Mary Rakow and The Memory Room
Q: You have a Ph.D. in theology. But you didn’t choose an academic life. Instead, you focused on being a mother, creating a home. What made you decide to start writing?
A: I think the questions that led me to graduate work in theology were abiding questions, big-picture questions about what’s meaningful and what isn’t, about moral conduct, good, evil, what lasts, what doesn’t. When I finished my dissertation I made a decision to enter a more contemplative form of life. Even though we had three kids I structured my day around the recitation of the Liturgy of the Hours, which is an arrangement of the Psalms. Why I eventually chose to address these larger questions through writing fiction is partly by default. Like Martha Graham said, “If I could write I wouldn’t dance.” If I could have danced, I would have. But I didn’t have any entree into choreography, which I’m very interested in, or into orchestration and musical composition. I did have the English language.
Q: But what was the moment that led you to begin writing fiction?
A: I think it was a series of moments. I had encouragement from other people. My husband would say, “I think you’re a writer.” He was telling me this years before I ever thought about it.
Once I wrote a letter to a composer whose music I really love, and he called me. I was gardening in the backyard, I picked up the phone and it was him.”I’ve never received a letter like this,” he said, and then added, “I bet you never write letters like this.” When I got off the phone, I was very touched, but I also realized I write letters like that all the time.
Q: Eventually you entered the workshop of author and poet Kate Braverman. From that workshop came the writers Janet Fitch, Donald Rawley, Joshua Miller and Les Plesko, among several others. What lead you there?
A: I read a poem of hers that I liked very much, and I tracked her down. She was teaching at UCLA Extension, so I took a workshop from her there. It was scary to move out from the solitude I had created for myself, and to go onto an academic campus again.
Q: Why had you rejected academia?
A: I was just so aware of people in the academic life piling up publications. I would rather write one sentence that is necessary than 14 books that aren’t.
Q: What was the impetus to write the work that became The Memory Room?
A: I was very driven to the idea of the loss of innocence, and of moral atrocity as it’s exercised on children. Initially I was working on a story about a character whose daughter is kidnapped and killed. But while I was working on that I happened to go to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and saw a projection of Guernica on the wall. I just started to weep. And I knew I had nothing to add to that statement. I had to go deeper into myself.
Q: Are you saying this novel is an autobiographical work?
A: If “self” is defined as where a person is born, or goes to school, or who their neighbors are, then no, the work is not autobiographical. I was never a professor like Barbara, the main character. I didn’t have a neighbor named Josephine, and I don’t play the cello like Barbara, although I wish I did. But if we mean “self’ as worldview, then this work is deeply auto-biographical. I have put my deepest concerns into Barbara. In that sense this is the most autobiographical thing I’ve ever done in my life.
Q: The Memory Room is concerned with memory, art, music and religion. What do you want readers to come away understanding?
A: We have at the center of our century both the Holocaust and humans walking on the surface of the Moon, a planet we’ve stared at for five millennia. It is this range of conduct that interests me. That we have these radical choices. I hope readers will come away from the experience of reading The Memory Room feeling that we can look at our dark side, our most heinous human behavior, because not only have we committed crimes as a species, but we have also created art and music and science—all things that testify to our greatest complexity. We not only can go into the darkness, but we must, to be honest with ourselves. The good news is that we don’t have to go empty handed. We can take with us Mozart, Cezanne, Einstein, the Psalms.
Q: The therapist is the only unnamed character in this book. Why?
A: I’m very much opposed to the concept of “big therapist, small client,” that the therapist somehow rescues or fixes the client. This is really baloney. The client fixes him or herself, so the job for the therapist is to provide an environment in which the client can do that. I think that kind of therapy is rare. But Barbara has found such a therapist and in the shelter of his moral integrity, she is able to go to hell and back. Which is exactly what she does.
Q: About the work on the page: This looks like a poem and reads like a novel. Did you intend to experiment with form?
A: No, the form evolved. I was writing in conventional scenes, margin to margin for several years, covering the whole page. But I heard that a mother had thrown her two young sons over the bridge into the Los Angeles River in broad daylight. Then jumped in herself. The infant died. The older boy survived. I didn’t read newspapers then, but I bought one and after that, I couldn’t write in the same way, as if the world were that coherent. You could say the story shattered into pieces. I called these fragments “dots,” thinking of the Pointillists or the Impressionists breaking solid form into points of light. I wrote in dots for about three years—hundreds of them piling up, arranged in stacks by what I saw as their emotional color. After they were sequenced, which took, I think, another year, a friend read the entire thing and said it reminded him of Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam.” I found the poem and lived in it for months, its elegiac tone, the numbered units. It helped me feel confident that there was a place for Barbara’s story in the world. I don’t know if The Memory Room is verse or not, but it is language that demands a certain degree of attention. It is a long meditation. It asks the reader to be quiet and to read slowly. My job then is to make their paying attention worthwhile.
Q: Where on the bookstore shelves would your book go?
A: I could see it beside poet Ann Michael’s novel Fugitive Pieces, which has a lot to do with memory. Or beside Carolyn Forche’s anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness. Even though my work addresses private atrocity, the main character, Barbara, is trying to learn how to be a witness to her own experience, to see it, to look at it, to say, This happened.
Q: The references to the Psalms and to the poetry of Paul Celan are integral to the construction of meaning in your work. Why are they woven into your story?
A: Barbara identifies with the German-speaking poet Celan when her own world unravels. She paints his words all over the walls of what used to be her prayer room. She is a professional woman with friends, a boyfriend, and so forth, but we find her on page one completely collapsed. The whole story is about her efforts to reconstruct a viable, rich, complex world that includes the atrocities she has started to remember. Celan’s task was much the same. After the Holocaust, he found himself in a shattered, obliterated world, having only the German language, which had been raped and broken. Barbara also identifies with Celan’s simultaneous embrace and rejection of Judaism. She rejects her Christian faith, but the Psalms keep coming back, particularly as a source of comfort. The words return in all their fierce anger and lament and in their hope.
Q. There is something very large, almost symphonic about your work, but at the same time, it is minute and deliberate and very concrete. Did you envision a text of this scope when you started writing it?
A: Barbara finds herself in a prison, and she has to dig out of it, bit by bit, with a spoon. She wants to know the exact contour and size of the prison that is her history, but she also desperately wants freedom. She doesn’t join a victims’ support group. She doesn’t want to stay isolated. Her pain bores her. She doesn’t want to make a fetish of it. She wants to live in the full human experience. The first Psalm line that comes into Barbara’s mind is a question: “Who shall lead me to the strong city?” She wants to inhabit again not only the city, but the strong city. So her arms are spread wide, and as the writer, I have to be true to her inclination and to her demand.
Q. What are you going to write next?
A: I’m pulled in two directions. I’m very drawn to disturbed subjects like Frank Bidart’s “Herbert White.” I believe this character. I think pursuit of some good lies at the base of even the most gruesome acts. Whether I could stand to inhabit such a character for several years is another matter! But it interests me as an act of imagination and of compassion. I’m also drawn in the opposite direction, to marriage. It’s ordinary and everywhere and something 1 still find completely mysterious.
Interview by Samantha Dunn. Dunn’s work appears in national publications including the Los Angeles Times and Poets & Writers. Her novel, Failing Paris, is available from Toby Press, London, England (www.tobypress.com).