Aimee Liu's Blog: Aimee Liu's New Blog Launch!

Attention lovers of the hit podcast SERIAL!
I'm delighted that the Los Angeles Review of Books has just published my essay comparing Sarah Koenig's brainchild to Sebastian Junger's book A Death in Belmont.

Here's a bit:

�It�s really hard to account for your time,� Koenig observed, then proceeded to ask several seemingly random teenagers to remember what they�d done on a day six weeks earlier. None of them could.

Okay, so memory is unreliable. But � three million listeners were hooked on this show. Why?

For the rest of my wrestling match with this question, go to
https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/ser...

Just published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, my essay inspired by author Meredith Hall:
http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/towa...

Here's the opening:

I’VE BEEN THINKING a lot about grace lately. More precisely, I’ve been thinking about it since last February, when I first met the critically acclaimed memoirist Meredith Hall.

What initially impressed me about Hall was her unusual path to literary success. She didn’t graduate from college or even begin writing until she was 44 and spurred by a painful divorce. Since then, her essays have appeared in many of this country’s finest literary journals. She’s received a Pushcart Prize and in 2004 won a $50,000 Room of Her Own Award, which gave her the freedom to write her first book, Without a Map. That memoir landed on The New York Times Best Seller list. Oh, and when not writing or teaching or winning awards, Hall — now 65 — physically builds houses alongside her sons in their family construction business. All of which should make her a source of inspiration for any serious writer … but that’s not why I keep thinking about grace — at least not directly.

Back in February, Hall and I were on a panel discussing “The Writer as Mediator in Memoir and Personal Narrative” at the 2014 Association of Writing Programs conference in Seattle. As she spoke about finding and crafting the perspective she needed to write her memoir, it became clear that this process had been emotionally grueling. The story she had to tell began in the 1960s, when she was a pregnant teenager shunned by her formerly nurturing family and small-town community and forced to give up her baby without so much as glimpsing him. Twenty-one years later she learned that this son had grown up in poverty just a few miles away, with a physically abusive adoptive father. Pain, rage, guilt, and grief dominated much of Hall’s life.

But the question before her in our discussion was: what had been her intention as she wrote this story? To punish or shame her unrepentant parents? To paint herself as the innocent victim of small-town small-mindedness — or, perhaps, as a reborn crusader for the rights of teenage mothers? To mine her own trauma for tear-jerking effect? Or just to unburden herself of an experience that was too heavy to carry alone anymore? I will admit that some of these very possibilities — some perhaps laudable, some less so — had tempted me when I was laboring with my own memoirs.

Then, as Hall proceeded to name the intentions she did not want to shape her writing, the word forgiveness came up. As a possible goal, or ethos, or governing principle, perhaps? I asked. Did she never write to achieve, grant, or express forgiveness? Or as a prerequisite; as in, you can’t write a memoir until you’ve reached a place of forgiveness?

No. She was emphatic. Some things — many things — that human beings do to each other, to the earth, to nature, and to themselves, cannot and must not be forgiven. Moreover, even though literature may contain forgiveness, such reductive responses are never what great writing ultimately is about. No.

“I write,” Meredith Hall concluded, “toward a messy and uncertain grace.”

To continue the essay, please go to:
http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/towa...

Nani and Thea get acquainted as they prepare for Christmas in the tropics

At Christmas time the schools in Port Blair went on holiday even though most students were Hindu or Muslim. The great church on Ross Island decorated its doors with wreaths made of palm fronds and big red bows. Scents from the bakery grew sweeter and stronger, and every now and then the old white ladies being pulled up the ridge in buggies tilted their high reedy voices into songs that Nani knew from school celebrated the birth

In which Thea and Shep welcome a new life to the Andamans

June, 1937

The ceiling fan offered a point of focus as Thea counted through her contractions and tried to ignore the torrents of rain smashing down on the roof. All through the hospital, pails had been set out to catch the leaks, around which teams of lizards raced, little phantoms against the green mildewed wall stains. One, two, three, four. The young Indian nurses hummed as they wiped her brow, and the daring giggled at Shep�s brooding presence hour after hour.

As every writer knows, a book is comprised of many moveable parts, and plot is structured through a combination of time and space travel as well as chronological action. One of the toughest decisions when writing a large story is the selection of the opening scene. Get the reader acquainted with the characters first? Or throw the protagonist into trouble? I opted to launch this series of outtakes with scenes to get you acquainted with Thea and Shep and their newly-wedded move to the Andaman Islands. But the scene I�ve selected to open the actual book occurs four years later, well into WWII. That scene is today�s Take 7.

