I cartwheel backwards through years, to the porch step where I am sitting beside a friend on a chilly October evening seven years ago. I try to breathe this cold past self alive, but her fingers and feet stay blue and rigid. I know why. I don’t really want her flitting and dancing and shouting in the fullness of true being.
If she were anyone but me, I could be kind to her. Laugh at the way she dispenses clichés like they are her mother’s truest whisper. Hug her for thinking she’s the only one who’s ever liked a Woody Allen film. Hold her by both wrists to keep her from covering her eyes in despair. Laugh, hold, chide, rejoice in, bear with in love.
But, poor thing, she is a former me. Awkward, unlearned, guilt-filled. I wonder some days, do I want to write her back to life again?
I have been time-traveling to revise a personal essay. The friend I sat beside that October would eventually become my husband. That evening was the night I fell in love. I try to listen in to what we are saying, but embarrassment keeps distorting truth.
I have been writing and revising this essay for five years. The structure is complete and complicated—subheadings, themes that need to resonate across sections, family history, research—but I sense that it is like a fully furnished apartment the writer’s past self has absented.
How can I welcome her back? How does anyone find the courage? How are there shelves of collections of personal essays, shelves of memoirs? Another glass of wine or whisky, another bite of doughy humility.
Another candle raised to see by, another nimble and light step backward. Joan Didion steps into an airport terminal in her best dress. This is the classic tale: Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That.” The woman looking backward. The closed chapter. How does Didion do it? Summon the old self without bitterness? Could I learn?
“Goodbye to All That” is a two-track discovery. As the older self, in narrating, glides backward, the younger self, in aging throughout the essay, inches forward.
The sense of discovery is one trick; here’s another: Didion recaptures her early-twenties self fully. When she’s afraid to call the front desk to warm up her freezing hotel room, this character seems helpless. When she refuses to ask her father for money, and decides instead to fight for her own survival, she feels plucky. Each story illustrates how the same person can embody opposite traits.
While creating this multifaceted character, the narrator acknowledges the twenty-two-year-old’s naiveté and is clearly sometimes ashamed of her reckless feeling that life in New York in one’s early-twenties didn’t count. But her young strength resounds, too. She’s able to proof magazines on two or three hours of sleep. She is full of visions about how to survive.
Rather than being dismayed at the awkward, unlearned past, Didion represents the “mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty three”: how new and singular all experience feels. Meanwhile, the early-twenties Didion moves forward, every day closer to becoming the narrator’s current self, the one who knows, to whom things occur.
And so, dear twenty-three-year-old, sitting on the porch steps in the autumn chill, here I come. Accept me, as I accept you, under the gaze of grace, and let’s puzzle this life out.