Clara Sherley-Appel (CSA): This is Story Behind the Story. I’m your host, Clara Sherley-Appel, and my guest today is poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert. We’re talking about her new book, The Unreality of Memory, a collection of essays about disasters, pain, and empathy that came out this past August. It has received rave reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, BookPage, and Kirkus Reviews, to name just a few. I read about it first in The Nation, in a review so laudatory I had trouble believing anything could live up to its praises. And yet, The Unreality of Memory does.


Elisa Gabbert, I am delighted to welcome you to Story Behind the Story.


Elisa Gabbert (EG): Thank you so much for having me. 


CSA: So I think we'll just dive straight in: You cover a lot of territory in The Unreality of Memory. Most reviews have homed in on the disaster component of it, which I suspect has a lot to do with the fact that it came out amid a pandemic, and, for most of the west — at least where you and I live — a spectacularly catastrophic fire season. So it seems inevitable that over the coming years and decades we’re going to experience more of these moments where we're dealing with multiple large-scale crises at the same time. Is compassion fatigue fussing out inevitable as well? Or are there other healthier ways you see for us to adapt?


EG: Oh gosh, yeah. It's really overwhelming. I did… you know, it's funny when people say to me, ‘How could you have known? How could you have known that you'd be releasing a book in the midst of all these disasters?’ And I think: well, there were disasters happening four years ago, when I started writing the book. It seemed very obvious to me that they were going to continue to get worse. My dream is that they're getting worse before some period of getting better, but I have no idea when… (she laugh sighs) when things will actually get better. So yeah, it still feels to me like all of this was easy to foresee the second that we elected Donald Trump. Of course, things were bad in multiple ways even before that, but that really seemed to push things over the edge into… there was just a sense that everything had gotten completely out of control. And I've had recurring periods of just…. something like apathy? It's not truly apathy, because I've never stopped wanting to try to make things better in some way; To fight, and to raise awareness of the issues that I care about. But, it does just get so overwhelming. I think there's something very natural in shutting down emotionally and needing to take a break, and I don't think that we should feel overly guilty about it. There's not much use-value to guilt at a certain point. But at the same time, if we're too forgiving of ourselves, then it's very easy to just say, ‘I'm doing self-care this year. No more no more activism.’ So, yeah… I still struggle to find the balance, I guess I should say, between how much… How much can I care? How many multiple issues can I care about, and what does that care actually look like? Cuz is it just me losing sleep at night, or am I able to do something useful or something actionable about it?


CSA: So this is your fifth published essay collection; What draws you to that medium?


EG: So this is actually my second published essay collection...


CSA: Oh, I'm sorry!


EG: Yeah no, that's okay! My first three books, they're usually classified as poetry. My second book is kind of arguably a book-length essay, or fragmentary essay… or poetry. I always feel kind of uncomfortable committing to a genre with that one because, I don't know, I think genre can be a little bit “Choose your own adventure” sometimes. 


But yeah, this is my second collection of poetry, and I've always written a lot of prose. I think that was just the default mode of writing, and the world. I feel like I've been lucky and surprised to find that I've been able to reach more readers. I don't know… I don't know why that should be surprising. Not as many people read poetry as read prose. I remember hearing the poet Mary Ruefle — the great poet Mary Ruefle — once say that poetry is private, but prose is public. And she has also found many more readers through publishing books of essays, or prose, than she had through her poetry. People always think it's kind of novel, or that there's some kind of good trivia into just mentioning, ‘oh, this book is by a poet’ — I feel like it often comes up in my reviews, and it's usually said with great respect, as though (you know), ‘of COURSE if a poet wrote this, it's going to be well-written, the prose is going to be beautiful!’ That always delights me, and I guess my fear would always be that somebody would be very suspicious. (she laughs) ‘Why would I buy a book of prose by a poet?’ Like, ‘She's not going to know what she's doing!’ (she laughs)


CSA: That's such a funny concept to me, that we… especially reading a book like this — where you do cover so many different domains of knowledge and in so much detail — that we would have that… I guess, that belief or that fear that we would be perceived too much as our domain being specialized and narrow, and it would be impossible for someone who is very good in one particular area to have any expertise in any other. 


