INTERVIEW: Karleigh Frisbie Brogan
Holding:
A Memoir About Mothers,
Drugs, and Other Comforts
Karleigh Frisbie Brogan
Steerforth
An interview with Tomas Moniz
Lately I’ve been thinking about how we write problematic characters. For a long time as a creative nonfiction writer, I wrote about parenting, always struggling to walk that line between writing about how I wanted to be versus how I actually was as a parent: all my mistakes, my regrets as well as my successes. Since I’ve transitioned to fiction, I found a similar difficulty in writing characters who make really problematic choices or behave badly. I’ve been finding inspiration by reading memoirs, which brings me to Karleigh Frisbie Brogan’s new book Holding: A Memoir About Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts. I was fascinated by the craft of the book, appreciating the narrative distance she established, how some moments felt so intimate and visceral, while some were measured and objective. The choice to balance summarizing events with moments of specificity and discomfort, established the tenor of the book so that it read not like “trauma porn,” but like an intimate conversation between friends.
Tomas Moniz: How do you want to talk about the narrator of Holding: A Memoir About Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts? I imagine someone coming up to you saying something like, Hey so when you made that really bad decision…. As a writer, do you still feel connected to the "I" of the story?
Karleigh Frisbie Brogan: I think it’s best practice for me to refer to the narrator in the third person, she instead of I. But I have trouble maintaining that. So I’ll probably go back and forth in this interview. Everything in the memoir happened so long ago, and it’s all so out-of-character for the person I’ve become, that it no longer completely feels like me. It does but it doesn’t. Which gets to the crafting of it. A lot of the groundwork necessary for writing this was time traveling. Which was basically me walking around my Portland neighborhood, air pods in, listening to the albums that transported me back to those years: Radiohead’s OK Computer, The Rolling Stones, Otis Redding, Curtis Mayfield, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, The Boogie Nights soundtrack…. The music, combined with other sensory triggers, like the way the sun fell against my shoulders, or a whiff of gasoline or cigarette or those trees that smell like jizz, or hot dryer-sheet air pumping out of some apartment complex’s laundry room, it would all just hurtle me backwards to very specific moments I’d immediately record in my phone’s notes app. That’s when I really had to start regarding the narrator as someone separate from myself. My therapist, who I would meet online once a week, used a practice called Internal Family Systems where I learned to differentiate parts of myself. The addicted 20-something was an outgrowth of the anxious, insecure child I had been. This person, this part of me, was called the exile. And I learned to look at her with compassion and a sort-of removed curiosity instead of folding her back into who I was then, who I am right now. What we do for art!
People have asked me if writing this memoir was cathartic, which is the most clichéd and probably misapprehended word in memoir-land. Writing out my painful past was not purgative. It was the opposite of that. I was putting everything back inside myself, bringing buried memories to the fore, really staring them down and trying to understand their implications on a larger level. What could my addiction from 25 years ago say, if anything at all, about the guy bent in half in a fentanyl nod at the MAX stop? What could it illuminate about human beings? About our quest for love or solace or safety, for feelings that are really just bodily responses to stimuli that are really just chemicals? I became determined to narrow the gap, as ambitious or naïve as that may sound, between the addicted person living on skid row and, say, the tax-paying, home-owning, managerial-class member. And for that, my mental health took a bit of a hit. It seems worth it, even if only five people read my book.
TM: I love your description of sensory triggers. I know exactly what you're talking about. I was also struck by how you named "mother" and "drugs" as comforts right at the onset. As I read on, I started noticing other forms of comfort woven throughout the book. What does comfort look like for you today?
KFB: At the onset of writing this memoir, I didn’t know yet that “drugs” and “mother” were the same thing, that through both of them I was chasing some sort of primary feeling—the inaugural high, the warm solace of arms and breast when I was an infant, respectively. And that both of these were, physiologically, the same exact thing. Both producing the same brain chemicals, the same feelings of wellbeing and safety. And I had to really examine that in order to understand addiction writ large. What are we after when we become addicted? To me, it seems to be a primal experience. A return to pure feeling, before we could intellectualize or distinguish ourselves as separate from our caretakers, from the nebulous world. And I learned to move through life finding ways to reenact that.
In one of the chapters, I talk about my early friendships, namely with Erica and Mercedes, but there were others, earlier ones when I was a child. I was an introvert. I was shy and afraid of everything. So I clung to extroverted, confident girls who not only protected me, but who made me feel like the most special person in the world. They were romantic friendships. Not necessarily sexual, though my girlhood friendships often were, in an exploratory and fantasy-making kind of way. Maybe that’s normal kid behavior. But with Erica, I was deeply emotionally in love with her. I was jealous when she had lovers. No one saw me and appreciated me as much as she did. So, in some ways, it was like she made me. She saw who I was so therefore, I existed. Talk about transference! I didn’t make the connection to my own unrequited mommy trauma until I was deep into writing the book.
TM: Has your relationship to comfort evolved?
KFB: Later, I found comfort with men. Truthfully, they weren’t always a comfort, but they were a means of survival. A man could provide a roof over my head, pool his resources with mine, share his addiction, his dope. A man could protect me from dealers and johns and other junkies. I couldn’t stand being alone. The minute things ended with one person, I’d hastily find someone else who would love me. And it always felt like love even if it was mostly need. I always believed it was love.
