Books by Women about Women: An Interview with Marcia Aldrich

Interview conducted by Meghan Hernandez

Marcia Aldrich, essayist and author, focuses her lens on the personal and overlooked in women’s lives. She has written three books: Studio of the Voice, Girl Rearing: A Memoir of a Girlhood Gone Astray and Companion to an Untold Story, which won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction in 2011. Two of her essays have been included in the Best American Essays and fifteen have been recognized as Notable Essays of the year. Her writing gives a voice to the young girls taught to be seen and not heard, the women they are expected to grow into, and the experiences in between. Her writing slips itself into different essay forms and narrative styles at will to highlight the winding journey of getting older, from young adulthood to motherhood, navigating storytelling in the present that often curves itself into looking back at the past.

She writes about her distant relationship with her mother and the complex role of daughter, a relationship that I recognized from my own life. Her book Girl Rearing is a collection of essays cataloging herself through her years as a young girl and into the early childhood of her own daughter. In her newest essay collection, Studio of the Voice, she writes about her relationship with her mother within the context of her own experience in motherhood.

Meghan Hernandez: When writing for Essay Daily in 2022, you mention reading poetry and poets like William Carlos Williams as “a way in” to writing your book Edge [a finalist in the 2021 New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM Chapbook Contest]. Can you describe what felt like the “way in” to writing Girl Rearing?

Marcia Aldrich: Girl Rearing began as a dramatic break and release from the writing of poems. I had come to a place in my writing where I felt constricted, too bound to formalistic ideas of what a poem should be, limited by my sense of poetic decorum. I gave myself permission to write prose in order to find a greater range of expression. The first piece exploded from my pen and others followed. I wasn’t naming what I was writing in terms of the standard generic categories. I thought I was writing an alphabet of girl rearing and that the format was elastic enough to accommodate a range of styles and invention required to tell the stories I wanted to tell. I knew very little about the principles of memoir, its conventions and literary traditions, the expectations it arouses, the contract of transparency with the reader it tends to engender. Nor did I think about violating those conventions. However, I did know something about current autobiographical studies and issues of self-representation in women’s writing. The shape and impetus for Girl Rearing evolved out of my response to the developments in women’s fictional and autobiographical writing, outgrowths of the bildungsroman, which explored personal identity through family history, class status, gender roles, racial marking, and so on. I began to think about my own history and identity: what factors played a role in shaping me. Some works that influenced me were Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Lucy Grealey’s Autobiography of a Face, Susanna Kaysan’s Girl, Interrupted, and Jeannette Winterson’s Oranges Aren’t the Only Fruit—reformulations evolving from traditional categories of fiction and autobiography.

MH: How do you find that becoming a mother changed the way that you write about your relationship with your own mother, if at all? Does motherhood alter the ways in which empathy expresses itself in your writing about your own childhood? Or perhaps another way to ask this is: Do you find that being a mother yourself complicates the way you write from the perspective of a daughter?

MA: The best essay I’ve written that explores this dual identity of the writer as mother and daughter is “She and I: (Field of Force)” in Studio of the Voice. It’s written in the form of a triptych. The first panel details an event when I dropped off my young daughter for a play date with the son of a professor my husband knew. She was older, accomplished, and her son Sam was tame. My daughter Clare refused to leave when I came to pick her up. She sensed that I was intimidated by the older professional woman and hampered my efforts to remove her. Eventually she ran down the alley and I chased her and caught her just before she ran into a cross street where she might have been hit. It’s a very funny essay about the battle of wills between mother and daughter and an ironic switching of roles because, of course, I had been the rebellious daughter my mother tried to control and now here I was in the mother position trying to corral my daughter, who was far more clever than I. The second section is a meditation on the power of mothers, and revisits what I made of my mother now that I myself was a mother and recognized I was more like her than not but also how the word mother and the identity of mother swallows up or erases the identity of the woman. Once a woman becomes a mother that’s all her children see. They don’t see who she once was and she tends not to share those parts of who she was before she became the all-encompassing mother. And finally, in the third section that same daughter is now grown up and leaving home and it’s devastating. The clash of wills described in the first section remains but this time I feel such remorse and sadness that we were so locked into battle. So much of Studio of the Voice is about that complication you mention in your question. Who was my mother behind her mother role? What didn’t I see or understand? What were her struggles and depression about and are my struggles like hers? Girl Rearing was written from the perspective of the girl, naturally enough, and shares more with the girl in the first section of “She and I” running down the alley. The essays in Studio of the Voice are much more written from the perspective of the daughter whose mother has died. Your question makes me think that the portrait of the mother in Girl Rearing wasn’t multi-dimensional. I was almost solely concerned with representing her as the mother who dictated and controlled. The portraits of the mother in Studio of the Voice are empathetically drawn. I’m much more concerned with the mystery my mother presents, her inaccessibility, and my lack of knowing very much about her. She’s elusive and haunting and I mourn how little we shared.

