Memoir as a Medium

I'm MSNBC's Alley Valshi. Welcome to the Valshi Band Book Club. On a past episode of the Valshi Band Book Club, I said literature can function as a mirror unto yourself, or as a window into another life. Today's meeting is a window. We're opening the covers of two critically acclaimed memoirs, Hunger, A Memoir of My Body by Roxanne Gay, and The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. The windows you'll look through when you pick up these books are different, but what they share is bravery. It takes courage to share the worst moments of your childhood, and the darkest thoughts you've had about yourself. It takes bravery to tell your story in the way it really happened. These two memoirs exist in a tradition that began well before the written word did, storytelling as a warning, as a lesson, and as an explanation. Behind the personal, intimate, and specific moments that make up a life, there is power. I will warn listeners though, that means confronting subject matter some might find difficult, including sexual assault and rape. If you're not ready yet, these books will be waiting for you. Let's begin with Roxanne Gay and her story. Hunger, A Memoir of My Body by Roxanne Gay, is an uncompromising and intimate look at what it looks like to live in America in a body that is viewed by society as unacceptable. Quote, "When you're overweight, your body becomes a matter of public record in many respects. Your body is constantly and prominently on display. People project assumed narratives onto your body, and are not at all interested in the truth of your body, whatever that truth might be. Fat, much like skin color, is something you cannot hide, no matter how dark the clothing you wear, or how diligently you avoid horizontal stripes." Written in Gay's trademark "Unadorned Style," an interspersed with witty and vulnerable anecdotes from her childhood, teen, and adult years, "Hunger" is a story about Gay's ever-changing relationship with her body. Hunger grapples with more than that, though. It's a look at societal demands of appearance, the politics of consumption, family dynamics, self-acceptance, and the fraught landscape of women's pleasure. From the very first page, Gay makes it clear exactly what hunger is and is not. Quote, "Writing this book is a confession. These are the ugliest, weakest, barest parts of me. This is my truth. This is a memoir of my body, because more often than not, stories of bodies like mine are ignored or dismissed or derided. People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions. They think they know the why of my body. They do not. This is not a story of triumph, but this is a story that demands to be told and that deserves to be heard." Gay's devastating rape at just 12 years old is central to her story and her relationship with her body. In this way, hunger offers deeply unsettling insight into the ever-present nature of trauma. Gay's description of her rape as a young girl is frank and detailed and included in nearly every one of the short chapters within her memoir, a metaphor in and of itself. Rather than read as gratuitous, it is insightful. The constant reliving and recounting of this trauma in uncomfortable detail, including the smell of the rapist's sweat, the way their clothes stayed on and their reddened faces, is the reality of trauma. The emotional imprint of rape and assault never, ever goes away. Every book we cover on the Valshi Band book club is important in different ways, otherwise they wouldn't be pulled from library shelves and removed from curriculum, just like hunger has been, in the Indian River County School in Florida. But I haven't read a work that so radically and persuasively demands empathy, change, and self-reflection. Although this is wholly gay story, the search for self-love and community acceptance is in so many ways, universal. I could go on, but today, gay gets the last word. "Living in my body has expanded my empathy for other people and the truths of their bodies. Certainly it has shown me the importance of inclusivity and acceptance, not merely tolerance, for diverse body types. It has shown me that being a woman of size, the phrase "I use" to discreetly inform others of my body in a way that offers a semblance of dignity, is as much a part of my identity and has been for at least 20 years as any other part of my identity. This body is resilient. It can endure all kinds of things, end quote. I'm joined now by the award winning in renowned Roxanne Gay, the author of one of today's Valshi Band book club features Hunger, a memoir of my body. Roxanne, good to see you. At last you and I were together. We were on a stage in Connecticut, and I don't know if you could tell that I was a little intimidated because you're a big deal, and it's a big deal to have you on the show. So thank you so much. I want to get right into the book. You touched upon the importance of language used to describe assault and rape. Over the years I've learned the importance of surviving and claiming the label of survivor, but I don't mind the label of victim. Then later in the book you write, it's easier to use detached language like assault or violation or incident than it is to come out and say