average life

One could easily describe Sarah Vowell as short, but she isn’t so below one’s gaze that her stature calls attention to itself.  Despite her height, the author of The Partly Cloudy Patriot and The Wordy Shipmates stared straight over the heads of her audience, even when she addressed an individual directly.  After reading from her latest historical book, Unfamiliar Fishes, which focuses on the colonization of the Hawaiian Islands by the United States, she took questions from the audience.

Several questions focused on Vowell’s writing style, which often focuses on the significance of small moments or attaches sentiment to (probably) insignificant artifacts.  After discussing her research for Assassination Vacation, a book that in which she writes about all of the U.S. presidents who have the distinction of being shot while in office (with the exception of JFK, he being far too recent to capture her imagination), she describes the only moment in which President Garfield has a glimmer of non-dullness in his writings is when he mentions his love of books.  He would sit sideways in his reading chair sideways (“like a teenager”, she describes) to the point that the chair is tilted to this day.  It’s those insights and moments that are characteristically Sarah Vowell.

One question asked her how she looks for those moments, to which she replied, “you can’t really look for them,” insisting that they just happen and you have to be paying attention in order to recognize them since they will often occur in ways you won’t expect.

Another audience member asked, “so, do you make those connections while researching or later?  I mean, when do you-”

“Make mountains out of molehills?” she interrupted and admitted that many times those insights happen in hindsight, noting the metaphor she used in Unfamiliar Fishes of the strangler fig she saw in Hawaii representing the U.S. expanding and driving out everything it touches wasn’t the first thing she thought of when she saw the tree.  When she first saw the tree with its twisted roots and sprawling branches she thought, “that looks like my brain.”

She explained that it was all just the process of writing.  “The parts of my life where I am most alive is when I’m sad,” she explained to the chuckling audience.  “I mean, there are days where I wake up, go to a matinée with my friend, do random stuff, and then go to bed, but I don’t write about it.  But that was a good day.  Or when I’m spending time and happy with my family.  We enjoy it, but no one wants to read about that and I don’t want to write about it.”

I extremely enjoyed the evening, not only because I love listening to Sarah Vowell read her writing in her own voice, but also because her writing process as she described it was one of the most similar to my own that I’ve come across.  True, Ms. Vowell is an accomplished author of historical non-fiction and I blog…sometimes…but some of the ideas are still the same.  I essentially will take a moment from my life (preferably from the mid-to-far distant past) and built a narrative around it.  I sometimes recognize those moments when I’m experiencing them, but other times those moments are recognized later.  The narrative is non-fiction, but liberties are taken with chronology, contexts, and ideas in order to make the narrative more interesting.  Did the story happen?  Yes.  Did the story happen in that exact order, was a conversation included in its entirety, or were my thoughts represented exactly as I thought them at the time?  …Maybe, if they help the story, but if not they are omitted, rearranged, or reshaped.

I also tend to focus on the parts of my life where there has been the most conflict, emotion, or, at least, cause for mockery simply because it makes for a better story.  While I’m a supporter of journaling, this blog (and my past blogs) are written to be read by someone other than myself.  While I had a wonderful time cooking for my friends when they came over to watch Conference, or spending the afternoon hanging out with the Marrieds and their kids while they did craft project, I don’t write it, because it isn’t a good story.  But they were good days.

As such, one could easily get a very skewed view of what my life is like with all of its angst and confusion, but the reality is that I’m actually quite happy.  Of course, this hasn’t always been the case and there were several periods of my life where I was very unhappy, indeed, even for long periods of time, but things haven’t been like that for quite a while.  My life, fortunately, has been quite good in the past few years.  I have wonderful friends, married and single (just covering myself there), with whom I feel at home.  I like my job and it affords me the opportunity to do things like fly to Seattle for the weekend on a whim (May! Whoohoo!).  My life isn’t perfect and there are days when I feel sad, lonely, or whatever, but those days are the exception, not the rule.  Most of my life is happy.  Just don’t expect me to write too much about it.

Because happy is boring.

:-)