A Lesbian is a Memoir

Lou Robinson

A lesbian is a memoir. Anything a lesbian writes arranges or steals and pastes is read as autobiography, pathology, already sexed and traceable. Mine will be more like a train.

Once in a bathroom mirror in Athens, Ohio, I saw every one of my years to come, nineteen to ninety, speeding by, blue and red in veins suddenly visible beneath transparent skin stretched tight with astonishment at so much momentum, exactly how my years would look: frowning, fierce, adamant about the body's right and every woman's body's right to be inhabited and to press them together. The word that rose then was not "right' but 'vehicle.' Then the bathroom door opened to screams, I forgot everything for years. An ice white ibis had been hit in the mouth, his tooth fell in his palm, his palm filled with blood. I drove, steering from as far away as Venus, to the emergency room where I refused to give the name of my gay comrade, Clay, my best friend, son of the man who owned the bowling alley where the football team beat us up, first lover, gay soon after. The doctor and nurses joking about pizza, don't you think these girls would like some pizza? Because they knew drugs turned our hungry minds to mouths and only girls have mouths. That will go in one compartment.

What I saw in a mirror in Athensw, Ohio—two girls with hair in braids wound around naked breasts, a woman wrapped in foil, gay boy dancers making sharper angles, masturbating, one bleeding from the mouth—that was reflected behind me. What I saw in my face, my future, Polaroid speed, prophetic, I'd say about 70% accurate, that was just veins. I was always reading into things.

A memoir can be made the same way. Take any novel and pretend it is autobiographical. Take some things out, put some things in. A lesbian is a woman who reads without respecting anything. Where is the authority in these words? A lesbian or a memoir neither has nor answers to authority. A lesbian is a memoir in the eyes of the world. Someone can make you a lesbian by saying, "I thought so because of the way your mouth turns down when you smile."

I remember taking a smoking stance against the wall beside the green water with its fawn-colored foam. I gave up smoking after the accident because lighting up drew eyes to the bent limb. The accident happened in Ireland when I was trying once and for all really trying this time to be a man, knocked down and the green twig fracture grew greener bluer yellow sky before a tornado. You are trying so hard not to be a man you go numb. Dead Man I write on your forehead where you stare from your waking sleep. My own accident won't appear here, you see it from a speeding train too fast for comprehension. Is the wild water out there too beautiful? Does it distract you in your furious efforts to understand?

Who wants to read about all the women she slept with, your mother asked you in her furious effort to understand. Answer: I have been with 2283 women. Two squirrels girdling a tree in a day and a half felled 2283 twigs to get at seeds. The tree with all its pendant spheres is starting to topple because of all the women I have girdled and trimmed. Two thousand two hundred and eighty-three women. Think about it. Words force their way into you.

In a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco I asked my friend Mary how many. She said: not many, 50 or so. I said I thought 22 was excessive. She said, well Clay lost count at 4,000 so why do you feel shame? We were pioneers.

Her fortune said "your lover will never want to leave you." Mine was a blank white strip. A moment came back to me. A passage in Delta of Venus read standing up in Borders bookstore. The bathroom in Jacobson's across the street to get off. In the stall next a woman in high heels standing facing like a man. Sound of pissing. What is a lesbian, I was still asking myself at 20. So I asked the heels, "can you tell me what a lesbian is?" He passed me a tube of lipstick called walnut and I knew that meant Hester Prynne: a lesbian is a prostitute because Hester stained her lips with walnut juice. Literature majors run to their texts. Nothing. See, to a memoir, literature is not sacred. I read it, it became mine, it lay with the others and merged as memoirs are wont. Who can say. Who can say what? Who can say what a lesbian is? A memoir is a manifesto is a lesbian fucking literature.

You. Sleep with 2283 women. Girdle the tree of life below the snow line and strip it, watch it fall. Sleep with 22 men and live to tell. Feel as little love as possible, even for the tree circled with ivy, the one that watched over you that comforted and rocked you and said s/he'd never leave you strangle it at the root.

Memoirs are not romantic. Even when they wallow they fail. The flat statement at the soul of the memoir is I can't feel. The lesbian can relate sentimental facts. But to write romantically, the lesbian must be an author this is a contradiction in terms. No I. A memoir cannot refer to another with any objectivity. There is no other. A memoir that begins You . . .

When a memoir reaches out to an ephemeral other, books fly off the shelves into your arms, a great love, a state of grace, ravages, night, a dusty answer. Led to believe we stave off the natural rot by loving women carefully, correctly. I mean, in all their diversity, confusing them with us. Violent loving, lesbians believe, disintegrates the integrity of the memoir, writing itself at the kitchen table this very moment, inserting itself into the underside of history, writing very close together to kill fewer trees. When a lesbian says love he or she means pride of self. A lesbian is a Hercules. A lesbian really loving women drops the earth, forests fall. Nothing means anymore. Look what happens. Worse you can't tell who. You are. A memoir about really loving is a contradiction in terms, if a memoir is a lesbian. You do this. You make me say these things.

I am writing your memoir I will make you feel, Dead Man. I am in you, you are putting down your pen, putting down your coffee. A sharp pain below a rib on the left that's me climbing, crossing diagonally. Circling your heart and squeezing. You made me. Wetness on your lashes now, this moment. You are thinking, looking at the steam rising from the lake as from a new corpse, that you have missed the point and maybe it is too late. You don't know what you are. How dare another woman make you feel this way. It is not real. It is only a footnote. Yet you have never been so alone, many times. A pioneer.

working notes

Historically women's writing has been trivialized or negated by assuming implicitly or explicitly that it is autobiographical, as if women can't make anything up; it is also sexualized in a personal way that men's writing isn't. With lesbians, it's a double curse. Lesbian writing of the seventies when I started publishing was more didactic than any other professed identity group's writing. It said, "this is who WE are, and what we stand for" and wasn't very much about poetry, language.

Today 'authentic' is part of everyday vernacular and there are no coffeehouse 'speakouts' against the politics of one's fiction. And anyone can write as anything with the anonymity of the internet. What still thrills me is the idea that a soul can shout, "I am a RaceTrack," "I am Don Quixote," "I am a spirit writing to you from within a locked box."

about the author

Lou Robinson is the author of Napoleon's Mare, a novel from Fiction Collective2 (and FC2 winner of 1st book of fiction). Her writing has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Trivia, Conditions, Quarterly, f(Lip), Epoch, Tessera, Trois, Gargoyle, Black Ice, Phoebe, New American Writing, The American Poetry Review, 13th Moon; in short story collections by City Lights, FC2, and Crossing Press; chapbooks by Top Top stories and Awede Press. With Camille Norton she co-edited Resurgent: New Writing by Women (University of Illinois Press). She was born in Delaware, Ohio and lives in Ithaca, New York.