Category: Memoir

Posted on

On Wanting to Be Liked

Sometime in the late 90s I got the erroneous idea that Jana Finkelstein was interested in me.

She was a writer who was just coming up, and I was an established writer in the lesbian scene at least, and when it became clear that Jana was impressed with me and had a strong desire to network and hobnob with me, I became somehow convinced that Jana wanted to fuck me.

My erotic radar had never been very good. Its mechanisms had been smashed by a hasty forklift turning sharply in the factory, and I had hardly ever been able tell whether there was a spark between someone and me or I just had too many frankfurters that day at lunch.

In particular, I had often been confused about the difference between someone liking my work and thinking I was smokin’ hot. There was the horrible time a sweet young staffer at a gay rights organization in DC had gotten me tickets to Bill Clinton’s inauguration, and I had assumed that rather than just being nice to a journalist, the girl was ready for a night of love. Then there was the lissome woman in Queer Nation who’d exclaimed, “Wow, so you’re Donna Minkowitz! I really love your journalism,” and I’d thought we’d definitely be eating spicy crab and playing footsie in a week or two.

It wasn’t simply that I was a cad, although one effect and perhaps cause of my confusion was that I was. More than that, though, I was spectacularly clueless, erotically colorblind.

I guess I had been brought up with two fundamentally contradictory but powerful assumptions about myself: that I was a stinking, livid turd freshly emitted from the ass of a sewer troll and the brightest human being in New York City.

This was what my mother had always told me — both things. First one, then the other, alternating.

This impacted the whole of my relations with other people. I suppose it’s natural that I saw the entire sphere of the social as subject to manipulations or inducements, like whether I could get someone free tickets to a play, or increase their cultural cachet by having their friends see them with me, the famous lesbian Village Voice writer. (By extension, if I ever exhausted the pool of free theater tickets, or if my writing ever stopped being published, I thought that no one would ever want me.)

In all fairness to my mother, she had made a similarly vertiginous assessment of her own value as a person. What she painstakingly taught my sisters and me as soon as we could hear was that the dividing line between paradisic charisma and worthlessness was horrifically narrow, and that it fluctuated in a strange and dizzying fashion. We could do hardly anything to affect which quadrant the needle fell in, but we must affect it, must perfectly and unerringly affect it at every moment and steer it into the right corner, at the cost of an unnameable terror.

So I was both desperate and “utterly confident,” naked and clothed in a fake armor of perfection — so that when Jana came by and remarked that she used to live in the same apartment building as me and had always been tickled to be my neighbor, I felt buzzed, anxious and under terrific obligation all at once: Here was some of this mysterious current of being liked, which alone — in the form of praise, sexual attention, publications, awards, and coffee dates — could certify me against the fecal. Continue reading “On Wanting to Be Liked”

Posted on

All I Ever Need to Know I Learned in Pilates

“I’ve got you,” I say to myself as I bend over at the low drinking fountain at the Y. Bending this way has been a scary movement for me for years, with low back and shoulder injuries and a perennially weak body.

Perennially, yes, but changing. Talking to myself, I’m speaking in the voice of my abdominal muscles, of all my muscles in fact, the internal and external obliques, the transverse, the rectus, and the thighs and pelvic muscles too, reminding the individual cranky and scared parts of me that they are not alone, never alone, that they are held up and cared for by all of me together and I’m not letting them go.

My teacher taught me this on the weird Pilates contraption known as the Cadillac, the one that looks like the medieval torture device known as the rack. I almost didn’t get on it. But when he put those disconcerting-looking metal leg springs on my legs and showed me how to let my stomach take the weight so that my poor back wouldn’t have to, I felt a surprising Ah inside, the Ah of my chest opening and magically getting lighter, the Ah of my entire body becoming more spacious — whole apartments and subbasements and rooms, inside my body! Whole gathering spaces and meeting rooms and galleries, an entire city of bone and ligaments and muscle!

A big pink flower in my body, like a tall lily stretching from my collarbone to my coccyx, and the leaves of it coming down my legs!

It is hard to say this, the following thing: it is hard to say this. Fear and tightness have been a very big part of my life. Not just physically! It’s not at all uncommon for me to feel stifled, strangled, caught. Like a fish in a net gasping, unable to move one way or the other; literal torture. I have often been afraid “the worst” would come — So, what do I mean by that, “the worst”? I mean something like feeling agony forever, physical or mental, and being forcibly stuck and held there, feeling shame, being starved for care and connection, even from (perhaps most from) myself.

