sadreads #7: the awful action
“I think of myself as a good steward of my own self: my brain, my heart, and my body. But not always. Not every day. Not even every year. I choose awful things and actions. Repeatedly, even.” Molly Brodak, Bandit: A Daughter's Memoir
When someone is suddenly gone, there is an urge to contribute your version of their existence to the record. I remember when a college friend died in a car crash; I remember someone who I thought was tangential to that person going around telling the story, which was a terrible story. I remember hearing the narrative solidifying as they repeated it over and over, the details turning into narrative beats, and gaining distance from the one who died in doing so. The story congealed into place the more times it was told. Congeal comes from the Latin gelare, to freeze; something frozen is no longer in motion. I remember listening to the person talking, and thinking What right do you have to tell people this. I remember being angry because the person who assumed the role of storyteller seemed an acquaintance at best to the boy who died.
Anyway, I am telling you this because I picked up Brodak's work after she died, but I feel I don’t have a place to reflect on her loss. I had read her poems, but never her prose; I didn’t know her, and I hardly even knew her work. But there is a beautiful tribute to her over at Volta, written by some of the people who love her best, along with some of her astonishing poems. It’s a way to know a little about this human, this artist, this friend.
I also have to give you this context because the compulsion to know someone after it’s already nightfall in their world is what drove me to pick up this memoir in the first place. I might’ve come across the book in another way, later on. But reading it just now, I found it extraordinary, the way it sidled up to my own miseries.
Bandit is the story of Brodak’s bank robber father, who is also a gambling addict and a pathological liar. It’s comprised of short sections that skip forward and back in time, from childhood to adulthood, trying to figure out the father’s motivations and also examine his role in her life. His casual charm, the way he pursued Brodak’s mother, the way in which he threw money at things and put up appearances while the black hole of his addiction demanded more. The way in which his ghost haunted her even though he was still living, writing her letters from prison, trying to wrestle away the definition of his life from his daughter the writer. At the end, she grants him the mercy of letting him tell it; she includes a letter he wrote to her in full.
This is not a "poet's memoir" in the tedious way; it has no performative poetics. It's incredibly readable and clear-eyed, and the poetry it contains is in Brodak's unusual phrasing and imagery.
The book is a memoir that hates being a memoir, because it hates that the action of telling a story about something awful is what you’re supposed to do with pain; it’s relentless about trying to suss out the motivations of its own storytelling. In Brodak's mind, storytelling is the most suspect thing of all. Why would anyone want to engage in this? It's about controlling the action, about putting up scaffolding to build a building, and then clearing away the scaffolding to pretend the building was always there. “Who would have taken this photo of a family in their most private and serious moment of grief, not posing but mourning[...]?” Brodak asks at one point, looking at a picture of her father as a child, at the grave of his own father, with his siblings and mother. “Is this what I am doing now in writing about my family?” Freezing the moment into the one definitive depiction. Liars do this. Media spin doctors do this. And artists do this, too.
Here it is: the thing that makes me scared. I wrote a book about the worst thing that ever happened to me, and I’m afraid of it entering the world, because I’m afraid that people will think I’m finished with the story now.
“In stories our minds link, emotional survival techniques are transmitted, moral models are codified, hows and whys are satisfied,” Brodak writes. “I know. But, then, is the story a kind of currency? Narratives are bought by readers and ... what is sold?”
I know the answer, and still I choose the awful action.