Illustration by Ryan Greis
A well-known brokerage firm recently ran an advertising campaign about why it chose to locate its headquarters in St. Louis. Under the heading "Why We're With St. Louis," the ads highlighted St. Louis landmarks like the Gateway Arch, cultural institutions like the Saint Louis Art Museum, recreational facilities like Grant's Trail and the city's award-winning drinking water. The firm even set up a website featuring an interactive map that paid tribute to local spots of interest. The campaign represented a generous bit of corporate civic boosting, and it might have even had a grain of truth to it.
But do any of us actually live in St. Louis because of these attractions? Why do I live in St. Louis? Why do so many people I know, so many of my relatives, live in this place where they grew up? My Tower Grove neighbors on both sides and across the street are three sisters, and two of their daughters live on the street as well. My sister-in-law and her husband live two blocks away. This type of local family density is not an uncommon experience for St. Louisans.
We live here not because of the bike trails, the drinking water, the professional sports teams or the frozen custard, but because this is a place where families and friends tend to stay to preserve their connections to each other. We're with St. Louis not so much for the place itself, the external territory, but instead for the internal territory, the web of personal memories and relationships that give a place meaning.
In the past 15 years, three memoirs by St. Louisans have explored this internal territory with particular power. These three books—The Tender Land: A Family Love Story (2000), by Kathleen Finneran; Daughters: On Family and Fatherhood (1994), by Gerald Early; and The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History (2006), by Jonathan Franzen—offer three different though overlapping perspectives on what it means to be "with St. Louis."
Kathleen Finneran
Kathleen Finneran grew up in Florissant, and she now lives and writes in University City. With The Tender Land, her only book, Finneran won a Whiting Writers' Award and was later awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. At its center is the suicide of Finneran's younger brother Sean at age 15, a tragedy whose ramifications echo throughout the narrative and the lives of the Finneran family—father, mother, brother and three sisters. "There was the time before he was born and the time after," Finneran states in the first section of the memoir. "Ordinary time. A time when we woke up every day, our souls still within us. And now there was this time"—a trying time poised precariously between estrangement and connection. For Finneran, as she struggles with her sexuality, her weight and depression, the book itself becomes a means of fighting alienation and reestablishing connections with her family and with St. Louis.
Finneran was in New York City during some of the time that the book covers. "I had chosen ... to move clear across the country," she notes with a certain amount of guilt. Part of this choice, I suspect, has to do with a writer's need for distance from the experiences and relationships she writes about. Yet Finneran suggests that the move is also related to what she calls "my constant state of self-exile, my need to get farther and farther away from any kind of connection. It was the happiness I felt as a child lying down in deep snow at the end of the back yard."
Finneran's self-exile lies unspoken beneath a difficult phone conversation she shares with her older sister, Mary, who lives in St. Louis with her husband and children. The sisters—Kathleen in New York, Mary at home in St. Louis—talk about the night Sean died, struggling to put words to the emotions they still feel about that night years ago: anger, grief, jealousy, resentment and awe. In the aftermath of Sean's death, Mary was left to clean up the mess in his room, while her parents waited for Kathleen, caught in a blizzard, to arrive home and debated how they could break the news to her. Underlying this conversation are the consequences of Kathleen's choice to move away from St. Louis:
In situations of sickness and death, [Mary] would always have to assume the duties of the older daughter. She would do the dirty work—change the sheets, scrub the walls, remove the human residue. I would be the one who was summoned after, favored and fussed over each time I came home. I would do nothing. She would do everything. And always she would suffer the glory I gained by going away, just as I would always envy her ability to be there. And we would love each other like this for the rest of our lives, orbiting each other in enmity and admiration ...
Like a prodigal daughter, Kathleen is welcomed back with a joy that sometimes makes her more constant sister feel ignored. Even in her re-creation of this conversation, however, Finneran works to communicate at last the complex feelings she was unable to express over the phone. The middle child of five, Finneran is both central to her family and apart from it. She remembers details with incredible precision and chronicles the family's history, yet she often feels herself a kind of marginal observer. Again, though, the book itself becomes Finneran's means of using her memory and insight to overcome isolation.
