tisdale herself, vulnerable and available, intimate and encouraging, our guide and our friend, her questioning presence lighting the way and celebrating it all, every little step in life’s saga, one lovely sentence at a time.

  CHARLES D’AMBROSIO, author of Loitering: New and Collected Essays

  In essay, memoir, and literary journalism, Sallie Tisdale writes with fierce and finely tuned attention to what she calls “ordinary things, the journey of grime and wonder through the world.” Abortion, elephants, female identity, family history, eating and dieting, her Buddhist view of living and dying, her work as an oncology nurse, the ethics of writing nonfiction – whatever her focus, she is never content with an easy resolution or anything less than the most nuanced, most honest, most finely crafted account she is capable of. Readers may not always agree with her, but they will know they’ve been in the company of an articulate intelligence thinking out loud in graceful and incisive prose.

  JOHN DANIEL, author of Rogue River Journal and Looking After

  I read Sallie Tisdale and within a few sentences, I am under her spell. It matters not whether she’s writing about the tyranny of weight loss, the startling lives of blow flies, or what it’s like to work in an oncology ward (she is a dedicated nurse as well as a brilliant writer): I’m all in, all the time. I will go anywhere she wants to take me. An alternate image – climbing into a submarine with Tisdale at the controls and diving down down down, into her singular sensibility, her genius for language, her love of our deeply imperfect world.

  KAREN KARBO, author of Julia Child Rules: Lessons on Savoring Life

  I’ve long admired Sallie Tisdale’s essays, and this collection brandishes her impressive strengths: she’s complicit without being woebegone, she’s philosophical without being windy or airy, and she’s empathetic without being hand-wringing.

  DAVID SHIELDS, author of Life Is Short – Art Is Shorter: In Praise of Brevity

  Women of the Way: Discovering 2500 Years of Buddhist Wisdom

  [A] beautifully crafted volume. The universal wisdom and enlightened thinking preserved in this collection transcends gender.

  BOOKLIST

  A well-written, deeply moving collection of stories … Fanciful and eminently readable.

  BUDDHADHARMA

  With her frank and thoughtful writing style, Tisdale takes the reader on a philosophical adventure.

  EAST WEST WOMAN

  An enlivening and indispensable volume.

  JANE HIRSHFIELD, author of Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women

  A much-needed account of feminine teachers and leaders in Buddhism.

  KANSAS CITY STAR

  Tisdale’s descriptive writing is especially imaginative.

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  The Best Thing I Ever Tasted: The Secret of Food

  Tisdale’s forte lies in helping readers to see the big picture, in which she ties together history, folklore, personal anecdote, and sharp analysis to show that we truly are what we eat.

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  [V]ery interesting and entertaining … Tisdale’s coverage of food writers is very good.

  LIBRARY JOURNAL

  Tisdale is the Zen Buddhist Antichrist to her mother of the perpetual TV dinner.

  KIRKUS REVIEWS

  Sallie Tisdale takes subjects that might seem mundane or overdone and renders them unforgettable.

  SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER

  She’s an easy, chatty writer who never says anything the way you’re expecting, which makes reading her a pleasure.

  BOSTON GLOBE

  This book reminds us to be mindful of every mouthful.

  PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

  Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex

  Tisdale’s provocative look at sexuality relates personal experiences alongside meditations on subjects such as pornography and prostitution.

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  A beautiful book.

  LIBRARY JOURNAL

  Great intelligence, humor and curiosity … whether or not you’re taken aback by [Tisdale’s] desires, you’ll definitely exit her book with something to talk about.

  GLAMOUR

  These essays on sexuality, gender, and censorship offer the relief of a voice that is unmuffled by inhibitions.

  MIRABELLA

  Tisdale renders, with delectable eloquence, the sheer enormity of the sexual impulse.… These are conversations we need to be having, with as much of Tisdale’s bracing honesty as we can muster.

  SEATTLE WEEKLY

  No doubt will raise both hackles and consciousness.

  NEWSWEEK

  Tisdale [has] managed to put her finger squarely on the hot button of public opinion.

  THE BOSTON GLOBE

  Stepping Westward: The Long Search for Home in the Pacific Northwest

  An odd and lovely work.

  KIRKUS REVIEWS

  Tisdale has produced a loving, literate work …

  LIBRARY JOURNAL

  [V]ividly written …

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  Ambitious, affectionate, sorrowful rhapsody … Tisdale’s voice is fluid and richly varied.

  CHICAGO TRIBUNE

  [Tisdale’s] prose is music for the mind’s ear.

