Give
them pleasure—the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.
–Alfred Hitchcock
*
A summer
night in Brooklyn. It is 1963. My father stands outside in the backyard,
tending the barbecue near the rose of Sharon that grows along the fence
separating our backyard from our neighbor’s. Next to him is a collie: what I
called a “Lassie dog” as a child. Like the one that fanged my upper lip and
cheek when I was in the first grade, so I needed stitches.
A
disembodied voice beckons me. “Look over there—at the man in the window.” I
glance over to see a shadowy profile in the ground-floor window of my parents’
bedroom.
It’s
Alfred Hitchcock! His bald head and round belly. The same figure I see at the
start of his TV show. In the semi-dark, lit up by street lamps that flicker
burnt orange, all I can see is the head and upper torso of this darkened figure
at the window.
“That
man,” the voice whispers. “You see that man . . . He has no bottom half.”
At which
point I wake myself up. In those first moments, in the dark, I don’t know where
I am. Then I become aware of my sister asleep beside me. I sit up in bed until
my breathing slows, and I look over to make sure there is no one at the window.
*
My
Hitchcock dream is the only recurring nightmare I had as a child. Or the only
one I remember having had. And don’t dreams rely on our remembering them?
“All the
things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams,” wrote Elias Canetti. What
things have I forgotten that this dream—Hitchcock’s truncated profile—wants me
to remember?
Perhaps
something about the absence of limbs or body parts, which always terrified me
as a child. Or else it is a stand-in for other kinds of forgotten
absences—amputations of memory. Memory itself being always partial and
therefore, in a sense, amputated.
Or is
Hitchcock, for me, the embodiment of fear itself?
Sometimes,
dreamwork can take a very long time to begin. For me it has taken 50 years.
*
Now I
see before me the wizened mother of our next-door neighbor in Brooklyn, where I
grew up. I lived with my mother, my father, and my older sister on Glenwood
Road in Flatlands from the time I was ten. A place where there was no glen, no
wood, only roads and numbered streets with attached, two-family brick houses
like the one we lived in, a cluster of apartment buildings nearby that we
called the Projects, and a few faded green- or yellow-shingled homes like my
neighbor’s, whose frail, elderly mother scarcely ventured outside. I saw her
only a few times. She was tiny, with a fragile head like a bobble-head doll’s
that might wobble and break.
She
stands outside by the gate in front of her son’s house, as though that is all
she has the energy for, always holding up a flowered handkerchief to cover her
neck and chin. Each time I study her carefully without appearing to, and each
time I wonder why she holds up that handkerchief.
Until
the one time she does not.
What I
see just once—and what I keep on seeing—is the absence of the bottom part of
her face. She has no lower jaw. No chin.
I
probably ran into the house. I am sure I never spoke to her; I am not sure she
could speak. But the memory of her, or the memory of what I thought I saw, is
indelible.
*
From
Hitchcock I learned early on that nightmares could be made real. That we cover
up an absence to suggest a presence. That a normal suburban family may have a
serial killer for an uncle. Or that a neighbor across the way may kill his wife
and dispose of the body in plain sight. Hitchcock understood absence. He
understood the power of the partial view: that a profile, more than a full
face, could haunt.
My
childhood was filled with absence, haunted by partial views.
Is
Hitchcock, for me, the embodiment of fear itself? Sometimes, dreamwork can take
a very long time to begin. For me it has taken fifty years.
As a
child, I watched Hitchcock’s movies with my parents, lying prone on their bed.
My mother Selma was so drugged up with antipsychotics that I picture her mostly
lying in bed. My father Irving was a traveling salesman who often acted like a
kid to entertain us, telling jokes and dancing around the kitchen table. As a
teenager I watched those movies with my older sister Marla in the bedroom we
shared. As an adult, I watched them yet again. Hitchcock, whose TV program
Alfred Hitchcock Presents entered my neighborhood through dreams.
