For me, the past opens not like a wound but a flower.
Lee Zacharias, “Inside the Palace,” (p. 52).
When I first held Lee Zacharias’s slender volume of elegant, long-form personal essays, I thought it resembled a collection of poetry. And it does, in some ways, read like a collection of prose poems: painterly, imagistic story-essays dense with lyrical language, a musicality of catch phrases and tunes from the baby boomer decades, along with rhyming action and vivid settings that evoke loveable, tragic, endearing characters.
Remember Me is a series of reflective, stand-alone pieces connected by the writer’s voice and astute observations of the world around her, and her own place in it. The volume puts me in mind of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (which translates literally “In Search of Lost Time”). Not because the styles are similar, but because Remember Me has an element of searching; the writer seeks meaning for the present via investigating the pasts these story-essays convey and explore; attempting—’essaying’—to make sense of the power these remembered experiences have in shaping the author as mature self and soul. In these pieces are connections to previous life-seasons; revisiting where she, her loved ones, and younger self have been before; memory sojourns in places and with people from the looking-back perspective of understanding their power in shaping her view of the world.
Lee Zacharias is a beloved, multi award-winning North Carolina fiction writer, essayist, professor. She is a long-standing member of the North Carolina literary community and beyond it through her many nationally recognized publications and literary prizes. The four essays Zacharias collects in Remember Me, find the author looking back, re-visit settings stretching from the mid-twentieth century through the first decade of the new millennium: “The Village Idiot,” (published 2002), “Crossing the River” (2008), “Inside the Palace” (2010). The fourth essay, “The Bride Beneath My Bed” (2009) deserves its powerful place as finale to the collection since it sweeps across transformative times in history, orbiting around the eternal question of what makes an authentic marriage. And what’s love got to do with it?
These essays are both celebratory and challenging portraits of an era lived out by baby boomers, so different to the present day they could be other worlds. Individually, the quartet’s pieces cover much ground: from the juvenile meanness lurking in a Leave it to Beaver world that disguises profound truths about community, to the difficult death of an adored in-law, to the heartbreaking suicide of a friend with whom the writer had recently lost touch, all the way to the “marry young” societal pressure of the early nineteen-sixties. We travel through the decades with Zacharias to a wisdom in full bloom sixty years later—a portrait of forgiveness and acceptance by Zacharias of her younger self and of the society around her.
I find the essays’ nearly chronological order compelling. “The Village Idiot” comes first and, from a child’s lived experience, we see the author’s own role in the group of neighborhood kids that belittled and made fun of its special needs resident, Wayne. He goes on to become the “living memory” of their “village”—a vanishing suburban community and sub-culture of free-range children. Zacharias builds to these apologetic last words:
We were mistaken to think Wayne stalled in time, as if he would not travel with us [through careers, accomplishments]. All these years he has been by our sides, though we were so blinded by our futures, so arrogant with health and certain of our luck, we did not know it was the idiot who made us a village, (p.16).
The writer is by turns chagrined and liberated by her self-implication and honesty, and pays an epiphanic tribute to the boy-man Wayne, who was their centering magnet, who made them a close-knit neighborhood before such ordinary places in American life disappeared.
In the second essay “Crossing the River,” I read compassionate reminders that no matter how prepared for death’s “crossing over” one thinks one is, going gently into that good night may not be an option. Such was the case with Zacharias’s exuberant and optimistic father-in-law, Jack, who spoke matter-of-factly about his own inevitable death. “Whenever age deprived him of another of his pleasures, it was always dismissed with, ‘Hell, I’ll be crossing the river soon.’” But when the last difficult year of her in-law’s life arrives and leads to a final month of suffering as his slow end unfolds, the reader sees the writer struggling to let go of Jack as much as Jack is struggling to let go of life. “I didn’t want him to go. I didn’t want him to leave us.” But in his very last moments, his life-long buoyant humor emerges from the middle of his “crossing” for a split second. And “I’ll be damned if we didn’t laugh until we cried,” the author notes. Jack’s parting gift to Zacharias and her husband and sons? The blessing of his humor and optimism having the last word, final say. As a reader, I was left with a loving sense of eulogy for and celebration of a good man’s life, well-lived and brave, even at his challenging end. “Crossing the River” subtly resonates with the biblical image (Joshua 3:14-17), of the Israelites crossing the River Jordan, going from their old life to their new one in the promised land: a pleasant metaphor for a pleasant passing from this life. Maybe Jack gets his way in the end, what the hell, and crosses over in last-minute, matter-of-fact joy.