that when I was 12 years old I was gang raped by a boy I thought I loved and a group of his friends. Tell me about this. Well, there are all kinds of conversations that we have about the kinds of language that we should use when we talk about assault and a lot of times people find it empowering and liberating to remove themselves from victimhood, and I would never try and deny someone using the language that best fits their circumstances. And I do like the narrative of survival because I'm still here, but at the same time I do think it's important to acknowledge victimhood to say that you were taken advantage of that you were victimized. So I don't mind that language at all, and I use victim and survivor interchangeably, though of course field right get the more I just use survivor and frankly it doesn't come up as much now as it once did. So it's easier for me to be able to use those words interchangeably. Most of the books that we feature here are novels pieces of literature. You have the ability to write in any way you wish to write. Why was it important to write this as a memoir for you? Well, I had put off writing about it for most of my adult life. I actually never planned on writing a memoir. And as I was thinking about the next book that I wanted to write the first thought that came to my mind was the last thing I want to write about is fatness. And that's when I knew, man, I'm probably going to have to write about fatness because anytime I'm intimidated by something intellectually, I know that it's probably going to be intellectually satisfying and I'm probably going to get some good work out of it. And so I started to think about how do I want to write about my body and assault and the connection between the two. It's not there for everyone, but it was certainly there for me. I mean, womanhood and what it looks like is a consistent theme throughout hunger. You write quote, this is what most girls are taught that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard. And if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. And most women know this that we are supposed to disappear, but it's something that needs to be said loudly over and over again so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us. And quote, where are we in that process of resisting surrendering of acknowledging and defeating beauty myths? Well, you know, for every step forward, someone's going to always pull us a few steps back. I think it's still a work in progress. I think we're actually seeing, I don't know if backlash is the word, but we're seeing a lot of lost ground, especially with the rise of tradwives and Barbie feminism and all kinds of things. But I do believe that we're continuing to fight the good fight to create a space where women can be, however they choose to be, whether it's conventionally attractive or simply living in their bodies as honestly as possible. I try not to judge the choices that women make. And I think that's a place we all need to get to where we just allow women to live as openly and freely as possible. You added an anthology of personal essays called Not That Bad, which addressed a wide range of experience, including rape, assault, harassment. I want to read a little bit of the introduction that you wrote quote, it was comforting perhaps to tell myself that what I went through wasn't that bad. Allowing myself to believe that being gang rape wasn't that bad allowed me to break down my trauma into something more manageable than something I could carry with me instead of allowing the magnitude of it to destroy me. But in the long run, diminishing my experience hurt me far more than it helped. This is a big issue because we are in a society where we convince ourselves that it's not that bad move on. It's fine. You'll get over it. Tell me more about how you're thinking on this as evolved. We tend to minimize our traumas for one reason or another. I think one to prove that we are beyond them, but also because we are always. comparing ourselves to others. When I look at what I've been through, it's not that bad compared to say someone in the Congo who's dealing with sexual violence. So it becomes this thing that we do to minimize our own experiences because we do know, I think most of us, that there are a range of challenges that people around the world face. And sometimes you look at your own experiences and you think, well, that certainly pales in comparison. But who does it really serve to minimize our experiences in that way? It's actually not going to help the person you're comparing yourself to in any way, shape or form. And instead, it just harms us. And so I've done a lot of work over the years to stop minimizing not only my own experiences, but the experiences of others. Because yes, indeed, it was actually that bad. And it may not have been as bad as what someone else went through, but it doesn't take away what happened to you. You often touch on your identity as Haitian American. We featured National Book Award finalist American Street by Ibiza Boy. We discussed American perceptions of Haiti and Haitian culture. Let me play you a bit about what she told me. Yes. When I was growing up, that's all you heard. Quano