EG: Yeah, I did have somebody ask me in an interview about a month ago about the question of expertise, and what am I bringing to this material not being an expert — which I thought was kind of funny, but I appreciated it because my great fear was that someone would ask me, ‘How do you think we can solve climate change?’ Or, ‘How can we end war?’ And then I would have to say, ‘oh, no no no no no! I am not an expert in foreign policy! I'm not an expert in climate science, or anything, really.’ I'm not an expert. Maybe arguably I'm an expert at writing poetry, but even that I don't really feel comfortable saying that I'm an expert in. So, yeah… I think what I bring to this material is that kind of wide-ranging, roving interest. That I read in so many different disciplines and my interests are so broad, that I'm able to make connections between things that an expert might not see if they're just always immersed in one subject all the time.


CSA: Well, and there's a line, or I guess a set of lines in the title essay of this book, you write, “On the one hand, it's dangerous to treat the Holocaust as a singular aberration in terms of failure of cultural morality: ‘Because it's happened, it cannot happen again.’ On the other, isn't it dangerous to treat genocide as a run of the mill inevitability: “Because it has happened, it certainly will happen again.’” And for me, I found this really fascinating because you talk a lot in the book about the limits of empathy, but it seems like that sums up the limits of something else. The limits of the way that knowledge, understanding, or context can move us to action; Can motivate change. And I found it personally very unsettling but also very resonant, right? Talking about this idea of expertise… okay, we can be experts in the knowledge, but what does that do for us?


EG: Yeah, I think a lot about what all this knowledge actually does for us and I try to be careful not to sound too doomsday-ish, too committed to some sense of determinism where it's too late, it's all over, we can't really change anything. But I do find that sometimes it feels like we've come to this point where it doesn't feel like we're truly making progress anymore that we are just spinning our wheels. Because for example, weather science — it has gotten so amazing that we know exactly when a storm is approaching and where it's going to ,and its path, how severe it's going to be… But then, that predictive power... I guess it's good to know, it's good to see it coming, but then we're still bad or preparing. We're really bad at disaster recovery. So we just — I'm thinking about hurricane season, of course. Hurricanes come in, and there's all of this damage that maybe we saw coming, but then if we're not able to coalesce the resources, to help the people and the communities that are then destroyed by these storms, it feels like all that science and all of that predictive power is kind of a waste. 


CSA:  Yeah, you say in one of your essays, you talk about the fact that we've known everything we know about climate change now; We knew all that in the 70s, and that's the thing. I actually only discovered that earlier this year reading a book about Octavia Butler that contained information from her notes, where she's reporting the same exact thing, right? We've known this, and we're going to continue to know this, and nobody's doing anything about it. I find that so fascinating. I feel like we almost can't process the knowledge that we've known it for so long. 


EG: Yeah. Yeah, it seems impossible, and it feels like it's taken this long — What? 50 years? For everyone to finally accept, like, ‘oh, okay, yeah, I guess this can't be denied anymore. This is true. This is happening.’ After all that, now there's this feeling of like, ‘oh, but is it actually too late?’ Now that we all finally agree that this is really bad, and it’s our fault, and we are the ones who have to fix it — there's already the sense that, ‘oh god, it might be too late. We already might be past this tipping point where there's nothing we can do,’ which that's really what I was trying to process with this book. Not so much disasters themselves, as why are we just so bad? Why are we so bad as a species? I want to say. (I mean, I kind of think Americans are maybe uniquely bad at it.) But I feel like this is a human problem: that we're really, really bad at preventing disasters, minimizing them, really, just… just anything. The question that haunted me, I think it is a line from the book is, ‘why can’t we or won’t we save ourselves?’ Because sometimes it feels like we willfully just, won't. It's not that we can’t, but we won't. 


CSA: Yeah, and I wonder how much of that is related to that feeling of overwhelm, right? These problems are so big that in addition to the scale issues, there are coordination issues. 


EG: Yeah, it feels so difficult as to be impossible. I’m remembering… There's this passage I love, in… my friend, the writer Brandon Taylor — you probably heard about his novel Real Life (it's getting a lot of attention, shortlisted for a booker prize!). But I read it when it came out, and there's this passage where the protagonist is a grad student working in a lab, and he's doing this very complicated, long experiment with nematodes. And something goes wrong with them, and he's thinking through the idea that he knows he has to redo it, and it's going to be so overwhelming, and the fact that it's doable and not NOT doable is what makes it so terrible. Because if it was truly impossible, then he could just give up, but he knows that h he does have to do it, and that he can do it. And I think that's something that we all succumb to, is this fantasy that it is impossible to solve these problems; that it's too late to make a difference in terms of climate change so we might as well give up, and be happy and be free. So yeah, it's this weird… kind of… Wish! for the true apocalypse, because that would let us off the hook.