Some Christians say that “hell” means most of all alienation, alienation from “God” meaning being denied contact with anything, anyone that contains the sacred. Because I think all human beings partake of the sacred, to me hell means, most fundamentally, not being connected — to yourself or anyone else.

Oh my reader: sometimes I’m afraid that people who act like they like and respect me actually think I’m stupid. It gets worse: Almost everyone I talk to each day I think, in some deep way, is going to hit me. Almost everyone I email, too. Hit me over the head with a pipe for being such an inferior person.

Sometimes I want badly to tell a friend or a relative something about my life and for a reason completely unknown to me, I can’t. I mean literally, I can’t. I pause, my speech gets labored, I grimace and gesture and look like I’m being stabbed — perhaps I am being stabbed — I’m frustrated and I struggle to try and drag myself up a path my vocal chords do not want to go. The person I’m with often says, “Wow, it’s seems like this subject is really hard for you. You don’t have to tell me about it if you don’t want to!” But I do want to.

People think of Pilates as just a kind of trendy exercise. But as I’ve used it to heal from my body’s injuries, the system Joseph Pilates invented has also been startlingly applicable to emotional and psychological barriers, interpersonal tightness, pain of the mind.

Oh, pain of the mind. Surely we all have it. I bet it was the same back when the cheerily depressive author of the Tao Te Ching wrote, “I alone am confused/Desolate/Oh, like the sea/Adrift/… I alone am different from others/And value being fed by the mother.”

Pilates is actually about being fed by the mother — the mother in our bodies, the vastness inside ourselves. I called the author of the Tao Te Ching “cheerily depressive” just now because in fact, he wasn’t feeling too bad about being confused, desolate, adrift.

He was accepting these feelings, even celebrating them, because he was celebrating and accepting all his feelings and needs right then.

He trusted “the mother” in the Way, “the mother” in himself to supply what would feed him.

That is what I learned in Pilates starting about five years ago, to connect with “the core,” “the powerhouse,” “the center” in my body and mind. And I learned that all parts of the self must work together and support one another, that no parts of the self (or body), even the hurt parts, even the parts that are not yet strong enough, are bad. From a deceptively slight-looking former dancer I learned that human bodies are flexible, that the spine is supposed to move, that even the weakest person has inherent power and that all of us have a “magic belt” around us that can provide nearly infinite power if we only let it support us with its discernment and love. And I learned that mindfulness is the soil to grow it all.

(c) Donna Minkowitz 2012

Posted on

Hot Apple Pie at Age 10

A little later, at age 10, the hot, fried apple pie from, yes, McDonald’s was the wild fulcrum of my most intense pre-sexual desires. I did not understand them.
I was moved deeply by something about the burning liquid inside the pastry package, the near-searing of my lips when I took a bite, the mystery of the musky, tangy ooze cut with cinnamon. I wanted the pie in a way I have never wanted any other food. (I think I was literally in love with it.)
My longing was for more than merely to eat it. It was a more basic and primal one than that, and probably one that could not have been satisfied in space and time.
That McDonald’s hot apple pie carried my sexuality through underneath the soil till it was finally ready to be revealed, first in the vague pleasure I got from holding my armpits in the fresh spring of sixth grade (my mom: “What are you doing that for? Stop!”), and then in the dawning of confusing fantasies about punishing women’s breasts (seventh grade) and very clear ones about lying on Michael Zappalini’s lap.
Posted on

Sexual Feelings in Childhood, Part One

Tony the Tiger, the sexy hero of my childhood
Been thinking lately about what my “sexuality,” if I had one, was like for me as a child. Early on, it meant being attracted to Charlie the Tuna, the handsome, cartooned face of a tuna representing the Starkist company. Charlie had big, dark, masculine eyebrows, glasses, and a flirtatious smile, tongue slightly revealed in that inimitable cartoon way and lips almost scooping the viewer up. I realize now he shares some of the ineffable qualities that draw me most compellingly to my wife, Karen. How could I try to name these things? “Masculine, affectionate mischief?” A funky and winking confidence, plus goofiness and muscle?

“The debonair?”

When I say “attracted” I mean I believe I was actually sexually attracted to that cartoon tuna. I think I also imagined his taste, and a sense of sexy “slipperiness” that I have learned is certainly true of tuna sushi. Some of my friends, men and women, say that they masturbated from a very young age. This was not true for me, but I did feel discernibly “erotic” feelings for animated characters, for a few foods, and for certain smells.

