Dr. Frizzle Does Not Have a Pipe: Teaching Philosophy

When I learned about the concept of Foucault’s pipe, it was at a religious university that was so opposed to any form of smoking, we could not even talk about it in the classroom. So instead of showing us the classic, “This is not a pipe,” picture, the professor put up a picture of a chair and asked us: is this a chair?

I was so annoyed.

Of course it was a chair.

I don’t know if he was wearing a bow tie, but he was definitely the sort of man who would wear a bow tie. Probably with brightly colored glasses that changed from day to day to match his bow tie. He asked us to raise our hands if it was a chair and I knew this was a trick of some kind, but it was a chair. So I raised my hand.

He smiled in that way that let me know I had done exactly what he wanted me to, and he said to me, “So, it’s a chair?”

“Of course it’s a chair,” I said. 

“Okay. Come up here,” he said. “Come sit in it.” 

I definitely did not stand up and try to sit in it. 

Because the most annoying thing about Foucault’s pipe/chair, is that it is not actually a pipe and it’s not actually a chair: it’s a picture of a pipe, a picture of a chair. 

I hate this.

Why do I tell you this story even though I hate it?

It’s not just because they sent me to a “how to torture students and be wicked” class before they let me become a professor. (Although, yeah, they totally did that.) It’s because even though it gives me rage, the whole picture/story/thing (and I really hate to say this) it makes a good point.

In all rhetorical modes, there’s the subject (the chair) and then there’s the medium (the picture). And if the artist/photographer/writer/creator has done a good job, you don’t even think about the medium part. You’re fully immersed in the subject.

The medium is invisible.

This is more true in writing than almost any other place.

Writing has a magic to it. And I say that not just because Twitter thinks I’m a bog witch, but because I believe it. Writing has a magic that extends beyond its ability to be invisible. Writing is the place where any and all subjects meet. You can write about fairy princesses, and you can write about particle physics. You can write about both at the same time! And when you’re done, what do you have? You have thoughts on science, thoughts on princesses, stories, theories, logic, fantasy, almost literally anything in the world.

Also, you have writing.

People hardly ever think about the invisible medium—that it’s writing they’re reading. But it is writing. And the fact that the very best writing is almost always invisible is precisely why we need to study it.

So how do you study the invisible medium?

How do you teach people to do something that, when successful, draws absolutely no attention to itself at all?

Personally, I turn to the absolute master of pedagogy: Ms. Frizzle.

Ms. Frizzle wears loud dresses covered with stars or plants or planets. She has a pet lizard, drives a magic school bus, and is canonically gay. She gives students so much freedom and agency, and she approaches learning with something deeply important to me: joy. One of her creators, Bruce Degan, says that her magic is that she can take “even the boring-est, unsexiest topic,” and turn it “into a crazy adventure.”1

Her trademark phrase is “take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.”

Writing well relies on our willingness to do this: to take chances, to make mistakes, to get messy. Audiences are dynamic and there is never a consistent set of rules that will be applicable for every audience, for every occasion, for every purpose, throughout all time.

Revision is where the core of writing success lies. Being able to re-see, re-think, re-write. And when you allow yourself the room to make mistakes, to be messy, and to do it joyfully, you are so much better situated to develop the long-term writing skills you need to effectively learn to communicate.

I believe in creating a classroom environment that is joyful, where the stakes are low enough that students will take chances, where the curriculum is iterative enough they will keep going back again and again until what they’ve created works—until the writing becomes invisible.

Ms. Frizzle does not smoke pipes, and neither do I, but both of us believe giving students the tools they need to successfully develop the skills that are so important starts with developing a love for and a joy in the process, itself. 

 

1 Lauren Mechling, “This School Year, Unleash Your Inner Ms. Frizzle,” The New York Times, Aug 31, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/31/parenting/ms-frizzle-magic-schoolbus-teaching.html

Who Peeks Through the Veil

They come to me in a dream.

            It’s one of those dreams you’d expect to hear about in church—the kind of dream for which rationality demands dismissal while irrationality demands attention. The problem is you’re not sure what to pay attention to and you’re not sure what to dismiss. And yet, you can’t forget about it.

            Right before the dream, I am stumbling into my professor’s office, collapsing into a self-pitying heap.

            “Oh, honey,” my professor, Zina, says. “You look like you need chocolate.” She sifts through her desk drawers and pulls out a Snickers bar and tosses it to me. “I’m sorry about the scholarship.” She pauses, as if she wants to say or do something else. “I have to teach a class. But I’ll be back. Take a nap and wait for me if you want. You look tired.” She points to the lounge-like chair she keeps in her office—specifically for naps—and leaves.

            I am tired.

            My exhausted, twenty-year-old self must be a mess. Eyes all puffed and red. Un-washed hair frizzing. Shoulders sagged by the git-like crying I have done about my own failures. All I can think about is that I’ve lost the Rhodes scholarship and will, consequently, never go to England.

            And going to England feels so much more important than it seems like it should.