Now I am
returning to Hitchcock in order to make sense of the painful episodes in my
life, which often feel as distant and oneiric as a movie. As though I were not
only the creator of my story but also its nocturnal spectator in the darkened
theater of memory. I have chosen Hitchcock as both lens and shield to help me
face trauma: to touch the wounds that have, to reverse Shakespeare’s Romeo,
never felt a scar.
Yet I
know that no memory is fixed. That our memories are not static pictures we
summon up from some mental filing cabinet. Memories, as we now understand, are
creations we construct in the moment, influenced by context and motivation.
I am the
director behind the camera each time I conjure up and reconstruct a scene from
my past. Braiding together my reading of Hitchcock with my reading of my life,
I hope the context of each scene will enrich and inform the other. Like
Hitchcock, who stepped inside the frames of his movies, I am stepping inside
the frame for more than a walk-on role in mine.
__________________________________
From
Hitchcock Blonde: A Cinematic Memoir by Sharon Dolin. Reprinted with the
permission of the publisher, Terra Nova Press. Copyright © 2020 by Sharon
Dolin.
Imagine
a memoir that braids together insights about Alfred Hitchcock's movies with the
narrative of a woman's life: scenes of growing up in Brooklyn in the Sixties
and Seventies as the daughter of a schizophrenic mother and a traveling
salesman father, adolescent sexual traumas, and adult botched marriages and
relationships— all refracted through the lens of ten of Alfred Hitchcock's
iconic movies.
In each
chapter, the narrator—an award-winning poet—trains her idiosyncratic lens on a
different film and then onto the uncanny connections they conjure up from her
own life. A singular cliffhanging tale, reminiscent in style of Azar Nafisi's
Reading Lolita in Tehran and Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk.
"Sharon
Dolin's trademark quick-wit and candor are infused with an uncanny mix of flirt
and fury." - Terrance Hayes
"Often
startling, full of surprises, this one-of-a-kind memoir is both eerie and
entertaining. It is a candid experiment in memory retrieval with the aid of
Hitchcock movies, until finally what we get is a fusion, life recalled as a
riveting dream film: part-horror, part-romance." - Phillip Lopate
"Sharon
Dolin performs a miracle in her memoir, deconstructing Hitchcock films and
using the shards to help build a mosaic of coming of age in 1960s and '70s
Brooklyn and living a woman's life in landscapes as diverse as Hitchcock's own.
Every chapter glimmers and surprises with its insights into Hitchcock's scenes
and his personal obsessions, which Dolin then redirects to an exploration of
identity, sexuality, gender roles, and mental illness. This is a rich American
story!" - Bonnie Jo Campbell
"Sharon
Dolin's candid memoir of mid-century working class Brooklyn (and beyond) is one
only a poet could have written. Not because it is "poetic"—in fact it
is sharply narrated, without gloss, even offering the hair-raising twists of a
mystery novel. The echo of the Hitchcock movies that shapes the book's chapters
is no mere literary device. It's an uncanny, captivating choral presence that brings
depth of field to this history of family life and erotic urgency." -
Patricia Hampl
Sharon
Dolin is the award-winning author of six poetry collections, most recently
Manual for Living and Whirlwind. She is the recipient of numerous grants and
awards, including the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress,
the Gordon Barber Award from the Poetry Society of America and her translation
work has been supported by Institut Ramon Llull and the PEN/Heim Translation
Fund. Her fourth book, Burn and Dodge won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
in 2008. Follow her on Twitter @SharonDolin and for more information visit her
website: sharondolin.com. She lives in New York City.
Jacki
Lyden is the author of the acclaimed memoir Daughter of the Queen of Sheba,
about growing up with her mentally ill mother.
She is a former NPR correspondent and host of several decades. She is also a Rosalynn Carter Fellow for
Mental Health Journalism, and founded
the writers workshop “Love Comes in at the Eye” in Connemara, Ireland in
2017. She is a board member of the
Cheuse Writing Center at George Mason University. She has won numerous journalism awards,
interviewed scores of authors and poets,
and is working on her next memoir.
McNallyJackson, Independent Booksellers, Presents:
Sharon Dolin (Virtual Book Launch) In Conversation with Jacki Lyden. June 16, 2020.
