Bonnie Friedman & Kyoko Mori | April 2021

   
Bonnie Friedman & Kyoko Mori

COMPLICATED CLARITY [KYOKO MORI]

At ten o’clock the night before the deadline, I started our University’s online training for IT Security Awareness—a dozen videos with multiple choice quizzes, none of which I passed with a single try. In the cartoon graphics, hackers in trench coats and dark glasses loomed across the screen: male or female but always white people working alone. The refrain, “Contact your institution’s IT team,” was accompanied by a group of clean-cut, racially diverse and nerdily dressed men and women. I couldn’t decide if the videos were trying be wishful, politically correct, or true-to-life. These were exactly the kinds of thoughts I was having in all the classes I failed.

In my sixth-grade math class, I couldn’t understand why anyone would go to the store only to buy apples and oranges. I scored abysmally on the part of the Graduate Record Exam that presented hypothetical situations such as: a movie theatre is planning a weekend foreign film festival featuring five directors; A’s work can’t be shown before B’s, C’s and D’s shouldn’t be consecutive, the festival cannot open with E’s, what is the correct sequence? I tried to imagine a real-life situation in which this problem might occur: no one wants to see Kurosawa and Fellini back to back, starting with Herzog on a Saturday morning would be a mistake, but regardless of the sequence, only a committed cinephile would watch five foreign movies in a row.

I continue to be puzzled but bored, too, by stories that present a simplified version of a real-life problem and ask me to make a choice. What I want to know, and think about, is always beside the point—some intriguing detail that caught my attention precisely because it didn’t fit into the lesson.

I initially was drawn to the short story because I could leave the character in an uncomfortable place at the end; nothing had to be resolved, but you still needed some plot. When I discovered personal narrative—especially essays—I breathed a sigh of relief. I could finally write a story in which nothing much happened outwardly.

I often write an essay to relive an event whose significance eludes me. When something interesting—which usually means “troubling”—happens in real life, I’m too busy trying to contain the situation or, failing that, to flee. But in writing, I can pause whenever I want to reflect on the contradictions and ambiguities that intrigue me. Often, I only understand the heart of the essay after multiple revisions. Truth emerges in the intersection of ideas and stories.

Although essays are not plot-driven, portraying people and places requires narrative and description—the two modes of writing that most composition classes present as basic building blocks. Students start with “simple” exercises in narrative and description (for example: describe a familiar object and write a personal story) before attempting comparison/contrast, classification, process, cause and effect, and gradually working toward “argumentation,” the pinnacle of rhetorical achievement. In the composition classes I taught in graduate school, I hated how the entire syllabus reduced narrative, an art form that I considered the pinnacle of all writing, into a warm-up for the real work of critical thinking.

To an essayist, narrative is both a building block and a goal. One of my favorite essays, Natalia Ginsburg’s “He and I,” starts with a series of descriptions—or maybe they are comparisons/contrasts, classifications, cause and effects, or argumentation (these distinctions always confused me)—of the narrator and her husband: she is cold and he is hot; he loves classical music and she falls asleep at concerts. The essay is a catalogue of disagreements until the last paragraph, which presents a narrative about the couple’s first meeting—“light years” before they met again and married—when they were just “two people who conversed so politely, so urbanely, as the sun was setting; who chatted a little about everything perhaps and about nothing; two friends talking, two young intellectuals out for a walk, so young, so educated, so uninvolved, so ready to judge one another with kind impartiality; so ready to say goodbye to one another for ever, as the sun set, at the corner of the street.”

The essay has stepped backward in time in order to leap forward in meaning: marriage has nothing to do with politeness or compatibility; people who love each other are not afraid to disagree and fight. What began as a simple narrative about a couple who can’t agree ends as a larger, more complicated narrative about love and marriage.

I read “He and I” a few years after my divorce. When I got to the end, I understood why Chuck, my ex-husband, and I couldn’t be together. Unlike the couple in “He and I,” we didn’t disagree often, but when we did, each of us thought, how weird, how can a perfectly intelligent person think/believe/do something so dumb? But that’s his/her life and none of my business. We were the most noncommittal, disengaged couple, forever walking around the block politely disagreeing while the sun set, unable to say hello or goodbye. But in the thirteen years we were married, we ended up influencing each other more than anyone else we’d known—enough to remain friends now, twenty years after our divorce. During a recent phone call, on Chuck’s sixty-fifth birthday, I promised if anything happened to him, his two cats could live with me and mine or else with someone I had thoroughly vetted and could visit regularly. What is our relationship but ambiguity and paradox. No real-life narrative can fit all its insights into even the best essay. What remains true is the need to simultaneously complicate and clarify the stories we tell. The ultimate narrative of nonfiction is the search for understanding.

