how to combine memoir with an area of expertise

DEBORAH PAREDEZ UNDERSTANDS THE fine art of combining memoir with cultural criticism. She is a poet, scholar, cultural critic, author, and professor who previously authored the critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory, and the poetry collections, This Side of Skin and Year of the Dog. Her poetry, essays, and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, National Public Radio and more. She’s a professor of creative writing and ethnic studies at Columbia University and the co-founder of CantoMundo, a national organization for Latinx poets. Her new book is American Diva, just published by W.W Norton. She’s here to discuss how to combine memoir with an area of expertise. Listen in and read along.

Deborah: Thank you so much, Marion.

Marion: Well, I’m just so glad you’re here. And as I said in my opener, among the many writers you are, you are a cultural critic. So let’s get everyone on a level playing field here by letting you explain that term please.

Deborah: Absolutely. So for me, a cultural critic is in many ways a kind of fancy term I guess for someone who is deeply interested in thinking critically and imaginatively about many forms of culture in our society. For me, it happens to be music and performance. So some of my favorite cultural critics are people like Wesley Morris or Margo Jefferson or Ann Powers. I guess she writes more specifically about music. But there are folks out there who are just really loving parts of culture, in my case, performance and who are eager to have us all as writers, as people in the world thinking critically and with great pleasure about culture.

Marion: Well, that helps enormously. And so in the opening of this beautiful book, American Diva, you write, “The sound of a diva’s voice was how I got to know my place in relation to others in the neighborhood, which is to say how I came to know my place in relation to American-ness.” That’s lovely and smart, and it puts the lens on the nose of the reader of how you’ll combine a beautiful piece of memoir with an argument about the role, the importance of divas. So let’s start there. My audience is writers. Many of them are memoirists. They are filled with these wondrous ideas of how to combine their stories with an area of expertise and just as quickly they talk themselves right out of it. So talk to me about coming up with this idea and then sustaining the energy to write the book from that point of view.

Deborah: Sure. So I am someone who in my training was trained as a performance scholar. That just means I wrote critically about performance, but I also am someone trained as a creative writer. So I was very interested in not just doing a deep dive into a particular performance or a particular person, but in thinking in a very big way about my long time love affair with divas and why I love them and why especially in the course of my lifetime as divas seem to get sort of batted around a bit more and more. I still continued to love them. And so for me, it was really important as a result of that question that kept propelling me over the years to find a way to speak across two genres or at least two genres that is memoir and criticism, and certainly there are models for that.

I just mentioned Margo Jefferson as one model, but it was very important to me to think through as I began to look at the history of divas in this country anyway, to think about how just within the course of my own lifetime, not only on a kind of personal level, but on bigger cultural level, divas were very instrumental in helping us as a country, certainly as various communities within this country. In the case of me, a Mexican-American woman find our way through our place here through a sense of belonging or shared struggle. And so for me, that question led me to situate divas within my life and my life within the role of divas more largely.

Marion: And it works. And I think that’s why I asked you to explain the role of a cultural critic to open up, because you do this beautifully in American Diva. Right from the start you tell us that in your lifetime, the word diva has been transformed from being a symbol of virtuosity into a word of derision. As you wrote it, it caught my heart and I felt it as a cultural truth. And I didn’t quite know exactly the timeline of it, but now I do, because I’ve read the book, it’s now spoken, the word diva, is now spoken as a projectile as in she’s such a diva. So I did a little etymology research and found it isn’t even included in my 1946 copy of Roget’s Thesaurus that I keep on my desk. But in my 1987 edition of the Random House Dictionary, it’s very lovely, “A distinguished female singer.”

They remind us that it comes from the divine. You write in your book that the word can be traced back to Casta Diva, chaste goddess, a line from Bellini’s opera “Norma.” But in my online dictionary today, it defined it as, “A self-important person who is temperamental and difficult to please, typically a woman.”

Deborah: Here we are. Here we are.

Marion: So as soon as I read that, you got my full attention. So why this word? Why did this word now… Books to come out in with what we used to call it, or what we still call in journalism, a news peg? In other words, we need to understand why we’re reading it now. So why now would this word and you?

Deborah: That’s a great question, and I think that we are certainly living in the 21st century in a moment that has truly culminated in more generally the self as brand, cultivating the self as brand, whether that’s online or whether it’s just thinking into the way that consumer culture has infiltrated all of our lives. And I think the diva figure becomes a way to really chart how that process happens. And then of course, it happens on the body of a woman and on the body of a virtuosic woman who has the audacity to be virtuosic in public or demanding in public. So I think that you see the coming together of those things with ongoing misogyny.

