“The Rupture,” by Peggy Shinner (Fiction ’94)
“The Rupture,” an essay by fiction alum Peggy Shinner, was recently featured in the Ocean State Review. Read an excerpt below:
The Rupture
I have long bristled at the suggestion that writing is therapy, and have secretly and now not so secretly, distanced myself from that notion. Writing is work, or the attempt to make work into literature, while therapy is the attempt to banish unhappiness, or at least understand it. Writing, in fact, can be a lifelong commitment to unhappiness, or to quote Philip Roth, writing is frustration…not to mention humiliation. Charles D’Ambrosio, when asked about confessional writing, held it accountable to the demands of language…. [T]he truth of writing…inevitably takes you away from the merely heartfelt….In a way, writing maps a path out of the self.
When my computer was stolen fifteen months ago, along with my back-up hard drive and flash drive—the hard drive was plugged into my computer which was slipped into my backpack sitting on the floor next to my desk (to make for easy transport), and the flash drive was, incidentally, in the backpack—the book I’d been working on was gone. In the days that followed, well-meaning friends, acquaintances, and strangers asked me if I was going to write about it or urged me to. A few dispensed with any hint of suggestion and went straight to the imperative: Write about it! One individual, getting swept up in the drama, said the theft was now part of the story, of what happens to the thief when s/he reads your manuscript… All this sounded almost gleeful, as if a great opportunity awaited me; as if horror would eventually transmute to something like pleasure; as if, delving into the well-known trough/trope of loss and despair, I’d come up with the requisite saving insights, and have a new project to boot.
I did not write about it. I had no desire to write about it. What happened to me and Ann was commonplace and uninteresting. (Ann’s computer was stolen too, but her hard drive, not plugged in, was left behind. Therefore, she had back-ups of all her work.) What could be said about it that, despairingly and maudlinly, hadn’t been said before? Why me? somebody might have cried. Why not? Ann and I retorted when it was our turn. Perhaps more to the point, I didn’t want to be confined to a narrative of trauma. In that narrative, there’s pain, defiance, redemption; or there’s pain, and more pain. My on-going project had been of a different order. I’d wanted to shed the self, or set it aside, so that it became, as D’Ambrosio put it, an angle of vision, a complicating factor, almost impersonal. You must be so angry, friends said. But I wasn’t angry. Somehow my mental processes by-passed the perpetrators, towards whom I might have felt angry, and I hardly thought of them. Instead I was irrationally angry at everyone else. I was angry at Ann, who was suffering but to a lesser extent. The book I’d been working on was gone.
People were, all at once, generous, comforting, off-key, and slyly castigating. Soup in particular was the universal cure-all delivered to our door. Squash soup, potato soup, tomato. Bucatini all’Amatriciana, zucchini bread, brownies, flowers, wine. There were tips for moving forward: [S]it down and do an outline from what you remember while it’s still fresh….you can fill it in later as you think of things. Read the introduction to William Gass’s “Omensetter’s Luck”… in which he describes how his first novel, which he worked on for nearly a decade, was stolen by a colleague and sold to a publisher under the colleague’s name. My dear friend, xxxx, who died this year, wrote a book on secrets. If you’d like to know of it, let me know. Begin again, whatever that means—and looking back: We SHOULD remember to print out our story/novel every day or so. Even though we’d have to retype it all again into our computer—if our work was stolen—at the least we’d still possess our months and years of creativity in hard copy. More than once I was reminded of Maxine Hong Kingston, who’d lost a book manuscript in a fire; Amy Tan, who allegedly experienced the same, only I suspect the consoler was confusing Tan with Kingston, both Chinese-Americans; Nabokov, who would write a novel and then put it in a safe, and write it again without referring to what he had.
How can I help? my mentor asked from many states away. Time to glean.
I knew what glean meant but what did he mean? Glean, to gather or pick up ears of corn that have been left by the reapers. [H]ow much has yet to be gleaned off this stony field. You’ll get through this hard time, he’d once said years ago, as we walked on the edge of a prairie—a hard time about which I have no lasting memory—and then there will be another, he added, and in that moment, with the goldenrod turning to seed and the wind cutting our faces, I saw that time would be relentless and also that it would pass.
Read the essay in its entirety here: https://oceanstatereview.org/2021/04/10/peggy-shinner-the-rupture/
