Articulate Experience
Articulate Experience
Butterfly Wings
On this episode of Articulate Experience—three writers reflect on pivotal moments that had life-altering consequences.
At 18, Darin Strauss was the driver in a fatal traffic accident. Though he wasn’t at fault, guilt defined his work and worldview for years after.
Sarah Ruhl was on her way to see a production of her first play when she was knocked unconscious in a car crash. She emerged without a concussion, but with a clear sense of her destiny.
When her mother was murdered, Natasha Trethewey looked to poetry to help sooth her unhealable wound.
- [01:24 ] Darin Strauss
- [13:57 ] Sarah Ruhl
- [31:16 ] Natasha Trethewey
Articulate Experience examines stories of humanity, resilience, and wisdom through the words of some of today’s greatest writers.
Articulate Experience is a production of the Articulate Foundation.
More at articulateshow.org
VO: Welcome to Articulate Experience, the show that examined stories of humanity, resilience, and wisdom through the words of some of today's greatest writers. I'm Jim Cotter. On this episode, three writers whose lives were changed by one fateful moment. Just before he started college, a fatal accident gave Darin Strauss permission to live the life he wanted.
DARIN STRAUSS: But then I had the accident. I think that was sort of the final push. Maybe it was just knowing that, uh, that life can throw you these curve balls. So why, why play it safe?
VO: Sarah Ruhl wasn't sold on becoming a playwright until one night she crashed into her purpose.
SARAH RUHL: There's a part of me as an origin story that feels like, did I die? Wait, has my whole life been a dream since? I mean, it's strange to me that there was a complete and total blackout before this change of vocation happened,
VO: And the poet Natasha Trethewey was 19 when her mother was murdered. Nearly four decades on, the loss remains.
NATASHA TRETHEWEY: I was saying to myself, now, you know, now you have a wound that never heals that might make you an artist.
VO: That's all ahead on Articulate Experience.
VO: One remarkable day in May 1988, high school senior Darin Strauss was driving some friends to a game of miniature golf when he noticed a pair of cyclists off to the side. Suddenly one of them, a 16-year-old girl, veered into his lane just 10 feet ahead. The next moments ended her life and changed his. Strauss would carry his guilt and a promise he made to her family for years after.
DARIN STRAUSS: Her parents said, “we know it's not your fault. We'll never blame you. We'll never sue you, but you just have to live your life for two people”. And that was tough because, you know, I didn't know what that meant. I was 18 years old, but I thought, “okay, I'm gonna try to do it”. She said, you have to be twice as successful, twice as happy. You know, it's a big burden. But I thought,” okay, I'll try to do it”.
VO: For Strauss, happiness had always meant writing, but growing up in 1970s, Long Island, he was surrounded by a sort of suburban ho-humness. The Strauss men built skyscrapers, sold real estate. None of them were conventionally creative— except for one.
DARIN STRAUSS: My grandfather wanted to be a writer and couldn't, and I think that's why I'm a writer. Really. I saw that as a tragic thing growing up. He fancied himself a poet, typical immigrant story. He, uh, his father came here with nothing, no English, no money. Ended up in, you know, immigrants relief, lived there for a while, went to work in a hat factory, and then eight years later owned the hat factory. I don't know how he did it. And then took that money and then started buying real estate in New York and, you know, owned high rises in the city. My grandfather had the, the great talent. He's probably the only one who was talented enough to inherit high rises in New York and end up flat broke. Like it's a very hard thing to do. You know, he was a terrible businessman because he was an artist at heart and my family wasn't.
JIM COTTER: So, then he wanted to be a poet and then you were, you were close with him.
DARIN STRAUSS: Yeah, I was very close with him.
JIM COTTER: And were you then, you know, I don't wanna be an amateur storyteller here, but is that the inciting incident or is it the accident that you think puts you on this path? Or is that, are there multiple endless inciting incidents instance?
DARIN STRAUSS: Well, I think it's both. And then I think that was sort of the final push. Maybe it was just knowing that, uh, that life can throw you these curve balls. So why, why play it safe? Anyway, so I went to college and I think really upset my parents when I said, “I'm gonna try to be a writer”.
VO: Years later, Darren Strauss would go on to publish an acclaimed memoir recounting the accident and its aftermath. But at 18, he was eager to put as much distance as possible between himself and that fatal tragedy. So, he moved to Boston to attend Tufts University as planned. Before social media or even Google, he found it was still possible to keep a secret.
DARIN STRAUSS: Didn't tell anyone, felt like an imposter lived with this dark secret,
JIM COTTER: But it was only a dark secret to you?
DARIN STRAUSS: To me, yeah.
JIM COTTER: Because you were the one who was allowing it to to fester in some ways.
