Interior States Read online

  Meghan O’Gieblyn

  INTERIOR STATES

  Meghan O’Gieblyn is a writer who was raised and still lives in the Midwest. Her essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The Point, The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Best American Essays 2017, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She received a BA in English from Loyola University Chicago and an MFA in Fiction from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband.

  www.meghanogieblyn.com

  AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, OCTOBER 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by Meghan O’Gieblyn

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Several pieces first appeared in the following publications: “Pure Michigan” on The Awl; “The End” in the Boston Review; “Sniffing Glue” in Guernica; “Exiled” in Harper’s Magazine; “Maternal Ecstasies” and “On Reading Updike” in The Los Angeles Review of Books; “Ghost in the Cloud” in n+1; “American Niceness” in The New Yorker; “A Species of Origins” in Oxford American; “Contemporaries” in Ploughshares; “Hell,” “The Insane Idea,” and “Midwestworld” in The Point; “Dispatch from Flyover Country” in The Threepenny Review; and “On Subtlety” in Tin House.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: O’Gieblyn, Meghan, 1982– author.

  Title: Interior states : essays / by Meghan O’Gieblyn.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Anchor Books, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018004173 (print) | LCCN 2018004981 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3615.G54 (ebook) | LCC PS3615.G54 A6 2018 (print) | DDC 814/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018004173

  Anchor Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525562702

  Ebook ISBN 9780385543842

  Cover design by Perry De La Vega

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v5.3.2

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  All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.

  —DAWN POWELL

  The Middle West is probably a fanatic state of mind. It is, as I see it, an unknown geographic terrain, an amorphous substance, the ghostly interplay of time with space, the cosmic, the psychic, as near to the North Pole as to the Gallup Poll.

  —MARGUERITE YOUNG

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Dispatch from Flyover Country

  Hell

  On Reading Updike

  Contemporaries

  A Species of Origins

  The Insane Idea

  Midwestworld

  On Subtlety

  The End

  Sniffing Glue

  American Niceness

  Maternal Ecstasies

  Pure Michigan

  Ghost in the Cloud

  Exiled

  Acknowledgments

  PREFACE

  One criticism of the personal essay—an old one, though it’s been revived with special fervor in recent years—is its tendency toward confession. To some extent, this is simply a matter of lineage. The origins of what we today call “personal writing” can be traced back to Augustine, so it’s not coincidental that the genre so frequently reverts to the tenor of the Christian ritual: the divulging of transgressions, the preening need for absolution. In fact, I’ve often sensed in these complaints about confessional writing an underlying impatience with religion itself and the persistence of its postures in modern life. It is now the twenty-first century, these critics seem to say, and high time we got off our knees and took ownership of our lives.

  The faith tradition in which I was raised, evangelical Protestantism, did not practice the rite of private confession. We did not confess; we professed, and we did so publicly. The narrative ritual taken up by our congregation was performed in front of the entire body of fellow believers, a convention called “giving testimony.” Most often, your testimony was your life story, though it could also be about a particular struggle or a period of doubt. While confession is typically born of guilt and predicated upon the experience of private catharsis, the testimony had a decidedly communal purpose. The point was not to absolve oneself, but rather to “testify” to the truth of the gospel, using one’s story as a form of evidence. Like the courtroom practice from which it derived its name, the idea was that your personal experience was a way of building a case.

  Each of the pieces collected in this volume is, in some sense, a testimony, which is to say the essays were spurred not by the need to unburden myself, but rather to connect my experiences to larger conversations and debates. Not all of these essays contain an explicit argument, but each began with a desire to make a claim—or in some cases, to complicate an existing one—coupled with the feeling that my life might serve as a form of evidence. The earliest ones were composed when I was still contending with my loss of faith, and writing them was a way to impose some semblance of order on a world that felt muddled and morally chaotic. Although these early pieces were published in secular magazines, I was writing primarily to evangelicals, trying to elucidate what I saw as a central hypocrisy of the faith I had left: namely, the church’s willingness—in its theology on hell, its relationship to science, and its approach to youth culture—to compromise its doctrine in order to remain culturally relevant.

  Over the past decade, most of the writing on Christianity in this country has taken the form of obituary. More than one of the magazine editors who published these essays insisted that I acknowledge the 2014 Pew Research study about the rise of the “nones”—young people who claim no religious affiliation—as though to affirm the popular notion that America is leaving behind its superstitious past and treading unwaveringly into the future. Perhaps this is true. But as someone who has traveled that path myself, I can confirm that such journeys are rarely linear or without complications. William James once noted that “the most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing.” In other words, even when a person outwardly denounces a long-standing belief, the architecture of the idea persists and can come to be inhabited by other things. This is as true of cultures as it is of individuals. Some of the essays in this collection examine the ways in which our increasingly secular landscape is still imprinted with the legacy of Christianity. The testimony, as a narrative form, endures in the rooms of twelve-step programs and in contemporary writing about motherhood, which often takes the form of conversion narrative. Meanwhile, the faith’s epic story of messianic redemption lives on in the utopic visions of transhumanism and in liberalism’s endless arc of progress.