            As I sit in the nap-chair, I try to push all my self-pity into each bite of chocolate. But as I eat, I keep hearing the judges’ gritty questions.

            “Don’t you feel a little naïve for having faith?”

            “Missionary work is a form of imperialism. And imperialism is one of the greatest atrocities of the modern era. How do you feel about being part of the atrocity?”

            “You’ve read Chaucer. You’ve read the ‘Wheel of Fortune.’ What makes you think it’s spun by God? How do you tell the difference between divinity and sheer chance?”

            It was an unexpected line of questioning—one I felt completely unprepared for. I had been convinced that, irrational as I knew it was, my competing was of vital, eternity-laden importance.

            So, I answered the best I could. And I thought I felt a power there with me as I was talking. I thought I saw one of the judges cry.

            And then I lost.

            I stood with the eleven finalists, waiting for the results. We’d all made it past state finals. This was the last level of the competition: four of us would go to Oxford. We were in the lobby of a Texas hospital where one of the judges was a doctor. Poorly-clad patients in wheelchairs, IVs attached to the handlebars, kept rolling by.

            When the judges came out of their deliberation in the conference room, I knew it wasn’t a good sign that they wouldn’t look at me. But I was still unprepared for the empty place in my chest when they didn’t call my name. Why had it felt so important to come here? To lose? It didn’t make sense. And it kept not making sense even when I was back. Even when Steve—who I’d met at state finals—emailed me to ask me on a date. And especially when I knocked on Zina’s door and when she handed me the chocolate.

            But at least when the last of the chocolate melts against my fingers, I feel some of my self-pity melt along with it.

            Completely spent, I decide to try that nap.

            Generally speaking, I don’t sleep very well. Especially during the day. But I drift quickly into a haze. And suddenly, everything around me is calm and fuzzy with light.

            I’m dreaming.

            There’s someone standing in front of me. He’s young and old in an ageless way. He’s got blonde hair and he looks like my dad.

            I tilt my head to the side—silently asking him why he’s standing there.

            He looks at me right in the face and he says, “You have to find us.” There’s an urgency in his voice and he doesn’t blink.

            I look down to his left and notice a girl is sitting there next to him. Her hair is darker than his and she doesn’t say anything.

            “But where are you?” I ask.

            There’s a beat of silence before he answers.

            “England,” he says.

            And the dream is over.

            Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been taught about dreams. About Lehi, dreaming of the Tree of Life. Joseph, interpreting the dream of the baker and the king. Joseph Smith listening to angels who spoke as he lay covered by his bed-quilts.

            A lot of what I’d heard came from my grandmother. She lived with us when she had congestive heart failure and, even though she did eventually recover, at the time we all thought she was dying. She couldn’t lie flat and breathe, so she’d sit upright in a chaise—a crocheted blanket covering her newly thin legs (that she claimed she was far too old to shave).

            Terrified she might die any minute, I would sit next to her every night until two or three in the morning. She’d hold my hand and tell me about my uncle who had visions. Her friend who heard voices. The way the ghost of her ancestors would speak to her and night when she was most afraid. The prophets of the Bible must have seemed maniacal, she’d said. But would be a little crazy, too, if I could see through the veil. Glimpses through the veil can terrify you with their violence.

            “You need to remember,” she said to me once, “when the veil between the worlds is open… it’s dangerous. Spirits flow both ways: life meeting death. If you’re not careful, you could fall back through.”

            If I had been older, or more cynical, maybe I would have rolled my eyes.

            But I wasn’t old, and I wasn’t (yet) cynical. All I knew was the clocks in the room seemed to whirl their arms around too fast. And that every minute, every second, I could spend with my grandmother was terribly important.

            So when I have the dream… when I feel how important it seems… it’s not terribly hard to ignore every bit of my rational self. Dreams can matter, I decide. Especially when they seem like they matter.

            But there is still something so baffling about it all. The urgency—the pleading. The call to a quest. The best I can figure is the people in my dream are ancestors. And ancestors are important, I think. That’s why we’re sealed—one generation to the next—in a line back through time and forward into an eternal round. Our connection to both the people before us and the people who come after us is sacred. Maybe, I figure, maybe I’ll still get to England. Because my ancestors are calling me to find them. The spirit of Elijah finally speaking to me the way my grandmother said it might someday.

            “How are you doing?” Zina asks when she comes back from teaching.

            “Good,” I say. But even though I try, I can’t elaborate any more than that. It all feels too important somehow. Even the nap-chair and chocolate have started to feel like holy space and sacred communion. “The chocolate was magical.”

            When I go home, I sit on my twin-sized bed—surrounded, as it is, by piles and books and notepads full of my scratchings. I watch the curtain to my bedroom window blow in and out, as if it’s breathing.