DARIN STRAUSS: Yeah. I don't think there's anything to be ashamed of now, but
JIM COTTER: Right.
DARIN STRAUSS: But at the time, yeah.
JIM COTTER: And, and was there any therapy, was there anybody you could go to and say, “I have these horrible feelings of guilt that are irrational and I dunno how to deal with them. Please help.”
DARIN STRAUSS: I did go to therapist, but he was a terrible therapist. Soured me for 20 years to therapy. He, um, he said, “oh, you know, it's not a big deal. Let's, let's uh, just drive past the accident site. I'll let you go in my Porsche. It's a really fancy car. It'll be fun.” So, he would drive really fast past the accident site in his Porsche, and that was therapy. And I just said, “this is not, this is not helping” <laugh>
JIM COTTER: Barely exposure therapy if you were going by fast. Right?
DARIN STRAUSS: Yeah, exactly. It was like a week afterward. So that was the only therapy I did for it for a long time. So I felt pretty bad about it.
VO: A month or so into his freshman year, Strauss learned that despite their assurances, the dead girl's parents had been convinced by a lawyer to sue him for $1.5 million. The legal battle dragged on for six long years.
DARIN STRAUSS: Yeah, it went from 18 to uh, 24, I guess.
JIM COTTER: Was that the legal action as much a part of what you would discover later on to be post-traumatic stress? Or was it the fact that you were absolutely out of control with what happened and that there was no, you had no, could have, should have, would've, which even when people are culpable, at least they have that they can say, “if I hadn't had that other drink mm-hmm. <affirmative> if I hadn't,” you know, there's always a coulda should have, would've if somebody is culpable for something, but you were completely innocent and without blame in this,
DARIN STRAUSS: If I was at fault, I think it would be much harder for me. I feel like at least I know I didn't do anything wrong. But maybe that's delusional because there is something, I mean, it's a tough lesson to learn as an 18-year-old that, you know, the world is totally arbitrary and you could do nothing wrong and this terrible thing could happen anyway.
JIM COTTER: But you suffered terrific guilt out of it.
DARIN STRAUSS: I did suffer terrific guilt out of it.
JIM COTTER: And, and that wasn't something you could seem to be able to talk yourself out of.
DARIN STRAUSS: No, and that's something that we all go through life feeling bad about stuff that maybe we couldn't change, but it just hangs over you. You know? Um, so that's why I recommend people write about it because I just buried it. And that's, I think why I felt so bad. I think, um, Isaac Babel says, you know, “there are things that sit over, you sit over you like a tote on a stone”. And that's what it felt like. It was just sitting on top of me, but then writing about it, I sort of got control over it. I think if you're a storyteller, it gives you control over the material. So you have to decide, “okay, what am I gonna leave in? What am I gonna leave out? How am I gonna phrase this” and that, just getting in there and working with the material makes you in charge, uh, in a way. And if you're not doing that, it's in charge of you. And so I just, I tried to bury it and I couldn't. And it was just sort of controlling me.
VO: As hard as he tried to avoid facing his feelings and fears, they always bubbled up in his writing. After Tufts Strauss entered at the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University, where one particular teacher, the late great novelist El Doctoral, encouraged him to pursue his thesis topic, the story of the famous co-joined twins Chang and End. Like Strauss, the pair struggled with what it meant to live two lives in one
DARIN STRAUSS: Opening sentence of that book is, “this is the end I have feared since we were a child,” cuz one of them is wakes up and sees his brother is dead. And so he knows he's gonna die. So this is the end I have feared since we were a child. So there are two people and one person. So obviously I was working through that without knowing it.
JIM COTTER: So explain to me the, the tiptoeing around the facts, or is there any tiptoeing around the facts or do you owe the real story credence? Do you owe the real story truth or is it because once you name a real period time or a person or whatever it is, do you owe any any obligation of truth to the original story?
DARIN STRAUSS: I think you, you owe a respectful telling and said that depending on the subject, that allows you certain latitudes or not. So when I told the story of Chang and Eng, I felt I had licensed to tell it because no one told it before. There was a biography about it, about them, but the biography was very boring because it said, you know, “they came to New York in 1822 and they did their first show in 1823”. But that doesn't tell you what it's like to be in New York as a, as a, an Asian immigrant in 1822. So if you have a good imagination and you, you put some craftmanship into the work, you can hopefully tell the reader something he or she wouldn't have known. Like, you know, you can give them this picture of what it would be like.
VO: Chang and Eng was published in the year 2000 and was soon shortlisted for the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and the Pen Hemingway Award, among others. Success brought opportunity, which in turn brought a call from a reporter at the Atlanta Journal. Would he like to attend a family reunion of Chang and Eng’s descendants?
