CHAPTER EIGHT

Writing the Body

As I hope the previous chapter made clear, sensory images are fundamental to creative writing because one of the primary ways we experience the world is through our bodies. Whether you like it or not, as a human, you are an inescapably embodied creature. By attending to the body and learning what lessons it might have to teach us, we can arrive at an even deeper understanding of our interior lives, the world of ideas, emotion, and psychology. In this chapter, before discussing four different essays as case studies, I’d like to acknowledge that it’s natural to feel an initial resistance to writing about your own body, but as I hope each of the following examples demonstrates, doing so can lead to powerful and insightful writing.

The Illness Memoir

Whitney Curry Wimbish’s “Bloodletting” gets the reader’s attention immediately: “I started shitting blood when I was 12. It began slowly, just a few red watercolor drops in the toilet water. Soon it was a flood.” By disclosing what is ordinarily not talked about in polite company, Wimbish makes clear that her essay will be vulnerable, honest, raw. Later, she acknowledges the internal censor that must be overcome to write such an essay: “You’re shitting blood, you say? That’s gross. Don’t be gross.” Art requires, however, that we risk being “gross” by confronting the common reality of our lived lives, including “shit” and other bodily functions. “To deny [shit],” she writes, “is to deny humanity, real humanity, not the ultra-sanitized neat-and-tidy American version that is the biggest fantasy of them all. To deny it is to deny reality.” Being “gross” for the sake of being gross, of course, might just be gratuitous and uninteresting, but admitting that the human body is “a slimy unruly mess of shit, blood, guts, fibers, bone, mucosa, ligaments” can lead to truths we need to hear.    

As readers, we sympathize with the writer’s suffering, worrying about what is causing her bleeding, but that is only part of what the essay is about. Wimbish does not hold anything back, leaning into the confessional mode, revealing that her father sometimes spent time “fucking our neighbor, the one with the drunk husband,” and her mother would go into a rage in her pottery studio. Eventually, “Dad tried to strangle her and she left,” leading to Wimbish’s “big alone,” during which she “considered…blowing my brains out.” This troubled familial context allows us to understand the narrator as a person dealing with more than just ulcerative colitis; she is dealing with emotional and psychological trauma as well.

This essay dares you to look away as the aftermath of a surgery to remove Wimbish’s large intestines is described:

Here is the smell of stomach acid, sweet and rotten. Here is the interior, exposed. Here is blood and shit and mucous, deposited into a bag worn at the waist. Here are the two halves of the body, precariously held together by thirty-two staples. My skin strains at the edges of the metal spikes like it wants to burst.

We are drawn to and repelled by such vivid writing as we are compelled to imagine not just the author’s body but our own. Wimbish recounts experiences in her youth when she would hide her condition from others, which leads her to “carry a hiding place inside” herself. “Bloodletting” is a memoir about illness, but like all great art, it takes on much more than that, too. It’s an essay about physical pain and suffering but also about the shame and fear of humiliation we all experience at one point in our lives. There is a lesson here for artists as well. As writers, Wimbish reminds us, we have a choice in our work: “Return to safety. Write about anything other than yourself. Hide.” Or you can dare to confront the truth of your embodied self—and then tell it.  

Freewriting Prompt

Write about a time you were sick, describing as many of the physical sensations you can remember and connecting this experience to an interior emotional or psychological state.

Body Image

Lee Ann Roripaugh’s “Notes on Beauty” tells the origin story of the author “never being able to feel comfortable in your own skin, your own body.” Her body image is shaped by years of her mother and father’s constant criticisms, namely regarding her weight. Once again, this essay focuses on her own personal experiences in and of her body, but it is also about the development of an emotional trauma. When her mother complains about her five-year-old daughter’s ballet dancing, wanting “a peacock, not a defective pigeon,” the woman threatens “to throw you away.” Roripaugh learns “to peacock for love. Of course, it was never enough. Of course, you were never enough. Of course, you still so often feel as if you will never be enough.” Her body is the site for this feeling of inadequacy both in memory and as part of her deeply embedded psychology in the present.

One notable stylistic feature in this essay is the author’s decision to use the second-person you rather than first-person I. The second person is notoriously difficult to pull off successfully in a piece of literary writing. Even though we use the second person in our everyday conversation quite frequently to tell stories about ourselves, it can nevertheless seem unnatural or come across as a gimmick if you use it without a good reason. In this case, not only does Roripaugh’s masterful writing carry the essay, but the second person enhances the sense of detachment when it comes to her body image. What’s more, the end of the essay makes clear that you is a complicated pronoun in this context:

More and more, as you get older, you recognize physical aspects of your mother in yourself: the dimpled hands with creased-pillow knuckles, a resting downturned mouth over an overbite, the smattering of freckles in a raccoon’s-mask pattern when you’ve gotten too much sun, the mismatched eyebrows, a brown age spot on the lower left cheek near the jawbone, the high but crooked Horikoshi cheekbones.  

