My Struggle, vol. 6: Omari, January 2

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

It does no good to write autobiographical fiction cause the minute the book hits the stand here comes your mama screamin how could you and sighin death where is thy sting and she snatches you up out your bed to grill you about what was going down back there in Brooklyn when she was working three jobs and trying to improve the quality of your life and come to find on page 42 that you were messin around with that nasty boy up the block and breaks into sobs and quite naturally your family strolls in all sleepy-eyed to catch the floor show at 5:00 A.M. but as far as your mama is concerned, it is nineteen-forty-and-something and you ain't too grown to have your ass whupped.

— Toni Cade Bambara, Gorilla, My Love

Dear all,

Before I get to Hitler, I want to talk about bodies and writing.

I finished K but I finished Kiese Laymon's Heavy first. To be slightly more precise, I finished all I was ever going to finish of K. I read a novel in two parts. The first ends with that delightfully strange meditation on insects, infrastructure, and apocalypse (side note: I've found the title for my next book project). That's the part I've written on thus far, the part that sets up expectations for how the Hitler stuff should have gone, woven playfully in and out of trips to the store to buy lemons or after a call to K's literary agent to deal with his anxiety about his uncle's potential lawsuit for the nineteenth time.

The second part of my version of Book 6 is an inelegant mishmash of the rest: sections in which K expresses his disquiet surrounding reading Mein Kampf in public; a shadow novel I wrote in my head about the life of the homeless man who chaotically occupies the Knausgaards' cabin in the country; and the last parts of the book dedicated to Linda's bouts with bipolar disorder as they push sharply against K's petulant attempts at adhering to a rote writing schedule. I read more than this; all-in-all I would guesstimate that I read a good 750 or so pages. At a certain point quite early in the section titled "The Name and the Number," I realized 30 pages had gone by and, though I had not retained an iota of K's commentary on Kafka, I was beginning to loathe him. A shame because I just recently remembered that I wrote my senior thesis for high school on The Trial. But that's for another letter.

When I decided to skip 300 pages, I figured I would take a break from K's prose and detour through Laymon's memoir, which has been hyped since even before its publication in October. Heavy is the retelling of Laymon's life through the vicissitudes of his black body, the ways in which it changes as Laymon and his world change. He recounts his relationship with his family, his work, and his race as it closely correlates with his fixation on how his body, a body that can never represent only itself, weighs. I needed something different and assumed that Laymon's prose wouldn't resonate with the thinking and loathing I was doing as I trudged precipitously through Book 6. After all, though they're both writers, Laymon, now a professor of creative writing at the University of Mississippi, couldn't be more different from Karl Ove Knausgaard. Yet, both are obsessed with writing as an embodied practice, or, at least, as a practice with a relationship to the body that stands in flux based on the various internal and external pressures that allow or disallow the body to do what it must be doing above all else in a perfect world—writing.

There's a chapter in Heavy in which Laymon recalls the impact of the first sentence of Toni Cade Bambara's short story collection, Gorilla, My Love, which I included as an epigraph for this letter. Revealed under the layers of Bambara's prose there and elsewhere in that volume is not only a love for blackness, its contributions to the national identity of a nation that hates it, a granular self-evaluation of what makes blackness beautiful and strange, the imaginative possibilities that blackness produces under the heaviest pressures, and a reckoning with every one of our multitudes, but also a critique of My Struggle that has always been in the back of my mind but that I have never articulated. As a scholar of African American literature, I have read my share of autobiographical fiction. Perhaps this skews my understanding of the genre, but this means that there were always serious stakes involved in trafficking in this form. Harriet Jacobs invents distance between herself and the protagonist of her 1861 autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, to protect herself and her family from white proponents of chattel slavery. Harriet Wilson couldn't find an audience for her 1859 autobiographical novel, Our Nig, most likely because of its fairly damning critique of race relations in the North.

Reading Bambara after reading admittedly brilliant writers like Eudora Welty, Laymon realizes that craft is a means to an end and that that end is impact. Not "universally" in the color-blind sense in which we often talk about writing by white authors. Rather, that impact must specifically be felt by the kind of black Southern boy Laymon was and, in some ways, always will be.

What Laymon shows us is that impact and risk traffic together. Autofiction is nothing if there is no danger in writing it.

Writing devastates Laymon. His body goes through immense transformations over the course of this short book. Many times, these changes are the immediate result of his mother's persistent requests that he write essays about everything from the history of Jim Crow in Mississippi to his experiences being accosted by the police. Other times they are the result of the readings that inform his thinking and actions. A sentence in Baldwin's essay "Faulkner and Desegregation" about how change reinvents identity—kills identity—prompts Laymon, who up until this point has eaten indiscriminately for most of his life, to go on an extreme diet. This diet absorbs him so fully that it rearranges his own understanding of his place in time: "I told Nzola [his love interest at the time] losing weight made me feel like I was from the future, like I could literally fly away from folk when I wanted to. Heavy was yesterday" (145).