So I think that that’s part of why it helps us understand how we got here in the ways that we both are taught to aspire to do those things, but also taught to deride those, and particularly I think a woman or feminine figure who has for a long time given us models for how to assert herself, especially in a public way and not apologize for how excellent she is and how that, but also the diva historically has been associated with excess. So how easily she also becomes a model for kind of unfettered consumption, right?

Marion: Yes.

Deborah: And so I think in many ways, because we are living in the culmination of this, and I chart in the book how, especially during the 1990s, we see the kind of real proliferation of diva everything, a diva girl and diva pop stars and diva everything that we are just living in the aftermath of that. And I was curious to see how we got here.

Marion: And me too. I have to say this repurposed so much of my own life for me. One of my favorite all-time divas is Divine. I was a huge Divine fan, and her show, “Women Behind Bars” was playing downtown in Manhattan when I was young and working in New York at the Truck and Warehouse Theatre. And honestly, I think I went weekly.

Deborah: Oh, I’m so jealous.

Marion: Well, you were just born-

Deborah: I know, I know.

Marion: So it would’ve been hard to take you.

Deborah: I know, but it would… I can be so envious from afar.

Marion: I was very young. I really… I swear to God I was very young. But your book helped me understand why I went almost weekly. At the time, it felt like a subversive act. I mean Divine, born a man, who acted in lots of John Waters movies as a mainstay in alt art, but allowed something in me that I could not have otherwise had words for until I read your book about… And this great line that you say that, “Divas turn our insides out.” Yeah. But that’s me.

In terms of your story as you describe a coming of age in America, you do it beautifully and it includes a lot of Divine and cheap tequila and hooking up with the wrong people. And all I want to say to you is yes, sister, yes, we all have artists-

Deborah: Yes.

Marion: … And songs and wrong people and stops-

Deborah: Yes.

Marion: Along the way that provoke and liberate us, but writing about them is something else entirely. So talk to me about the vulnerability needed to write from such a place of honesty about yours.

Deborah: Thank you for that. I think there is no other way. I think that for me, having written a book about American Diva, I’m often asked, oh, are you a diva? And I said, “It depends on who you ask.” I said, “The people I live with, I’m sure would say I am.” But in the book, it was very important for me to show myself as a kind of bumbling acolyte to really inhabit the space of vulnerability, of risk, of not knowing. So that the reader could also see my sense of discovery, could see the really powerful impact that divas had in teaching me how to become who I wanted to become.

And so the position of the narrator there, or the self that I create as a writer in the book, I was very lucky. I had dear friends who were readers who kept pushing me, and especially in the Divine chapter to show more of that vulnerability. I recall one of them, a dear friend of mine’s idea, said, “It needs more vomit and more blood and shit.” And I was like, “Okay. Oh no, I’m going to have to go all the way there.” But I do think that meant more risk, which meant more vulnerability. And I think because this is a book about learning from divas, I had to have a narrator who was not all knowing, who actually was learning along the way and making those kinds of mistakes and learning from a diva that you could come back from mistakes and you could come back from all of that struggle. So that was, I think, important for me as a writer to learn.

Marion: I just love “bumbling acolyte.” It’s my new favorite thing. I’m going to use that, I teach memoir, and I’m going to use-

Deborah: Oh great.

Marion: That as the person we can be that we should inhabit when we’re looking at things, people, songs, pieces of art, whatever that we admire, that we’re picking it up, magnetizing it to our soul somehow. But you do make yourself out to be such a sympathetic character as your friends are holding your hair as you’re puking into the toilet after too much cheap tequila. I was like, yep-

Deborah: Yep-

Marion: … Been there.

Deborah: … Been there.

Marion: Yep, yeah. Okay. And the other thing, there’s so many things about this book I love, but it includes photos, my favorite of which, and it gets back to Divine, it’s Grace Jones and Divine at Xenon. I remember Xenon well. Oh dear God.

Deborah: Yes.

Marion: Well kind of.

Deborah: Yeah, exactly. People over there-

Marion: A little bit.

Deborah: … Don’t remember it as well sometimes.