DARIN STRAUSS: She said, “do you know they have every five years,” uh, a family reunion of, of the descendants and there are thousands of them now because you have, you have 21 kids in 1850 expanded
JIM COTTER: Exponential growth,
DARIN STRAUSS: Right? So, uh, “we'll fly you down if you want to go and we'll do a story about it.” This is when newspapers would do that, you know? So I flew down on the Atlanta Journal's dime and I went with a reporter and it was really strange because, you know, you never go into a room where 2000 people have read your book and have an opinion about it. They all were angry at me, you know, because they were saying, you know, you talk about 'em being, uh, alcoholic talk about, you know, infidelities and stuff. But, uh, the sad and interesting thing was that so many of them knew nothing about their family. And they said it was because as soon as they died, they stopped talking about them in the family because of shame. And so I, I naively thought, “oh, well that's the shame that, uh, disabilities or however we would look at it would bring shame to a family”. And they said “no, is that they were Asian”. You know, this was, uh, 1871 and in North Carolina we couldn't have Asian blood. So as soon as they died, we pretended we were just straight white family.
JIM COTTER: They were angry with you for writing this because it wasn't true or because it wasn't the truth they wanted?
DARIN STRAUSS: It wasn't the truth they wanted. Chang certainly was an alcoholic and that I didn't make up and they just didn't, you know, they thought, “we don't know anything about our family. And here it is back in the spotlight and it's this negative portrayal”. But I don't think it's a negative portrayal. And I think if you're right about people, warts and all, you know, that's how we all see ourselves. And so, we relate to those people. If you see a character as perfect, you don't like that person on the page cause you think, “oh, that's not real, or that's not who I am”. So, when I wrote my memoir, this is a big part of it.
VO: It would take two more novels on 11 more years before Strauss completed his memoir, Half a Life. Here's an excerpt read by the author:
DARIN STRAUSS:
And how do they handle this? What I want to write is I lay there until morning with tear-stained eyes, tear stained pillow, a tear stained life. What can one do with levels of gloom and guilt, fear, and disbelief of bewilderment above one's capacity to register?
VO: Strauss says that writing Half a Life was cathartic, freeing, and a whole lot tougher than he'd expected. Half a Life received the National Book Critic Circle Award for autobiography in 2010 and opened a floodgate of support. From readers’ responses, Strauss learned a surprising truth: that by the time we're adults, most of us carry some sort of guilt.
DARIN STRAUSS: And I thought non-fiction was gonna be easy because you have to ask, “did it happen or would it happen because it did happen?” You don't have to ask, would I say this because I did say this, but the hard thing is taking that mass of inartful life and making an artful story out of it. But it's not always factual. So, this is an interesting thing that happened. So, I wrote the book, it came out and I was so worried about what the girl’s parents would think about it that I didn't even really consider my own parents. And I wrote about the funeral where I went to the funeral with my dad and I, the scene is me and my dad going to the funeral alone, the two of us. And it came out and then my mom said, “you know, um, I was there, you, you were wrong.
I went to the funeral with you and your dad and you should fix that”. I said, “okay, yeah”. So, for the paperback I was gonna rewrite it and say, you know, I wanted to be accurate. I, you know, it's a nonfiction book. So, I thought, yeah, I'll rewrite it, I'll put my mom in that scene. And I started to write it and it was the only time I felt like I was writing fiction because I thought, “I don't remember her there, so I have to leave it as is, even if it's factually wrong”. And I thought, “well maybe she's misremembering”, but it just felt fake. It was the only time I felt fake putting her in. So, I just left it. It's my story and that's the way I remember it. And I don't know if my mom was right, but a memoir is a different beast. You know, it has to be factual according to your recollection. I think.
VO: Having finally squared up his ghosts in Half a Life, Strauss felt free for the first time. His next book signaled the start of a new era. In 2020’s, The Queen of Tuesday Strauss combined biography, fiction and memoir to honor his beloved grandfather Izzy—another life he felt compelled to vicariously rectify. Strauss built the story around a single speck of truth—his grandfather's chance meeting with Lucille Ball at a Coney Island demolition, hosted by the infamous real estate developer, Fred Trump. Into the Izzy-Lucille saga Strauss weaves his own real and imagined conversations with his grandfather towards the end of his life.
The Queen of Tuesday excerpt read by Darin Strauss:
In my grandfather's hospital room, at his request, I found myself pawing through a briefcase that sat under a Burberry coat on a chair across from the bed. Found it, he said, I think this will be something you can use. I pulled out a manila folder filled with papers. No one knows that exists. Papa Izzy said, did you ever hear, I knew Lucille Ball.
VO: Darren Strauss shows his characters struggling with destiny, often living double lives as he was forced to do. His art has imitated his life, and today he writes from replace somewhere between healing, forgetting, remembering and imagination, finding his own and some universal truths in these multitudes.