When I returned to K, I began to wonder, not for the first time, what writing offers K. What dangers was K facing by writing My Struggle? K wants to make a possible lawsuit and his anxieties about celebrity and the concomitant dissolution of the self that comes with it the central problem to work through in the book that I read. It preoccupies him at all times and I can understand why. Gunnar, his uncle, challenges the limits of memory and, thus, K's connection to reality and his father. That's not nothing. Then, after parts of K's Struggle have been released to the world, resulting in women in airports telling him that they themselves have visited all of the places he described in the small fishing village of Sørland, K is forced to deal with the consequences of his writing. But those consequences never feel as acute for him as they do for those around him. Celebrity and its discontents manifest just as K said they would earlier in the novel when he claims that there is safety in anonymity, whereas "nothing feels more perilous to us than to be exposed to the attention and gaze of others" (412). Yes, that's another thing, another risk. But here's the rub. The interaction in the airport is benign and mundane, but for all of the theorizing on names, K often acts oblivious to the irradiating effects of the name that becomes more than a name or the very real effects that writing can have on the bodies that are not simply the writer's or the reader's.

K's refusal, for so long, to acknowledge the consequences of his writing for anyone but himself brings up a related question for the autobiographical novel in general and My Struggle in particular: what is this for? K wants it both ways. He wants to be faithful to the events in question while he also does not seem to be concerned with what reality looked like for the characters he aims to represent realistically. This is barely a negative critique; it would be difficult to imagine autofiction that not only means to take seriously the writer's experiences but also plumbs the depths of how everyone else felt and thought. But K understands his power and wants none of the criticism. Of course, he painfully sends drafts of his work to people who end up as characters in his work but only for the purposes of their approval rather than for their commentary or feedback—presumably because the pen knows what it's doing and the momentum of its actions are far too great.

And yet, I have to give feedback on how K's unwavering fidelity to autofiction as a form does damage in its portrayal of Linda and her experiences with illness in the last few hundred pages of Book 6. I won't linger. I think Katherine was ultimately right and much more insightful and incisive than I can hope to be on the matter when she notes that the novel (rather than Karl Ove Knausgaard the writer) finally confirms that the unfortunate aftereffect of this grandiose project is the destruction of K's family.

I disagree with her, though, when she says we love the man who, when given the choice to back off or fully commit to said project, chooses the latter. The moments when K puts into words his regrets for what he has subjected, is subjecting, and will subject Linda and his children to are undercut by his underwhelming reflection on the damage. I read this as a conscious decision on his part, this disproportionate lack of reckoning with exactly how unpalatable he was during this time in Linda's life. It is not enough to know thyself if knowing thyself fails to go beyond a description of being self-aware.

I agree with Diana when she says that the detachment from Linda that characterizes his approach to writing about her illness is purposeful rather than the natural result of a husband who tries but ultimately fails to understand what the closest person to him is experiencing. Writing autofiction or any of its adjacent genres is, like Stephanie long ago suggested, necessarily a narcissistic project and K just keeps falling again and again into the cool waters of the pool at the hospital complex to which Linda admits herself while largely disregarding why everyone else is also drowning.

But, then, that's incorrect. A memoir may not call itself autofiction, and vice versa, but I've always thought that the line is a fiction, given how fickle memory can be. And Heavy shows us that, whatever we call it, such writing can extend its vision beyond the author's experience. Laymon's book is about Kiese Laymon as much as it is about blackness or about his mother or about his grandmother or about all of the people and spaces and concepts that he genuinely loves. Heavy reads as a letter to Laymon's mother that is constantly explaining its raison d'être: he loves. His mother is far from perfect but nothing that we truly love can hope to be perfect. That's why love is so difficult but, in some/many/most/all instances, is worth the imperfections. The ending of that memoir continues to haunt me in a way that resonates with how Book 1's treatment of K's father's death continues to haunt me. Here's Laymon:

"I wanted to write a lie. You wanted to read a lie. I wrote this to you instead because I am your child, and you are mine. You are also my mother and I am your son. Please do not be mad at me, mama. I am just trying to put you where I bend. I am just trying to put us where we bend." (241)

Love comes with stakes, stakes that Laymon tirelessly lays out throughout this memoir as a son, as a grandson, as a writer, as a black man. There's a danger here that is be radically different from that of Harriet Jacobs or Frederick Douglass or Olaudah Equiano or Harriet Wilson or William Wells Brown, but it is a danger within the genealogy of danger that continues to take shape in this violent experiment we call America. Laymon is no danger of being sold back into slavery once his truth is revealed, but among his many dangers is that, given the tendency to treat any black story as representative of blackness, readers will misuse his story toward the end of pathologizing blackness and recuperating white supremacy.

