Before I Knew Any Better: Author’s Foreword

Before I Knew Any Better

Copyright 2007 by Harvard Perspectives Press

For Gen and for R, two real women

It is amazing how complete is the illusion that beauty is goodness.

--Tolstoy





Love is an angel

Disguised as lust,

Here in our bedroom

‘Til the morning comes.

--Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen





If it hadn’t been so good, baby,

It wouldn’t be so bad.

--Delbert McClinton, and others







Every word of this memoir is true,

Or my name’s not Alicia Wentworth.

--“Alicia Wentworth”




Author’s Foreword

A few years ago I was invited, by a member of my congregation, to attend a private film screening. The gentleman who extended the invitation is the owner of the theater, and he loves movies; this is a combination that I have appreciated in him from the first. He even likes movies that are rather widely considered “bad” movies. The movie to which he invited me, along with several dozen other people, probably fits well into that category. He never explained why he liked it, but he did offer the following preface as he stood in front of the screen before the film began to roll:

“I like this movie. There might be apologies for this and that, and sometimes you might have to stand on your tippy toes to see what I see in it, and there’s funny and wacky and silly stuff that happens, and it’s okay to laugh at that stuff, but please don’t laugh at the movie to show yourself or anyone else – least of all yourselves – how cool you are. Wait until something is funny and laugh at that. Because I want you to get into it, and if you put up a force field of smugness you never will. Just leave. I will give you your money back.”

We all laughed, because of course we had not paid anyway; we had been invited. But I loved what he said. How wonderful it would be, I am thinking now, if I could find some effective way to cut through the smugness of some readers (surely not you!) and get them to approach my memoir as my friend wanted to approach “his” movie. But I am not optimistic.

So I will try to render myself as simple-minded as possible, so as not to over-think my relationship with you. There was much, in these events, that was great fun. Funny and wacky and silly stuff. I do not intend to shy away from that, or to look for gravity on every page, even if now means embarrassing myself, a respectable thirty-something woman, and making myself blush.

I suspect you will apprehend a certain nostalgic exhibitionism in my relating of this memoir, and particularly in my choices of which memories to describe and which words to use in my descriptions. There does not seem to be any good way of making a measured ascent of this peak of experience. In my daily life, now, as a Unitarian minister, the parent of two gifted pre-adolescents, and a supporter of various good causes, I have grown (or atrophied) into a certain ornate way of expressing myself. One could say that I am a little long-winded, and I am sure that some members of my Sunday congregation would agree, and yet it is my own self-indulgent view that I do not waste words. Words are my stock in trade as a preacher, and I use them carefully to locate both the content and the nuances that I believe are important. When I write something down on paper, as now, my phrasing tends to become even more deliberate.

But now I am struggling a bit. I am finding that with every scene and incident, I want to charm myself into remembering selectively, and the charmers, the selectors, are the words themselves. My occasionally over-embroidered speech patterns of today seem at times especially effective at avoiding the kind of descriptions that might make me blush. Is there any more effective a hallucinogenic or delusionary device than the arsenal of one’s vocabulary and ready phrases? Some say that ontology recapitulates phylogeny; I simply do not know, but I do suspect that vocabulary recapitulates ontology.

So at times I will drive myself to recover the simple vocabulary and phrasings toward which I tended at seventeen and eighteen, when I inflicted the following experiences on myself as I am now inflicting them upon you. At other times, no doubt, I will step back to this more deliberate voice that serves me well enough today. Perhaps the process and the choices are at one with my selective memory, or perhaps it is my simple and humane tendency to protect myself, and you, from the harshness of experienced. I certainly mean you no harm, only good, just as I intended myself no harm, back then.

Life seems all a bit like trying to maintain one’s balance, and to be the speaker or narrator often carries with it some pretense of balance. Perhaps it would be better if I owned the theater and could simply show you the movie, although I fear I would need my friend to introduce it with his lovely appeal to your gentleness as an audience. I also fear that, if I were to choose the medium of movies rather than memoir I would have to make a clearer commitment from the outset on the basic question of whether the following is a cautionary tale, or just some silly, wacky fun. But it may be that that would merely be a failure of craft.

--Alicia Wentworth