---
Sarah Ruhl is an award-winning playwright, author, essayist, and Yale University professor. She's also been the recipient of a so-called MacArthur Genius award. Ruhl is known for works that reimagine old stories, expertly infusing facts with complex feelings and some fictitious elements. But if she just had a slightly louder speaking voice, she might have been a great actor instead.
SARAH RUHL: And I mean maybe that's why I chose the career of playwright was you could have you speak in a perfectly quiet voice and people would listen. They would assume that what you had to say was important cuz they were forced to memorize it.
VO: Ruhl may not have been destined for center stage, but she holds no grudges against those who were. The distinguished playwright respects actors regarding them as collaborators. And, she says, she always has.
SARAH RUHL: My mother was in community theater growing up and she used to bring me along and I would watch in the dark while she rehearsed and I would take notes and I, to me, the actors were so glamorous and they were community theater actors, but you know, they would put on their stockings and they would smoke and yes, you just wanted to be around them or, or please them. So, you wanted to create language that would please them and allow you to continue to be around them. <laugh>, do you know, just as a first impulse to write a play, right?
JIM COTTER: But it's also, I mean, not all actors are delightful and charming. There are a lot of really dumb actors. Like there are a lot of really dumb, everything's,
SARAH RUHL: I don't work with the not smart ones.
JIM COTTER: Really?
SARAH RUHL: Really! Lucky. Lucky. They have their own creative capacity. At every moment on stage, they're actually in charge of the ether and the playwright is banished to the back and they're using your language but unlike movies where the director's in charge, on stage, the actor's in charge as soon as there's a performance. So, they are creating the moment and you're collaborating with them because they have your language. I feel like truly great actors are some of the bravest people. They're investigating what it is to be human. And then they're sharing that with an audience who might judge them in 10 different ways.
JIM COTTER: They're sharing your view of what it is to be human,
SARAH RUHL: I guess. I feel like the language is collaborating with their history, their emotional life, their bravery. Like it's a very bizarre, intimate collaboration and, and we're completely codependent. The actor without the language has nothing. Right? And a play in a drawer is a dead thing without an actor.
JIM COTTER: How are you on opening night? Are you hiding? Are you happy or nervous?
SARAH RUHL: As a playwright? Yeah. Oh, I'm just a wreck. A complete wreck. It's awful. I mean I wouldn't wish it on anyone. <laugh>, particularly in New York
VO: As a playwright Ruhl now has more than 15 works to her name. But once she believed she was destined to be a poet— until, as an undergrad at Brown University, she met a teacher with other ideas. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel proved to be a dedicated and occasionally devious mentor.
SARAH RUHL: So, she snuck a play of mine into a new play festival and it was called Passion Play. And um, I got in a car accident on the way to the theater, my mom was driving and we got blindsided and I hit, I hit my head and I blacked out and I woke up and my mom said, “oh my God, are you okay?” And I said, “yeah,” and, and she said, “we should take you to the hospital for an MRI. Make sure you don't have a concussion.” I said, “no, we have to get to the show. I have to go see my play.” So we went to the play and it was so thrilling that night, seeing the thing in three dimensions, seeing the audience react. And I kind of, that was it. And I thought, “I'm never looking back.” And I got an MRI the next day and didn't have a concussion. But there's a part of me as an origin story that feels like, did I die? Like has my whole life been a dream since? I mean, it's just strange to me that there was a complete and total blackout before this change of vocation happened.
VO: It took Ruhl a decade to finish Passion Play, which bloomed into three parts, drawing on her Catholic upbringing. It began as a story of two brothers from northern England fighting over who will play Christ in their small town’s retelling of that final journey to crucifixion. Eventually things turned political, and Queen Elizabeth shows up to shut down the hall affair.
SARAH RUHL: And then I got obsessed. So I said that was the first little part. And then I did a part in Nazi Germany where in and Hitler came and saw it and loved it because the Jesus was so wonderful and Aryan. And the first people to join the Nazi party, sadly were the director and the man who played Jesus and bizarrely the man who played Paunchus Pilot. And the man who played Judas never joined the Nazi party.
JIM COTTER: Hmm.
SARAH RUHL: So I did that second act and then it took me 10 more years to write a third act in the States where they do a Passion in South Dakota. So I had Queen Elizabeth become Hitler, become Reagan. So in, in the third act, Reagan goes and visits the passion play in the, in the corn fields.
JIM COTTER: Is there a fourth act looming <laugh>?
SARAH RUHL: I dunno, I think I'm done. I'm done. I'm scared to think what the fourth act would be.
