The Best American Essays 2013 Read Free Page A

pleasure to have her return to the series, this time as an editor. Her keen sense of prose narrative is evident throughout this collection, as is her receptivity to a diversity of voices and periodicals. So get ready to experience an abundance of exciting essays.
    R.A.

Introduction
    W HEN I TEACH WRITING I tell my students that the invisible, unwritten last line of every essay should be
and nothing was ever the same again
. By which I mean the reader should feel the ground shift, if even only a bit, when he or she comes to the end of the essay. Also there should be something at stake in the writing of it. Or, better yet, everything.
    The stakes of my own first essay couldn’t have been higher, beginning as it did at dawn in Taos, New Mexico, on the Fourth of July in 1997, when I woke abruptly and tearfully, as if from a nightmare, and sat straight up in my bed with the icy realization that I was forgetting my mother. It was a strange thing to realize, given the fact that in the six years she’d been dead I’d written about little else, my nascent body of work a mosaic of her too-short life. My mother the horse-crazy army brat. My mother the pregnant nineteen-year-old bride. My mother the battered wife. My mother the scrounging-to-get-by single mom. My mother the bread-baking, back-to-the-land animal lover. My mother the intellectually avid optimist. My mother the forty-five-year-old cancer-riddled corpse.
    You could fairly well say she was my subject, though
obsession
might be a more accurate word. Both before and after her young death she was at the heart of every short story I wrote, and she was also at the center of the novel I was writing then—on that Fourth of July in Taos, where I was a resident at the Wurlitzer Foundation. Teresa Wood, the character I’d based on her, was my mother condensed and expanded, magnified and muted, twisted and reformed—my attempt to create the purest expression of who she was. But on that morning when I woke with a sense of urgency and regret, I understood in a flash that I’d done the opposite. All of that conflating and distilling and mishmashing hadn’t made my mother more pure. It hadn’t conjured her back to the world. It had only taken her from me in yet another way. Fiction had ruined her.
I
had ruined her. It was an unbearable thing to realize all at once. And so I did the only thing I could do. I went immediately to my computer and began writing with one simple mission: to remember my mother.
    I wasn’t trying to write anything that would be anything. The word
essay
didn’t even come into my mind. I wanted only to transfer my version of the actual truth from my head to the page so a document of my mother’s life and death would exist as a buffer against the other, fictional version I felt so deeply compelled to write. I began with a description of her naked dead body. How strange that moment was—when she was so profoundly there while also being so profoundly not there. From that first line onward, the words came raw and reckless and ravaging all day long. The hours passed without my noticing as I wrote and rewrote each sentence. I didn’t eat. Or think. In my memory, I didn’t even rise from my desk, though I must have. Out of a feeling of emotional necessity rather than artistic intention, I wrote the true story of my mother’s cancer diagnosis and the ugly death that followed only seven weeks later; of the way my enormous grief turned into a self-destructive sorrow that manifested itself in heroin use (among other things); and of the brokenhearted acceptance I finally had to bear. By the time I stopped writing it was dark outside. Night. I paced the room as the pages I’d written printed out, and then I read them out loud to myself, understanding only then what I’d done. Written an essay.
    The word
essay
means “to try,” “to attempt,” “to test.” It’s what I was doing that day when I woke and sobbed in my bed and ended up hours later with an essay