  SEATTLE TIMES

  Conjures the Northwest in a rare and magical way … This book will make you hit the road.

  CRAIG LESLEY, author of Burning Fence: A Western Memoir of Fatherhood

  Tisdale’s portrait of her home territory is personal and ingenuous.

  THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

  Lot’s Wife: Salt and the Human Condition

  A rare book about a common subject.

  RICHARD SELZER, author of The Exact Location of the Soul

  Harve
st Moon: Portrait of a Nursing Home

  A rare combination of candor, compassion, and deft art. I recommend this book to anyone seriously intending to grow old.

  JOSH GREENFIELD, author of Homeward Bound: A Novella of Idle Speculation

  Copyright © 2016 Sallie Tisdale

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage-and-retrieval systems, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tisdale, Sallie. [Essays. Selections]

  Violation: collected essays / by Sallie Tisdale.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-9904370-9-3

  I. Title.

  PS3570.I717A6 2016

  814’.54–DC23

  2015029013

  98765432

  Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts

  2201 Northeast 23rd Avenue

  3rd Floor

  Portland, Oregon 97212

  hawthornebooks.com

  Form:

  Adam McIsaac/Sibley House

  Set in Paperback

  ALSO BY SALLIE TISDALE

  Women of the Way

  The Best Thing I Ever Tasted

  Talk Dirty to Me

  Stepping Westward

  Lot’s Wife

  Harvest Moon

  The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

  Contents

  Introduction

  Orphans

  Fetus Dreams

  The Only Harmless Great Thing

  Burning For Daddy

  Gentleman Caller

  The Weight

  The Happiest Place On Earth

  Meat

  The Basement

  The World Made Whole and Full of Flesh

  Big Ideas

  The Hounds of Spring

  Temporary God

  Crossing to Safety

  Recording

  Violation

  Second Chair

  The Birth

  Scars

  On Being Text

  Balls

  Chemo World

  Twitchy

  The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies

  Falling

  Here Be Monsters

  The Indigo City

  So Long As I Am With Others

  Publication notes

  Introduction

  WHEN I WAS SEVENTEEN AND A SOPHOMORE IN COLLEGE, I took any course that interested me. One semester, I signed up for Advanced Writing. (I had never taken a writing class, but I was a bit of a snob.) I bugged Dr. Ryberg constantly, haunting his office hours until he took pity, declared me his assistant, and set me to the filing. I gave him a lot of junk to read. Toward the end of the semester, I gave him a story with trembling hands. I was so proud of it; I thought it might win a few awards. He handed it back to me a few days later with entire pages crossed off in red ink. He had circled the last paragraph and written, “Start here.”

  The following spring, I ran into him in the college bookstore. I was dropping out, I told him. Going north to test my theories of love and goodness.

  “You’re a writer,” he said. “You’re already a better writer than me. What are you waiting for?”

  I think I laughed. What an idea—that you could be a writer. But I wasn’t ready; I was consuming life like a gourmand just let out of jail. I went north and joined a communal household and a co-op and tested, with some success, several theories of love and goodness. I was still signing up for every subject that looked promising. But after a few years, when I had a new baby and hardly any money and decided at the last moment not to move into another commune in the mountains, I thought that instead I could be a writer. I hocked my piano and bought a typewriter and joined a writing support group. The leader told us to study Writer’s Market, so I sat in the reference room of the library and read about query letters and submission guidelines. I started writing essays about all kinds of things and sent them out more or less at random, with polite cover letters and self-addressed stamped envelopes.

  Out they went and back they came. Sometimes there was a little note thanking me for my submission, but often not. I would type a fresh copy and send the story out again. The support group dissolved after a few months when the leader committed suicide. Others might have taken that as a sign, but I was young and ignorant and somehow immune to despair. I had decided to be a writer and so I wrote. I sent stories out, again and again. And then one didn’t come back.

  The essays in this book are a selection of work spanning almost thirty years. I have never lost my fascination with the essay, and the stories here range across the continuum of the form. You don’t know what your voice sounds like until you speak. My writer’s voice chose itself. I recognize it here, but I’m not in charge. I used to wish I was a comic writer or a novelist or an investigative reporter. I tried to be a poet for a while. What I am is an essayist.

  Certain themes recur as well; why should this ever surprise us? Life is just following a trail around a mountain. The path loops back to the same view time and again. Sometimes we see all the way across the plain and sometimes we’re lost in the woods, but the perspective is a little higher each time. So I return again and again to questions about the nature of the self, what it means to live in a body, why we are all lonely, how to use language to say what can’t be said. These are questions of intimacy and separation, and the answers are ambiguous at best. Long before I knew how to describe it, I liked ambivalence. Certainty has always seemed a bit dishonest to me.

