CM: Phantom Limb is a very moving account of a time in your life when you were tending to your mother’s needs when she was quite ill. How emotional was it for you to relive this period in your lives and what effect did that emotion have on your abilities to move forward with each chapter?

JS: First of all, I’m so glad you think that I am "moving forward with each chapter." That means I’ve done my job, which was to make everything in the book seem inevitable. However, Phantom Limb was not a book that started with a blank first page and then progressed page by page. Actually, it’s more of a collage, in which I used passages that I wrote while going through the experience; others from earlier stories and essays; as well as lots of new writing. I kept moving pieces around, revising and revising, until I found the story I wanted to tell.

I was also looking for resonance. When I placed a section from childhood next to one that takes place in the present tense of the story, I didn’t necessarily want the cause and effect of narrative. Sometimes I wanted a progression that was like poetry; at other times I wanted to reflect on events using the voice of a personal essay. Holding all those elements together was my biggest challenge.

Now, to answer your question: when as a writer I relived this period, it was difficult. But that’s what it means to be a writer – especially one who writes memoirs. Other people in other professions might say "oh, I don’t want to think about that." Instead, I sit at my desk and say to myself, almost like a mantra, "Go deeper." I think if I were just reliving those moments without an artistic purpose, it would have been almost unbearable. But the re-living was in the service of the writing.

CM: How much time had lapsed from when you began working on the manuscript from when the events with your mother occurred? How did this amount of time factor into your adrenaline levels when it came to finishing the book?

JS: For a memoir writer, time is multi-layered. The writing of Phantom Limb began in the mid-nineties, the period when I was flying back and forth from my ongoing life – a good one -- to periods of several weeks caring for and living with my parents in their apartment. Feelings I had thought were long-gone suddenly surfaced; unexpectedly I’d be back in adolescence, wanting to scream at my mother for some small irritant. Instead, I got into the car, drove to a café, and wrote.

It wasn’t until a year or so later that I realized I had a book. My mother had been suffering from the condition of phantom limb – when you lose a limb but feel that it’s still part of you. The "Aha!" moment came when I realized that we all have the condition of phantom limb; we all have someone or something no longer with us who remains part of us.

After that, I wrote draft after draft, for about four and a half years. Some of that time was spent researching the phantom limb phenomenon, to make certain I knew what I was talking about, that the metaphor was scientifically sound. I also made quite a few false starts, trying to interweave several different phantom limb stories. Eventually I realized that the book was one story, in which several elements came into play – memories, scientific information, and scene.

Also, I hadn’t written a proposal nor received an advance for this book, as I had for earlier books (the two volumes of The Writer on Her Work, W. W. Norton). This was a deliberate decision: I didn’t know where I was going with the book, and didn’t want anyone’s expectations (including my own) to influence me. I just kept going, which was especially hard I thought the book was finished, and my agent sent it out. I had many rejections. At the time I thought, "they don’t understand what I’m trying to do." Now I see that editors were right – it wasn’t done. So I had to keep "getting back on the horse," again and again.

Meanwhile, during those years I was also living through some of the experiences in the book, both feeling them deeply and taking notes as a writer, more or less at the same time. It was complicated but necessary. One of these days I’ll write a memoir from the vantage point of recollection, starting with the blank page and going forward page by page. I think it will be easier, but who knows? Maybe the clubmemoir members will tell me that it’s a daydream. In the second volume of The Writer On Her Work, Margaret Atwood says "It never gets any easier." That’s comforting to hear, from as prolific a writer as Atwood. It may fall into the category of "cold comfort"!

CM: You are a poet and Phantom Limb, with its extremely short chapters, has a certain poetic rhythm to it. Did you intentionally write Phantom Limb in a poetic voice, or is that just your personal style coming through?

JS: A colleague of mine said that Phantom Limb exists in a place between poetry and prose, adding that it’s an "underused" place. That’s right, I think, and a very provocative challenge.

As a poet, I thought about every word choice, about the rhythm of each sentence, even the amount of white space between sections. (On the latter, I was careful not to ask white space to do work that I should have been doing – sometimes, especially as a poet, it’s too easy to make a leap into the next thing, when the story needs more. )

Of course all that thinking was done during revisions. If I thought about such things while I was writing a first draft, I’d never get beyond the first sentence!

I wrote short chapters because that’s what this book needed. I can’t say it was a decision. My instincts, again as a poet, are always to make my prose more and more concise, looking for the specific telling details. In the future, I’m going to challenge myself to write "longer" – not necessarily in terms of chapter lengths, but for the entire manuscript. We’ll see.