AN ENVELOPE FROM LONG AGO
[BONNIE FRIEDMAN]

There are the many things that, as playwrights and psychoanalysts have taught us, we know and don’t know, and these things, in our essays, resist being known even as we simultaneously crave to know them.

The chronological narrative, with its independent, somewhat detached rigor and potent drive to complete itself, can finesse this ambivalence. Which gives narrative essays a distinctive power of discovery—one more reliable, it seems to me, than that possessed by, for instance, an assemblage of fragments bounded by cool and capacious white spaces (in which much can be conveniently forgotten or submerged), or by the lyric, with its siren-song imagery capable of imparting the sensation of resonant meaning while actually obfuscating.

Narrative offers fewer seductive ways for the mind to evade itself. The flat or elided places in a story attract attention to what is being repressed. The writer cannot so easily spring to an association or swerve to an alluring object. Strapped to time, the narrative possesses a salutary remorselessness that invites us to see things through and thus, to see things as they are.

Admittedly, nonfiction, which prizes coherence, often has a tad of fiction mixed in, fiction generated by authorial ego, or, more likely, dramaturgy. The existence in the essay of that which is present simply because it actually happened adds something meaningful that is adjacent to and often at odds with the conscious quest of the essay, and it is this adjacent material that frequently provides the resinous anti-strophal friction that lets illumination blaze.

But I want to interrupt myself with a story. As I’m writing, I keep recalling a raspberry-red sweater my mother knitted for me when I was about five: a cableknit cardigan of thick wool she worked on day after day in a beach chair on the lawn of our New Jersey bungalow colony. In early August, she finished the sweater with its snug cuffs and braided surface, which had mysterious eel-like creatures cohering from the depths and diving back down. I put it on immediately even though the sweater was heavy, and the weather sweltering. It fit me well, was, if anything, already a little small. I was surprised, even proud, that my mother had made such a beautiful garment for me. Still, somehow or other, walking along the edged slope of a field, I stumbled and found myself stuck in a briar-filled thicket. When I extracted myself, my royal sweater was laced with a hundred tiny

mustard-gold burrs, each a jagged star that scratched. I clasped hold of a single one and, pulling hard, yanked it out. It shredded the surrounding wool. Horrified, I went back immediately to my mother. Perhaps I thought she would somehow make it all right. Well, my mother was stricken. Nearly in tears, she cried out, “How could you do this? What’s the matter with you?”

How could you do this? What’s the matter with you?

I needed to write out the entire narrative to recall those questions, which happen to be the very ones that haunt me today, almost my whole life later, a fear I may again inadvertently destroy something of great value that I will never have again. Despite the fact that I’ve held that story in my head, I didn’t know that this was what the red sweater wanted to ask me. I needed to set down the entire narrative from the beginning—the sun, the beach chair, the thickness of the wool, the stumble, and all sorts of things that I was recounting merely because “they actually happened.”

I believe this event is one of the static tarot card emblems of my life, although it took narrative to set it in motion and allow it to arrive at its destination.

When I tell the story of that afternoon, what occurs to me is my inability to accept my mother’s gift. Wearing her sweater on a hot summer day, I was clothed in her heavy love, which I found oppressive even as I craved it. I have always identified with the red sweater in its latter state of being spiked and swarming and irretrievably internally marred. For truth be told, in my heart of hearts I knew I would likely ruin the lovely garment, and it was a relief to get it over with and to return to my life as the plain lonely ordinary and maybe even ugly girl I’d been.

Recounting all this, I suddenly understand the reason why the sweater called to me today from its home in the vast kingdom of remembered things, like an envelope sent to me from long ago.

To explain, I have to reveal a bit more from the narrative of my life today. I am contemplating relinquishing something of great value, my employment, in order to write full time. In the small hours of the morning, I awaken with terror at the idea of what I might be ruining, which took so long to achieve. “How could you do this?” a voice exclaims. “What’s the matter with you?” And shame and horror flood me.

