The Madonna Secret by Sophie Strand

I've just finished reading Sophie Strand's The Madonna Secret.

I love the voice in which the book is written -- where Miriam is looking back on her past, where Miriam can tell us the moments in which she wishes she had understood more or acted differently -- yet this is occurring in a specific moment, Miriam is telling these stories to Leukas, who has sought them out, who has traveled extensively to find her and ask her what happened. In memoir, the looking back tone tends not to work very well, I've read many early drafts where these future-perspective comments tend to pull the reader out of the narrative, where the comments seem to serve the writer (the writer's ego?) rather than the reader's understanding. But here, we don't have navel-gazing or rumination about the past, we have the crisp urgency of a story told in a particular moment (Strand even tells us the year), in a particular place, to a particular person, and perhaps even with a particular hope, that Leukas can keep the story alive. This supports the sense of urgency.

I'm think of Paul Monette today, in part because my son knocked his photo off my ancestor altar twice today (the second time breaking the frame, though fortunately not the glass) and in part because I always think of him and in part because he knew quite a bit about the urgency of storytelling and the need to reshape one's own narrative.

I'm reminded of Monette's Becoming A Man, the urgency of that book -- to tell the truth of his life as a gay man -- pushing him past the shame of some of the actions he needs to share. I have found it difficult to parse the experiences he shares toward the end of the book, in which he admits to engaging in a sexual relationship with a high school student at the boarding school at which he teaches. It's tempting to envision all of this as a different time in how these relationships were viewed. It's also just something I think about -- that maybe he wouldn't have shared this except that he knew he would die, the urgency of telling his truth outweighing any other consideration.

Strand's book was written by someone who writes about storytelling as an emergency, and here we see this demonstrated.

But Strand also deftly handles the problem of apocalypse. Her Miriam's lover is long dead, nearly everyone Miriam loved is dead, Jerusalem and Bethany are burned. At times Miriam wonders if Lazaros or others might still be alive if it weren't for her. Miriam is an old, old woman. Yet for a moment she brings them all back for Leukas. We end with Miriam having gone to gather plants in the field, with Sera telling Leukas that she always comes back. Miriam the Mother, Miriam who knows she has led many other lives besides this one.

How do we write about the worst coming to pass without it becoming apocalyptic?

I'm interested in Lisa Garmire's thesis about narrative structures in AIDS literature. She writes about how some narratives have the inevitability of death, the entire plot driven forward by the inexorable march toward death. How such narratives are particularly common in Judeo-Christian culture, a thought that is echoed by Dara Horn regarding the ways that redemption narratives are less common in the Yiddish literature.

I'm interested in the way Paul Monette resists these narratives in his fiction. In Halfway Home, we have a narrator whom we know is dying, whom we know will die, but we also know the book won't end with a deathbed scene. We know the narrator – his slightly ascerbic voice, his weariness, but also his hope – will be alive at the end of the book. We know this in part because the book is written in first-person past tense, but we know this also because it becomes pretty clear that that isn't the shape of this particular story. That Monette has decided he's not going to do that to us. That even people dying of AIDS can have entire plotlines that don't revolve around their dying, but rather about their ability to change and grow and love.

I turn to Monette for this because trans people are still too often placed within the apocalyptic plotline. Sometimes we even place ourselves there, perhaps mistaking these for the truth or entirety of our story.

I was nervous to read The Madonna Secret because although I love Sophie's work, as a trans person, sometimes I find that "ecofeminist" work is not for me, or I find myself flattened out of history by an uncritical approach to gender. But in Strand's book, I found a heroine I could relate to, Miriam, who we find arguing about scripture with the men early on, then later finding the importance of female friendships. Miriam is clear-eyed in her comments about men's actions toward women, yet without the novel becoming moralistic or didactic. But more than anything, Miriam is rewilded. She returns to the earth, to the long story. That is where she draws her power. I needed to read this book, about a heroine who angers and hurts and loves, who lives through the unimaginable and still learns something about healing herself.

I felt as though I was given a kaleidoscope to look at my own experience, as though I were being given permission to let my experience dissolve and reconstellate into another shape.

"If we scrubbed away all the dirt, we would have no earth in which to place our seeds.” – The Madonna Secret