In this diary entry, Thea reveals why all her grand plans to become the next Margaret Mead may be jeopardized.

January 4, 1937
Why do I find such comfort in graveyards? It�s not that I think them sacred, exactly, and with all the death they contain � so many different kinds of death �

I�m thinking on this Thanksgiving Day that writing is like a complicated recipe.

First you need to gather the ingredients (ideas) and envision the final product; you have to have a general vision for the end result and know what it is you�re making. Then you combine the first batch of ingredients

Take 5 from my novel-in-progress...in which Thea meets an unexpected member of her new household.October 12, 1936
By the time we fell into bed last night we'd received our luggage, made a preliminary appearance at the club -- we seem to be the youngest members by at least a decade -- and

Out Take #4 is a sketch of Ross Island, headquarters of the Colonial administration of the Andaman Islands in the early 1900s. Ross is also where Shep and Thea live before disaster strikes. [See earlier blog posts to catch up with the story.]

Ross bazaar, in stark contrast to the spacious bungalows of the European Zone, consisted of two rows of brick shop houses that plunged down the incline in the southern -- Indian -- end of the island to land at the Hindu temple. The bazaar and temple, as well as a small shark-netted beach farther along the shore, served the ministerial staff, Indian clerks, doctors, and military police quartered in the Native Zone, as well as the servants from the European residences and barracks on the upper end of the island.

Out take #3 is from the latest draft of my novel-in-progress...
In which Thea and Shep sail from Calcutta in 1936 to their new home: the Andaman Islands.

[For the full post, please visit & subscribe @ www.aimeeliu.net/blog.htm ]

The weather changed for their four-day crossing to the Andamans, and Thea spent most of her time aboard the S.S. Maharaja sick to her stomach. Not until the last morning did the skies clear and the water change from black to iridescent green. She let Shep drag her up on deck as Land Fall Island hove into view. This small pincushion of palm trees was dwarfed by the green monolith of North Andaman behind it.

Thea caught her breath and Shep took her hand, but a wave of nausea forced her to pull away from him. She clung to the rail, squinting through the flood of sunshine to the white bands of beach that divided jungle from sea. What had she imagined? Native dancers. Polynesian dugouts. Grass huts and totem poles. Tropical sunsets and wall to wall servants, had become a joke between them, but the absolutely primal state of the land before her was anything but funny. "There's no one there."

"No seeums," Shep quipped, and she punched his arm.

This first sight of her new home -- and, theoretically, her first "field" -- should have been exhilarating. Instead, despite the bright light and crystalline water, she found the forest sinister and foreboding. It warned her just how little she knew -- about anything. What did she think she could accomplish here? Did she honestly see herself trekking about in that impenetrable jungle? She’d barely been able to penetrate Radcliffe-Brown's book about this place. She was a rank amateur. And she felt awful.
But fear was unacceptable. Ruth Benedict would be ashamed of her. Her mother would be dismayed, her father alarmed. And how could she do this to Shep?

He lapsed into silence, sucking his pipe and studying her with a bemused expression. The smell of his cherry tobacco steadied her. "So this is Paris?" She gestured at the primeval forest and dared him to smile.

He smoothed the bangs back from her forehead as if to see her better, then rested his palm coolly at the nape of her neck. "It's our Paris, Thea. Even if we have to build it from the ground up."
#
Six hours later the steamer approached Port Blair -- but for a couple of isolated coastal villages, the first evidence of civilization since Calcutta. A blinking lighthouse. A regimental building spiked with antennae. A road with trucks crawling around the base of a steep hill. Thea consulted the gazetteer that Shep had left in her keeping while he finished packing below. The hill was called Mount Harriet, one of the local sights along with Aberdeen Bazaar, Viper Island, Chatham Sawmill. And the Cellular Jail.

"But first and foremost, there, Ross Island. Your new home." The elderly woman who'd been sitting beside her for the past hour pointed away from the coast to a stump of green rising from the sea off the port bow. The woman's name was Hilda Strong. For twenty of her sixty-odd years she'd lived as the wife of a coconut planter on the mainland, which meant only the mainland of South Andaman, as opposed to the Indian or Burmese mainlands. Now she was returning after a year-long visit with her daughter in Wales, and she seemed none too happy to be back. "Well, good luck to you," she said, standing abruptly. "As for me, I'm neither here nor there anymore." And with that, the primly buttoned and tucked Mrs. Strong leaned over the railing and spat at the turquoise sea.