Writing Parts Into a Whole: An Interview with Grace Talusan
By Jessica A. Kent
February 27, 2020
“I think I’ve had about a hundred events since March,” local author Grace Talusan tells me over coffee and tea at a Cambridge Starbucks on a cloudy Monday. Her memoir, The Body Papers – which was awarded the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing – was released last year, and it’s been a whirlwind ever since.
“Because I had taken so long to write it and it took me so long to publish it, I wanted to do everything in my power to support my book and make sure people knew it existed,” she says. Talusan and her publisher Restless Books worked with booksellers around the country to stage readings and events, sometimes twice a day, to get the word out about her story. A self-proclaimed introvert, Talusan didn’t necessarily want to be the center of attention at book events, but knew it was part of the territory of having a debut release. After all, she had a dream of one day publishing a book and “this thing that I wanted for so long came true.”
Having heard Talusan read bits of The Body Papers at Tell-All Boston and GrubStreet, and with a slew of local events coming up for the paperback release next week, I wanted to chat with her to find out more about how this memoir – or collection of essays, or collage of a life – was put together.
Talusan at Brookline Booksmith (Photo Credit: Alonso Nichols)
Assembling The Body Papers
Talusan calls her life as an emerging writer “really long, twenty years long,” as The Body Papers is her debut. The book’s origin can be traced back to an autobiographical novel that Talusan wrote for graduate school, and it contained much of the contents of what’s now her memoir. (It was so autobiographical, in fact, that when she needed new material for The Body Papers, Talusan rewrote chapters from the novel.) But fictionalizing her life – and the trauma and violence in it – was the only way Talusan could deal with the material, at that point. “As time went on, I did publish little essays here and there,” she tells me. “That was my way of testing the waters. Can I be the author and the narrator of material that is so revealing of my experiences?” She was going to find out.
The Body Papers has somewhat of a non-linear structure that centers on a theme in each chapter and circles around that theme with memories from childhood – pet hamsters, for instance, or cow tongue stew – or anecdotes from today, like learning how to make yogurt in the Philippines, or learning more about an uncle who was a poet. In many ways it mimics memory, one thought evoking the next, evoking the next. While The Body Papers is considered a memoir, it was initially called a collection of essays, and then a collection of linked essays. But despite its presentation as a compilation, there are three main threads woven tightly together throughout: Talusan’s childhood sexual abuse, her diagnosis of a hereditary breast and ovarian cancer gene, and her experience as an immigrant, having been born in the Philippines before a move to Boston in the 1970s.
While other memoirists might choose to segment those stories into three separate books, Talusan didn’t want to take that route. “We’re not separate like that,” Talusan observes, as we talk about this idea of each of us having multiple identities that we live in every day. “I didn't focus on only one experience or identity or storyline of my life in the book because I don't experience my life as compartmentalized. I am all those things, all of the time, although different parts of me are emphasized at different times. And so whether it’s a collection of essays or a memoir, my challenge as a writer was to see if I could contain all those parts of me together in this one book.”
And while the structure of the book – individual essays with common connective tissue – wasn’t deliberate in the making, it was solidified in the revising, as Talusan attempted to reconcile experiences as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, a formerly undocumented immigrant, a daughter, sister, wife, aunt, teacher, writer, and other identities. For example, she explains how being someone undergoing a mastectomy is always going to be connected to the part of her that is a sexual assault survivor; the writing would inherently be connected in the same way. “I hope I've achieved a reading experience where there are ways that these themes reverberate in the other topics, because those parts of us are always there. And even if we can’t always bring them for various reasons, they’re with us all the time,” Talusan says.
It goes back to the theme of body – a personal body, certainly, but the make-up of one’s body of identities – that’s found throughout the book, a theme Talusan both knew but never thought too hard about while writing the essays. Her process is to “follow the images that come out. I just have to trust myself that in telling what happened, those images will come out.” She relies on her subconscious to take care of the details, so that the various themes and connections can surface for the reader.
Documenting History for the Future
Talusan’s essays explore various definitions of body: the physical body, the idea of presence or visibility, the tongue and language, the eyes and sight or vision, the loss of physical parts of the body, but also the body of family, the body of the church, the body of a writer’s work, the body of a person’s heritage. But there’s also a body of documentation in the book – thus the title The Body Papers, given by Talusan’s friend Joanne Diaz – that consists of photos, letters, medical test results, and immigration records. The documentation had always existed, of course, but the book was written apart from it. “I didn’t seek out the documentation and the photos until I knew this was a book,” Talusan explains. “Once I knew this was a book, then I actively sought out the boxes of materials. I went through and did a research phase, seeing what might occur to me to write about and what sparked light. And it was fun to go through old slides.”
But the documentation wasn’t going to remain silent, simply something to be pulled for images for the book. In going back through the photos from childhood, Talusan found herself faced with the past again, namely childhood sexual trauma. “I am a survivor and it happened a long time ago in terms of years, and there’s a way that I live in the world so I don’t think about it,” she tells me. But in looking through the slides of her as a girl, specifically at seven years old when it started, it couldn’t be ignored any longer. “I couldn’t dismiss what I had gone through. Seeing those pictures, I was faced with a kind of evidence that I wasn’t faced with before. So I needed that documentation, those images to reshape the narrative in my head,” Talusan explains.