CSA: You know, it's interesting that you bring that up too… that sort of impossibility. I just reread a book I loved as a child, The Phantom Tollbooth (cuz I needed a break from all the disaster, as well). (She laughs)


EG: Yeah…


CSA:  There's a conversation near the end of that where they're telling Milo, they tell Milo: ‘There is something that we can't tell you until you have accomplished this task,’ and he comes to the end of it, and they say, ‘Okay. We're going to tell you now what it was:
This was impossible.’


And I think there's something… it’s interesting to me — that's obviously a nearly 60-year-old book at this point, but I've been seeing a lot of that in media now, too: The obsession with impossibility as both a limiting and a freeing factor. I think about The Good Place when Eleanor says, ‘Our fates are sealed. But we have one move left. We can try.’ Maybe there is… maybe we can look at it as impossible, and find that as a galvanizing force as well. 


EG: I think that we're all more and more given to fantastical thinking; Like I remember… I remember in the period after the election, but while Obama was still in office, this sense that maybe he could save us, somehow. Maybe he could, like, fix the election. I don't even know exactly what we were imagining, but there is just this very childish or childlike wish for somebody to be the adult, the parent. Because we feel so helpless, and just wanting someone with more power or knowledge than us to do something, and it's so frightening to realize that there's nobody else to save us. We have to do it.


CSA: Yeah. Well, let's return to the writing for a moment. You mentioned that you're also a poet, and I found it really interesting that you said that there's a book of yours you have trouble categorizing, as poetry, or as essays, or as something in the middle. That made me interested in how your poetry informs the way that you write prose and vice versa?


EG: I think being a poet makes me very attuned to micro effects, so the specific kind of sound that the quality of the pause, for example, between…. the difference between a comma versus a period versus a semicolon versus an em-dash — I find those all to be slightly different, and I think it matters. You know? I can be very adamant sometimes when an editor wants to change something like that, and what I always say is, “I promise you that I thought more about that comma than you have!” (both laugh) And I know that sometimes a comma is technically incorrect, but I'll be like, ‘I know what's correct because I used to be a copy editor, so I promise you there is some kind of intentional effect I'm going for here.’ And of course, you can't fight for every single comma that an editor removes, but I do fight for some of them. Because with a poem, there are just many fewer words on the page, and many fewer words in the book, you are forced to pay attention to all those small choices. In terms of the rhythm of the line, and how you're using white space, and so I bring almost as much attention (you can't really bring quite as much because you're trying to convey something on a larger scale with these longer arguments. I try not to be too argumentative in my prose. But yeah…) — I still really care about the micro effects. I really… I try to achieve some kind of rhythm, I think. The unit that I'm really most interested in is the paragraph, so that does connect to that hard-to-define book that I was talking about: They’re prose blocks, but you can also just think of them as paragraphs. I wanted each paragraph in that book to hit certain notes, you might say. Like I wanted them all to have an aphorism — something kind of very general, but also something very personal, and working within that kind of framework. I of course veered from it — they're not all exactly the same, but there was a little bit of a formula. I just really like the way paragraphs work. Like, in a long-form essay, how do you move from one paragraph to the next? How do you decide, ‘I want all this to be in one long paragraph, versus two small paragraphs?’ I find those decisions very interesting. To some extent, it's hard to even explain or justify the decisions you make; It's just like this. It just feels right. And I just am really interested in the way that the container of a paragraph can hold all these different sentences and ideas, and make them mean something else just because they're placed in proximity, and in this particular sequence.


CSA: That's fascinating. Talk to me, too, about the process for this book; Where did you start? Where did this book start, and how did you approach these essays as a collection?