I was introduced to Sharon Dolin’s work by my thesis
advisor while completing an MFA last year, so I was already a fan of her poetry
before reading Hitchcock Blonde: A Cinematic Memoir (Terra Nova Press). A poet
myself, I was particularly interested on seeing how her story unfolded in
prose. It was an intense, yet rewarding, experience—seeing the similarities
between our lives’ big catalytic absences, especially those brought on by a
mother’s mental illness, dealt with such grace and emotional poignancy.
It’s easy to fall in love with this book. Ten Hitchcock
films serve as the book’s framing device. She ingeniously weaves his
filmography–a formative part of her childhood–and leading women into her own
narrative, helping her paint a picture of what it was like to grow up in 1960s
Brooklyn with a schizophrenic mother and traveling salesman father, and work through
romantic and creative turmoil in her adulthood. Despite the difficult themes,
Hitchcock Blonde is well-paced and engrossing, a vivid attempt at getting to
the bottom of the “memory-wounds” that have shaped her art and who she is.
Amid
this terrible pandemic and publisher deadlines, Dolin made the time to
correspond with me via email earlier this year to discuss the memoir, the power
of metaphor, and the relevance of Rear Window to our current way of living and
connecting with others.
1. What called you to write a memoir at this particular
moment in your career and life?
I have been writing poetry for many decades and I always
like to set myself new challenges. When I began writing this memoir seven years
ago, I was looking for a long-term project for writing about my life, but one
that would, as Emily Dickinson advises, “[t]ell all the truth but tell it
slant.” When the idea for writing a memoir through the lens of ten Alfred
Hitchcock movies occurred to me, I leapt at the creative challenge it
presented. I see my use of Hitchcock as akin to metaphor, where two things are
compared that have similarities as well as differences. Of course there were
formal challenges involved. How much should I switch back and forth between my
discussion of the movie and my discussion of my life? I wanted to give readers
two kinds of experience: intellectual as well as immersive. First, there is the
aesthetic, intellectual experience of seeing, for instance, Miss Froy in The
Lady Vanishes, as a metaphor for my vanishing mother. But then, I also wanted
to give the memoir reader the emotionally immersive experience of being along
with me the one time, as a child, I visited my mother in the psychiatric ward
of a hospital and felt as though the mother I knew had vanished. Here, of
course, both the aesthetic and the emotional should converge in the reading if
I have been at all successful.
2. What were some of the most challenging and surprising
aspects of writing this book, both during the thick of it and after having a
completed draft?
I was most challenged and surprised in the act of writing
this memoir by those parts of my life I had avoided facing: the infidelities of
my father, for instance, and the cocaine use of my fiancé. In working on Rear
Window, the challenge of having to face the truth of my dad’s infidelities
shocked me into awareness when I realized that there were similarities between
Thorwald the travelling salesman and my father the travelling salesman. It took
the writing of the chapter for me to make these chilling connections, regardless
of how many times I had seen this movie before. The same was true for
Spellbound, where I had to face my fiancé’s cocaine addiction as being much
more pronounced and probably responsible for what I had previously never
understood as psychotic behavior. It was through watching the threatening,
violent, unpredictable behavior of Dr. Edwardes that I was able to reach this
unhappy realization.
After completing the book and in revising it, I also came
to acknowledge how much my being the daughter of a schizophrenic mother had
shaped me and had influenced my relationship choices. Of course, these moments
of discovery are what every writer is in search of, no matter how painful. I
write to discover what I had not noticed or known before. And it was through
the lens of Hitchcock that I was able to make these discoveries. Oddly, I doubt
I would have been able to see my life as clearly if I had only looked at it
directly. I cannot overstate the power of metaphor (the slanting gaze) as a way
to make us see clearly.
3. Did you share sections of the book with family or
people you wrote about? What is your policy for writing about people close to
you?
