Hearing My Story in Someone Else's Words

Today I attended a luncheon featuring a reading by musician and writer Debra Marquart, who is on campus for the university's annual Women's Voices celebration. She is a native North Dakotan who has written a memoir about her childhood here, and she read aloud excerpts from that book: The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere (read this and this).

Each passage was terrific and managed to be both ordinary and extraordinary simultaneously. She wrote about topics that I could have written about, except that her perspective is a decidedly feminine one. Other than the woman's lens through which she views her rural childhood experiences, her looking back is not unlike my own; and the places, events, and people she recollects are similar to those from my past, just with different names.

Marquart writes about family members and, now as an adult, tries to make sense of their behavior and character traits in light of their life circumstances (something that, as children, we don't bother to do--for example, we just know Aunt So-'n'-So is peretually grouchy, but we don't take the time to walk in her shoes and understand the causes of her demeanor). Marquart also writes about the physical world in which she grew up--the farm, the countryside, the small town--and the way in which she and others her age came to know this setting by interacting with it--by doing farm work, by attending parties in the hills outside of town, by driving the main street with other teens as a social activity.

Most impressively, Marquart finds larger truths in the smaller details of ordinary daily life. She comes to admire the struggles that her parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc., faced and the hardships that they endured silently as a matter of fact, their lack of complaint a reflection of the character both prerequisite to and a result of making a living on the plains. In what she read aloud today, I heard her describe relatives who could have been my own, who had gone through trials in life that my own immigrant ancestors must have. I heard her describe childhood experiences and attitudes that were my own or those of my friends and neighbors. She described life on the farm the way I might, and she now looks back on her childhood with an insight brought about by the passage of time, her own maturity, and a poet's ability to see the world in metaphors.

I had tears in my eyes occasionally as something she read brought back vivid memories of my own past: a particular relative, an item in someone's home, a summer moment outside on the farm, a feeling about growing up in the country and yearning for life in the city, etc. The final passage, one that she hadn't ever read aloud for a group, brought tears even to her own eyes. It was a great way to spend a lunch, and I'll definitely check out her book.