A 14-minute read.
It had begun at 8:15 in the morning–fifteen minutes late, I noted, as I pressed my finger against the tip of my pencil. Heaven forbid the lead fall out and I need to ask the proctor for a replacement. I didn’t want to walk to the front of the room, eighty eleventh-grade eyes fixed on my sweaty back, after they had just passed out the tests. But the lead was fine, so I wrote essays about juxtaposition and answered questions like:
Which answer best describes the author’s tone or mood in the passage?
a) Outraged
b) Wry
c) Lactonic
d) Melancholy
e) Demanding
The test was graded on a scale of one to five, and I had convinced myself that if I didn’t get a five I would be a) Outraged and then d) Melancholy, because only the highest score would accurately reflect my writing abilities. Beforehand, I took practice exams like an addict, and rehearsed the broad example topics for the argumentative essay that I could pull from in case nothing came to mind–Harry Potter, Wall-E, and Lord of the Rings.
With 35 minutes and four blank pages left, I reached it, the third and last essay prompt: “Write an essay that argues your position on the value of striving for perfection.”
I read it again: write an essay that argues your position on the value of striving for perfection. What should my main point be? What story should I tell to illustrate it? But after two hours of testing, all that was left in my skull was cotton candy. And Sven and Ole.
Sven and Ole, and Ole’s wife Lena, are fictional Norwegian immigrants who live in Minnesota. When Ole painted his house last summer, he wore both his winter jackets because the can said, “Put on two coats.” The night before the test, my dad had encouraged me to have fun. He said, “If you write a Sven and Ole joke on your test, I’ll buy you ice cream.” I never tell Sven and Ole jokes, but he does, all the time.
I closed my eyes, but only saw purple rectangles the shape of the fluorescent lights. I thought, I guess I could write about Sven and Ole. I have to pick something, and they’re pretty imperfect. I mean, why do people find jokes about mistakes so funny? What does that tell us about perfection?
At the end of the first page, I stopped. Did I want to complete my main point first and then illustrate it by telling a Sven and Ole joke? Or should I write the joke first and explain my point after? I tapped my pencil on the paper. I didn’t know, and I couldn’t think. And what joke should I tell? Unfortunately, the only one I could remember was the one where Sven and Ole clean the outhouse by blowing everything out of the hole with dynamite, except just before the dynamite goes off Lena runs into the outhouse, and she thinks it’s her own farts that propel the small building into the air.
Even at the moment, I couldn’t believe I was writing this on my AP exam. I had made it to the height of academia, an advanced English test for smartest eleventh graders in the school–and all I could come up with was this?
I knew the essay was one of the worst I had ever written, but I didn’t have enough pages or time to start over. As I sealed my book shut with papery white stickers, I wondered if my grader would have a sense of humor. My dad said they could tell if we were having fun. I hoped my fun would earn me those extra points.
It felt like years before I got the email proclaiming, Your Scores have Arrived! It told me to log into my College Board account to Get your Results! I logged in. See your Scores! A banner said. I clicked.
Four. But I was sure I was going to get a five. I thought of Sven and Ole, and their cleaning disaster. This was a disaster. I wasn’t told why I got the grade I did, but I am convinced that it was Sven and Ole’s fault, really.
I took AP Literature with Mrs. Mueller the next year, and signed up for its exam with slightly lower hopes. The test had the same format, but it was harder–fewer students got fives on the AP Lit exam than on the AP Lang exam.
All I remember about the essay section of the test was that I had to analyze a poem about shaving, but I know for a fact nothing I said was funny.
Sometime in June, as I sliced an apple for lunch, my dad came into the kitchen, grinning. “Mueller said you should check your AP score,” he said.
“Did she tell you what it is?” I asked.
“No, she just said it was good.”
I dug out my computer and logged in. Good could mean many things–but a big number five stood out on the screen. I didn’t want to smile, because something like this shouldn’t be so important to me, but I couldn’t keep the corners of my mouth down. “Five,” I told my dad.
