Loss for Words

The writer Jean Rhys, a great miner of autobiographical ore, once said, “The things you remember have no form. When you write about them, you have to give them a beginning, a middle, and an end. To give life shape—that is what a writer does. That is what is so difficult.”

In her genre-bending, autobiographical novel-in-verse, The Summer of Dead Birds (2019), Ali Liebegott gives a morass of difficult real-life losses—cancer, divorce, the impending death of a pet—a hybrid literary shape that feels surprising but apt. She organizes lightly fictionalized episodes from her own life into sharp, spare lyric poetry. In doing so, she reminds readers that genres aren’t always distinct and that the big four broadly identified by the publishing industry and creative writing classes—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama—are neither wholly isolated nor exhaustive in their description of the forms that literature can take.

Liebegott constructs her beginning, middle, and end from a series of linked, lineated, sequential vignettes assembled as artfully as a well-built building. In fact, she opens the book with an epigraph from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Book of Pilgrimage (1918) that itself evokes the notion of built space: “Summer was like your house; you know where / each thing stood. Now you must go into your heart as onto / a vast plain. Now the immense loneliness begins.”

Liebegott, who lives in Los Angeles and writes for the Emmy-winning Amazon series Transparent, is the author of four books, including the Lambda Award–winning epic road poem The Beautifully Worthless (2005), the Lambda Award–winning novel The IHOP Papers (2006), and the novel Cha-Ching! (2013). The throughline of her work is a quirky, voice-driven approach to gender and sexuality. In The Summer of Dead Birds, her narrative stand-in shares traits that Liebegott herself possesses: she’s a writer and a teacher going to and from writing classes, as well as a lesbian and a consummate animal lover.

Barely 100 pages, The Summer of Dead Birds tells of a trifecta of grief and death set in California and its outlying deserts. First, Liebegott’s narrator chronicles her mother-in-law’s rapid and fatal deterioration from cancer: “if you want to see time move fast / watch a fifty-five-year-old woman / go from gardening to dead in two months.”

Next, she recounts the subsequent dissolution of the narrator’s marriage to her adored then-wife. When the narrator’s therapist warns “Few lesbian relationships survive the death of a mother” and the narrator declares, “I was so mad when she said that / We will, we will, I thought,” readers root for the couple but are not surprised when the first lines of the next vignette announce “after I left you I had nowhere to live / so I moved into my tiny writing studio.”

Finally, the narrator records the decline of Rorschach, her beloved dog, whose unusual name is spot on (get it?) because she’s a dalmatian. “Rorschach will be thirteen in a few weeks,” Liebegott writes, registering the obsessive, anxious thinking that this fact incites. “I want to ask every stranger in the street, / What’s the oldest dog you ever knew?”

Published by the Feminist Press, a nonprofit founded to amplify feminist voices, the book is animated by both feminist and queer concerns. Its very form questions the normative discourses and assumptions surrounding both subjects. In a conversation with fellow formal innovator Maggie Nelson for the Believer in 2012, Liebegott observed, “It’s weird. In a world where there’s so much evolution in other ways, there’s this stronghold in keeping this genre this genre, that genre that genre.” And in an interview with BOMB in 2013, Liebegott said, “For me, it’s really important that queer characters be authentic—that they're not some television version of lesbians.” The storytelling style of The Summer of Dead Birds feels crucial to Liebegott's aim of achieving what to her feels authentic. Its deliberately fluid orientation toward genre disrupts and blurs categories of gender as well.

Of course, writers have blurred formal boundaries for centuries, but what makes Liebegott’s approach fresh and thoughtful is that she’s self-aware enough to subvert stereotypes or presumptions that might otherwise hang like mist over her story. Covering The Summer of Dead Birds for the feminist Women’s Review of Books, critic Laurie Stone acknowledges the possible clichés inherent in a tale of downhearted, animal-loving lesbians and praises the manner in which Liebegott defies such clichés :

The press release […] describes it as “a chronicle of mourning and survival, a vulnerable and honest document of depression and failed intimacy.” Would you read that? The press release imagines you are a sad lesbian, full of yearning for all the loves you have lost and loves you have yet to lose, plus dogs who will die on your couch. And it imagines you want your sadness to amount to something like wisdom, acceptance, or meaning, along with pet hair and lint. If you are this person, The Summer of Dead Birds is not for you. Read something else.