In the book, Talusan mentions the phrase “tago ng tago,” which means “hiding and hiding.” It’s referring to the act of keeping a low profile so as not to catch the eye of immigration, moving about, never staying in one place, never talking about it. In many ways this “tago ng tago” way of existence bled over into other aspects of Talusan’s life, and she talks about how her family would tell themselves stories to get through the day. But that wasn’t what Talusan wanted, not any more.
“At some point I realized the importance of [telling my story]. I thought of all the people who came out about #MeToo, and all of those voices really made me think, ‘I have a story and I’m part of this, too,’” Talusan says. “I felt like part of a community, this larger community of survivors, and I wanted to contribute my work and my voice to that community. That’s why I felt the motivation to do it.”
In many ways, the book has become a documentation in and of itself. Talusan took a look at which libraries carry The Body Papers now, and found out that her book had spots on shelves all around the world. “Instead of the story being something people whisper about in my family or other spaces, and try to shut down or try to forget, there’s an object now that exists,” she says. “So this story doesn’t die with me and the people who also hold my story. Now it exists and can continue to exist.” It’s become the public record, in many ways, of her experience.
Initially Talusan was nervous about the reception – that readers wouldn’t like it or, worse, ignore it – and with the material involved, she feared a cruel or even judgmental reaction. For a while, the audience she had in mind was herself; since the book wasn’t getting picked up, and since it looked like there was no guarantee of an audience, she wrote for an audience of one. But initial encouragement from her writing group pushed her forward, and once there was a book deal, she started thinking more about who the audience would be, who she would be writing for. And she found that the audience she was writing for was herself, “but it’s a younger me. It’s my nieces and nephews, my students, it’s younger generations. That’s who I was thinking of,” she tells me. “I am very inspired by young people, so that’s why I was thinking of them, and talking to them.”
And the reception ultimately has been positive. Talusan gets notes from readers about what the reading experience meant for them, “especially other people with my experience, whether that’s the experience of being an immigrant or survivor of assault or being from a Filipino family or being Filipino. Whatever it is, I hear from folks who connect with the book very deeply and that’s been incredible to hear what it meant to them.”
For now, Talusan is “playing around with new projects” – essays, live storytelling – and wants to return to fiction, the genre she started off writing in. There are a few novel starts in the works, but she’s looking for something that will really take hold of her.
A Member of Other Bodies
Because we talked about the idea of bodies as groups of people, I asked about the other communities Talusan is a part of here in Boston. She mentions FORCE (Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowered), the organization she writes about in the book. She talks about how they helped her make decisions around her preventative surgeries, which she’s been transparent about not only in the memoir, but in articles she’s written for Boston Magazine. Additionally, she’s involved in the Filipino-American community, increasingly so. She tells me that after the release of the book, she was motivated to seek out more organizations to meet the people there, but she also wanted to have writing workshops with them, to hear their stories.
Speaking of writing workshops, Talusan is a creative writing teacher; she taught for many years at Tufts, and is currently the Fannie Hurst Writer in Residence at Brandeis. In the acknowledgements for The Body Papers, she thanks her students, stating that “I hope my story makes a space for you to tell yours.” Many of her students, especially those with marginalized identities, want to tell their stories, but don’t know how, as their experience is rarely reflected in narratives or histories.
So what better way to tell your story than through live storytelling? That’s what Talusan has her students do – and no notes allowed. “Sometimes they feel unconfident, that this isn’t important enough or interesting enough,” Talusan tells me, saying how it’s up to the other students to tell each other that their stories are worthy and needed, to encourage each other to stand up and speak. “I have all of them get up in front of an audience and tell their true story in six minutes. It’s awesome, it’s great. Even if they’re nervous, the more experience they get with that, the more they know they did it and they’ll continue to do it. We always have to do this kind of work, even if it’s not formally standing up in front of an audience. It’s very important for us to be able to communicate our sides, our positions, our narratives, ourselves in all kinds of ways,” she tells me.
Talusan also talks about another community she’s a part of: the community of writers in Boston. She cites GrubStreet as being a hub for her literary life, and the importance of their Boston Writers of Color collective. She attends BFAB, the Boston Filipino-American Book Club, which has been meeting for ten years to read and discuss Filipino-American authors. (“Everyone brought a dish of some sort, some Filipino food we attempt to make!”) Talusan also values the presence of independent bookstores and what their readings and events contribute to the local landscape. (“My stack of books is insane! Because I just bought a book every reading I went to, because they were all so compelling.”) We reminisce for a while about the indie bookstores that have closed shop around town.
But an integral part of her literary life is the Chunky Monkeys, a writing group consisting of fellow authors Calvin Hennick, Sonya Larson, Whitney Scharer, Chip Cheek, Celeste Ng, Christopher Castellani, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Becky Tuch, Adam Stumacher, and Jennifer De Leon. The group has seen such success in their short time together that it was profiled in Publisher’s Weekly last year. When the group formed six years ago, they had yet to publish books of their own (though many were published essayists and short story writers), and they made the promise that they would help each other get their work in print. Today, almost all of them have books out in the world, with a few already a few books in. Initially hesitant to bring her essays to them, Talusan says that their encouragement and support is what gave her the confidence to go forward with The Body Papers.
When I joke about how I hope the group won’t disband now that everyone is published, Talusan says no way. “I need them. We need each other. That’s even a body itself, the body of that group, and our body of work.”
Grace Talusan will be kicking off the Spring paperback tour at the Boston Athenaeum on Tuesday, March 3, followed by events at the Needham Free Library on March 12, Papercuts J.P. on March 19, Framingham State on March 24, and Newtonville Books on March 27. Visit Restless Books or gracetalusan.com for more.
