The Voice of Nancy Mairs

[bibliogramma]

Plaintext
Remembering the Bone House
Carnal Acts
Ordinary Time
Voice Lessons
Waist-High in the World
A Troubled Guest

Nancy Mairs is a skilled practitioner of the art of the personal essay that explores a universal truth. I’ve read seven volumes of her essays – most recently Carnal Acts – and have continued to be profoundly moved, both emotionally and intellectually, by her work.

Her themes are often universal – memory, the body, sexuality, love, the creative impulse, the relationship of live and death, the spirit. She addresses these through the material of her life and that of her friends and family, through her experiences as a child, a woman, a mother, a writer, a person of faith, a person who questions, a lover, a person living with multiple sclerosis, an teacher, an antiwar and social justice activist.

Carnal Acts is a collection of essays, speeches and one short story, most of which foreground the issues of disability and the body – specifically the female body – but also address many of Mairs’ other key themes. In two introductory essays, in this volume, Mairs does not deal as directly with disability issues as she does in the rest of the volume, but rather takes as her theme writing about the body, its physicality – as a woman, her voice issuing out of a woman’s physical, carnal body. A key passage in understanding the focus of Mairs’ work, from a selection on columns written for the New York Times (“The ‘Hers’ Columns):

By ridiculing or trivializing women’s utterance, men seek to control what is and is not considered important. Weighty, worthwhile in the world.

I, for one, was an awfully well-bred girl who grew up into a Yankee lady. From infancy, the language slipped into my mouth was scrubbed as clean as my rattles and teething rings; and to this day, I wince at the possibility that I might be thought rude. A man’s sneer shrivels me. But I guess that’s just what I’m going to have to be: rude. Because if women are ever going to be really heard, people (including women themselves) are going to have to get used to the sound of their voices and the subjects they believe worth discussing. So I, for one, intend to keep telling the truth about myself as a woman: what I see, who I love, where I hurt, why I laugh.

In doing so, Mairs talks frankly and carnally about being a person with a major, visible and degenerative disability. Many of the “carnal acts” Mairs discusses are acts of the body – and increasingly dis-abled body; they are also acts of everyday courage in the face of fears that she also talks about, frankly and carnally.

Especially moving for me is one essay, “Faith and Loving in Las Vegas,” where Mairs talks about her experiences at an antiwar protest. She chooses to commit, with other protesters, an act of civil disobedience that will result in an arrest, knowing that as a pwd (person with a disability) and a wheelchair user she faces concerns that an able-bodied protester would not, but also facing the fact that, under some circumstances, her disability status will separate her and possibly shield her from the experiences her fellow protesters will face.

In the end, the most carnal act Mairs commits, and commits again and again, is the act of speech about an embodied life – for Mairs, this embodiment is both as a woman and as a pwd, and intersectionality fraught with many meanings, many pains and many joys.