Review of Marie Conlan's "Say Mother Say Hand”: An Anti-Memoir Plumbing Memory to its Depths
by Sophie Allen and Sarah Feng
In so many works of memoir, poetry allows writers to accept, forget, and dissolve their trauma, to sever the ties of pain that connect them to their ghosts. But in her debut anti-memoir, Say Mother Say Hand, forthcoming from Half-Mystic Press on April 18, 2020, Marie Conlan does just the opposite.
SMSH is a collection of scenes and memories from Conlan’s childhood and her relationship to her mother – and her mother’s relationship to her mother, stretching from concentration camps in Germany to hospitals in America. Spanning decades and minds, the separations between which grow increasingly fluid as time progresses, the work, which dives into trauma rather than escaping it, shedding the anchors of chronology and reality in the process, is best described by author Marie Conlan as an “anti-memoir.” “Anti-memoir,” according to author Yiyun Li, refers to a work whose narrative is more about the reader than the writer, a piece of writing which is decentralized and focused externally.
In this sense, Say Mother, Say Hand, is not quite an anti-memoir, but it’s not a traditional memoir, either. It is a visually alive, painfully deconstructed recollection of Conlan’s life and the lives of her mother and grandmother, placing it squarely in the category of “about the author.” As we read, we grow to understand how Conlan’s development into an independent adult has been affected by her matrilineal lineage, and explores her legacy of deeply flawed women who were, themselves, learning how to survive in a world that often seemed out to punish them.
There is so much to say regarding this compact novel, so we will begin with the most apparent: Conlan’s anti-memoir lies at the intersection between poetry and art. She is direct and honest, presenting the experiences of her narrator – and herself – with unvarnished, Benjy-Compson-esque light. She describes experiences with clippy phrases and delineates scenes with sequences of surreal imagery, scattered over the page with indents, white space, and floating paragraphs, sometimes even accompanied by abstract shapes.
“Say Mother, Say Hand” is not quite an anti-memoir, but it’s not a traditional memoir, either. It is a visually alive, painfully deconstructed recollection of Conlan’s life and the lives of her mother and grandmother, placing it squarely in the category of ‘about the author.’”
This book might best be defined visually as a series of diary entries by a writer whose memory is so forceful and ballistic that it shatters the traditional road of memory and flings the shards out into a suspended gel of equilibrious trauma. These choices impressed, shocked, distracted, and engaged us, all at once. We still respect Conlan for being exceedingly explorative in grasping the visual, dream-like nature of grief and mental illness; each page looks like the subconscious itself during the sleep of the narrator, if it can be pinned to an unmoving image.
Because Conlan’s work is so abstract, both in literary and visual terms, Say Mother, Say Hand doesn’t follow any sort of timeline. The narrative jumps around from past to present and back again. This sometimes complicates sorting out the timeline as a reader: what’s happening, to whom, and when? is a question we found ourselves asking in our post-read discussion. In addition to her use of white space was unique and mostly effective, moving the words around on the page in a way one does not normally see in works of prose. Her half-adherence to both genres of poetry and prose left us both wondrous and slightly confused about what was metaphor and what was reality. Her purpose, seemingly, was to blur these boundaries, and although it seemed sometimes that the language eluded her control and grew overwhelming, we enjoyed how the narrator’s memory grew completely fused with her mother’s and grandmother’s with little pretext, creating a myth-like shared history.
Conlan doesn’t hesitate to dazzle with a powerful foundation of raw poetic material. It’s surreal, hazy, stylized… her imagery retains its vitality and propelled the reader onwards.
