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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312263935 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/07/2000 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.43(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
One February day in the seventh grade, I was apprehended in the girls' bathroom at school, trying to cut my arm with my Swiss Army knife. It is always February in the seventh grade, that terrible border year, that dangerous liminal interlude.
I was apprehended in the girls' bathroom, in the act — to be precise — of wearing at my arm with the saw blade of my Swiss Army knife.
Until the moment of my apprehension, I didn't once think, People will find this odd. How could they? Is there nothing more fascinating than our own blood? The scarlet beauty of it. The pulsing immediacy. The way it courses through its endless circuit of comings and goings, slipping and rushing and seeping down to the cells of us, the intimate insider that knows all the news, that's been down to the mailroom and up to the boardroom.
In Mr. Davidson's biology class, the air dry with winter heat and pricked by the smell of formaldehyde and decay, we had been peering at mounted samples of unknown origin pressed flat between glass slides -- papery shreds of tissue and muddy blotches of long-dried blood. And I got the idea that it would be more interesting to examine my own blood under the microscope. Blood still wet, still rich with urgent color. I imagined lively, plump little corpuscles tumbling against each other like a miniature game of bumper cars.
Everything is perfectly clear when looked at in the right light; I chose the school bathroom for my theater of operations because if you want your blood to be fresh to the task, you have to be handy to the microscope when you bring it forth. I had brought my Swiss Army knife to school precisely for this purpose. It was recess. I would cut, and then I would quickstep down the hall to Mr. Davidson's classroom -- with its shelves crowded with chunks of rock and skeletal remains and things floating pickled in Ball jars -- and screw down the probing eye of 1OX magnification onto the very essence of my own self.
I found this plan so compelling it blinded me to other thought. The idea of the blood beckoned to me, hypnotic and seductive. How often do we know the blood of our veins? It reveals itself to us only as the herald of bad news: the injury, the illness, the sudden slip of the paring knife or the prick of the doctor's needle. Why should we meet only in disaster?
It wasn't as big a leap as you might imagine. I'd never been blood squeamish. I proudly displayed my scabs and scars, vaguely envious of my older sister, who seemed to garner all the really good injuries, the satisfyingly dramatic ones that needed stitches, and constructions of gauze and splint and tape, and shots and salves to ward off deliciously hideous consequences: lockjaw, sepsis, gangrene.
The key to success is to envision the thing in your mind. Draw the bright chrome of the blade along the slender rope of vein wrapping sinuous around your left wrist, and everything parts obediently beneath your command, like the Red Sea before Moses.
Except it didn't. The knife blade was worn too dull, as dull as the dun walls of the bathroom where I stood. With my arm braced against the warm metal shelf over a radiator, I could see the veins meandering blue and purple and green like a road map beneath the thin cover of my flesh. Only the frailest membrane of tissue keeping self from self. Yet who would have thought that skin could have so much substance, so much resistance?
I attempted and discarded in quick succession the can opener, the leather punch, and the flathead screwdriver. I settled at length on the saw blade, an unhappy compromise. It scraped back and forth like a fiddler's bow against my arm, chafing the skin red and raw. Little white clumps of flesh gummed up the blade, and the stubborn shelter of my skin refused to give way.
The radiator clanked and hissed. The bathroom smelled of disinfectant and body functions. I stood there and sawed. I wasn't doing a very good job of it, because sawing on your arm hurts. It burns. Disappointingly clumsy and painful and blundering, it was nothing like the swift, precise operation I had imagined.
To compound matters, I gathered a tiresome audience of other girls. You know, the popular girls. The typecast antagonists of the after-school movie. The ones who have always found that life just happens to be in perfect agreement with their opinions.
"Eeeuhhh. What are you doing?"
"I'm trying to cut myself," I said.
"Why?"
"Because I want to."
"That's really disgusting," said one.
"She just wants attention," muttered another darkly.
But still they stood about, like rubberneckers at a train wreck. After so many years of recesses, after all, what excitements are left? You have fifteen minutes, and you have to kill them somehow.
"You're going to get in trouble for this," announced the ringleader at last, rendering her verdict with a self-satisfied toss of her confident head, before guaranteeing the outcome by retreating to alert the authorities.
In the intricately nuanced grade-school hierarchy I wasn't one of those popular girls, the ones born to straight teeth and straight hair and genetically predetermined self-confidence. I wasn't one of the outcasts either — the pale kids with the weird health problems, or the ones who always said the wrong thing at the wrong time and didn't even know it, or the ones whose mothers made them liverwurst sandwiches for lunch. I had always occupied the shifting territory of the middle ground, sunk low by my hopeless ineptitude at all sports involving a ball, raised up by my standing as one of the smart kids.
