Grace Talusan is author of the memoir The Body Papers, winner of the 2017 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing for Nonfiction. She was born in the Philippines and came to the United States with her parents at age two. She has published essays, long form journalism, fiction, and book reviews in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Boston Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Rumpus, and many others. She has degrees in English from Tufts University and the University of California, Irvine. Her writing has been supported by the Fulbright, Hedgebrook, Ragdale, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and others. She teaches writing at Tufts University and GrubStreet, and in fall 2019, will be the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University.

EB: So, how did you get into writing and how did you start writing nonfiction specifically?

GT: I have lots of memories as a kid writing. When I was looking for photos for The Body Papers, my father found pictures of me at age three pretending to write.

EB: [laughter]

GT: There was a lot of evidence before I even started school that I liked to read and write. I liked to do it on my own for fun, like over the summer I’d get a notebook and tell myself I was going to write a book. It was something I did with very little expectation because I didn’t understand how something actually became a book. But I always just enjoyed telling stories. In middle school, I remember that my friends and I tried writing a book together—we had a notebook, and one person would write a chapter, and then we’d give it to someone else, and they’d write the next chapter—so writing was really social, something fun for me. So, yeah, I always liked to write and read, and I can’t imagine one without the other. But what was actually being a writer? I didn’t know.

EB: Ha, yes. Still not sure about that.

GT: When I went to college, I wanted a major that would give me a career path. My parents are doctors and so are all of their friends and I thought that was what one did when they grew up. So I thought I wanted to be a physician. I did all the requirements for medical school, and then I got to second semester senior year. I was in Organic Chemistry II and Physics II and I was working really hard, and I wasn’t getting the grades you need to get for med school. I had a tutor, I had study groups with my friends, I worked through extra problem sets, and I still wasn’t seeing the results, and I realized that maybe I needed to rethink this. And then Jonathan Strong, one of my first writing teachers, made the suggestion: why don’t you become a writer? He encouraged me to get a job and some work experience, take some writing classes maybe, and form a writing group. So I graduated and I did that for two years. I got a job in Boston, I took classes at Harvard Extension School, and I wrote, and then one of my professors at Harvard suggested I go to grad school for writing. He explained that it was possible to get scholarships, and so I applied, knowing nothing about MFA programs, and I got in and got a full ride. That was really the moment when I committed to trying to become a writer.

And then in grad school I got to just read and write for two years!

EB: Oh my gosh, yes! I remember people kept telling me while I was in my MFA program to really enjoy it, because it will be the only time when all I have to worry about is reading and writing.

GT: Yes!

EB: But, of course, I don’t think I fully appreciated it until I was done.

GT: Right, because it’s also work. You work really hard.

EB: Seriously. After I turned in my MFA thesis I immediately developed laryngitis. But, yeah, once you’re back in the real world… you realize how good you had it then. So, did you study nonfiction writing in grad school?

GT: Actually no.

EB: [gasp]

GT: I went for fiction. I didn’t even start writing nonfiction until… actually, I am not completely sure when I started writing nonfiction! For a long time I definitely thought of myself as a fiction writer. The novel I worked on for my thesis in grad school was loosely autobiographical, and actually some parts of my book were originally fiction that I rewrote back into nonfiction.

EB: Oh, that’s so interesting!

GT: I wrote my first essays out of necessity—I was having a lot of feelings about some things and these pieces are what came out. I published a couple of those first attempts at essay—the one about my father’s childhood and the one about my niece getting eye cancer—and I reworked them for The Body Papers. When I was writing those two pieces, I wasn’t thinking about publishing or impact, I just felt this deep urge that I need to write these things. And then they both got picked up and published pretty quickly. That had never happened for me with fiction.

EB: So how did The Body Papers come about?

GT: Some of the pieces in The Body Papers were actually published ten years ago. I didn’t conceive the book as a memoir; it is made up of essays I already published. I was working on fiction, I’m still working on fiction, but in between writing stories, I would publish essays. And then I was in the Philippines on a Fulbright, and my friend Joanne Diaz, who is a poet, was also in the Philippines because her husband also had a Fulbright there. So we would meet every day, Monday through Friday, to write from about 8am to 12pm. And one day I was feeling kind of down, and I said I’m never going to publish a book, and Joanne said, what are you talking about? She pointed out how many essays I had and suggested I think of them like a poetry collection and play around with collecting and arranging them. So that very afternoon I did that, and I sent it out to some essay collection contests, and then I immediately forgot about it, because that’s what I do.

EB: I do that too! I submit and then black out.

