What more appropriate way to kick off this year-long adventure than with Patricia Foster’s collection “Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul.” In this beautiful, decades-old work, twenty women contribute essays on a variety of topics, issues that seem at once universal and yet particular to the female experience. From weight issues, motherhood and fertility, race, and self-esteem, these women share personal anguish and triumph.
As Nancy Mairs writes in her essay “Carnal Acts”, “The voice is the creature of the body that produces it.” Just so, this collection is full of distinctly female voices sharing thoughts on the bodies that made them. And it is heart wrenching and heart-warming all at once. I feel I can’t improve upon the words I’ve read. I struggle simply to tie a few selections together as I let my mind continue to mull the messages it has received. And so, for now, I take the easy way out, closing this entry with two excerpts from Lucy Grealy’s essay “Mirrors”.
“On one level I understood that the image of my face was merely that, an image, a surface that was not directly related to any true, deep definition of the self. But I also knew that it is only through image that we experience and make decisions about the everyday world, and I was not always able to gather the strength to prefer the deeper world over the shallower one. I looked for ways to relate the two, to find a bridge that would allow me access to both, anything no matter how tenuous, rather than ride out the constant swings between peace and anguish. The only direction I had to go in to achieve this was simply to strive for a state of awareness and self-honesty that sometimes, to this day, rewards me and sometimes exhausts me.”
“I once though that truth was an eternal, that once you understood something it was with you forever. I know now that this isn’t so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things. Society is no help; the images it gives us again and again want us only to believe that we can most be ourselves by looking like someone else, leaving our own faces behind to turn into ghosts that will inevitably resent us and haunt us.”
chronic bibliophilia 