By Christine Rice

About halfway through Toni Nealie’s absorbing debut essay collection, The Miles Between Me, I wrote this in the margin:

This book makes me feel less alone.

In these essays, Nealie drops a singular event or pattern of events onto the page and explores the narrative ripples. Through beautifully wrought prose, her explorations weave and zigzag through time and space until she’s thoroughly cut to the bone of what she’d set out to explore..

In “Trailing,” the first essay in the collection, she writes:

I like to fly. Space and time dissipate with the vapor trail. Bubble-wrapped solitude, headphones, and a book. Deliciously detached. One weekend I flew from Chicago to London to celebrate a family wedding. Eight hours without commitment. The weightlessness of traveling in silvery air, floating without my mother-wife carapace.

There are also moments of bracing self-awareness. In “Rupturing,” Nealie mourns her brain-damaged brother’s death and the residual regret that dogs her:

My brother Robin–I should name him–died in the summer, at his home, peacefully. My sister stroked his hair and whispered to him as he slid away. She organized blue balloons. My eldest sister and I, both far away, found poems for his service. I imagined I would visit my brother, sometime, when the dust settled, when the Christchurch silt stabilized, when his dust had been cast into the Canterbury breeze.

Nealie’s essays thoughtfully frame issues–including her journey to the United States as a person of color, waiting seven years to get permanent residency, racism here and in New Zealand, family secrets, illness, abandonment, earthquakes, theft, gardening, putting down roots, eating, food poisoning, parenting, feeling alone as a young mother, emotional distance, physical distance, the human ability to bridge gaps–and then, as great essays do, connect the personal to the greater human experience.

I caught up with Nealie, Literary Editor at Newcity, via email to thoroughly pick her brain about her experience writing The Miles Between Me.

CHRISTINE RICE: Our experiences are so different and yet many of the moments in these essays felt like you were channeling my own thoughts–especially the moments about the isolation of early motherhood. Perhaps it’s because the essays don’t feel judge-y…

Can you talk about that lack of judgment and how that allows you to see issues from all sides, to connect issues, to come to a better understanding?

TONI NEALIE: I was taught by David Lazar to reach deeply into the legacy of Montaigne, Hazlitt, Lamb, Woolf, Weil, Benjamin, Baldwin and others, to use the expanse of the essay to explore and question the magnitude of the self, society, nature and everything in it. So these aren’t opinion pieces–which do tend to be more judge-y. Life is complicated and doesn’t add up like a balance sheet.

Many writers carry multiple threads about the human condition–Montaigne and Shakespeare for example. My mother had an infuriating habit of saying: “Always try to see the other person’s point of view.” Drove me crazy as a kid, but it is good advice. Life falls outside the singular, or the binary. It’s the essayist’s task to attempt to understand–not to get there, but to try.

I do judge! Often myself.

CR: I relished following your exploration of being the other in America. The conversation has–for so long–focused on the so-called problems of immigration that the narrative has shifted away from America being built by people from other countries (& great because of it) to America being destroyed by those same people. Your investigation of this timely issue took all these nuanced and profound zigzags; the essays lead me to new and often uncomfortable (but necessary) realizations.

In the essay “On The Rights and Privileges of Being an Alien” you write:

I am permitted to live in the United States. I am permitted to work and pay income taxes, to pay private insurance for health care, to own a house and pay high property taxes that fund local schools. I am not allowed to vote, a fact unusual to me because New Zealand, along with Great Britain, the Netherlands, Chile, and many countries in between allows universal suffrage for all residents. I have been obliged to offer up pieces of myself – my eyeballs, my thumbprints, my history, my blood, some of my freedoms, here in the land of the the free.

A few weeks ago, there was this piece in the New Yorker about the Supreme Court’s arguments around President Obama’s immigration directives. As you probably know, his directives basically state that parents of children born in the United States should not be deported if they pay a ‘modest fee’ and have committed no crimes. Which seems reasonable and yet it has become a flashpoint.

More than any time in recent history, immigration has taken front and center stage…not only because of the misinformed comments of certain candidates but because of the positive, organized initiatives to broaden the conversation (by activists and immigration-rights groups). The issue is so highly politicized that it is difficult to hack away, to get to the truth which is this: you, me–everyone–except the original inhabitants of the Americas, came from somewhere else.

What have you noticed, what has taken your attention in today’s circus-like political climate? What nonsense is the most absurd? What makes you angry or uncomfortable? Or do you see this as the natural machinations of democracy?

TN: Most absurd: suggesting a wall on the current border, paid for by our neighbor, ally and trading partner. Makes me angry: Raids and deportations in the small hours. Splitting up families and terrifying children. Removing people from planes because another passenger is threatened by their appearance or language. Making exclusion and deportation of Muslims an election plank. Advocating harm to people on the basis of their religion or nationality. Natural machinations of democracy? For a start, American democracy is very different to what I have encountered in New Zealand or the UK. Lobby groups have such vast interest and the money involved in elections is unbelievable. Is it any nastier than before? Political conversations back in Lincoln’s day weren’t at all charming!

