Structural challenges in Change Me Into Zeus’s Daughter

Dear class comrades,

There are many pressing content and thematic elements to explore in Moss’, Change Me Into Zeus’s Daughter, but, because of where I am currently situated in relationship to the preparation of my own thesis (the first draft of which is due early next week) I will be focusing on some structural elements of this work that I struggled with while reading.

1) Episodes and narrative arc

After reading this work slowly over the last few days and then consuming approximately 160 pages in one sitting today, I feel absolutely flooded, as though there is not one inch left of me available for story. The feeling is not pleasant and I’m thinking about the way in which the structure of this text is informing the sensation.

This work (as seems to be common in memoirs, inclusive of my own) is built of episodes that at times open up onto each other, and that are at times separated in the form of distinct chapters. To differing levels of success these episodes serve to build world, character, relationships, conflict, tension, within the family, and between the family and the world/s in which they lived. While the opening of the work at times feels slow, and laborious, occasionally overly detailed, or repetitive, as the work unfolds the emotional register is cast high. In a sense it is a litany of wounds opened, that in their truth I’m sure, and in their rendering here, for the most-part do not heal. (Here I’ll own again that I’m not quite finished the book yet, so maybe something shifts that I haven’t yet arrived at).

In reflecting on Winterson’s memoir I wonder how a more active meaning-making, present-time, adult narrator would have served this work by both honouring the complexity and pain that is made visible through the episodes, while also offering some kind of broader narrative journey that gives a greater purpose to the episodes beyond witnessing of events. It seems there are attempts at this – the struggle with the desire to be beautiful, the use of Alice in Wonderland. This feels particularly salient to me as I am thinking through what are the structural pieces that will support readers of my work in agreeing to venture from one, often difficult, episode to the next.

This leads me to:

2) Tracking time

The transitions in this text between episodes are at times profoundly inorganic. For example I often found myself searching for indicators of age. While I appreciated the ways memories unfolded onto each other, Moss was very inconsistent in offering age/time markers. This compounded the overwhelming impact of the episodes; and perhaps that was part of her strategy, to produce a sensation of disorientation within the reader, highlighting both the static dysfunction (though it did ebb and flow) and mapping the way in which the sensation of time is often altered as a result of PTSD. The impact however was that there was very little room for breath in the text, which for me would have allowed the elements of the story to land more clearly, and squarely into my heart, which I think is ultimately where a writer wants to connect with their reader, first; at least that’s true for me.

3) Parenthetic and italicized text

I wondered about the decision to utilize both parenthetic and italicized text in the work. Again these strategies felt forced and drew me out of the story.

Part of what wasn’t working with the italicized text was the tense jumping, as takes place for example on page 41 and 42 during the bathroom makeover scene. It seemed as though in the writing Moss was wrestling with committing to a present time narrative voice, or trusting that in simply allowing her characters to act in the time-space in which they were situated, that the internal world of those characters, particularly little Barbara, would be made sufficiently visible. The italics in their very visual lean, were attempting to lean us into the little Barbara’s worldview/experience/childlike state of meaning-making and internal dialogue; my experience however was that these moments dragged the text, at times over-explained what was already obvious, and patromized, both the character and the reader. Sometimes it felt as though this strategy was being utilized to round up information as on page 45, “How dare he act like a civilized human being with her… When we were kids, if we happened upon a dog that didn’t fit his ideal, he waited until we loved it and then shot it.” It seemed like these moments in the text were at times used to offload a strong feeling or judgment that she, as in Moss the person, needed expressed, which in effect drew me away from sympathy with the narrator, not because I wasn’t already down with her cause, but because it did feel forced. I wonder if part of what this gestures to was the challenge in determining what episodes to develop, and trusting that enough “information” about characters would be revealed through those episodes. In my own approach to reading and writing I am currently moving away from what has been a pretty strict adherence to the show-don’t-tell ethic, which I think is important to mention as I share this reflection.

In terms of the parenthetic text, the impact for me was that they broke the fourth wall, which can work, but was unnecessary. These moments of catching-us-up on details ie. page 94, “(Dad used the word immaculate to describe anything he though was particularly fine…)” could have simply existed as part of the text that preceded and followed. That sensation of whispering to us simply made me more aware of Moss the writer and drew me away from the story. In more than one occasion what showed up in parentheses was demonstrated through action later, so the impact was that I didn’t feel trusted by Moss to be paying attention to the story enough to catch those threads.

4) Narrative credibility

There were some challenges I had with trusting the narrator. For example early on in the text we are told that she witnesses her mother cry only once – after the death of the baby – however I believe we see Dorris weep on at least 4 occasions following (up to where I’ve arrived in the work). Further, Moss writes on page 130, “We had left so much of ourselves so many times that I hoarded all of my things in a sturdy cardboard box.” I felt confused at this moment as based on my understanding of the story they had until this point moved twice. The impact was that this then read as an exaggeration. The reason I question this is not to question the actuality of events or the truth of the feeling of the experience but to rather identify the gap between the way in which the events are being recounted and the emotional impact as it is being mapped.