GT: Right. You send it off and it’s gone. But it started to end up on some semi-finalist and finalist lists for the contests, and I began to think maybe there is something here. So then the next season, I saw that Restless Books had a contest and it seemed perfect: it was for immigrant writers, it didn’t have to be a memoir, it could be an essay collection. So I submitted and forgot about it. And then a few months later, the publisher emailed and said he’d like to talk to me about my manuscript. But I was afraid to call back! I was sure they would say they liked my work, but it wasn’t quite good enough. I happened to be messaging with a friend at the time, the writer, Calvin Hennick. We had been in a habit of emailing each other every day to keep ourselves motivated to finish our writing projects. I told him the publisher emailed me and he told me to find out what he wanted and to call him afterwards. That made me feel brave enough to do it. For a long time, I’ve felt like I would never break through, and publishing a book was something I have wanted to do for a long time, and it felt impossible. I was sure I never would. So I was very surprised and delighted when I got the good news. And now, Calvin has his own good news. Once More to the Rodeo, a memoir about fatherhood, family, and what it means to be a man in America, the project he was working on while we were messaging each other that spring, will be published in December 2019 by Pushcart Press.

EB: Congratulations!

GT: Thank you!

EB: How did the manuscript change? From when you first submitted it to contests, to when you sent it to Restless Books, to how it is in its published form?

GT: The version I sent to Restless Books included a lot of material that I wrote while I was in the Philippines, not just my previously published essays.

EB: Got it.

GT: It started as an essay collection, then we were calling it a memoir in essays, and finally we landed on memoir, because it seemed like the right fit by the time we had worked through the material through several substantial revision.

EB: It’s so interesting to hear about how people choose to brand their books, like Mandy Len Catron’s book is also a memoir in essays. Or sometimes your book gets branded as something you don’t want, like Suki Kim’s book being called a memoir.

Even though your book is now officially a memoir, you started with all these separate pieces. I love how The Body Papers is arranged thematically; it reminded me a lot of Daisy Hernández’s memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed. So how did you figure out how to arrange the essays and chapters?

GT: With a lot of help!

EB: [laughter]

GT: The original order was chronological, but each piece isn’t a straightforward chronological telling. The narrator can go anywhere, and does, back and forth in time. So I kept shuffling. The whole thing used to be probably twice as long. The crossing the street in Manila piece used to be the last chapter and now it’s the first—

EB: Really? I love it at the beginning!

GT: Thank you! Two friends suggested it, and it felt like a really radical, last-minute change, but it got to be fun, thinking about the book as a singular reading experience and what that reading experience would be like if I moved things. It also made me think of myself as a character, as the narrator of the book, and trying to figure out her own narrative arc and journey. It was a hard creative experience, but it was fun and satisfying.

EB: Well, I love the order you ended up with! I love the back and forth in time, and how each chapter circles through multiple time periods, and how each chapter builds on the next to create a more complete story. It feels like how our brains work and store memories. A lot of memoirs feel dishonest to me, in a way, because we don’t think our way chronologically through life, you know?

GT: Right. That’s what so fascinating to me about memory—you start to talk about something that happened to you, but talking about it changes the memory for you, and it changes based on who I am telling the story to, or what other people have told me about my own story… what I am choosing to tell and not tell.

EB: And how you can have memories of things you weren’t even alive for, because you’ve heard those stories told to you so many times.

GT: Right. And everyone has their version! And it’s interesting to think about what is the point of that version, what are they trying to communicate. There’s a story about me as a kid in the Philippines. I had hid our kitten behind the refrigerator. It’s not even that important of a story, but for some reason everyone in my family knows this story and tells me about it. Why are you telling me this story? What is so pervasive about it? Why is it important? I am still trying to figure it out.

That’s the feeling I have when writing an essay, that I am trying to figure something out. That I have an image or a question that I can’t let go of, or a memory I keep thinking about, and I am trying to understand something about it.

EB: Yes! The question I get the most in from my GrubStreet students is how do I know if something is worth writing about? And I always say that if you can’t stop thinking about it, or talking about it, there is something there, even if you don’t know what it is when you start writing about it.

GT: That’s very true, but it’s also very different from how we approach academic essays. You go into a paper with an idea, an outline, research. This type of writing is different, it’s more of an act of discovery.

EB: I love that.

GT: Me too.

EB: Have you taught academic writing?

GT: Yes, I taught first-year writing for many years.

EB: Is that a difficult shift for you to teach academic writing, as compared to teaching creative writing? Or thinking about academic writing versus your own creative work?

