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 PORTLAND, OR Somewhere To Run To: An Interview with Ariel
Gore
Ariel Gore was already well known for her zine Hip Mama - as well as her DIY-minded parenting books The Mother Trip and The Hip Mama Survival Guide - when she decided to sit down and write about the unusual travel adventures she had as a teenager. At the beginning of her memoir Atlas of the Human Heart, Ariel is a freshman in a Palo Alto high school - or "somewhere to run from," as she calls it in the book. Because just as she's beginning to come into her own as an introverted, sensitive writer, her hometown is becoming an increasingly difficult place to negotiate. Though her hippie parents moved there years before for its comfortable bohemian vibe, her section of the Bay Area is turning into a small hell of strip malls and teenage drug addiction. At age 15, Ariel decides she wants out. So she makes up a story for her mom and stepdad about a student exchange program, packs a backpack, and boards a plane to Shanghai, not to return for four years. She describes the experiences that follow in vivid imagery. Of discovering the mind-altering effect of breathing thin air in Tibet, she writes, "I walked through daydreams of weeping willows, leaves that shimmer in the sun the way things shimmer when you drink vodka in the morning. ... I'd never thought of it before: the path to enlightenment might just be a matter of subtracting a little oxygen." But the book is also an uncanny journey inside 15-year-old Ariel's head, as she recounts her short-lived career as a clothing smuggler in Communist Kathmandu, her life in a squat house in London, and her escape from an abusive relationship in Tuscany. No longer a regular American abroad, Ariel has joined the ranks of a stranger group: the herd of young itinerants who have been away from home for so long that they scarcely have one. Finally, in Italy she finds she's pregnant with her daughter, Maia, and it's time to go home. Atlas is stitched together with the recurrent themes of ancient Chinese medicine and the workings of the human heart, but essentially it's a collection of unreal adventures - some good, some bad, and some that Ariel herself, in her soft-spoken Northern California drawl, might call just plain trippy. Here, she talks about memoir and memory, real-life people who belong in novels, and what "place" means to a person who can't stay put. Now the mother of a young teenager - almost the age she herself was when she left for China - Ariel Gore talked to HERE via phone from her home in Portland, Oregon.
What were you looking for when you set off on your travels? In some ways my motivation was random: I was bored, for sure. I was depressed, for sure. And seeing the people who were a couple of years older than me in school, it didn't look like it would get any better. It was a really trippy time to be growing up in the Bay Area. It had gone from from this hippie place to yuppieville at the same time that my childhood was ending. When you're becoming an adolescent everything looks like shit, and in reality, even from an outside perspective, everything WAS looking like shit. It was just a lot more intense. I have no regrets about my experiences. At the same time, I had no concept of how dumb I was. I had always been so academically smart, and no one told me that that wasn't the same thing as - well, being smart. It's also just a teenage thing, to think you're an adult when you're not. I hung out exclusively with people who were a lot older than I was, I had the idea that everyone is basically good, that things would always turn out okay. Which I guess was true, but ... what a dumbass I was. Some of your imagery is so gorgeous. Do you write fiction too? I haven't written much fiction. But I tell my students that when you're writing about yourself if it wouldn't make it as fiction, then nobody cares - unless you're Cher. At some point when I was writing the memoir I thought it would be a novel, and that was sort of freeing in some ways. I was able to just get into the rhythm of it: okay, this guy talked like Madonna, this girl sounded like a valley girl. I submitted it to my editor as a novel-slash-novel-slash-memoir. Still, my character's name was Ariel, so they suggested I publish it as a memoir. My education is as a journalist, and since the dialogue is reconstructed, I thought I would have make it a novel. My editor had to tell me, No, that's what a memoir is! I think it's really just a publishing differentiation, a fashion. Memoir is an unusual genre in terms of memory affecting "reality." It seems to me that there could be other stories here, other ways of stitching together the facts to get a narrative, even though the facts themselves don't change. One thing that I tried really hard to achieve in the book, my main goal with the narrative, was to attempt not to overlay my current opinions on the story. To not write from a feminist perspective, or from a 30-year-old perspective, or whatever. When I very first starting working on the book I was teaching high school, and I'd just started working on a story about being in high school. About 50 pages into it, I realized it was definitely longer than a short story. I started to think about the pace I was going [with the story], how many years I would be fitting in. In that way I just sort of figured out what I was dealing with in terms of a story arc. In some ways I was just sort of using the tools of the novelist to think about making that period of my life into a story that would be readable. I just used really tradition novel structure, and overlaid the truth. In looking at my memories and my life and deciding which stories I want to tell - I mean, in the book sometimes I pass over a whole season; there would be a million stories there - I sort of chose characters that were good enough to be in a novel. It's funny, the narrative of the book now almost replaces my own memory. The things I decided not to write about are so vague to me now, and I changed some of the characters, so now I actually remember them that way. I renamed my high school boyfriend in the book, and when he came to a reading, I accidentally called him Guy. What's it like thinking about all this now that your daughter is so closer to the age you were when you left for China? I never thought of how it would be to have a teenager when this book about my own teenage years came out. I know she's read parts of it ... but I don't think she thinks it's that interesting! She's heard me doing readings from it, though. There are parts of the book that are more crude than my motherly self, you know, but as for just general facts, there were never any secrets. She knows about what's happened in my life. It was actually harder for my older relatives. My mom got super upset. She thought I'd made her look like an asshole, and she also kind of thought I was living in dorm rooms, with a student exchange program. My sister was glad she wasn't in it. I did that on purpose: I tried to leave my family out of it as much as possible because those are the people whose identity you can't mask in any way. One thing that struck me was that you never would have had these adventures - some amazing, some scary - if your parents hadn't let you be so free. How has that informed the decisions you've made with your daughter? Frankly, they would not have happened if I had not been such a dumbass. In some ways when I go traveling now it's not as much fun, because I can't just go wandering off into the world. I HAVE a train ticket; I know where I'm going. I've been SO overprotective of my daughter. Every year of her life I think of what I was doing at her age. Now that she's a teenager - I've been there and I don't want her to have the same bad experiences that I had. Is she a writer too? Well, we're working on a book together about parenting teenagers. She's like the opposite of me at her age. She's the captain of the cheer leading team, she loves school, she's very popular. I was an introvert, you know, the black-clad self-imposed outcast! Her place in the world, as she sees it, is very different. This is a little corny, but what did you learn from your teenage adventures that you value the most? Well, I grew up, basically. In the beginning of the book I'm very much a child, and then ... I better not be! I learned to trust my intuition. Also, there's the concept that I tried to pull out in the book: the security of the imagination. Giving that up, whether it's to governments, or to commercialization, or to a lover - it's all the same thing. I figured out what it is in me that I'm not willing to give up under any circumstances, whether I was alienated in high school or living in a police state or in an abusive relationship. Everyone has to learn that, and for me it has to do with poetry. That it's gonna sustain you - and tell you when to get out, if you can. 
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