Marion: Yeah, that’s a little fuzzy. And anyway, and it’s amid this wonderful lyrical set of pages about what a diva is. My favorite line from which it is that, “The diva shamelessly insists that the spotlight shine on her darkness.” And you say that she shows us how to draw upon her difference as the very source of her power, that it’s no wonder that those of us living on the social margins often turn to a diva as a guide for how to live along the fault lines. Wow. I get it. What you said at the beginning, I just wanted to show the audience here that you do this, you show up as using these people as your models for living on the fault lines, and you show us this in the book, but there are several large themes in this book, divas, living on the margins, feminism to name just a couple.

And so again, my audience is writers, and sometimes they’re confounded when the themes are so big. So I guess the question as writer to writer is did you make a list of themes or did you make a timeline, or did you drink just an enormous amount of caffeine and slam things down? I mean, how did you choose and organize your thoughts? This is a lot of people that you bring in with you, but it’s also a lot of thematic braiding.

Deborah: Yes, it is. So part of it took me a really long time to write this book.

Marion: Ten years, is that right?

Deborah: Ten years. Ten years. Which meant because it started out as more criticism and then it went more memoir. And then I found I was not happy with either one of those pathways. And I think the reason it is in the registers that it is in which is this moving back and forth between memoir and criticism, was precisely because there were so many themes and so many people populating it. And so the way that I managed it was that I focused often on a particular story or a particular diva that really did have an impact or that I confected with in a particular moment. So the story of my mother and me watching West Side Story over and over with Rita Moreno or the story of my great aunt who was a very important figure in my life, and I wrote and wrote and wrote into those figures. And as I wrote and wrote into them, I sort of tried to then cull from that, what were the kind of themes or ideas? What was this diva teaching me about? And in the case of my great aunt, she was teaching me about style.

So then there was one version of the book that was like thematic, the style chapter. And then I thought, well, yes, it’s the style chapter, but I still want it to be the story of a particular person and a particular moment in my life. And I think the thing clicked when I said, “Okay, talk about situation versus story.” So I wanted the story to be my life. So if the chapter then became framed with where was I in that particular moment in my life, a teenager or an early teen, and then I used that moment in my life or that moment in history, if it was the 80s, let’s say, or 70s, to play out the theme and the person. So the timeline in my life became important. Sometimes that’s the case in memoir, it’s sort of linear, but it wasn’t exclusively just linear that guided me, but it was usually about focusing on particular moments.

Marion: Yes.

Deborah: So a moment, it was just that particular performance of Aretha Franklin’s in 1992.

Marion: Yes.

Deborah: Then sets us off into what’s happening in the 90s. So as a performance scholar, I learned how a performance, if you can just focus even on one small moment, you can actually tell the story of a decade. So that was helpful.

Marion: Absolutely. I frequently have tried to explain to people that weren’t alive then what it meant when Jim Morrison showed up in low slung leather pants.

Deborah: Yes. Oh, sure. Absolutely.

Marion: It changed everything.

Deborah: Yes.

Marion: And they were, they were just below the hip bone. It was a thing.

Deborah: Yes. You could see that little part of like… Yep.

Marion: Right.

Deborah: Yep. Absolutely.

Marion: So let’s drill into this a bit more.

Deborah: Sure.

Marion: Your great aunt is just a spectacular character, and you write that divas helped you become a Brown feminist writer, artist and mother of a certain age. And that got right into my soul as I read it, because it reminded me of the people I’ve admired and where they led me. It’s a fascinating assignment to make this kind of a line of people to look at one’s life this way, to make a list of these people and experiences then expose the internal change provoked by the other person, whether they be celebrities or family members. And so you’ve got your great aunt in there, and I wonder if you might, for the writers listening, just drill into that a little bit more about what kind of details are best to utilize. I mean, here’s this book on divas. I saw some pretty spectacular photos of shoes. I saw some pretty spectacular writing about what people wear and what is left behind when they go. And so what kind of detail could you teach right here, right now about how to portray this kind of indelible mark on your soul from somebody?

Deborah: I think if we take the example of my Great Aunt Lucia in the book, it was very important to me… She was a gambler. And so I thought, okay, where to go with that? And one of the details that I think was very important for me, which I think perhaps could be helpful to others, was looking at and figuring out what could come of just sitting with the charm bracelet she had passed along to me from loss that she had gotten in Las Vegas. And the charm bracelet has, as is pictured in the book, a couple of dice that you can unclasp and roll. And I think that the focus on a particular, in this case, just a piece of jewelry, on a particular image or a particular piece of material culture sometimes can actually unlock all the things you… Or some of the things, right? Or at least put you on the path to unlocking some of the really important bigger ideas that chapter is about.