As a writer, I have always felt that I had the right to
write about anyone, even the people closest to me. I have always exercised that
level of freedom in my poetry, for instance, writing poems about my mother’s
schizophrenia in my first poetry collection Heart Work. I don’t go out of my
way to show my writing to anyone, or to get their permission. The most I have
done for this memoir is ask if they would prefer a pseudonym and I have changed
almost all of the names, aside from my parents’, to protect the living and the
dead. Most people have a narcissistic streak, I have found, and feel flattered
to have themselves appear in my writing, even if it is not in the most
flattering light.
4. Who is Hitchcock to you now? Has your perception of
him/his work or anyone else featured in the book changed after writing the
memoir?
I have had to learn, over and over again in my life, that
there is a huge difference between the person and the creator. I think
Hitchcock is a genius when it comes to filmmaking, but I think he was a
deplorable man, particularly in his behavior towards certain women, such as
Tippi Hedren, which I mention in my chapter on The Birds. I don’t think my
attitude toward Hitchcock the filmmaker has shifted. I love his movies. I have
always loved his movies, and even after repeated viewings, I can return to them
in the same way I return to certain paintings and songs that I love.
My favorite movie remains Rear Window. And now that we are
all caught on Zoom or Webex or some other on-line platform where our hunger for
human connection has all made us voyeurs to some extent, the movie seems as
contemporary as ever. Here I am, sheltering at home in New York City, where I
find myself peering into the windows of those in the same meeting with me—very
much the way Jeffries, caught inside his apartment with his broken leg, peers
inside the rooms of his neighbors across the way. I don’t expect to witness a
murder, but I do acknowledge the minor titillation of catching someone slightly
off-guard as I am watching. Of course, if my video is live, I continue to have
to grapple with that somewhat uncomfortable feeling that eyes are also upon me.
5. Dreamwork and recurring nightmares are featured
prominently in the book. Could you talk about the importance of these
subconscious patterns and their role in your work as a whole?
Dreams are gifts to us from the subconscious mind, just as
poems are. And when a dream recurs, I take it as a sign that something
particularly potent wants to communicate itself to me. Thus, it became a
natural when I had hit upon the idea of writing a memoir using Hitchcock that I
return to the recurring childhood nightmare I used to have in which Hitchcock’s
truncated body figured. Writing that opening section, “Hitchcock in Brooklyn,”
allowed me to do dreamwork on that childhood nightmare, and to make the
connection between Hitch’s truncated body and other kinds of truncated and
partial views in my childhood, as well as to suggest the larger point about memory
itself always being a truncated and partial view.
And of course there is something dreamlike—or, rather,
nightmarish—about many Hitchcock movies. So I am doing dreamwork on Hitch as
much as I am doing dreamwork on my own dreams and, by extension, on my own
life. Life is a dream, wrote Calderón, as the memoir reminds us.
In the Spellbound chapter, I record the poem that emerged
out of a dream, another gift from my subconscious mind, where my mother and
dead lover were connected. I think the poem, more than prose, is better able to
gesture at the rudiments of desire: first for the mother and then for the
lover.
At this point in my life, I don’t often remember my
dreams, so I was thrilled when, after working on this memoir for so long, and
right after completing a draft of Vertigo, the final movie I discuss in the
book, that I should gift myself with a dream—a rather positive one—which I
describe in the coda “Hitchcock in Manhattan.” Like most memoirs, mine does not
focus on the moments of joy in my life, so I am particularly happy that my
dream allowed me to end on a note of hope.
6. Where
do you go from here? What is your next project?
Aside
from working on poems, my next prose project will be as different in style and
tone from this Hitchcock Blonde as possible. My next project is a memoir about
dogs, which I began working on last summer, with the growing awareness that my
14-year-old dog was nearing his last days. It is a book with much greater
levity—one that allows me to write about my life with dogs and my life as a
parent and to draw some unusual—even amusing—parallels.
Conversation
with Sharon Dolin on her memoir Hitchcock Blonde. By Claudia Acevedo.
Vesto PR & Books , June 10, 2020.
1) “The
Man Who Knew Too Much and the Girl Who Knew Too Little” (Vol. 17 No. 1) is an
intricately braided essay about the fear of being kidnapped by your mother,
your father-the-rescuer-who-may-yet-turn-abandoner and the role pop culture
plays in triggering memories. Your title invokes all of these complexities and
more. How did you come about it?
