Read Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir Online
Authors: Rita Zoey Chin
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Personal Memoir, #Retail
Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir (32 page)
This isn’t to say that I don’t still get afraid. I do, all the time, most often when I’m riding. But that’s part of the beauty of riding: it’s this lesson about fear happening in motion. Claret will spook, for instance, at a door (there are many doors around our arena), and then my instinct will be to avoid the door. But if I avoid the door, I’m only confirming Claret’s fear, and taking it on as my own. So instead, I ask Claret to go back to the door, and I think how good the air feels moving over us, and I think that we are strong, that the door is just a door, and then we’re moving past it, into the next present moment, and the next.
Do you still think of yourself as a runaway? Is it an intrinsic part of your character, a primary thing that defines you?
Occasionally, on a particular kind of summer night, when the air is slow and fragrant, when the stillness feels like a curtain at the edge of excitement, I find myself almost reflexively gearing up to run. And then I think,
Oh, wait, I’m already here
. But I think I will always be a runaway at heart. That doesn’t mean that I’m skittish or that I don’t commit fully to things; in fact, I value my commitments—to the people and animals I love, to my writing, to my students, to truth and balance and justice—perhaps more than any other thing. But the first time I ran away, even though the police brought me back three hours later, I learned something powerful and rare: I had the ability to change the seemingly unchangeable, simply by leaving. This knowledge played a significant role during my journey through panic; when something didn’t work, I just moved onto the next thing, still believing in possibility, still driven by imagination, still full of hope—the same hope that comforted and inspired me, and gave me courage, as a child.
When you were young there were a lot of transient people in your life, not only your parents, but friends and people who were kind to you or helped for a period of time. How did you deal with the impermanence of those relationships? Did you ever reconnect with or want to find any of the people from your days as a runaway?
This is a sad question for me, because there are people I’ve wanted to reconnect with but have been unable find. One of these people was Miss Peggy, a woman who worked in one of the many institutions I was in—the adolescent unit of a state-run psychiatric hospital. For several days after I arrived, the ward was overbooked, so I had to sleep in a cot in the hallway. And on my first night there, this beautiful woman strutted in—voluptuous and surefooted and regal—and slipped a Hershey bar under my blanket. Instantly, I became her puppy, and every night I spent in that hallway, I waited for her to come in for her shift, when I’d gaze up at her with equal measures of gratitude and hunger before secretly filling my mouth with chocolate.
Miss Peggy became my faithful (and undefeated) Spades partner, and my friend. She always referred to me as “Elizabeth Taylor-Face,” because of my eyes, she explained, and in return, I never took my eyes off her when she was around. And ever since then, I’ve wanted to thank her, not only for her love, but for that initial kindness, when she reached out to a strange young girl wearing too much eyeliner and sleeping in a hallway, and gave her something sweet. It’s kindnesses like this that I will treasure for the rest of my life. So, ironically, these impermanent relationships are the ones that have formed some of the most indelible memories I have.
At low points in your life as a runaway you talk about going into happy memories of your childhood—memories of your sister or your best friend, Dawn. Can you talk about the role of memory and its importance during dark and harsh times?
I remember reading a few years ago about a brain study that found that the neurons that fire during a memory of an event are many of the same neurons that fired initially, during the original event itself; therefore, remembering can be a lot like reliving. But we don’t need scientists to tell us this because we experience it all the time, in the stories we find ourselves retelling again and again, in that old bottle of perfume we sniff when want to be immediately launched back to, say, 1989, or in those memories that sometimes seem to arise suddenly out of the ethers with shocking clarity and vitality. So it doesn’t surprise me that during my darkest moments on the run, I turned to memories of light. In those moments, when I gave myself over to the haven of my happier memories, I got to relive them; I got to be happy.
At one point you realize that your unspoken pact with Larry will not hold, that he must understand your past in order to know you. Were you able to have that conversation with him? Were you able to speak openly about your young life with him? How has he received this book?
I can’t say we’ve spent much time speaking about my younger years, but Larry has read this book, which is probably the best way I could have told him about that time in my life. The first thing he said as he was reading it was, “Wow, this is very accurate. You’ve really captured me.” And that was probably the best thing he could have told me, because when you’re writing about real people there’s always a danger that they remember things differently from how you do. So I was relieved to know that he felt I portrayed him accurately.
When Larry finished reading this book, he got choked up by what he called “the mathematical beauty of the three storylines converging into one,” and also by his observation that I had helped Claret in a way that nobody had helped me when I was panicking. I explained to him that I had helped myself, and that, really, nobody else could have done it for me.
Who are the writers you read most, or you most often turn to for inspiration?
Oh, so many! And it changes depending on what’s going on in my life. One constant, though, is poetry. Mary Oliver is perhaps my most oft-visited oasis. Her poems always captivate my heart and my imagination, and remind me of what feels most essential. Rilke is another poet I often turn to, and Jack Gilbert’s
The Great Fires
has recently taken up residence at my bedside. I can’t stop reading Albert Goldbarth’s poem, “To Be Read in 500 Years” or Stephen Dobyns poem, “How to Like It”; and Anne Carson’s
Autobiography of Red
, a novel in verse, is one of my favorite books in the world and is usually within arms’ reach.
Other writers I keep coming back to are (in no particular order or genre) Denis Johnson, Lidia Yuknavitch, Albert Camus, William Stafford, Elizabeth Bishop, William Faulkner, Katherine Dunn, and Jess Walter.
I also love children’s books and am kind of obsessed at the moment with
The Little Prince
, which I only recently discovered and which I will probably read at least once a year for the rest of my life. And I am forever in love with Geroge Saunders’s
The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip
.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on two things actually: a second memoir and a novel, and I’m excited about both! I can’t say much more than that right now, except that the memoir is, in part, about love.
How is Claret doing? Is he still at Jane’s barn?
I’m grateful to say that Claret is thriving happily. I ride him about three days a week, and he makes sure I deposit the requisite amount of carrots, jellybeans, and other snacks into his mouth each time. He loves to play in the paddocks with the other horses, and he’s still as mischievous as ever, still sweet, still a wild thing. And we’re still with Jane, who is endlessly supportive and patient, and who has earned Claret’s (and my) deepest trust and respect.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RITA ZOEY CHIN
was born into a world that roared: a Queens apartment near Kennedy Airport, where planes were a constant storm. But a move to Maryland four years later introduced her to quiet and creeks and the sounds of cows in the distance, and when she saw horses for the first time, she discovered the most primal source of her wonder embodied in their movement across the field. An award-winning poet, Rita holds an MFA from the University of Maryland. She now lives in the Boston area, where she teaches memoir classes for Grub Street, mentors troubled teenage girls, and rides her mischievous horse.
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Interior design by Ruth Lee-Mui
Jacket design by Rex Bonomelli
Jacket photograph © Alessandro Passerini/PhotoVogue/Art+Commerce; horse © Ken Gillespie photography/Alamy
Author photograph © Sharona Jacobs
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chin, Rita Zoey, author.
Let the tornado come : a memoir / Rita Zoey Chin. — First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.
pages cm
1. Chin, Rita Zoey—Mental health. 2. Panic attacks—Patients—United States—Biography. 3. Authors, American—Biography. 4. Human-animal relationships. 5. Horses—Behavior. I. Title.
RC535.C45 2014
616.85'2230092—dc23
[B] 2013050803
ISBN 978-1-4767-3486-6
ISBN 978-1-4767-3488-0 (ebook)
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