EG: The first essay I wrote in this book, I definitely wasn't thinking of a book yet. It was just something that I was really interested in. That essay was, “Vanity Project,” and I wrote that in early-to-mid 2016. It had basically come about because I was reading a book called The Ego Tunnel which I found really fascinating. It’s sort of a cognitive science book; like, part neuroscience, part philosophy, and it's this… I want to say German writer/ scientist who is making this argument that, basically, the self is kind of like a user interface. So this idea that we're experiencing the world directly is inaccurate, and it's more like… it's basically like a very immersive video game that our mind is constructing, and the idea that you have of yourself is your avatar. I just became really obsessed with that idea. I thought it was fascinating. I've always noticed that there are times that I experience myself outside myself, in the third person. So, like, in a memory or in a fantasy, I’ll be watching myself instead of being inside my body. This book deals a lot with the idea that that's because we have this little model of ourselves in our mind, and sometimes you can go outside it, and see ourselves from the outside. That's what's happening when you have a classic out of body experience, which often happens during trauma. Say, if you're in a car accident, that often happens. If there's something that's really shocking to the mind, you can glitch out and catch your avatar from another angle. 
And so, that was the first essay I wrote. And then the second essay I wrote was the first essay in the collection: “Magnificent Desolation.” I had been making notes, and I got really interested in the Titanic for a little while,and then I went through a period of just watching a bunch of, like, space disaster movies and documentaries. I was just obsessed with disaster, and this was 2016, so it makes sense. But I didn't have really a lot of direction there, until right after the election. It changed all my priorities, it changed what I was reading. I remember we threw out all our old New Yorkers that were sitting around that we hadn't read yet because it was like, ‘These can’t possibly be relevant to our lives now; That's from a different era.’ There were certain books in my to read pile that just seemed… frivolous or something. They no longer interested me. I completely changed what I was reading, and I decided, ‘oh, I'm ready to write the disaster essay now.’ So I started working on that, and when it was published, a friend of mine (the writer Matt Salis) told me, ‘Oh, I would read a book of these!’ So then I started thinking “maybe I could make these into a book…” And then for the next several months I was going back and forth between wanting to write these disaster essays that are in the first section, and things that are a little bit more about… just, like, the weirdness of the human mind. The memory essay was one of the early ones I wrote and I saw how it was coming together. As this look at external disasters that happen in the world, and also internal disasters that are happening in our mind. And that's kind of why the external disasters happen: because our minds are so weird and so… I guess, faulty? When it comes to the way we process information, and try to understand both ourselves and the world. That's how it started coming together: slowly. And so after I had written maybe four or five essays, I wrote a book proposal, and that forced me to think through how it could be a coherent collection. That was tricky. I don't know if you've ever written a book proposal, but it's definitely like… there's a little bit of a “fake it till you make it” quality to it, (she laughs) because you have to come off sounding really convincing that you can write something that's going to turn into a good book. But I wasn't sure if I could. (she laughs)


CSA: I mean, I think though that’s what’s fascinating about this, especially now hearing that — I would never have guessed that that was the first essay that you wrote in this collection, in part because the the disaster stuff feels like it's so central (and again, so much of that I think has to do with the context to which it was published), but —


EG: Yeah.


CSA:  I do find it really stunning the way that all these different topics you're writing about converge. So the “Vanity Project” that you just mentioned is about the perception that we have of ourselves, and how that meets with quote-unquote “reality,” and how other people see us. And then you have this whole section of essays that's about emotion, and pain, and the relationship between those two things. And they do really feel like they are coherent; like it's a collection. Like they were written together… And so, I guess, you answered this a little bit but I'm curious about how conscious you were about these connections as you were writing, and how much they arose organically for you, and what the give and take of that process of creating a coherent narrative in these essays was like?
  
EG: I think part of that is just the natural result of the fact that I wrote them mostly over a three-year period, and kind of… rolling one into the other. So often what would happen is when I would start a new essay, I would find that some of my research material that I had from the previous essay, it felt relevant to the new piece I was writing as well. So there would be these little overlapping links, and I would sometimes use even the same quote from the same book because it seemed equally relevant in both settings. But certainly, I feel like when I write an essay, it's basically a documentation of the thinking that I've been doing for a couple of months, and just because I finished the essay doesn't mean that the thinking stops; Cuz like, I continue to be interested in those ideas and so those threads just tend to keep emerging again and again and again. And so it's almost like, if I'm going to write a bunch of different essays over the course of three years, how could they not form a kind of cohesive and connected collection? Because it's my mind. My mind is present and all of the essays, and I have the same obsessions, and I keep even having the same realizations over and over again — or slight variations on the same realizations. 


And so, yeah. I did find that I didn't really have to force the connections as much as when I set out to write a book. I thought I might have to shoehorn things in somehow to make it feel like, ‘These all belong in the same book,’ but that happened much more naturally, actually. It ended up being quite organic. And yeah, and people have told me that it's interesting that as you read through it, you're still kind of thinking of the previous essays each time you start a new essay, so you see the motifs that are there.


***AD BREAK***


CSA: If you're just joining me, my guest is author Elisa Gabbert, whose essay collection, The Unreality of Memory, came out in August of this year. 