Because the diva teaches us how to gamble it all, how to lose it all, how to come back from losing it all. It teaches us how to responsible with money in this case as she was, the kind of mess. So I think that those particular details, sometimes we start with something that isn’t even a story yet. Sometimes we have stories from the past and that can be the entryway in, but sometimes we don’t even have a story, but we have some piece of remnant. And I think that spending time with that charm bracelet led me down a road to tell a bigger story about her.

Marion: Yeah, it’s beautiful. And I think that gives people permission. The artifacts, I remember the way… I don’t know what you call it on the zipper, the thing that you pulled down. You know that-

Deborah: Oh, yes.

Marion: Yeah. I remember the way my mother’s used to bounce when she danced.

Deborah: Oh yes.

Marion: And it had a thing about. So we are able to convey so much, but I say to people, run your hands over some stuff.

Deborah: Yes.

Marion: And go look at somebody’s material objects. They’ll be there for you in those. And it’s helpful.

Deborah: Yes.

Marion: So I want to talk a little bit about your poetic eye because you are a well-published poet, and your 2020 book, Year of the Dog was a winner of the Writers League of Texas Poetry Award and a finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Award for best poetry book. And The New York Times called it a “new and notable poetry book.” These are real accomplishments, and you utilize your poetic talent, I think all through the book. But in a particular one moment there when you do this poetic interlude in the book, which is composed entirely of headlines and pronouncements from popular news articles that appeared between January 1998 and December 1999, and it shows many things, not the least of which is that by the end of the 1990s, the term diva was everywhere. And then by the end of the 20th century it was, as you say, a train wreck, which is fascinating. So what I want to drill into is that poetic interlude. What is it about the discipline or precision or whatever you think it is about poetry that it helps inform writing?

Deborah: Yeah, I definitely feel like in my heart of hearts, I think I’m always a poet, which is probably why I became a performance scholar because I think both the poet and the person who is invested in or interested in watching performance, there’s so much of a dwelling with a moment and often a fleeting moment, live performance, if it’s not recorded, it only lives on in your detailed memory of it. And so I think that deep attentiveness is something that can serve us regardless of whatever we’re writing.

And also I think that poetic sensibility that doesn’t always work in a kind of logical way, but sometimes can be associative or sometimes can be speculative or otherwise, can give us a way to make sense of or an argument about an issue. So in the case of the poetic interlude in the chapter about the 1990s, I had amassed with the help of my research assistants, all of these news articles about divas and various ways of thinking about how anybody can now be a diva. And I thought, how am I going to talk about this or how do I approach this? And I tried to come at it as a cultural critic, and it was just kind of dry and boring. And then I tried to come at it in the memoir way and it was just sort of predictable or it wasn’t really resonating. And then I thought, well, poetry gives me a form to maybe play with this or to sort of show the saturation of that discourse.

And I did it by what we call an Abecedarian poem where it’s like A through Z, and the lines are just A through Z, and it kind of shows a way to catalog something from A to Z. when I figured out that I guess poets can be attentive to form in really acute ways. And once I realized as a poet, I had those tools to really show how deeply saturated in this language we were in the 90s, it provided that platform.

Marion: I love that answer, and I get it completely. And another phrase you’ve just given me is deep attentiveness along with bumbling acolyte, I’m going to teach-

Deborah: Happy to have…

Marion: … Two, to deep attentiveness-

Deborah: Given them…

Marion: I just think it’s fabulous. So let’s stick with the poetry for a minute. You were part of the 2009 founding of CantoMundo, a national organization that cultivates a community of Latinx poets. You hold workshops, symposium, public greetings, and it hosts an annual poetry workshop that provides a space for the creation, documentation, and critical analysis of Latinx poetry. And thank you for that. You teach at Columbia Center for Study of Ethnicity and Race. So let’s talk a bit about this climate we’re currently in in America and the importance of seeing oneself on the library shelves. I would love you to speak to this if you would. What’s at stake when we in some places in this country return to a place where we cannot locate ourselves in the libraries?

