Books

“Licked by Fire”

Sallie Tisdale’s essays use elaborate metaphors to explore the morality of memoir. 

meat cooking.
Meat, cooked and raw; fire; shadow—these are the totemic images sliding across Sallie Tisdale’s curiously dappled prose.

moonbase/amanaimagesRF/Thinkstock

In the title essay of her ensorcelling anthology Violation, Sallie Tisdale observes that “most writers approach a new story like a boxer circling the ring—with a certain reluctance to engage and break the spell of what might be.” Anyone stepping up to review Tisdale’s work faces a similar problem. She catches so many strings and braids so many tones into her mostly autobiographical pieces that you don’t want to diminish her by attempting description. Her dense but light-fingered language holds a dozen wiggling and contradictory ideas in suspension. To enumerate them one by one, as a critic must, feels like bloodying a face or trying to play a symphony on a chainsaw. It feels like plucking all the threads out of a tapestry so that you can no longer see the woven image. It feels—and of course, she’s set us up for this—like violation.

Tisdale, a nurse practitioner in Portland, Oregon, has written eight books, the most famous of which, Talk Dirty to Me, disclosed her “intimate philosophy of sex.” If you haven’t read it, you’re probably getting the wrong idea: Rather than scandalizing readers with throbbing flesh, Tisdale offers a patient, ruminative account of arousal, allowing meaning to accrete in tiny steps. Violation is also accretive. It collects over 30 years of essays from their glistening podiums at the New Yorker and Harper’s and the Antioch Review, including the pieces for which Tisdale is best known: “Fetus Dreams,” originally published in Harper’s as “We Do Abortions Here,” “The Happiest Place on Earth,” about Disneyland, and “A Weight That Women Carry,” about the endlessness of dieting. There are also lovely meditations on the aggravations and remunerations of teaching high schoolers to write; on the search for elephant pheromones (you will learn pungent trivia terms like musth, a state of aggression in bull elephants, and flehmen, the snarling expression horses, cats, and elephants make when inhaling a chemical trace); on family and bodies and adolescence and memory and agony and justice.

Sallie Tisdale.
Sallie Tisdale.

Campbell Salgado Studio

But Tisdale is best when writing about writing (though you may suspect she’s writing about writing even when not writing about writing). She finds words for the fluid, untrammeled experience of it when it’s working, and for the frustration when it’s not. “I climb slowly up the scaffold of old work, yesterday’s good sentence or two,” she says, nailing it. Or: “I write in bursts—intuitively driven torrents—followed by careful repair.” At one point, she pins down an anguish familiar to anyone who has ever been edited: “I’ve been told …. This isn’t the story you meant to write, this isn’t how your story really ends, this isn’t what you mean to say. I know what a childish grief this is: I don’t know how.

Tisdale knows how. She knows how to tickle the part of the brain that “sees” what isn’t visible, like when “white metal display cases” in a butcher shop curve away “like the fabric of space.” She hints at the glamour of firefighters, to a child, by summoning the youthful pleasure of onomatopoeia in a siren’s “long whooing call.” “When we were done,” she writes of her family’s meat dinners, “our plates were littered with the rags of bones.” At once sensual and erudite, the description alludes to Yeats’ “rag and bone shop of the heart,” where the mute leavings of experience await transformation into art.  

It is an apt place to linger when thinking about Tisdale. Meat, cooked and raw; fire; shadow—these are the totemic images sliding across her curiously dappled prose. In one piece, she cites the philosopher Bachelard on fire’s “physics of reverie”: the way flickering flames prod the mind to wander. “I still sit cross-legged and dreaming,” she continues, “watching the hovering flies of light that float before me in a cloud.” If, as Bachelard said, “that which has been licked by fire has a different taste in the mouths of men,” the life material licked by Tisdale’s imagination and craft also acquires an odd flavor. It ripples; it’s never all one thing. Tisdale favors transitional words like quiescent, nascent, and calescent to make sentences quiver with dreamlike mutability; they are always changing and becoming.

But this is truly summer. Paul is planting summer wheat, and winter dreams are laid bare and clean in wet shadows, to sprout along the earth’s long curving beam. A veil stirs with the breeze of the day’s ordered passage—and behind it, shapes I can’t make out. …. The sun falls across the floor, I am watching the water splash in the sink, and the silence is gone. I hear murmurs in the damp earth below. The breeze is turning to wind and it fills with sighs and sloughing words too low to understand, the whisper of fruit ripened past its glory, tearing the skin, adding to the world’s insistent roar. I stand in the kitchen alone, holding the glass, shot with light.

No, you go shatter the might be of that passage with interpretation. I’ll say instead that Tisdale cares about the moral as well as the technical problems of writing. If fire equals creative imagination, she is the cook applying the flame, watching the flesh change color. In one essay, identifying with meat wrapped in butcher paper, she considers the “depth of betrayal” entailed by searing and eating animals: “It feels as if I’m cutting my own flesh … and that I’ll choke to death upon it, like a prisoner fed his own treacherous, boiled, tongue.” More often, the singed skin belongs to Tisdale’s family members. “If we aren’t careful,” she concedes, memoir “can make us into monsters.”

Prometheus’ theft of fire, the original violation, was a son’s rebellion against his father. Tisdale writes about her firefighter dad, an emotionally distant alcoholic. She incurs her sister’s anger, which she also writes about. One sororal dispute arises after Tisdale publishes a story in which “I describe her at age six as ‘squeamish, chubby, pale, and black-haired—she’s the one left out, the baby.’ ” “I was not,” Tisdale reports her sister protesting. “Not like that.” So the memoirist returns to a box of photographs and resurrects the one she had in mind. She discovers, she says, a child “pretty and dark with charming bee-stung lips and black hair falling in big, natural curls. She isn’t plump; I was wrong; how could I have remembered it that way?”

Natural curls? Bee-stung lips? Is this accurate—or is Tisdale, the memoirist, learning her lesson about depictive politesse? But she explains: Originally, “I was wrong and I was right, for this is what I meant by that word [chubby]—fragility…girlish weakness in a world where weakness was lethal.” The false flesh was pressed into conveying a larger truth, one Tisdale continued to stand by. In memoir, what’s provable doesn’t matter and what matters isn’t provable. How do you establish ethical rules for a genre where truth, fact, and fiction interact so unpredictably?   

Tisdale suggests that an autobiographer’s power lies not so much in the details she exposes as in the way her voice and viewpoint color those innocent data points. “Nonfiction is never exactly true—the writer’s own perfume lingers on every word, gently and insistently filling the reader’s head with one person’s singular world,” she says. Yet this scent, hanging in the language like smoke, conjures “a truth, some truth or other, some portion of it.” Serving up a subjective and partial bit of information as honestly as possible represents the best a writer can hope for. 

Which, admittedly, is not much. Whether you adhere to what is or what might be, Tisdale seems to argue, violation will occur. The writer transgresses against herself in the moment or against who she will be after the story is written down. She transgresses against her “characters.” She leaves the material too raw or chars it black. She dances around her opponent looking for ways to control him without exposing herself, to strike him without ending up facedown on the mat. She throws a punch.

Violation by Sallie Tisdale. Hawthorne.

See all the pieces in the Slate Book Review.