Quote, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. But now we can say, Porter Prince is not all of Haiti. A neighborhood in Porter Prince is not all of Porter Prince. And we want to push back against that narrative that Haiti's culture, Haiti's spirituality is not the reason why it's in this situation that it is now. What are your thoughts? I absolutely agree with EB who is an incredible writer and thinker. Haiti has always been maligned in the Western media and has always been framed as the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere. There are all kinds of issues in Haiti, but it is also a beautiful country with beautiful people, beautiful art, music, literature. And I wish that we could talk about those things alongside the very real struggles the country is facing, but I also wish that we could have better conversations about where the culpability belongs for a lot of Haiti's problems and a lot of it belongs in sort of external interference in Haitian governing. And until we deal with those external interferences, Haiti is going to continue to be mired in conflict. Thank you Roxanne Gay, author of the first of today's Velshi Band book club features Hunger, a memoir of my body. Right after a quick break, the Velshi Band book club will be back with Jeanette Walls, the author of the award-winning memoir The Glass Castle. Walls' story is one of resilience and forgiveness. You've got to experience it yourself. Jeanette Walls' earliest memory is being on fire. Walls, her parents, and three siblings were living in a trailer park in the southern Arizona desert. She was three years old and wearing a pink tutu to cook hot dogs for her family. Her mother was too busy painting to cook. The skirt caught fire, badly burning, Wells's stomach, ribs, and chest. After six weeks in the hospital and extensive skin grafts, her father pulled her out against the doctor's advice and took her home. "A few days after mom and dad brought me home, I cooked myself some hot dogs. I was hungry. Mom was at work on a painting and no one else was there to fix them for me. Good for you, mom," said when she saw me cooking. "You've got to get right back in the saddle. You can't live in fear of something as basic, as fire," end quote. And so begins The Glass Castle, Jeanette Wall's stirring memoir and one of today's Velshi Band book club features. Written using Frank Language and vivid descriptions of moments that are so emotionally fraught and shocking, you'd be forgiven for thinking that they are fiction. The Glass Castle is a masterclass in thought provoking memoir. The Glass Castle chronicles Wall's deeply abusive and dysfunctional childhood, spent uprooted, again and again at the whims of her parents Rex and Rosemary. Wall's inner siblings face bullying, hunger, homelessness, and sexual abuse. And yet, where Wall's could depict her parents as one-sided abuser, she does it, writing instead with nuance, depth, and love. Wall's father was a brilliant man who, when sober, ignited his children's imagination and love of learning. Wall's mother was a free-spirited artist and self-proclaimed, excitement addict who wholly rejected dumb esticity. Both Rex and Rosemary grappled with severe mental health issues and left their children to fend for themselves. Wall's amazing ability to convey the ugliest, darkest parts of life with the most beautiful precious moments make the Glass Castle immensely and surprisingly readable. Initially published in 2005, the Glass Castle spent nearly eight years on the New York Times bestseller list. It's been translated into 31 languages and as one numerous awards. It is so popular and such a contemporary classic that members of the Valshi Band Book Club wrote in, incredulous, that it had been removed from libraries or classrooms anywhere. But it has. Again and again. The most common reason to remove the Glass Castle from high school reading lists and curricula, Wall's very real depiction of sexual assault, and quote, "disturbing material," end quote. The Glass Castle opens with a glimpse of Wall's life as a successful gossip columnist right here in New York City. Walls ended up graduating from Barnard the Women's College at Columbia University before making a living as a writer for New York magazine, Esquire, and msnbc.com. I appreciate Wall's starting the Glass Castle this way. Through the breathless and relentless moments of abuse and life-threatening neglect that punctuate her childhood, her life as an adult is a light at the end of the tunnel. The Glass Castle is a story of perseverance. It is a story of survival. I'm joined now by the remarkable Jeanette Wall's author of the Glass Castle. Jeanette, I want to start by talking about the genre of your memoir, telling your story, especially one is emotionally fraught as yours is, it's courageous. Talk to me about how you got to the point of being able to write this down. I was terrified. I didn't think anybody would get it. I thought I would be banned and ridiculed and that people would just look down on me and the opposite is happened. I cannot tell you the number of people who come forward and said, "Your story is a little bit like mine. The details are different, but we have a lot in common." And it just goes to show you the power