Impact: Dissatisfaction and Embodiment

First, a housekeeping note - I am not able to access page number in e-books/Kindle. I feel like a total dummy because I can't seem to google my way to a solution on this. I'm sorry! I will attempt to resolve this before my next blog entry.

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I found a few thematic threads running through Hill, Scott, Clabough, and Chao: discomfort, dissatisfaction, and a confrontation with embodiment.

It was harder to take a close look at Hill and Scott because something about the particular flavor of hopeless resignation in those pieces turned me off and catalyzed judgmental thoughts. Hill's piece was in third person and Scott's was in first. Hill's piece was poetic prose and Scott's prosaic poetry. But the narrative voices were similar in their weight and self-pitying rumination. The reliability of the narrators in each is drawn into question at various moments. Hill's protagonist, Gloria, grapples with reflections of herself, self-medicates with booze, and hears "voices in her head." The moment credibility ruptures in Scott is when he plays with memory/age/time in "Colors of Hardware." It's pretty difficult to give serious consideration to someone who describes his babymama's vagina as "the portal that received my seed" because it implies a level of awe with the penis/heteroprocreative sex that grosses me out majorly. The redeeming elements of Scott's poems are the interplay between embodiment and medical technology.

Clabough and Chao's longer, more subtle pieces held more interest for me than Scott and Hill. Clabough, like the other assigned others, engages with embodiment and mortality rather overtly with the trope of the skeleton and the memento mori it serves as throughout the story and in the classroom. Gender plays an interesting part in Clabough - I implicitly assumed the narrator was female-identified and was startled, halfway through the story, when the mother refers to them as her "son." There is no reason for me to have assumed that the narrator was female-identified, likely it was some socialized crap going on for me about how emotional the narrative was or something.

The overt story driving the plot here is about revealing the secret of the mother's career history, then the reveal of what the classroom visit would entail, culminating in a small social victory for both mother and son. But for me, the real story is encapsulated in the teacher's comment at the beginning that "a lot of what homemakers do is unremarkable." Capitalism, let alone society and social life, couldn't function without the feminized, unwaged, and undervalued labor of the home -- both emotional and material! But rather than provide a plot point that obviously confronts the error in that statement, Clabough reveals that the mother is actually highly educated, resilient, and complicated, whether or not she is a practicing scientist any longer. I would argue, though, that the remark is confronted by what the mother does. She shows the children what they are which is a pretty heavy service and certainly "remarkable."

The narrator's identification with the nonnormative fetuses in jars was a beautiful exhibit of showing rather than telling. In that lovely passage, we discover the gentleness, compassion, and loneliness of the narrator, as well as his identification as a mutant, without being told any of those traits explicitly.


Chao's "Why I Did Not..." was founded on a hilarious premise and in a nontraditional but appropriate/effective format (list). The format allows central facts to be revealed slowly over the course of the piece. Thus you find yourself liking and sympathizing the narrator before even realizing how intelligent, talented, capable, and hardworking she is. By the time you get to the martial arts excuse, you realize you want this person in your life as her friend, and it's not until the end that all her traits and life experience assimilate together into one complex person who did not become a world-famous classical violinist. One standout element to this piece for me was how well and how consistently it conveyed the high level of anxiety and powerlessness that children (and for some of us, adolescents and adults) experience. Since our course focuses on the coming of age aspect of memoir, this was something special to notice.