CR: True. It doesn’t seem democratic…or charming. In fact, it’s anti-charming.

Looking at America’s dirty laundry from the point of view of ‘the other’ was fascinating. But you never sounded angry (or the anger was always balanced by thoughtful response). How did you find that balance between indignation and a quest to get to the bottom of your experience?

TN: James Baldwin wrote about how his life was most endangered by what was within him, how his main fight was to keep his own heart free of hatred and despair. I think I am definitely judgmental, but I try to use the page to unspool my often conflicting ideas.  All countries have their dirty laundry. You can distinguish between ugly things carried out by administrations and still have affection and loyalty towards a country. It was also a very strange time–fear from the attacks and fear of anthrax, the justifications for going to war, the instructions to seal our windows with plastic and duct tape. I was living here and experiencing the same events as my neighbors and new friends. When I was in London for the first holidays after 9/11, the radio was full of commentary about how America shouldn’t have been surprised by the attack. I found myself defending Americans–there could be no justification for that type of atrocity. At the same time, seeing a government official deny a chair to an old, infirm immigrant woman at Social Security outrages me. That’s a level of pettiness at a very human level, it can happen anywhere. We contain multitudes after all.

CR: As I read The Miles Between Me, I kept making these connections between my grandparents and me. Especially my grandmothers. Weird, right? They both came here in the late 1800s (one set Germans from Russia, the other set from Lebanon) in search of a better life.

Your journey happened in 2001, after you had gone to college and had a number of successful careers, but I kept connecting your feelings to them. Your essays made me wonder at their bravery, their fears, their sense of utter detachment from family and friends. It opened this new door for me to explore. Them in your place. You in their place. Me in their place.

TN: That’s great! If a piece of writing makes a reader reflect on their own lives, it is earning its keep.

CR: In “Trailing” you write:

All the selves I had constructed unraveled like an unfastened bandage. Attributes that I thought were fundamental to my being had vanished. I was no one’s friend, employee, countrywoman. I was not even a citizen. My familiar identities were oceans away. I grieved for what I had mistaken for self. When the bank manager opening our account wrote down “homemaker” as my occupation, I burst into tears.

It’s those little moments, those seemingly benign moments that you are able to dissect, connect, and make sense of in the larger context. For me, in my fiction, it’s such a process to make sense of those moments, I guess, until I’ve had a bit of time to let them settle in.

I’m wondering how fear and self-doubt fueled these essays? I’m also wondering what you might have done with all of those emotions if you weren’t (like my grandparents) a writer?

TN: I knew I wanted to write about the experience of being a “trailing spouse” soon after I moved here, but I initially envisaged it as more of a journalistic approach, a collection of other people’s stories. I was overwhelmed with the aftermath of 9/11, the experience of being alone with young children. I began working and then took took a couple of writing classes at Columbia College and began reading and writing essays–a revelation. The essay allowed me to dig away at emotions and discomfort, to create a persona on the page and go beyond mere reportage. I really enjoyed the pleasure of language, playing with image, the sound and rhythm of the word or sentence.

I went back to Columbia several years later for an MFA and wrote the first draft of my manuscript then.

The emotions probably would have dissipated if I hadn’t captured them and written them down. Or maybe they would have festered and made me insufferable. I enjoyed writing about them!

CR: Did the writing come in fits and starts? Or are you a very disciplined person about your writing?

TN: I was going to say I am not very disciplined but it takes discipline to complete an MFA and a book, especially when you are working, have a family and a dog that needs walking. I’m not very structured though–I write in fits and starts, but I would like to figure out a more elegant way to do it. I’m very slow about it, mulling and walking and reading before I can sit down to write. I’m a tornado when I’m writing–books and papers everywhere, and domestic tasks become very low priority.

CR: I loved how you explored your grandfather’s past. Like you leaving New Zealand for the United States, your grandfather left everything he knew to travel from India to New Zealand. You found sympathy for a man long dead, unearthed a more sympathetic version of him, rewrote his history (and connected it to your own). A good deal of his history was inevitably written for him because he was a ‘dusky-skinned’ man in a white world. At the end of “The Dark-Skinned Dispenser of Remedies” you write:

Why even concern myself now with any of this? We may all have unreliable biographies, but I think my grandfather deserves to be fleshed out, to be more than a caricature, a crime entry. Like me, he was an alien in a foreign country at a time when paranoia about outsiders was high. I want to claim my Indian heritage, for my children and me. I care about my mother, a fierce keeper of secrets, sheltering me from phantoms and bogeys until I was old enough to shout at them. It took my own isolation to empathize with hers. I care about her–a lonely little girl who lost her family to prison and disease and endured humiliation by racism–who finally gets to share her burden. The child grows up to protect the mother.

What do you think your grandfather might say about your work? About him playing a central role in your narrative? About how you have revived him on the page?

