Judy Sandler, author of What Kind of Mother and Rachel Weaver, author of Dizzy, chat about their new books, which are the first two books published under the newly launched Connective Tissue series at West Virginia University Press.
In 2024, Renee K. Nicholson launched Connective Tissue: A Health Humanities and Narrative Medicine Series, a book series published by West Virginia University Press, to bridge the gap between clinical healthcare and personal, lived experiences. Connective Tissue explores the human condition and its intersection with health, illness, and healing through the lens of the humanities and its methodologies, as well as through expressive creative works that illuminate people’s lived experience with health, illness, and medicine. This series seeks to publish books that cover innovative approaches to healthcare, integrating expressive arts and humanities practices into health settings, as well as books of creative writing that artfully render stories of illness, disability, and healthcare.
Rachel Weaver’s Dizzy: A Memoir, and Judy Sandler’s What Kind of Mother: A Reckoning are the first two books of the Connective Tissue series. Although the subjects of the books are very different, universal themes common to stories of narrative medicine emerge from both books. In conversation with them, Weaver and Sandler take a close look at topics such as truth in memoir, structure, form, and vulnerability in writing stories of narrative medicine.
Weaver’s Dizzy is a braided memoir of her time working in the backcountry of Alaska and her time in the medical world as a chronically ill patient with a mysterious illness:
As a young woman, the stunning loss of Rachel’s father sent her seeking the edges of adventure working on boats and in the wildness of Alaska; a stress test of sorts to be ready for the next catastrophe by keeping catastrophe close. But it wasn’t the bear who stuck his head into her tent, or the shipwreck in cold Canadian waters, or the waterspout four hundred miles out in the South Sargasso Sea that brought Rachel to her knees. It was clinicians in clean white coats and an undefinable, debilitating illness.
Over the course of eighteen years, Rachel would see over forty medical practitioners, face hostility and indifference, be accused of making it all up, go broke, wonder if she really was making it all up, and be subjected to endless drugs and invasive procedures in her search to learn the truth about her body. A medical mystery and a cautionary tale about our broken medical system, Dizzy is a story about perseverance in pursuit of answers, of learning to live with life’s uncertainty, and the struggle to find joy in an imperfect but beautiful world.
Judy Sandler’s What Kind of Mother: A Reckoning is a mother’s memoir that reckons with her son’s descent into severe mental illness.
What appears to be substance use disorder in high school, later becomes a dual diagnosis as bipolar disorder emerges. Her son soon grows disillusioned with prescribed pharmaceuticals and participates in a residential treatment program that assists people in forgoing medication altogether. However, the program ultimately ejects him from the community for the very behaviors that the medication once managed.
Written in short chapters, in a sometimes humorous, but always honest voice, the book chronicles Sandler’s initial denial of her truth, her painful awakening to mental illness in her family, and her eventual acceptance that she cannot save her son–only he can save himself.
There are so many memories and experiences from your life to pick from, it can be overwhelming to decide what goes in a memoir and what does not. How did you decide what to spend words on and what not to?
Judy: When I was working towards my MFA in creative nonfiction writing, a common refrain from classmates was, “Can you tell me more about that?” Or, “Go deeper with that, I want to know that character better.” But the truth is, in writing a memoir, even when you narrow down your idea to, for example, my experiences raising my son who is diagnosed with bipolar disorder, you have to narrow the lens to what was happening only to you. In this case, I had to remind myself that this is my story, not my son’s. My words need to be spent on how I experienced my son’s bipolar episodes.
My story overlaps with other people–my family, my husband, our friends, doctors, therapists, and I needed to include these scenes in the story, but it’s not about my marriage, or my other children, or how I maintained a job teaching third grade while this was happening. I spent a lot of time editing the manuscript for anything that would be considered “someone else’s story,” and re-focusing the scenes so that the piece reflected, to the best of my ability, what was happening to me; in my body, around me, in my head– when these events occurred.
Rachel: In the crafting of Dizzy, I faced two main problems: the many doctor appointments in which no one could figure out what was the source of the dizziness were repetitive and the braiding in my experiences as a field biologist in Alaska was disjointed. The two braids only vaguely seemed to go together. It wasn’t until I landed on the similar thematic element that I figured out how to both get the braids to mirror each other and which of my many experiences in Alaska to include. Once I landed on power dynamics as the central theme, I could pick specific doctors appointments in which the power dynamic was evident or at play and things that happened in the backcountry of Alaska in which I was thrown into a power dynamic with the natural world, usually in the form of a 600-800 pound bear, but just as often with weather or Forest Service land use politics. With regard to the repetitive doctor appointments, I started focusing on how my response was changing in the face of a consistent, unchanging obstacle. Once I identified that as the signifier for which to include, the construction of the book got a lot easier.
What is your relationship to truth after writing this book?