Currents of eulogy also run through Remember Me’s elegiac third essay, “Inside the Palace.” An epistolary elegy, if you will, Zacharias’s astute and sensitive portrayal of abuse-induced mental illness robbing a close friend, Tom, of life too soon. Shot through with sadness, rather than with the poignant grace of “Crossing the River,” the letting go explored in “Inside the Palace” happens in the form of self-forgiveness, as the author says: “I knew you were lost the last time I saw your apartment . . . I was aghast. It was like a bunker, a fortress only a crazy person would build. I don’t think anyone could have saved you,” (pp. 51-53). Compassionately, Zacharias goes on to reveal the paradox of relief she experiences upon learning that in the last year of his life, Tom was “shooting morphine” “more and more” and knew he would get caught. “I find strange solace knowing that in the end you must’ve felt you had no choice. Or maybe it just lets me off the hook,” (p. 51).
Even letting herself off the hook, Zacharias acknowledges the lapse in personal connection with Tom that final year, elements of which are “my fault of course. But I’m not like you were, I don’t beat myself up.” The conversational element of talking to Tom via writing a letter to his posthumous self, echoes earlier exchanges between them and reflections on their friendship: “That’s the difference between us. You could never grant yourself absolution . . . You forgave nothing,” (p. 51).
“Inside the Palace” is the heartbreaker essay of Remember Me, written as a letter to the lost friend—an epistolary elegy—that could also be subtitled all the ways we could’ve said goodbye (had we the chance). To avoid giving away too much, I’ll simply add that the eloquent run-up to the crescendo-ending of this third piece in the collection carries the message that “making sense” of a tragic, untimely death, can only be approached via the root of authentic friendship and human community; through the lens of, “We loved you. Maybe that’s all you wanted to hear,” (p. 52).
“The Bride Beneath the Bed” the fourth and final essay collected in Remember Me reads as a condensed history—both personal and cultural—of the sociology of marriage as it evolves from the mid-twentieth century. It is a moving rendering of cultural pressure on that era’s women and girls to marry young—before it’s “too late” according the expectations of the day. The essay’s central image is a classic dry-cleaned and box-sealed bridal gown, a holy relic from the sacred wedding day—preserved to be passed on to a future granddaughter. The wedding: in this case, a day which supposedly rescues the young woman from having to live with her parents. The irony that Zacharias likens the sealed-box’s window view of that long-ago bride’s dress to an open casket’s “viewing” arrangements is haunting to say the least. Likening that era’s view of marriage as unto death for the young bride? Maybe.
For many mid-twentieth century young women, marriage was the only way to leave home, to find some form of independence apart from one’s family of origin. What else could a girl do besides get married—even if she did have a teaching or nursing degree as a “back-up”—to launch from her childhood home? Certainly not rent an apartment and try out various jobs and life-designs, nor build a “family” of friends apart from a traditional household. The voice of the Zacharias’s teenage bride points out that, thank God, there are pending nuptials by the time college graduation arrives, because she realizes she “was desperate, she had no choice, that was her problem, she never realized she had choices,” (p. 60).
