In our latest queer issue, Anne Hays’ “You’re Like This And I’m Like” gave us clashing narratives on either side of the generational divide. Here, Anne gives us a look at this glorious mashup, this myth of memory:

1. To me, this story operates on two levels: on one, it’s the narrator’s development through time, through memories and moves, the tonal shifts of personhood; on the other, it’s the reflections of the narrator’s parents, reflected back on those same memories. What made you decide to structure the story this way?

In terms of structure, I actually took three old failed pieces and wrangled them into one: an oral history workshop exercise which involved interviewing oneself, a short story (ie fiction) about an abusive lesbian relationship, and a prose fragment piece about aspects of life that make a person feel trapped. I started writing the new hybrid piece at 11pm one night and finished in a frenzied, dizzy state at around 3am. It was a wild experience for me, writing it, because it seemed to come flying out as a coherent story all on its own, despite me. Over the next few days I crunched it, editing, but for the most part my feverish midnight exorcism remained intact. But I’m glad you asked this question because the original title of one of the failed pieces had been ‘I know This Is true,’ and my intention was to interrogate varying versions of memory and truth, and what are those things.

2. In this piece I also felt a clash of remembrance, a struggle to reconcile two sides of the same memory, sometimes one that the speaker herself doesn’t even remember. What do we learn from the so-called “mythic impressions” and “crazed technicolor versions” of the memories we’ve left behind?

Ah, yes. The narrator finds her own memories more satisfying than her parents’ renderings of similar events, but the reader can see that the stories don’t actually directly conflict. Their stories aren’t even all that crazed, but because they’re being told to the narrator over bottles of wine, the storytelling scenes themselves have a crazed quality to them. Maybe they’re more shrill than crazed. ‘The fucking suicide list,’ for instance. I think (in real life) parents often tell stories that stand in for the way we were as children, and in the re-telling, the stories get stronger and sturdier, perhaps more sturdy than those memories really should be. I try to make sense of myself sometimes through my parents’ stories about me, so I wanted to give that to this story. You know, “you were always artistic!” and suddenly, just like that, I always have been. I feel this way about photographs, too; I remember photos better than the scenes they represent- the photo becomes and then replaces the memory. Also, because the first half of the piece emerged out of an oral history-style “self-interview,” the tone of voice sounds as though the narrator is interrogating her own life as a detective, not based on how she feels or remembers feeling, but entirely based on what she tells herself, and then versus what others tell her about herself. It’s a very specific and disorienting way to try and tell a story. Those are the qualities that, I think, give the story a zany, blurry, technicolor feel to it. Continue reading →