MEDIA

What do you hope readers take away the most from THE WRECK? 

I want people to recognize how we are shaped by histories of power and disempowerment that impact our everyday lives. Those histories give birth to us as much as our parents do. And, our creations, including our healthcare systems, are not separate from those histories either. I hope that this book certainly raises awareness about how healthcare is shaped by gender and race. And while individual advocacy is definitely necessary, it’s not enough to address systems. I think I was naive about my power to address systemic problems. It is not that I didn’t understand the existence of inequity. But I didn’t always accept the durability of it. Without realizing it, I’d bought into the idea I’d been taught from a young age, that if Black people present themselves as respectable and assimilated, they can get around mistreatment. But that’s not how systems work. You don’t manipulate your way out of systemic oppression. 

I often think about the fact that one of the doctors who tried to tell me Black women weren’t infertile was Black herself. She was educated in a system and a culture that made her believe that. That’s the power of the systemic. I want readers to feel empowered to talk back to those systems instead of figuring out how to work around them. Telling our stories can make us a noisy collective and that’s a powerful thing. But to do that we have to throw off the shame we’ve been assigned.

This book is also a note to all those folks out there struggling with infertility, many of them in silence—a little note to say, I see you. You are not selfish, you are not foolish, you are not insufficient. And please, show anyone who says you are any of these things, to the door. 

The book’s story moves fluidly between the past and present, following your research into a horrific car accident in the 1960s that killed five members of your family as well as your experience of trying to conceive your first child in a neglectful modern healthcare system. What drew you to combine these two narratives into one memoir?

For me, the story of past family and the possibility of a future one were always intuitively connected. Because the wreck took place before I was born, it functioned as a kind of ambiguous loss, invisible to outsiders, but profoundly present in my family’s lives. So much of what was happening in my childhood—my father’s drinking, my mother’s obsessive homemaking—originated in that accident. I think ambiguous loss has this way of collapsing our sense of time and history—making it feel more circular than linear. My experience of infertility was another kind of ambiguous loss, something that thoroughly impacted me that was mostly hidden from others. My longing for a child had everything to do with my longing for the mothers I had lost in the wreck. 

The book is both a memoir and a call to action, encouraging readers to fight for improved care for Black Americans who often fall victim to medical malpractice and neglect. Why is this still such an important issue today? And how can individuals best use their voices to improve things? 

I think we have to start with the premise that everyone should have the right to the highest standard of healthcare and acknowledge the fact that American healthcare systems were not built on that presumption. Racial segregation in healthcare essentially meant that Black people had no right to care. I think I, along with a lot of people, have been a bit forgetful and naïve about the recentness of that practice and the reality that we are living with the fall out of that system. It wasn’t until I was researching this book that I discovered that my own siblings were born in a colored ward. I had such a hard time wrapping my head around this fact that I must have told everyone I know, and they all looked as stupefied as I did. If we can accept that the system was unequal by design, we have a better chance of rooting out and addressing systemic inequities. And that requires work. Occasionally, students tell me that they were taught that change for the better happens because of the passing of time—like we are all riding an escalator to a world that is morally and ethically better than the current one. I think that’s an incredibly disempowering viewpoint—like we should all just wait out oppression. Change requires a lot of work, investigation and activism, testimony, and lots of voices demanding equity and accountability. 

You write to your future daughter, “the body is a story that does not end with the body.” What does this mean to you?

I think that our stories are inseparable from the stories of our bodies, but when our bodies come to an end, the story can continue to live and even grow, most often through our descendants who seek meaning in those narratives. There’s a chapter in the book that is united by the theme of storytelling as this powerful practice that allowed me to learn about my ancestors. Honestly, there weren’t a lot of these stories, but when my extended family gathered, they often told the same ones over and over again. The stories were always about moments when my grandmother experienced danger and hardship, moments when she put her body at risks to resist oppression. My family found inspiration in those accounts and thus the stories became a way to recreate what they lost when she was killed in the wreck. Storytelling was a way for us to reconstitute a lost family. The telling was an empowering way of working through trauma through language. 

THE WRECK includes epigraphs from The Bluest Eye and Beloved by Toni Morrison. What drew you to the quotations you chose? Do you see common themes between Morrison’s work and the story you tell in THE WRECK?

This question makes me think about how Russian realist writers were said to have all come out of Gogol’s “Overcoat,” which is a both the title of Nikolai Gogol’s famous short story but also a metaphor for Gogol’s influence on a generation of writers. I don’t think there is an artist working today who didn’t come out of Morrison’s overcoat. Her work allowed so many Black people, including me, to imagine themselves as writers and see Black life as the inspiration for literature. 

I chose those specific quotes because they are about memory and Morrison’s characterizations of memory have really helped me to understand what I’m trying to do in my writing. She called memory “a form of willed creation,” and she distinguished it from research which she argued was about finding out the way “it really was.” She said that memory was about “dwell[ing] on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way.” I remember reading that and thinking, OMG that’s what memoir is. Ironically Morrison never published a memoir and famously cancelled a memoir contract—i.e., she was smarter than me. But in her fiction, she sought inspiration in memory.

The two quotes I chose are about this idea of memory as creation. One is the voice of a daughter talking about a memory of her mother and she’s questioning whether her memory and what happened are really the same. I think this is an important admission for any memoirist because you can’t recreate the experience. You’re always going to be conveying your impression of what happened and that may not match anyone else’s. 

The other quote is from the perspective of a mother who is explaining to her daughter how memory is not just a recollection, but instead is a thing that takes up space in the world and thus we are always revisiting and reliving ours and others’ memories, including and especially the most traumatic ones. She warns her daughter not to go back to a place that hurt her. But of course, the past shows up anyway because it’s never really escapable. This quote captures so much my family’s story. It was as if our attempts to repress the past only made it more present in everything. 

I love both quotes because they capture this idea of memory as a living thing that we spend our lives struggling to make sense of. 

During your fertility treatments, you talk or pray to your late family members about your hope to continue their lineage. Now that you are a mother, what are some of the most important parts of their legacy that you hope to pass on to your children?

I try to pass on this idea of our connectedness to the past. I want my kids to take pride in the remarkable resilience of their ancestors, while also wanting them to understand that their ancestors would hope that the world would not demand as much resilience of their grandchildren and great grandchildren. I find Black resilience to be this dangerously fine line where we tell Black kids that they have to be resilient, that they should have to sustain suffering and if they can’t do that, then that’s on them. When I think of the stories of my grandmother that I heard as a child, so many of them were about her strength, but that strength was always rooted in a kind of tenderness toward her children—this desire to protect them from a world that she knew would not love them. I don’t want that to get lost. I want my kids to know that they deserve that level of protection. 

For more information on THE WRECK or to schedule an interview with Cassandra Jackson, please be in touch with Kristina Fazzalaro: kfazzalaro@prh.com | 212-366-2078