            The last time my curtain breathed that way was on the morning I decided to apply for the Rhodes scholarship. I had been eating oatmeal and when the urge hit, I called it the ghost of Cecil Rhodes calling. But it was just a feeling. If I’d had another grandmother, I might have called it something besides a ghost. The only other sources of the feeling I could think of were God and the devil. I did not want God to tell me to do something so annoying. And the devil seemed an unlikely visitor at dawn, when I was eating oatmeal.

            Today I hold a notebook in my lap, wanting to write the dream about my ancestors down. But I can’t even do that. The words don’t come because every time I think of them, they’re pushed out of my head by waves of calm.

            It’s six years before I can write it down.

            And it’s three years before it ever occurs to me the messengers of my dream could be anything other than ancestors.

            Because it’s not until three years later—when I am married to Steve, who I met competing for that Rhodes scholarship—that I find out we can’t have babies.

            And it’s not until the same three years later that a professor—who is practically a stranger to me—walks up and asks me to come teach a study abroad class with him. It’s a hiking trip, he says. More than two hundred miles over seven mountains.

            And it’s in England.

 

 •

 

            We’re en-route to Milton Abbey, hiking through a muddy forest. The light is dim—twilight in the midday. There is no sign there might be wild animals, but the thick trees that surround the footpath are the kind you’d expect to look into and see multitudes of glowing eyes looking back. Ancient England had lions, but today is the first time I really believe in them.

            My feet are leaden with mud, and I am so exhausted I feel almost as if my spirit isn’t fully connected to my body. It’s hovering just outside the space of my body, connected only to my toes. I’m embarrassed to be so exhausted. Embarrassed the injections have made everything so dark and fuzzy feeling.

            I should be grateful, I think. Here, in England, IVF is so much less expensive than it is at home that even we—on our grad-student budget—can afford it. This is our only shot at having a baby for years. The only shot at making that dream I had unfold. The fact I have to hike two hundred miles on IVF hormone injections shouldn’t be an undue sacrifice. Even though my reaction to the hormones has been… extreme. I’ve been seeing things, hearing things. At night I dream of dismembered body parts and demons who eat the rancid carcasses of cats. When I wake up in the morning, I can almost feel fur caught between my teeth. My head will pound, I will vomit, and then I’ll start to cry. I keep a record of it all for the clinic. They have never had a patient as young as I am, they tell me. They don’t know what will happen. “None of this is normal,” they tell me. “But it isn’t abnormal either. Sometimes people experience homicidal urges. Sometimes they get violent. The injections are literally changing the function of your brain. No one really knows what is going to happen when you start interfering with a person’s brain.”

            But is it really the injections making me feel this way?

            The emotions feel real. The disorientation and darkness feel real. Every bit of anxiousness has a real cause. Can I blame drugs for that?

            I try to keep my eyes wide open, and a smile pasted on my face. But the view ahead is obscured by a misty haze and the squishy path underneath our feet punctuated by sharp rocks you can’t always see. I’m not hiding much of anything very well.

            I slow my pace and look around. The trees are tall.

            And then my spirit, still hovering in front of me, looks at me.

            “Someday you’ll be rich,” she says.

            I have never cared about being rich. But in that moment—surreal as it is with the living shadows of trees hovering—it seems like a really, really wonderful idea.

            There are two people nearby talking about their boyfriends. They must know I can hear them, but I’m not sure if I’m supposed to pretend I can’t or if I’m supposed to join the conversation.

            The spirit who looks like me speaks again.

            “And when you’re rich, people will want to hear you speak. They’ll cry and applaud and the very sound of your voice.”

            The connection between me and my spirit loosens. It’s elastic now and stretching away from me.

            Steve is far ahead of me, smiling, as he talks to someone in the group. I think, “He is such a good guy.” A bird squawks above me. I look up at it.

            The spirit who looks like me says, “He’ll probably be an apostle someday. You’ll have to travel the entire globe and everywhere you go people will fawn.”

            Someone in the line of hikers bumps into me, and I let myself fall farther back in line.

            Says the spirit, “When you’re rich and powerful no one will bump into you. Or if they do, they’ll be sorry. They’ll rue the day they bumped into you.”

            My guts start filling with… a yearning. It’s a completely unfamiliar sensation. A mix of greed and bloodlust.

            “You can make it happen you know. It’s easy. Watch.”

            In the sky in front of me, I see a cliff. I see the cliff and I see the person who just bumped into me. I see them falling down the cliff and then I see myself. Pushing arms out. Standing at the edge of the cliff. Smiling.

            I stop.

            The hikers keep moving forward, like a moving body of water. I look around, trying desperately to snap my spirit back into my body, but I can’t.

            “Who are you?” I ask the spirit. “Because you are not me.”

            She smiles once more, fading into the shadows of the trees.

            I quicken my pace and try to find someone to talk to, to pull myself out of the fogginess of my IVF addled brain.

            For a while, I almost feel like myself again.

            When we get to the Abbey, Steve hands me a pamphlet about its founder—King Athelstan. He was king a long, long time ago—somewhere around 900 AD. I read the pamphlet with a tired sort of disinterestedness. I’m hot and cold and the same time and so exhausted I approach the grandeur of the Abbey with something like boredom.