I decided that Sven and Ole were fun and all, but what I really needed was to write deep, meaningful observations about shaving as a symbol of growing up.
***
My freshman year of college, I signed up for a creative writing class. The first assignment was a short nonfiction memoir. After reading example essays about young abused girls watching their grandparents die, we had a class period to brainstorm. I leaned my elbows on the edge of the desk and thought through my life. What should I write about? None of my close family members had died. I didn’t struggle with debilitating depression. I had never been in a car accident, or even been injured. But… I picked up my pen. The year before, my sister had been hospitalized for internal bleeding. It wasn’t like she had cancer or anything, but she had to be put on a life flight to Sioux Falls. It was terrifying, because we didn’t know it was just an ulcer until after it was over. I wrote, “I stood alone in the front entry, staring at the black hole created by the front door. Yellow lamplight made triangles on the walls, but I could hardly see them.”
My professor said it was a good essay. I submitted it to my college’s writing awards competition, and it won second place. The other essay I submitted, about a man’s horrible experience in the Vietnam War and the depravity of human nature, won first.
The day of the Award ceremony, I met my mom in the parking lot and we walked up to the small theater together. The seats, arranged on steep risers, were mostly empty, so it was easy to find two chairs.
“Welcome to the 2023 Bellman Writing Awards,” the professor in charge said. “I’m Matt Bauman.”
Then he said everyone needed to read an excerpt of their essay aloud–even those who weren’t in first place, which I hadn’t realized. I opened Google Drive on my phone and found my essay about my sister and scrolled through it. I wanted to read a part that was well written, and interesting. But the memoir focused on fear and sadness. So when my name was called and I walked onto the little stage, I began,
We didn’t want to think about how Ann should have been all better after they figured out what was wrong with her, and after her first blood transfusion. We didn’t want to think about anything. It was easier to pretend that everything was normal. We were alone, and Dad had been gone for an hour longer than he said he would, and he was in a hurry, and the roads were icy.
I couldn’t see any faces, because the lights were bright and I wasn’t wearing my glasses. But the audience was silent as I sat down. I felt I had just dropped a boulder onto the stage and walked away, and now they had to figure out how to move it. I felt wrong.
***
Once, my mom and Ann and I drove seven hours to Denver. My mom struggles with vertigo, so she refused to let me drive. Instead, I slouched in the passenger seat, shoes off, feet propped on the dashboard, a bag of popcorn in my lap.
“How’s the semester going?” My mom asked.
“Pretty good,” I said.
My mom is a good listener, so half an hour later, my popcorn sat forgotten as I described the creative writing assignment I was struggling with.
“We have to write a fiction story,” I said. “And I’m tired of depressing stuff.” My first year of college and the summer after had been hard, and now every story I read was about sexism or suicide or an abusive relationship, thus shining a spotlight on the horrendousness of the human race.
“I know those topics are important,” I said, “and the stories are really good, but I don’t want to write about that. I just want to write something funny. You remember what Ann wrote? About the kid in the banana costume?”
“You’ll have to remind me.”
“She said there was this kid whose mom gave him a banana costume for halloween, and he didn’t like it but they didn’t have money to buy another one. But then the banana costume took him back in time to the 1800s, to a train that was being robbed, and he stopped the robbery. After that, he was happy with his costume. And the way she wrote it was super funny. I just want to write funny stuff like that.” I paused to adjust my socks. “Why does everything have to be about how bad people are? In academia, there’s so much pressure to write something profound that reveals a new idea about human nature, but I don’t care. Why does it have to be sad? Can’t I write something that’s funny and meaningful and have it be appreciated too?”
***
My dad introduced me to the writing of Harrison Scott Key my junior year of high school. For our last assignment before Thanksgiving break, he recorded himself reading a chapter from one of Key’s memoirs, The World’s Largest Man. It took him hours, because he couldn’t stop laughing. I walked into his classroom after school, and he was sitting at his desk giggling, tears in his eyes.