  Being a writer of the long personal essay is a little like being the village blacksmith. It takes decades of training, and there may not be much demand. I think I’m a good writer, but not a very good author—that is, I’m rather introverted and uncomfortable with self-promotion. As the noise level rises, I retreat a little more. Writers are increasingly expected to be multimedia performers, chasing the zeitgeist and molding their work to fit. I remember hearing the word midlist for the first time, decades ago. My editor was gently explaining her modest expectations for my book, but my first thought was, yes, that sounds about right. The midlist is disappearing now, and I could spend a few more years fretting about it. But the cure is to write.

  To write—which is to say, solve the problem. I sometimes imagine the barren stretches, false starts, and breakthroughs that I experience with almost every story are kin to what any scientist or inventor feels. The essay is the problem and I seek the solution: a structure, a start, an end, a phrase. A word.

  My basement is filled with failures—boxes of unfinished drafts, scribbled outlines, entire books collapsed into chaos. Countless dead ends. But it is as important for writers to fail as it is for any inventor. A year of not succeeding is a year without editors or deadlines. No other voices intrude. There is, finally, nothing to fear. If you don’t know what to do, and finally you don’t know so completely that the entire world seems to be the question—well, then anything is possible. When we don’t know the way, a thousand paths exist. All I have ever had to do to succeed as a writer was to fail, because not solving the problem means the solution lies ahead.

  I write out of what really happened, a huge field in which to roam—but a bounded field nevertheless. I sometimes work with students who are struggling to write at all. I might ask them to draw a picture of their writer’s block. One young woman covered a page in black and wrote across it, “I will be found wanting and thrown out of the universe.” We are all imposters, never more so than when we try to tell the truth. To write the essay is to be haunted by our own lies. No story is the whole story. Everything we know is shadowed by what we’ve missed, forgotten, or been afraid to see. The title essay is my answer to a question that I have asked myself and been asked by others countless times: how do we know what is true? What is fair for me to say about others? What do I have the right to say, when I can never be sure about
the truth?

  I try to solve the problem.

  Few things are worth writing down—that’s why there are so many boxes in my basement. But there is only one way to find out what those things are. Now and then, I have imagined not writing. What a different shape my life would have had. How much time! Mine has been a very indie, mezzanine, remainder table, 367-followers-on-Spotify type of career. What if I wasn’t writing or trying to write or avoiding writing all the time? What if I didn’t have this witness on my shoulder? What if I just … stopped.

  Instead, I fall asleep to language bouncing around my skull. Words pour through my life like drops of water, running together into a stream, becoming—

  Start here.

  Orphans

  LAST CHRISTMAS EVE MY FATHER TOOK ME BY THE ELBOW and whispered: “Your grandmother died ten years ago today. Be nice to your mother.” I had forgotten. He is a reticent and furtive man, but he remembers things. For years he would wait till a few days before Christmas and then hand me $20. “Go buy something pretty for your mother,” he would instruct, gruffly, and turn away.

  That evening while we watched television, all lined up beside each other and chatting desultorily, my mother spoke abruptly, in a new voice. “My mother died today,” she said, wonderingly, as though she’d just been told. The television prattled on. She deflects expression and emotion by riposte and foil, deftly, and we exist in the cautiously defined spaces between. It is an inharmonious harmony, tense, with voices rarely raised.

  She asked me what I remembered of my grandmother, and I told her of driving fifty miles out of our way on our last vacation just to see my grandmother’s house, the house where my mother was raised.

  “Was the ivy still on the chimney?” she asked, for since the house was sold she hasn’t been back. The threads tangle while we talk, a tweedy web of shifting associations: my mother and her daughter, her mother and my grandmother, and around us father and husband, brother and children, their children, my children. This is her surprise for me, her secret: my mother yearns to be a daughter again.

  My mother’s mother was a forbidding woman, stern and drawn, with an immaculate house and a tiny yipping dog that nipped at our heels from behind her calves. She would stand in the gleaming kitchen, hot in the summer morning sun, with a spatula raised as though to swat at the first sign of disobedience. It was a house of territories, borders, boundaries, permitted and forbidden places. I knew as an undeniable law that what I valued she often ignored; that she placed value where I couldn’t see it. I searched for snails in the rose bed, hid dolls in the mail chute. She waxed the kitchen floor.