            I leave my heavy-with-mud shoes at the entrance and walk around in my wet wool socks.

A tour guide is talking. “He used to walk in those hills,” I hear him say. I assume he is talking about Athelstan, but I am only vaguely listening. “He had visions of glory. He would do anything for the glory. Some people think he killed his brother. The abbey is dedicated to him.”

The Abbey looks like every other cathedral we’ve been to so far. Ceilings so tall you feel like you’re outside when you’re in. Stone walls that echo against a quiet so present it seems to force reverence. Walls of graves etched with the names of noble patrons, whose lifetime of money earned them a hollow carving in rock.

I read through the pamphlet as I walk—the cold, hard of the floor such a contrast to the muddy path.

The pamphlet traces the bloody history of the Abbey.

It’s strange to read of ghosts who might have walked the same path I just walked. I wonder how heavy with mud their shoes were. How tired they were as they came out of the woods.

The pamphlet moves from one owner to the next, all of them merging together in my mind, into a singular king. A singular entity.

In the 18^th century, a man named Damer became obsessed with his status, and the abbey’s ability to boost it. He thought the land should be grander. He had visions of himself as great. The ghost of his dead wife haunted him. He was worthy of her. He was better than her.

And I saw it play out in his head, the way I had watched myself. It was simple, he would have told himself, stomach churning with something like greed and bloodlust. Just a few things to do first. Watch.

There is a bench next to me and I sit down on it.

I can still feel it in my gut, too—that unfamiliar yearning.

But he did more than just feel it.

He was so swayed by his visions he went to the town that stood at the edge of the forested hills. He razed it to the ground.

The entire village.

In the space of the destruction, now sits his glory.

I feel cold as I put the pamphlet down.

I can almost see that spirit who looks like me, laughing. A phantom haunting the very stones I sit on.

I watch the other members of the group move past me and am again struck by the sensation they are part of a moving body of water while I am a rock, stuck in the mud of the riverbed.

Could it be a real demon? I think. One whispering temptations, driving you to sin, or maybe insanity?

How large is the gap between sin and insanity?

I start to shiver.

I can’t see Steve anywhere. But I think I can hear him just outside the Abbey. I think I can hear the way his laugh is so present, and I wonder if I’ll ever be so capable of being present again.

Is the veil between the worlds a mix of molecules and neurons? When the clinic shut down my pituitary gland, did they evacuate my brain of whatever chemical was keeping it closed? Are the hills of Milton Abbey inhabited by a spirit who haunts kings and Kerrys?

I stand up and I walk from tomb to tomb inside the Abbey, scanning the names of the dead.

My wet, wool socks leave footprints behind me as I go.

 

•

            It’s egg collection today. They gave me a Valium this morning, but I don’t feel it working. Not even a little bit. The room is hot, and I am half naked and shaking. The doctor is almost unrecognizable in her surgery garb. She is covered from head to foot and is wearing goggles. I can’t see her eyes.

            They give me something in an IV and everything starts to get fuzzy fast. My legs are pried back (so dignified!). Steve is holding my hand, all whispering and smiles.

            When they asked me earlier how much I weighed, I was embarrassed about how much weight the hormones made me gain. So, I lied. By about thirty pounds.

            It’s not until they use that weight to start calculating my anesthesia that I realize you should never lie about your weight to doctors who have to give you anesthesia. Especially if you’re a redhead and you need more than other people do.

            The next thing I remember is pain. Screaming pain. Writhing pain. Tearing pain. Deep, penetrating pain. And a fuzziness. I am here and there and nowhere all at once.

            And then, in my mind, I am back at Tintagel, where the sun beat down on at us when we scaled the cliffs. I can feel the sun against my eyes, my head throbbing against its piercing. The sun is blanching.

            I think about the word “blanching” and immediately my inner voice begins to recite Elizabeth Barret Browning’s “Grief” in a nonstop loop as I kick at the dust of the cliffs. Intra-poem, “Grief” morphs into John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud,” and then “Batter my Heart.”

            Below I see the bright aqua of the Atlantic Ocean, crashing on the shores next to Merlin’s cave. The air smells like dust and salt.

            I remember the way Steve meets me on the top of the hill where, underneath our feet, lie the ruins of a castle floor. He walks with me to find shade. I am beginning to stink with sweat and my headache intensifies, shooting a stake through my pupil to the back of my skull.

            Steve kisses my cheek and puts a “pregnant” flower into my hair. “It’s a magic flower,” he says, pointing to the way the belly of the flower bulges. “The ancient veins of power pulse here with the mystery of conception. All they need is an offering now.”

            “You talked to George too long,” I say. George, the bus driver, kept going on about the “veins of power” underneath Tintagel Castle. I frown in the blanching sun, unable to smile at Steve’s magic flower. My inner voice of Browning-Donne chanting grows louder and louder, humming in a cacophony of grief, sin, and death.

