An Essay A Day…
Bridget Potter
Lucky Girl
A question comes to mind: what is the difference between memoir and
nonfiction? And, what would be the difference between memoir and an
essay? Does it have to strictly do with length? Or…
How do you say more in fewer words?
Bridget Potter’s lucky Girl is written in first person, the story of a
19 year old woman who has an unwanted pregnancy with her boyfriend and
must navigate the cultural terrain surrounding abortion in 1962. She
eventually ends up getting an illegal abortion in San Juan (South
America). At first it seems, the title of the essay attributes her
luck to having successfully got an abortion after many attempts to
find somewhere who would perform the illegal procedure, but the author
concludes the story with a ghastly statistic (about 17 percent of U.S.
women dying during pregnancy and childbirth in San Juan in 1962 is
attributed to illegal abortion) leading the reader to believe
something different about the title Lucky Girl.
According to a 1958 Kinsey study, illegal abortion was the option
chosen by 80 percent of single women with unwanted pregnancies.
Statistics on illegal abortion are notoriously unreliable, but the
Guttmatcher Institute, a respected international organization
dedicated to sexual and reproductive health, estimates that during the
pre- Roe v. Wade years there were up to one million illegal abortions
performed in the United States each year. Illegal and often unsafe. In
1965, they count almost two hundred known deaths from illegal
abortions, but the actual number was, they estimate, much higher,
since the majority went unreported.
Michael and I checked around for remedies. First we had a lot of
energetic sex, even though we were hardly in the mood. That didn’t
work. One night I sat in an extremely hot bath in my walk up on
Waverly Place while Michael fed me a whole quart of gin, jelly jar
glass by jelly jar glass. In between my gulps, he refreshed the bath
with boiling water from a saucepan on the crusty old gas stove. I got
beet-red and nauseous. We waited. I threw up. Nothing more. Another
night I ran up and down the apartment building’s six flights of
stairs, Michael waiting at the top to urge me to go back down and do
it again.
The two paragraphs above represent a transition between research on
abortion during the time of her story, to a chronological personal
narrative from when she gets pregnant up until her trip home after
getting an abortion in San Juan. Why would the technique of blending
fact with personal narrative be an effective method of storytelling in
essay writing?
There are a couple of great things at work here.
First, consider the audience and why an essay about the dangerous,
potentially life threatening, shaming, cultural terrain surrounding
abortion in the 1960’s is particularly visceral and important in
2011-2013, when women’s right to chose has come a long way, but is
threatened daily by those in places of political and gender influenced
power.
Secondly, although the story is incredibly personal and intimate,
Potter never goes out of her way to preach or stand on a soapbox. In
fact, she never really states her opinion directly on the subject
matter. But does she have to? Doesn’t it seem obvious after her story,
where her feelings must lie? She also offers clean tidy evidence
backed up. All information is objective. She shows and she does not
tell.
Another subtle syntax trick is her use of single sentence statements
after a full paragraph. She explains that in the 60’s doctors injected
a women’s urine into a rabbit and if the rabbit died then for whatever
reason, it was proof that the woman was pregnant.
My rabbit died.
For the intensity of the subject matter, and the severity of her
story, throughout her essay, Potter maintains a voice that is calm and
collected and informative. We are asked to arrive at our own judgment
based on the research given in the essay, and how we interpret the
tribulations of a young woman trying to get a medical procedure done
in a time (not too long ago) that was stigmatized.
Considering the last essay Irreconcilable Dissonance by Brian Doyle,
would Doyle’s carefree, conversational approach to storytelling be
effective in this piece given the intensity of the subject matter?
Sorry to throw you under the bus Brian, but the contrast of the two
essays is useful in demonstrating a point her.
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