Barrie Jean Borich’s Interview with Herself

September 2000

Q. Why did you write My Lesbian Husband?

After I completed my first book, which was, more or less, a coming of age memoir, I experienced a fallow period in which I wasn’t sure what to do next. When I began writing again I allowed myself to play and experiment, in order to find out what I was thinking on a level beyond my immediate awareness. What I kept coming back to was the scene at the end of the first book, which was a moment of Linnea and I together. I ended Restoring the Color of Roses with these lines. " Linnea sleeps beside me, breathing hotly into her pillow, her fingers relaxed, curled into her palm. Her fists look like rosebuds. I kiss her forehead. She moans sweetly, but does not wake up." What kept occurring to me was that I had written my past, and now I wanted to write my present. I wanted to write the life that emerged out of the memories of that first book. That present was, overwhelmingly, the story of relationship, of long and enduring love

Of course, the love that fills my particular present is lesbian love, and the minute I utter those words my project becomes as political as it is personal or lyrical. I didn’t begin with the idea that I would write about the ISSUE of lesbian and gay marriage. Honestly, it wasn’t a topic I was particularly interested in. If you would have asked me in 1993, the year before I began this book, what I thought of the issue of "lesbian marriage" I would have said something like "isn’t that like gays in the military? Maybe we should be able to, but why would we want to?"

But as soon as I found myself writing about my life in the present I became overwhelmed with questions. What is marriage? Is it a concept that applies to Linnea and my life? What words are there to describe the life we have built together? Is our devotion valued among family, friends, and community? The first thing I wrote was a scene that never even made it into the book, in which I describe waking up in bed with Linnea. My reflections on that image led me to questions, and questions led me to observations, images, stories, and finally I knew that I wanted to write a book that illuminated longtime lesbian relationship as I have experienced it.

Q: You say you are done writing about the past, but there are sections of this book that are about memory. Why?

Once I asked the question "are we married?" I began to wonder what I thought the word marriage meant. I looked it up in the dictionary and listed out all the denotations of the world and compared them with my own connotations. I noticed that I had a number of assumptions about the concept of marriage-for instance, that marriage is a trap or a sham, that women lose themselves to marriage, that marriage is a stuffy, conservative institution that serves to throttle free expression. I began to wonder how I had formed these notions, and whether they would hold up under closer scrutiny. This led me to memory, and thus to memoir.

There is not a great deal of childhood and early adult memoir in the book. Most of it is set in the first dozen years that Linnea and I have spent together. But the deeper memories I did include, in the chapters titled "Before," are about exploring who I was as a young woman and why I once fled so fully from the idea of deep commitment. This is not to say that I came to believe my more feminist critiques of the institution of marriage were wrong. I still hold to them. They are some of the reason Linnea and I ended up embracing the language of marriage in such an ironic manner. Rather, the memoir sections tell the part of the story in which some of the foundations of my current belief system were formed. Today those beliefs are more complex, and contain a few contradictions, but much of the foundation is still intact.

In the broadest sense most people have some version of this experience in their lives. The times, place, people of our childhood form us in some way. Then as young adults we have to decide what to accept and what to challenge. The mature adult is some kind of collaboration of all these forces. This is the human story that we can all relate to, even if the details and concerns of our particular lives vary a great deal. There are readers who love memoir and readers who don’t, and there has been a great deal of speculation in the past few years into the reason there has been a "memoir-craze" in publishing. I think that one of the reasons is that people who buy and read memoir are attracted to the literary attempt to figure out that basic human experience of getting from there to here.

Q: Why does the book move back and forth in time and go off in so many different directions?

From the start I imagined this book as a nonlinear narrative. In part it is simply that this is a way of writing that pleases me. It sounds good in my ear. But I was also quite intentional about this form, because I wanted to capture the way life is experienced, which is never as a nice, neat chronological story. Any given moment is full of a thousand other moments. We act and remember and hope and talk simultaneously. This is why it is so hard to pin down what anything really means. There are so many layers. For me this experience of living with all the sensors open was essential to the story I had to tell. The dignity of any life is held in the compressed experience of all its moments.

And yes, the focus of the books shifts quite a bit. I included family stories and home stories and neighborhood stories. I explored monogamy and our friends’ break-ups and butch and femme gender identity and the history of lesbian fashion. These are all the little colored tiles and bits of glass that form the mosaic of Linnea and my lives together. All of these bits are a part of our lives everyday. The mosaic structure is expressive of our experience.

Q: Why is the last chapter so long?

There are so many aspects to this book. I wanted to bring them all together in the end. My goal was to compose a grand suite in which all the issues of the book played off each other. I intentionally varied the pace of the individual pieces of this chapter. Some move fast and frantic, others are slow and meditative. My intent was to illustrate that in a time of intimate crisis, in this case a hard time in a marriage, all the elements or our lives clash and conspire. Out of the confusion Linnea and I invented a ritual for ourselves that was, in part, an inheritance from the weird world that made us and was, in part, a creation all our own.

Q: Why the title, My Lesbian Husband?

It appealed to me because of the juxtaposition. Lesbian and husband are two words that aren’t supposed to go together. So what happens when you do put them together. What are we talking about here?

The phrase My Lesbian Husband came to me by accident, early in the process of writing the book. I was invited to read work-in-progress at Patrick’s Cabaret, a Minneapolis art and performance hot-spot. The cabaret publicizes its shows with postcard-sized mailers, and they feature five or six performers an evening, so that little postcard fills up quickly. I was asked for three words, and only three words, to describe what I was going to read. The words My Lesbian Husband came to me in a jolt. Lesbian is an identity word embraced first by the generation of liberationist lesbians that came just before me. We claim it still in order to proclaim both our dignity and our difference. Husband is a word that springs from the mainstream cultural institution of marriage, an institution queers are not supposed to be a part of. We all know that language and culture are inextricably joined. So what happens when you shove those words together? That is the central exploration of my book.

