Naked Two Ways

A nude photo and writing from life.

A Nude Photo

Yesterday, I asked Richard to take a picture of me naked. I was on the floor on a towel. I’d just had a bath. I’m naked with Richard all the time, and he is naked with me. The first time we had sex, he got out of bed and walked to the bathroom, and I looked at his ass, and I thought, “You walk to the bathroom like a deer walks wherever a deer wants to walk.”

I like when he sits on the lid of the toilet when I’m taking a bath. We exchange whatever thoughts we’re having since the last time we talked. I like the way I look in the bathtub, as much as I can like the way I look in my current state. I’m not sure I ever thought my body was that great. Somewhere along the line, I gained trust that men don’t look at women the way women see themselves, and the way men look at women has a built-in kindness of blindness and amazement that sex is about to happen.

I know this isn’t true of all men. I was once with a man I think looked at women the way women look at themselves. He was astonishingly beautiful and well built, and I knew I wasn’t the pretty one. I was a lot younger than I am now but still not young. I was in my early 50s. I was so hot for this man I would whip off my clothes as if I was still beautiful, to the degree I had ever been beautiful. With this guy, the things I felt about us being together caused me not to eat, so that was a help, I guess, looking back.

I have a friend who takes pictures of her body all the time and posts them on social media, as much as it’s possibly to post pictures of semi-nudeness. It’s an art project and a social project. She chronicles her life this way, as do other women I’ve known.

I knew a woman who would take nude pictures of herself in public places, such as bathrooms in hotels or in a friend’s living room when the friend went to the kitchen to get wine, let’s say. This woman was extremely beautiful. She was also an excellent photographer. Maybe those two things were related. In my opinion, even as this woman entered her 70s and was still taking nude pictures of herself, she had little to risk, because she was just gorgeous at every age and knew how to pose in mirrors. She didn’t post these pictures. They were her private archive.

I don’t know why I asked Richard to take a picture of me yesterday. I thought, in the light, I didn’t look so much like a wreck, if you factored in I am 77. If I didn’t like the picture, I could always delete it. During the past year, I took some pictures of myself topless in the upstairs bathroom mirror and sent one to my friend who posts nude pictures of herself. I’m not sure why. Maybe in solidarity with her projects. The color of the areolas around my nipples has faded. I never liked my breasts all that much as things to be proud of. I wasn’t proud of anything about my body when I honestly think about it, except maybe the way I looked in clothes.

I don’t look back at my former body as a desperately fabulous thing I’ve lost, although in comparison to the body I have now, it was, well, I don’t need to tell you what it was. All you need to know is it was hugely better than the body in the picture Richard took of me yesterday. I looked at it carefully. I might have been influenced by the ravishingly gorgeous nude photos of Shere Hite I’d just seen in The Disappearance of Shere Hite—the brilliant documentary about the sex researcher. She is desperately beautiful as she ages, although none of the photos show her at my age—the age at which she died.

I didn’t delete the picture. I didn’t much like the way I looked, and I said to myself, “Well, dear heart, that is who you are.”

Writing from life, the place of memory and the place of craft.

A few days ago, I wrote here about a severe low sugar Richard had and having to call an EMS team to help him. lauriestone.substack.com/p/sugar-time The piece has turned out to attract the largest number of readers of any piece so far, and it has prompted many more comments than usual. These comments are the reason I’m thinking about the form of this writing combined with the type of subject matter I covered. I wonder, based on some comments, if there are times when the craft techniques of writing can feel confusing or destabilizing to some readers because of what you are telling them about.

Do they find themselves lost in your tale and aroused by the way writing techniques—such as jump cuts, images, and the use of language that describes rather than evaluates—are designed to heighten the reader’s interest and sense of connection? The reader feels manipulated, maybe? Or thinks you are writing fiction and isn’t sure how to position themself in what you are sharing? Or the text feels too intimate precisely because you have not bored them with stuff that happened and have instead tried to produce a dramatic moment for them, layered with associations and reflections? I honestly don’t know. That’s why I ended these sentences with question marks.

The piece I posted on Substack was different from the first account I wrote and posted on Facebook, and to me this difference was the reason it worked as a piece of writing. I wrote the first piece right after the EMS workers left the house and Richard was recovering in his office. I sat with him for the rest of the day to make sure his blood sugar stayed level, and while I was with him, I wrote about what had just happened.

I felt great relief, and the relief gave me freedom, and the first account reflects those immediate emotions. It skirts a bolt of fear I felt during the incident that Richard might die, although it’s mentioned. The original piece had more comedy in it, almost slapstick. It has a manic edge, I think. I said in the post I was telling the story without giving it time because it had a good ending. It was the ending I wanted to rush to.