MH: Your essay “The Unmaking of Memoir” [which appeared in The Pinch vol. 35, no.2, Fall 2015] is described as a meditation on Girl Rearing. In the essay, you define your use of “free memoir” as a term to name the type of writing that you are doing in Girl Rearing. You go on to explain that this style deviates from fact while recounting the past. Readers first see this applied when you are writing the birth scene in the alleyway at the beginning of the book. In your writing, how do you choose which parts of your experiences to fictionalize? Does this feel like a choice to toggle vulnerability or privacy, or is this more rooted in the needs of the story?

MA: Here I’ll say what other writers have often said. Once you cast your memories into words on a page, those memories take on another status. Language mediates and transforms memory whether we wish it to or not. The written version writes over, dramatically so, the original, if we even have access to something called an original. And once I realized my lived experience was being transformed, not falsified but transformed into art, the writer in me worked to burnish and bloody it.

I thought I was writing an assemblage of some sort, perhaps essays, poems, and fictions, that took as its subject girl rearing, and its approach was to use individual letters of the alphabet as triggering prompters and points of entry. It was a series, limited by the number of letters in the alphabet, 26. It wasn’t meant to be exhaustive, but suggestive, something that could be continued indefinitely. I thought of it as an ironic take on the old-fashioned commonplace book or an instruction manual on the training of girls gone wrong. What I created owes some artistic debt to the dramatic monologue in theater, serials in the visual arts, even quilts in the domestic arts. I drew upon my own life in the composing, but I also selected those experiences of gender formation that seemed most pointed to my generation, class, and race.

MH: Since the time of your publishing Waveform in 2016, the public craving for women writing and directing stories about girlhood and womanhood has only increased in intensity. I am thinking about writers like Roxane Gay and Leslie Jamison and storytellers like Greta Gerwig. What hopes do you have for your readers who are young girls and women in telling your own stories? Does it feel pressuring or inspiring to think of your reader while writing?

MA: I remember keenly my own familial pressures to keep quiet. There was a relentless sense that I was unworthy to think of myself as a writer. My family thought it was ridiculous, the height of delusion on my part to think I could write. My father was a life insurance salesman and both my sisters married salesmen. Neither my mother nor my sisters ever had a job. I was and am an outlier to my family in every way you can name. Reading books by women about women was literally a lifeline, something to grab hold of and pull myself out of the hole my family would bury me in. This silencing and undermining my sense of myself underlies everything I’ve done, from the writing I’ve undertaken to my sense of purpose as a teacher whose main goal is to support my students in their ambitions, to help them negotiate their identities in a hostile world. There is so much that gets buried in most people’s lives but I am most concerned with what gets buried in women’s lives. So I do think about these questions. The damage done by silencing or not believing or discouragement is emotionally deep. Besides the emotional damage, I also think women have been deprived access to writing about material that is most essential to them and this is changing. Subject matter that in the past has been taboo is now honored. The #MeToo movement is a dramatic example of the unleashing of women’s stories and the power that brings: to hear that another woman experienced something similar to what you experienced and to have that out in the open is an absolute game changer.