            We make our way, shoes in hand, down into Merlin’s cave as the tide comes in.

            “You feel the power here, don’t you?” asks Steve.

            Cold waves crash, stinging against my feet. The cold slowly creeps from the numbness of my toes to my torso, but the ache in my head lingers and the stink of my sweat mingles with the crusty smell of water and sand. “Yes,” I say. “I feel it.”

            I wade into the oncoming waves inside the cave, pushing my sunglasses up into my hair to help adjust to the darkness of it. I’m teetering on rocks as the swirl of the tide sends me off balance. While I try to right myself, I do not notice my sunglasses have fallen from my head and have been sucked into the swirling vortex of water and rock.

            Back on the beach, after the tide has pulled the cave opening almost completely underwater, I notice they are gone.

            The Tintagel Gods of conception have taken their offering, says the ghost of Cecil Rhodes, who is laughing. And fortunately, they have a taste for hideously ugly eyewear.

 

            I cry out, shake my head.

            “No, Cecil Rhodes is not allowed to be here,” I say.

            “Don’t worry,” says the doctor. “Hallucinations are common with this type of anesthesia.”

            “I lied about my weight,” I say.

            They don’t believe me. The nurse strokes my arm. “Hush honey, it’s going to be okay.”

            The pain is making me sweat and it’s a struggle not to scream out.

            My memory is doing funny things

            In front of me, I see my thesis and I see myself sitting over it, hunched with anxiety.

            My advisor wants another draft. And he wants it to be good.

            I don’t care if it’s good. I just want it done.

            But I know if it’s going to be good, I’m going to have to consider the logical possibility there is no god.

            The premise of my thesis is that Enlightenment philosophers misinterpreted the physics of Newton’s Principia. That the hypotheses upon which their atheistic philosophies rested were laden with fallacies.

            You can’t write that kind of thesis without considering the logical possibility there is no god.

            I close my eyes. Take a breath. I’m not entirely sure whether or not I’m about to talk myself out of my faith and it terrifies me.

            Axioms, I think.

            If you follow them back far enough, all logical conclusions are ultimately based on fundamentally unprovable axioms.

            Trace the logic back to the axioms. What’s the axiomatic difference?

            The pages of my thesis get caught in the breeze of my swamp cooler, but I let them scatter.

            Nothing.

            Something.

            I realize.

            That’s the axiom.

            There’s either something.

            Or there’s nothing.

            Neither one is provable.

            Neither one is necessarily more probable.

            Both are the beginning of two very different types of logic.

            Logic, ultimately, is a question of faith.

 

            “My left ovary is a mess,” I say. “Scar tissue. It burst a couple years ago. And I lied about my weight.”

            The nurse leans down harder on me because I am writhing.

            I repeat things without knowing that I’m repeating them.

            My left ovary.

            I lied.

            I lied about my weight.

            There’s scar tissue.

            I lied about my weight.

            Every few minutes I see the doctor hand something to the embryologist, who then runs into the lab next door.

            “We’ve got another one,” I hear coming from the other room.

            If I could be just the tiniest bit coherent, I might realize this is the moment of human conception: dreams meeting reality inside a petri-dish.

           

            Psalm 19.

            I’ve been having Steve read it to me every night. I’m not entirely sure why, but it has resonated with me in a way none of the other psalms have.

 

            The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament sheweth his handywork.

            Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.

            There is no speech, nor language, where their voice isn’t heard.

            Their line is gone out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.

            In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun

 

            The sacredness of nature. The importance of words. How all things testify of God.

            I can feel myself shaking, feel the nurse holding me down.

            I start to cry. A deep moaning sob that I could never have allowed myself if I weren’t drugged.

            It was never Cecil Rhodes who sent me to compete for those scholarships, I realize. Never Cecil Rhodes who sent me on this trip.

            It was always God.

 

            I try not to writhe, try not to let the pain get in the way of the collection.

            Should we have faith in God? Or faith God will do what we want?

            I know the answer to this, and it makes me feel desperate and angry. I don’t want to be told an empty uterus is all part of God’s plan and I don’t want to be told that God wants me to suffer. I want someone to tell me it will all work out. I don’t want anyone to tell me it will be okay even if it doesn’t work. I want it to work.

            I am not okay with failure. And it makes me feel like a terribly selfish person.

 

•

            Now I lie on the edge of a London gutter.

            The air smells of dust, grime, and cigarette smoke. Vaguely, I am aware of the filth that is coating my hair, dirtying my clothes. But I can’t make myself care. Everything is hazy from the egg-collection anesthesia and my stomach is aching.

            Steve is knocking, trying to get the property manager to open the door so we can check in and I can lie down on an actual bed instead of a grimy gutter.

            “We’re not open right now,” says someone from inside. “Come back in an hour.”

            “But I told you we’d be coming,” says Steve. And he did. He told them I’d be having surgery. That we needed to check in right after it was finished.

            “It’s lunchtime,” says the nasally voice through the door. “Come back in an hour.”