At around five, I had been even more attracted to Tony the Tiger, the champion of Frosted Flakes. In fact I can’t stop thinking of Karen now when I see Tony’s sexy leap across the cereal bowl in the commercials of today. Tony leapt, then and now, with paws that looked like arms ready to embrace a person. He stirred me in a way I couldn’t explain.

Sometimes at 47, I will smell a particular “crazy, sweet smell” that made my nostrils flare when I was 3 and a half feet tall. It still stirs me, hard, so that I come to attention like an Army private. The scent was on my bamboo bathroom towel today, but what is it, smells like the woods in June, like an animal, like an armpit? It pushed my brain’s pleasure centers in a way that made me want to take it to my nose and smell it again and again and again, like (later) some girls’ panties. Did I encounter it en route to a family picnic, through the car window? Was it a forest animal’s pheromones?

[To be continued…]

(c) Donna Minkowitz 2012

Posted on

What’s Spiritual about Memoir?

Pens that can fly


This is from a talk I gave at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture in October 2010. It’s about why memoir is good. 🙂 For writers, readers, and the entire world.

I started writing memoir in the early 90s, when I was a journalist at the Village Voice. And almost inevitably, when I was at a party or the gym or a political meeting and said what I was doing, someone would ask, “Aren’t you a little young for that?”  I was 28 when I began.  And I would take a deep breath and answer, “No.”

Before the late 1980s, people generally used the word “memoir” to mean a fat and comprehensive book written by someone at the end of their lives, almost always someone very famous, like a president or a movie star or a Titan of Industry.

Of course, people who weren’t as prominent as that had been writing personal accounts of their lives for hundreds of years, thousands if you count poetry. They just hadn’t been calling them memoirs. Continue reading “What’s Spiritual about Memoir?”

Posted on

Lust on the Corner of South Third

Photo: nyctaxiphoto.com

Lust on the Corner of South Third

I wrote this piece around 1988, when Williamsburg was a very different place.

Dark hair, sexy, with an arrogant face like a dyke or a thief, harder chin and hotter eyes than any other woman in decaying Williamsburg. White, with jagged short black hair. Are you a lesbian? One of the most beautiful heads, mouths and jawlines I have seen, here in this wasteland. On Lorimer Street all the women look beaten. Quickly scan the legs, which come out tan and hairless out of light blue shorts. Shaving seldom means everything. I know thousands — but how could I miss so much? Even from far away this one looks sick, every thirty seconds like she’s hit in the face, a slap of confusion, or nausea, or loss. Like a stick across the eyes. She’s tall, and stoops a little. As she passes close to me I feel attraction and pity at the same time, I want to fuck her and to give her aspirins, water, toast. “Sweetheart,” she says, and my heart’s racing, my hips take on warm speed, “do you have fifteen cents for a little juice?” Juice — You bet I want to give you juice, I want to give you mango, guava, apple — I say “Sorry” because I am and “NO” in as loud a voice as I can, I step back. I think she wants me to fish in my pockets so she can step in, step closer and — my instincts say to move. My karate teacher said to always follow my instincts.

Did she have a knife in her pockets or was that just the knife of her face, I was expecting peril but a different peril. Do they really resemble each other? Genet sees a murderer and moans. I don’t, I want a different lover, a different loving — Not this smack in the guts — Not wide nausea filling all the throats on Lorimer — Was her pain as sexy as her rocky jaw, why did my heart move to her fists? I know one hundred reasons women should be tough as rocks. The same: the reasons why I want to open for an avalanche.

(c) Donna Minkowitz 2012

Posted on

Spring Memoir Writing Class


Hi folks. This is just to let you know that I’m teaching a memoir writing class this spring, from Wednesday February 8 to Wednesday March 28 (eight weeks).

It meets from 7 to 9 PM in Brooklyn, and the fee is $300.

This workshop focuses on craft, particularly on using emotion, sensory details, and imagination to construct a profound and relatable piece of personal writing. Students will get frequent feedback in a supportive atmosphere.

The number of students is limited to eight.

If you’re interested or you have a friend who might be, please let me know at minkowitz AT earthlink.net.

Many thanks!
Donna

More info: Donna Minkowitz has taught memoir writing and creative nonfiction since 1998, at the 92nd Street Y, the In Our Own Write program of the New York City Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, the World Fellowship Center, and The Kitchen, as well as independently. She won a Lambda Literary Award for her memoir Ferocious Romance, which was also shortlisted for the Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Visions Award “for the most promising and distinctive work by a new author.”