I had
already decided I was going to write a book-length memoir using Alfred Hitchcock’s
movies as the lens through which I examine my life. The idea for this essay
came to me quickly: that it would focus on the early experiences I had of
feeling like I was being kidnapped. I knew I had to start off with the earlier
version of the movie and the mother’s shock at her daughter being kidnapped,
then the viewer’s experience of seeing the look of terror on the face of the
girl, adolescent and blonde, as she is being kidnapped. I knew the leap to my
own experience would come after that. As for the part of the title “the Girl
Who Knew Too Little,” it is true that the experience of childhood is often the
experience of having little or no agency. Parents just do things for or to
their children and make decisions without consulting them. In my case, the
consequences were more harrowing because it was my schizophrenic mother who was
making those choices. Or, my somewhat overburdened, simple-minded father. My
use of pop culture? Hitchcock is in my blood the way, say, the poet Whitman is
in my blood. They were mainstays in my youth and have continued to be so.
2) This
essay in Five Points is the first chapter of your upcoming memoir Hitchcock
Blonde. Can you share a little about the memoir with us?
Of
course! Hitchcock Blonde: A Cinematic Memoir is my attempt to read my life
through ten Alfred Hitchcock movies and to read Hitchcock movies through the
lens of my life. No other director has been such an integral part of my life
since childhood. Hitchcock gave me a way in to writing about my life by using
this very large metaphor. Perhaps the braiding back and forth between
discussing an aspect of Hithcock’s movie, discussing an aspect of my life, is
what allowed me to handle some of my emotionally fraught memories. I needed
distance. I also needed a different way in. Who needs to read or write another
memoir about a schizophrenic mother? Of course, the memoir does move on to
other chapters of my life, up to the present, though I suppose you could say my
mother haunts all of them.
3) Did
you always know this was going to be part of a larger work, or was it written
as stand alone? In either case, how do you think that affected writing it?
I always
knew it was going to be part of a larger work. I wrote it as a companion
chapter to “The Lady Vanishes and the Absent Mother.” I knew that my memoir had
to begin with my relationship to my schizophrenic mother. It seemed too
difficult to cover all that ground in just one chapter, so I divided things up;
the choice of which movies to use came to me almost instantly. In The Lady
Vanishes, I focused on the times my mother disappeared into a mental hospital
and then, from the time I was ten, her disappearance (sedation) under the
influence of too much medication. In The Man Who Knew Too Much essay, I focused
specifically on the terrifying experiences I had when my mother would have a
breakdown and try to run away with me. In some ways, it was easier to write
because I wrote it second. I gave myself permission to use the term “kidnapped”
as loosely as possible, as a metaphor for my experience. Thus, the sections
about my mother’s abductions of me, my time as a model, and the ending with my
time at a Fresh-Air camp—in all of which I felt the way a kidnapped child
might.
4) Your
essay weaves in and out of both Alfred Hitchcock’s 1934 film The Man Who Knew
Too Much and the 1956 American remake. In both versions, you identify with the
kidnapped child. Did your mother ever watch these films? If so what was her
reaction? If not, what do you think she would have thought of them? Your
father?
I
watched the Hollywood Technicolor version with my parents, I’m sure of it. By
then, my mother was heavily sedated and didn’t react much at all. Nor did my
dad. And it took me until the writing of this memoir for me to identify with
the kidnapped child in more than a hypothetical way. That has been the amazing,
sometimes painful, journey I have had in writing this memoir: I made
connections that I otherwise would not have made to these movies because of the
context in which I was viewing them. As soon as you rub two ideas up against
each other, in this case my life against Hitchcock, the commonalities spring to
the surface more and more readily. It is the same way we make metaphor, a basic
human impulse.
5) I was
fascinated by your concept of the ‘good-enough-mother’. In the essay, your
sister Marla and you have an interesting relationship in the essay. She makes
you cry and at one point you attack her with a hammer, yet you two sisters are allies
when it comes to you mother, for instance when Marla runs to the police to
report that “Our mother is running away with us.” Would you say there is such a
thing as a ‘good enough sister/sibling’?
