The World Before Mirrors (review)

The essay has been called an intimate form, intimacy being a hallmark of the confession. By confession, I don't mean necessarily the Catholic ritual of naming acts (in a dark booth on Saturday mornings, as I recall from childhood), but rather a revelation of thoughts. More so than any genre, the reader of essays enters the mind of the writer, and sees there the architecture of thought itself. In an essay collection, it follows, the reader enters not just the mind of the essayist, but the many-roomed mansion that is the heart and soul of the writer, the very world as seen through the writer's lens. You'd better be sure it's a place you want to be. Joan Connor's collection of essays, The World Before Mirrors, which won the River Teeth 2005 Literary Nonfiction Prize, was a place I wanted to be, almost like home.

Perhaps because her life story is/has been similar to mine (a woman alone in the world, an easterner stuck in Ohio—a scathing argument against Ohio pops up in many of Connor's essays, so piercing and artful that one begins to pity the state), Connor's literary terrain feels familiar, but her appeal is more universal. Throughout the collection she wrestles with the loftiest themes, love and desire, place and displacement, memory and loss, the very meaning of life itself. Her voice is astonishing; she is witty and elegiac both, erudite and silly, eloquent and plain speaking. As a writer she has enormous range, intellectually and artistically, and she allows herself the freedom to cavort wildly in her field of inquiry. One essay is called "Flying Rabbits and Disappearing Playground," which sounds like the title to an abstract painting, appropriate for the form of this piece, which affects the reader like a mood (if this essay were a color, it would be indigo). This essay takes an almost exaggerated license to travel; an essay is supposed to meander, to wander about, but this piece is an uber-form: it circumnavigates. Connor ambles from two boys she recalls from childhood, the proverbial good and bad brothers (two sides of herself), to rabbits, hobos and their esoteric pictograms, the sexual molestation Connor suffered as a child, loneliness, turning 50, email spam, a back road in Vermont, seahorses (death and cruelty), Edith Metzger (the girl who died in Jackson Pollock's car, the friend of his lover), the etymology of the word boudoir, menopause, a cow and a moose in love, and finally, the act of writing, a reason for living, a mark we make upon the world. It may strain credulity after the list above to say that the essay coheres, but it does. The piece is ultimately about love.

Love, in fact, is the theme that tethers the essays to each other and unifies this collection. "Do not ask me what love is," Connor writes, though she will answer the question through a variety of metaphors and musings. "Riding a horse is like loving someone. Illusions of control. Delusions of control. You sit on the back of an animal who could kill you on a whim, who outweighs you, outruns you, who, truth to tell, is only humoring you and only for the while. Rein right, rein left, indeed. Gee. Haw. Golly gee and haw, haw. You're on your back and staring at the stars, you ass. Hee haw, haw, haw."

The narrative is rendered taut by the powerful undercurrent of longing. "I worry that love's unattainability may be what makes it love," she writes. At times, Connor is petitioning: "Is that life, finally, tiptoeing through some desolate room waiting for a stranger to speak? Where are you? I've been waiting. Speak to me now. I am in the ballroom in my prettiest dress and waiting to hear your voice. Let's leave something of ourselves, our love behind in this aging world. Speak to me. Now." Yet at other moments, she renounces: "I no longer believe in...