Debut memoir explores the intractability of memory

by Alex McWalters 

Like any exquisitely crafted narrative, local author Rachel M. Hanson‘s debut memoir, The End of Tennessee, encapsulates the story’s fundamental ache within the book’s opening lines.

She writes:

“Not a year before I ran away from home at seventeen, I stepped out of my house at dusk, still able to see shrub oaks thinned out for winter, fame flower, too, and dun clay so wet the smell of it seemed settled in my skin. At my back, pastures spread far, darkened where dairy cows huddled for warmth in a slow January drizzle. I crossed the road, walked the length of my neighbor’s yard, and knocked on his door, asking to play the piano he’d mentioned I was welcome to weeks earlier. I’d played when I was younger, when one of the houses we rented had an upright in the living room. Here, at my neighbor’s, I hoped to remember how to make the keys work, and for the briefest moment, have some space to be more than a second mother to my siblings.”

Much can be made of the author’s subtle turn of phrase, “make the keys work,” but suffice it say that Hanson’s memoir, at its core, is an account of her remarkable but often heartbreaking determination to overcome the abuse she suffered during her nomadic and religiously extreme childhood in rural Tennessee — an account of a woman seeking again and again to find or make metaphorical music amid the relentless difficulty of her circumstances.

The things that haunt us

Hanson’s mother, readers learn early in the memoir, struggles with mental health issues and is neglectful. A religious fanatic, she also forbids Hanson and her siblings from attending school.

Meanwhile, Hanson’s father is a former truck driver turned third-shift factory worker.

Given the family dynamic, the preadolescent Hanson is often left to care for her younger siblings. It is a role she both relishes and resents, in that her unwanted duty to them is what initially keeps her around — exposing Hanson to severe abuses.

Her eventual departure is also what continues to haunt the author long after she leaves.

“Now in my thirties,” Hanson writes, “because I understand we can never go back and that things cannot be set right, I write of my older brothers as children — I speak to the children they were then. Boys. Men. I don’t know how to speak to them, grown up, big brothers. I don’t know them, don’t care to know them. But once upon a time, many different times, there were parts of my heart that broke for them. There are parts that break still.”

‘Imprecise cuts’

While there is a compelling ambiguity built into Hanson’s narrative, her sentences are terse, direct and powerful. There is a fitting starkness of tone that is in turns punctuated and ruptured by crisp often poignant imagery.

Describing one of the many ramshackle dwellings her ever-growing family either rented or squatted in during her Tennessee years, Hanson writes: “There were holes in the floor where a clawfoot tub had once stood, another where there had been a toilet. Our father covered the holes by nailing boards over them, imprecise cuts of yellow plywood.”

Here, as elsewhere, Hanson finds exactly the right words — “imprecise cuts” — to make the image, vivid in itself, blossom with metaphorical power. Nothing about the life she describes in these pages is precise, ordered, stable, normal.

And because no amount of adult retrospection can quite explain or comprehend the child’s wounds, her cuts, now scars, will remain always painfully amorphous, resistant to coherence.

Finding the right word

Yet there is real triumph in this story. After the harrowing saga of her teenage escape, Hanson eventually beats the odds and makes it to college. From there she goes on to earn her master’s in creative writing and later a Ph.D. in literature and creative nonfiction — an achievement for anybody, much less somebody who was forbidden from attending school as a child.

To pay tuition she finds employment as a river guide in the Grand Canyon. She finds love. None of this is without trouble and difficulty.  But much of what gives the book its heft and moving complexity is the truth it confronts; the truth the author knows she cannot change or escape: Her past will always be a part of her.

“All the moving and babies have a way of blurring time,” she writes. “When I think back to the beginning of Tennessee, I add it to my mental map of my family history and the years I spent with them in Appalachia. I piece together the events. … I reorder them as best I can chronologically — it goes against the way I experience these things now, this order. Memory doesn’t work chronologically. I collect the years I lived at home next to those after I left—wondering how much the distance between the two has changed me.”

Remarkably, artfully, The End of Tennessee is and is not chronological. While it does move in a generally linear fashion from Hanson’s early girlhood into the present, the narrative simultaneously manages to capture, through its brilliant use of past and present tense and its episodic structuring, the inner reality of the teller’s ongoing and often disruptive or uncooperative experience with her past. To tell it chronologically would be to imply that it happened and has passed, that the recollections can be contained, placed, assigned to some sensible or navigable former self.

The truth, however, is that memories such as the ones Hanson renders here do not conform or comply with a person’s efforts at order or relinquishment. They are, by their very nature, disordered, incomprehensible, maddening. And so only by telling her truth, by weaving amid the bits and pieces, can one hope to achieve a semblance of — what? Justice? Peace? Catharsis?

By the memoir’s end, Hanson does find the right word. But only by reading to the end can you know what it is and how she found it.