Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss

introduction

IWAS A COLLECTOR AS A KID—COINS, PUFFY STICKERS, scented dinosaur-shaped erasers, glass animals, Nancy Drew books, Breyer horses, and the like—and took special care to arrange my treasures just so, even though I was (still am) a girl prone to mess. I loved them all, but my favorite collections by far were the shells and rocks and sea glass I’d gather on the shore of Lake Michigan across the street from my apartment. Gifts the beach would offer up as my feet sank into wet sand, eyes trained for glint and whorl. Gifts that begged to come home with me, gifts that felt just right in my hand, gifts I loved to splash with water and watch their hidden pinks and greens flare, then fade, gifts I’d arrange and rearrange inside my many-compartmented jewelry box to see how they looked next to each other, to see what they might say to one another, mica winking at a pebble of frosty blue glass, a geode sharing its jagged sparkle with the inner blush of a freshwater snail shell.

Organizing this essay collection felt akin to arranging these rocks and shells, finding resonances and conversation between them, casting off ones that no longer sparked my heart. I didn’t write these essays with a collection in mind—each one came to me as its own stone, shaped by the tides and grit of my life—but ongoing threads of curiosity and grief and devotion course through them like veins of shared minerals, placing them on the same map, a map made of something warmer than stone. A map of body and word and the breath that animates and unites them.

A map of my writing life.

While most of the essays in this collection are far more recent, the title essay, Drawing Breath, is more than twenty years old, originally written as a critical paper when I was working toward my MFA in Fiction at Antioch University, mentored by the brilliant, visionary Alma Luz Villanueva. I’d been fascinated by the connection between writing and the body for many years by that point; I’ve been a writer and dancer since I was very young and created my own BA concentration at the University of Redlands’ Johnston Center for Integrative Studies—Poetry and Movement: Arts of Expression, Meditation, and Healing—to explore my beloved arts more deeply, graduating with that degree in 1990. I often said I wanted to dance in a way that was as articulate as language, to write in a way that was as muscular as dance, and I found the nexus of those two arts was the body, the breath. I divided my critical paper into inhales and exhales to meld form and content, exploring my own lived experience of breath with each inhale, then looking outward with each exhale, delving into research related to breath and writing. In some ways, this created the template for my life as a creative nonfiction writer—all my essays since have tended to look both inward toward embodiment and outward toward the world (and many have played with structure, as well). Organizing this collection around different types of breath is an extension of this template, a reminder that our breath (and our writing!) can take so many forms.

The first section of the collection, Eupnea: Quiet Breathing, holds essays grounded in childhood and a burgeoning relationship with language. It includes another vintage essay, Spelling, published by Salon in 1999—my first major byline—about my then–five-year-old daughter learning to write, an essay that remains one of my favorites, even after all these years, an essay that gave me the chance to celebrate just how magical the process of writing can be.

The next section, Hyperaeration: Increased Lung Volume, looks at ways women (cis/trans/nonbinary) can support and empower one another, ways we can increase one another’s volume on and off the page, individually and in chorus. I share several women-identifying voices along with my own in these essays—those who write in the first-person plural, those who responded to my questionnaire about thighs, those who helped me after sexual assault, those whose writing about their mothers speaks to and for my own complicated maternal relationship.

The essays in Ponopnea: Painful Breathing investigate my mother’s suicide and are the most grueling essays I’ve written. If you’ve read my memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis, some of the passages will likely sound familiar. I wrote these essays before I was ready to write the book; they helped gird me for the longer project, and I grafted some cuttings from them into my memoir as it evolved. Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying, which appeared in The Rumpus in 2012, was an especially significant essay for me: it was the first piece I’d published about my mother’s suicide, and the day it came out, I felt so vulnerable and exposed, I thought I might pass out or throw up. The generous response the piece received encouraged me to commit to writing my memoir.

Tachypnea: Increased Breathing Rate examines the process of writing and publishing The Art of Misdiagnosis, a process that was both profoundly difficult and profoundly transformative. I hope this section will be of special interest to those writing a memoir, or considering writing one, as well as those curious about the process and experience of laying one’s life bare on the page.