CM: What would you advise to other memoir writers who are considering a similar format?

JS: I’d tell them to stay away from other memoir writers during the writing of their books. (This is presupposing that the writer already has read a number of memoirs, as well as books about the writing of creative nonfiction.)
When I was writing Phantom Limb, I stayed away from other authorial voices. I read lots of whodunits, and lots of general audience science books on memory, on consciousness, on phantom limb. All I can say is never, ever, think about anyone else’s format. There’s no recipe for memoir.

The writer has to fully understand that the person in the story – the one who carries your name and your perceptions – is not you. That person may be very close to who you really are, but you have constructed that person much as you’d construct any other character. That’s key: a memoir is always a construction, a writerly act.

CM: How did the editing process aid or hinder your voice?

JS: When I submitted Phantom Limb to the press, it was virtually finished. My editor, Ladette Randolph, did have several good suggestions, which I followed. For example, she was concerned about the ending of a chapter, the one where I go with my parents to the opening of a meat-packing plant (page 18). She thought I hadn’t yet "landed it," and she was right. I added just one sentence, as follows: "For himself, he took a glass filled with Moxie, the soft drink so strong that swallowing it down was a badge of bravado." Yes, it’s only a detail (a made-up one). But it’s the resonant one I needed, the detail that speaks for more than itself. This one establishes something about my father at the moment of the scene, and also how I see him now from the perspective of time. I also like the phrase, "badge of bravado," and spent a lot of time getting to it.

In that short but complex chapter, I also mention a Parker House roll, and Gulden’s mustard as well as Moxie. There’s a whole lot of locale (Boston); time (Moxie) and class (Gulden’s, the favorite of baseball games). Did I think of all that? No. But I did try to go deeper and deeper into that scene, conjuring what might have been there. So that while those details are "made up," they are also the "truth."

CM: What advice would you give to other writers about how to handle the editing process.

JS: Three pieces of advice:
1) Get the book as near to your vision (that means structure, themes, language) before you engage in the editing process. Even if you feel that you need help, or that you’ve done the best that you can, don’t give in to those feelings until you’re certain – which means taking your time. Help can be found through friends and books on writing. When the book and you are still vulnerable, don’t set yourself up for an editor’s judgment. Even if you have a great relationship with your editor, s/he is not your friend; it’s a business relationship, at least during the editing process. So go into it as a professional, not a needy person.

2) Don’t be defensive. Unless your editor is a sadist or is ignorant, chances are s/he is on your side, just trying to do the job.

3) If a suggestion from your editor feels very very wrong, postpone your reaction. Do nothing for a few days. Then if that feeling persists, stick to your guns.

CM: If your mother could’ve read your book, what do you think she would feel about it?

JS: I don’t think she’d have any problem with my telling this story. And I think she’d be proud of me and of the good reviews that Phantom Limb is getting. That said, I think she’d be terribly upset at actually reading the book. She would have understandable trouble separating herself from her own sense of what really happened. She’d be upset with some of my judgments. She’d worry about appearances. She wouldn’t understand that a memoir is a construction, not a piece of reporting. And she’d be tremendously touched by some parts. I’d like to think that, in the end, she’d understand it – as most readers do– as a loving tribute.

CM: Who should read Phantom Limb?

JS: Anyone who feels and thinks and cares about and struggles with and loves their parents. Anyone interested in good literature. Anyone who wants consolation, especially after a loss.

CM: What writers do you enjoy reading?

JS: For enjoyment, I read whodunits. I have a wonderful time reading Charlotte MacLeods’ mysteries – my husband says I smile all the way through them. I think that if she didn’t write in a genre, her Peter Shandy series would be recognized as classic comic writing.

As for other more serious books: I tend to be a magpie, reading what I feel (often on an instinctual level), that I need to read. Most recently, I’ve got enormous pleasure and depth from Jonathan Safran Foer’s new novel, "Everything Is Illuminated." I’m worried that it won’t find the readers it deserves because he’s being packaged as a 25 year old David Eggers-like ironist. But the book isn’t like that at all. In fact, I’ll make a provocative suggestion: anyone interested in memoir should read it not as a novel but as a memoir – one that points to a new way to write about one’s own experiences. Beyond that, there are too many to mention.

CM: What are you currently reading?

JS: My Grandfather’s Blessings by Rachel Naomi Remen (Kitchen Table Wisdom), because in a recent radio show, the interviewer said that something about Phantom Limb reminded him of Remen’s work.

About the Author