Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013, March 17, 2000, Page 37, Image 37

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    - march 17.2000 t ,
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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
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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.
For more information about FLIGHT OF THE
M in d , call (503) 236-9862 or surf on over to
wveve. teleport. comj-soapston/fhght/index. html.
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