JIM COTTER: Passion play premiered in all its tri pronged glory In 2010— the same year Ruhl became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama and earned her first Tony nomination for her Broadway debut, In the next room, the vibrator play. Audiences were enthralled with its hilarious, yet incisive exploration of medically prescribed orgasms in the 1880s.
SARAH RUHL: I read a book called The Technology of Orgasm. And I was fascinated because it said like, as soon as electricity was invented, one early application was vibrators for doctors using it on women who hysteria. It was like, you know, the, the iron and then the vibrator and the doctors said it was this amazing time saving device. They were so grateful, but they really didn't see it as sexual because it, they just thought they were giving women medical paroxysms that apparently was helping as many as two thirds of women. Um, which of course two thirds of women probably could use an orgasm. And it was only when it was considered sexual, and women were thought to have sexuality that vibrators became illegal in the U.S. around the 1920s. So, the point of departure for me was sort of, how can this be? How could the doctors have been really thinking they were providing a medical service? But then it became about something more, it became about marriage. The whole idea of compartmentalization of the mind and the body. How do you put the two together? It became about wet nurses.
JIM COTTER: And, and with that, were you attempting to, to shift the needle on anyone's ideas or, or behaviors apropos their attitude to women's sexuality?
SARAH RUHL: I think I don't have a conscious “I will perform this action on the audience”. It's just not how I write. But if I were to analyze it after the fact, I think even just the act of putting women on stage, having orgasms in 19th century frogs, I mean, I think it does something, I don't know exactly what it does, but there's a stage direction in the play about wanting the actress who has to perform the orgasm to do it in such a way that it's not how we imagine that all women orgasm. Because now we have a lot of pornography and a lot of cultural references. We think we know how women are “supposed” to sound when they orgasm. But in the 19th century, women didn't know how they were supposed to sound or how, how they were supposed to register this strange paroxysm. So, I was really interested in how could that experience for the actress too be a really internal discovery.
JIM COTTER: So the stage directions were this should not be a pornographic orgasm.
SARAH RUHL: Yeah. Or this, I wish I had it exactly, but it's something like, “don't feel obligated to perform an orgasm the way you think women are supposed to orgasm. Remember that this woman had no idea how she was quote unquote supposed to orgasm, no idea of how it was supposed to sound or look.”
VO: Just as “The vibrator play” was earning her widespread critical acclaim, Ruhl longed to hide away from the world. She'd faced a difficult pregnancy during which she was diagnosed with a rare blood disease, which made her constantly itchy and threatened the lives of her twins. But even when they were born healthy relief was short-lived. After a lactation consultant noticed Ruhl’s left eye drooping, she was diagnosed with Bell's Palsy, an incurable disorder that causes paralysis in the facial muscles. A decade later, the condition would mostly resolve itself. But for 10 years Ruhl couldn't smile, even at her children. In her 2021 book Smile, the story of a face Ruhl writes of a struggle she never wanted to talk about but couldn't hide.
Smile Excerpt by Sarah Ruhl
I've grown to love the syllables in the word. Maybe today my head is full of maybes. Maybe healing is not linear. Maybe there is no one healthcare savior. But many patient practitioners, maybe the long haul is longer than anticipated. Maybe a nap is in order, maybe writing down your story helps
VO: Smile was not the first nor the last time Sarah Ruhl wrote for the page instead of the stage. Today, she's released two poetry collections, a book called 100 Essays. I Didn't Have Time to Write— capturing her fleeting thoughts and memories as a sleep-deprived mother of three, and and one collaboration with a former student. 2018’s Letters From Max weaves together poems and letters shared between the unlikely friends as Max battles cancer, ultimately unsuccessfully.
SARAH RUHL: He was clearly an exceptional human being. And it's almost like he had this ancient light bulb hovering over his head. And, and then at the end of the semester he had a recurrence of a pediatric cancer called Ewing Sarcoma. And I felt as his teacher, it was really important to see him through it. And so, we became close. But then when he graduated, he went to Columbia and got his MFA and he just said, “all I wanna do is write with the time I have left.”
JIM COTTER: So he knew at this point that he, he wasn't going to live to be an old man.
SARAH RUHL: There was the hope, but also he knew what the numbers were like probably.
JIM COTTER: So when, so you knew him for how long? He died at 24
SARAH RUHL: 4 years. Right. And so, I mean, for a while we just wrote the normal kinds of logistical emails, but at a point they got more philosophical and considering things like the afterlife and poetry. And at a point we thought it would be a fun project to, to intentionally write to each other. And partly he traveled a lot. He went to the NIH for trials in California and I thought it might distract him from chemotherapy. And also, I felt a sense of mission to get more of his words into the ether because I, I knew he was a genius and I knew that there was limited time.
JIM COTTER: So tell me some of the topics you covered and, and tell me how purposefully you were in introducing a topic.
