Reviewed by Lara Zielinsky
Regardless of the age at which a person comes out, the search for identity brings out traits often associated with youth— awkwardness, uncertainty, and end-all, be-all feelings.
This “everyone goes through something like this” message permeates each event of Audrey Beth Stein’s very relevant memoir Map.
In 1996, through an online romance with another young woman, Catrina, Audrey is flung through all the youthful exuberant stages of overwhelming love. Her days and nights filled with correspondence, she grows increasingly certain that she’s found her one true love.
A creative writing senior at the widely accepting University of Pennsylvania campus, Audrey commits to traveling to Seattle to meet Catrina. She envisions perfection, every word and touch exactly as it should be. Her creative writing courses provide some outlet for her thoughts and feelings, and she feels torn between that and her romance with Catrina. Audrey briefly chooses her writing over the romance and yet, tapping into the feelings, she is able to produce some of her most powerful writing to date. She returns to her romance feeling that her love for writing and her love for Catrina can coexist.
However, just days before the trip, Catrina breaks up with her. She won’t return Audrey’s calls or emails. This is where the youthful love story becomes a tale of growth and maturity in love and heartache; Audrey begins with the help of friends and ex-boyfriends to figure out what happened, what went wrong, and what to do now. She examines all the romances of her past.
She resolves to go ahead and travel to Seattle—to stay at a youth hostel instead of with her would-be-lover, and to visit with a friend who lives a few hours south of Seattle. She also connects with some fellow Indigo Girls fans, and finds a sense of individual purpose. She’ll see the sights, and see what happens.
Map is a journey. Stein uses the map metaphor to show us the lay of the land as she has seen it. Her style of prose is, at times, lyrical. Told in first person, it has a stream of consciousness feel, letting the reader in on Audrey’s disjointed, disquieted thoughts about her parents and former romantic partners. Then, gradually, order comes to the internal monologue—decisiveness, definitive action. The sentence structure becomes more complete, even as questions remain. But no longer are these particularly questions of identity; she is comfortable with the identity of ‘bisexual.’ The questions have to do more with her place in her community, her goals, her family, and her resolve about her writing.
I found Map extremely readable. Events in the story blended well one to the next. I found the writing style interesting, and while the italicized dialogue was off-putting at first, it became clear that it was to show that these were recollected conversations, not necessarily verbatim.
I had a brief conversation with Ms. Stein, discussing her life as well as the purpose and structure of her memoir. Ms. Stein teaches memoir and novel development at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Lara Zielinsky: You indicate near the end of Map that you moved to Boston. You had been at the University of Pennsylvania which is “40% Jewish” and also has a large, open and welcoming GLBT population. What took you to Boston? What differences and similarities have you found?
Audrey Beth Stein: I’ve always liked Boston, and a part of me was disappointed to discover that my first choice college was somewhere else. I grew to love Philadelphia while I was at UPenn; I think it is an underrated city and a wonderful place to spend four years of school. But I was starting to outgrow the city itself and whereas Boston for a single twenty-something is really about a lot of different connected areas with unique characters—Cambridge, Somerville, JP, Brookline, and so on—Philadelphia had a much greater divide between city proper and suburbs. So even though Philly is technically bigger than Boston, Boston feels larger. I moved here for the city itself as well as its proximity to family—it was a place I could see myself staying long-term— and then figured out how to find community and a job and all that stuff. Being queer and being Jewish were definitely helpful in the beginning in terms of meeting people, and in fact I met one of my very good friends through volunteering on the Bisexual Resource Guide that first fall.
LZ: Early in Map you express your identity as bisexual. And it appears in the execution and your choice of language through much of the memoir that it is/was more of a struggle to be accepted as bisexual rather than your own personal struggle with describing yourself as such. Is this the case? If so, what are the key points of someone else accepting a person’s orientation?
ABS: I actually think the largest challenge was not being sure, and then once I was sure, having that almost immediately being tied in with something else challenging to talk about— namely, falling in love via the Internet.
In terms of someone else accepting a person’s orientation, I think that’s a tricky question to answer in the abstract and I sometimes wonder what my own experience would have been if I’d been in a less-accepting environment. I would agree with what I have witnessed elsewhere: that time and familiarity often temper more extreme reactions. For me, having confidence in myself and assuming the best of other people has worked well.
When I teach writing classes, I habitually wear a rainbow necklace on the first day to send a message that I am both queer and out to anyone who will find that helpful, and I use my language and example to make clear that my classroom is a safe space for all kinds of experiences. I don’t leave room for expressions of intolerance, but I do try to allow for someone who is less comfortable around queerness to feel comfortable enough to stay in the classroom, and then to quietly come to a more accepting space without having to admit they might not have been there at the beginning.
LZ: Toward the end of Map, you write of writing the memoir itself. This self-referential style is not something I’m familiar with in the memoir form. Could you explain why it was important to describe the struggle of writing the memoir within the memoir?
ABS: Over the nine and a half years of writing Map, it became more and more clear that the writing process was part of the story—the struggle to articulate is a piece of the journey to understand and to connect. As I say on the last page, “I noticed that even those people who seemed to think that this relationship didn’t quite count still responded to individual passages of manuscript, yes, I remember that feeling, I’ve been there.”
I also found it challenging to write a memoir where I came out as bisexual when I have since moved away from using that term. (Bisexual had never felt completely comfortable to me, though it wasn’t/isn’t inaccurate, and nowadays I mostly use queer.) It was important to me to honor my own experience of the language—which I’ve found many others share—but also to respect the incredible activism that has taken place under the bisexual label that has paved the way for so many of us. Using a flash-forward in the middle of the book allowed me to address my own identity-labeling in a way that felt clear and natural and— I hope—leaves that aspect of the story relatable to people regardless of the terminology they use to describe their own history and behavior and identity.
LZ: Your experience with Internet romance has many lessons unto itself and could easily have become the story. Did you find that aspect complicated to “contain” in order to tell the larger story of your experience with realizing you could love anyone regardless of gender?
ABS: Actually, it was the opposite—I began with the story of the relationship and early manuscript readers kept asking for more. The revision process involved a lot of layering as I figured out how to tell something that was simultaneously a love story, a coming out story, and a coming-of-age story.
LZ: Thank you, Ms. Stein, for your time.
ABS: Thank you for your kind words and for the opportunity to talk about Map for the Bi Women newsletter.
Order Map and learn more about Audrey Beth Stein at http://map.audreybethstein.com.