            “Steve looks at me, a little desperately. I see the lines of anger, compassion, worry, all deepening as he looks. “But my wife,” he says, “she’s not doing very well.”

            His face is so kind. So Steve.

            The voice from the other side of the door snaps, “A person has to eat!”

            And Steve steps away from the door, fuming. He kneels down next to me, touches my hair.

            I’m aware that I could be crying, but I am feeling so hazy I can’t tell whether or not I am. I simply smell the dust, the cigarette smoke. I feel the pavement under my hips, the total dirtiness that has accompanied this entire attempt at an, ironically?, immaculate conception.

            And then, there in the steamy London gutter, I feel her next to me.

It is unalarming in a dream-like way. And maybe I am dreaming. But when I think about it, she’s been watching me for days. Watching me as the heat sets me snapping. Watching as I retched at the toilet during Les Misérables. Watching as I cried when we rowed our way across the lake at Hyde Park.

            Today, when they took those eggs so forcibly from my ovaries, they put them into a dish. There was no sex. No meeting of two people in love. Just a violent attempt to force open the veil.

            I look at her Madonna face. She seems so young. So much younger than I would have ever imagined. How violent was her immaculate conception? How hard was it to open the veil and let Jesus through?

            “Did you know?” I want to ask her. “Your uncle talked about light and darkness and death when he heard. But did you know he was talking about you? That you would have to go through something even Joseph, sweet as he was, could never understand?

            I close my eyes, listening to the hum of traffic as it is filtered by the concrete.

            I don’t know yet that this procedure is going to bring me those children I dreamed of. But I do know things I didn’t. That conception, no matter how miraculous, brings you directly through the shadow of death. That God meant it when he told Eve she would have sorrow in childbirth.

            And that even she, mother of God, was a daughter of Eve.

            I watch the black taxis whiz past, stirring up black fumes.

            She reaches out, holds my hand.

            She puts a hand on my ankle. “The thing about immaculate conceptions,” she says, just a hint of laughter underneath the softness of her voice. “They just never let you in the inn afterward.”

            And, for just a moment, I forget about the pain. I forget about the grime and the ache in my stomach. The entire dirtiness that has accompanied this possibly futile attempt at an immaculate conception.

            I just stare at the open veil.

            And I laugh right along with her. 

 

A poem for Iseult of the White Hands

True Love is no great thing 

It is more the wordless gift of a Diet Coke on your bedstand 

(Because I just thought you would want it later)

than it is an epic story of heartbreak and longing

It is the hypnagogic kiss, sleepily left on your shoulder, every night,

not an ecstasy of moonlight and song

Tristan had it wrong

Love is not a poison to consume 

It is white hands reaching to steady you

when you've forgotten to steady yourself

It is a thousand tiny moments 

the assuring presence 

of someone who would never 

leave you to hurt alone

There is No Drama Like Closeted Gay Mormon Drama: A Review of Autoboyography, by Christina Lauren

I am a Mormon from pioneer stock. My ancestors crossed the plains with oxen and handcarts, I am Mormon in my ontology, my culture, my history, my assumptions and my worldview.

I am also queer.

Both my Mormonism and my queerness are integral aspects of my identity, one as equally changeable as the other.

Because of this, I am both the best and the worst person to review this book.

Autoboyography, by Christina Lauren, is the story of Tanner and Sebastian. Tanner, a bisexual non-Mormon newly closeted by the ultra-conservative culture of Provo, UT, falls in love with Sebastian, the gay, closeted even to himself, son of a Mormon bishop.

Sebastian, like me, is Mormon. It is ingrained in the way he thinks, the way he responds, the ways he learns to smile to cover his feelings and the way he shuts down or runs away from something he has been conditioned to reject about himself. “Sebastian’s identity isn’t queer,” says Tanner. “It’s not gay. It’s not even soccer player or boyfriend or son. It’s Mormon.”

That rang true.

A lot of this book rang true to me.

A lot of this book made me want to apologize to every person who has ever had to date me. (I am so sorry, y’all. Queer Mormons are an exhausting mess.)

I lost count of the number of the times I wanted to scream and throw my phone (I read this book on my phone) because it had hit a nerve I’d forgotten about.

I could only finish it in the arms of my partner. She held me while I read the last few chapters. I was shaking. She has learned to recognize when I am having Mormon-related trauma. She can see it on my face, often speaking it before I even realize I’m experiencing it. Sometimes she whispers, Fuck the Mormons. Sometimes she whispers, You’re beautiful just the way you are. Most of the time she just holds me.

I imagine someone who isn’t Mormon, particularly someone who isn’t queer, would respond with skepticism to certain parts of this book.

But this book got so much right. And even some of the parts it got wrong? They are important—integral to the purpose and impact of the book.

Things the book got right:

1) The description of BYU.

Tanner says BYU is “a lot of long skirts and modest shirts, straight trimmed hair and genuine smiles.” He is dumfounded when someone playing Frisbee actually says, “Gosh darn it!” And then says “BYU is exactly like I imagined.”