SARAH RUHL: There was one point where Max, we had lunch, we had pizza. And he said he was afraid to die. And I went home and thought, “Hmm, what could I write to Max to make him feel better about being afraid to die?” And so I told him about a dream I'd had. My own father died of cancer when I was fairly young and in the dream—at that point I was an atheist— but my father appeared and we were looking at silver, silver writing in the heavens. And it said in really big, bold letters, “there is no God”. And I turned to my father and said,” but how could the letters get there then?” And my father said, “exactly” <laugh>. And I woke him and thought I was just immensely comforted.
JIM COTTER: So you told Max this?
SARAH RUHL: So I told Max that dream
JIM COTTER: And he responded?
SARAH RUHL: Well, he took a year to write back. I mean, and in between we would hang out, we would discuss things, we'd write other letters. But it was so, I mean I think he described it almost as a burning sensation, you know, that it was hard to really look at that directly at that point in his life. And then a year later he wrote back this long letter about how he envisioned the afterlife.
JIM COTTER: And he was a believer?
SARAH RUHL: No, he, um, was raised Jewish, um, was an atheist, but really probably the most spiritual person I've ever met. So he, it was an interesting set of contradictions. I mean he meditated, he read all kinds of religious texts, but he didn't believe in an afterlife.
JIM COTTER: And he went to his grave like that.
SARAH RUHL: I wish I could say with certainty, I don't know. But I do feel like there was a lot of comfort passed back and forth in our letters. And mainly it was being able to ask the questions of each other. And at a point he said, “heavens are all alike and the people who make them are all artists”. So it seemed like he was evolving towards some kind of idea of the afterlife as one zone artistic creation.
JIM COTTER: When, when I started looking at the letters I I correctly or otherwise sort of thought, and I've thought about this a lot, the, when my own mother died for years beforehand, we'd had conversations about when she was going to die and we'd talked through everything and we'd set everything we needed to say and we'd set her goodbyes and we'd, we'd passed everything and we'd done the sort of the, the therapy insofar as you can do therapy with somebody who's that intimate with you. And I and I and I thought, "great. I've done my pre I used to call it my pre, we used to laughingly call it our pre grieving. Mm. And then she died and I was utterly heartbroken. Ah-huh <affirmative>. Um, did the pre grieving work for you with Max?
SARAH RUHL: Not entirely. It was a really sad time after he died
JIM COTTER: And there was none of that consolation of it was a release or was there some consolation in that cuz the body he was occupying at that point was no longer functional?
SARAH RUHL: That's true. And I do think the body is an amazing teacher and my own father died of cancer. And seeing that up close twice, it, that prepares you for death in a way that I think of in a funny way like pregnancy prepares you to have the baby. It's like you can't get any bigger. It has something has to give. And I, with Max or my father, the body was so riddled with pain, something had to be released. So I do think there's that preparation, but I mean, I think a number of things were hard for me after Max died. And one is that a former student or a friend, I don't think we have a lot of cultural ways to grieve for those people.
VO: Here's an excerpt from letters from Max read by the author.
Rain falls on the house.
My mother dries dishes
in the dark house in the rain.
“I’m your little dish,”
I tell her, even though I ought to be a man.
“You’re a big dish.”
“You mean I’m very wet.”
I haven’t seen much,
and don’t see much:
The jungle of my short life is one row of white, straight
naked
trees.
The vines are white and fall apart in my hands,
as if dissolved under the tongue.
Every living thing is screaming dust.
To imagine a heaven is to admit
there are things in this
world you think you could never bring yourself to
love,
even given an unlimited number of attempts.
“Learn to love everything– the world becomes
heaven.”
“That sounds hard, I have a better idea, pass the soap.”
VO: Like her beloved student Max, Sarah Ruhl often walks the razor's edge between humor and grief, for it is at this intersection that she accesses the intense, contradictory, confounding potency of the human experience.
SARAH RUHL: I do think though that one wonderful thing about both crying and laughing is there is a liberty to both of them. You can't sort of command people to laugh organically either. I mean, you you could, but it would, you you would, it would feel canned. Hmm. Um, and it's a wonderful liberation that your emotional life is interacting with things and your your some weird con nexus of your soul and your physiology is choosing to laugh or cry at any given moment. And I think that's also why I feel a bit of permissiveness with the plays in terms of what effect do I want them to have. Um, I enjoy that mystery. I enjoy a play where everyone else in the room is laughing and I moved for some reason and then no one else is laughing. They're deadly silent. And I, I have some really loud embarrassing short because I find it incredibly funny. I like that that play.
JIM COTTER: But the plays that you're writing, I'm guessing you, you, you do want people to laugh where you thought you were writing funny.