  Many of these essays return to questions about history and historical narratives. It is a topic that is difficult these days to avoid—though this is particularly true for those of us who live in the Midwest, which F. Scott Fitzgerald famously called, in The Great Gatsby, “the ragged edge of the universe,” a place where it’s easy to conclude that history is over. Much of my childhood took place outside Detroit, a city that was, during those years, in the process of being reclaimed by the prairie, its downtown haunted by six empty prewar skyscrapers. During the bleakest years of the finan
cial crisis, these rotting cathedrals of commerce became such an unambiguous symbol that some residents proposed their ruins should be preserved as an urban Monument Valley that tourists could visit, as they do the Acropolis of Athens, to witness the collapse of American empire. Of course, this never transpired. Instead, this stretch of downtown has been transformed into a playground for the creative class, a development that has displaced the city’s most vulnerable residents and only heightened the sense of historic unreality. Like so many metropolises along the Rust Belt, Detroit has become a hastily drawn caricature of the city it once was, festooned with the signifiers of the manufacturing age (Diego Rivera murals, PBR on tap) that have been drained of any real political and economic significance, while its factories have been reimagined as farm-to-table restaurants and the sleek offices of tech start-ups.

  What unites the states of the Midwest—both the ailing and the tenuously “revived”—is a profound loss of telos, the realization that the industries and systems that built the region are no longer tenable. And I suppose what unites these essays is similarly an abiding interest in loss, particularly the loss of direction that occurs after the decline of a doctrine, an economy, or an entire worldview. The notion of “lostness” is, of course, crucial to the genre of Christian testimony, which hinges on the belief that bewilderment, limitation, and doubt can become the source of connections with others and more transcendent sources of meaning.

  I feel compelled to mention that I did not set out, in any deliberate way, to write about these topics. In seeing these essays collected, it’s difficult to avoid sensing something perverse in the fact that I have returned so obsessively to the religion I spent my early adulthood trying to escape. And while I have written so much about the Midwest, the truth is that I’ve often felt that I would prefer to live almost anywhere else. I’m not sure how to account for this, except to say that it’s a paradox of human nature that the sites of our unhappiness are precisely those that we come to trust most hardily, that we absorb most readily into our identity, and that we defend most vociferously when they come under attack. Like the convert who develops a fondness for the darker moments of her testimony, I have come, through the act of writing, to believe in the virtue of my experience. These essays are a record of that process and contain some provisional attempts to make sense of these preoccupations.

  DISPATCH FROM FLYOVER COUNTRY

  The August before last, my husband and I moved to Muskegon, a town on the scenic and economically depressed west coast of Michigan. We live in a trailer in the woods, one paneled with oak-grained laminate and beneath which a family of raccoons have made their home. There is a small screened-in porch and a large deck that extends over the side of a sand dune. We work there in the mornings beneath the ceiling of broadleaves, teaching our online classes and completing whatever freelance projects we’ve managed to scrape together that week. Occasionally, I’ll try to amuse him by pitching my latest idea for a screenplay. “An out-of-work stuntman leaves Hollywood and becomes an Uber driver,” I’ll say. “It’s about second chances in the sharing economy.” We write the kinds of things that return few material rewards; there is no harm in fantasizing. After dinner, we take the trail that runs from the back of the trailer through an aisle of high pines, down the side of the dune to Lake Michigan.

  Evenings have been strange this year: hazy, surreal. Ordinarily, Michigan sunsets are like a preview of the apocalypse, a celestial fury of reds and tangerines. But since we moved here, each day expires in white gauze. The evening air grows thick with fog, and as the sun descends toward the water, it grows perfectly round and blood colored, lingering on the horizon like an evil planet. If a paddle-boarder happens to cross the lake, the vista looks exactly like one of those old oil paintings of Hanoi. For a long time, we assumed the haze was smog wafting in from Chicago, or perhaps Milwaukee. But one night, as we walked along the beach, we bumped into a friend of my mother’s who told us it was from the California wildfires. She’d heard all about it on the news: smoke from the Sierra Nevada had apparently been carried on an eastern jet stream thousands of miles across the country, all the way to our beach.

  “That seems impossible,” I said.

  “It does seem impossible,” she agreed, and the three of us stood there on the shore, staring at the horizon as though, if we looked hard enough, we might glimpse whatever was burning on the far side of the country.

