But when it comes to writing, every chapter you write is surrounded by those you don’t, every confession by what remains secret or indescribable or unremembered, and only so much of the chaos and fluidity of experience can be sifted and herded onto pages, whatever your intentions and even your themes. You’re not carving marble; you’re grabbing handfuls of flotsam from a turbulent river; you can arrange the detritus but you can’t write the whole river. Though so much of the stories of those who came before is missing, I understand now how the deep damage passed down from my grandparents formed my parents, and how public histories shaped our private lives in various ways. I’ve lived long enough to know five generations of my family and to see how the weight of history that happened two generations before me—hunger, genocide, poverty, the brutalities of emigration, discrimination, and misogyny—still has consequences two generations after me. I’ve written my parents’ obituaries on that little desk from the woman who didn’t die and lived in the peace that came after they were gone. I’m uninterested in the brutalities of childhood in part because that species has been so dwelt upon while some of the brutalities that come after have not.
Threads are usually the wrong metaphor for things that branch and fork and lead in many directions, but maybe the way many fibers are twisted into a thread means that following a thread should mean unraveling it or recognizing the individual strands. For example, after graduate school, I got hired by a little art magazine as an editorial assistant and I quickly became the assistant editor, by title, and more or less the managing editor in terms of what I actually did. I learned a lot of things there, from the rules of copyediting to how to direct a staff older than me to how to put together a publication to quite a lot about contemporary art, particularly California art. I wrote obituaries, reviews, some features, and a few investigative reports, and endless bits of filler, and with the magazine’s owner coedited the dozen or so often abysmally written pieces we received each Monday until they were ready to send to the printer on Thursday afternoons. It was an all-woman office in downtown Oakland I worked at for three and a half years after I graduated from Berkeley, and it was a haven of calm and routine, and a place where even though the magazine was not a great magazine I learned great things.
I am endlessly thankful that my path to writing detoured through visual art. It was an arena in which artists were asking questions that went down to the very foundations and reached in all directions. Art could be almost anything, which meant that every premise was open to question, every problem to exploration, every situation to intervention, and I came to understand visual art as a kind of philosophical inquiry by other means. I learned from paying attention to the work of some artists, from conversations with others, and from collaborations with yet others, and from wandering through the texts often then referenced in the art world, the French philosophers and feminists, the postmodernists, and other dense things from which useful ideas could be gathered.
When I was a couple of years out of graduate school, still working at the magazine, I went to a slide talk by the photographer Linda Connor about landscape and gender. She had collected a lot of amusing images of men pissing and teeing off golf balls from high places, and she postulated, with this evidence and a lot of more serious contemporary photography, that men photographed space, but women photographed place. It was a funny, tough, insightful talk about how we represent place and what our place is supposed to be. I’m not sure either of us would now agree with the neatness of categories she sorted the world into then, but she stood there as someone with a key to a door I wanted to unlock and pass through.
I cooked up a couple of assignments to write about her so I could learn more. She was sixteen years older than me, in her prime, with a great halo of curly hair and a big circle of friends, a house full of curios and objects she’d picked up around the world, and nonchalance about cooking dinner for forty at a time or carrying through deserts and mountains her enormous view camera that made eight-by-ten-inch negatives. Her black-and-white prints were made on printing-out paper, an archaic light-sensitive—but not too sensitive—paper she could just lay under the negatives and leave out for hours to develop in the sun of her back garden, in what felt as domestic an act as hanging out the laundry.
She was traveling while I was on deadline to write about her, so I asked if I could talk to her while coming along on her drive to New Mexico. It was a tutorial in how to go on a road trip, and she was a brilliant guide to diners, campsites, motels, to when to detour and when to cover distance. We pulled into the grand old pile that is the La Fonda Hotel in downtown Santa Fe one afternoon in early August, where she’d arranged for the artists Meridel Rubenstein—another landscape photographer I knew slightly—and her husband, the painter Jerry West, to meet us. We had come all this way like an arrow flying through the air past many other things to hit exactly this target that was the table in a shadowy alcove in the honeycombed hotel, where Meridel’s assistant, Catherine Harris, was also seated. We ordered margaritas, and Meridel and Jerry invited me to come stay at the house Jerry had built on the prairie outside town on land his parents had homesteaded during the Great Depression.
And Catherine—a darkly beautiful young artist with tawny shoulders in a sleeveless white jumpsuit—and I began talking. We became close friends, perhaps best friends, for years after, had a falling out that kept us apart for years, then I dreamed of her one night and ran into her on the street in the morning—she had moved to San Francisco at that point—and we exchanged phone numbers and picked up where we left off. I am not a proper memoir writer in that I cannot reconstruct a convincing version of any of our conversations, even the long one last summer in the house where she lives in Albuquerque with her husband and two kids and some dogs.
Those conversations were analytical, confessional, usually punctuated with gales of laughter, taking up the pieces of our education, the ideas and templates and pigeonholes, and trying them on to see how they fit our urgent personal needs. I do remember how amused we were one time as we rejected the earth-mother ecofeminism of the moment by noting that our mothers—squeamish, anxious, repulsed by human bodies and their smells and secretions—were not in the least like nature. And of course in those early years we talked about the boys we were pursuing or entangled with or disentangling from, but that was mixed in with books, politics, ideas, projects, and plans.
When we were eating breakfast in the yard of Meridel and Jerry’s house a day or two after I first met her, Catherine told me, as she watched me untangling my damp hair, about going to the pueblo corn dances two days before and seeing women with hair down to the hems of their long dresses, and then about the job she’d had photographing the students at a Native American school and how one of the girls told her about cutting off her own long braids. The story found its way into an essay of mine, because Catherine was told the child “was ashamed to go home afterward, and when she did, her grandfather chided her gently, telling her that her hair contained all her thoughts and memories.”
I had published journalism and reviews, but I was exploring a more intimate, lyrical kind of writing, one where the spirit guiding the connections and trajectory was intuitive and associative rather than linear or logical. The results were short and dense, though this essay was a thicket of stories about hair and its power. Catherine’s anecdote gave me its conclusion. Then she made a photograph of me sitting and looking back at her with my own hair hanging to my waist, against one of Jerry’s unfinished adobe walls, the concrete scraped into rough ridges so the mud would adhere.