Finneran's mother, she tells us, keeps a prayer book that she pages through daily and fills with newspaper articles and personal notes and photos—material for meditation and reflection. Finneran admits, "I don't have the same kind of faith as my mother," who believes, for example, that "Sean was an angel sent to save someone." Finneran writes, "I turned her belief about Sean into something more like metaphor." This act of transformation lies at the center of the book's method. The Tender Land becomes Finneran's prayer book. She fills it with texts—a list her sister makes of all the rivers the two of them cross during a road trip to Louisville, a receipt for her dead brother's donated clothes, a loving note from her mother, even Sean's suicide letter. Out of these fragments, Finneran constructs a type of coherence. Not religious in the traditional sense, the book is nonetheless devout in its attention to the details of the world and the humanity of others, sacramental in its reverence for the mysteries of existence and the preciousness of human life and family connection.
At the end of "As My Father Retires," the section of the book that focuses on Finneran's relationship with her father, Finneran has a phone conversation with him. She is still in New York, he in St. Louis. And again, the conversation turns to the night of Sean's death. Kathleen feels guilty about that night. She didn't call her brother that evening though she had promised to do so. She turns to her father for absolution: "I want to say to my father, Bless me, Father, for I have sinned." Again, Finneran locates the solace and meaning of religion in the family connections she has in St. Louis. Indeed, her father offers her something like reconciliation.
"You think if you called that night he might still be alive?" he asks. Definitely, she replies, and he answers her:
"I think if I didn't have a heart problem, ... if my heart medicine hadn't been in the house for him to swallow, he'd still be alive. Your mother thinks if she'd gone to bed earlier that night, if she'd gone upstairs to say goodnight to him sooner and noticed there was somethin' wrong, that he wasn't well, he'd still be alive."
"But she never goes to bed early."
"See what I'm sayin'?"
In the final section of the memoir, one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I've encountered, Finneran addresses her brother Sean directly, calling out to him "across the tender land," recalling a rainy afternoon she spent helping him harvest rainwater for his fish tanks. The story represents the opposite of the snowy isolation Finneran describes elsewhere. Through memory, through writing, Finneran strives in this piece to overcome death, the greatest of separations.
Surely one of St. Louis' underappreciated masterpieces, this memoir circles ingeniously through years of experience, gathering meaning and revealing its characters with tenderness and love. The book explores with nuance and insight the complexities of family love that tie so many people to their hometowns—and bring so many St. Louisans back. For Finneran herself, who now lives in St. Louis, the book itself has become a connective force within her own family. Though her parents at first recoiled from the intimate revelations in the memoir, the author has explained at various public readings, over time they have come to embrace the book, even using it as a kind of touchstone of their rich family history.
Gerald Early
Gerald Early, originally from Philadelphia, may be St. Louis' most prominent and public intellectual. The Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University and the director of its Center for the Humanities, he appeared in three of Ken Burns' massive documentaries, including Baseball and Jazz, which aired as miniseries on PBS. He has published three collections of essays on American culture. He has also edited books on Sammy Davis Jr., Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, Miles Davis and Muhammad Ali. In 1994 Early published his memoir Daughters. Out of print now (but easily obtainable via online booksellers), the book is another unfairly neglected treasure of recent St. Louis autobiography.
Like Finneran's book, the territory Early's memoir explores is mostly internal and intimate: the author's perceptions of himself and his relationships with his two daughters and his wife. In the introduction Early tells us that the memoir is "the story of a faith struggle, of how the members of a family come to believe in each other and, through this ... to believe in that which not only makes belief in ourselves possible, but makes it matter." The book's story, in this way, is like The Tender Land's: a St. Louis story about the meaning that family can lend to life.
To the extent that St. Louis does become an important part of the Earlys' story, it does so through issues of race. Though Early notes that, as the director of a black-studies program, he probably owns and has read more books by and about black people than anyone else in this city, he also stresses, "I am not Afrocentric." He and his family live in a mostly white neighborhood, and his daughters' schools are mostly white as well. Yet he needles his daughters from time to time by asking them, "Don't you guys think you ought to get to know a few more black kids at school?" The Earlys' place in this highly segregated city is a complicated one—one whose complications Early himself likes to probe even when his daughters do not.
Early explores the complications of being black in St. Louis most thoroughly in his narration of an episode in November of 1991 when by his own estimation he was "probably the most talked-about man in St. Louis." He was at Le Chateau Village in Frontenac, waiting for his wife and daughters to finish up at the Junior League Christmas bazaar. Going to find his wife, he walked past a jewelry store, whose owner judged him a security threat and called the police, who came and questioned Early. When his wife and daughters walked up to Early in the parking lot, he was standing with his hands up.