Judy: It’s such a great question. I have discovered a great deal about truth in memoir from writing this book. In grad school, I wrote a craft paper titled, “The Trouble With Truth in Memoir,” and I read authors on this very subject: Augusten Burroughs, Lee Gutkind, Elissa Altman, Mary Karr and Sue William Silverman, to name a few. And here is what I know: You are allowed to write your truth. I agree with Dinty Moore that you aren’t allowed to make things up, or even exaggerate very much. You do your absolute best to tell your story. It will not be your son’s story, or your mother’s. It is not the way your neighbor might describe it, or your husband. Memory is an unreliable narrator; many factors affect how you remember an experience, such as emotion, personal experience, and attention. Go ahead and ask your sibling to describe a holiday dinner, or an argument between your mother and father. Your memories of that incident will inevitably be very different. I learned from writing this book that my son and I will never agree on what happened because we lived two different realities. It took me years to understand that concept, and it took me a few more years to explain that to him. We now agree to disagree about what happened. And that’s okay, and as it should be.
Rachel: I stressed out about this the whole time I was writing the book. My brain was foggy and slow due to the illness throughout the entire time frame I was writing about and throughout most of the writing which made me worry I wasn’t remembering things ‘right’. It was a long process of putting myself back into each situation as fully as I could to experience it as deeply as possible and then trusting myself. I had to keep connecting myself to my specific emotional truth in each situation and writing from there. I also worked to think through everyone else’s likely perspective within each scene so that I was aware of what was likely going on around me as I was writing my own experience. This was a slow process, but felt worth it in the end.
Judy, your book is a series of scenes and fragments, often quite short and always whip-like. Rachel, yours is a braided narrative of your time around bears and your time around clinicians. How did you each decide to use these particular structures?
Judy: I did an interview recently where I was asked, “If your book was a bird, what kind of bird would it be?” My answer was a hummingbird. First, I live with ADHD, and I write in short bursts. I can write for a few hours in the morning, but then after that, I will come back to a piece like a hummingbird to a feeder; in short bursts. I like to read flash pieces, I like the intensity of them and the importance of each word in the writing. I wanted the reader to feel the experience in the same way that I did. In order for that to happen, I decided the chapters should be concentrated, powerful descriptions, without a lot of explanation about background. I think readers are smart and figure out the back story, if the writer pushes on with the scenes with enough pace and vivid detail. The book is written in the same way I remembered the events, which is not necessarily chronological, but feels more fragmented and as you describe, “whip-like.”
Rachel: I wrote the medical braid first in a marathon seven twelve-hour days at a writing residency in Wyoming. It was too disruptive to go back to all those difficult years in short bursts while I was attending to all the rest of my life’s responsibilities- young kids, a job, laundry, etc. It was easier to go back there and stay there in my mind and heart to capture it fully on the page. This was emotionally draining and I spent about 8 months recovering from those 7 days. When I finally came back to the book, I knew it was too much of the same thing. The reader would need a break from the devastating medical mystery and the book needed a wider focus. I asked myself what the book was really about, what I was trying to say. This took a long time to answer. Once I realized I wanted the book to add to the wider discussion of power dynamics in the clinical setting, the braid of power dynamics in the natural world came into focus. I was interested in how and why we fall into the roles of submissive patient and dominant clinician and the ways in which it serves and does not serve both parties as opposed to the roles of submission and dominance we fall into when we cross paths with bears in the backcountry.
To write a memoir is to make yourself vulnerable in the world. Emily Rapp Black, who wrote The Still Point of the Turning World about her terminally ill son, reports that she often was told, “I would die if I were you”, from other mothers who had read her story. How have you dealt with the vulnerability inherent in putting your books out in the world?
Judy: Along the same lines as “I would die if I were you,” I often get the comment, “You are so brave.” But I did not write this book to be brave, or to focus attention on my story. In fact, the desire to publish the manuscript came more out of a frustration with my own shame and silence. I think I was tired, no, I was exhausted, from pretending mental illness had somehow escaped my family, and all was perfectly fine. And when I started to look closely, I realized not only was I not alone in my experience of having a child with mental illness, but chances were very good (one in five, according to National Alliance on Mental Illness) that the people with whom I was speaking had a child, mother, sister, brother, husband, who also had a mental illness. I suppose publishing this story makes me vulnerable, but I prefer to think of it as just telling the truth. If more people told the truth about their relationship with mental illness, writing a book like this and putting it out there would not have to be considered an act of bravery.
Rachel: I get vulnerability hangovers after some interviews. I’m an inherently private person. I wrote an essay about my medical journey years ago and was astounded by how many people reached out to say they too had gone through something similar. I had so many real, important conversations with strangers-turned-immediate-friend. It made me realize how powerful it can be for people when you put words to an experience many of us are having. It made me feel writing the book might be worth the personal emotional intensity and the resulting vulnerability. The emails I’ve gotten from other chronically ill people, the deeply moving conversations I’ve had with readers in the six months since the book published have definitely made me feel it was worth it.
Dizzy: A Memoir by Rachel Weaver
What Kind of Mother: A Reckoning by Judy Sandler