The
good-enough mother is, of course, not my idea, but that of the famous
psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott. It’s an interesting question to think about in
terms of my sister. I suppose, in relation to what went on with my mother, she
was. My sister protected me, she took care of me, she often allowed me to accompany
her and her friends to the movies. I can remember riding down Kings Highway (on
the sidewalk) in a line of bicycles, with the older kids like my sister up in
front and the younger ones like me taking up the rear. So we played together
with children of all ages. There was less segregation by age back in the
Sixties, at least in my Brooklyn neighborhood. So, yes, I’d have to say she was
a good-enough sister during my childhood, though I always felt keenly how
different we were and still are from each other.
6) Has
your sister read your essay?
She has
read it. I was afraid of her reaction. Actually, she quite liked it but had no
memory of the hammer incident. It confirms the idea that things happen to each
of us differently, and we remember differently, even if we grew up in the same
household.
7) At
one point in the essay you say “Knowing too much and knowing too little.” One
would think that it is always good to know too much. Would you agree? Or does
knowing too little serve as a sort of cushion when it comes to unpleasant
memories?
As a
young girl, I knew far too little, and wished I had understood more. For
example, I am sure no one asked me if I wanted to be a child model or explained
to me that I might be in the company of grown-up strangers, that this was all
make-believe, just for the sake of a photo, and I would get to go home with my
own mother. Perhaps I would have been less frightened when I was suddenly
thrust into the hands of a stranger or had water poured on my head. In a later
chapter, the one on Rear Window (which is being published this spring in
Witness), I struggle with knowing too much. Yes, I think it is possible to know
too much. Not about political assassinations, which is what happens in The Man
Who Knew Too Much; there, in both versions, the father and mother save a
foreign diplomat from being assassinated because of their knowing too much.
Knowing too much in terms of the family is possible. You’ll have to read that
chapter to see what I mean.
8) What
was the process of writing this essay? How did you tackle revision?
The best
advice I got for writing prose was from another poet who has written several
books of fiction. Victoria Redel said (and I’m paraphrasing here), just write
one scene, one moment at a time. Then you can figure out afterwards how it all
fits together. So that’s what I did. Revision is all a blur to me now. In
looking back at the drafts of this chapter that I saved, I see it always began
with a quick-paced description of the shots in the movie of the mother and then
her daughter. Some times, my edits amounted to what to cut out, what to leave
in. There’s so much more to my childhood than the part that focuses on my
mother. The challenge was to remain focused on the way my memories were
triggered by these specific movies. The biggest eureka moment for me in this
essay was my decision to put together two memories: that of belting my sister
in the stomach with a hammer and the one time my dad threatened to have me
hospitalized. Frankly, I don’t remember when he made that threat, other than
the fact that it was after I had been crying for too long a time, for him to
take. It made sense to connect those two episodes. No memoir is entirely
factual. I took my method from Vivian Gornick, who admits she condensed many walks
with her mother into the one she describes in Fierce Attachments.
9) You are such a prolific poet. How was the
experience of writing an essay? Did the poetic form inform the essay’s
structure in any way?
I’ve
written literary essays, even an entire dissertation, but writing a prose
memoir is an entirely different enterprise. I began the process by enrolling in
a 4-session class on writing memoir with Wendy Salinger at the 92nd Street Y,
where I taught poetry workshops for 20 years. The class gave me a structure. I
understood I would have to write dialogue, probably the most unnatural thing
for me to do. I had to push myself to write 10 pages. How was I going to turn
it into 20? But I did, knowing I had an audience who would be reading it. I
also knew where I would begin: with a recurring childhood nightmare, which
still opens the book. The rest was a mystery and writing poetry made me
comfortable with the unknown.
10)
Which medium do you prefer?
Poetry.
It is my native tongue. Prose will always feel a bit like I’m speaking a
foreign language. A difficult one.
