“A memoir of friendship and literature chronicling a search for meaning and comfort in great books, and a beautiful path out of grief
Anne Gisleson had lost her twin sisters, had been forced to flee her home during Hurricane Katrina, and had witnessed cancer take her beloved father. Before she met her husband, Brad, he had suffered his own trauma, losing his partner and the mother of his son to cancer in her young thirties. "How do we keep moving forward," Anne asks, "amid all this loss and threat?" The answer: "We do it together."
Anne and Brad, in the midst of forging their happiness, found that their friends had been suffering their own losses and crises as well: loved ones gone, rocky marriages, tricky childrearing, jobs lost or gained, financial insecurities or unexpected windfalls. Together these resilient New Orleanians formed what they called the Existential Crisis Reading Group, jokingly dubbed "The Futilitarians." From Epicurus to Tolstoy, from Cheever to Amis to Lispector, each month they read and talked about identity, parenting, love, mortality, and life in post-Katrina New Orleans, gatherings that increasingly fortified Anne and helped her blaze a trail out of her well-worn grief. Written with wisdom, soul, and a playful sense of humor, The Futilitarians is a guide to living curiously and fully, and a testament to the way that even from the toughest soil of sorrow, beauty and wonder can bloom.”
It was a strange book to read as a former student, an odd book to process for someone who had once sat across a desk from its author and, ignorant of her personal pain, requested silly things like special dispensation to write only poetry (to forego the burdening length of short stories and the constriction of unbroken lines) in my final portfolio. Little did I know, as I whined that it was my poetry that people liked (Peter Cooley liked it, and he was a man who liked nothing), her thoughts may have been on a different Rebecca, a sister whose ashes sat in a cemetery but whose memory lingered everywhere.
Ms Gisleson had always seemed fairly calm--stressed perhaps, but patient. While some of the other teachers had seemed at times too temperamental or aloof, she was the teacher to whom I had most related. Perhaps it was because her father had known my father (and a grandfather, too); a small mirror of connectedness, just large enough to see myself in her. Perhaps it was simply the care and attention she showed me in a less-confident period of my life. Regardless, it was she that sat at the head of the conference table most days, bordered by dim interior lighting on one side and bleach-bright sunlight from windows on the other, leading discussions on the thick books and narrow lines that consumed my life for three years. I remember the way she’d flip her hair this way or that. The way she’d shift in her seat, tucking one leg or another under her. Her too-large pants, and the way she’d tighten and re-tighten her belt at frequent intervals. It was restlessness, I see that now. But at the time, they were simply the quirks of yet another teacher. For all I knew, she lived under that conference table, slept on the neutral carpet beneath it. For all I knew, she spent all moments of her life thinking about us, her students, and the words we wrote and read.
Teenage self-absorption at its best.
Looking back, I can remember flashes of moments, little things I never really thought about. The sad or stressed looks that sometimes dispersed from her face when she’d see you in the hall. The way she’d rebuke the aggressive shows of femininity from a certain student (a reminder of her lost sister?). The little patience she had for the dysfunction that sowed in and out of the classroom my junior year: heady threats between students, impetuous marriage proposals between others, glorified stories of near-misses, of puke-filled bathtubs, of much-older boyfriends, of impulsive tattoos. I expect we were both uncomfortable with the goings-on of that year, though for different reasons. I, as one otherwise sheltered from dysfunction. She, as one perhaps trying to escape or understand it.
They were not all bad, these three years of reading and writing. In fact, that middle year of unbelonging was the exception to the rule. The first year was hard but meaningful, and the last year was nearly perfect: the classes, the people, the shared wonder. For three hours a day I sat (somewhere between gleeful and tired) in one chair or another, discussing author intentions and themes and the way writers make you feel things, make you think things, make you experience things you’d never known before.
I suppose that I have always wanted to be a writer. As I child, I once pronounced to my mother, sitting on her bed with a book half in my lap and half in hers, that I would someday win a Newbery Award, and she replied that she did not doubt it (though I now do). My grandfather was a reader and a writer, my parents both wordsmiths in their own right (my father’s legal and flourished, my mother’s practical and direct). Growing up, our house overflowed with books, on tables and chairs and shelves and counters. My grandparents had even more, their house was literally filled by them, bookshelves as walls. All of this finally leading to the beginning of true writership: a multi-page application, an interview, and three years gathered with other teenagers around a campfire of words.
The words weren’t always as pleasant as I’d hoped. Literature is rife with pain and discord. Like life, it can’t escape them. Every good story requires conflict, something to resolve (or not), something to drive the story forward; and the deeper I delved, the more I wrote, the clearer the tendency toward suffering became. Happiness is hard to write without relinquishing power to humor or cliche, but pain is deep. It’s all around us, all the time. There is always space beneath us to dig, always tunnels to burrow into on either side of us. And there is hope - the sharp look back up towards the sky from our ever-deepening holes - but that comes and goes, covered by clouds and rain and dust storms. We cannot choose between them, either, between happiness and pain. It is impossible to numb selectively. Life, chemicals, relationships, they give us a choice: to feel or not to feel.
The histories of the writers I encountered on my teenage journey through text in that large brick-laden building furthest from the river seemed stuck between the two, between feeling and unfeeling. They were people shackled by addiction. Heavy with depression. Tied to bottles and pills, affairs and debt. Trapped between sealed doors and open, unlit ovens. I distinctly remember thinking, perhaps even voicing aloud, that great writers seemed to require terrible lives. And if I had to choose between great writing and happiness, I, for one, would choose happiness.
Teenage naivete.
It turns out that you do not choose sadness and heartbreak. Rather, they find you. True, they find some more easily than others - some of us are better hidden, perhaps - but great writing is not a necessary consequence of pain. It is the consequence of practice, of years of reading and writing and rereading and rewriting. Of training and retraining your mind to make sense of the world (or not) with well-crafted words. To see stories in swimming pools and wallpaper. To see poems in dapple-dawn-drawn falcons and rain-glazed red wheelbarrows and the fluster of lost door keys. To find meaning (or be meaning?) with every strike of a key and stroke of a pen.
Anne Gisleson taught me this: the art of writing, the beauty of the written word. How to capture pain and joy and longing. To make others feel and think in new ways. It tooks me weeks to finish my last book and only 36 hours to finish this one. Were it not for the 132 children awaiting patience and scientific discovery the next day, I might’ve foregone my prescribed time of sleep and finished it in 8. The book is beautiful. It is heartbreaking and hopeful and confused and clear, and I cried and laughed and learned and loved every minute of its reading. And most of all, I was proud. Proud to have been taught by such a strong woman and wordsmith. Proud to have learned art from a true human and artist.
This post was meant to be about the book, but somehow it became bigger than all that (which might actually be more fitting for this book, anyway). So, let me finish what I intended to start: You should read this book. Whether you relate to the grief of loss, the mystery of parentage, the oddity of New Orleans, its destruction and subsequent rebuilding, or the simple beauty of a well-written word, you will not regret it. Anne Gisleson is onto something, and I for one cannot wait to read what else she has to say.