GT: It is definitely a shift. I actually liked teaching first year writing because it felt really important: we are going to practice this thing, learn this way of writing, and then you are going to go to your other classes and implement this thing right now. But I would always try to get my students to try things that people do in essays in their academic writing, and it was hard to get them to trust me about it. Like I would say that they can use “I”––I have seen many excellent pieces of scholarly work that use “I”––but it was just so ingrained in my students that they couldn’t use “I” that they were afraid to do it. And it just seems silly to me because this piece of academic writing is you, it is your opinion on this book, this piece of art, whatever, and you should try to get it to be as close as possible to you and your voice. And that’s the same job I feel like I do as a teacher of essay writing and creative nonfiction writing—trying to get students to cut to the bone a little more.

EB: And even in writing fiction and poetry, I feel like the goal is the same, isn’t it?

GT: Yes. You are trying to write something true.

EB: Speaking of cutting to the bone, how do you approach writing about deeply personal things about yourself, or personal things that involve other people? Especially people you love and care about? In your book you write that your family knew a “story could destroy you” and that “you could not take back a story once it had been told.” How did that mindset affect the writing of this book?

GT: So, my parents live close by, an hour away in the house where I grew up. And when they have new people over for dinner, they will joke be careful, Grace is a writer. Because they see me get into this line of questioning, they recognize how I closely I am paying attention, and they say watch out everybody. But they are used to me being like this, and they know at this point that if they are speaking to me, there’s a chance anything they say could end up in a story.

But I also have a relationship with people and I want them to trust me. I had a conversation with each of my family members when I found out the book was going to be published, and each of them said, we know you and we trust you. They were comfortable with things I had been publishing about our family for years, and they trusted the line in me where I feel morally and ethically comfortable about what I would and wouldn’t share. I just think about it like filtering everything through me. I am not trying to get anyone. I am not trying to gossip about anyone’s personal details. It all has to be in service to what I am trying to do as a narrator in the piece. For example, my niece is mentioned in that first piece about making yogurt in Manila, but she is mentioned just to show the contrast to the girls her age growing up in the Philippines. It’s not really about her.

I also decided to change everyone’s names at the last minute, because, with the internet, I didn’t want everyone to be so searchable, and I didn’t use many photos from the present—mostly photos from the past.

EB: Since you had previously published many parts of The Body Papers before, did you ask for permission before you wrote those essays?

GT: No. If I had asked for permission, I never would have written those essays. I just had to do it little by little bit. I also stopped showing family, including my husband, early drafts because it put too much pressure on them. It just wasn’t working to do that. That’s why I have a writing group and friends who are writers. [Editor’s Note: Grace is part of the legendary Boston-based Chunky Monkeys writing group consisting of Christopher Castellani, Chip Cheek, Jennifer De Leon, Calvin Hennick, Sonya Larson, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Celeste Ng, Whitney Scharer, Adam Stumacher, and Becky Tuch.]

But before I publish something, I always check in with my family. For example, when my dad mentioned that a dentist in the Philippines recommended he had all his teeth pulled, even the healthy ones, to avoid future dental bills in the United States, I remember thinking oh that has to go in the book. But I asked him first if it was okay to put that in there, because I didn’t want to disclose someone’s personal medical information without their permission.

EB: I was wondering about that, how so much of The Body Papers is about bodies and medicine and health scares. How did you handle writing about such personal medical situations?

GT: Well, everyone in my family is a doctor of some sort except for me, but they are also all interested in writing, too. My sister blogs—she writes about some really personal things, way too personal even for me—and I think she did some work to make my family comfortable with having that stuff out there. But my other sister doesn’t like to talk about it, so I try to do what feels right for each of them.

EB: Right, there’s no hard and fast rule. And the things I am most worried about appearing in essays, people don’t even seem to care about. They’re always pointing out these little things I didn’t think mattered at all, like, um, actually, it was a different brand of jeans.

GT: And it happens in fiction too! People see themselves in fiction all the time, even if the writer assures them it is completely made up.

Though, I must say, none of family has read the book. I offered it to them, but they wanted to wait until it was out And they are really excited! They are flying in from all over to come to my book events! So hopefully it all works out. [Editor’s Note: At the time of this interview, The Body Papers had not yet been published. Hopefully, by now, everything has worked out.]

And I did give my mom a reading list to prepare—she doesn’t normally read memoirs, so I assigned her some books, like Sherman Alexie’s memoir, which is about his mother directly, and Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s book, which is about abuse. I wanted her to know what a memoir is. Because I think that’s part of the problem, is that people don’t understand what a memoir is. It’s the truth, yes, but it’s my version of the truth and how I remember things.

I needed love and support from my family to help me try to finish writing it; I couldn’t take on everybody else’s stuff too.

EB: Right, like the only way I can write anything is if I think that no one in it is going to read it.