of storytelling. There are so many people out there with these complicated backgrounds who hide them, who think it's a source of shame. And the ones who start talking, hatred is contagious and so is fear, but so is honesty and so is vulnerability. And once you start telling your story, it's very empowering. May I explore that for a moment? The idea of honesty and vulnerability to convert things that our culture has us grow up to think are things we should be ashamed of into things that what, we should be proud of or that we can build our careers on or can inspire others with. Tell me what happens. When the shame goes away, what does it become? I think that so often, everything in life is both a blessing and a curse. And very often these things that we dislike about ourselves, it's the best thing we have going for. I'm a scraper. I had a tough childhood, you know, kind of hard white trash and I went to such great lengths to hide it. And then once I came clean about it, I was able to tap into this complicated past of mine and be honest. And, you know, Ali, addressing these kids where this book has been banned in these schools, it's the same thing. These kids are walking around with shame, fear, they're hiding who they are. And it breaks my heart that this book is being banned in schools. So many teachers come forward and say, this is one of the most valuable teaching tools I have ever encountered. Kids who think they hate reading recognize themselves in your story and are actually reading ahead and come to me and say, are there other books like this out there? I thought I hated reading, but now I understand that I just need to find books about people like myself and their kids might be dealing with issues of addiction and violence at home. And then they realize, you know, here's somebody else who's been through it. And she not only survived, I had the one-year woman saying, I know how you survived, but you stand up on the stage and you're being proud of who you are. How did you get this? >> Yes, that's the question. >> That is what I want to teach these kids that just because you encountered these complicated things in your past that in no way makes you less of a person, you are a fighter, honey. You have the ability to endure. Don't be ashamed of these things you went through. Put it to work for you. >> A teacher posted on social media, a teacher from Eastern Washington State. Ali Vell, she's going to break me with this interview with Jeanette Walles. It's one of the best books I've read and it's unavailable to my students, free the books. You were afraid people wouldn't like your book for certain reasons that didn't come out to be true. People adored it and grew from it and learned from it. But some people did want to ban it for vulgarity, for sex in there, for the fact that they wouldn't think that a story like yours is actually inspirational. >> I have begged these people to come talk to me about this. I get it. People want to protect children. I get them. We all want what's best for the children. But I would argue that the way to protect children is not to put them in a bubble and pretend that these bad things don't exist but rather to give them the tools to deal with the complications and ugliness that life often presents us and that many of these kids are on already dealing with and let them discuss these issues in the safe place of their classroom. You know, it was banned in a very well to do suburb in Dallas and one parent objected to it. And the other parents and the teachers and God bless them, the students got together and said, we need to know about people like this. We have so many privileges. We need to know who are those homeless people and why don't they take care of their families? So they got the book and banned and I went and spoke to these kids. And then afterwards one of them hung back and thanked me because a relative was behaving sexually inappropriately with this person. And I would argue it's not just be poor kids who have dysfunctional families. A lot of people need to deal with these issues and hide them and discussing like the glass castle and the issues of abuse and substance abuse. It's very empowering to these kids to understand, I'm not the only one going through it. And this is how somebody else dealt with it. >> Let's talk about the title. It's called the glass castle for what your father always said he would build once he had enough money. And eventually before you leave for New York, you confront your father about this dream saying quote, "Dad's hands trembled slightly as he unrolled different blueprints. He had drawn frontal views, side views and aerial views of the glass castle. He had drawn the interior of rooms and labeled them and specified their dimensions down to the inches in his precise blocky handwriting. I stared at the plans. Dad, I said, you'll never build the glass castle." That's a heartbreaking scene. Talk to me about that moment and then naming the book after it. >> Yet to me, the glass castle was really about hope. I mean, dad was an alcoholic. He was a dreamer. He was also brilliant. And one time's got really tough. Yeah, he'd pull out the blueprints for the glass castle and he never did build it. But I believe that