I mean. I laughed. So hard. 

2) When Sebastian says he’s not gay.

How can someone admit to being exclusively interested in boys, but not, as Sebastian says, “Not… that?”

In Mormonism, there is no room for homosexuality in the Plan of Salvation. The highest order of the priesthood, the highest order of salvation, is in heterosexual marriage—the “sealing” for eternity that is meant to provide the template for this life and the next.

While having feelings for the “wrong” gender isn’t overtly considered a sin (don’t get me started on the subtext), “acting on them” is considered one of the gravest sins. The church discipline for being in an active same-sex relationship is the same as it is for attempted murder. Entering a same-sex marriage is considered the highest apostasy, and triggers mandatory excommunication.

I have known since I was a teenage student at BYU that I had an annoying habit of falling in love with women.

It wasn’t until I was in my thirties I was even willing to speak a name to it. 

3) Sebastian’s angst.

Maybe people will find Sebastian’s angst unbelievable.

If anything, I think he didn’t have enough of it.

He was able to speak it, out loud, to Tanner. Even as he said he’d never said it out loud before.

It was only a few years ago I spoke it out loud. I sat in the passenger seat of my friend’s car. We drove out to Utah Lake. It was frozen, a mix of white and brown and grey.

I had been trying to say the words for hours and I hadn’t been able to.

My friend had been teasing me. “It can’t be that bad,” she said. “Did you drink coffee? Did you get drunk? Do you want to have an affair? Please tell me you’re thinking of having an affair, monogamy is so boring.”

I laughed. She was joking (I think). She was a teenager when she was married, only a little younger than I was when I married my husband. We were, all of us, virgins on our respective wedding days. (I had never even been to second base.)

Finally I said, “If I did have an affair… It … would be… with a woman.” It felt like I was spitting the words, trying to get them out. I thought I might choke on them.

I had never said it out loud.

I had fallen in love with woman after woman after woman. And it had never occurred to me to give it a name. I knew it was something you buried. It was something you kept quiet. It was not, ever, something you admitted out loud.

4) The part in the acknowledgements where they talked about “teen after teen who honestly believed, devastatingly, that their parents would probably rather have a dead child than a gay one.”

This is not just something the teens believe. It is something that is true. I have heard so many parents (who may or may not have known whether they had a queer child) explicitly say: It would be easier to have a dead child than a gay child.

I had a friend, a blonde gay boy, maybe 20 years old. He wanted to be a cook and once he cooked me something Japanese that I’ve never had again, though it was one of the best things I’d ever eaten. He told me, “My mom asked me why. Why couldn’t I keep my gayness to myself? When I told her I was suicidal, it was either kill myself or come out, she said, I wish you would have killed yourself.”

I told this story to another Mormon mother in horror. She just frowned at me and said, “But it would have been easier.”

Even for queer Mormons with supportive parents, suicidality is a major problem. In most states, suicide rates fell after the legalization of gay marriage. But in Utah the numbers have steadily risen and are now nearly triple what they used to be. The rise—which correlates with the LDS church’s tightening of rhetoric against gay marriage, particularly in the 2008 push for Proposition 8 and the 2015 policy change which bans the children of gay spouses from baptism—prompted the CDC to issue a special report investigating the issue.

The last time I was in Provo, I sat with the mother of a gay Mormon boy who committed suicide. We had both since left the church, and we sat in the bar of the hotel, holding our drinks. She told me about his first kiss. How he was so excited. She told me how long it had been. She told me a lot of things. The silence after she spoke told me more.

I was on the phone with another queer friend once, begging her to drive to the hospital instead of walking into traffic.

Yet another queer friend once told me, “I’m doing OK… by which I mean, I am no longer involuntarily committed… that is the standard that I measure OK by now.”

I could tell literally a hundred of these stories.

I cannot think of a single queer Mormon friend of mine who has not struggled with depression and suicidality.

One of the biggest things that prevents suicidal behavior is human connection and that is the one thing the Mormon church expressly forbids for its queer members.

Most of us leave the church. We decide that it is better to live than to be Mormon. It is harder than people understand to leave the church. It fractures us on the inside. Giving up Mormonism is only slightly less difficult than asking us to not be queer.

But we do not all make that decision.

And far too many of us simply don’t survive.

Things the Book Got Wrong

1) Little Things

Most of the things the book got wrong were little things, really. Orem is many things, but it is not quieter than Provo. It is called The Honor Code, not A Honor Code at BYU. Mission interviews are not with the missionaries. There were several little things like that.

Honestly, I’m more surprised at how much the book got right than how much it got wrong. The authors clearly talked to actual Mormons and did research beyond internet searches. I was most impressed by the subtext they got right. So much of Mormonism happens in the subtext. Mormons are polite, as the authors point out. They do not say the things they think, they are pathologically incapable of being overtly mean. The text conveyed this well. 