The press release’s formulas and pigeonholing aside, the shape of Liebegott’s book—84 linked lyric poems—and her confidential yet conversational, funny-sad voice upends expectations of a traditional memoir that follows a familiar arc of sorrow and redemption. The result makes for a far more idiosyncratic book. Both the lineated poems and the acknowledgment that this book is based on true events (that have been fictionalized) call attention to the constructed makeup of Liebegott’s story.

Queer writers in particular have taken delight in crossing and re-crossing the borders of genre, especially as those boundaries seek to demarcate truth from fiction. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Gertrude Stein’s gamesome version of her own autobiography, springs to mind, as does Toklas’s The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954), which really does contain intriguing recipes (including a notorious one for hashish fudge) mixed with the author’s memoiristic accounts of her adventures with Stein in France, Spain, and the United States.

One also thinks of the poet and novelist Kevin Killian, whose two memoirs—Bedrooms Have Windows (1989) and its previously unpublished sequel, Bachelors Get Lonely—were released late last year, along with a new prose piece, Triangles in the Sand, under the title Fascination: Memoirs. Despite its being called memoirs, Killian included sections of Bachelors in two subsequent fiction collections. These texts are about a writer also named Kevin Killian and are examples of the meta-/self-reflexive approach he pioneered beginning in the late 1970s as one of the founding members of the New Narrative movement. Along with Dodie Bellamy, Robert Glück, Bruce Boone, Dennis Cooper, and others, Killian and his New Narrative cohort sought to depict subjective experience while pointing out that no text can be totally objective, and they encouraged skepticism of linear, coherent narratives.

In “Long Note on New Narrative,” Glück writes that this mode arose partly in response to the question “How to represent my experience as a gay man?” as well as “How can I convey urgent social meanings while opening or subverting the possibilities of meaning itself? That question has deviled and vexed Bay Area writing for twenty-five years. What kind of representation least deforms its subject?”

Without the heavy citation of theory that characterizes much New Narrative, Liebegott—herself a Bay Area/West Coast writer—is, as Glück wrote of New Narrative, “serious about wanting to bring emotion and subject matter into the field of innovative writing.” She works territory similar to, and in a similar fashion to, that of both Eileen Myles and Michelle Tea. Liebegott’s work also recalls that of the aforementioned Nelson, who describes Liebegott’s book as “a fierce, funny, agonized, cracked-open aria in homage to the presence and passing of fiercely loved things.” In The Argonauts (2015), Nelson crafted her own remarkable pastiche of discrete but interconnected prose blocks, an “authotheory” method that leaps from intimate descriptions of her relationship with her partner, the artist Harry Dodge, to citations from an array of fellow thinkers, including Roland Barthes, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Donald Winnicott. Like her queer, hybrid forerunners and contemporaries, Liebegott pursues a mode of storytelling that achieves a cohesive emotional truth while calling attention to that truth as a personally experienced, yet artificially built, thing.

In each strand of her story, Liebegott, the writer/narrator, mixes the causality, temporality, and suspense of narrative prose with the idea- and emotion-driven sparseness and linguistic play of lyric poetry. At the risk of stating the obvious, this aspect of her genre-blending—real-life sadness and melancholic reflectiveness expressed in poems that rarely exceed a page—keeps the atmosphere from growing too heavy. Because lyric poetry tends to be shorter than memoiristic prose, this epigrammatic form allows Liebegott to yield a compact, entertaining result.

