[WTAW Press; 2024]
It’s hard to write about one’s entire life, so Molly Giles writes about crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. Her memoir, Life Span, is written in snippets, moments when she crosses, thinks about, or otherwise connects with the bridge. In one, she crosses a bridge in Arkansas, where she taught for many years, because the man she is seeing at the time tells her it looks like a smaller version of the Golden Gate, which he knows she loves. The importance of the San Francisco bridge itself falls in and out of the story as its importance to Giles’s life waxes and wanes. Sometimes the bridge is entirely how she understands herself and her place in life, like in the 2003 entry, which features a conversation between Giles and her Better Self. She confesses that she feels like she is the bridge: stuck, supporting everyone else in her life, carrying a weight she can’t quite pinpoint. As she says she feels taken for granted and “over an empty abyss,” the Better Self stops listening, leaving the reader to determine how seriously to take these feelings. Other times, the bridge is merely a means of transportation and entry point into what she wants to tell us about her children and ex-husbands and boyfriends and writing aspirations and successes and repeated, nagging feelings she is still missing something, somehow falling behind.
Except for one year, 2017, which includes a note from each month, each snippet covers a single year of Giles’s life since 1945, when she was three years old, continuing until 2023. The book shows the decades fluttering past with the turning of pages, offering a grand sense of time. Some entries read like postcards, updating us on all the people and happenings from Giles’s year, but most focus on just one moment. Life Span doesn’t tell a typical, linear story with rising tension and an ending boxed up and tied with a ribbon. The book ends on a seemingly perfect moment between Giles and her granddaughter, who shows genuine interest in reading Giles’s work while they drive across the bridge. The granddaughter points out a bird she thinks is pretty as they pass the toll gate. It is a satisfying ending as much as I was aware that this book can’t really have an “ending” in the traditional sense, because we know the “story”— Giles’s life—goes on after that last page with the bird on the post. We know that she drove on.
To call Life Span a story would make it less compelling. But with the lack of perfect continuity between years and loose ends left hanging, Giles accurately expresses what a lifetime feels like: not a finely crafted story with one direct plot line, but hundreds of branches growing in different directions. Characters are seemingly abandoned one year only to return again and again throughout the book, never dramatically reclaiming center stage in Giles’s life but simply holding on in a different role. She leaves her first husband, but it’s not like we’ll never see him again. They have children together, and their split is fairly amicable. He continues to appear at weddings and funerals in entries throughout the book. No single good event solves all Giles’s problems, and no single tragedy knocks her down completely. Instead, the good and bad pile up together over years.
Giles worries that her young daughters don’t like her when they return from visiting her ex-husband. His “twenty-three-year-old girlfriend has French braided the girls’ hair and painted their fingernails scarlet, and they are not glad to see me.” Later, she worries as each of them goes her separate ways—one to a relationship with a man decades older, another to Amsterdam. Each time she mentions her children, she tells us something new about their dynamic, how it has shifted since we last heard from her. She tells us that her relationship to her oldest daughter, Gretchen, is particularly strained. They live near each other for a time, Gretchen working in a bar while Giles rents out a studio where she can work on her first novel, Iron Shoes. Giles admits that they don’t see much of each other despite their close proximity, that she knows they should interact more—“She won’t bother me, she says. But she will. I am bothered just knowing she is there, working hard while I am doing nothing to help her.” When Giles’s car battery dies, she reluctantly gets Gretchen’s help, and Gretchen is triumphant that her mother had to stop avoiding her and ask her for help. They don’t get a reconciliation scene, but in later years the strain between them has seemingly loosened. Gretchen and Devon, Giles’s youngest, take her out to dinner in one of the final entries, and she watches while they “quickly fall into laughing conversation . . . not all of which—I am getting deafer by the day—I can hear.” Giles is content just to watch them. They are still her daughters, though she doesn’t know them as well; she calls them “beautiful strangers.” Later, after Gretchen and Devon hustle her away from a man with a hypodermic needle, Giles realizes that they have started to parent her, their mother. Her implied reconciliation with Gretchen is enough. We pull away from each other, especially our parents, at times, and then, if the elastic doesn’t snap, it tugs us back toward them.
Giles’s refusal to make her life story into a clean-cut narrative exposes something true, if a bit uncomfortable, about life: Maybe we want to feel like main characters running toward compelling twists and full-constructed happiness. But it doesn’t work like that. We can spend our whole lives, Giles shows us, trying to construct a life that has everything we want, but this construction process will more likely than not be eternal, and at the end there will probably still be some missing floorboards. Even when Giles starts teaching creative writing and receives awards for her writing, she feels unsatisfied, or lonely, or like she’s still somehow barely holding on. She finally finds a man she loves who takes care of her and has never declared bankruptcy, but she continues to worry about the other women he meets for dinner and swimming trips in Switzerland. The novel she is working on takes her years of struggling through subpar drafts to finish. She simultaneously made me hopeful that your dreams can be realized much later in life than your twenties (a comforting and unusual thought) and apprehensive that these dreams almost never just “fall into place,” instead taking many imperfect years of work and wondering if trying was worth it in the first place.
As a writer who once included my characters’ every dream in my books because I didn’t want my stories to miss a moment of their lives, I felt immensely satisfied by the way Giles lets us watch her entire life. I am okay with the resulting lack of a specific sense of time and place. But the book’s postcard-like structure does turn Giles into more of a pen pal you have never met than someone you deeply get to know. She is a collage more than a singular human. I hear from her, but I don’t get to live with her for long before moving quickly on to the next year, the next moment, the next traverse of the bridge. The fleetingness of life comes through in this structure, but it comes at the cost of Giles’s own personality expressed on the page.
There is one exception to this: I connect with Giles often when she describes writing. I see myself in her, my own thoughts and frustrations and second-guesses. What does it mean to be successful as a writer, and when does it make you fulfilled? Her novel Iron Shoes is received well, but she struggles with the next one. People in a writing class she attends don’t understand her work, even when the professor likes it. When she describes how nervous she is for the workshop, how badly she wants that professor’s praise, I remembered the way my own heart tried to break through my ribs the first time I sat down and took a vow of silence while classmates discussed my work. As Giles described being unable to write, wasting hours on the internet or lost in a book, or doing other tasks until a romantic interest invites her on a date, I smiled along. I, too, have felt reluctant to write, only for an exciting turn in my social life to turn writing into something exciting and fun again, and me into the exciting and fun writer I missed.
Long before she has published any books or has much time to write, Giles knows she wants to write. She longs for it in an impossible, endlessly frustrating way: “I just want to be able to say what I don’t yet know how to say in a way that says it so well even I understand it—” she writes, “if that makes sense, which I suspect it does not.” What writer hasn’t longed to create just one perfect thing? We hope for this as if it isn’t too much to ask. Giles never returns to this idea, this wanting something perfect, something that changes her own understanding of herself as a writer. Maybe she has revised her idea of it. Maybe this book is her attempt to do so. When I started reading Life Span, I empathized so strongly with her youthful longing. I wrote the quote down immediately. It was so true. By the end, she had shown me that, much as I still hoped for this, I would have to find other ways of being happy as a writer. Giles doesn’t tell me exactly what those ways will be, just that I need to find them.
Erin Evans is a writer from Michigan, now living in New York. She studied Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she also worked as an arts writer and editor for The Michigan Daily. Her essays and criticism have appeared there and in Vestoj.
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