Tracing the Desire Line: A Memoir in Essays by Melissa Matthewson
Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Split Lip Press (2019)
Purchase @ Split Lip Press
Review by Jeannine Ouellette.
Melissa Matthewson’s memoir in essays explores, both in content and form, the tension between wholeness and fragmentation, and the ways in which the concept of oneness seductively encompasses the entire continuum between the two, while evading us most of our lives.
The memoir—separated into a series of linked essays which themselves are further separated into various hybrid forms such as lists, letters, and prose poems—uses fragmentation on the page to explore fragmentation both within relationships and within the self as the narrator and her husband navigate her desire to open their marriage. Contrasting the persistent fragmentation is a thru-line, however, one that weaves through and between sections as a kind of poetry of the land. Keenly observant, Matthewson captures the family’s Oregon farm, the creek that runs through it, and the mountains and woods that surround it, in a subdued symphony of the natural world that plays quietly throughout the book. In so doing, she finds metaphor in the most literal of places, as here, where she describes the experience of dusk:
We left dinner cold on our plates to meet the shank of the day. As we climbed the hill, my children and I—we stopped near the pond, just on that edge between
slope and perch, the willow branches all fiery and orange and long for the day, and I wanted them to put their ears to the ground, to hear the earth swallow, to
listen to the night and the hum of a million tiny organisms, working to grow the trees, but instead, in the twilight of a March day, we listened to the frogs. (33)
Matthewson’s precise and pleasingly strange language, when she applies it to the unraveling of her marriage, takes on a restrained, breathless force, as in this passage in which her daughter has swallowed a dime:
The children continue to cry. It is so loud it feels as if the whole family is crying, all in a zoo of tears, but really, it is just the children filling the house with their
sobs—an exponential echo in the small room where I argue with Josh. (92)
Or here, as the couple argues about the reality of opening their marriage:
He points his finger at me as I lay against the pillows on our bed … He says, “You’re the one who’s fucking another man.” I think about pointing, about all the
ways it strikes, condemns, and implicates. A baby points early on, for desire, to express a state of need. Primates point. Dogs. Elephants. (168)
Matthewson’s observations are perhaps most resonant when she turns her gaze to her children, and shows us the world through their eyes:
Ava asked me, “Do you know how to hug a porcupine?” You put on a hundred gloves and gather yourself from the belly to wrap your gloved hands on the spines.
(197)
And:
Ava comes to me, says, “Hold this.” She hands me her leaf and lifts her arms. “I want to fly,” she says, and off she goes, costumed as some superhero, the front all
dirtied with soil, bottom wet from the ground. “I want to fly,” she screams and the sun, it goes down quick, back behind the trees, and the whole field gives way to
smoke and shadow except for the neon red and blue of her costume as she ducks behind the truck and disappears. (211)
Ultimately, Tracing the Desire Line resists the traditional confines of memoir as much as the narrator resists the same in her marriage. Matthewson successfully defies the genre not only by way of nonlinearity and fragmentation, but also through her expansive and relentlessly curious approach to her subject matter. Unlike the memoir that seeks to understand primarily by looking within, Matthewson searches for coherence by looking to the outside world, in all of its generosity. From natural history to botany, philosophy, literature, and biology, she prods and stretches at the fabric of knowledge in her quest to make sense of her experience. By turn she accepts, denounces, justifies, and integrates her conflicting desires by contextualizing them within a world so faithfully rendered that most of us will recognize ourselves in one way or another, sometimes with a jolt of surprise.
Publisher: Split Lip Press (2019)
Purchase @ Split Lip Press
Review by Jeannine Ouellette.
Melissa Matthewson’s memoir in essays explores, both in content and form, the tension between wholeness and fragmentation, and the ways in which the concept of oneness seductively encompasses the entire continuum between the two, while evading us most of our lives.
The memoir—separated into a series of linked essays which themselves are further separated into various hybrid forms such as lists, letters, and prose poems—uses fragmentation on the page to explore fragmentation both within relationships and within the self as the narrator and her husband navigate her desire to open their marriage. Contrasting the persistent fragmentation is a thru-line, however, one that weaves through and between sections as a kind of poetry of the land. Keenly observant, Matthewson captures the family’s Oregon farm, the creek that runs through it, and the mountains and woods that surround it, in a subdued symphony of the natural world that plays quietly throughout the book. In so doing, she finds metaphor in the most literal of places, as here, where she describes the experience of dusk:
We left dinner cold on our plates to meet the shank of the day. As we climbed the hill, my children and I—we stopped near the pond, just on that edge between
slope and perch, the willow branches all fiery and orange and long for the day, and I wanted them to put their ears to the ground, to hear the earth swallow, to
listen to the night and the hum of a million tiny organisms, working to grow the trees, but instead, in the twilight of a March day, we listened to the frogs. (33)
Matthewson’s precise and pleasingly strange language, when she applies it to the unraveling of her marriage, takes on a restrained, breathless force, as in this passage in which her daughter has swallowed a dime:
The children continue to cry. It is so loud it feels as if the whole family is crying, all in a zoo of tears, but really, it is just the children filling the house with their
sobs—an exponential echo in the small room where I argue with Josh. (92)
Or here, as the couple argues about the reality of opening their marriage:
He points his finger at me as I lay against the pillows on our bed … He says, “You’re the one who’s fucking another man.” I think about pointing, about all the
ways it strikes, condemns, and implicates. A baby points early on, for desire, to express a state of need. Primates point. Dogs. Elephants. (168)
Matthewson’s observations are perhaps most resonant when she turns her gaze to her children, and shows us the world through their eyes:
Ava asked me, “Do you know how to hug a porcupine?” You put on a hundred gloves and gather yourself from the belly to wrap your gloved hands on the spines.
(197)
And:
Ava comes to me, says, “Hold this.” She hands me her leaf and lifts her arms. “I want to fly,” she says, and off she goes, costumed as some superhero, the front all
dirtied with soil, bottom wet from the ground. “I want to fly,” she screams and the sun, it goes down quick, back behind the trees, and the whole field gives way to
smoke and shadow except for the neon red and blue of her costume as she ducks behind the truck and disappears. (211)
Ultimately, Tracing the Desire Line resists the traditional confines of memoir as much as the narrator resists the same in her marriage. Matthewson successfully defies the genre not only by way of nonlinearity and fragmentation, but also through her expansive and relentlessly curious approach to her subject matter. Unlike the memoir that seeks to understand primarily by looking within, Matthewson searches for coherence by looking to the outside world, in all of its generosity. From natural history to botany, philosophy, literature, and biology, she prods and stretches at the fabric of knowledge in her quest to make sense of her experience. By turn she accepts, denounces, justifies, and integrates her conflicting desires by contextualizing them within a world so faithfully rendered that most of us will recognize ourselves in one way or another, sometimes with a jolt of surprise.
Melissa Matthewson’s essays have appeared in Guernica, DIAGRAM, American Literary Review, Mid-American Review, Bellingham Review, River Teeth, and The Rumpus among other publications. She has been awarded an AWP Intro Journals award in creative nonfiction as well as residencies and scholarships to PLAYA, Art Smith, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and Tin House. She holds degrees from the University of California, Santa Cruz, University of Montana, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Learn more at melissamatthewson.com or @melmatthewson on Twitter.
