We are happy today to be talking books with a gifted author. Her name is Ann Putnam and she’s the new author of a memoir called Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye.
When Ann isn’t writing books, she’s teaching creative writing and women’s studies at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. She has published short fiction, personal essays, literary criticism, and book reviews in various anthologies such as Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice and in journals, including the Hemingway Review, Western American Literature, and the South Dakota Review. Her recent release is Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye. You can visit her website.
Q: Can you begin by having you tell us why you wrote this memoir?
A: This is not an easy question to answer, as the writing of the book came out of a series of little notebooks of lines, phrases, sometimes single words I carried with me like a talisman through the months when I lost my father and my uncle, his identical twin. Those notebooks seem like relics to me now because I remember the places I carried them, where I sat when I wrote in them: hospital cafeterias, emergency rooms, ICU unites, hospital hallways, elevators, lobbies. I carried the notebooks to keep me safe, to keep me from rushing out the doors of those hospitals and never coming back. Months after my uncle and my father died (six months to the day apart), I realized I had the beginnings of a book, and a book which I wanted and needed to write, not knowing how it would ever see the light of day. What interest might there be in reading of this inevitable journey taken by such ordinary people? Turned to the light just so, the beauty and laughter of the telling transcend the darkness of the tale.
Q: How did you come up with such a unique title?
A: Well, I had wanted to title the book, Lyric from a Thin Place, but my editor was dissatisfied with that. (That remains as a chapter title.) So after much going back and forth, she pulled a line from my book that said, “she was in that shimmering place where one is kept safe from despair by the tugs and pulls from both the living and dead, where the beloved dead are always a full moon at noontide.” Now the phrase is actually a permutation from a line in a Jewish prayer that says the beloved dead are always with us, like the stars, even though we can’t always see them. I used the moon instead of the stars, because of a conversation I once had with a Peruvian doctor, who explained the Peruvian mythology of the moon, which venerates the moon as stronger than the sun, because we can see it always, even by day.
Q: What was the hardest part to write?
A: I would say the first rough draft was the hardest. The first thing I wrote described the death of my father, which comes late in the book as it was finally sculpted. But I’d written that part for a reading at a conference. It was about six months after my father had died and I thought I was ready to write about it. I didn’t sit at my computer with tears running down my face at all. I was cool and very much the writer at work, telling herself that she could do this just fine. But after about an hour, I would begin to feel ill. And sure enough found myself running a fever—the aches and weariness, the works. I’d take a couple of Tylenol and lie down for an hour or so, and it would pass. So I learned that I could only write about an hour at a time through those summer months. That feeling eventually just sort of left me, and only returned now and then. But as I wrote the memoir, I experienced more losses—the death of my mother, and then when I was doing final revisions, the death of my husband. So I guess now that I look at it, it was all very very hard.
Q: What brought joy?
A: This is a wonderful question to come after what I’ve just talked about, because as I was writing out the answer to the previous question, I was pulled back to that hard time. Now I’ve come up for air and the sun is shining and the world goes on. I think the most joyful moment was also the very hardest if that doesn’t sound totally contradictory. I wrote an “afterward” while my husband was dying of cancer. He was on the couch in the living room and I was on a little cramped table in the dining room. My office was downstairs and that seemed too far away from him. This “afterward” became a love poem in prose to him, and to this day I do not know how I managed to write it. It came forth all of a piece, almost unbeckoned. I am most proud of that little page at the end of the book, which came at such cost.
Q: After you wrote “the end,” how did it make you feel?
A: There were many “ends,” so to speak. I’d send of a “finished” draft to my editor, and her keen eye and sensibility would find all sorts of things to change, and so off I’d go for days and days of revision. I don’t think I came to “the end” or that feeling of true completion until I received the email from her, that it was a wrap! Then I felt just a wave of giddiness but mostly gratitude to the universe for words that came to me unbidden, and the strength to get them all down.
Q: Is there an underlying message you are trying to get across to your readers with this book?
A: I think my book asks a very difficult question: What consolation is there is growing old, in such loss? What abides beyond the telling of my own tale? Wisdom carried from the end of the journey to readers who are perhaps only beginning theirs. Still, what interest might there be in reading of this inevitable journey taken by such ordinary people? Turned to the light just so, the beauty and laughter of the telling transcend the darkness of the tale. What I know so far is this: how pure love becomes when it is distilled through such suffering and loss—a blue flame that flickers and pulses in the deepest heart.
Q: What has been the reaction of your family after finding you have written this book?
A: This is a great question, too. I have a very small family, no brothers or sisters, only three cousins, no uncles or aunts. So I am mainly thinking of my children when I ponder this question. I have three children and so far only one of them has been able to read my book. Each of them is at a different stage in the grieving process. My daughter, for example, just can’t bring herself to read it yet. It’s interesting to me because they know most of the things I record and they know also how big a role each of them plays, so you’d think they’d want to be sure I got it right. But you know? It’s all, all right. It’s all right if they never read it. My husband never got to read it, yet he’s virtually on every page. And that’s all right too.
Q: What would you say to others who would love to write their own memoir?
A: Oh my. I wish there were an easy answer. Bonnie Friedman wrote a wonderful book called Writing Past Dark: Writing about the Living where she talks about the fears of such things, as inevitably the living occupy our stories as much if not more than the dead.
I had written a scene about my uncle, which struck me as I was writing it, as indelicate at best, a betrayal at worst. He, of course, would never read it. But I worried about extended family, especially my father’s cousin, who had helped with some of the archival research on my grandmother for the book. Of course, every family has its secrets, and to reveal them is a very difficult thing. After he’d read the book, he called me to tell me how much he loved it, and to thank me. I told him I was worried about the part about my uncle. He said, “thank you for telling everything.”
I quote Mary Oliver, who says, “We need to be each others’ storytellers—at least we have to try. Still, it is like painting the sky. What stars have been left out? But it is a fearful task, each telling of the great tale.” We have a right to our own stories. We are the only ones who can tell them.