As the days passed, and Richard and I continued to talk about what had happened, I found myself coming back to the fear and not the relief. The day after his low sugar, when he was fully recovered, he wrote an account of things from his side of the rabbit hole. In severe low sugars, he loses language and his sense of consciousness feels close to his memories of acid trips, as if he’s approaching some cosmic profundity or other. At least this is what he can report. He has no memory of what he did or said or how his body moved in time and space. He can remember nothing of what I tell him happened, and he feels weirdly distanced from his life in these moments of intensity and distanced from me while I’m fearing for him. That’s just the way it is.

I rewrote the piece I’d posted on Facebook, so it now starts with the fear I’d felt and the associations the fear stirred up, not while I was living the fear but while I was writing about the fear, right then, in the moment of stringing together sentences. That’s the way I work. One sentence leads to the next sentence. That’s the job. The job is not rummaging around in memory or the order in which things took place.

When I think about memory as an activity, when I think about looking back at something, I think we remember what consoles us to believe happened. Memory operates in two time frames: a memory of what we think we lived through in the past, including the feelings stirred up then, and memory includes the shading of the past by the feelings we have now, as we look back. In this sense, memory operates the same way that narrative operates in these exact two time frames.

Why then do I propose that memory, when it’s spontaneous, is sniffing for consolation, when so much of what we remember is painful and when the pain in our memories is easier to recapture in detail than memories of when we felt happy or hopeful or liked ourselves and the lives we were living? I think memory is structured as some kind of confirmation of ourselves we gravitate to, some form of the hero-victim or victim-hero who has come through whatever and lived to tell the story. In my case, at least, my sense of myself as a creature looking at the center of life from the curled edge of the linoleum feels like who I am.

And this is why, as a writer, I have had to become aware of this tendency of mind and try to subvert it. In my earlier days, when I looked back at things that happened in my life, relying mainly on memory, the writing was whiney and self-serving, invariably a form of flashing and showing off, I would say. I was inviting the reader to look at me instead of something else I was making alive and mysterious and contradictory on the page. In order to write something the reader could enter, as if the story was about the reader—in order for the reader to feel something rather than feel asked to love or defend me—I had to rely almost entirely on the techniques of literary craft and use very little of what I could have remembered.

This is what I mean when I say that memory, itself, plays a small role in writing about something that has taken place. Did the things I reported about Richard’s low sugar actually happen? Yes, in terms of the facts. But many more things happened that a surveillance camera would have recorded than I set down in the piece. I was selective in order to keep the reader reading. My aim in a piece like this is the same as my aim in any piece of writing: to keep the reader reading. It’s a form of seduction. My aim is not to assemble facts as they occurred, as you would in journalistic reporting, or to arrange the details of narrative to add up to an understanding or a meaning. The reason I felt I had a story worth telling was that I had changed my mind, as well as the tone of the memory, and I could contemplate these changes in the body of the piece.

Often, if you use material from your life and don’t disguise it as fiction, people will say you are “brave.” I always feel this is code for saying, “I would never expose that.” But this is me being defensive, perhaps. Maybe people think my aim is to illuminate some aspect of the human condition. It’s not my aim, but I can’t control what readers make of what I do.

In talking with me about this subject, Richard made the point that readers have different emotional approaches to writing they consider fiction and something they consider to be an account from life. He said that, reading fiction, the reader is more likely to respect the boundary of what's been presented in the story. Readers aren't inclined to ask the writer to write a different story—provide back story, or motives, or write in a different tone, or leave in or delete this detail or that one.

In memoir, in personal essays, and in other forms of writing from life, the boundary of "this is a story, take it or leave it" might be less respected. Readers of these accounts will tell you the form or the tone made them uncomfortable, with the implication the writer should change it, or the reader may want more information in order to adjust their emotions, not because the piece really needs it in the terms it’s been offered, as a story but not a fictional story.

I find intriguing the idea of different genres creating firmer or more porous boundaries around them for readers. And you, readers, will have to decide where you stand.

Prompts and Zooms

Prompt:

“I wondered if I should go into the store and buy some olives. I wondered where the sex collects when people, like ships, pass in the night.”

Take any part of these two sentences or both of them and go. See if you can consciously think about these three things, even as you write your first draft: layering events with the feelings and memories they stir; jump cuts that deepen or heighten a moment; writing sentences that show the narrator's love in telling you whatever the narrator is telling you—even if the narrator isn’t talking about something they love.

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