GT: And it feels comforting when things are only in print. I originally published “The Man in the Mountain” piece about the abuse from my grandfather in Salamander, and it was reassuring to know, okay, this is only in print, you can’t Google this.

EB: Scaachi Koul said something similar when I interviewed her for this series. She said that a book has a certain level of buy-in—people have to pay money for it, or go all the way to the library to get it—so it’s harder to troll people for it like you can with a piece that’s online, where you can just read the headline and see your author photo and say whatever you want.

GT: That’s so interesting. That’s really true.

EB: So, maybe you already answered this, but what do you find most challenging about writing nonfiction?

GT: I have written all kinds of nonfiction. When I was doing reported, long-form journalism pieces, I loved it—because I would just have an idea of what the piece might be, and then I would have to go talk to a bunch of folks and read a ton, and I loved the research part of that. The challenge is what is the story. You have all these threads, all this research, this pile of string, and you have to find the story.

When I am writing about my own life, it is a similar question—what am I trying to express here? What is this all about? Why am I writing this? But the challenge is being patient. We want things to be efficient all the time. You think I am going to write about this thing and submit the piece to these places and be done with it, but with personal writing, you have to stay close to the idea of it and take your time with it and really figure out what is this thing. The challenge is not thinking about writing as a product that people are going to publish and read and just focusing on the writing.

EB: With personal stuff, too, sometimes you just need more time to process.

GT: Yes.

EB: And what do you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction?

GT: It’s a feeling. That’s it. It’s the feeling of: I wrote this! I did this! I wrote a new essay recently for the first time in a while, and it just felt really good. It’s that feeling of when I wake up and I think I can’t wait to get back to it. It’s rare, so that’s a really good feeling when you have it. When I was writing that new essay, I was in a coffee shop, and people I know came in, and I didn’t even register them because I was so into the essay. It’s that creative process, the flow, whatever you call it—that to me is the rewarding part. People can experience that in all kinds of ways, other creative endeavors, playing basketball, all kinds of way.

EB: Yeah, when I can get into that, and I come out of it… it feels the same as waking up from a really good nap. It’s rejuvenating.

GT: Yeah! That feeling, and also getting notes and responses from folks. For example, I did a reading on campus of one of the most sensitive parts of the book that I hadn’t read out loud before, and afterwards this Filipina-American student came up to me, and she was weeping, and she said, “I can’t talk right now, I am not composed, but I just want you to know, I really responded to your work.” She couldn’t even articulate it, but I sensed it meant a lot to her to see another Filipina-American woman in front of an audience, reading something she wrote. That’s a profound feeling. I know, because I’ve had that feeling, too. You don’t even realize until the person is in front of you how little you see Filipinos folks in that space.

EB: That actually leads right into to my next question! In The Body Papers (and in the Resistance Issue of Pangyrus) you write about the influence of your writer uncle, Alfrredo Navarro Salanga, and how powerful it was to see books written by someone who looked like you. What other writers have influenced you as a writer?

GT: Since I was such a big reader as a kid, I came across Maxine Hong Kingston’s book The Woman Warriorwhen I was in high school—

EB: I lovethat book.

GT: My sister found it first, and then she gave it to me, and that book was a revelation. She has a line in there that is something like “what is Chinese and what is the movies” and it made me think about how I was performing all the time—how I was supposed to be in the house with my Filipino family, and then how I was supposed to be at school, and then how I was supposed to be in church. Then after Maxine Hong Kingston came Amy Tan, and then I started reading anything I could find by Asian-American women writers. I just foundthose books.

And then there came a point, maybe five years ago, when all of a sudden I couldn’t keep up! Which is great. I have a stack of books by Filipino-Americans that I have bought in the past year—Elaine Castillo’s America is Not the Heart, Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto, Cinelle Barnes’s Monsoon Mansion—and there are too many to read! But I remember when it was just Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan for a long time.

EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow non-man writer?

GT: I love this passage by Vicki Forman from her book This Lovely Life, which I quoted in the review I wrote about her book for The Rumpus many years ago. I return to it every so often and admire the courage it took to write this. She is writing how things really are, not how you expect or want them to be:

I don’t know what I expected: a movie ending perhaps, a final cry and then stillness. What happened instead was this: my daughter’s body grew cold and then colder, her skin turned dark and then even darker, and when I felt nothing from her at all, no warmth or movement or breath or heartbeat, I cried and asked the nurse to check again and pulled back the quilt so she could reach Ellie’s chest and she put the stethoscope on my tiny baby and shook her head and said, ‘No,’ meaning, No, not yet, and this went on, over and over, a dozen times perhaps, over the course of the next two hours.

Photo credit Grace Loh Prasad.