Deborah: I think everything’s at stake. I think that there’s a way in which, particularly for what we think of as Latinx communities or Latina communities right now, there’s both a kind of hyper visibility or hyper surveillance of Brown bodies, of immigrant Latino bodies and a simultaneous kind of erasure or lack of presence in popular culture. So we’re surveilled and we are like the impending crisis at the border or on the buses pouring into New York City or whatever it is. The story is being kind of thrown at us and yet still are not often depicted, whether it’s on television or in stories in literary stories. Although young adult novels I think are doing a really good job at trying to push that along.

Marion: I agree, I agree that form is doing a nice job.

Deborah: They really are. I have so much admiration and some wonderful writers. And so I think that as a result, I think that’s why in part it was so important for me to begin the book with that sentence that you quoted earlier, or you alluded to what comes before that, which is that the sound of the diva’s voice was how I knew we were Mexican.

Marion: Yes.

Deborah: Meaning that I came to know of myself through hearing the voice of this Mexican-American diva, and the way my family responded to it. And I think that alone shows how the sounds of or the sights of something that is powerfully… Even if we don’t fully understand it in the moment, which I didn’t at quite first, the sound of that or the site or the connection with that representation can be so important. And also though I think it’s important for us to constantly question the terms of our visibility. Is it only the story of our trauma that wants to be sort of promoted? Not really interested in that either.

Marion: Yeah, I think it’s the curse and challenge of living in interesting times. But I think I’d love to speak just a bit more about what we gain by the diversity of voices. I got to listen to your recorded poetry at the Poetry Foundation. I know the diversity of voices we still have or are assured to get in many of this nation’s state libraries and in the curriculum at places like Columbia. So if you would speak to just that, we’ve talked about the downside of taking them off, but the upside of the diversity of voices informs us all about one another is the obvious answer. But what else does it do?

Deborah: I think that it’s so interesting to me because reading or engaging with performance, whether it’s a film or live theater or whatever it is in many ways has always been about the travel from self to other, even if it’s something we relate to. It’s so much been about that. Reading Hamlet is about the travel from self to other. I am not a Danish king. And so to me, reading Hamlet is no different from reading Toni Morrison or reading a writing by a trans writer in the sense that even reading another writer who may be Mexican-American from Texas. Because it’s, again, the experience is going to be different. And so I think that being able to encounter these works through art gives us that gift to travel from self to other, which is just so crucial for the development of empathy, which seems to be extremely hard to come by these days. Yeah, I think that that’s just one of the most important functions of art in general.

Marion: I agree. And that was beautifully put, self to other. So as we wrap this up, I would love to just say to everyone listening, first of all, they’ve got to buy the book, they’ve got to read the book. And one of the wonderful reasons they have to read the book is because of the laying on of hands that you let your daughter inherit as you turn the Venus and Serena Williams story into a bedtime story. So just give us a little insight into that as we wrap this up today, please, because that’s a diva story for the ages.

Deborah: It is. I’ll say part of what was important to me in making one of the interventions I was hoping to make in the book was divas are often associated with singularity, don’t play well with others, all that stuff. And yet they taught me deeply about relations, and they really are the way I learned how to be in relation to so many people and Venus and Serena and the way they were in relation to one another was in addition to them just being phenomenally and unapologetically talented Black girls and then women, that was also I think, part of their allure.

And so in the chapter about… I noticed in the turn of the 21st century, there’s sort of all this diva stuff put on girlhood, and it was around the time when Venus and Serena were ascending, and I was like many people so angry at how they were treated when they were girls.

Marion: Yep.

Deborah: And I had a daughter and I wanted that chapter in particular, also have a valence of rage. I’m just raging. And so I thought, well, how do I teach my daughter how to be in this world? I’m going to tell her the story of Venus and Serena, which is at once inspiring and cautionary.

Marion: Yes.

Deborah: And the divas taught us that.

Marion: Well, I think it’s the perfect bedtime story for then, now, and the future. And I can’t thank you enough for telling it. I can’t thank you enough for writing the book. Thank you so much for coming along today as well. I hope the book does as well as it deserves to do it. It’s just a joy to read.

Deborah: Thank you so much, Marion. It’s been such a pleasure.

Marion: You’re welcome. The author is Deborah Paredez. See more on her at Deborah Paredez dot com. Her new book is American Diva, just out from W.W. Norton. Get it everywhere books are sold. I’m Marion Roach Smith. You’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at Overit studios dot com. Our producer is Jacqueline Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of the Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes in how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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