An Interview with Carmen Giménez Smith

Barrie Jean Borich recently interviewed Carmen Giménez Smith about Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else, her lyric memoir which received a 2011 American Book Award.

Borich

Do you consider this book a lyric essay? Why or why not, and if yes, what do you mean by the term “lyric” in relation to prose?

Giménez Smith

I do consider it a lyric essay, and as I write more and more nonfiction, I realize that this form is the one I'm best suited for. I like the associative jumps and the compression this form requires. It's a more peripatetic form too, and these are the ways the form is lyric, although I also think it's interesting to consider the terms of subjectivity after Montaigne, which is the way I most like to frame the notion of lyric: how does this form privilege the speaker's subjectivity as opposed to more conventional nonfiction?

I think there's an emotional and sensual depth to the lyric essay that I adore, but the essay (as opposed to more conventional lyric poetry) accommodates my need to nerd out on a subject. I actually don't love too many books of poetry that have a very heavy nonfiction element. I think the lyric essay is a descendant of the familiar essay, which according to Anne Fadiman, is half-brain, half-heart.

Borich

How does writing in this manner resemble and depart from the ways you write poetry? The way you write personal essays or other prose works?

Giménez Smith

I spend a lot of time thinking about language and music regardless of the genre. I connect the music logic with the intellectual logic of essays and of poems. However, I think how I come to the two forms is very different. I go to nonfiction when I want to really investigate and inhabit a subject, and I write poems when I really want to engage with language and imagination. Nonfiction requires an awareness of complex structures that can really bedevil me, and I like that.

Borich

Did you write the book in the actual present tense, the way it reads, or are the moments of this book recollected and/or recreated later, as an evocation of memory rather than as a document of being?

Giménez Smith

I wrote a lot of that book as it was happening. In fact, when I gave birth to my daughter, I was really preoccupied with making sure I could record the details of the birth! I definitely had to revisit the book to temper some of the immediacy that felt melodramatic. I kept journals and wrote things down as they happened and I sometimes assembled disparate occasions, but mostly it was pretty close to a diary in terms of its relationship to the actual chronology.

Borich

Do you write in fragments and collage, or edit back to this fragmented form?

Giménez Smith

I do write in fragments when I'm writing this stuff, although I definitely write a lot that I then compress. I keep trying to write more traditional essays, but they don't work for me. I'm very self-conscious about the type of voice that I think "the essay" requires. In this way, I think that I draw a lot from Cixous's concept of ecriture feminine. I'm constantly thinking of how my discourse is gendered and shaped by my body, and this was particularly significant when it came to the book.

When thinking about nonfiction, I think about ideas that I want to explore. These ideas are often generative. I like the lacuna (which probably comes from my training in poetry) and what it says as much as I like the texts around it, so building this tension by scaling back or editing is pretty fulfilling.

Borich

The deep subject, or subtext of this work seems to be as much about the speaker’s relationship with her own mother as it is about mothering her own young children. Did you know this coming in, or is this a layer of subject you discovered while writing?

Giménez Smith

When I was very young I read an interview with Luce Irigiray (speaking of French postfeminists!) in which she said, "Let's free ourselves with our mothers." That really resonated with me, and for years, I tried to write poems that spoke to that idea. They never worked. When I started writing about my own mothering for this book, I realized that I kept returning to my own mother and how I was and wasn't like her. Some of us have a deep identification with our mothers, and I thought that this must have been what Irigiray meant: engaging with that identification with respect and empathy. I had shaped an idea of my mother and hadn't really considered it. Now I was facing this really deep relationship, and I wanted to think about how I could perform this act of emancipation. Ironically, I was also facing the death (?) the erasure (?) of my mother's self because of her illness, and I was desperate to record her life, pay tribute to her. I wanted to write my mother's text, so as I wrote more and more, the book returned to her. The imaginary notebooks came as a result of my talking a great deal with her as her loss of memory (due to dementia) pushed her deeper into her past. So I discovered this layer, and all of its microlayers, as I wrote the book. That's what I LOVE about the essay. It can be a space of incredible self-discovery.