11) When
did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I never
wanted to be a writer. I just wrote. I never questioned what I was doing. It
seemed as natural a thing for me to do, particularly writing poems, as skipping
rope or playing stoopball.
12) Can
you tell us about your typical writing day? Do you have a routine?
When I
left a teaching job in order to finish up the memoir, I remember worrying about
how I would structure my day. I read a book called Daily Rituals: How Artists
Work, by Mason Currey to see what other artists did. It consists of very short
chapters about lots of artists, writers, philosophers, scientists and their
daily work routine. In about 90% of the examples, the artist has a very rigid
schedule. For instance, every morning Flannery O’Connor had breakfast with her
mother at 7 a.m. after morning prayers, then they both went to Mass, and then
she came home and wrote from 9 a.m. until noon each day. Yeats wrote from 11am
to 2 pm. Then there are the 10% who cannot stick to a schedule, like William
James. What’s so laughable about that is that James felt one should have a
regular schedule in order to be productive, yet he never could maintain one
himself. I realized that I am like William James. I decided I should be kind to
myself, not turn writing into a painful experience. It is difficult enough
already. So being a rather disorganized person who abhors routine, I decided
I’d come up with a minimum of two hours a day (except for Saturday, my Sabbath
day, which is work-free). Most days I work for longer than two hours. But I can
choose where those two hours occur. Some days I work for 6 hours and not at all
the following day. Sometimes I start at 10 a.m. (never earlier). Other times I
have errands to run, a class to prepare, my son to attend to, and don’t sit
down until 4 in the afternoon. At other times, I write at night, like Kafka
did. The important thing is to know one’s nature. As long as I’m getting the
work done, who cares if I have a regular schedule? I try to keep in mind
something Neil Gaiman said: Writing should not feel like work. It should be
joyful.
13) A
novel, short story, poem and/or essay you believe should be mandatory reading?
I think
it’s important to read widely in the genre in which you’re working. We writers
are sensitive, moody people. There’s a right time and a wrong time to read
particular works. When I was an undergraduate at Cornell, for example, I could
have been reading and studying with A. R. Ammons. But his poetry, at the time,
didn’t speak to me, a Brooklyn girl from a working-class Jewish family. It took
me until my late thirties before I was ready for his poetry. When I decided to
write an essayistic memoir, I began reading many memoirs and essay collections.
My favorites are the quirky ones: Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk, Edmund de
Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, Rebecca
Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby, Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast and Firebird, Nick
Flynn’s The Ticking Is the Bomb, Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran,
Patricia Volk’s Shocked. While I admire the immersive memoirs of Mary Karr and
Jeannette Walls, I knew I was trying to do something else.
14) Is
there any classic novel you wish you’d pushed through in your teens?
David Copperfield. I remember loving the book,
but never finished it.
15) A
book you wished you’d written?
That’s
tantamount to wishing I’d lived another life.
16)
Which writer and book has had the most influence on your work?
That’s an impossible question. To be a writer
is to be open to a constantly changing group of influences—from books, to art,
to film. Here’s a dark answer: Franz Kafka. His story “In the Penal Colony.” I
read it when I was about 14. It has haunted me ever since. I feel as though the
words of it are written on my skin.
17) What
role do you think literary journals play today in a writer’s life, as well as
in the overall conversation about books and reading?
Literary
journals are crucial for writers. As a poet, I always feel I have to publish
individual poems in journals and to read as many as I can. Five Points is the
first print journal to say “yes” to one of the essays from my memoir. It has
been wonderfully affirming, and I am certain it helped convince my agent to
represent me. Especially after Witness took yet one more essay.
Confab
with a Contributor: Sharon Dolin. By Soniah Kamal. Five Points : A Journal of Literature & Art, March 4, 2016.
You can
read this essay ‘’ The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Girl Who Knew Too Little”
on the website of Sharon Dolin.
Reading
Sharon Dolin’s memoir, Hitchcock Blonde, is like sitting in a theater next to
the author as she watches a movie reel of her own life, and uses Alfred
Hitchcock films to make sense of her memories. The author herself tells us she
finds it easier to remember things by not thinking about them directly, and
therefore the Hitchcock movies help her process the scenes that span her life
including the complicated relationships, thoughts, and feelings carried within
the episodes that she shares.