in taking out those blueprints and discussing the science and the math of it, he was educating us. But more importantly, it was his way of saying, you deserve something better than what you have right now and you will have it one day. And I believe that that's what the glass castle is really about. Yeah, it's about poverty and all those issues that I dealt with. But it's also about hope and about making a life for yourself. And even though dad never did build a glass castle, he gave us the tools to build our own. And I'm very among those tools was reading. I cannot remember not knowing how to read on our house was always filled with books. And I think that education is degrade equalizer and getting books into kids hands that tell them how they can change their circumstances is tremendous. And my story, my raggedy little poor white man story, if that can in any way help somebody who is in despair who doesn't see hope, then that's why we tell stories. And we know that it does help. Thank you to Jeanette Wall, author of the award-winning memoir, The Glass Castle. Joining me now are literary editor and producer of the Valshi band book club, Hannah Holland. Hannah, these are two remarkable raw, difficult memoirs beyond. And I have to say, Roxanne Gay has to be one of the greatest thinkers of our time. I was a little bit intimidated. I was a little bit starstruck. You know, the book is amazing in and of itself, but producing an interview like that. You're like, oh, okay, so you were intimidated producing the interview. Roxanne and I appeared on a panel together. This must have been a year ago or something like that. And I was seated next to her. I have been intimidated very few times in my life, just her sheer presence and her intellect. And by the way, it becomes very clear when you read the book about the difficulty she's gone through in life gives her a self-composed, self-possessed nature. She has gravitas. She's got gravitas, right? I had to think before I answered any question, because I thought to myself that I'm sitting next to Roxanne Gay, but what makes her accessible is this, right? That she has written about how vulnerable she was. And she's vulnerable about the thing that is some people make judgments based on who you are. And we very much live in a society which continues despite the progress we'd like to think we've made makes judgments about what you look like, how you dress, and what the color of your skin is. I think what she does so amazingly well is distilling these realities that every woman has in a different way. And making this argument and crystallizing how radical it is to accept yourself and to love yourself, you know, it's become sort of like a line and dove commercials love the skin you're in, but to actually do it and confront the parts of society that make that impossible day in, day out is unbelievable. But there's an added dimension to this. We've engaged in things like body positivity discussions, but we're really not. We're really not. And so it's one thing to love yourself for who you are. It's another thing to love yourself for who you are in spite of the fact that most of society is not there with you. So the people who see you on the subway, the people who see you on the street, the people who see you on TV, they've still got some judgment in their mind. There's this scene where I believe she goes with her father to the doctor and they treat her inhumanely. That's the only way to describe it. And it was just one of those moments where I closed the book and I was like, wow, that is unbelievable thing for her to capture. The thing that I thought was remarkable about Roxanne Gay, she talked a great deal about vulnerability. Yes. Jeanette Walls said, quote, hatred and fear are contagious, but so is honesty and vulnerability. And I think that's interesting because when people speak of their vulnerability, it causes those of us, I'm no expert at vulnerability, like many people of my gender. But when people are vulnerable with you and to you, it causes you to say, I wonder what that would feel like for me. I wonder if that would be as liberating to me. So when I did the pre-interview with her, I swear to God, I think we talked on the phone for 40 minutes. I was like, I love this woman and I hung up the phone and I was like, why is she so easy to talk to? And it's because of that. She's been liberated. Everyone knows this story now. And so she can talk about anything. And so then by nature of that, she comes across so real because she is real. You can't help but love her. You know, like there is this just magnetism to her. And yes, as she said, vulnerability is contagious. I'm certain she's a person who sits on an airplane and the person next to her is like, I'm going to tell you my life story. She just has that ability to connect and provide this vulnerability. One of the things that she talks a lot about, which I wouldn't have thought in a book like that that I'd have a lot to relate to. But it was about hiding her childhood to try to prove to people that she was raised in a normal upper middle class American household. Now, by situation, it's entirely different. But I also wanted to convey normalcy outside, which is a normal thing you want