SARAH RUHL: Of course. I mean everyone's happy when people laugh and it's such a wonderful, for playwright, it's, it's like a nice warm bath. I mean you can hear them respond.
VO: At seemingly every turn, Sarah Ruhl has faced impossible odds, once in a lifetime coincidence and other evidence of fate. All in all, they collide to form the twisting path of a life well lived and material for stories still yet untold.
VO: The Pulitzer Prize-winning and two-time U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi in 1966 to Mother Gwendolyn and Father Eric. He was a white poet from Nova Scotia. She was a black social worker. They met in a college drama class and quickly fell in love. 1965, the pair eloped to Cincinnati, two years before the Supreme Court struck down all laws banning interracial marriage. But legal or not, the relationship wasn't made to last. And they separated by the time their daughter was seven. The young Natasha had to figure out how to navigate the world as a child of divorce when it wasn't yet so common. But at the same time growing up by racial in a very racially divided place. Yet Trethewey says she doesn't hold her childhood against the south.
NATASHA TRETHEWEY: I am of that place, that soil, that climate, that history to not love the native land is to not have a part of self-love, I think because it is the place that made me.
JIM COTTER: Wow. What did your father teach you about whiteness and what did your mother teach you about blackness and what did the other teach you about the other? Like I have this image of your dad as this really naive Canadian guy who up in the south and and waltzes on a, a university campus and marries this beautiful black woman and they all live happily ever after with a, with a kind of a beautiful and romantic naivety that maybe somebody who was from there would never have had.
NATASHA TRETHEWEY: Well, I think that my father did have a kind of naivete. I don't know if it was necessarily because he was Canadian, because he was also aware of history. I think it has more to do with a kind of naivete that I've actually seen in a lot of white people for the longest time. My father wanted and therefore allowed himself to believe that there was space in the world for me to exist in that place and time as a mixed-race person. And when he believed that, I think what it actually meant was “as free of the burdens of blackness as he was”. That was naive. But I learned from my father about white people, about good white people. It's a phrase that I think of my grandmother saying all the time. It meant something very specific is that even my beloved father who loved me dearly and whom I loved dearly still harbored deeply ingrained and unexamined notions of racial difference and racial hierarchy. I learned from my mother that I could not exist as a biracial person without the burdens of blackness that my father would've wished for me because I was always going to be seen perceived as a black woman and that was going to come with all sorts of burdens and barriers. She wanted me to be fully aware of that because the lack of awareness would be dangerous
VO: Sooner after the divorce Natasha moved with her mother to Atlanta to usher in a fresh start there. Gwendolyn met, married and had a son with Joel Grimmett, a Vietnam veteran prone to violent rages. They split up in 1983, but the abuse didn't stop. In 1985, shortly after finishing a 12-month stint in prison for a previous attempt on her life, Grimmett murdered his ex-wife in the parking lot of her apartment complex. Gwendolyn Turnbough was only 40 years old. and her loss left a 19-year-old Natasha heartbroken. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, Trethewey turned to poetry for comfort and even managed to find some in W.H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts was particularly consoling, (read here, in part, by Trethaway):
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere else to get to and sailed calmly on.
JIM COTTER: Why was that such a consolation to you?
NATASHA TRETHEWEY: Because it reminded me that I was not alone in feeling alone in my grief. The image that we’re given in the closure is of those tiny legs falling into the sea, whereas everything is sort of in the foreground going on as if nothing has happened. No one is noticing this tragedy because everything else is going on as it always has.
JIM COTTER: And that was your feeling when your mom was killed?
NATASHA TRETHEWEY: Yes. And you know there's another poem that gets at it so beautifully and it's Lisel Mueller's When I'm asked, and it's a poem about writing poetry. She begins, “when I'm asked how I began writing poetry, I talk about the indifference of nature,” and she goes on to describe something very similar to my own experience of losing her mother on a June day. And the sun was shining and flowers are blooming and everything is going on. Nothing is looking sad, there's no clouds, there's no rain. And she closes the poem by saying, “I put my grief in the mouth of language, the only thing that would grieve with me”. It's that feeling of seeing the world going about its way and not noticing that makes you feel alone but reading a poem about it or seeing a painting about it reminds you that that feeling of aloneness is a shared experience and that there is a kind of community of people grieving and feeling alone.
JIM COTTER: Is it cruel of me to point out that both of these deaths, Icarus’s and your mom's were not natural? Mm,
NATASHA TRETHEWEY: No.
JIM COTTER: That wasn't relevant.
NATASHA TRETHEWEY: No, it wasn't the cause of the death, the unnatural circumstances that formed for me the largest part of that ball of grief. I mean certainly the tragedy of her death exacerbates my feeling of loss.