Now seems like a good time to have you read an excerpt from the book, and we can ground some of what we've been talking [about] in your actual writing. Can you just set it up a little bit for us: tell us a little bit about what you're reading, and the essay it comes from.


EG:  So I think actually I'll read a little section from “Vanity Project” since we were just talking about it.


CSA:  Oh, great! 


EG:  I already set it up a little bit, but this essay starts with a meditation on my quote-unquote “good side” (she laughs), so I also feel like this essay has become newly relevant, just because everybody's on zoom all the time and we all constantly have to confront these images of ourselves. I feel like a lot of people I know have had a crisis of the self over it, because watching yourself on video is very unnatural. Even if you get used to the way you look in photographs, video is something different; You don't normally see yourself talk. And I just heard people say like, (laughing as she says it), ‘Oh my god, I look so much worse than I thought of myself. It's not as flattering as my own self-image was.’ And that's exactly what this essay’s about, so I find that very funny. I feel like I've already had that whole crisis! (They both laugh) I've gone through it and processed it, and the section that I'll be reading, I'm talking a little bit about that avatar idea that I touched on earlier.


(She reads)
Think of a memorable experience from your childhood. Do you embody your childhood self in the memory, or do you see it as though from across the room, or a bird’s eye view?


There is something fundamentally different about mental images drawn from memory — when you picture a friend or a celebrity, say — and your self-image. The brain seems to build a self-model, a representation of your own body within your mind, so robust that you may glimpse or even confront your own “avatar” in certain fringe states of consciousness — dreams, memories, and fantasies where you watch yourself in the third person — and through the course of “glitches” in conscious experience, such as out-of-body experiences, or autoscopy, the spooky phenomenon of seeing your own double.


What we see in general is not entirely the result of vision. The mind builds a model of our environment based on sensory input, which functions well for our purposes, but is not identical with the “real world.” Attention and assumptions play a large role in this, which is what causes “change blindness.” In one well-known study, participants asked to focus on a task didn’t notice when a man in a gorilla suit walked through the room. It’s as though people are seeing a cached version of the world that, to save processing power, hasn’t been refreshed.


According to cognitive scientist and philosopher Thomas Metzinger, our mind builds not only a world model, but also a model of the self to exist in that world model — our inner avatar. In The Ego Tunnel, Metzinger posits that we need this avatar to experience selfhood. All experience is mediated, but we don’t experience the mediation as such, in part because we identify so completely with this avatar. What we experience as direct access to the actual physical world through our actual physical body is really just an extremely immersive user interface. Rather than experiencing the world directly, we move through life in a kind of continual virtual reality.


This feeling of self-identification can be extended outside the body. In the famous "rubber hand" experiment, participants were induced to identify with a rubber hand on the table when their own hand was out of view, behind a screen. In a paper published in 1998, Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen describe how each subject sat with eyes fixed on the rubber hand, while the researchers use two small paint brushes to stroke the rubber hand, and the subjects hidden hand, synchronizing the timing of the brushing as closely as possible. The subjects reported that it seemed like they were feeling the sensation of the paintbrush in view on the RUBBER hand in view. These results have been repeated many times. The illusion is apparently so easy to recreate that you can do it as an impromptu party trick.


People who use a cane every day or who have artificial limbs experience a similar illusion. They don't have to think about where the cane ends; they completely internalize the new  dimensions of their body.


This provides evidence for our mental ability to identify with an avatar—it’s as though selfhood can float outside the body and latch onto something else. In a typical Out-of-Body Experience, the “astral body,” a doubled self, seems to exit the body through the head and hover near the ceiling, so that it can view the now “empty” body below. Of course, you have not actually left your body; instead the self-model seems to be replicating. These “replicants” may contain errors. Metzinger mentions an epileptic who, during a seizure, saw himself from the outside, wearing the same clothes but with “curiously” combed hair, whereas he knew his own to be uncombed.


Then there are phantom limbs. Amputees frequently continue to feel the presence of their missing limb and even feel pain in it, suggesting that the mental self-model can be so persistent and strongly ingrained that changes to the physical body are difficult to incorporate into a new mental model — that the mind is not as plastic as the body. Or perhaps it’s that the sense of self expands more readily than it retracts, that the mind is resistant to reducing the scope of the self. I am reminded of the poet Anne Boyer remarking on Twitter that she did not identify with recent photos of herself because her hair was missing, following treatment for breast cancer. Of course, I thought: phantom hair.