to do as a kid or even after your childhood, you don't want anybody's pity. You just don't want people to think you're any different. You want to fit in. Right. Right. She opens the book with this scene where she was leaving some party on Park Avenue. She looks out the window of the car and she's like, oh, I think it's, you know, some, some houses people, whatever. It was her parents. So this moment of, I've made it, quote unquote, you know, I'm in this car that's paid for leaving this party and there are my parents. I can be as successful as I can be. I can have as much money as possible. But there are my parents. This will always be a part of my life, the realities of her upbringing. She said, quote, I want to tell these kids that just because you endured something complicated in your past, that doesn't make you less of a person, end quote, which connects me back to Roxanne Gay. Yeah. Right. They both had things happen to them as children that could have defined them for the rest of their life 100% and they had to come to terms with the idea that things that happen to you do not define you for the rest of your life. Yeah. 100%. And, you know, Jeanette said to you that people come up to her, of course, after speaking engagements and that it doesn't matter where she's speaking. If it's like a very wealthy neighborhood, she mentioned the students in Dallas. Someone said, yeah, this resonates with me in this kind of Tony neighborhood in Dallas. And it's true. I mean, in different degrees, every, I'm sure everyone has something in their past that, you know, is to some degree could hold you back, but doesn't, you know. She touched on the idea of education as the great equalizer. Yes, I love that. Close to our hearts is that her house was filled with books. Yeah. She talks a lot about how when her parents were doing well, it was an amazing place to live, right? She was very much able to forgive them and see the good in them. And part of that was this idea of teaching them things and even this idea of the glass castle, which is, of course, the title, but her dad literally had like blueprints. And she says, oh, I also think he was trying to teach us about math and wanting to show them, of course, that they can have a better life. But she was like, yeah, no, on some level, this man was teaching us how to use a blueprint, you know, so every step of the way the parents were trying in whatever capacity they could dedicate them. The empathy for her parents reminds you of Garrett Connelly, right? Where you would imagine that they both have every reason to not write in a complimentary fashion about their parents, but they, they seem to understand their limitations, what their parents limitations were. They seem to understand that there was goodness in them. Yeah. There was love in them, but there were a lot of flaws. And I think that's healthy. We've come across a few books that have those types of themes. Well, I think we should just examine that glass castle concept for a second, because it, toward the end of the book, it starts to manifest. Yes, right. There's that scene that you talk about with Jeanette where she's finally like, there is no glass castle. I have to leave. I have to start my own life. But yeah, I mean, the idea of it is amazing to write this castle, this place that the father was going to build for them as a shelter, but yet it's so fragile, right? It's made of glass. So on so many levels, it's just this unbelievable metaphor for her life. In fact, both of these books have an element of coming to terms with what happened and finding power as a result. Yes, definitely. On the next episode of the Valshi Bandbook Club, we're going to examine one of the most powerful literary archetypes in existence, tragic love. From Shakespeare's enduring classic Romeo and Juliet to a contemporary novel, all the rivers by Dorit Rabinion, we will critically examine the cultural, familial, and cosmic realities of StarCross lovers. Quote, two households, both alike in dignity and fair Verona, where we lay our scene from ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes, a pair of StarCross lovers take their life, whose misadventured pitius overthrows due with their death, bury their parents strife. Don't miss it. Thanks for joining us. Be sure to subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts. When you do, you'll be able to listen to the Valshi Bandbook Club podcast Add Free, along with other MSNBC originals like prosecuting Donald Trump, how to win 2024, and why is this happening with Chris Hayes without ads? Plus, you'll get episodes of season two of the Valshi Bandbook Club one week early, as well as exclusive bonus content from this and other podcasts. Sign up now on Apple Podcasts. I'm the host of the Valshi Bandbook Club, Ali Valshi. Our producer and literary editor is Hannah Holland. Our executive producer is Rebecca Dryden, alongside our senior producers Jared Blake and Dena Moss. With production support from associate producer Nicole McRennels, our coordinating producer is Lily Corvo. The executive producer of MSNBC audio is Aisha Turner. The head of audio production is Bryson Barnes, alongside our audio engineers Catherine Anderson, Katie Lau and Bob Mallory.