Television, a memoir
by Karen Brennan. Four Way Books, March 2022.
Many Lives, Many Selves: a review of Karen Brennan's Television, a memoir
The word “television” has meant different things at different times. For example, in my particular household when I was a kid in the 1980s, the word “television” did not mean “cable.” It did not mean “MTV” or “VH1” like I wished it did. It did mean having to stand up and walk to the physical television—a giant beast of a thing with a depth of probably two feet—to manually turn knobs and press buttons. This is how channels were changed. This is how the volume was adjusted. It is something of an art, turning the volume up or down when one’s ear is so close to the speaker because one is turning it up or down for when one's ears are back on the couch.
In Karen Brennan’s Television, a memoir, the word “television” means many things over the course of the book. In earlier essays, it means “Mama,” a show that ran for most of the 1950s. It means “Lawrence Welk” as well as “Mad Men” and “Big Little Lies.” It means gathering en masse at the home of the neighbor who was first on the street to get a TV. It means being interviewed in front of the camera as a teenager—“princess” of Luxembourg for the International Azalea Festival—in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel. It means binge-watching. It means not having a TV in the house on principle. It means your father buying one for you anyway and you standing silent and seething while your children cheer.
No matter your age now, no matter what the word “television” has or has not meant for you, for each and all of across time us it means the transmission of moving images and sound. It means light blaring behind screen to flicker the impression of life before our very lives.
There are seventy-six essays in Brennan’s memoir. Seventy-six fragments, episodes, channels. Seventy-six full color visions that move and breathe in the imagination suspended. A lifetime in scenes. Excerpts of moments that represent larger stories. Mundanity. Reflection. Heartbreak and devastation play out next to sweetness and surprise. Drama and comedy, and at times the hybrid dramedy, but absolutely no after-school specials. Brennan looks keenly and with curiosity. When writing about her life, especially the most difficult parts, she honors events with honesty and emotion, and by not trying to sum them up neatly. Open endings abound in these seventy-six flash essays. Uncertainty is embraced almost as a matter of identity.
I wasn’t interested in my appearance and when I looked in the mirror, I felt that the face I beheld was not my own. Why this face and no other? I remember wondering. In place of thinking, I dwelled in wondering—not bafflement exactly, but surprise that this or that would be such and such a way, combined with a kind of anxious curiosity. I hoped all things would be revealed to me, sooner or later (Brennan, 8).
Lately, I have been thinking much about the phrase “everything happens for a reason.” My belief is that it does not. My belief is that humans are wired for story and that this narrative drive allows us to make retroactive sense of our lives, sense that we might then see—not as something we participated in, but—as something entirely outside ourselves. One of my favorite things about Television, a memoir, is Brennan’s innate ability to not look for reason. True, there are times her writing leans toward the philosophical or pondering:
From a neighbor’s house, the happy strains of a party and once again we are outsiders. There is laugher, music, the lilt of easy conversation between adults of goodwill, people who actually like each other. Our own life, by comparison, is lackluster, dull, often complicated and frustrating. Our relationships are fraught with difficulties, too often lacking in ease and warmth. We are lonely, plagued with loneliness, suffocated by solitude. No wonder our presence is not required at such a gathering. But were we to peek through the picture window of the party house, we would find no lively human guests, but a flat screen teeming with beautiful, animated simulacra and person asleep on the couch (Brennan, 105).
And is this not a most relatable of paragraphs? There are studies that link elevated screen time—a phrase that used to refer solely to television, but now has come to encapsulate computer usage, social media, smart phones—with depression and anxiety. We’ve all seen the news that Meta/Facebook is aware of the deleterious effect of Instagram on teenage girls. Like any screen ignited with interiority that is ultimately absent, television can connect and inform—and it can also make us very aware that the place where our bodies exist in time and space can run with sudden coldness in comparison to that which is lit from within.
The author twice references Madame Bovary, a book about a protagonist of the same name who is known for having a somewhat foolish mentality, of being wont to wander among romantic daydreams rather than live with her feet on the ground of Normandy. Speaking of her childhood self, noting her “difficult personality” and lack of self-awareness, Brennan wonders if reading Flaubert’s novel at this time would have caused her to recoil “from [her] own vanity and superficiality (57).” Instead, she read the book as an adult when living in Puerto Rico. “Invited to observe the Puerto Rican Parrot with Nathan Leopold, a man newly sprung from a life sentence for the murder of a fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks,” the author wants nothing to do with the man and instead stays home and reads Madame Bovary which is to say: are we all not in the starring role of our intense, albeit mundane, dramas?
Except Karen Brennan does not strike me as she purportedly sees herself, with a “shallow, self-serving side.” I believe her when she says this side existed or sometimes exists and understand how it would come to be so, a child living in a home fraught with generational wealth and expectations, a mother changed by polio. a father who deems her worth relative to her ability to reproduce. If television—screens generally—have the possibility to render the viewer feeling like a foreign object, this memoir of that name does the opposite. Brennan’s visits with her life’s experiences (and she has lived, it seemed, many lives, many selves) are expertly crafted, written from the perspective of the present looking at the distant and not-so-distant past, sans nostalgia at that. She lets the many former versions of herself, glamorous and positively not so, pixelate and take shape. She presents things for view. Then she changes the channel to another scene.
When I finish reading Television, a memoir for the second time, I play Lucy Dacus’ Home Video album. From the first track “Hot & Heavy:”
Being back here makes me hot in the face
Hot blood in my pulsing veins
Heavy memories weighing on my brain
Hot and heavy in the basement of your parents' place
Brennan returns “hot in the face, hot blood in [her] pulsing veins” to feel what she felt in moments of great anguish, sorrow, anger, boredom even. She lets the images take shape. She creates transmissions of them—all light-flicker and wonder—for us. She turns up the volume.
She [flies] back to those lost years and they cannot contain me. I am mid-flight, inventing a fairy tale, while around me the world falls apart. The table is set so carefully, forks on the left side, knives and spoons on the right, while not so far away someone is in handcuffs and someone else is weeping uncontrollably (100).
And she does so—“heavy memories weighing on [her] brain—so that we may come along. No, it is true that I have never found myself in a restroom with Marlene Dietrich. I have never had to visit my daughter in her long-term care facility for patients with traumatic brain injuries. I have never been fired under the pretense that I wore funny hats to work. But, also, haven’t I?
Brigitte Lewis is the author of Origin Stories, winner of the Iron Horse Literary Review Chapbook Prize, 2020, and the memoir Speculative Histories, forthcoming from JackLeg Press, 2023