To be frank, I don't think K shares similar stakes when it comes to representing Scandinavia or whiteness or rugged masculinity and, thus, what I don't understand is what I regard to be K's refusal to truly understand anything but Hitler when he has all of this freedom. It matters to him that he accurately portrays Hitler's writing and Hitler's motivations and Hitler's destruction but, though he acknowledges his own failures and his own guilt, he largely refuses to comprehend or even reflect upon his wife's serious mental health episode beyond using it to frame his relationship to his children and his mother-in-law or, most importantly, his writing. I'm not sure whether my unease with K's detachment from his wife as she struggles with a bout of mental illness is the result of my recognition of a moral failing on K's part or simply an ideological disagreement that the two of us have. Take the following, which amounts to a recognition of how terrible he was when Linda needed him most. It simultaneously evinces the limits of K's self-awareness and stands as a (bad) recommendation for those dealing with mental illness:

"But sometimes you have to be big enough to rise above the trivial and the mundane, all the pettiness and self-absorption in which we live our lives, or at least I do, because now, when it really counts, when it is a life-or-death situation, the minutiae don't matter and the person who clings to them is small-minded." (963)

I understand that in these lines K, the author, looking back at K, the character, diagnoses his own failures in his marriage. I even can concede that this novel constitutes a shattering of the self that might facilitate the construction of different, more functional relationships to the people K has hurt over the course of his life—most of all, Linda. But there are limits to what is possible when the self stops at the shattering stage and doesn't do the resultant work of putting the pieces back together. The last paragraph of this novel, written around 7:07 on September 2, 2011, imagines a future without a past. It imagines a future that hopes that Linda and the children can forgive him for the path of destruction that he has placed them on without a life boat or an emergency kit or a disaster relief fund.

So, then, what is diagnosis without a cure? The most famous line of Toni Cade Bambara's most famous novel, The Salt Eaters, is its first: "Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?" I want to ask K the same question.

I think his answer would be that he wants to be well but that wellness must be achieved on his own terms. This, perhaps, is white masculinity: an adherence to wellness for the self independent of or at the expense of the larger community.

Laymon, on the other hand, has to refuse the individual model of wellness much like Bambara does in her novel precisely because their love for family and, by extension, black community supersedes their desire for the health of any one individual even if that individual is oneself. For much of the black autofiction and memoirs that I have read, health for the individual is irrelevant at best and impossible at worst if that health does not harmonize with the communities to which that individual belongs.

In representing Linda's bipolar disorder, there's none of the tenderness that Laymon injected into his discussion of his mother's gambling addiction and his own subsequent dangerous relationship with casinos and the comped cuisines, Italian and Mexican, that came with them. There's none of the care that Laymon offers himself in recollecting the ways his obsessions with his body kept the contours of that body in flux. There's none of the compassion that Laymon had for writing, a process and a practice that can harm as much as it can soothe.

I take it back. Autobiographical fiction isn't inherently a narcissistic project. It's just the perfect project for a narcissist.

Love,

Omari

ALSO IN THIS SERIES:

The Slow Burn, v.2: Welcome Back

The Slow Burn, v.2: An Introduction

My Struggle, vol. 1: Cecily, June 6

My Struggle, vol. 1: Diana, June 9

My Struggle, vol. 1: Omari, June 14

My Struggle, vol. 2: Dan, June 17

My Struggle, vol. 2: Omari, June 24

My Struggle, vol. 2: Cecily, July 1

My Struggle, vol. 2: Sarah Chihaya, July 5

My Struggle, vol. 2: Dan, July 12

My Struggle, vol. 2: Diana, July 16

My Struggle, vol. 2: Jess Arndt, July 18

My Struggle, vol. 3: Omari, July 25

My Struggle, vol. 3: Ari M. Brostoff, August 1

My Struggle, vol. 3: Dan, August 4

My Struggle, vol. 3: Jacob Brogan, August 8My Struggle, vol. 3: Diana, August 12

My Struggle, vol. 4: Katherine Hill, August 25

My Struggle, vol. 4: Omari, September 1

My Struggle, vol. 4: Dan, September 2

My Struggle, vol. 4: Diana, September 15

My Struggle, vol. 5: Omari, September 27

My Struggle, vol. 5: Diana, October 3

My Struggle, vol. 5: Dan, October 13

My Struggle, vol. 6: Omari, September 25

My Struggle, vol. 6: Dan, September 28

My Struggle, vol. 6: Stephanie, October 5

My Struggle, vol. 6: Cecily, October 9

My Struggle, vol. 6: Emily Tamkin, October 10

My Struggle, vol. 6: Diana, October 15

My Struggle, vol. 6: Rachel Greenwald Smith, October 23

My Struggle, vol. 6: Katherine Hill, October 26

My Struggle,  vol. 6: Omari, October 31

My Struggle,  vol. 6: Jess Arndt, November 6

My Struggle,  vol. 6: Joshua Keating, November 12

My Struggle,  vol. 6: Marit MacArthur, November 13

My Struggle, vol. 6: Dan, November 20

My Struggle, vol. 6: Jacob Brogan, November 29

My Struggle, vol. 6: Cecily, December 4

My Struggle, vol. 6: Marit, December 6