A Book Is A Bomb: Read the New Afterword to Grace Talusan's Memoir "The Body Papers"

Back in 2017, we awarded the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing to Grace Talusan’s memoir The Body Papers. As Anjali Singh and Ilan Stavans wrote in their judges’ citation, Talusan “incisively navigates the ambiguities of identity that immigrants constantly face… with the diligence and courage of a true writer.” Since then, her silence-breaking memoir has connected with readers around the country, and was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Critics’ Pick for 2019. Immigration, family, abuse, cancer, fertility, love, what it means to be Filipino-American: in The Body Papers, Talusan untangles the most profound questions of her life and transforms them into art. It’s out now in paperback, with discussion questions, an author Q&A, and a new afterword. Here, we’re thrilled to share with you the afterword in full.

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I never set out to write a memoir.

I had never considered myself a subject worth writing about. So I wrote fiction populated by the sorts of characters I observed in my life in a homogenous New England town and who were also reflected in the movies, TV shows, plays, and books that I consumed. In other words, I wrote about white people, who in my mind were the only kinds of people one could write about.

I would brace myself whenever an Asian figure appeared onscreen or on the page because it meant contending with caricatured depictions that would attach themselves to me like a ghost or a stench. No matter their gender or ethnicity or time period, the character became a part of me, not only in my own ideas of myself, but in how the people around me understood me and treated me. Long Duk Dong, wartime prostitutes, wise karate masters, model minorities, dragon ladies, physicians—the lists of torments are long.

I was a voracious reader throughout childhood, and yet it wasn’t until thousands of books into my reading life, when I was about to graduate high school, that I encountered Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior and Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club. There I was, finally, not as a side character in service to protagonist or as a joke, but a consciousness allowed all its complexity and humanity. I was not a caricature or a stereotype or racist fantasy of the Asian or the so-called “Oriental.” As rich and varied as my reading diet was, my imagination had been curtailed and I didn’t even realize my own profound absence and invisibility from literature until I saw myself appear. Maxine Hong Kingston led me to Amy Tan, who led me to Jessica Hagedorn and others. I read intentionally from then on, and I felt a space open up for what was possible in writing and storytelling.

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A long time passed between knowing that I wanted to be a writer and publishing my first book.

When I would share the news that I had been published in a literary magazine, my immigrant father would always want to know how much I was paid and then try to work out how much per hour I had earned researching, writing, and revising the piece. I stopped telling him when I published because I could not take the baffled, disappointed look in his eyes and his questions about the value of something called “contributor’s copies” and “exposure.”

While writing the pieces that became this book, I was trolled by terrible questions: Who cares? Why bother? I considered stopping many times. A few things kept me going, including the feeling that I was already so close. I wanted to pay back what other writers had done for me with their books by putting my own out into the world. I also thought of you, anonymous readers (who I hoped to meet while on tour for the book) and wanted to tell you that our stories do matter and that you should tell yours. But I could not cross this final distance alone.

When I saw the call for submissions for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, I felt hope. It was like reading about myself as a writer. I entered the contest and promptly forgot about it. By then, I’d trained myself to think of submitting my work as the success, not the outcome. I could not believe the news when I found out that I had won and that I would publish my book. People have asked me what it’s like to publish a book, but for me the real moment of transformation came when I won the contest and knew that the door I had been knocking on for a long time had finally opened for me.

A few days after receiving the news, I met my publisher, Ilan Stavans, and one of the first things he said to me was, “A book is a balm.” We were eating lunch; I had never eaten lunch with a publisher before. I kept stabbing at my green salad without bringing the fork to my lips. When Ilan said “balm” I instantly relaxed, almost smelling the honey-scented beeswax balm that my occupational therapist used to massage my typing arms.

Ilan looked confused at my reaction and then repeated the phrase, “A book is a balm.” He asked if I had elephant skin because I needed to be ready for what would happen after my memoir was published. Relationships and other things would change.

Oh. I had misheard. Ilan meant bomb as in B-O-M-B, not balm as in B-A-L-M.