While Conlan’s avante-garde, epistolary form can, at times, retreat into a thicket of bewildering, over-abstracted prose-poetry, her imagery is what tugs the narrative forwards. From blue butterflies that terrorize the narrator’s mother, and then the narrator, to the spinning, womb-like orange lake, Conlan doesn’t hesitate to dazzle with a clearly powerful foundation of raw poetic material. It’s surreal, hazy, stylized, and glimmering with a sheen of barely surfaced recollection. Especially compelling were interspersed scenes in which the narrator considers the three images of herself, her mother, and her grandmother, deciding which ones to sustain and nurture. When her form threatened to sag, her imagery retained its vitality and propelled the reader onwards.
Because her imagery and form lie so close to the subconscious state, the work is incredibly raw to a reader, but this proximity can also make it more difficult to connect with the text. Part of what makes it impossible to define Say Mother, Say Hand as an anti-memoir is the lack of emotional distance from the events and people described. While Conlan’s use of symbols to represent real people and relationships can make the work more accessible to those who don’t know Conlan or her family, these symbols and images were inconsistent. She uses a lot of interesting metaphors and allusions to supplement her work, but a lot was the operative phrase. Rather than a few images functioning as a throughline of the whole book, there is so much happening that we felt like our attention was spread too thin.
We still respect Conlan for being exceedingly explorative in grasping the visual, dream-like nature of grief and mental illness; each page looks like the subconscious itself during the sleep of the narrator, if it can be pinned to an unmoving image.
Given that the book is about the relationships between mothers and daughters, the few references to ancestral mothers and maternal haplogroups (a family connected by mitochondrial DNA leading back to one common ancestor) were definitely effective, and we wish there had been more. In the same way, Conlan’s references to seeds and growing things like acorns were also excellent, but they were sprinkled in among many, many other images and symbols that were sometimes difficult to parse.
Although the book does not masquerade as prosaic nonfiction, nor does it define itself with any genre beyond the vague “anti-memoir” label, we do wonder if Conlan’s work might have better fit the label of a collection of poetry. It’s possible Conlan would have benefited from working in a less rigid structure, since she was already using line-breaks, enjambment, surreal imagery, and other traditionally poetic devices at times.
Sometimes, books or plays with a complex network of related characters will have a family tree at the beginning to help the reader keep track of these relationships. Something like this would have been appreciated in Say Mother, Say Hand, since the revolving cast of characters is largely unnamed. Other than Conlan’s grandmother, everyone in the book is referred to using solely pronouns, which quickly became confusing. In combination with the unconventional structure of the book, the lack of names made the story tricky to follow.
Just as we must inherit the trauma of our ancestors, we must also inherit their dreams. In writing this book, Conlan asks the reader to carry this burden as an honor, and to dream on for the eternal narrator of this anti-memoir.
On the other hand, if you like solving puzzles, this is the book for you. The payoff of figuring out where everybody fits in to Conlan’s family tree is admittedly satisfying, even if it sometimes feels like the work outweighs the pleasure of the end result.
We wanted to end this review with a final note of admiration for Conlan’s exploration. By the end of the novel, the grandmother, the mother, and the narrator were three separate but connected beings that sustain one another. There is a responsibility to remember, to pass on the histories of others; and just as we must inherit the trauma of our ancestors, we must also inherit their dreams, Conlan tells us. In writing this book, she is asking the reader to carry this burden as an honor, and to dream on for the eternal narrator of this anti-memoir.
SAY MOTHER, SAY HAND
By Marie Conlan
104 pp. Half-Mystic Press. $7.00.
Preorder here.
Sophie Allen is a junior at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the prose editor of COUNTERCLOCK Journal. She does not know how often she should be watering her cactus, but is doing her best. Find her on Twitter at @spiiriitkiid or Instagram at @sallen.jpg.
Sarah Feng is from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the editor-in-chief of COUNTERCLOCK Journal and the director of the Arts Collective. Her creative writing has been awarded by the Poetry Society of the United Kingdom, the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the Adroit Prizes in Prose & Poetry, NCTE, the Critical Pass Review, American High School Poets, the Leyla Beban Young Author’s Foundation, Teen Vogue, and the New York Times. She studies at Yale University.