“This is hopeless,” he said.
I read the book last year. It’s about Key’s relationship with his abusive father. It’s also hilarious. He tells ridiculous anecdotes about hunting and football, but then he goes beyond–he figures out what it means. He explores what fundamental truth of human experience the story shows, and who he is now compared to who he was then, all while delighting the reader. He takes a sad story and tells it for laughs. He finds a truly painful part of his life and he presses it until the truth comes out.
The book only took me a few days to read, and when I finished, I had laughed and cried at the same time, and my chest hurt, and I wanted to go write my life story down in the funniest and deepest way possible. Key demonstrated what E.B. White once said: “I don’t think I agree that humor must preach in order to live, it need only speak the truth — and I notice it always does.”
So my classmates read Dostoyevski and Kafka, and my professors assign gruesome books by Cormac McCarthy, and I read memoirs about people who call their neighbor Jimmy, which is short for Jimmy Crack Corn, which is long for crack, which they’re sure he smokes.
***
Not long after, I began another memoir. Once again, I made a list of topics. I had used up my one traumatic story, so now I thought, what parts of my life are interesting? In the end, I focused on how I grew up homeschooled and worried it had made me different from everybody else, because heaven forbid I be a unique individual. I wrote about taking field trips to the zoo, and why I didn’t want to tell people I was homeschooled, and how I wore a Laura Ingalls Wilder bonnet for a whole summer. The jokes came as naturally as laughter, but that was it. What the Laura Ingalls Wilder bonnet revealed about me, I didn’t know.
When I was in middle school, my parents got my siblings and I a go-pro, and we used it to make “movies.” I put myself in charge, of course, dreaming up ridiculous plots about really bad detectives. I walked around exclaiming, “What?” and, “No I didn’t do that!” and, “Onward!” After a few years, I realized the movies were terrible, and I was as good an actor as a potato. So I looked for a different place to be funny, maybe one where it would actually work.
With this next memoir, I decided writing was the place. My humor has never been the kind with jokes–Sven and Ole are my dad’s thing. I’m sarcastic. I’ve made fun of myself my whole life, and now I was just writing it down. Funny is better than depressing, but I wanted my memoir to be insightful too. I wanted people to walk away laughing and saying, “I felt like that too, once.”
So I asked myself questions. Why did I keep my homeschooling a secret? Why did I feel so out of place in public school? Why did I blame it on my educational experience? And I realized that I was afraid of people, but not because I learned math at my kitchen table.
When I turned the memoir in, I smiled. I hoped I had made something true that would make someone laugh. I titled it “Me Thinketh to Tell You as it Seemed to Me,” and submitted it to the same writing awards I won with the memoir about my sister. I got second place.
***
I picked my excerpt an hour before the Awards ceremony, while I was at work. I couldn’t decide which part to read from, but I knew it didn’t matter because there was no way I could give the audience a good idea of an eight page paper with a few paragraphs.
When my memoir was announced, I tripped down the steep steps to the podium and shook Matt Bauman’s hand. I said, “This was a nonfiction memoir I wrote about growing up homeschooled, and my transition to public school.” Then I started reading,
To my surprise, many of my classmates were annoyingly friendly. They would say hello, and I was not yet ready to respond or engage in normal human conversation. Please understand that this was not typical for me. In the past, I never struggled to find things to say to anyone, and I could hold eloquent conversations with my teachers in English and Spanish (“no me gusta hamburguesas,” I would tell Señora Kranz, “pero me gusta frijoles”). But when my classmates spoke to me, which was often, meaning about once a week, my brain would stall and strangely terse or sarcastic things would come out of my mouth, or I would be rendered mute, left only to nod or look mildly panicked.
The lights were bright, and once again I had left my glasses in my backpack. But somewhere to my right, people were laughing, laughing at something I wrote–and that was a bigger prize than any fancy piece of paper or check. I thought, sorry Sven and Ole, you’ve been replaced.
Ellen Sheehy 