Senior Portfolio Seminar

Sarah Gerard’s essay “Going Diamond” is about consumerism and development. These themes, which are national issues, are delivered to the reader through Gerard’s account of her parents’ time with Amway and also through fictionalized home-buying scenarios that follow a couple who have “gone Diamond.”

The home buying scenes are the most direct in delivering Gerard’s points. They increase in worth and the final “fictionalized composite account” is a tour of an exclusive club. These scenes are purposeful. They place consumerism – the nitpicking of elaborate homes – against the natural world on which the homes are developed. This is mentioned throughout the essay. On page 81, the pre-development land is described by the realtor as “very marshy.” One of the homes looks over a retention pond (81). The most expensive community is flooding due to rain, and while looking at the home, they notice “a flock of ibis has congregated around the standing water.” (101) The natural world and developed world are at odds. It’s in this home that the realtor also repeatedly mentions hurricane shutters. There are also several mentions of friends and family in New Orleans, and I wonder if Gerard is furthering her point about impending natural disaster through these little moments.

Consumerism is another topic in this essay. Again, the houses increase in worth and extravagance. Gerard says, “In Amway, there’s no such thing as contentment.” (77) Preceding this line is an “economic snapshot” of her “solidly-middle class” upbringing. Gerard ends this section with the following line: “We were happy, until we were told we could be happier.” (78)

More, more, more is the underscore of this essay. Brought to you by Amway and the American Dream. (83) Buy, buy, buy.(80)

A few other notes. On page 84, Gerard includes a footnote that the price of tickets to Amway functions have gone up. This makes it a current issue. She is not afraid to be sarcastic in this essay, and she uses this voice when talking about working hard to achieve the American Dream. (85) On page 89, Gerard shares an unpleasant portrait of herself as a child, wherein she is completely spoiled and proud of it. She has fallen victim to the more is more mentality too. She shares this to make herself more open, reliable, and relatable to the reader. She is not scolding the reader; she’s a consumer too. Gerard also, for lack of a better term, skewers the DeVos family. Rich DeVos is the cofounder of Amway, and his daughter-in-law is now the highly controversial US Secretary of Eduction. Gerard ends the essay by clouding consumerism, development, religion, and politics into one beast – which it truly is on both a national and local level.

I find it more difficult to discuss craft in a non-fiction collection of essays, but I noticed after a few pages that Gerard seems to be playing with the structure of the story. It is organized in scenes that alternate between facts about Amway and their business ventures and lawsuits, and scenes that take us into the real estate of Amway with the all-too perky, fake blonde realtor. Gerard also includes flashbacks to her childhood, loving the large home and the never-ending feeling of being included. There’s a sort of transformation at work; as a child, Gerard becomes the embodiment of everything that can go wrong in a cultish environment like this community: she’s a spoiled brat. We see her later in life develop a kind awareness of what she and her husband are buying into. However, she begins this essay with an italicized sentence to inform us that some sections are “fictionalized composite accounts.” She repeats “We’ve gone Diamond, we tell the Realtor. We’re buying a house in Feather Sound. We’re starting a family.” The houses gradually become more expensive until there is no price listed and things suddenly change. In the last two pages, we learn that Richard DeVos, one of the founders of Amway, lives in a community not unlike the Bayou Club, everyone is agreeable, everyone is wealthy. He’s living in a fantasy while the world attempts to sue him for everything he’s worth. She ends with a $100 million settlement in a class action lawsuit, sort of a reality check for the readers and for DeVos.

Repetition is used in several sections of Gerard’s essay. In one passage she repeats “imagine,” imagining a luxurious lifestyle with “opulent chandeliers” and “home theaters.” Later, she writes “listen to them. Listen to them. Listen.” There is something dystopian in the way Gerard explains this community. They only interact with other members of Amway, they read about Amway, they talk about Amway, they attend conventions and conferences for Amway. She later writes that in Wilbur Cross’ book Amway: The True Story of the Company That Transformed the Lives of Millions (what a longwinded title), the company’s methods and business plan are never actually divulged, making it seem even more strange and elusive.

In an earlier post, I wrote that Gerard seemed to be warning us against the corruption of the law or its failure to protect victims of spousal abuse. To some extent, I think she is doing the same in “Going Diamond.” Amway claims to be a corporation built on dreams and the achievement of dreams, but Gerard is showing us everything it isn’t. They claim to defend freedom but, ironically, their neighborhoods are identical, without individuality and with strict limitations: no kids on the golf course, in fact, they’d prefer no people on the golf course at all. Gerard reveals toward the end that her mother never wanted to be a part of Amway, to begin with, and for good reason. Oddly enough, while reading an article on the multilevel corporation, I realized that there were far more lawsuits than there was actual information on the company.

