Reflections on Sarah Vowell

So last Friday night we headed out to Showalter Auditorium in order to see a public reading by Sarah Vowell, of This American Life fame. I was not very familiar with her work, but a description of her radio voice in The Inlander (as “perky, slightly squeaky”) made me pretty confident I had heard some of her commentaries. I also thought that anybody who ran in the same company as David Sedaris (whom Tatsu and I saw in a hilarious live reading at last year’s festival) would be worth the price of admission – which in this case, was free.

When we arrived at the Auditorium, we were convinced that the organizers were trying to craft a private performance. There was no signage from the front of the building. Even after bravely entering what looked to be a deserted fortress of past academia, the payoff was yet to materialize. At least the doors were unlocked. We eventually found a small sign directing us to the second floor. After finding our way to the auditorium, I was not surprised to see J, M, and K F there. This after having told Tat on the way out that I needed to make sure to carve out time to talk to J about our common interests!

They were centrally seated a few rows from the stage, right behind a row of seats marked “RESERVED”. The only seats being held in the whole place. We snagged a couple of seats right behind them. Those reserved seats turned out to be for the guest of honor, as well as her family. The whole Vowell clan sitting two rows away. My attention was divided during her actual reading – in part trying to soak up the family reaction to her prose. The material was witty, poignant, cynical, and democratic (with the capital D). I especially enjoyed a piece titled “God Will Give You Blood to Drink in a Souvenir Shot Glass” that dealt with the tendency to make a tourist commodity out of even the most horrific chapters of history.

My initial impression was that Mom & Dad must be ever so proud of their Sarah – soaking in the crowd’s appreciation of her work as an affirmation of whatever sacrifices they had made in order to nurture such a force of creativity and culture.

After picking up her second book, Take the Cannoli, I’m not so sure that it is as clear-cut as that.

My doubts started right away with the first essay, “Shooting Dad”, where Sarah lets us know that her teenage years were spent engaged in bitter political opposition to her father. As she matures, she’s learning how to live with ideological differences – but one still senses that there are other issues in play. Religious language makes its first appearance when she rebukes a pistol (“what my mother told me to do every time I felt an evil presence”). A mere two essays later, in “The End is Near, Nearer, Nearest”, we learn of her upbringing in the Pentecostal Holiness church. Failing to be satisfied by the answers to her questions (she seems convinced that the church crumbles at the concerns posed by her at six years of age), she has abandoned faith in God – replacing it with atheism and temporal purpose, the hope being that “heaven, such as it is, is right here on earth”.

I’d be more convinced she meant it, if there wasn’t such a despair evoked in her work. I get the sense that while she makes her living being introspective, she doesn’t fully know herself. Some of the most telling analysis comes from other family members. From her twin sister Amy, who while traveling the Trail of Tears with Sarah, found Sarah’s tendencies to be driven by ego – “I don’t think four thousand people needed to die so that we could be sitting here today…we need to come to grips with that – Sarah.” From her mother, who advises Sarah that her insomnia might be related to a deep unrest of the spirit. That exchange became especially telling:

She says, “I want you to get rid of anything that might be bothering you.”
“Like my whole life?”
“Your whole life? No, I’m talking about things you need to let go of, things that in the past have upset you or hurt you that you need to let go of.”

So, the impression that I’m left with is that whatever her family felt that evening, I’m sure it was different than pride, because pride would merely be the identification with the accomplishment, building relationally around a common ideology (I’m thinking here of “school pride” or “national pride”). What I’d like to think they were feeling is love. Because love would have room for the diversity of that family – a family that contains a fundamentalist Christian, an atheist, a gunsmith, an artist, a Republican, a Democrat. I hold the image of that family as a portrait of solidarity; that even those who are different are one, that those who are broken can be bound together. And in hindsight, that is more significant than the reading itself.