The key word in the next section’s title, Orthopnea: Breathlessness in Lying Down Position Relieved by Sitting Up or Standing is relieved; the essays here unpack some of the gifts that have risen from painful experience, such as the gift of my friendship with the man who had been convinced I was his biological mother in my viral Washington Post essay, Shadow Son; the gift of reconciling with my husband after I blew up our marriage; the gift of reigniting my activism in the Trump era (as much as I wish it hadn’t been necessary). The essay Anniversary Gifts in this section is a mash-up of two essays published by The New York Times: Our Anniversaries Matched Their Gifts, which appeared in the Ties section, and We Wanted to Split Up. OK Cupid Had Other Ideas, which appeared in Modern Love.

Rounding out the book are the sections Bradypnea: Decreased Breathing Rate, whose essays chronicle my beloved father’s decline and death, and Apnea: Absence of Breath, whose essays take on our pandemic era, including how my dance with presumed long COVID has affected my body, mind, and writing voice. I confront my own mortality in this section, but it’s fair to say this entire collection is charged with the presence of our mortality, charged with awareness that the breath in our dear bodies will someday cease, our inhales and exhales framed by endless silence.

As someone with asthma and other respiratory issues, breath has always been somewhat fraught for me, and breath, of course, has become a culturally fraught subject during the time of coronavirus—

Breath as danger: with an airborne virus like COVID, we can literally kill one another with an exhale.

Breath as injustice: George Floyd told Derek Chauvin and his fellow officers, I can’t breathe more than twenty times before Chauvin’s knee took his breath forever.

Breath as appropriation and division: I can’t breathe—a phrase heard and seen often at 2020 protests after Floyd’s death, a phrase used in protests since Eric Garner’s 2014 videotaped chokehold death, a phrase uttered by Elijah McClain and Manuel Ellis and other Black men lost to racialized police violence—was co-opted by white, anti-mask protestors who equated mask mandates with Nazi Germany, people who wanted their breath unfettered, no matter the cost to the most vulnerable around them. These anti-mask protestors will likely never have their own breath cut short by police officers, and I share that privilege, even as I don’t share their position. I touch upon my whiteness in some of these essays and know continuing to investigate this privilege, and how my Jewishness intersects with and complicates it, will be a lifelong endeavor. So will continuing to listen to BIPOC writers and speakers and friends who illuminate unjust systems, reminding me we may all breathe the same atmosphere, but not everyone has the same access to clean air. Their voices help me recognize my complicity within these systems and point me toward doing better.

The word essay shares the same root as assay, a verb used in metallurgy, chemistry, alchemy, meaning to test or weigh a substance to determine its composition. I think back again to my childhood collections, my intuitive groupings of pebble and shell, my attempts to determine which rocks were formed from cooled magma, which rocks were formed from the skeletons of beings who came before, which rocks were formed from the fusing of other rocks via heat and pressure. I similarly tested and weighed these essays as I put this collection together, tracing their origins of heat and grief and heart. These essays tested me as I wrote and revised and ordered them, too, showing me what I’m made of (for better and for worse), their weight aching within me until I was ready to release them from my body, breathe them out into the air.

Thank you—from the bottom of my heart and lungs and all the rest of me—for breathing them in.

I

EUPNEA:

quiet breathing

portrait of the writer as a young girl

THE GIRL WRITES HER FIRST POEM WHEN SHE IS four years old:

Blow, little wind,

Blow the trees, little wind,

Blow the seas, little wind,

Blow me until I am free, little wind.

Somehow, even at this young age, the girl knows writing can be a wind that blows through her, makes her more spacious inside, freer. She feels it from the very start. She’ll still feel it decades later.

The girl’s favorite writing surface is the cardboard tucked into her dad’s dress shirts when they come back from the dry cleaners. Some of the folded, cling-wrapped button-downs are stacked inside the bone-colored armoire in her parents’ room; others are stacked in the top shelf of the closet, where her winter coats hang over her rubber boots. She slices the wrappers open with her finger and slides the pieces of cardboard out, the shirts slumping inside the plastic like a sigh.

One side of the cardboard is slick and white and smells a little bit sour, like paste; the other side is brown and rough, nubby like oatmeal, and smells more like sawdust. She lies on her stomach on the living room rug and lists titles of stories she wants to write. Her crayon scuds across the white side, leaving waxy shreds in its wake; on the rough side, the crayon leaves a deeper, thicker tread. She feels her breath push into the carpet as her words push their way onto the stiff page, the ghosts of her father’s shirtsleeves wrapped around it like a hug.

The girl is shy—she makes her sister order for her at Arby’s, rarely ever raises her hand in class—but when she writes, she’s brave. She creates a neighborhood newspaper and interviews neighbors and sells subscriptions door-to-door. Writing is her superpower, the caped heart that flies inside her mild-mannered skin.