How accurate, then, are our mental models? There’s a pop-psych idea that people in general (women, especially) are plagued by low-level body dysmorphia, believing ourselves less attractive than we really are. But there’s evidence to the contrary. One study found that people were more apt to “recognize” themselves in photos when their images had been enhanced — that is, Photoshopped to appear more attractive. This points to an innate vanity. Maybe we prefer our mirror image to photographs, especially candid photographs, because the reflection more closely aligns with our self-model. The photograph is objective; the reflection is enhanced. Further, change blindness could explain why we appear old to ourselves on camera. We have grown old in real life but have been blind to those changes in the mirror; our mental model has not adjusted.


My favorite variety of mirror delusion is known as “negative autoscopy.” When this rare condition occurs, the patient — like a vampire — cannot see their own reflection in the mirror. To me, this has devastating implications, suggesting that what we see when we look in the mirror is not what is reflected at that moment but what we expect to see: our self-model. If we sustain damage to the area of the brain responsible for the self-model, we may be unable to construct a reflection.


And how much damage can the self withstand? The Cotard delusion, also known as “walking corpse syndrome,” is a rare disorder in which patients stop using first-person pronouns, and deny their own existence. This led one sufferer, known as “Mademoiselle X,” to believe she was incapable of dying; she starved herself to death. Physiologically, it is thought to be related to the Capgras delusion, a form of prosopagnosia in which those with familiar faces are experienced as impostors. But here it is the self-face that is seen as an impostor. We no longer see or believe external confirmation that our mental self-model is real — a delusion which can lead to a catastrophic loss of self.


CSA: Thank you so much for that! I find both in this essay and in the set of essays that is about pain and emotion, there's a lot of discussion of “real” versus “fake” (I’m using air quotes which people on the radio can't hear), but there is this sort of setup between perception and some kind of reality. And I think one of the things that I find so interesting about this, it's that line about photographs being objective — Do you feel that they are objective?


EG:  I guess they're not really, because they're always just a slice of reality, and then it's made two-dimensional. I mean, photographs don't look like the real world. (she pauses) …Yeah. I'm fascinated by that othering of the self that occurs when somebody just takes a candid photo where you're looking off in a weird angle that you never see yourself at, and it doesn't seem like it could possibly be you because you've never seen yourself from the side in that way. There's this level at which nothing is objective because we're always looking at it through our subjective minds. So there's no reason, really, to think that we're processing the photograph as it really is any more that we're processing the mirror image as it really is, for example. Yeah, I feel like reality is always coming to us through these unreliable filters. 


CSA:  I feel like that creates this other complicated dichotomy, right? We feel like we're uniquely in this time where facts and reality don't seem to hold the sway that they once did at a broad scale, and we can tell the difference right? Like we have this intuitive understanding of okay... ‘This is a fact. This is something that is real and grounded in reality.’ And then we also have this knowledge that there are so many different ways of looking at things and of proceeding them, and it can be a difficult tension to sit with or resolve. How do you resolve that for yourself? 


EG:  I don't know that I can resolve it. You know I think part of what I got so obsessed with thinking through the material in this book was just this feeling that history is not very stable, and that we feel like in the present we know what's really happening, what we're seeing — these are facts. And the fact that people are getting their news from different sources can be so maddening because this fear that people are watching Fox News and not getting the real version of reality. But yeah, it feels like the further you go back, the more you have to confront the possibility that the history books aren't accurate either. And it was something I thought a lot about when going through fact-checking; Which, this book was fact-checked and a lot of the pieces originally appear places where they were fact-checked. I find fact-checking kind of fascinating because often what they're looking for is just one other source that confirms what you're saying. If you can find a book that has that fact in it, ‘Okay, that fact is checked.’ But what if that book is inaccurate? Because not all books are fact-checked, and you can often find multiple seemingly reliable, reputable sources that contradict each other. So just the complexity of information… It's like, what is actually happening all the time, there's too much of it for it to really be recorded completely accurately, and so there's always simplification happening when something becomes quote-unquote “history.” Yeah, I think that's one of the failures of cultural memory. One of the reasons that we're repeating the same mistakes that we've already made in the past century, now, is that feeling that history is somehow unstable, and that people maybe don't really believe that it's true. And I have that sense! Even things of course that I completely believe! I mean, I'm not a holocaust denier; I 100% know that the Holocaust happened, and yet, as fascism started encroaching again on America, I didn't feel that I knew what to do. It wasn't like, ‘well because I've read history and said we could never let that happen again,’ it doesn't doesn't mean that I know how to stop it. So I have to question my own questioning of, like, ‘Well how could people in the past have let that happen? How could they?’ It’s like, well, what are they… They're no worse than us.