MH: In an interview for AWP, you explain that while working on Companion to an Untold Story, finding the right form for your writing was a process that spanned several years. In Girl Rearing, the persona describes planting flowers in their home garden and comments on wanting the process to take a long time. She expresses a desire for losing herself in the dirt and water. Do you apply similar desires to your writing process?

MA: When I was in college, I used to dream poems. I’d pop out of bed and write them down. It felt as if I was in a trance and the poems were being dictated to me. They’d emerge in one complete outpouring, from first line to the last. What a gift. I had no idea where they came from. It didn’t feel as if I wrote them.

Here are a few opening lines:

Because it was an answer you wanted, I never found it

She had her head in a flower vase.

Outside the window, a glass tree, sleet last night.

The stars in the swimming pool / make a crown of your name.

Imagine waking up with these lines in your head.   

As I got older and my life became more complicated, my writing process became much more laborious and interrupted. Nothing like having a job or a partner or kids or dogs who need to be let out to slow you down. Those single-minded trance-like states didn’t have the right soil to flourish. The closest I came to replicating those early zones of writing was when I could stay in bed and shut everything else out. Close the door, as it were, on my life and its busy demands and just sink into the sheets and think or feel or whatever it was I was doing that produced the writing. I’d have an old-fashioned composition book, you know the kind with lined pages, and a pen sitting on the bedside table. And I’d write for as long as the impulse moved me or my life came crashing in. That’s how much of my essay “Hair” was written. Not quite like the gift of the poems but I wasn’t writing short-form poems, I was writing prose and it gushed out of me. Fat chance those conditions could prevail. They couldn’t and they didn’t. Although as I’m writing this I’m thinking about how desirable it would be if I could recreate those conditions.

I’m not sure when my life changed so dramatically—probably when other people’s lives changed. When we got cell phones and laptops and were constantly on the hook to answer emails and text messages and keep up with various social medias and correspondence in general became a blight upon our lives. It shoved my lounging about in bed for an hour when I first woke up to the wayside. I’m not sure why I relinquished that ritual that served my writing so well.

Now I’d say my writing process is varied. Essays the length of something I’d publish in Brevity, for example, of a maximum length of 750 words, tend to materialize in an intense spurt of time. I’ll work on them afterwards, sometimes quite a bit, getting the words and rhythms right. Longer essays as I said are laborious. One of the most laborious essays in Studio of the Voice is called “Enough” and I can’t say how many drafts that essay went through. I had a folder thick with versions in my file cabinet and feared many times that the essay would defeat me. So my writing falls all over the spectrum from pieces that almost feel inspired to essays where all the aspects are unsure. But here’s the thing. Sometimes my husband, who occasionally reads my drafts, would urge me to give up on a certain piece partly to ease my suffering and partly because he thought it just was a no-go and I should cut my losses. And clearly there are some drafts that had best be put to rest. But an essay like “Enough” wouldn’t let me walk away. I just couldn’t quit it and I’m glad I stuck with it because I think it is one of my best essays even if it was laborious to write.

MH: In the same interview, you mention feeling as though “a writer has to give birth to herself over and over”. What are some of the experiences or circumstances that led to you being able to write and complete Studio of the Voice, and how are these different from what led to Girl Rearing?

MA: With Studio of the Voice everything has been different from my writing and publishing Girl Rearing. Both books contain an essay that was selected and published in the Best American Essays but even in that instance everything was different. When I published “Hair” in The Best American Essays I can’t say how many agents contacted me about whether I had a book to show them. When “The Art of Being Born” was published in The Best American Essays, I was contacted by no one. “Hair” opened doors for me and I eventually found an agent I liked and further still I found an editor at Norton, Jill Bialosky. There was considerable interest in my book, but I need to emphasize that all of those agents and editors treated Girl Rearing as a memoir, not the quirky unclassifiable thing I had written. Girl Rearing came out during the memoir craze, which I benefitted from and didn’t benefit from. I benefitted in the sense that there was commercial interest in what I wrote. I didn’t benefit from the memoir label because what I wrote wasn’t really an exemplar of the memoir and memoir expectations weren’t met. It was compared unfavorably to Angela’s Ashes. The book I wrote was published but not understood.