JIM COTTER: Was that, do you think, because I've seen it reported that that was one of the impetus that made you a writer.
NATASHA TRETHEWEY: I don't think I knew it at that moment, but in the weeks following her death, the first thing I did was try to write a poem about it turning to the only language that would grieve with me because we often believed that poetry is the only place to speak the unspeakable. And I went there too to think about how her death made me a poet in those same weeks afterwards, I had a dream about her and it's the only dream I've had of her in which I know that she's dead. Any other kind of dream I have, it's as if nothing's happened and there's always the waking up opening my eyes and realizing again that she's gone, which I think must be not unlike what Orpheus felt when he couldn't resist turning around to see if -- was following him and banished her back to the underworld.
Now in this dream, she was dead and I knew it and we were just walking around, uh, kind of an oval walking side by side, not speaking. And then a man is coming toward us and the man is her ex-husband, my former stepfather, the man who murdered her. And when I see him coming toward her, I kind of wave and smile and speak a very kind greeting to him. Even though in the dream I also know what he's done. And then he goes past us, my mother turns and she looks at me and she has a hole in the center of her forehead the size of a quarter, and there's this bright light shining through it. And she says to me, “do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?” And now at 19, I'm pretty sure I had never read Lorca didn't know anything about Duende, but in his essay about Duende Lorca writes, “in trying to heal the wound that never heals lies the strangeness in an artist's work.” And it's as if in the dream my mother was telling me, or perhaps if in the dream I am also all the characters as well as the dreamer.
I was saying to myself, “now you know, now you have a wound that never heals that might make you an artist”.
VO: Her mother's death has showed up frequently in Natasha Trethewey's work over the years, but it would take decades before she was ready to face the tragedy head-on. First, through a collection of poems, 2018’s Monument. Then, in the 2020 book, Memorial Drive, a daughter's memoir. When she emerged from this project, she found she was not quite healed, but somehow a little more whole. This is Imperatives for Carrying on in the Aftermath from Monument, read by the author.
Do not hang your head or clench your fists
when even your friend, after hearing the story,
says, My mother would never put up with that.
Fight the urge to rattle off statistics: that,
more often, a woman who chooses to leave
is then murdered. The hundredth time
your father says, But she hated violence,
why would she marry a guy like that?—
don’t waste your breath explaining, again,
how abusers wait, are patient, that they
don’t beat you on the first date, sometimes
not even the first few years of a marriage.
Keep an impassive face whenever you hear
Stand By Your Man, and let go your rage
when you recall those words were advice
given your mother. Try to forget the first
trial, before she was dead, when the charge
was only attempted murder; don’t belabor
the thinking or the sentence that allowed
her ex-husband’s release a year later, or
the juror who said, It’s a domestic issue—
they should work it out themselves. Just
breathe when, after you read your poems
about grief, a woman asks, Do you think
your mother was weak for men? Learn
to ignore subtext. Imagine a thought-
cloud above your head, dark and heavy
with the words you cannot say; let silence
rain down. Remember you were told,
by your famous professor, that you should
write about something else, unburden
yourself of the death of your mother and
just pour your heart out in the poems.
Ask yourself what’s in your heart, that
reliquary—blood locket and seedbed—and
contend with what it means, the folk saying
you learned from a Korean poet in Seoul:
that one does not bury the mother’s body
in the ground but in the chest, or—like you —
you carry her corpse on your back.
VO: Natasha Trethewey is now older than her mother was when she died, and has mourned for more years than they spent together. In 2019, Trethewey's former stepfather was released after more than 30 years in prison— elderly, but poised to live out the rest of his life as a free man. Yet despite the cosmic unfairness of it all, Trethewey doesn't harbor ugly feelings about Grimmett’s second act. Somehow, she still hasn't given up on the idea of justice being about more than revenge.
NATASHA TRETHEWEY: I believe in restorative justice. And what that means is, as much as the man who's being released from prison did something unthinkable, I remind myself that there was a time that he was an innocent, that he was a child, that he came into this world and something so terrible happened to him, something so disfiguring of his own soul that it made him capable of doing a monstrous thing. There's no justice for him either I suppose.
VO: Natasha Trethewey may have inherited the gift of poetry from her father, but her literary legacy is a testament to her mother's life, love and death. And though her core wound may never heal through writing, she's been able to find clarity, honor, and even hope.
Articulate Experience is a production of the Articulate Foundation.
More at articulateshow.org
The program is produced by Tori Marchiony with help from Christine Walden, Mark Miller, Tom Contarino, Eva Roben, Matt Hoisch, Gabby Bing, Paula Butler, and Mary Morilla.
Our fact checker is Christopher Munden.
Original music and sound design by John Avarese.
I'm Jim Cotter.
