The title of Alex Lemon’s new memoir – Happy – is somewhat a sleight of hand. “Happy” was one of Lemon’s several nicknames at Macalester College in Minnesota, where in 1997 he was a bright young freshman and a star athlete – vital, callow, reckless. But his coming-of-age journey is interrupted by a mysterious disability that turns out to be bleeding in his brain, and his narrative turns from college partying and manic adventures to physical and mental devastation and high-risk surgery, followed by his long struggle back to ordinary life and a deeper sense of self-discovery, and yes, happiness. Recent Texas immigrant Lemon – he spent his college and graduate years in Minnesota and now teaches at Texas Christian University – is the author of two previous books of poems: Mosquito (2006) and Hallelujah Blackout (2008); in press is a third volume of poetry, Fancy Beasts. He spoke to the Chronicle last week from his new home in Fort Worth.
Austin Chronicle: What was the impetus for the book?
Alex Lemon: It started because of assignments in graduate school, at the University of Minnesota, where I got my M.F.A. I had always journaled and written, and written about the experience, but when I started to have to write about it for an assignment – thinking about craft, thinking about the aesthetics of a piece of literature, not just emoting, journal-wise – my prose writing, my nonfiction, begin to evolve into something that had more substance. …
I feel like prose and poetry can both get to the same spot emotionally; they can both cut to the bone. But the way they do it is radically different. I felt like I needed the landscape of the full page of prose to really understand and appreciate and kind of masticate, to chew on those things that had happened – to really kind of embrace the messiness of all of the shit that happened to me.
AC: What’s your sense of yourself in this book, having come through that experience?
AL: It wasn’t cathartic in the sense that I transcended and moved beyond all of that darkness. Writing it and spending so much time with all that material both as a writer and as someone who had lived that stuff – I’m not sure I came any closer to understanding it – but writing it allowed me to handle the material and to face it in a way that, instead of it crouching in the shadows, I could face it. It allowed me to juggle fire. Instead of flinching away from fire, it allowed me to juggle fire.
AC: I assume you’re still dealing with the lingering effects of your condition.
AL: My situation now is that my day-to-day baseline is that I live with a visual disability. I have nystagmus and diplopia – bouncing eyes and double vision. I have paresthesia and neuralgia, so sometimes my face or my hand is numb. My vestibular system is off, so my gait, I kind of fall to my right a bit. I have chronic pain in my lower back and my legs. …
It’s present. I think I would be kind of shrouded or cloaked in it anyway, but every day I’m dealing with a part of it, whether it’s not being able to see my students in the third row of class, or kind of stumbling around the house every now and then.
But there’s also the hope: Even though it doesn’t have the kind of sugarcoated, saccharine happy ending of a lot of books, the hope is that I’ve learned how to deal with a lot of things. I live this really amazing and charmed life in so many ways.
AC: How do you mean that?
AL: I found out that I love literature and writing, I found out that I love teaching, and all that was really a surprise to me. I was a political science major as an undergraduate, and I’d always journaled and written but never took it seriously. I hint at it in the book, that a lot of my behaviors were reactions to my mom’s kind of fringe-ish life, the fringe-ish way I was raised. So I sunk myself into those hypermasculine things: I was good at sports, I was good at partying, I was good at having girls, getting girls, and all of that was really just ignoring how much I wanted to be an artist and how much [I wanted] to be thinking about the arts or books or music, via my mom and my stepfather and the house I grew up in.
AC: This changeover must have been a great blow to that athlete you portray in the early chapters.
AL: Oh, yeah. I think that was one of the major difficulties. I chose to write in the first person present tense from the perspective of that young man, so I had to really embody this person that in a lot of ways I resent. I don’t like a lot of things that I’ve done. I’m not happy how I mistreated people at times, or lied, or whatever – a lot of those things. So it was a huge and horrible thing to lose, really to lose your body. As a young man who really lived in my body, because my mind was a scary place, because it was a place where I thought about things. So I lived this kind of bacchanal existence, because then I wouldn’t have to think about all of this horrible trauma. …
The book is less about medical trauma and addiction or some things than it is about masculinity and mental illness and the love that happens between a mother and a son. …
AC: Talk a little bit about that relationship.
AL: The book is an homage to her. … So many memoirs are about how kids hate their parents, and this is a love story. She was a saint, because I was really a bastard in a lot of ways. I was insanely frustrated to be 21 years old and to be like a baby, and have to be taken care of, when I wanted to be – I wanted to be a man, and I wanted to be normal, and I wanted all of those things that were impossible for me. She put up with all my bullshit. We have come together – I talk to her nearly every day, and we have an amazing, amazing relationship. I feel so lucky to have somebody so vibrant in my life, and to have been shaped by this really amazing person.
This article appears in January 22 • 2010.