And now, having written all this out, I am surprised to perceive one thing more: the great gift my mother gave me, and that she doesn’t want me to ruin, is my life. Not the job. Not the garment. She wants me to have all the fulfillment I can because even when life is long, it’s brief. In every phone call we have these days, she asks, “What do you want?” At 99, she has a perspective that I lack. She sees that I far prefer to dream my way through my life and blurrily pretend I will live forever. To try to fix this problem, I recently went to a Zendo to take a class on playing the Buddhist ritual instruments. I heard the gong that says: “Time is finite.” I struck it myself, and felt the jolt reverberate. On my way out, I took a pamphlet with a chant I wanted to memorize: “Let me respectfully remind you: Life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken… Awaken! Take heed. Do not squander your life.”

When I realize that it’s my life and not anything else that my mother asks me not to ruin, I feel the rewards of narrative. For the real, cohesive, secret story of this essay, I see now, has to do with my current predicament. It’s why the red sweater called, first with questions that hurt me, then, in a different timbre, with identical questions that brought relief.

Narrative is the thread that lets you leave the maze where you were lost in echoes and dead ends. Sometimes it takes a while to understand the particular narrative that you are clasped onto. But isn’t that one of the chief pleasures in writing essays—the way advancing your story makes it resonate, and events that were real become symbolic and even archetypal, until you yourself are advancing, guided by chronology, to only the gods know where?

A MAGIC GARMENT [KYOKO MORI]

Bonnie begins her essay by evoking the tangled-up feeling familiar to essayists caught between the powerful longing to know the truth and the equally powerful wish to escape its full knowledge.

The story Bonnie tells after establishing this argument has elements of a fairytale: a special garment that a woman knits for her daughter, day after day on a beach chair on her lawn; the briar thicket that the daughter falls into; “a hundred tiny mustard-gold burrs” that turn the royal garment—a labor of love—into a scratchy hair-shirt of shame and regret. The story is an anti-fairytale. The beautiful sweater doesn’t turn the girl into a princess. She remains “the plain lonely ordinary and maybe even ugly girl.” Instead of earning her mother’s blessing, she receives two semi-rhetorical questions, a conundrum or even a curse, that she must carry through life: “How could you do this? What’s the matter with you?”

After telling this story, the narrator, now an adult, examines her past. Perhaps the story meant that her mother’s love was a burden. She had failed to be the daughter her mother wanted her to be, one who could wear a luxurious handknit sweater to an appropriate place and for the right occasion and be admired for her own beauty and for her mother’s skill as a creator of beauty. By wandering outdoors, being dreamily inattentive, she had “inadvertently destroyed something of great value that I will never have again,” and would forever be cursed with a sense of failure.

But after following the logic of this reading to its conclusion, the narrator starts on a different path of exploration. The story isn’t simply about the past; it has “something to say that touches on my current life.” The narrator has been considering “relinquishing” her employment in order to write full time. Her employment, something of value she has worked hard for, is her current red sweater. And when she contemplates this red sweater, she realizes that her relationship with her mother has shifted. Her mother no longer asks those harsh questions that expressed her disappointment. When they talk on the phone now, the mother asks, “What do you want?” The narrator realizes that her mother—like the gongs in Zen meditation—is reminding her of the finitude of time and warning her not to squander her life.

Like any good story, this anti-fairytale has details that do not neatly fit into any interpretation. Why was the mother knitting a thick cable stitch sweater in August? Shouldn’t she have been walking in the fields or lounging on a beach? Why didn’t she stop the girl from putting on the sweater to take a walk? And isn’t it interesting that the sweater “fit me well, was, if anything, already a little small.” That’s my favorite detail. The out-of-season sweater was already a garment that the girl had outgrown, destined, perhaps, to be ruined in an almost-beautiful way with those mustard-seed gold burrs (like the piles of gold that another girl in a fairytale might have spun out of hay; or the mustard seed of faith that, according to my Sunday School teacher, would grow into a large shade tree). In putting on the sweater and going out into the field on that summer day, the narrator-at-five was practicing what the narrator-now is trying to do: live in the moment; time is fleeting; do what you want.

Bonnie’s essay is both a formal argument and a personal parable. The sweater had to be unraveled to become the thread of a larger exploration, a colorful reminder of the essay’s argument. The raspberry-red cardigan might have been forgotten if it had been worn for a few months and outgrown like other sweaters from childhood. By being destroyed—sacrificed, one might say—it became a magic garment that reaches us across time and transforms our understanding.