I'd slid by on smart. I'd made smart do in the place of industry and application. As far back as nursery school my teacher had noted on my report card that Caroline loves to volunteer information, but Her attention span is quite easily distracted and She has no incentive to accomplish a finished or well-done paper. I never took naturally to the linearity of school, the ordered progression of hours and ideas. My mind has always raced about with the distracted enthusiasm of a dog chasing squirrels, pursuing one idea, then whirling after another, and sometimes losing itself staring up along the endlessly branching pathways down which the last idea has fled. I stared out windows, daydreaming. I doodled. I read books tucked surreptitiously within the covers of whatever textbook we were meant to be following. I got by on last-minute efforts —: and what's worse, I knew I could.
I got my comeuppance in sixth grade, when I was demoted to the slow-learning section for having what my school termed "a poor attitude." They didn't call it the slow-learning section, of course — B1 is what they called it, as distinguished from A, or, more direly, B2 — but we were none of us so slow-witted that we couldn't figure it out.
I remember feeling at the time of my demotion that some inevitable truth had at last come out. I come from a family of scholars and educators, and I think I've long suffered a sneaking suspicion that I've never quite measured up to the high standard of intellectual rigor valued above all else by my relations.
I can't remember a time, in fact, when I didn't think I was coming up short in one regard or another. Through no fault of her own my sister, two years older, had served as the measure by which my inadequacies were perpetually thrown into relief. She was better at sports, better at board games, better at drawing and painting and projects, more musical, more popular, and, of course, smarter.
"Oh, you're Julia's little sister," her former teachers would say to me, the first day I entered their classes at the beginning of a school year, and though I felt a swelling of pride by association, I could see already how there was no hope of proving adequate to all the expectations implied by that statement. In the first grade, according to the report by the administrator of an IQ test I took then, I kept repeating, "Oh, stupid me, that's wrong," and "I'm stupid and I can't do this."
The demotion to B1 had the quality, therefore, of a long-expected if dreaded inevitability. I even remember reassuring my parents, when the school informed us of my new class placement, that it was probably the best thing anyway.
For the better part of the day they sequestered us, the hopeless and the hapless of the B1, in a subterranean cinder-block dungeon of a classroom, its walls painted a psychosis-inducing shade of dingy yellow, its only window a narrow slit high in the wall, through which we could see the occasional passage of a knee-socked leg on the playground above. Our teacher had tried to invest the room with some faint cheer by taping up those droll little posters of bedraggled kittens and antic orangutans, captioned "Don't bother me, I'm having a bad day" or "No more monkeying around."
We were all, always, having a bad day in B1, or so it seemed. We snarled and sniped at each other, flinging invective, muttering mutinously. Every few weeks or so we were treated to a visit from the headmaster or the middle-school director, whose sole purpose in coming was to lecture us on our utter failure to live up to even the most nominal and rudimentary standards of decency and respectability, and the imminent likelihood that our entire school's reputation would be laid low by our sorry collective performance.
I have no memory at all of what we did to earn ourselves such administrative enmity, but I felt marooned in a savage land. Though mine was a small school, I swear I never saw or spoke again to any of my former comrades in A, and at the same time I felt as though my B1 classmates regarded me contemptuously as a fallen member of a corrupt aristocracy. I'd been exiled by the unforgiving academic caste system: a student without a country.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. Copyright © 1999 by Caroline Kettlewell. All rights reserved.
Reading Group Guide
In Skin Game, author Caroline Kettlewell writes about her history as a "cutter," one of what is estimated to be, in the U.S. alone, as many as two to three million self-injurers-people who deliberately cut, burn, or otherwise injure themselves for the relief of overwhelming psychological distress.
"People ask me why, after keeping my history of self-injury a secret for so long, I chose to reveal it in such a very public way," says Caroline Kettlewell, about her memoir of self-injury, Skin Game.
"There isn't one specific answer to that question. In part, I wanted to write the book because I believed that my own experience would provide me a means of exploring certain questions or themes that interest me as a writer. Questions about identity, about how you define your 'self,' how you become that person you call your self, about whether you can even ever say who is the true self, given that we all play different roles in different contexts. Also, I am interested in the way that even those closest to us have secret, inner lives we know nothing about. What do we reveal, what do we conceal, and how do those choices about revealing and concealing shape our lives?
"I also wanted to write the book because there is a great deal of misunderstanding about self-injury, about what it is and what it isn't. I wanted readers to understand that even apparently 'normal' people might be self-injurers-that it could be your sister, your best friend, and your child. I wanted to try to dispel some myths and misconceptions: that self-injury constitutes a suicidal gesture; that self-injurers are by definition severely emotionally disturbed; that they are necessarily the product of terrible, abusive environments; that they are, by the verdict of too many in the counseling/therapeutic community, 'incurable.'