As is fitting for a book with birds in the title, the collection starts with imaginative yet precise descriptions of avian behavior. As the narrator fills her birdbath, “a bird the size of a dust ball tried to fly / never getting higher than an inch off the lawn” while “a dove sat on a nearby branch / flapping its wings slowly and sadly / the way you numbly open and close a cabinet door / when there’s nothing inside to eat // finally, the dust ball gave up / fluttered inside a cinder block to hide.” The sick and doomed dust ball bird becomes a kind of objective correlative that sets the tone for the rest of the book, establishing a narrator who—self-aware in regard to how unrealistic her desire is—wants to rescue not only that creature but also every other broken or dying organism, even as the voice of one of her students, “the woman who raised canaries,” echoes in her head: “You can’t save everyone.”

Liebegott’s ample use of white space and section breaks gives her juxtaposition of personal grief with environmental and social grief room to breathe. She trusts readers to bridge the gaps and keep up with implied connections. Of the rash of smashed birds she sees in the section “Crying Season,” presumably killed by the walls and windows of the human city, she writes “it’s impossible not to think apocalypse / when the ground is covered in dead birds,” adding “there were so many I wondered if I should / take one to prove they were real.” Although she doesn’t mention in that vignette the divorce from her partner or the death of her mother-in-law or even Rorschach’s slow decline, readers understand the grim implications of the anecdote. The fissures between the fragments evoke the interpersonal and ecological breakdowns that the narrator herself struggles to live through.

She picks up this motif again in the following section, which begins “it’s the end of May and the sky is filled / with birds being little whores,” adding “this is the kind of courtship I understand / one lover throwing themself in front of a car / every four seconds in order to seduce the other.” A few pages later, she repeats the image, saying to her ex, “remember when we were little whores / weeks into our love affair on women’s land?” but notes that even in the ecstasy of “fucking like nobody’s business,” she couldn’t stop thinking of the damage that humans do to each other and to the planet: “I crawled around a field with my sketchbook / trying to capture the poses of a hundred dying bees” suffering from colony collapse.

Lest the book sound unrelentingly morose, it’s worth noting that Liebegott also performs standup around Los Angeles, both as herself and in the persona of her dog, Flaca; she even sometimes sports a mascot-esque dog suit. This facility with eccentric comedy is evident throughout The Summer of Dead Birds as she wisely blends humor into the sadness. Liebegott possesses an unerring eye for absurd personal detail, as when the narrator and her then-wife debate what to call an “impulse pet-shop buy” bird. The narrator wants “to name the bird Nabokov / but you didn’t want to commemorate a pedophile” and so “the only name we could agree on was Angel.” When that same bird dies after the couple break up, the narrator “froze her, cried hysterically, / and asked my therapist if I should have an autopsy done.”

Many of the vignettes would lend themselves to performance as standup monologues. They frequently open with the kind of incisive, throat-clearing declaration that sets a comedian up to deliver a riff. One begins, “I’d stop looking for dead things / if there’d stop being dead things everywhere”; another starts, “you think a dog is old until it gets even older.” The pieces often conclude with the acutely observed, contrarian, not-quite punchline that such riffs might reach, as when, recalling Rorschach’s puppyhood, Liebegott writes, “everyone said, / Don’t let the dog sleep in the bed with you / you’ll never be able to discipline the dog after that / but the whole point of having a dog / is to let it sleep in the bed.”

Liebegott’s genre versatility hops across media in that she is also a visual artist who often works with deadpan whimsy in oil on found wood. Some of her work incorporates such wry text as CONGRATULATIONS ON BEING A BIG DYKE and THE LESBIAN AVENGERS: WE RECRUIT and KEEP ABORTION LEGAL. The cover of Dead Birds features original art by Liebegott: a gouache on paper which depicts cacti out the window, a backpack by the door, and a spotted dalmatian resting atop a colorfully dotted bedspread. This image recapitulates and emphasizes the narrator’s explanation that “everything is spotted on a Dalmatian / not just the fur // the roof of the mouth, the inside of the lips and ears.”