The girl sees her mom write poison pen letters when she is upset about something. She watches the letter-writing campaigns her mom spearheads change things: a traffic light installed at a dangerous intersection near her school; guns and ammunition removed from her local Kmart after some violence. The girl starts to write her own letters—letters to the editor railing at the teenage boys who throw rocks at ducks at the beach, at people who throw trash out the windows of their cars. She writes to President Carter to ask how she can stop pollution and receives a Keep America Clean pack in return. She takes the bright orange garbage bags, printed with Woodsy Owl—Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute—to the beach and picks up pop-top tabs and stray wrappers, knowing she has a presidential order to do so. She sends a letter in solidarity to Amy Carter after the first daughter gets in trouble for reading at a state dinner, and Amy Carter writes back. The girl tacks the letter, along with a photo of Amy Carter torn from a magazine, over her bed.

The girl’s mom’s Uncle Jimmy, who looks like W.C. Fields and lives in a men’s hotel in Cleveland and pulls silver dollars from her ears, tells her mom he is looking for someone to write his life story. The girl immediately offers, sure she can tackle the biography of a 76-year-old man who was raised in an orphanage and fed her mom bear meat when her mom was a girl. Jimmy writes back to let her mom know a child could never write his story; he wants his book to focus on women who performed unusual sexual acts. The girl has little understanding of what usual sexual acts even entail, but she is intrigued. She wonders if this is what people write about when they’re grown.

When the girl touches herself, she swirls words into the place between her legs, whatever words spring to mind—peanut, bird, Zamboni. She doesn’t know this is about sex—these feelings are just a sweet gift from her body. Words and pleasure become intertwined, become the same thing. She’s introduced to shame when her mom catches her and tells her she’s too old to be doing such a thing; body and mind start to split then, body and word. It will be quite a while before they’re reunited. She’ll later wonder what a transcript of all those words she ground into herself would say if she could somehow unspool it from her body, that list of words written on her most tender skin.

The girl likes to write about what is hidden—her series, The Elves and I, follows creatures who live in the drainpipe in front of her building; her first novel, The Secret World, is a twenty-page, thinly veiled knockoff of her favorite book, The Secret Garden. Her teacher has it laminated and spiral-bound and put in the school library; it gets its own card in the card catalog, her name in the same wooden drawer as Judy Blume’s. Her first taste of being a published author.

The girl fills a plaid-covered Anything Book with short stories. In School Daze, a teacher has plastic surgery and turns psychotic. In Never Say Diet, an anorexic woman makes her whole family eat a diet of grapefruit and rice before she’s rushed to the hospital. In Rocky, a girl tries to cope with going blind, aided by her trusty horse. The girl doesn’t know she will write about these same themes—mental and physical illness and the mysteries of the body—the rest of her life.

The girl stands at her bedroom window in her pink baby-doll nightgown, a wisp of cotton candy nylon. The Humpty Dumpty lamp on her dresser is on; she knows people can see into her fifth-floor window if they choose to glance up, can see this ten-year-old girl who feels both younger inside and, somehow, much, much older.

The building next to hers looks like a castle from the front—red brick, turrets, a sunken garden courtyard that she likes to sneak into—but from the side, it looks unfinished, a paler brick, exposed beams, stark concrete steps.

The girl touches the yellow-and-white gingham drape that hangs by her side, the one that matches her bedspread, her puffy rocking chair, the yellow and white, faux-bamboo bedroom set. She knows she must glow in this window. She might even look sexy, whatever that means.

The girl wants to understand the backs of things, the unfinished sides of things, the place where the castle ends and real life begins. She shifts her head so she can see Lake Michigan undulating across the street in the dusk, a pewter gray mirror. She wants someone to look up and see her. She wants to be seen, not just the front of her—the frothy pink, the princess—but behind that: the inside of her notebook, her soaring caped heart, the parts she’s been warned to never show.

white footprints

IAM LEARNING THE NAMES OF MY CHILDHOOD WORLD.

I learn the weed I loved—the one with smooth, green leaves circled around a tall spike, a spike I used to love to run my fingers down, strip it of its little green buds—is called plantain. Like the fruit but not like the fruit. I learn plantain is a healing plant—if you chew or crush it and press it to your skin, it can stop bleeding, neutralize bugbites, bring splinters to the surface. I had thought it was a Midwestern plant; when I saw it for the first time in California, years after I had left Illinois,