From the publisher: “After her adoptive mother’s death, Lori Jakiela, at the age of forty, begins to seek the identity of her birth parents. In the midst of this loss, Jakiela also finds herself with a need to uncover her family’s medical history to gather answers for her daughter’s newly revealed medical ailments. This memoir brings together these parallel searches while chronicling intergenerational questions of family. Through her work, Jakiela examines both the lives we are born with and the lives we create for ourselves. Desires for emotional resolution comingle with concerns of medical inheritance and loss in this honest, humorous, and heartbreaking memoir…”
Don’t miss out: Celebrate the re-release of Jakiela’s award-winning memoir Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe (Autumn House Press) and the release of Dave Newman’s latest on Thursday, November 14th at Brillobox. Readers include Newman, Jakiela, Lou Ickes, Meghan Tutolo, and Adam Matcho!
About the Author: “Pittsburgh author Lori Jakiela is the author of the memoir Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe, which received the 2016 Saroyan Prize for International Literature from Stanford University, was a finalist for the Council of Literary Magazine and Small Presses Firecracker Award and the Housatonic Literary Award, and named one of 20 Not-to-Miss Books of Nonfiction of 2015 by The Huffington Post. Jakiela is the author of an essay collection, Portrait of the Artist as a Bingo Worker (Bottom Dog Press), as well as two other memoirs — Miss New York Has Everything (Hatchette) and The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious (C&R Press). She is also the author of the poetry collection Spot the Terrorist (Turning Point) and several limited-edition poetry chapbooks. Her latest poetry chapbook, Big Fish, was published by Stranded Oak Press in 2016.
Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Rumpus, Brevity and more. Her essays have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize many times, and she received the 2015 City of Asylum Pittsburgh Prize, which sent her to Brussels, Belgium on a month-long writing residency.”
“Readers who wander into Lori Jakiela’s world fall into a broken-in honesty, full of warmth and wit. It’s like hanging with your best friend, only with more wry humor, withering candor and the lack of affect which is the best of the rust belt.” —Jody DiPerna, Pittsburgh Current
The woman who calls herself my sister is Blonde4Eva. This is her e-mail address. I find this upsetting, even though I’ve dyed my hair blonde for years. “I’ve always been a natural blonde,” I say, meaning I dye my hair to match my baby pictures.
“What do you think it means?” I ask my husband, who shakes his head. My husband says I shouldn’t judge people by their e-mail addresses.
Fluffykitty1000. Poetgrrrl. Flyguy. Blonde4Eva.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” my husband says.
The Catholic Charities counselor has promised to be in touch. She wants to contact the birth family.
“I have to advise you to not continue this correspondence until we speak with the birth family,” the counselor says. “Until then, we can neither confirm nor deny that this woman is or is not who she says she is.”
“From mobster to politician,” I say.
“What?” she says.
“Thank you,” I say, “I will.”
Blonde4Eva sends more messages. I read them over and over. They’re a puzzle, pieces of sky that don’t seem to fit. I’ve loved words so deeply and for so long I thought it was genetic. But Blonde4Eva struggles with grammar, syntax.
“I’m not judging,” I tell my husband, though of course I am.
It’s a shitty thing to do.
I’m a writer. My friend Patience is a librarian. We both judge people on their words, the books they love, if they own bookshelves, whether or not they love books at all. Sometimes we feel bad, but we go on doing it, the way people on Wall Street judge people on their stock portfolios and plumbers judge people on how they feel about copper pipe and my mother judged people by whether or not they could twirl spaghetti on a fork without using a spoon.
Everybody needs a compass in this world.
“I all ways KNEW,” Blonde4Eva writes.
Two words. All. Ways. KNEW in capital letters, bold type. Green and highlighted. “Decoding,” I tell my husband when he asks what I’m doing now.
Patience and I did not grow up in families of readers. In our craggy Pennsylvania towns, it was better to be caught with a cigarette than a book. It was better for our mothers to catch us getting fingered by a boy than catch us on the couch reading.
Reading was uppity. Reading made people think things.
“Devil’s work,” Patience’s mother would say.
My mother called it lazy. “Don’t you have something useful to do?” she’d say, and mean dishes.
In Patience’s house, there was a Bible and copies of “Highlights for Children” lifted from the dentist’s office. There was “The Farmer’s Almanac.” There was “TV Guide.”
Me, I kept a Webster’s dictionary in the bathroom of my parents’ pink one-story house. I hid it under the sink, behind stacks of toilet paper and my father’s tubes of Preparation H. The dictionary’s cover was denim blue, designed to look like the back pocket of a pair of jeans, an everyday thing.
My mother hated bathroom reading most of all. “Shit or get off the pot,” she’d say.
“The mouth on that one,” my father, the mill worker, said when they fought. “Just like her mother.”
I saw words as handed-down things, like heart disease and bad teeth.
Orphaned, adopted, I was not my parents’ child.
Blonde4Eva writes: “My mother was born of two Irish imagrants. And I suppose no I know that things were no good. We have 3 other siblings.”