If any of you have read it, this story reads like one of Rebecca Lee’s short stories from her collection Bobcat. It is strange and unnerving, from the rooms without doors, to the surveillance, to the disappearance, all of it is very strange. Not strange like Atwood’s Stone Mattress — there’s nothing fantastical going on here –but it’s unlike any of Strout’s work we’ve read thus far. The characters in “Cracked” — Yvonne, Karen-Lucie, and the Cornell-Petersons — have the same dark, hidden inner lives present in Strout’s other characters, but for some reason, they are more unfamiliar, less…quotidian.

Initially, the link is unclear, and even at its first mention, it is blurry and hazy. After a phone call with her daughter, Linda reminisces about her youth, the fresh green of the landscape and the “fields and fields of corn and fields of soybeans” (84). I had noted this soybean field in other posts because it appears again and again. And then it all becomes very clear: Linda is one of the Nicely girls, a sister to Patty Nicely. She’s experienced the same heartbreak and trauma connected with her mother’s affair and she’s, somehow, reliving it in her own marriage. While Patty has spent most of her life alone, with a brief marriage, Linda decided she’d rather be married to Jay, allowing and almost condoning his voyeurism, than be alone and “ostracized” like her estranged mother.

We’ve talked about these linked stories and their ability to stand alone, and this one seems to be more independent than the others. Knowing Linda is the daughter of an adulterous mother seems almost insignificant compared to her husband’s crime. This story is made even more complicated by the fact that Linda has chosen to stay with Jay, she isn’t forced, isn’t even necessarily uncomfortable. The title “Cracked” also seems to have more metaphoric meaning, especially with Karen-Lucie’s line “I have thrown stones at a glass house, and I am sorry.” That house has not cracked but shattered.

In “Cracked,” the third chapter of Elizabeth Strout’s bestselling novel, Anything is Possible, I was most interested in the characters. The chapter’s main character, at least in contrast to Yvonne and Karen Lucie, is not entirely confident or assured. I question, even, if any woman could be self-assured if, after having been asked by her husband to watch other women undress, she agrees.

I have so many questions: Why doesn’t Yvonne continue in her pursuit of justice? Why won’t Linda testify against her husband, or admit to Karen Lucie that he has a problem? Why, when Joy stops by her house to talk to her about the possibility of jail, does she slam the door in her face? Where is Yvonne at the end of this chapter? We hear so much about Linda and her husband, but so little about Yvonne. That last we hear of her, Karen Lucie has taken her to the airport for a flight home where she will visit a “proper doctor.” What can we make of this?

Unlike the other linked stories, it was unclear to me how these stories were linked until the end. There was no unifying Lucy Barton.

As far as craft is concerned, I think the first paragraph is interesting. We learn a way in which character can be developed. For Linda Peterson-Cornell, it isn’t what we are told about her, but what she notices about Yvonne that informs the reader about Linda’s character. Also, in the first paragraph, is an important line that seem mysterious at first read, “Oh, this will be the one.” Of course, this thought becomes more clear at the end of the story.

Another aspect of character description can be seen on page 70. I like the formula, so to speak, that Strout uses to describe the young woman who disappeared (who I assume we will see more of later). She uses three descriptors: a general, slightly more specific, and very specific. Any more information would seem busy, and any less would give the reader a too broad idea of who this young woman was.

An observation: this narrator seems much more distant than the other two, and there is a much bigger mystery/suspense element in “Cracked.”

Dark Lady by Margaret Atwood was an interesting final piece of the Gavin puzzle. Or the Constance puzzle, though, to me, Gavin seems to be the biggest part of all three stories, even though he is the worst of all the characters.

I really enjoyed how Atwood set up this story, from the point of view of Tin. I would argue that the story (at least the plot) is about Jorrie. She is the driving force behind the narrative and the one that ties the story back in with Gavin. However, because the story is from the point of view of Tin, Atwood can really be honest about Jorrie and analyze her. If the story had been from Jorrie’s point of view, yes, we probably would have gotten more about her inner thoughts and the “other layers” that Tin mentions at the end, but we would not have gotten how ridiculous the gold flakes on her face look or the information about how much botox she has gotten. Tin is able to provide a perspective of Jorrie that she would not necessarily realize or admit and we get a fuller view of her. He is also her twin that knows her very well so we do get to see some of her insecurities and close past as well. I think it was a really smart way for Atwood to set up the story. Jorrie seems like she would be a very unreliable narrator.