 

The cover image—naïve, rough-edged, deliberately amateurish—reflects the simplicity and almost comically childlike nature of some emotions in the book: after the narrator's wife's mother finally dies, the narrator says, “you took the pillow that propped her head up / plump, like a pillow in a coloring book / big down marshmallow with a goose-head tag // and walked around the house / trying to pull the scent  from its depths.” Both Liebegott’s visual art and her verbal portraits of grief can share a darkly cute quality: she writes, “after a divorce, does everyone float like a lost balloon? / their head a forest of rotting animals.” Significantly, Liebegott’s narrator identifies as a visual artist as well, saying to her soon-to-be-ex-wife, “our apartment was big and cheap / we both had a bedroom to hide in // in mine, I began a portrait of myself / pushing an oil pastel hard into the closet mirror / outlining my sunken eyes and worried brow.”

In his New Narrative essay, Glück writes, “We were thinking about autobiography; by autobiography we meant daydreams, nightdreams, the act of writing, the relationship to the reader, the meeting of flesh and culture, the self as collaboration, the self as disintegration, the gaps, inconsistencies and distortions, the enjambments of power, family, history and language.” Liebegott’s decision to construct her autobiographical narrative as a novel-in-verse rather than a conventional prose memoir allows her narrator to convey those meetings, disintegrations, and enjambments in visceral bursts. In one of many passages of lyrical direct address to the “you” who is the former wife, the narrator says that she’s spent her days sifting “dumbly through milk crates / filled with eight years of cards and presents.” She then focuses on “two pictures of us at the amusement park / on our first date after you admitted cheating // each of us alone on a green bench, our young faces / smile cautiously from behind the same stuffed pig.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly given Liebegott’s longtime involvement with the San Francisco–based lesbian-feminist spoken word collective Sister Spit’s Ramblin’ Roadshow, which made multiple tours across the United States from 1994 to 2006, The Summer of Dead Birds incorporates elements of the road story in its final section. The open highway becomes a crucial setting and freedom of movement a crucial action by which the narrator attempts to make sense of an onslaught of interwoven sorrows. Driving “for a long time beside a boxcar with doors open / on both sides,” Rorschach riding shotgun, the narrator loses herself in a kind of mythic American reverie, putting her own stamp on what is typically—thanks to Jack Kerouac and his acolytes—a masculine trope: “I wish the gap between those boxcars was my birthplace / I understand the risk of losing legs to hop a train // and that horn, who doesn’t want to fuck to that sad shit?”

After all these thousands of lonely desert miles, the book does not arrive at a happy ending, but in one of the last vignettes, Liebegott writes, “I’ve become the cavern I want to visit // each loss begins as a single drop of water / struggling to roll off the ivory edge of a rib // until it begins to harden / and hangs, a stalactite tomb.” The natural process she describes in which innumerable tiny components cohere into something monumental is not unlike the way in which she amassed her book.

The form of Liebegott’s work is emphatically present but not at the expense of evoking empathy. The self-reflection and conscious hybrid shaping of her story make her narrator’s urgent emotions—“I hate that everything dies, marriages and dogs and mothers”—direct and cutting on levels that are both cognitive and affective. Perhaps the best image for what her technique achieves is when the narrator, speaking of the disconnected pattern of her days following her separation, says

[…] I opened the blinds and sat down
on the bed
 
the people at the bus stop ate candy and drank sodas
letting their wrappers drift away behind them
 
sometimes they watched me inside my diorama
 
did I say diorama, I meant aquarium
 
and I was the fish that swam in small predictable circles

This remarkable novel-in-verse reads like a meticulously fabricated miniature, an object whose small size and great care of assembly never let readers lose sight of its loving artificiality—its existence as a crafted object. The deceptively breezy yet subversive manner in which Liebegott eschews prose narrative in favor of poeticizing her memoiristic content queers the form, so to speak, in a way that feels inextricable from her own lived experience.