CSA:  It makes me think of, there's a play by Alan Bennett called The History Boys, and there's an exchange between a teacher and a student in that, where the teacher is talking to them about the Holocaust and trying to get them to engage with it critically, and think about… I mean, I don't think intentionally… not with the ultimate aim of empathizing with Nazis, but trying to get them to maybe look at the history as written from the other side, and a character in it who's Jewish calls him on it. And the teacher says, ‘This is history — distance yourselves.’ And the student says, ‘But if you explain something, then you can explain it away.’ And there's, right? That's what we're talking about here. It's that we get the sense of history, the sense of context and the sense of the past, and rather than giving us a template for how we move forward, it just lets us shove it under a rug. (They both laugh tensely)


EG:  Yeah, I'm reading a memoir right now by a woman who was raped by one of her best friends, and she, some 14/15 years later, she decided to reach out to him and talk to him about it, and she wrote this book about it. And one of the central questions of the book is, ‘Can a good person do a terrible thing?’Because I think she's trying to confront or contradict the narrative that rapists are “bad people,” (lots of doing air quotes) or “monsters,” which makes it seem like nobody knows a rapist. Every woman knows somebody who’s been sexually assaulted or raped, but men don't seem to know anyone who has committed sexual assault or rape. So there’s this breakdown of, so, who are these people? And the reality is that they're not monsters, they're just normal people, and normal people can do bad things if they're in a situation where it's possible, and they think that they can get away with it. That's something — not in the context of the sexual assault or rape necessarily, but just in general— that was something I was thinking a lot about with my book; Was just kind of the idea of good people and bad people, and how falling into those patterns of thinking, I think, can be not useful and even dangerous. Because I think we excuse ourselves a lot by telling ourselves, ‘But I'm a good person… You know, my family and I — we’re good people.’ And you think that necessarily means, ‘Well I'm not racist,’ and, ‘I'm not doing anything that's directly intentionally harming anyone. I'm a good person.’ But there's all these very subtle insidious ways that we are harming other people all the time, and we just… we don't think about it because we think of ourselves as quote-unquote “good people.” And we'll do the same with Nazis, or Republican Senators (she chuckles), we talk about them like they're evil and their monsters — and I do think some of them are evil. I do think that. But it's… I think it's important to focus it on the acts and the actions, less than the people themselves. Because yeah, what we want is to stop people from committing evil acts. We can't punish people for being inherently evil. I don't think that's a thing.


***AD BREAK!***


CSA: If you’re just joining me, my guest today is Elisa Gabbert, whose essay collection The Unreality of Memory came out in August of this year.


So I'm going to shift focus a little bit, but I do think it's related to things we’ve been talking about. In “The Great Mortality,” which you wrote in 2018, you talk about the effects of climate change, not just on environmental disasters but also on pandemics. So, on an intellectual level at least, as we've discussed, you sort of knew it was coming, if you didn't know exactly when. Has that made a difference at all the way that you've experienced the pandemic or other disasters of this past year?


EG: Yeah, I really wish I could say that I felt any more prepared for the pandemic than somebody who hadn't recently done a lot of reading about pandemics, but I did exactly what everybody else always does, which is: you just feel like this probably isn't the big one. You just always think a disaster isn't really going to happen to you. I have a friend who, I remember, she seemed worried earlier than anyone else I know, and she kept saying, like, ‘Are you reading these stories? Are you worried about this? This seems scary…’. And I was kind of like… ‘ehhh, we've all lived through flu panics before.’  I was pretty dismissive until maybe mid/late February. when you really kind of had to start taking it seriously. And I remember thinking like… oh, I think part of the reason I wasn't so worried is because I wasn't thinking about it as something that was happening while Trump is president. And he dismantled our pandemic team, and he's done a lot of dismantling of the systems that would have been in place 10 years ago that would have allowed us to manage that much better. And so I was leaning on 40 years of assumptions around, ‘The government can generally handle stuff like this.’ But of course this is exactly the kind of thing I was afraid of when Trump was elected; that he was not going to be running the government in such a way that we could handle disasters. Yeah it's just… it's very easy to be complacent, and to feel like, ‘It's not really going to happen to me, it's not going to happen to us. It's not going to happen now, this year. Just postpone disaster indefinitely.’ I mean I think I snapped into action quickly; I remember hearing that a couple of kids in the high school that's two blocks away from where we live had tested positive for Covid, and I was like, ‘Well, I can't go to the gym anymore, because the gym is right across from the high school.’ They hadn't actually shut anything yet, but I was like, well, we shouldn't go. And then we just, like, didn't go… like,that day, we basically just stopped going anywhere for a month. You know, it was early March, and a few days before we had gone and looked at dinosaur footprints at this weird nature park in Colorado, and that was the last time we saw people in public for a really long time. 