 2) Sebastian had not nearly enough fear of getting in trouble at BYU

As a BYU student I was utterly terrified someone would think I was queer. Even being queer was forbidden when I was a student. Today being queer won’t get you in trouble, but doing anything—anything—that could remotely be considered “acting on it” could be grounds for expulsion.

Once, I told my colleague from my current university this. I told her holding hands with another woman would have been enough to get me thrown out of BYU. I had not admitted to anyone that I was not straight. I was in my 30’s, still married to a man at the time. I have a feminine appearance. So when she looked at me, directly in the eyes, and said “That must have been hard for you,” I felt part of my throat close up into a choking near-gasp, feeling utterly exposed.

Incidentally, I did hold hands with a woman at BYU. I was 20. She touched my hair and she held my hand and for days I couldn’t sleep. I was absolutely overcome with panic and shame and horror. No one could know. No one could find out. I rationalized that it hadn’t been… wrong… not exactly. (Neither one of us admitted it was something related to… that.) But I was utterly terrified of what it could mean and I was utterly terrified of being found out.

Sebastian and Tanner do more than hold hands.

He should have been way more freaked out by that. 

3) Sebastian generally has too easy of a time with the physical affection

Doing anything more than kissing before you’re married—even if you are a hetero Mormon couple—is something that would require a lengthy repentance process and a confession to the bishop.

With Sebastian’s background, he came to the conclusion that it was OK faster than I think someone with his background would have.

Here is where I start to become really torn, though.  

Sebastian does address the question of guilt. He prays. He prays and feels peaceful. He says, “I haven’t felt guilty about it […] which is unexpected.” He comes to decide that God approves of his relationship. He says, “Guilt is sort of a sign that I’m doing something wrong […] and when I feel peaceful, I know God approves of what I’m doing.”

As a queer Mormon, I recognized this feeling.

Mormons put a lot of emphasis on gender, on gender roles. But they also emphasize prayer and personal revelation.

When I look at myself, when I look at my partner… I start to get a sense about the eternal nature of gender. I feel like it is more complex and more beautiful than we understand. It is more than a simple binary. And this feels very, very sacred.

Like Sebastian, I have never felt guilty about the fact that I am not straight. I have never felt like I was doing something wrong when my partner touched me. When I pray, I have never gotten the sense, even once, that God wants anything for me other than to have a relationship that makes me happy.

But I have struggled with shame.

I have struggled with the walls-closing-in-on-me sense that my people will never accept this. That they would rather cast me out than accept me in a relationship where I can be the kind of person I was born to be. When Sebastian says, “It feels like I’m pushing through the dark and I know that what’s ahead is safe, but no one is following me there,” I knew what he was talking about.

The first relationship I had with a woman failed for a lot of reasons, but a big one was I couldn’t get past this shame. It became debilitating, overwhelming, and I broke underneath it.

And so… I want queer young Mormons reading this to hear Sebastian’s truth. Even if I can’t fully accept it as 100% believable. Because I want them to understand what Tanner understands: “A God worthy of your eternal love wouldn’t judge for who you love.”

Mormons often try to simplify homosexuality down to a question of sex, libido. It is a perversion, they say. One you can overcome with enough prayer and fasting and faith.

But this is a lie.

Homosexuality is about so much more than sex. It is about bonding. It is how our bodies were built to love.

And I want all the queer kids who read this book to believe this.

Which brings me to the final bit this book got wrong… 

4) The immediate sense of hope

Most queer Mormons do not get beyond their Mormonism the way Sebastian does. At least not while they are still teenagers and not without the support of affirming parents—parents who often have to walk away from the church along with their queer children to give them the hope they need. I have been blessed to meet many such parents working with the Mama Dragons, a group that supports the mothers of Mormon LGBT children. They are remarkable for so many reasons, not the least of which is that they are willing to give up everything for their children. But they are in the minority.

Queer Mormons with families like Sebastian’s go on their missions. They enter their mixed orientation marriages. They do not tell their parents they are gay. They struggle for years with the loneliness and despair that comes from denying such an essential part of themselves.

I personally know dozens of people who underwent “conversion therapy.”

I personally know people who have died.

The reality for most queer Mormons is much bleaker and much more heartbreaking than the hopeful ending of this book makes it seem.

And I loved that.

And so I don’t actually want this part of the book to be different. It may not be accurate. But it is necessary. Because I want young people who read it to know and understand that they are lovely, that happy endings are possible, that there is a way out that does not involve death.

The things this book got “wrong” are part of what makes the book beautiful.

This book was my life, in so many ways.

The geography, the emotion, the self-loathing, the stakes.

I have hiked Y mountain, I have skied on Utah Lake. I taught at BYU for 15 years. My house, in Salt Lake City, has Brigham Young on the deed.

I wish I could have read this book as a teenager.

I wish I could have started to envision a different sort of reality when I was young and so, so, so terrified of my own queerness.

I want every queer Mormon teenager to read this book, to know that hope is a possibility. That even in losing your entire world and half of your identity, there can be joy and there can be beauty.