And it’s a funny title. Many people, especially lesbians, laugh the first time they hear it. I love that. From the moment I first thought of that little string of words there was no other name for this book.

Q: What do you mean by the subtitle, Landscapes of a Marriage?

The landscapes are the places Linnea and I have lived or frequented, together and apart. The mosaic structure of the book has a three-dimensional aspect. It is a turning glass globe or prism, a constantly mutating map, through which I view Linnea and my life together. That view changes, depending on the context (or the prism facet) through which we are seen.

I was also thinking about the role of particular places in our lives, our memories, and our cultural understanding of our worlds. A quote by Scott Russell Sanders sums it up well. He has written ""What we call landscape is a stretch of earth overlaid with memory, expectation, and thought. Land is everything that is actually there, independent of us; landscape is what we allow into the doors of perception."

How Linnea and I are seen, as a couple and as individuals, shifts depending on where we are. At home in Minneapolis on the block where we live, we are citizens of a particular neighborhood where the people we see everyday probably don’t, for the most part, think too much about the politics of our lives together. We are just their neighbors. But when we leave, to return, for instance to our family homes, or when we travel, that easy familiarity does not always travel with us. We are cast in new light. It is not as easy to just live. This is true for anyone, but for lesbians and gays that shift has a particular charge. When we go to Chicago for a brother’s wedding, for instance, an event I wrote about extensively in this book, we are simultaneously immersed in the intimacy of family and ostracized by a culture and history that is not accustomed to our open and celebratory presence.

We all have a sense of the "place" of the heterosexual married couple in our society. Ideas about institutions such as marriage might be shrouded in myth, might even need to be radically reorganized, but the committed and ritualized partnership between men and women has a name. We have words with which to begin discussion. How do we begin to speak about the place of a couple, like Linnea and I? Where do we fit into onto the great wheel of shared culture?

I used to believe that we did not need to have this discussion because lesbians and gays and other so-called deviants lived out side of that wheel, expatriated by choice. I view things differently now. We may live happily and defiantly outside of coercive and stifling notions of morality (and wish to continue to do so) but outsiderhood is part of culture too. Heterosexuals don’t own culture. We are as much a part of what makes up the world as anyone else.

So, the landscapes of this book are also its political and cultural layers, and these politics are related to particular places. The personal and public history, the sensibility, the physical sensations of any particular place seep in, and have an impact on how we understand and are understood. When Linnea and I leave the landscape where our lives are familiar, to ourselves and to those around us, we enter a sort of exile that is both literal and figurative. We long for home ground. My play with the word landscape is metaphor meant to express this longing.

But I also use the word in a purely physical manner. Linnea and I lived in the same place for many years. Our sense of ourselves as a couple had a very specific geography. Then we were forced to move. This is the setting for the story I have to tell.

Q: What kind of writing is this? Is it something new?

I write in a genre that is called these days, creative nonfiction. It is both a new genre and an extremely old genre. The term creative nonfiction is defined in all sorts of ways, and there are all sorts of writers and editors vying for the right to offer the definitive definition. I am interested in all the ways this form is defined, and my own definition is an amalgam of many others.

I see creative nonfiction as an umbrella genre that includes memoir, personal essay, travel writing, nature writing, literary journalism, spiritual autobiography, meditations on ideas, hybrid forms, and even, in its outer limits, "confessional" prose poetry and autobiographical fiction. My favorite overriding definition is: "Factual literary prose writing that has the narrative, dramatic, meditative, and lyrical elements of novels, plays, poetry, and memoirs."

There are other names for the genre as well. Narrative Nonfiction. Literary Nonfiction. Lyric Nonfiction. Documentary Literature. What I like about this kind of writing is the way it slips out of all of the language we try to use to define it. There are definite influences, but nothing is set in steel. We make it up as we go along. It’s a queer genre, and in many ways resembles the unclassifiable nature of living any sort of outside-of -the-mainstream life.

At the same time, the influences of the form are as old as literature itself. We can look, for instance, to the "confessions of St. Augustine" written in the 5^th century, as a model for writing out of our own life and experience. We can look to the 18th century writer Montaigne, who originated the personal essay form when he used literature as a forum for asking questions about his own experience and observations. We can look to 19^th century colonial travel narratives as well as the miracle of 19^th and 20^th century slave and Holocaust narratives. We can look to Thoreau’s meditations on his pond. Proust’s modernist memories emerging out of a madeline. Virginia Woolf’s memoir club. James Agee’s lyric collaborations with documentary photographer Walker Evans. Christopher Isherwood’s documentary fiction. Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel. Audre Lorde’s and Maxine Hong Kingston’s biomythographies. We can look at what is now thirty years of radical women’s ruminations on the personal crossroads of race, class, gender and the construction of identity or the whole sub-genre of AIDS memoir. I could go on and on. Creative nonfiction has been around for a very long time. It’s only recently, when there has been a surge in the publishing and sales of writing that springs from actual life, that the literary world is concerned with what to call this writing that is not quite fiction, not quite poetry and certainly not textbook nonfiction.

In my own work I am trying to accomplish something akin to documentary photography, but instead of film I employ a palette of language. I want to capture the essence of actual life, not in its entirety, but in its moments. I want my readers to linger on both the tiny glimmers and enormous infernos of life as it is lived. I want to cry out, "Look, we are here too. Don’t walk past without noticing."