Talk with Megan Stielstra about the art of writing essays and you'll end up in a conversation about the art of living instead. It's not a change of subject, just recognition that, in many ways, the activities are interwoven on the most intimate of terms. "The thing about creative nonfiction," she says over the phone from Chicago, where she lives with her husband and young son and teaches writing at Northwestern, "is that our experience runs parallel to our pages." I know exactly what she means. How do we make art out of a life we are in the midst of living? "The biggest question," she acknowledges, "is the stopping point."The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, a collection of loosely linked essays that add up -- bit by bit -- to a memoir. The title comes from a reader's comment on a piece she wrote for the New York Times about a fire in her building; the implication is that she somehow responded incorrectly. But who's to say, Stielstra wants to know, what's right or wrong? And how can we help doing it our way when we have no choice but to make it up as we go? This, of course, is what the essayist does. "We have to get into it," she writes in the introductory pastiche that opens the book. "Throw it against the wall, stand back and take a good close look. It's ugly: heavy, dark, and centuries in the making. You might want to move on, to turn it off, watch something else, but wait -- look again. Look closer. How was it made? When was it made? What was happening when it was made? What are you going to do about it? And when are you going to start?"The Wrong Way to Save Your Life covers material that will be familiar to anyone who has read Stielstra's 2014 volume of essays, Once I Was Cool . (She's also the author of the 2013 short story collection Everyone Remain Calm .) Both of her nonfiction books revolve around the rigors of work and family, the question of identity, the challenges of being an adult when there are no road maps, and we slip from one moment to the next without any clear demarcation between where we're going and where we've been. The echoing, she says, is "absolutely intentional; I wanted the essays in this book to talk to one another, which led me to think about how this book might talk to the last one, or to other essays I have written." To highlight that intention -- while also developing a kind of narrative spine for the project -- Stielstra divides The Wrong Way to Save Your Life into four parts, each of which begins with a fragmentary meditation on a decade (ten, twenty, thirty, forty) of her life. "It was a happy accident," she says about the structure. "When I started, I didn't expect the book to be connected." At the same time, the device allows for what she sees as a necessary double vision, a tension between present and past. "I'm interested," Stielstra explains, "in narrative distance, in tracing how, as I age and live, my experience changes my perception. I'm interested in always telling the truth but also in telling you how I am telling you, in trying to be honest to who I am as I am writing, but also to who I was."The Wrong Way to Save Your Life . After her father has heart surgery, she starts dissecting deer hearts in her kitchen, as if by exposing the mechanics, some sort of deeper meaning will be revealed. "I tried to explain: blah blah metaphor blah," she writes, when a friend asks what she is doing. "Randy waited patiently as I talked myself in circles, finally arriving tipsy at the truth: I'm afraid he will die. I'm afraid of the truth. I'm afraid for his heart ." The condition of his heart, as it turns out, proves less of a threat than Stielstra has anticipated; but the fear, once summoned, never goes away. Indeed, fear is a central motif of the collection, its métier, we might say. The book begins with an epigraph from Ben Okri: "Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger." There it is, love and terror, the conflict we cannot resolve. "The book began," Stielstra recalls, "as a list of fears. I thought it would be five pages long. Sixty thousand words later, I called my agent."The Best American Essays 2013 and republished in Once I Was Cool, highlights Stielstra's fear of becoming a mother and her experience with postpartum depression, material that emerges in the new collection as well. "I hadn't been aware of the constant buzzing," she says, "until my son was born, but once I became aware, it was everywhere. I was unhappy at my job, but I was scared to leave. And when the building caught on fire, it was the greatest moment of fear ever. I wanted to write about it. I still want to write about it." The trick, the transference, is that in addressing her own most vivid fears and emotions, she gives voice to everyone's. "This is what happens," Stielstra points out, "when we write personal essays. The works connects to others through ourselves."The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, invoking her students, family, and friends. In one of the book's most powerful sequences, she remembers being asked, during a college writing class, to define her attitude toward her work. "If your writing is political," her teacher told the students, "stand against that wall . . . If it doesn't have anything to do with politics, stand against the other wall." Stielstra opted for the latter, explaining, "I write love stories." A gay student and a woman of color, standing at the opposing wall, responded that they did the same. "To this day," Stielstra writes, "I struggle to explain what happened in that moment. All of the clichés apply: lightbulb, lightning, ton of bricks . . . It was the first time I'd considered how a person could be perceived differently based on their identity."David L. Ulin is the author of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he spent ten years as book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times.