I spiked with anxiety. Change, even good change, frightens me. One of my earliest experiences was leaving my home, my language, my culture, and everyone I knew and loved, including my yaya, the young woman who cared for me around the clock. But even in that moment when I could have changed my mind, still I was certain that I wanted to publish this book. I was afraid of the unknown, but I also trusted the folks at Restless Books to lead me over this borderline.

I experience the world as an ongoing series of border crossings, and since the book was published, I’ve felt as though I’ve crossed another border into a new country. I have landed in this foreign land with a new identity, and I continue to learn what it means to be the author of this memoir. For so many years, I dreamed of publishing a book and wondered (and sometimes despaired about) whether I ever would. And now I know. To be a person whose dream came true is something I am still adjusting to.

During the production of this book, a family member made his own eternal crossing. At Thanksgiving, cousin Ramon, an early supporter of my writing, said aloud what everyone was wondering: “I am dying.”

His cancer treatments did not seem to be working. He told me he had preordered my book, but I did the grim math of cancer and asked my publisher to mail an advanced reader’s copy as soon as possible. And then I questioned this decision, remembering a quote by Annie Dillard: “Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”

Did my cousin really want to spend any of his precious remaining time reading my book? I did not want to enrage him with triviality and I didn’t want to bum him out with my trauma. I wondered, Why do we tell the stories that we do? Who are they for? What good would my book do for a man facing his imminent mortality?

After New Year’s, Ramon texted me: “Grace, I read your book twice & every time I cried. I can relate to a lot of situations especially now in the stage of my life. Sometimes someone close to you will hurt you. I am getting strength & learning from your book. I feel like I am carrying the cross for my family & it’s getting heavier every day.”

The next time I saw my cousin, he could no longer communicate and my family and I took turns at a bedside vigil. At the funeral mass, his brother talked about how my book had been my cousin’s companion these past few months. I liked that idea and understood it. Books had been my companions during the worst times of my life. I was grateful that my cousin felt my presence through my book during what I can only imagine as the loneliest time of a person’s life, fully conscious that every moment is a departure, a once and for all.

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Not everything has been wonderful. While the book was being made, the old depression, anxiety, and PTSD symptoms returned with a vengeance. I made things worse by hiding from those closest to me because I felt guilty about feeling such grief and fear when this good thing I had been waiting for my whole life was imminent. A few weeks before I was supposed to travel across the country, I was in the ER with pneumonia and almost cancelled my book tour.

During those fever dreams, my low-oxygen mind felt certain that there was not a world where both me and my book could exist. I know how dramatic that sounds, but I thought I would die before my publication date. I imagined the air in my lungs displacing with fluid as I silently, slowly drowned in plain view. This would be my punishment for telling my story.

And yet I didn’t die. What did die was the version of me that was willing to protect those who did not deserve protection. What left me was any desire to smile and hide how furious I am about what had been allowed to happen to me. This is a fact that will haunt me for the rest of my life. Before I was even born, there were people who could have stopped the runaway train racing toward me and pulled me out from under its wheels before they flattened me against the rails over and over. And yet they did nothing.

Secondhand, I’ve heard the appalling things that some people have said about me and my decision to publish this book, which I will not repeat here, except to answer their questions definitively: No, I did not want it, and as an adult woman, no one, not even my father, has the power to allow or forbid me to do anything, much less share the truth of my own life.

At Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass, the novelist Jenna Blum introduced me at my book launch with this quote by Muriel Rukeyser: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” Once my stories were out there, I could not unsplit the world. I had always been afraid of this rupture, but once I could not contain it, I walked into a new world where I did not have to hide the truth of my life. I did not want to carry the shame for someone else’s crime.

From readers, I’ve heard that my book is a balm. My publisher was also right. A book is a bomb. And if my book has done anything to chip away at the structures upholding inequality and suffering in our society by adding my one voice, or if I’ve helped repay the debt I owe authors before me by helping one reader feel less alone in the world, I choose explosion again and again.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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© Alonso Nichols

Grace Talusan was born in the Philippines and raised in New England. A graduate of Tufts University and the MFA Program in Writing at UC Irvine, she is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines and an Artist Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Talusan teaches at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts and is a longtime member of GrubStreet. She is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University. The Body Papers, winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, is her first book.