The Monster at the End of This Memoir
Everything I know about reading and writing, thanks to lovable, furry, old Grover.
I never believed in monsters. My parents didn’t have to lift the bed skirt or peek into my closet at night to pretend to look for intruders. My mother didn’t believe in deceiving children, not even in benign ways. For example, she refused to promote the existence of Santa Claus. (Years later, when I converted to Judaism, I would wonder if my mom’s ambivalence about the portly old saint made it easier for me to give up Christmas.)
My dad insisted on leaving milk and cookies out for Santa every Christmas Eve, but this wasn’t convincing evidence, even when I woke up on Christmas morning to an empty glass and crumbs. My dad was a known source of fiction. He also told me he dated Wonder Woman and Carol Alt.
I was a skeptical child. I kept my eyes open when the grownups said grace. Monsters, I assumed, fell into the same imaginary category as God, Santa, and the bearded deities in my beloved D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths: useful fairy tales, not literal fact.
I never believed in monsters, and yet my favorite book was about a monster who was afraid of monsters. Blue, childlike Grover from Sesame Street is the hero of this book. Grover is aware that he is a character in a book titled, The Monster at the End of This Book: Starring Lovable, Furry, Old Grover. Grover is afraid of the titular monster, so he attempts to prevent the reader (me!) from reaching the end, first by tying the pages together with ropes, then by nailing two-by-fours haphazardly all over the pages, and finally, in a blockade worthy of the Three Little Pigs, by building a brick wall across the pages.
My dad read me the Grover book before bedtime. This was when I was little and we lived in our first house, in South Austin. Our dining room walls were Kelly green and our bathroom was decorated in shades of traffic cone orange. I loved the primary colors; I wonder now if they reminded me of Sesame Street.
After my bath, I snuggled under my dad’s arm on a tweedy, off-white couch that left a textured imprint on my thighs. My dad pretended to struggle as he lifted the edges of the pages that Grover had tied together and boarded up. After the page sealed with brick and mortar, he fell back against the couch cushions, breathless and heaving with feigned effort, his chest marked with a big wet spot from my head.
He said, in Grover’s voice: “You are very strong!”
Despite Grover’s strenuous efforts, we always reached the monster at the end of the book. What Grover doesn’t anticipate is that he is the monster at the end of the book.
“It was me all along,” he says. “I, lovable, furry, old Grover, was the monster at the end of this book.”
“And you were so scared.”
Grover as postmodern narrator
Like all my favorite books, The Monster at the End of This Book has returned to me with new meanings for different times in my life. In grad school, when I took a seminar on literary theory, I would remember those reading sessions with my dad and realize, with a shock, that I’d learned all I needed to know about self-consciousness in postmodernism before I could even read.
I dropped out of grad school 23 years ago because I missed reading for pleasure. But I still have a textbook from that seminar on my shelves. In it, I find that I underlined this sentence in an excerpt from The Postmodern Condition by Jean-François Lyotard: “I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”
Merci beaucoup, Jean-François, but I prefer Grover’s: “You are very strong.”
Grover as memoirist
For years I thought The Monster at the End of This Book was clever, but then I started to write a memoir. Now I realize that it’s beyond clever—it’s profound.
Grover imagines himself as the hero of his story, so he’s afraid to meet the character he’s been led to believe is a monster. As anyone who has seriously tried to write a memoir or a personal essay can tell you, writing about your own life requires you to imagine yourself as a character. But if you get stuck in thinking of yourself as simply a hero, or simply a monster, the story is not going to be very good.
The memoir I am writing is based largely on my teenage journals. When I started to read them, I was afraid that I might find a monster. It might have been a guy who took advantage of me when I was younger, before I’d built defenses against such things. It might have been an adult who failed to love and support me unconditionally during a chaotic and vulnerable time. Even worse, the monster might have been me—an unruly, snarling adolescent who thought she knew everything.
Four years later, now that I have read all my old journals and looked directly at events that once caused me so much shame, I see that the real magic of The Monster at the End of This Book lies in the end, when Grover realizes that, in fact, he, Grover, is the monster, but it’s okay, because he was always lovable.
I haven’t finished my memoir yet, but I already know how it ends. There is just me—lovable, furry, old Sarah. I never needed to be afraid.
Other interesting things
I am slowly reading Make Art Make Money: Lessons from Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career by Elizabeth Hyde Stevens. It’s an interesting blend of biography and self-help for artists, a guide for learning to make money with your creative work without feeling like a sellout. Hyde’s book draws inspiration from another book, The Gift, in which Harvard professor Lewis Hyde (apparently no relation) explains that art, in anthropological terms, is a gift rather than a commodity. “When gifts are sold,” he writes, “they change their nature as much as water changes when it freezes, and no rationalist telling . . can replace the feeling that is lost.” And yet, some artists, like Jim Henson, find a way to run a successful business making joyously unhinged art. There’s a lot to unpack in these books. Maybe I’ll return to the subject of art, money, and Muppets.
Speaking of monsters, I didn’t even need to read this whole essay about horror novels by Alexander Chee to know that I love it. First line: “No one is likely to shame you for not having read Dracula, the way they do The Mill on the Floss or Middlemarch, though perhaps they should and perhaps that is, ever so subtly, what I am up to now.
From McSweeney’s, This Week's Punctuation Power Rankings. “I’m sorry, Semicolon. No matter how simply you try to explain what you do, nobody gets it. Are you a colon? A comma? Gun to your head, could you tell me? Look, why don’t you take a moment to think about it, and then we’ll talk. Right now, I can’t afford to invite your level of chaos into my life. Not again.”
As a slow writer, I appreciated Laura Alwan’s essay, “The Virtue of Slow Writers” in The Millions.
S.
It’s probably my most used meme :)
Such an apt analogy. Also, Grover was my favorite with his gangly arms.