Of the various consequences of this incident, which became a local controversy rehashed on TV, on radio and in the Post-Dispatch (it was also covered in The New York Times), the memoir zeroes in on two moments with Early's daughters. On one occasion during the aftermath, Early's daughter Linnet tells him that she's tired of talking about the incident and about race. He vehemently attempts to get her to understand that "race runs this world"; that, living in Webster Groves, she's become too cozy with white people; that the Frontenac police treated him the way they did because they considered him "some kind of animal." As his righteous anger spirals out of control, his daughter and, soon, his wife try to calm him, and he leaves the room, shocked by his own emotion. "My outburst," he writes, "partly a result of the enormous stress and public scrutiny I was experiencing, was not, finally, about racism, or my daughter's racial consciousness or lack thereof. It was perhaps about my own insecurities about race and maybe even about my insecurities as a parent, as a father." One of the most insidious effects of racism, this passage suggests, is its tangled effects on black parents who are simply trying to love their children and, as best they can, prepare them for the world.
The ties of family love, the memoir implies, also can soothe the pains of racism in unexpected ways. Early's daughter Rosalind apologizes for not having been with him on the day that he was questioned by police simply for having been at the shopping village in Frontenac. "The guy wouldn't have called the police if I was walking with you," Early's daughter tells him. She's right, Early realizes; in fact, he tells us, he often brought his daughters with him when going out in public for the patent benignity that they lent to his appearance in white people's eyes. "I was touched and humbled, moved not only by what she said, but by the depth of the realization it revealed," Early writes. Having daughters, Early suggests, adds for him a rich layer of meaning, a depth to experience, a humbling movement away from the self and its concerns.
Late in his memoir, Early reflects that "it was in the very 'restrictions of marriage' and family life that I had gained the greatest sense of freedom and the highest form of liberation. For it was through being bound to others that I found that I could lose myself, escape the entrapment of solipsism, cease the restless search for that fulfillment of myself simply through acts of absorption." Early the scholar, of course, absorbs himself deeply in his academic interests. "My dad is a person who likes to be alone and is always wrapped up in his work," Rosalind writes in her diary. Through such insights from his daughters, however, Early seems to gain a healing perspective on himself. He's not the center of the universe—not even the center of that particular diary entry, sharing space with his wife, his other daughter and the family dog.
Early's children love him, the memoir suggests, not because of his intellectual accomplishments, but because he's their daddy. On a family vacation to Memphis, Early lectures his daughters about the cultural meanings of the R&B and blues music he plays on their minivan's tape player—Nina Simone, Howling Wolf and Motown—and about the struggle for civil rights. It's fascinating stuff, but Early downplays his own erudition by prefacing his account of this vacation with another excerpt from Rosalind's diary, in which she painstakingly records every detail of a quite different trip—a visit to Disney World. Amusement rides, not her father's lessons, are her most notable vacation memories, this juxtaposition suggests. At the end of the chapter, Early tells his family that he'd like to take a trip to New Jersey to visit the grave of his father. "Well, okay, Daddy," Rosalind replies. "But after we go to New Jersey and be sad and serious, can we go to New York and have fun?"
Early, whose own father died before Early had a chance to know him, finds a complicated joy in becoming a father himself. "That someone would call me what I had always yearned to call someone else was not a fulfillment but a triumphant disquietude," Early concludes, "a quirky, spotty redemption." For Early, in this account, St. Louis' ultimate significance lies not in its institutions or cultural history but in the redemptive family experiences he's had while calling this adopted city home.
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen, a native of Webster Groves, now resides in New York City. He was one of 20 writers selected in 1999 for The New Yorker's Future of American Fiction issue. His third novel, The Corrections, set in a fictionalized version of St. Louis called St. Jude (the patron of lost causes), won the National Book Award in 2001. Since then, he has published two collections of essays, including The Discomfort Zone, about his childhood and young adult years.
Finneran's and Early's books, despite the grimness of some of their subject matter, offer a vision of St. Louis rich in personal connection and family love. In Franzen's book, however, the author returns to his hometown, both literally and mentally, to find a lack of the connections that nourish and sustain Finneran and Early. For that reason, The Discomfort Zone, entertaining, insightful and often hilarious as it can be, is ultimately the saddest of the three.