Stet — the word editors use when they don’t correct errors because the error means something more. An error can be an insight. An error can be a map. Stet means “let it stand.”
When he was President of the United States, George Bush misspoke a lot. “I’m the decider,” he said, and journalists left his mistakes alone.
“I’ll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office,” George Bush said.
“Terrorists have no disregard for human life,” George Bush said.
“Amigo! Amigo!” George Bush called out to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi as the cameras rolled.
Growing up, I’d hide in the bathroom and read and memorize dictionary pages. I’d find smug new words and use them in sentences at dinner.
Words I liked: Flibbertigibbet. Oxymoron. Loquacious.
“I could wipe my ass with what you know,” my father liked to say.
“I don’t know where you came from,” my mother would say, and I’d say, “Neither do I.”
“I don’t know where you came from,” Patience’s mother would say to her, too, though Patience was what my grandmother called a natural-born child.
I was not natural-born.
I was loved, mostly, despite it.
With Blonde4Eva, it isn’t just the grammar. It’s the implied sense of drama – “I suppose no I know.”
I ask my husband again about the meaning.
“What do you think it means?” my husband asks back, and I don’t answer.
One time my father bought me a set of encyclopedias from a man who was selling them door-to-door. My father never opened the door for strangers, but this time he did. I don’t know why.
The set was The World Book of Knowledge. The books looked like bibles, egg-shell colored covers, gold spines, gold-tipped pages with strings sewn into the binding to use as bookmarks.
“She’s smart,” my father would say to explain why I’d hole up for hours reading A-C when my mother thought I should be outside playing.
“She’ll ruin her eyes,” my mother said.
“She’ll go to college,” my father said. “She’ll meet a good man.”
My father bought a bookshelf, the only one in the house, a low two-shelved number he put together just for the encyclopedias. The bookshelf had a glass door that slid closed to keep the books safe from dust. My father wanted the books safe.
My mother wanted me safe from the books.
“I want what’s mine to stay mine,” my mother liked to say, something she learned from her father, the orphan who would have loved me.
He meant he wanted his children close. He meant he didn’t want anyone to leave him ever again.
“She’ll get ideas,” my mother would say about the encyclopedias and mean the world. She sighed a lot. She dusted the bookshelf with a pink feather duster.
As far as I knew, she never opened any of the books.
Patience and I met in college. We were English majors. I wanted to be a journalist. “Pipe dream,” my mother said, and I imagined a pipe as big as a factory, an assembly-line of clouds. To be cruel, my mother told people I was studying to be Barbara Walters.
I’m not sure how Patience’s mother explained things.
When Patience was eight, an encyclopedia salesman came to her house, too. Albion, Pennsylvania was farm country, tornado country, the 1970s, the kind of place where people name their children after virtues or deserts or saints. There were a lot of girls named Hope and Mary and one girl named Sahara. The day of the encyclopedia, the doorbell rang. Patience’s mother, expecting vacuum cleaners or a new kind of floor soap, opened the door, and this man dressed for the city said, “Might I borrow a few moments of your time, Miss?”
Patience’s mother looked more than her age.
She looked like a woman with housecoats and three children and a life in Albion, Pennsylvania. She looked like a woman who’d welcome the opportunity to purchase a new kind of floor soap and she knew it. The man held up a big white book. The words Wonderland of Knowledge were embossed in gold on the cover and there was a picture of a globe, shiny blue for water, more gold for the land. Patience peeked from behind her mother.
The man bent down. “Hello, honey,” he said. “Do you like to read? I know I do.”
Patience liked to read. Patience liked globes, too.
The man made a flourish, a magic trick. He tried to present the book to Patience’s mother, who kept both hands on the doorframe.
“You’ll be giving your beautiful daughter a head start,” he said. “She’ll have an advantage over other kids.”
The “TV Guide” was open on the coffee table, dog-eared, highlighted. Patience’s mother was proud of their TV, the sturdiest piece of furniture in the house. “This will outlast me,” she’d say, and pat the TV like a puppy.
The salesman held his magic book like a lantern. Patience watched her mother once-over his shined shoes, tweed pants, smooth hands, gold watch big as a compass.
“Now why,” Patience’s mother said, the words slow, clicking like deadbolts, “would my daughter deserve an advantage over anyone?”
Patience took care of both her parents until they died. Now she lives in a small apartment with a cat and many books, and says she doesn’t like people though both of us know it’s not true.
Patience’s car is filled with books on tape. When she drives, she turns up the volume and likes to feel the stories, those other worlds whirling inside her.
Blonde4Eva says she found out about me two years ago. “One of my cousins dropped the bomb on me,” she writes. She says her mother denied then admitted it. Her mother gave her few details.
“Were you born with a club foot?” Blonde4Eva wants to know, and I want to tell her no, I was born with two, two clubbed feet.
I wonder if my story, the one my parents told me and the one I helped invent, has been wrong from the start.
“You are probably as weary as I, to determine the truth so that nobody gets hurt,” Blonde4Eva writes.
There are so many versions of the truth.
All of them would hurt someone, I think.
This excerpt of Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe is published here courtesy of the author and should not be reproduced without permission.
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