Writing Ready, Set, Oh By Diane Josefowicz

Brooklyn, 2004: I am standing in the biting wind on the corner of 4th Avenue and Union Street, and the sun has emerged for just long enough to slap my un-sunblocked face. Spring’s about to arrive, but I’m still waiting for the plot of a novel that I’ve felt stirring within me for the past six months.

My daughter, not yet a year old, is asleep in the carrier, oblivious to the beeping truck that’s reversing out of a loading bay at the South Brooklyn Casket Company. Inside the truck, shiny new caskets are stacked from top to bottom. Emblazoned on the truck’s side panels is a company name: Sunshine Industries. The cynicism takes my breath; the wind whips fine sand into my eyes. 

The news that morning had been full of stories of dead soldiers returning from Iraq, casualties of a war that had started the night my daughter was born. Support for the war was waning, and then-President George W. Bush had just upheld a ban on photographing military caskets as they arrived at Dover AFB, citing the privacy of the families of the dead. His position, so reasonable on its face, seemed as cynical as shipping caskets in trucks labeled Sunshine Industries. No feeling person could argue with the President’s position—and yet, shouldn’t Americans be kept fully aware of all the costs of a war waged in our names?

Years earlier, when I was a graduate student in history, a teacher told me: “The five years before your birth will always be the site of your deepest historical amnesia.” If he was right, then my personal amnesia would have started around 1966. This conversation occurred in the mid-1990s. At that time, academia was still—still!— coping with the cultural changes of the Sixties, particularly in the history of science, my specialty; there was a lot of empty noise about postmodernism and a lot of very telling silence around hiring, promoting, and firing. In the trenches of academic labor, it was clearly best to be wealthy, white and male. I sensed my vulnerability but was unwilling to plumb it—I still hoped my work would be excellent enough to make me an exception. 

To no one’s surprise but my own, I failed to get an academic job and so went into publishing. Within a few years, I was a freelancing editor in New York City, writing at night and on weekends. Still I felt a nagging unease, one that was only heightened by Bush’s election. Everyone knows what came next: 9/11, WMDs, shock and awe. As I began to wonder, really to wonder, about this perpetual stumbling into war, I remembered my teacher’s words about historical amnesia, and soon I was writing about the five years before I was born, which coincided with the height of the American war in Vietnam. 

I had recently lucked into a spot in Columbia’s MFA program in writing, and I had a two-year fellowship in which I had free reign of the library and so I was back in the stacks, reading everything I could get my hands on about the Sixties and particularly about that war and the long history of civilian resistance to it. I talked to many people who were young men and women at that time, and they shared their reminiscences. A number of women I spoke with also talked about the fight for personhood, privacy, and autonomy, and how all three dovetailed in the right to abortion. I kept imagining what it must have been like for my own parents during that time, each fighting to be recognized as full human beings—my mother, as a person who might want control over when, if ever, to cede her independence to childbearing; my father, as a person with a future, a fate beyond cannon fodder.

To address myself to this topic felt, and to some extent still feels, illegitimate. I was raised to be quiet, to be seen and not heard; nothing in my upbringing prepared me for urgent participatory requirements of, for instance, citizenship. I have disquieting memories of my father shouting at my mother over dinner, dinner she made, about women in combat. Did she have any right to speak, my father shouted, seeing that her life had never been on the line? That, as a mother of daughters, who at the time were also ineligible for combat, she was not even on the line as a mother? That memory still shames me. I cowered as he shouted, even as I resented the implication that my own life was not worth much, either. I should add that my father, who was eligible for the draft during the late Sixties, did not serve in active combat duty though he was a Reservist—a lucky break, as Reservists were unlikely to be called up. 

For me, Ready, Set, Oh is not just a novel about the Vietnam era but an attempt to settle its ghosts, to respond in some useful way to angry patriarchs and their forever wars. What’s at stake is always the same—whose lives are worth living, investing in, and fighting for.

—

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing