- march 17.2000 t , !fl© K $ ........ ¥ ............... ocal literary legend Judith Barringtons new book, Lifesaving, is a beautifully-writ ten memoir of three summers she spent in Spain, beginning in 1964, as a young Eng- hwoman recovering from the tragic death of ier parents at sea. Readers who are drawn to this sexual com- g-of-age story should be forewarned, lowever, that this memoir focuses ilmost exclusively on the author’s mouthful misadventures with men, not with the lesbian lovers she saw back lome in England during the winter months. (For some of that story, Bar rington directs readers to an earlier book, Hers 3, a 1999 anthology of les bian short fiction published by Faber &. Faber that contains a novella about her first relationship with a woman— known as Sophia in Lifesaving.) As a lesbian reader, 1 kept hoping Barrington would write more in this book about the apparent dichotomy of her binary existence during those years, but she keeps her focus on her state of mind as she dealt with her grief and the resulting rather wild behavior during those sultry summers in Figueras, on the eastern coast of Spain. This is what she writes in the book about being asked if she had a sweet heart: “Perhaps 1 knew that if I thought about it, I might have to speculate,.not only about marriage, but also about heterosexuality. Such speculation was unthinkable in this Spanish world of the early sixties and in my own state of unacknowledged fragility.” Barrington says avoidance was how she coped with the deaths: “T he time in Spain symbolized being in denial through compulsive behavior.” As for the men about whom she writes, the author (who was just 20 that first year) says, “I still had an openness to a guy in a romantic light.” In Lifesaving she describes her denial like this: “Most people don’t have safe opportuni ties to feel. I certainly didn’t— not there in Figueras, and not back in England either, where it had seemed to me that no one wanted me to feel bad around them.” Toward the end o f her three years in Spain, Barrington did face her reality: “Nor was sex with men any longer an adequate distraction; 1 only went on doing it to keep up heterosexual appearances, and out o f habit. W ith women, I needed more and more intensity.” In her memoir, Barrington makes brief ref- The life she saved was hep own cult to write,” Barrington notes, explaining that she had to piece together what actually happened to her parents and then attempt to recreate their drowning in her mind. Though Barrington has made Oregon her home since 1976, she now returns to England each year to do readings and teach workshops. Not too long after her arrival here, Barrington met Ruth Gundle, who became her partner in life and in many things literary. “W e’re now in our 21st year together," Bar rington says with a quiet stride. “One of the things that’s kept us together is we both have a passionate love of books and writers. She’s a brilliant book designer and a very good editor.” Indeed, as the founder of Eighth Mountain Press, Gundle also edited Lifesaving. So how difficult was that, having your lover edit your memoir about earlier lovers? “She knows me well enough to ask the right ques tions of me, she knows what I’m leaving out,” Barrington explains. In 1982 Barrington and Gundle founded Flight of the Mind, summer writing workshops for women led by well-known women authors and held at a rural retreat along the McKenzie River. This year the teachers include Grace Paley, Barbara Wilson, Gish Jen and Allison Joseph; there are two one-week sessions between June 16 and July 2, and the deadline for applications is April 17. The dynamic duo also founded Soapstone, a retreat for women writers near the Oregon coast. Currently undergoing some repairs, it will be accepting applications in 2001. Now a thoroughly acclimated Oregonian, in Lifesaving Barrington writes of the calming effect of fresh Oregon air: “It works because the air is part of the sky, part of the trees, part of the grass— because it’s out there touching clouds and the warm skins of animals I can’t see." Barrington is also the author of the 1997 best seller Writing the Memoir, and those inter ested in the craft of writing will enjoy reading what Barrington has to say about the process behind Lifesaving. “W hen you write a memoir, you have to be the kind of person who doesn’t mind so much about privacy,” she understates. Readers seeking insight into coping with profound grief and the development of a writer’s mind will find much to enjoy in this sensitive book. Revered Portland author shares a turbulent part of her past In Lifesaving, a new memoir by O riana e 6 a v t n a y «■XvXv- . . * v a«» i f t f l f H P W « H § § : . yjf R i v - £ • *» . . 1 erences to another girlfriend named Josie and now says she’s considering writing a book about that relationship. “It’s important for people to know what it was like to live in repression,” she says about those sexually-constrained times, then adds: “I would’ve been suicidal without the gay and lesbian and women’s move ments.” Barrington— who also has two volumes of poetry to her credit, both of which contain short memoirs— records many eloquent obser vations of small-town Spanish life: “What I recognized most, as I watched those women approach the church and slide through the brass-studded door, was their shame— the way G reen their bodies shrank into the black folds of their clothes as if to say I’m sorry, as if to say I’m full of unseemly passions, as if to say, as I, myself, would say through the years to come: I am unworthy, 1 am nothing, and finally, in the seductive light of a thousand candles: I am yours.” Asked to expand on that passage, Barring ton says: “1 identified with their shame but for different reasons.” The prologue and first chapter of Lifesaving cover Barrington’s early relationship with her parents and the familial connection to the sea. The last two chapters and epilogue relate the author’s later adult trip back through Spain to visit her parents’ grave in Gibraltar and provide some resolution to the grieving process. I found these two sections, which bookend the | youthful Spanish ) l summers, to be the more engag ing and emotion ally moving por tions of the book. Reflecting a more mature point of view, the author’s recounting of her graveside ceremo ny was especially poignant as she told her long-dead parents about the person she had become. “It was then that the tears came— the first uncomplicated tears I had shed since the accident,” she writes. “Standing be side the headstone, the simple fact I had been so afraid to face settled there beside me: I missed my parents. I missed them and that was all.” “The last chapter was by far the most diffi ■ LIFESAVING by Judith Barrington. Eighth Mountain Press, 2000; $16.95 softcover. 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