"When the book first came out, I was terribly apprehensive about what the response would be among friends, co-workers, family-none of whom had known about my history of self-injury. I was surprised and relieved to find that people responded very positively. Many have told me that the emotional struggles I write about resonated deeply with their own experiences. Beyond the specifics of my particular circumstances, Skin Game is really a coming-of-age story, and in that context I think it covers often painfully familiar ground for many readers."
1. An increasing number of intimate memoirs-many on "taboo" or disturbing topics-have appeared in recent years. Proponents argue that literary memoirs can serve as a powerful means of discussing universal themes through personal experience. Critics dub the genre "Confessional" and deride it as symptomatic of a society caught up in uncritical self-absorption. Do you believe there are subjects too personal to put in a book? What is the value of using literary writing to explore highly personal experiences?
2. Kettlewell writes, in Chapter 11, "There's probably no critical mass beyond which cutting yourself would ever seem, to most people, like a reasonable choice." Does she suggest that she believed cutting was a reasonable choice? Could self-injury be argued to be a rational behavior? Does the author suggest it is?
3. Tattooing, body piercing, and even scarification and branding, have become fashionable lately. What is the difference between such body injury in the name of fashion, personal expression, or group identity, and Kettlewell's self-injury? Is there a difference? If Kettlewell's self-injury is deemed "dysfunctional" by mental health experts, should tattooing or other body alteration be thought of in the same way? What about elective plastic surgery?
4. "So when I discovered the razor blade, if you'll believe me, cutting was my gesture of hope," says Kettlewell. In what way did cutting serve as a "gesture of hope" for the author? Does the author ultimately view self-injury as self-destructive or beneficial? Or is her verdict more ambivalent?
5. "Anorexia is not for the weak," the author writes in Chapter 17. Why does starving herself make Kettlewell feel strong? Does our culture place too much value on "self-control"? Many cultural critics have noted that the standard of female slenderness grows more stringent every year, with everyone from movie stars to Miss America contestants markedly thinner today than they were 20 years ago. What do you think "thin" stands for in our society? Why is it so valued?
6. The narrative tone, the "voice" of the book, is often cool, ironic, even humorous-even in the midst of disturbing and unsettling scenes. What impression does the tone serve to give you of the narrator? Does the voice heighten or mute the intensity of the cutting scenes?
7. The author never defines a particular "cause" for her history of self-injury, but rather argues that "some things are too complex to suffer reduction to a simple equation of why/because." Do you feel that the book serves as a satisfactory explanation of why the author became a cutter? Do you think the book needs to offer a satisfactory explanation?
8. Kettlewell writes, "Here's the part where I'm supposed to have the big epiphany: some climactic confrontation, a couple of weepy scenes, and then the tidy wrap-up, the denouement." A number of recent memoirs express an ironic self-awareness of the "conventions" of memoir-in Kettlewell's case the conventions of a "recovery" memoir. As you read the book, did you expect the author to overcome self-injury by the end? Would your response to the book have been different if she hadn't? Does a memoir such as Kettlewell's have to end on a positive or redeeming note?
9. "Maybe...you have to make your journey and bear its scars," Kettlewell argues. Is Kettlewell suggesting that there was value in her experience with self-injury? If you could live your own life over again, are there painful incidents you would willingly relive, or would you choose to avoid them? Scientific advances hold out the promise of "curing" emotional disorders such as depression and anxiety. Can you imagine any reasons why a person might choose not to be "cured"?
10. Kettlewell notes at several points in her book that, despite her confused and turmoiled mental state, from all external appearances she led a "normal" life. Based on the story she tells, would you agree with her conclusion? If, as in Kettlewell's experience, only one aspect of a person's behavior is notably "disturbed," would it be correct to call that person mentally ill? Do you believe that emotional disorders are caused by experience, biology, or both?
11. "Memory is faithless like a cheating lover, telling you what you believe is true," Kettlewell writes. How reliable is memory? What is the difference between memoir and biography? Between memoir and literary journalism? Since two different people might have completely different memories of the same event, what defines "truth" in a memoir? Imagine how the "interrogation" scene in Chapter 2 might be different if written by one of the teachers present.
12. "We all inevitably present a version of ourselves that is a collection of half-truths and exclusions," Kettlewell writes at the end of Chapter 16. Do you believe that is true? Are there thoughts you've had or facts about yourself that you would never reveal to anyone? Is it ever possible to be completely honest?