amber noelle sparks

It begins, “Long ago,” and so you know that Molly Gaudry’s We Take Me Apart is going to be a fairy tale of sorts. But the next part of the sentence, “in a different version,” signals clearly that this will not be a tale you’ve heard before. And the repetition of that key phrase, in a different version, lets you know throughout this wild novella that this will be no comfortable, well-worn tale.

Sure, it’s full of the familiar trappings of the fairy tale: rags, hunger, wish fulfillment, magical dresses, the loss of a mother, red roses and cabbages and rebirth, both literal and figurative. But this is a different version, a different vision of the landscape that lies between girlhood and womanhood. Like the very best fairy tales, its heart is the dark forest that comes wrapped in lovely, evocative language, beautiful word pictures.

It’s clear immediately that the narrator is telling her tale from a distance. She is locked away now, it seems in some kind of institution, in a place where the plates “are not of the shattering kind.” And so right away we know this tale has no bright Disney ending.

The story is that of her passage from childhood into adulthood, and coming to terms with what being a woman means, to others and herself. Like Rapunzel, she is fiercely protected by a mother figure, and like the fairy tale maiden, she leaves the mother figure for a man. I was almost reminded more, though, of the version of the witch from Sondheim’s Into the Woods. She alone knows the danger of the woods, of men, of women alone in the dark, and yet even she can only protect her daughter so long before protection becomes a prison. Gaudry’s narrator reminds us that though we heed the warnings, we will eventually  leave the nest and be caught by the pain of growing up and old.

The idyllic fairy tale, at first, is intact: we are introduced to a mother and daughter living humbly–but mostly, it seems, happily. Gaudry writes:

I quite often felt as if we were
two women in a garden in a famous painting
sitting as we were beneath a parasol of petals
protecting us from the sun

But then, appropriately arriving in a rainstorm and in need of a bed, the stranger appears and the mother and daughter duo is broken apart:

But then you came along & in this version
happiness was my hoped for ever after for us

One of the greatest strengths of the novella is Gaudry’s mastery of language. This “novel(la),” as it’s described on the cover, is really a prose poem; the language comprising it ebbs and flows, drifts and spurts and sometimes dries up almost entirely, in a manner that gives a clear urgency, but also a backwards pull, the gravity of nostalgia, to the narrator’s prose.

All childhood becomes a fairy of sorts to adults, and adulthood is myth of sorts to children. We don’t know quite what lies there; it’s undiscovered country. And Gaudry’s use of silence surrounding the words perfectly captures this unspoken unknown. As Calvino wrote:

Myth is the hidden part of every story, the bured part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.

The silence, the wet white space around the burn of language, reads at times as if a character from Beckett had crawled or hobbled into a fairy tale–the kind of Beckett character that keeps his or her silence, only to suddenly wax eloquent in manic bursts. Consider this passage from We Take Me Apart:

when she spoke her words were a flurried rush from the shallow space mistaken for her throat

scratched

papered

I begged her not to speak & learned the actions of her bidding

Did them because I could not bear to hear her voice

Which in the past had been the bursting of winter into the green of spring but had become a memory in the middle of her bed in which she rested no like vegetables in a salad but vegetables in canned soup

The language can be florid and fluid, but also economic, sometimes achingly so. Phrases like this one: “Gratitude is a cousin to the squeezing of a heart” are sadder in their brevity than a full paragraph could ever be.

Gaudry also plays, skillfully, with contrasts throughout the novel. The use throughout of food and fertility, often coupled together, stands in stark contrast to the images of death and endings in the book. Consider this passage:

I like to think of those women growing larger with the growths of grapes and cherries and apples inside them

anything but citruses

of course

for I had given up citruses

Food is both a source of life and a path to endings, just as fertility itself leads to birth but also, eventually, to death.

Gaudry uses this same double contrast with food when the narrator returns to her mother, who has now gone from strong to weak and wasting. The narrator explains how she can’t even call her mother “Mother” anymore, because “Mother” is, in her vocabulary, a strength word. Instead her mother finally must go by her real name, and the foods associated with her have changed as well.  She says:

Mother had been black cherries in a bowl& Susan had become chewed up & pit-spit out & Mother had been days & Susan was seconds…Mother had been pepper & Susan was the mistake the ruins a meal

Perhaps it’s not surprising that the narrator would choose food metaphors for her mother and herself; throughout the book, as here, the women’s worth always seems measured by others, literally parceled out and spooned up and sifted and served, as shown here:

the well-known people

they scoop me with a tiny spoon

you are the spoon in me dividing me

and in  phrases like, “they stir me into steaming cups.”

Of course, there is no eventual savior for the women in this novella, after the mother’s death and a ghastly final act by the narrator. But though destroyed by the past, the narrator’s happiness is also salvaged, a little, by the grace of myth and memory.  “When I think of Mother now,” she says, “I think of us as little women wearing white dresses with red ribbons woven into our hair.”

The child and the woman have merged, have gone back to the days of innocence to live in memory and in a woman’s strength, gone back to being whole, unparceled and able to eat the reddest fruits once again.  Gaudry’s beautiful story is ultimately a tragic tale, but a kind of  redemption mingles with the sadness: you can never go back again, but you can wander the halls of the permanent past for as long as you like.

We Take Me Apart by Molly Gaudry is the first novel(la) in a new series from ml press. It is available for purchase here.