A GIANT STEP CLOSER [BONNIE FRIEDMAN]

Although we only met recently, in her reading of my essay, Kyoko has identified the core story of my life, the themes and the school of bewildering emblems that have enforced the terms of my existence. She also points out that writing often involves going in opposite directions at once: “[Ginsburg’s] essay has stepped backward in time in order to leap forward in meaning.” With that double-movement in mind, I shall plunge again into my past in hopes of ascending toward a better understanding of narrative.

In my early memory, I was an invisible child in the land of concrete objects: the kitchen table with its green vinyl tablecloth that smelled faintly of the moldy sponge, the beige wallpaper with its cheerful whirling pattern of teakettles and latticework pies and rolling pins. My mother sat silently submerged within herself; she sipped black coffee and scarcely ate. She had, until recently, been a vigorous, clever, fashion-conscious woman—an office manager who earned more than my father—but (as I discovered much later) she was suffering from post-partum depression, complicated by a course of electroshock. And all this flowed from the fact that the man who was her obstetrician had refused her request to “tie her tubes” after her last pregnancy. Alone with me all day, she sat in our long narrow kitchen on Harrison Avenue. When I showed her a picture I’d colored, she gave a tired smile but her eyes did not quite focus on the image in my hand. When I asked her to look at the plastic alphabet blocks I’d balanced one upon the next, holding my breath as I eased the final triumphantly-high-one almost on the rim of the one before, she nodded blankly. The tower became nothing much. All was really nothing much in that bleary time.

And then I left her and went to school and discovered reading and writing. Which very eventually provided a way to extract me from myself, as if I were a jammed coatsleeve. My story is not unusual. Many of us enter writing after seasons of obscurity. We were once invisible: now we have a way to glimpse ourselves. We were once make-believe; now we are a giant step closer to being actual. I remain fascinated by the fate of those who were deprived of attention during the Lacanian mirror phase. Do such people ever feel permanently real?

Kyoko’s opening essay expresses her allegiance to the nuanced, her revolt against the patronizing, easily digestible, anodyne view of life. What attracted her were the story details—located “always beside the point”—that “didn’t fit into the lesson.” She marks the way that reality must be contorted to serve the story’s purpose: the arbitrary stringency of the choice between only apples and oranges, the film festival that would run Kurosawa and Herzog back to back in obedience to an algorithm. She became a writer as an act of protest. She wanted the story that didn’t propound, and the tale that left its heroine “in an uncomfortable place.”

The pedantic stories Kyoko rejects are like my already-too-small sweater. Perhaps they, too, might be saved by subversion. When Kyoko discovered essay writing, she saw that even an ordinary day can deliver an interesting story and the details that don’t fit into the narrow life lesson gleam with possibility. What is adjacent, what one tumbles into, and what embeds itself and abrades—is what inspires investigation.

Kyoko wants us to see that we constantly misinform ourselves and others about the nature of reality. She wants an art that doesn’t condescend. She prefers histories laced with the shimmering details that point to an opposite outcome or that refuse to yield any outcome at all. In her stories, even a conclusion doesn’t necessarily conclude.

My work has benefited from her widened perspective. She has illuminated for me the anti-fairy tale which has often been my experience. In my story, too, one doesn’t advance from “Before” to “After.” “Before to After” is itself a falsely simplified trope.

I recall an eleven-year-old Bronx girl in a sky-blue princess costume that came with a star wand. Even the black rattling cellophane-windowed box the costume arrived in was a mad delight. Yet, as one rushed along Johnson Avenue with the twinkly costume tied behind neck and waist, a trick-or-treat bag in hand, there arrived into consciousness an awareness of the iron-heavy dungarees worn beneath. Their clamminess. Their chill. They dragged one down to earth. See?, they said. This is reality. You are ungainly. Galumphing. A princess only to the waist. It was, I see now, an experience of disenchantment. And in its own way as predetermined as the stories Kyoko disliked. For our psyches are pedantic authors; they too dictate iron outcomes, pressing us to repeat a narrow pattern that constrains.

But wait! Just as in the story of the sweater, this story also contains an element that works in the opposite direction.

For sparkles drifted from the sky-blue costume onto the pavement. Poorly glued glitter trailed even the ugly duck. A sign seemed to sift down from nature itself, who is the fairy godmother of us all. She knit us. She blocked us into proper form. She set us walking. No matter that the beleaguered parent in her emotional distress could not provide the recognition a child needs. A far older grander mother bestowed radiant signs of approval, a profligate blessing: mirror snippets strewn along the asphalt and merging with the mica that flashes up ahead of one’s toes, as if the very stars echoed underfoot.

Narrative is a path strewn with mirrors. A road that flickers emblems. A way to glimpse what lurks in peripheral vision.

AN INCOMPLETE MAP [KYOKO MORI]

Bonnie is right. I love a story that moves in opposite directions at once, letting hope shimmer in the periphery of disappointment. My decisions in life are often motivated by a similar desire for an unexpected outcome.

I live in Washington, DC, with two extraordinary cats, Miles and Jackson. Although the annual AWP Conference enables me to see dozens of writer friends scattered across the country, I always wish, as the cats eye my packed suitcase with suspicion and begin meowing and prowling around, that I had not signed up to go. But this year, as San Antonio declared a state of emergency due to the coronavirus outbreak and hundreds of participants canceled their plans, I felt enthusiastic about attending. This was going to be the most unusual conference ever: a real adventure.

I had not been to San Antonio since 1995, but the soundscape of the city was instantly familiar. Great-tailed grackles perched in trees, mimicking tornado sirens, mechanical rattles, emergency alert whistles, storm-tossed trees, and plumbing pipes sucking water. What had changed utterly was the way pedestrians navigated the streets. They stopped at intersections to consult the phones in their palms, glanced up briefly, then proceeded.

I’ve never learned to use GPS devices, which give information in fragments. I’ve managed to run in every unfamiliar city I ever visited by getting a running map and a city map from whatever hotel I am staying in and comparing the two: one for detailed turn-by-turn directions, the other for the big picture. By the time I step out the door, I’ve made my own map and sketched it into memory.

But in San Antonio, a map of the whole city was not available anywhere. I cobbled together two six-mile routes along the River Walk by studying the palm-sized running map obtained from the concierge and the two versions of the “Downtown Shopping and Dining Map,” (one from the hotel, the other from the Convention Desk). Once I had run past the reach of these maps, I had to figure out the rest of the run on the run, from the maps posted along the River Walk, most of which were mysteriously missing the “You Are Here” red dot promised by the legend.

Running in San Antonio was like trying to write an essay: you came up with a sketchy incomplete outline, got as far as it took you, and then figured out the rest on the fly. The experience confirmed my allegiance: I preferred the narrative to the lyric in real life as well as in writing. A series of disparate pictures, however vivid, immobilized me with confusion. I could only move through an unfamiliar terrain by following its continuous rise and fall.

Bonnie and I met for the first time on the last day of the Convention, as copresenters on a panel about the role of narrative in nonfiction. What she said about the lyric’s “siren song imagery capable of imparting the sensation of resonant meaning while actually obfuscating,” resonated with me as a writer and a teacher. While the danger of the lyric is to obfuscate, the danger of the narrative is to oversimplify. Still, I can recognize the places in my students’ or my own writing where an essay took the easy way out and often guess what is being evaded. I can point the writer back to where he or she should start over. Faced with a lyric essay that is only “imparting the sensation of resonant meaning,” I cannot explain what is being obfuscated, or how the words on the page might be amplified or rearranged to deliver more meaning. The lyric mode is more private and abstract and, as such, defies discussion. For all the ways it can go wrong, narrative invites discussion.

Before we left San Antonio, Bonnie and I agreed to continue our joint investigation. Little did we know that we would soon be emailing each other from our respective quarantines.

My life in DC remained relatively unchanged during the early days of the pandemic. I don’t have children or aging parents to care for, and I live in a coop building with neighbors I could meet up for coffee in the backyard. Miles and Jackson were having the time of their lives with me, staying home all day except to run. I was sad about the thousands of people getting sick, losing their jobs, and even dying, and worried about the future, but I wanted to conserve my energy for when the siege was over and I could assess how to help myself and others.

Bonnie was in Brooklyn with people getting sick all around her. Her mother—the woman she wrote about with such insight—was in a nursing home, where they couldn’t see each other, and her caretakers were getting sick or quitting. In the morning, when I ran in Rock Creek Park, I thought of Bonnie doing her Zen meditation in her apartment, with her computer connecting her to the Zendo she could no longer visit in person.

What emerged from our collaboration, as we exchanged our quarantine dispatches, was the parallel trajectories of our pasts. When Bonnie portrayed her mother “silently submerged within herself” in their kitchen, I recalled my mother hunched over our kitchen table the winter I was eleven. Like Bonnie’s mother, my mother had been known for being cheerful, stylish, and energetic. She descended into depression suddenly, too, though her trouble started with our family’s move to a new house when I was ten—while Bonnie’s mother’s depression began when both mother and daughter were much younger.