The idea of aging has been present in all three stories. Growing old (I’m assuming) is a pretty big emotional dilemma so it gave Atwood a lot of material to work with.

I really enjoyed the aspect of returning characters. We were able to confirm that Gavin died. Constance definitely seemed much stranger in Gavin’s story and Jorrie’s story than she did in her own. It was interesting to see her from different perspectives. Reynolds seemed much more immature in Dark Lady though.

This is a complex personal essay, created by less complex pieces of journalism. Gerard reports on her parents, she reports on the legal system regarding domestic violence, and she reports on New Thought, Christian Science, etc. When reading creative nonfiction, perhaps even more than when we read fiction, it’s important to look for the “so what?” of an essay. Why do these things matter to us, as readers, who perhaps have no connection with these experiences and these places. Furthermore, I think it has to go beyond just being interesting material. It has to feel personal to the reader in some way or another. Throughout this essay I kept noticing big jumps between subjects. Sometimes between her mother’s work and the history of Christian Science, and sometimes between one of these things and more personal memoir. The essay is circuitous. Frankly, at times the information seems irrelevant. The essay jumps between three spheres: Gerard’s mother, Unity Church of Clearwater, and her own memories. We find the heart of the essay on page 67. Gerard asked her mother “whom she believed she was praying to,” and her mother responded, “It was really more about how the universe functions.”

The universe functions in a nonlinear direction, and so do our lives.

All of these experiences have made Gerard the person she is today, and all of our personal experiences have informed our present. We aren’t necessarily always aware of what shaped us, but most things do to some extent or another. Some of the reporting in the essay feels irrelevant to the heart of “Mother-Father God,” but I think that is part of the point.

1. What do we think of the title? Do you see a double meaning in it?
2. Do you agree about the heart of this essay, or did you find something else? Perhaps, it is the same heart, but we will have different ways of articulating it. Did you not feel anything regarding a heart in this essay?
3. Now that we’ve read two essays, what do we think about the change in style? Did Gerard have a purpose for beginning the collection in such a way?
4. So far, what about the title of the collection, Sunshine State? Does it work? What is uniquely Florida about this collection? I read a review (just an Amazon buyer) that stated confusion, and disappointment, over the title being misleading because it really wasn’t about Florida. Isn’t it though?

I have some more things to mention, but I think it’ll be easier just to flip through the text and point out things that point to national trends (a “so what?” of the essay), characters, and the big jumps I mentioned before.

I can remember, as a little girl, feeling close to God, knowing he existed. I was baptized and raised in the church by parents who were active members and believed themselves to be “faithful.” While in Nashville we went from a rigid, strict Episcopalian church to a more free-form, non-denominational one with a female pastor who preferred to preach barefoot. She actually bears a striking resemblance to Gerard’s minister Leddy Hammock. We attended a Methodist church when we moved to Lynchburg and our pastor’s name was Bob, Father Bob. I insisted on calling him “Father God” which I’m sure he found both endearing and embarrassing. As I grew older I realized that while my mother was actively involved with the Lord, my father aired on the side of agnosticism and didn’t claim to know who or what existed “up there.” Years after their divorce my mother married a Catholic conservative, so we stopped talking about religion.

I found Gerard’s first entry to be too confessional, too revelatory, but as I started to read “Mother-Father God” I wanted to open up and write about my own experiences. It feels more like a story rather than a private conversation I shouldn’t have overheard. We learn about her mother and father, her mother’s abusive relationship, her journey with religion as well as her parent’s. It is, in some ways, more welcoming, more inviting.  Initially, I wasn’t sure I liked or understood, the segway into the discovery of certain scientific phenomena or the discussion of “mesmerism” and “hysteria.” It becomes clear that she’s getting into the creation of Christian Science, which connects with her parents interest in the New Thought Movement, but I’m not sure what purpose this tangent serves. Is it necessary for Gerard to give us a full history lesson on the development of Christian Science?

Aside from eliciting my own confessional response, this essay calls legal precedent into question, particularly regarding mental health and spousal abuse. Gerard begins to do more than tell a personal story. She has concerns about the standard protocol with victims of spousal abuse, concerns that I’m sure resonate with many of her readers. Mental health is unfortunately still a taboo subject. Gerard addresses not only her own uncomfortable or personal journeys, but also the secrets of society, the things we’d rather keep behind closed doors, the skeletons in our closets.