Studio of the Voice is unabashedly a collection of essays, a genre that is notoriously hard to publish. In the past at an AWP Conference I was standing in a group after a reading from Cheryl Strayed’s recently completed memoir, Wild, and a woman asked me what my next book was. As an essayist, this is a question I’ve come to dread. I began to talk about the problem I’ve encountered putting together a collection of essays in the current publishing climate when Cheryl leaned over and said, “Oh essays, they’re the kiss of death in publishing.” It reminded me of what Brenda Miller said when I interviewed her for Fourth Genre. She said, “No one wants essays; you can’t say the word essays. They have to be memoirs or meditations or chronicles, anything but the word essays. Not having a solid center where a publisher could say in ten words or less what the book is about makes it difficult to place.” Collections of essays often lack the memoirist’s dramatic arc or single theme or “hook” as my long-ago agent referred to it when she pointed out its absence in the collection I sent her.

It’s been a long hard road to bring Studio of the Voice to realization and publication. I’ve assembled many a collection of my essays and not succeeded in having any of them accepted. They lacked that hook that agents and editors needed to believe the book would be marketable. Once I was at a bookstore reading of a truly horrendous novel when I received the last of the rejections from an agent of my essay collection. She said for her to take on a manuscript she had to feel certain the book would move a certain number of units. It was all about how the book could be marketed and in my case it was doubtful my essays had any sensational angle to promote. I have a folder on my computer with a variety of different selections of my essays, arranged in different ways, and different titles affixed to the whole. Nothing seemed to matter; nothing worked. I might be in the finalist grouping but my collection wasn’t selected. I was on the verge of throwing in the towel. Just accepting that some of my best writing was never going to be published in book form. Then I was diagnosed with breast cancer and I realized how much I wanted to complete this task before I died. And I went into the whole process again but this time I did exactly what I wanted. Lo and behold it won and now I have a book of my commercially dead-in-the-water essays that make my heart sing.

MH: What have you read recently that you recommend?

MA: Perhaps it will be surprising when I say the most important book I’ve read of late has been a scholarly book by Leigh Gilmore called The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women (Columbia University Press). Leigh and I were graduate students together at the University of Washington; I was the best woman at her wedding, but most importantly, we were students together and I learned a tremendous amount of what I know about women’s life writing and the history of autobiography from her. I quote two important passages from her first book Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation:

Autobiography provides a stage where women writers, born again in the act of writing, may experiment with reconstructing the various discourses—of representation, of ideology—in which their subjectivity has been formed.

The relationship between truth telling and referentiality upon which traditional autobiography studies depended can be seen as a discursive process rather than an essential mirroring. The neglected aspect of this analysis is the writing self. While the author as the person in the world and the author as the person in the text are two representations of identity addressed by both truth telling and referentiality, the author as the person who writes (The I who writes I) is left precariously unaddressed.

To put it strongly, Autobiographics inspired my first book, Girl Rearing.

Now Leigh draws upon her long scholarship in women’s life writing and feminist theory to present a vision of #MeToo as a form of narrative activism, storytelling in service of social change. The #MeToo Effect is difficult to read for I hazard a guess that most women will see their own stories reflected in its pages as I did. But more than difficult, it is optimistic in showing how the cultural conversation changed when so many women learned they were not alone and added their voice to the collective saying Me Too.

Meghan Hernandez is a MA student at the University of North Texas studying creative writing with a focus in creative nonfiction. While an undergraduate at UNT she won the Arthur Sampley Scholarship for her personal essay “Dime Sized”. Her essays center around her strained relationship with her late mother and the complexities of girlhood.