Reviewer: David L. Ulin
The Barnes & Noble Review
05/15/2017
The essay collection that I still think about the most, for its wit and its wisdom, is Megan Stielstra’s masterpiece.” — Maris Kreizman
“I’m fascinated with the way kindness cancels out fear (and fear cancels out kindness), and Stielstra’s essays wrestle with both.” — Chicago Tribune
“It’s opened up my thinking about the personal essay. She has a knack for taking her personal, intimate stories and broadening them outward to consider how she fits in this larger project of humanity we’re all engaged in. The book is genius.” — Amanda Fortini, Nevada Public Radio
“Warm, funny and occasionally furious. . . Megan Stielstra maps essential questions about art and the self: questions about memory, assumption, love and fear. . . .Stielstra is an evangelist for story’s power to transform lives. . . . Her sentences hum with the humor and asides of oral storytelling.” — Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“A star of the Chicago story-telling scene, Stielstra internalizes her engagement with the live audience and translates it to the page with a voice that is personal and candid, yet neither nostalgic nor self-referential. In the four parts of this collection, each devoted to a decade of her life, Stielstra segues between quotidian concerns and harrowing ones, like what objects to grab as she and her son narrowly escape their burning apartment building.” — National Book Review
“The author of the beloved Once I Was Cool returns this summer with a fresh book of essays on fear, and it couldn’t be more timely. Stielstra’s essays read like the conversations you want to be having with friends, family, neighbors, co-workers, and strangers, but maybe—like me—you’ve been a little afraid to initiate. Like a good friend, Stielstra doesn’t hold back on her love, wit, wisdom, and truth. . . . What I loved most about this book was how deeply I felt Stielstra’s own heart thumping on every page. She taught me that the opposite of fear isn’t courage. It’s kindness.” — Ploughshares
“It’s Stielstra at her best: wryly funny and brutally honest.” — Chicago Magazine
“These essays—all centered on the subject of fear—are powerful, beautiful, relevant, raw, and important. In deeply intimate and personal stories, she invites readers on a journey through multiple neighborhoods, homes, writing programs, jobs, and beaches; through concert venues and dog parks; through offices and classrooms. Chicago is alive on the page—not just as a backdrop, but as an active agent on the choices and events in Stielstra’s life. Her life has clearly been marked by the city, and she grapples every day with how to mark Chicago in turn—to make it better. This isn’t her first collection, and how lucky we will be if it isn’t her last.” — Chicago Review of Books
“A life-enriching collection of essays by a conscientious writer and teacher who knows that asking the right questions is more important than having all the answers. . . . The author sounds like a marvelous teacher, and her collection offers plenty of teaching moments. In a style that is literary but never pedantic, Stielstra has crafted a collection that has such a sense of continuity that it could pass as a memoir.” — Kirkus (starred review)
“She has a flair for nostalgia and for cultural criticism that is never pretentious. Moreover, her take on going from her hapless 20s to her more sophisticated 40s is funny and smart. It is easy to connect with her experiences as she unabashedly relates embarrassing or discomfiting moments, whether it is digging through the trash for her retainer at Wendy’s as a teenager or sleeping with a guy during her 30s ‘who made me keep my socks on. He was afraid of feet.’” — Publishers Weekly
“For its wisdom and compassion, honesty and courage, Stielstra’s stellar essay collection is a lifeline and a microscope, a means of examining the dread of whatever one finds daunting and a manner of exorcising demons through the sheer power of commitment and desire.” — Booklist (starred review)
“Reading this book is like listening to stories from a wise, compassionate, and irrepressibly funny friend—one who allows her empathy to fill every unflinching tale about how fear both plagues and saves us. Whether she’s writing about gun laws, a bear attack, or post-partum depression, Stielstra’s clear voice calls for us to stay awake, and to pay attention.” — Esmé Weijun Wang
“In The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, Megan Stielstra takes a core sample of her life, like a core sample of a glacier, and subjects it to her great punk-rock sensibility. What happens? It melts beautifully! There are fires and guns and knives in these terrific essays, and heavy metal and bloody hearts on cutting boards, and Stielstra handles it all with humor and expert humanity.” — Eula Biss, author of On Immunity
The author of the beloved Once I Was Cool returns this summer with a fresh book of essays on fear, and it couldn’t be more timely. Stielstra’s essays read like the conversations you want to be having with friends, family, neighbors, co-workers, and strangers, but maybe—like me—you’ve been a little afraid to initiate. Like a good friend, Stielstra doesn’t hold back on her love, wit, wisdom, and truth. . . . What I loved most about this book was how deeply I felt Stielstra’s own heart thumping on every page. She taught me that the opposite of fear isn’t courage. It’s kindness.