I was moved by Bonnie's story of growing up as an invisible child: a girl who showed her mother the blocks she had stacked into a tower, only to earn a blank nod.

Far from invisible, I was all my mother could see. My father, a business executive, seldom came home from his travels—some for work, others to spend time with his various girlfriends. My mother and I spent our evenings at the kitchen table, my mother with a book, me with homework, until she started crying and telling me, once again, that her life was meaningless. After reading Bonnie’s narrative, I understand. My mother felt invisible to everyone but me. I was the one person who could keep her from disappearing—until I couldn’t. When she killed herself a week after I turned twelve, I wasn’t surprised.

In my “season of obscurity,” I turned to writing with earnestness and despair, starting with diary entries and strange urban fairy-tales (in one of them, I tried to rescue the dilapidated green Volkswagen Beetle that was parked in the same spot for months). It would take me years to write anything that wasn’t terrible, but, eventually, writing would extricate me, too, out of the jammed coat sleeve of nonexistence.

Narrative defies the laws of physics and geometry. While the same story can move in two directions at once to reveal the truth at its core, two parallel narratives across time and distance can suddenly collide to spark a shared revelation. I picture the eleven-year-old girl Bonnie used to be, dressed in a feather-light sky-blue princess costume and sturdy dungarees for Halloween, scattering shiny snippets of mirrors in her wake. Although she doesn’t know it, the girl is a magical creature: half princess, half ugly duckling, better than a mermaid any day. I imagine her flying over the River Walk in San Antonio, showering the grackles with tiny mirrors, as I run past another map from which the red dot has disappeared.

Months into our quarantine, I am exactly where I used to leave my characters at the end of a short story: with the world as I knew it shattered, but the new world I might find or build too uncertain to offer hope, much less, a lesson. But the girl I used to be—the eleven-year-old determined to keep her mother from disappearing—is still in that kitchen, listening. I don’t need a map to show me where I am. Every step, every moment, I am here.

THE GRACKLES IN THE TREES [BONNIE FRIEDMAN]

Early this morning a siren wailed, and I couldn’t tell if it was an ambulance or a police car. This marked a new moment. At the beginning of my quarantine time in Brooklyn, the streets were silent except for two sounds: the birds chirping in the trees and the ambulances carrying the sick to the hospital down the street. After a month there were fewer ambulances. The birds became even more noticeable. They stood invisibly in the now-densely-leaved trees like loyal friends, and I was grateful because every other voice I heard was over the phone or Zoom. Then seven days ago the protests following the murder of George Floyd began. Now every night there is the thrum of a helicopter hanging in the sky over the Barclay Center, twelve blocks away. Its militaristic ratchet dominates, hovering over the citizens gathered on the plaza.

Rereading my dialogue with Kyoko, I am again struck by the importance of adjacent material, as we try to understand more deeply the way that narrative in essay functions. The adjacent material is often what lives in our blind spot, either personally or culturally. It is the grackles in the trees, now sounding like tornado sirens, now like emergency whistles, now like birds. It is the patriarchal systems that made our mothers invisible, each in pain and isolated in her kitchen. The adjacent invites us to move laterally, going neither forwards nor back but at a meditative, exploratory angle that allows what is embedded to be illuminated down to the very pattern of the surrounding material that holds it in place.

How do we work with the adjacent? The narrative essay is fed by it; it contributes particulars that you don’t realize are significant until you revisit your work. More than any other form of composition, essay writing rewards rereading with the analytical scrutiny essential to the revision process. The narrative accumulates more and more of this not-consciously chosen information even as the story presses to complete itself.

Kyoko makes an important point when she says that it’s easier to teach the narrative because we can notice what the author evades while the lyric comes from a more internal place so we teachers might be of less use. Still, we may have set up an opposition when none actually exists. Lyric or narrative, our writing “defies the laws of physics and geometry.” Kyoko is still the girl sitting at her table, determined to keep her mother from disappearing, and she has. And I forever have the red sweater I don’t deserve, this beautiful gift that humbles me, and it is always the moment before it is ruined, when I can live ecstatic within its transforming weave. I daydream on my path, hot, snug, and thinking of Kyoko, who is sometimes adjacent, although it may be years before we can meet.

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Bonnie Friedman is the author of Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction And Other Dilemmas In The Writers’ Life, just reissued from Harper Collins.

Kyoko Mori’s most recent book of nonfiction is Yarn: Remembering The Way Home.