“The Bride Beneath the Bed” is Zacharias’s tribute to reconciliation with the writer’s younger self. This essay is also a compassionate peace-making with an era’s societal expectations and restrictions, which exhort women to sacrifice individual personhood and vocational choices in service to a husband’s career advancement, plus his and their children’s “physical needs.” The potential dark underbelly of that social dynamic: the possible slow atrophy of the young bride’s talents and intelligence. A quiet death borne of no time to think for herself, to study, expand her skills beyond the home, to build a career. The bride in this cautionary tale manages to escape membership in a lost generation of women sacrificed as “young marrieds” on the altar of post-war WWII family values. She does so by risks: divorce, graduate school, a university teaching career, and authentic (re)marriage to a compatible life partner.
One gift to readers that Remember Me confers is that the quartet collected here presents distinct essays in harmony with each other assembled in one place, gathered from their previous publication venues. All four pieces are philosophically in sync, if not exactly “linked” in the sense of recurring characters, themes and locations. The stand-alone essays do have connections among them in that they circle back to the author herself, to reveal how her worldview, personhood, and the events of her well-documented life have been shaped by these closely observed and reflected upon moments in time. Zacharias’s is a journey of increasing understanding of the world at large and the self within, including the implicated self who didn’t know what she didn’t know early on, but who comes to wisdom through close reading of these memories.
The graceful language and objective insight woven through Remember Me shine—for myself and for other readers I know—because of the poetic details rooted and grounded in quotidian moments. These objects, and images, render a firm balance between personal memories and events and their universal meaning to our common humanity; a balance required for credibility and the warm voice that invites the reader into such vivid memories: nineteen-fifties village-neighborhoods’ free-range children playing red rover, tag, and hopscotch; a dying in-law’s accumulated material goods representing sixty years of suburbia (“the electric knife, half a century old, still stored in its original box”) that won’t be needed “crossing the river”; the remembered meals and gardens shared with the dead friend—“gumbo on the stove,” “red pentas for the hummingbirds” which correspond to the late friend’s “obsession with detail” and his passion for life, sadly snuffed out by addiction. And, of course, the sealed-away bride-in-a-box whose message resonates culturally with so much more than the sum of its personal narrative parts.
Images laced with poetic language and set to breathlessly musical sentences, sometimes in artistically long, stream-of-consciousness paragraphs, characterize the style of Remember Me. The elegant volume is by turns welcoming and challenging in its collective meaning: who were we then, and who are we now are implied questions that pervade, inviting all of us to ask the same, examining our own lives and memories. The essays are so richly layered with the elements of pitch-sensitive writing and insight, that I will re-read them regularly, like sitting companionably with old friends. If I have one wish for the collection it would be for an introduction and/or an afterword by the author—or perhaps a foreword by a fellow creative scholar—to orient the reader to each essay’s origins and its place in Zacharias’s oeuvre. The emotional and intellectual power of these and others of her essays, as well as her fiction, deserve a wide and attentive readership. The narrative arc of the author’s remarkable journey-story spans a remarkable era in American history. One take away from Remember Me? Our individual histories can move beyond the merely personal—beyond one woman’s insightful, honest, poetically detailed and documented life—to intersect with cultural histories and universal stories that connect us all in our humanity.
Lee Zacharias is the author of a collection of short stories, Helping Muriel Make It Through the Night; four novels, What a Wonderful World It Could Be,Across the Great Lake, Lessons, and At Random; and a collection of personal essays, The Only Sounds We Make. She has co-edited an anthology of stories with Luanne Smith and Michael Gills. Runaway was released in the spring of 2020 by Madville Publishing. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. She is a two-time recipient of North Carolina’s Sir Walter Raleigh Award and has won Southern Humanities Review‘s Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award, Prairie Schooner‘s Glenna Luschei Award, and two Silver Medals from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (the IPPYs). At Random was a finalist in literary fiction for the 2013 International Book Awards, the National Indie Lit Awards, and the USA Best Book Awards. Across the Great Lake was named a 2019 Michigan Notable Book, received the 2020 Phillip H. McMath Book Award in Fiction, and was a finalist in literary fiction for the 2018 Foreword Indies Book of the Year.