The essay collection that I still think about the most, for its wit and its wisdom, is Megan Stielstra’s masterpiece.
It’s Stielstra at her best: wryly funny and brutally honest.
These essays—all centered on the subject of fear—are powerful, beautiful, relevant, raw, and important. In deeply intimate and personal stories, she invites readers on a journey through multiple neighborhoods, homes, writing programs, jobs, and beaches; through concert venues and dog parks; through offices and classrooms. Chicago is alive on the page—not just as a backdrop, but as an active agent on the choices and events in Stielstra’s life. Her life has clearly been marked by the city, and she grapples every day with how to mark Chicago in turn—to make it better. This isn’t her first collection, and how lucky we will be if it isn’t her last.
It’s opened up my thinking about the personal essay. She has a knack for taking her personal, intimate stories and broadening them outward to consider how she fits in this larger project of humanity we’re all engaged in. The book is genius.
I’m fascinated with the way kindness cancels out fear (and fear cancels out kindness), and Stielstra’s essays wrestle with both.
A star of the Chicago story-telling scene, Stielstra internalizes her engagement with the live audience and translates it to the page with a voice that is personal and candid, yet neither nostalgic nor self-referential. In the four parts of this collection, each devoted to a decade of her life, Stielstra segues between quotidian concerns and harrowing ones, like what objects to grab as she and her son narrowly escape their burning apartment building.
Warm, funny and occasionally furious. . . Megan Stielstra maps essential questions about art and the self: questions about memory, assumption, love and fear. . . .Stielstra is an evangelist for story’s power to transform lives. . . . Her sentences hum with the humor and asides of oral storytelling.
I’m fascinated with the way kindness cancels out fear (and fear cancels out kindness), and Stielstra’s essays wrestle with both.
In The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, Megan Stielstra takes a core sample of her life, like a core sample of a glacier, and subjects it to her great punk-rock sensibility. What happens? It melts beautifully! There are fires and guns and knives in these terrific essays, and heavy metal and bloody hearts on cutting boards, and Stielstra handles it all with humor and expert humanity.”
For its wisdom and compassion, honesty and courage, Stielstra’s stellar essay collection is a lifeline and a microscope, a means of examining the dread of whatever one finds daunting and a manner of exorcising demons through the sheer power of commitment and desire.”
Booklist (starred review)
Reading this book is like listening to stories from a wise, compassionate, and irrepressibly funny friend—one who allows her empathy to fill every unflinching tale about how fear both plagues and saves us. Whether she’s writing about gun laws, a bear attack, or post-partum depression, Stielstra’s clear voice calls for us to stay awake, and to pay attention.
Reading this book is like listening to stories from a wise, compassionate, and irrepressibly funny friend—one who allows her empathy to fill every unflinching tale about how fear both plagues and saves us. Whether she’s writing about gun laws, a bear attack, or post-partum depression, Stielstra’s clear voice calls for us to stay awake, and to pay attention.
07/01/2017
★ 2017-05-15