TN: That’s an interesting question. I realize I don’t care about him or what he would think. It’s my mother I care about, and how the legacy has affected her. And I felt guilty that I let the photographs of my grandfather go to a television producer who was concerned about making cheap, high-rating television rather than contextualizing his apparent crimes.

CR: You’ve been writing your entire life but this is your first published collection. What is the most surprising thing about publishing a book at this point in your career?

TN: That people are reading it and finding connections to their own lives and enjoying the word on the page. I was so focused on writing the book that I wanted to write so I hadn’t really thought about what came after–the experience of my life in someone’s hands.

I wish I’d written a book sooner, but it wouldn’t have been this one. Maturity enabled this collection.

CR: Throughout the book, you use research to prove a point or plant other ideas in the readers’ minds. How do you deal with research? Do you dig into it as you write the essay, letting it drive discoveries, or do you tend to get the research out of the way and then write based on what you found? Or both? Neither?

TN: Both. Another writer’s work may be a driving force to get me going–for example Sei Shonagan’s The Pillow Book and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets inspired “Meditations on Brownness.”

But for factual research, I dig about as I write an essay. And other things just bubble up–fragments of nursery rhymes or proverbs for example.

CR: I was startled at the blatant racism directed toward your grandfather and mother in New Zealand and the single-mindedness of the authorities to find your grandfather guilty (why…not sure…wasn’t familiar with New Zealand’s history and culture).

TN: Yes – but it was also the 1920s and 1930s. Not 2001!

CR: Here in the United States, as you explore in a number of your essays dealing with the color of your skin, this kind of systematic racism continues. You came here in 2001…when the mistrust of immigrants was especially high in the years following 9/11.

You write:

Being viewed as a potential threat fractures you, diminishes you. You begin to suspect your own legitimacy, your place in the long, snaking lines of mainly brown people waiting for their numbers to come up. Are you trying to sneak into a society that doesn’t want you? Are you in the shadows of illegality? Could they deport you? Could they separate you from your children? Could they make you disappear?

In the United States, there had been nothing quite like 9/11 (except, possibly, Pearl Harbor) and the years following the event are a testament to that. Were you at all prepared for this reaction to you, as a brown woman, when you came to the United States?

TN: No. I had experienced racism before, in relatively minor ways, what would be called micro aggressions. They accrete, but this was the first time I felt really scrutinized and discriminated against. I had never had difficulty in securing work before, and my pathway into the workforce in the U.S. has been quite different to what I experienced in New Zealand or the U.K. Not to say racism doesn’t exist there–it does, and it is becoming more overt currently. Uncertain economic times and obnoxious politicians help foster racism.

CR: In my mind, essayists have to possess a certain amount of bravery. In Phillip Lopate’s introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay, Lopate writes:

The hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy. The writer seems to be speaking directly into your ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom. Through sharing thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, and whimsies, the personal essayist sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue–a friendship, if you will, based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship.

And I did trust your narration. And it did feel like, as a reader I had entered into a kind of literary companionship. As a fiction writer, I can hide behind my characters. But as a personal essayist, you put a good deal of your inner life on display. That’s just the deal. What do you plan to explore next? What won’t you explore?

TN: It is the deal, but there is also the question of persona. I am playing with my role somewhat. I allow myself the full extent of parental neurosis on the page–but I don’t think I’m quite like that in real life–or am I?

I have a lot I don’t put on the page–the book is only 227 pages long after all! Carefully curated inner life on display.

Yes, I agree, I think I did need to be brave, especially in revealing myself to be sometimes pathetic, ill, lonely, immature, criminal, immoral–not very attractive. The hardest pieces to write were about racism, because that taint–even though I refuse to own it–is very sticky. The hardest pieces to read out loud are the sections where I show my vulnerability in relation to my children’s fragility, or where I recall my mother. So far I’ve avoided those in readings in case I cry!

CR: One of my favorite essays is “Bequeathed.” I love how you wove those instances together and that last paragraph:

I am her youngest child. From the distance of America, I can poke away at all that I’ve inherited, these keepsakes of loss, racism, shame, tolerance and love. My childish fantasies about heritage dissolved with time and knowledge, lost with the ivory beads. Now I decide what to hold on to, what to let go of, and what to pass on.

I have always been a bit anxious to let my Mother, who is 94, read my fiction because, in some instances, it mirrors some of our shared experiences. What has been your mother’s reaction to The Miles Between Me?

TN: She has read some of the essays that were published previously. She doesn’t have the book yet. Women & Children First sold out at my launch so I had to wait for my box to arrive a few days ago! Mailing a signed copy to her tomorrow. I hate to shake out painful memories, as she lives on her own and worries. I wish she was nearby so I could give it to her in person. I hope she likes it–it really is a labor of love for her. Mothers–especially of that generation–endured so much and often subsumed their feelings as part of a bigger sacrifice. I am very grateful to my mother, and I hope she recognizes that as the engine behind many of these essays.

The Miles Between Me, published by Curbside Splendor, is available at The Book Cellar or your favorite independent bookstore.

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