Reviewed by Pedro Ponce
5.14.07

by Amy Fusselman
144pp
Counterpoint, 2007
$17.00SF Weekly New York Times Magazine article by the author Buy the Book

Amy Fusselman’s March 2001 debut, The Pharmacist’s Mate, introduced readers to the author’s trademark collage style. In keenly observed fragments—some as short as a sentence—Fusselman narrated her experiences trying to get pregnant while coming to terms with her father’s death. By turns glib and moving, Mate evokes the shellshock of reaching adulthood, when personal landmarks like marriage, career, and family are tempered by a growing awareness of their transience.

8: A Memoir picks up where Mate leaves off. Fusselman, now a mother of two, faces new challenges: “People can read books and watch children at the same time, for instance. Of course, both the reading of the books and the watching of the children will be performed in a way best described as half-assed.” While similar in scale to its predecessor, 8 is much more ambitious in scope, covering such topics as monster trucks, the nature of time, figure skating, life after 9/11, biodynamic craniosacral therapy, the metaphysics of the Beastie Boys, and how to become a licensed scooter driver in New York City.

When it comes to philosophy, Fusselman is no Heidegger or Ricoeur. “Time is inside humans and outside humans and they learn in it,” she muses in one of her early chapters. “Their learning cannot be divorced from it. Which is to say they learn—tick tick tick—by doing the same thing over and over until they are good at it or they abandon it.” Fusselman’s penchant for digressions and scene-ending punch-lines can at times blunt the force of her insights and mannered humor. At the same time, her fumbling, fragmentary style often yields moments of sublime clarity.

In dissecting our everyday experiences, Fusselman insinuates a surreal quality to the familiar reminiscent of authors like Cortázar and Millhauser: “Time is the annoying thing I wear on my wrist. Time is the thing that ticks on without me. Time is the round sculpture on the wall with numbers that I look at occasionally to help me figure out where I am in my day.” And if Fusselman doesn’t have all the answers, it is because one of her central themes—our relationship to time—has none of the linear logic we take for granted. There is everyday time and there is emotional time, and it is the last that She struggles to come to grips with: “Events in time are not—boom—over. They have tentacles, and they wrap around, and they swish back and forth, and they sink and swim.”

One of these events is the author’s experience of rape, perpetrated when she was a child by a babysitter’s husband. It is an experience that the author approaches gradually, interspersing other narrative layers with unsparing recollections of its effect on her and those around her. But within the chronological mosaic she constructs around it, the rape takes on surprising significance for the adult author and for the reader. “Our story,” observes Fusselman, “is that [children] are in the bubble that is perfect and beautiful and protected by us and we are so nice to do that and we are such good protectors. And child rapists do not come in there, and if they do come in there, they ruin everything forever and ever.” While acknowledging herself as a victim, Fusselman is writing a survivor’s story, one in which she can even thank her abuser “for scaring the living shit out of me so that I could be brave.”

If The Pharmacist’s Mate is a book about loss, 8 is concerned with what remains in its wake. What remains is difficult, provisional, always in progress but also resilient and, at times, joyful. Like the figure 8’s Fusselman recalls practicing as a young figure skater, Fusselman’s latest is intricate, elliptical, and hard-won.