In the first of the six essays the book comprises, Franzen returns to sell his childhood home after his mother's death. For Franzen's mother, the home's value profoundly reflected her sense of her life's meaning. A nonbeliever who nevertheless attended church her whole life in order to avoid seeming out of step with her peers, Franzen's mother saw her house, according to Franzen, as "the heavy (but not infinitely heavy) and sturdy (but not everlasting) God that she'd loved and served and been sustained by." One of her final concerns was that the house be sold for its maximum value, in her estimate $350,000.
In this humorously self-deprecating story, Franzen, choosing a sexier real-estate agent who promises a higher selling price, ends up getting only $310,000 for it. "But this wasn't the big way I'd let her down," he says. "What lived on—in me—was the discomfort of how completely I'd outgrown" the house and the life it represented, "and how little I even cared about the final sale price." Franzen returns to his childhood home only to reject the world that it conjures up for him—and his mother's posthumous dreams for it.
This disjuncture between himself and his parents, the essay suggests, has deep roots. The piece concludes with an account of a miserable trip to Disney World, during which a teenaged Franzen pouts. His parents had insisted on taking him to the theme park despite his having no desire to go. He recalls: "I'd been their late, happy child, and now there was nothing I wanted more than to get away from them. My mother seemed to me hideously conformist and hopelessly obsessed with money and appearance; my father seemed to me allergic to every kind of fun. I didn't want the things they wanted. I didn't value what they valued."
The rest of the book mines this vein of separation. The essay "Centrally Located" narrates in exquisite detail the various pranks and exploits of Franzen and his Webster High School friends—hijacked flagpoles and stolen school bells, adventures to the roofs of tall buildings, impersonations of blind men at the top of the Arch. Yet how does the essay end? With a scene in which Franzen, the day after an extended birthday expedition with his friends, is asked by his mother what he and Chris and Ben did yesterday. "Nothing," Franzen tells her. "We had breakfast." This disconnection grows deeper when Franzen heads off to college at Swarthmore in Pennsylvania. In "The Foreign Language," Franzen quotes from his correspondence with his parents, letters in which they suggest that he choose a "salable" major and he coldly rebuffs them.
Over and over again, without offering much in the way of resolution, the book presents these painful family conflicts like a series of wounds that have never healed. The book's title is derived from a contested temperature setting on the thermostat of Franzen's childhood home. His father insisted that the thermostat be set within a range labeled "the comfort zone," though his mother preferred it to be set lower. In later years Franzen and his mother mock his father for his "temperature sensitivities," making him mad enough that he gets up and leaves the room. "He thought I was being cruel, and I was," Franzen reminisces, "but I was also forgiving him." This strangely cruel forgiveness is the book's main currency.
In the final essay of the collection, Franzen tells us that he had finally started to love his mother "near the end of her life, when she was undergoing a year of chemotherapy and radiation and living by herself." Yet this late-blooming love seems insufficient to draw Franzen home to his mother, to St. Louis, for any significant period of time. In a passage that strikes me as being almost too deeply sad for this short book to contain, Franzen writes:
Even toward the end, though, I couldn't tolerate being with her for more than three days at a time. Although she was my last living link to a web of Midwestern relations and traditions that I would begin to miss the moment she was gone ... I still took care to arrive in St. Louis on a Friday afternoon and leave on a Monday night. ... "I hate it when Daylight Savings Time starts while you're here," she told me while we were driving to the airport, "because it means I have an hour less with you."
While St. Louis' landscape reminds some of their loved ones and the good times they shared together, for others the landscape is less central. One of Early's other book projects is an anthology of African-American writings about St. Louis. Its title, Ain't but a Place, reminds us that, in the end, St. Louis is just valleys and hills along a river, and the structures and roads we've built atop them.
As a kid I didn't see it that way. I grew up in a suburb—a perfectly idyllic suburb, full of big trees and quiet streets where I could ride my bike or throw a football without interruption. My mom had grown up in the city, though, near Tower Grove Park, and visits to my grandparents, my mom's childhood home, made an impression on me. The city somehow seemed realer to me; it had an aura of history and mystery. I recognize now that that was something of an illusion. Older does not mean realer or better. My mom once told me that I had more pleasant associations with her childhood home than she herself did. Nevertheless, that childhood sense that the city was more than just "a place" is part of why I now live where I live—half a mile from where my mom grew up on the opposite side of the park.
The charms of this place are significant and deep. That ad campaign was on to something. But the ultimate meaning of St. Louis, for me at least and for these three authors, has little to do with the place itself. The reasons we live here—or don't—are many and mixed. In the end, whether this place is a tender land or a discomfort zone depends on the relationships and memories it holds.