CSA:  It makes me think too, just going back to those ‘pain and emotion’ essays that you wrote, there's this idea that you repeat a few times: “If you believe you're in pain, you're in pain.” But of course, most of the time we talk about pain as, again, a kind of objective thing; There’s “real pain” and “fake pain,” which is pain that's in your head. And of course, women are more prone to fake pain than men are. (She chuckles with rage) Where do you think that tendency to dismiss pain, and to dismiss these other big, scary things — Where do you think that comes from? 


EG:  Yeah…Pain is unusual in that it feels so completely real to us, but is totally uncommunicable. It’s kind of like, when it's really hot or it's really cold, at least you know that other people have a pretty good idea; That other people are feeling something similar to your feeling. But, I mean, if you just have a migraine, you can't seem to communicate to people what it actually feels like, even if those people have had a migraine before. If they're not currently in pain, it's very hard to remember what pain feels like when you're not in it. Yeah, there's this thing called the… it's called something like, “The hot/cold…” I can’t remember exactly what it’s called. The hot/cold … Experience?


CSA: …something-or-other!
  
EG:  Paradox…something like that! But it’s the idea that when you’re really hot you cannot remember what it’s like to be cold. Like you can’t access that memory of that feeling at all, and that any kind of really extreme state like that, the theory is that you basically become a different person. So, when you're really, really angry, for example, you become such a totally different person, your whole personality changes — that that's why when you're calm, you can't really explain your behavior, like what you did when you were angry, because now that you're not angry, you're a different person. And you can't really remember what it was like, what that feeling was like. I think about that with pain, you know in part because my husband has a chronic illness that… It doesn't usually cause physical pain, but it causes a lot of complicated kinds of suffering. One of them is that he'll get this really terrible tinnitus, and I think people with tinnitus know that it feels like you're being tortured. It just drives you insane, and there's no cure or treatment for tinnitus, and you can't really explain it to other people. What he always says is that he feels like he really wants to be able to play it for other people somehow, because you just can’t imagine how loud it is. You just can’t possibly imagine how loud it is, and he wishes he could somehow record it and make other people listen to it. OSimone Vale once said when she has a migraine, she wanted to like hit somebody in the head right exactly where she was feeling the pain so they would know what it was like. 


…I’ve wandered a little bit from your original question. (She laughs, embarrassed)


CSA:  That’s fine, that’s fine!
EG:  But yeah, I’m very interested in those states that feel so real to us and can’t be communicated. In that long essay about conversion disorders, what I was exploring is: why do we tend to think of quote-unquote “psychosomatic illnesses” as not real? We've gotten better about this, but there is this still bizarre tendency to think that if we don't understand a condition entirely, that it's in the person's head and it's not real. But yeah, pain is pain. 


CSA:  Well, yah! Now, we’re almost out of time but before we go, what's next for you? What's on your horizon now? 


EG:  I've been trying to finish a book of poems. So, back in the mode of writing poetry. They are somewhat essayistic poems — I feel like I'm always kind of sliding on this continuum between essay and poetry. And I've been writing a lot of literary criticism, which is comfort writing to me — after this much more difficult material, it's nice to just read a novel and think about it. That's what I've been working on.


CSA:  Well, I look forward to it. Elisa Gabbert, thank you so much for joining me today. 


EG:  Thank you so much for having me!


CSA:  To learn more about Elisa Gabbert and her writing, visit elisagabbert.com. You can buy The Unreality of Memory from the McMillan website, or anywhere books are sold.
Catch Story Behind the Story on the first Friday of every month for 5 to 6 p.m., during the second hour of “Talk of the Bay,” right here on KSQD 90.7 FM.


To share your thoughts on this or other shows, drop me a line at Clara@KSQD.org. The Story Behind the Story is produced for KSQD 90.7 FM by me, Clara Sherley-Appel. Our sound engineer is Lanier Sammons; He also wrote our theme.