The author is describing her own body (hands, mouth, freckles, eyebrows, age spot, cheekbones), but she is also describing her mother’s, such that you can imagine the essay being addressed to an other, a you. Her internal sense of self has not only been deeply etched emotionally by her mother, but it is also now reflected actually: “It’s disturbing when the face you’re having trouble forgiving is now your own.” The final question lingers as the author and reader realize together how body image is a process of internalizing a myriad of personal, familial, and cultural ideals: “And why is it that the hardest thing for the self to forgive is the self?” Now the essay seems to have become an answer to its own question, a small step toward recognition and, one hopes, healing.  

Freewriting Prompt

Write about aspects and elements of your own body, describing not only physical traits but perceptions of your body image. Reflect on where your ideas of what is or is not beautiful have come from.  

Braided Bodies

Esinam Bediako’s extraordinary “Body/Mind Braid” makes explicit what I have been suggesting throughout this chapter, i.e., in order to understand our internal selves more deeply, we should not ignore our external lives as experienced through our bodies. Touching upon some of the same body image questions that Roripaugh explores, Bediako tells the story of her pregnancy while also describing how “I’ve never felt at home in my body.”

From early on, she experiences racialized standards of beauty: “In elementary school, some kids chased me down in the playground, calling me ugly and worse. I remember their names and their words, but I won’t speak or write them, except to point out that one of the things they called me was an ugly African.” Her African American classmates considered themselves “more American than me, they figured, since their parents had been born in the US unlike mine.” Later, race gives way to sex, when in middle school a boy barks at her and calls her a dog, another boy saying, “You have big boobs” and “You’re going to be a slut one day.” Bediako admits, “It was too confusing, my body and other people’s thoughts about it.” Despite being aware that “My soul was what really mattered,” Bediako internalizes these comments over time. When she imagines sharing a poem of advice with her hypothetical child in the future, noting how they will be criticized in both racialized and sexualized ways, she stops short of finishing the verse: “How dare you, I scolded myself, give advice you still do not take?” Instead, her strategy for coping with the world is to detach and disengage.

The description of her pregnancy is vivid and subtle as she feels a “Vibration” and a “flutter,” eventually hearing “a thrumming that I could feel in my bones, my body a conduit for some unnamed thing.” As she experiences morning sickness and learns she must have a C-section, her doctor encourages her to “Take deep breaths.” While she interprets this as a way to detach from her body in order to avoid pain, the doctor corrects her, explaining that the vagus nerve is “like the mediator between your mind and your body…. It’s not about detaching from your body. It’s actually the opposite. It’s the most present you can be.” The essay ends having braided together Bediako’s internal and external life creating an integrated whole as she holds her newborn son for the first time and addresses him: “You are here, and I am. I breathe in and out as deeply as I can. I call into the room my body, my mind, whatever soul I have, to bear witness to you as you take your place on this earth.”  

Freewriting Prompt

Write about a time when others made assumptions about you because of your appearance. Describe how that made you feel then and explore how it might still affect your sense of self today.

Other Bodies

Writing about your own body can inspire you to acknowledge and honor other people’s bodies as well. It can be tricky if you begin writing about other people’s bodies, of course, lest you cross into the territory of objectification, criticism, or judgment of one kind or another. Instead, one hopes that as you write, crafting images of other bodies that you encounter in your life will lead to a deeper feeling of sympathy with people, as you develop a keener sense of the embodied existence we are all a part of. An artful example of an essay that renders images of another person’s body is Brooke Wonders’s “Skinwalk,” which opens with an inviting provocation: “To remember sex with someone who’s now dead is an act of necrophilia; to recreate a living person on the page a desecration.” Despite the warning, Wonders continues to “recreate a living person on the page,” each of the seven sections focused on a specific body part of her ex-boyfriend, who had died by suicide. In fact, the sections can be almost read as post-mortem dissections, as we move from one piece of the body to the next.

The framework of the essay acts as a kind of skeleton upon which these parts can hang together, creating through quick vignettes a sense of the whole person when he was alive. In this way, rather than only dissecting, or dismembering, the essay is also a way for the author to reconnect and remember. Not all of these individual parts are equal, however, as the opening sections get progressively longer, from Ear to Hair to Eye, each touching briefly on her ex-boyfriend’s body and subsequent death, until arriving at the much longer and more significant portion called “Muscle.” Wonders recounts getting a professional massage both before and after the death of her ex, describing the physical sensation but also the feeling of vulnerability she experiences as she offers the reader a revelation: “Bodies conceal our secrets. Those who see our naked bodies can then hurt us. But bodies are also miracles. They feel even when the mind can’t.” What she feels at the end of the massage is “a powerful heat” leading to disorientation: “I thought This is bizarre, and Please stop, and Give that back.”

The essay winds down the way it ramped up, each successive section of Skin, Arms, and Hand getting progressively shorter until finally we reach the culminating comparison of the “Native American boogieman, the skinwalker” to her experience of grief: “Our memories wear us, and we wear them, brittle and transparent as onionskin. And yet this is also how my body keeps his, his touch imprinted on me, me living in him and him in me.” We can intellectually know certain facts and information about what has happened in our lives, but as Wonders makes clear here, our memories always live in our bodies.  

Freewriting Prompt

Write either about a person you’ve lost or someone you haven’t seen in a long time, describing their embodied presence in the world. Explore how they exist in your memory as well as in your own body.