Today, I rely less on others for comfort which, counterintuitively, results in richer and deeper relationships. This might be a boring answer but writing is my number-one comfort. My job is very public-facing, interpersonal, and sensory-overloading, so after a long ten-hour day there’s nothing I want more than to escape into my laptop. I’m presently working on a novel and it’s bringing me such joy to create this world, these characters. I also spend a lot of time just sitting in hot water, letting my mind think about nothing. I go to this hippyish co-ed spa every weekend and just chill in the hot tub, listening to the wind chimes. And I take too many showers.
TM: Sometimes you gotta love the hippies! There's a moment in the book where your narrator talks about the devious pleasure she gets from introducing drugs to the men in her life and this moment is discussed in the same chapters where we see how repeatedly the men in her life at that time period are taking advantage of her. It’s almost as if there's a kind of revenge playing out. I’m curious if you could speak to writing that moment, or how you decided to address that duality.
KFB: That’s a really good question. At the time, I didn’t see it as devious to introduce men, or anyone for that matter, to heroin. If anything, I thought I was giving them a gift. I thought it was an act of love. But I also knew, on some level, it would snare them. It didn’t seem any different than taking them on a trip to Italy or something. In the case of the man I refer to as the masseuse, he was already using hard drugs on the reg, he already had one foot in that world, so I didn’t feel guilty about shooting him up with heroin for his first time. He was extremely abusive but I didn’t see it that way at the time. Not fully anyway. I thought I was lucky to be with him. But I was also afraid of him. So I really like this theory you posit about a revenge playing out. It’s entirely possible that’s what I was doing on a very subconscious level.
I had a very unhealthy understanding of men. My very first real boyfriend, with whom I was madly in love, cheated on me and I was completely crushed. This was before Dale. I recall making a very conscious decision after that to be a slut and to not care at all about men’s feelings. But I did care. I think I just tried to pretend I didn’t because I didn’t want to get hurt again. Men, in many ways, were like a drug. I felt like I needed them. Sex was validating. I got off on the power dynamic—how easily I could make them want me. I felt like I had all the control. I wound up in toxic relationships mainly because I was a drug addict. Healthy, well-adjusted people do not take up with drug addicts. Broken wants broken. Once I got clean I learned how to have healthy relationships. And I started dating women.
TM: Another thing that really moved me was your character’s relationship with addiction—specifically how she looks back on her addictive behaviors with a kind of fondness or even love. There's that powerful moment—without being too explicit—where she can almost make herself orgasm just by thinking about using. I’m wondering how you approached writing that kind of visceral connection.
KFB: I take a hands-on approach. Ha! Really though, what goes through my head when I’m fucking or masturbating is the most private montage, a collage of disparate images, some of them having nothing to do with sex at all. But usually having to do with sex. And I cringe at not only my public admission that the thought of dope can expedite an orgasm, but the fact that dope can do that to me at all. How depraved, right? Maybe it means, in some ways, I’m not totally over it. Maybe I never will be. Like how people who haven’t smoked in two decades can still smell a cigarette and crave one. It’s not really about the cigarette. It’s about that time in your life. When I think about shooting up, it's not just about the dope, it’s about who I was back then. And I’d be lying if I said it was all awful. I lived for the moment, something I have a hard time doing now. I’ve returned to my original form—a somewhat neurotic snooze-fest. I don’t do drugs, I don’t smoke, I can’t tolerate alcohol. I get tired easily so I never go to parties. Or on long hikes. I spend most of my time at work or writing at my desk. I’m a perfectionist and a clean freak and I’ve been diagnosed with a few acronyms I won’t take the medications for. So the chick I was back then is a total stranger to me now. And there’s a hotness there that’s wrapped up in her freedom.
TM: And finally, can we talk about setting? I really loved the way you captured the North Bay—can you share a bit about how you approached writing setting and how it impacted your narrator’s evolution?
KFB: I’m obsessed with the North Bay. I think it’s the most gorgeous place, if not on Earth, then in the US. I’ll move back there someday if I can afford to. Capturing the North Bay was vital to the whole project of the memoir. I feel like when people think of drugs, they think of gritty cities or of poor, forgotten rust-belt or mining towns. Sonoma County doesn’t seem like the kind of place that would host a whole network of drug addicts and dealers, not to mention methadone clinics and needle exchanges. I was trying to illustrate that addiction happens everywhere. It’s not reserved for the very rich and the very poor. The rural and the urban. It could happen to your suburban, football-playing son. Your awkward mall-goth. Your dental hygienist. It can happen amongst golden hills and old oak trees and fragrant vineyards under perfect blue skies. A homeless couple could be squatting in your bougie gift shop, right alongside some zinfandel jam and handmade, goatmilk soaps! This is, again, an effort to bring everything close to the reader. We are more emotionally impacted when we read about a car accident that happens in our hometown as opposed to one that happens in another country. Maybe because we can imagine it more clearly. And there are a lot more Santa Rosas in the US than there are Beattyville, Kentuckys. Or Baltimore, Marylands.
My narrator ends up back in Sonoma County in the final scene because that’s where it all started. It’s like nesting dolls: Sonoma County is the great mother, where the narrator’s mother and her mother’s mother were born. It’s an abundant place. So much grows there! It’s where Luther Burbank had his test gardens. And in returning to Sonoma County, I’m returning to Mom. In the last scene we take a walk in this area that’s between Santa Rosa and Sebastopol—the two towns I grew up in. It’s a sort of outskirts, neither/nor area that the undergrad me would have described as a queer space. And I liked landing there for that reason, too. For the difficulty to define such an area.