  * * *

  —

  The Midwest is a somewhat slippery notion. It is a region whose existence—whose very name—has always been contingent upon the more fixed and concrete notion of the West. Historically, these interior states were less a destination than a corridor, one that funneled travelers from the East into the vast expanse of the frontier. The great industrial cities of this region—Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis—were built as “hubs,” places where the rivers and the railroads met, where all the goods of the prairie accumulated before being shipped to the exterior states. Today, coastal residents stop here only to change planes, a fact that has solidified our identity as a place to be passed over. To be fair, people who live here seem to prefer it this way. Gift shops along the shores of the Great Lakes sell T-shirts bearing the slogan FLYOVER LIVING. The official motto for the state of Indiana is Crossroads of America. Each time my family passed the state line on childhood road trips, my sisters and I would mock its odd, anti-touristic logic (“Nothing to see here, folks!”).

  When I was young, my family moved across the borders of these states—from Illinois to Michigan to Wisconsin. My father sold industrial lubricant, an occupation that took us to the kinds of cities that had been built for manufacturing and by the end of the century lay mostly abandoned, covered, like Pompeii, in layers of ash. We lived on the outskirts of these cities, in midcentury bedroom communities, or else beyond them, in subdivisions built atop decimated cornfields. On winter evenings, when the last flush of daylight stretched across the prairie, the only sight for miles was the green-and-white lights of airport runways blinking in the distance like lodestars. We were never far from a freeway, and at night the whistle of trains passing through was as much a part of the soundscape as the wind or the rain. It is like this anywhere you go in the Midwest. It is the sound of transit, of things passing through. People who grew up here tend to tune it out, but if you stop and actually listen, it can be disarming. On some nights, it’s easy to imagine that it is the sound of a more profound shifting, as though the entire landscape of this region—the North Woods, the tallgrass prairies, the sand dunes, and the glacial moraines—is itself fluid and impermanent.

  It’s difficult to live here without developing an existential dizziness, a sense that the rest of the world is moving while you remain still. I spent most of my twenties in South Chicago, in an apartment across from a hellscape of coal-burning plants that ran on grandfather clauses and churned out smoke blacker than the night sky. To live there during the digital revolution was like existing in an anachronism. When I opened my windows in summer, soot blew in with the breeze; I swept piles of it off my floor, which left my hands blackened like a scullery maid’s. I often thought that Dickens’s descriptions of industrial England might have aptly described twenty-first-century Chicago: “It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.” Far from the blat of the city, there was another world, one depicted on television and in the pages of magazines—a nirvana of sprawling green parks and the distant silence of wind turbines. Billboards glowed above the streets like portals into another world, one where everything was reduced to clean and essential lines. YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL read one of them, its product unmentioned or unclear. Another featured a blue sky marked with cumulus clouds and the words IMAGINE PEACE.

  I still believed during those years that I would end up in New York—or perhaps in California. I never had any plans for how to get there. I truly believed I w
ould “end up” there, swept by that force of nature that funneled each harvest to the exterior states and carried young people off along with it. Instead, I found work as a cocktail waitress at a bar downtown, across from the state prison. The regulars were graying men who sat impassively at the bar each night, reading the Tribune in silence. The nature of my job, according to my boss, was to be an envoy of feminine cheer in that dark place, and so I occasionally wandered over to offer some chipper comment on the headlines—“Looks like the stimulus package is going to pass”—a task that was invariably met with a cascade of fatalism.

  “You think any of that money’s going to make it to Chicago?”

  “They should make Wall Street pay for it,” someone quipped.

  “Nah, that would be too much like right.”

  Any news of emerging technology was roundly dismissed as unlikely. If I mentioned self-driving cars, or 3-D printers, one of the men would hold up his cell phone and say, “They can’t even figure out how to get us service south of Van Buren.”

  For a long time, I mistook this for cynicism. In reality, it is something more like stoicism, a resistance to excitement that is native to this region. The longer I live here, the more I detect it in myself. It is less disposition than habit, one that comes from tuning out the fashions and revelations of the coastal cities, which have nothing to do with you, just as you learned as a child to ignore those local boosters who proclaimed, year after year, that your wasted Rust Belt town was on the cusp of revival. Some years ago, the Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art installed on its western exterior a neon sign that read EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT. For several months, this message brightened the surrounding blight and everyone spoke of it as a symbol of hope. Then the installation was changed to read: NOTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT. They couldn’t help themselves, I guess. To live here is to develop a wariness of all forms of unqualified optimism; it is to know that progress comes in fits and starts; that whatever promise the future holds, its fruits may very well pass by, on their way to somewhere else.