Each
chapter is anchored with a Hitchcock movie and a synopsis of the plot while the
author dissects the characters and even Hitchcock himself. Flowing between past
and present, Dolin uses her insights into the film to tell us stories of her
own life. This technique produces a memoir that is episodic and thematic versus
a more traditional narrative, with themes of abandonment, fear, self-doubt,
mental illness, desire, sexuality, regret and the heartache of wanting to save
someone unable to be saved.
In part
one, most of the five movies referenced involve a child in some sort of
peril—taken hostage at gunpoint or kidnapped for ransom—which resonates with
Sharon because she was often a child in peril, and recognized the familiar look
of fear and anguish in their eyes. Sharon grew up with parents who struggled to
afford much more than a bottom-floor rental in Brooklyn, New York. Her mother
suffered through life as a paranoid schizophrenic, a sleepwalking burden to her
husband and daughters. Sharon’s father, a mysterious and charismatic traveling
salesman, protected her and her older sister but did not provide the sanctuary
that all of us crave in a childhood home.
In part
two, we move into adulthood where Sharon tries to make sense of her sexuality
and her place in this world as a woman through five more films. She draws
parallels between herself and the female characters that Hitchcock used to make
his sadistic judgments about women and their carnal desires.
The
author has struggled with Body Dysmorphic Disorder and doesn’t consider herself
attractive to anyone, much less the opposite sex, and seems genuinely surprised
when a man desires her. Not yet realizing that it is the desire itself that
lures her to the men in her life, she is a sure bet for anyone interested in
her regardless of the issues they bring to the relationship, such as bigamy and
betrayal, addiction and tragic death, control and infidelity. Sharon’s
intuition into the relationship with her controlling and ultimately unfaithful
husband will resonate with anyone who has been in a relationship like this
before— “Though there are probably more women whose voices might throw back an
echo if I called out to them, I know I have to pull myself away. That I have
heard enough to know I do not need to know more.”
It is
obvious to the reader that Sharon Dolin, an award-winning poet, is a master of
language and highly eloquent, but it was a few of her simplest lines that held
the most power for me. In The Lady Vanishes, the author discovers similarities
to the challenges of a mentally ill mother who was either away in a mental
institution, having an episode where she was unstable and unpredictable, or
drugged to the point of nothingness, all leaving a void that shaped her
daughter’s life. At the end of this chapter, the author summarizes her
relationship with her mother in one profound sentence that made my heart
lurch—“She is my lady who vanished.”
For all
the insight and revelations within this work, the author is also gentle with
her memories and leaves room for the fact that her vision is cloudy. One of the
major themes of this memoir is the conundrum of memory and truth and finding
the balance of both in order to understand our past and make sense of our
present. In Sharon’s own words, “Every one of us with a memory lives in briny
water,” referencing the murky mixing of the past and present.
The most
magical experiences are ones that stay with you long after the movie ends, or
the curtain drops, or when you put the book down. Perhaps you are troubled or
haunted by something and you’re not quite sure what it is, but you find
yourself still thinking about what you saw or heard or what the characters may
be doing next and where the story may lead. Hitchcock had that effect on his
viewers. I’ve seen three Hitchcock movies in my life, and although I don’t
consider myself a fan or a buff, the ones that I’ve seen have stayed with me.
The Birds terrorized me as a child and produced a life-long suspicion of any
winged creature.
A master
class on Alfred Hitchcock, this memoir studies his motives, character choices
and the filmmaking techniques that he used to produce the distinct viewer
experience and psychological suspense he was known for. Sharon Dolin leveraged
her discerning fascination with Hitchcock movies to produce a distinct reader
experience that has remained with me. Once in the rhythm of this technique, I
found Hitchcock Blonde enjoyable and haunting at the same time. It is a
cinematic memoir, indeed.
Hitchcock
Blonde by Sharon Dolin. By Kelly Bargabos. Mom Egg Review , May 13, 2020.
