Pigs Can’t Swim: A Memoir. By
Helen Peppe. Da Capo. $14.99.
Memoirs ae not known for
being sweetness-and-light recollections of childhood. They are generally
retrospective workings-out of issues left over from an author’s early years, an
attempt to come to grips, in the public forum of a book, with a childhood that
fell short in innumerable (if always individual) ways. There is a certain level
of authorial masochism to letting everything “hang out” in book form, and a
certain level of displaced masochism for readers in examining someone else’s
family’s proverbial dirty laundry. So readers of Pigs Can’t Swim will go into it knowing pretty much what to expect
– and that is pretty much what they will get. Oddly, the book is dedicated to
Peppe’s parents, who, to put it charitably, do not come off well in it; but whether
this is fence-mending, guilt or something else is never quite clear. The intent
of Pigs Can’t Swim is to show the
large and small things that save us from the excesses and difficulties of
childhood, and to communicate that message of earthly salvation in a wry,
poignant style. The dedication to Peppe’s parents appears to be part of this
overall approach.
Peppe, now a writer and
photographer, grew up as the youngest of nine children of a homemaker mother
who left school after eighth grade and a father who worked as a janitor and
handyman for the local post office for 25 years. The family lived in rural
Maine and determinedly defined itself as middle class even though there were
constant money issues and those who knew the family considered it pretty much
the definition of hardscrabble. The household was, unsurprisingly, chaotic, and
there was plenty of drinking, smoking, fighting and sex to keep the older
children occupied and distracted. For her part, Peppe defined herself by asking
questions that made other people, especially her parents, uncomfortable,
notably about animals’ feelings: it was her own feelings for animals that led
to her becoming a vegetarian and eventually an animal photographer. Peppe, in
her own explanation, did better as a child with animals than with people,
especially favoring dogs and horses. Loving to read – a fact that caused her
problems at one point when she failed in her duty as lookout for siblings
engaged in activities of which their parents, to put it mildly, did not approve
– Peppe was soon attracted to books by British veterinarian James Herriott and
later, somewhat surprisingly, to those of fellow Maine resident Stephen King.
Peppe tells readers that King’s frightening worlds seemed safer to her than her
everyday reality, but the explanation is not totally convincing; nevertheless,
it is the only one she provides.
Peppe’s coming-of-age story,
although surely different in particulars from those of most readers, is at
bottom just another tale of family dysfunction and the compromises required,
day in and day out, to make it through life. By the time she starts high
school, Peppe has survived sexual assault as well as the taunts of her family,
which considers her “queer” (in its old meaning of “peculiar,” not its more-recent
homosexual connotation). She begins dating Eric, a pastor’s pianist son – who,
she says, looked “a bit like a chimpanzee,” but who played as if he belonged at
Juilliard. Parental disapproval and a miscarriage at age 16 only strengthen the
young people’s bond, and Eric eventually becomes her husband, so we have a
happy ending (or happy life-in-progress) there. But Peppe goes through a lot –
memoir writers always do – to get to a stable adulthood. “Unless I made myself
a pest, I was invisible,” she says at one point, and it is in her “pest” guise,
notably through her intellect and questioning ways, that she makes the greatest
impression.
A leavening of humor helps
make what is essentially a downbeat (if determinedly positive) story something
other than a slog to read. Peppe is a good storyteller, and her accounts of a barn
fire, a swimming piglet, the imagined depredations of a local ghost, and an
exploding pressure cooker help offset the sadness of her family’s
circumstances. Whether she has a really good memory or is prone to
embellishment, she writes with charm, and that is worth a lot. The reality of
everyday drudgery is never far away, though. For example, there was only a
single house key shared among 12 people, and Peppe once had to break a cellar
window when she got home early from kindergarten and desperately needed to use
the bathroom. There is another reality here as well, one made evident by
Peppe’s decision not to give her siblings’ names in the book but instead to
talk about them as, for example, her “blustery-and-favored brother,” her
“sister-who-holds-grudges-longer-than-God,” her “tough-yet-admirable sister,”
her “hair-twirling-pretty sister,” her “sister-of-poor-choices,” and so forth.
Whatever Peppe’s professed reasons for this stylistic oddity (which soon
becomes tiresome), this labeling shows that for young Peppe, and perhaps even
for Peppe today, her family members were collections of personality traits
rather than separate and distinct individuals. That may be inevitable in so
large a group, and to some extent it is indicative of the way everyone looks at
other people, relatives or not. But it is unusual to have blood relatives, with
whom one has shared so much pain and not a little joy, lack names and disappear
behind repeated descriptive word strings.
It is love, that most
redemptive of all forces, that eventually brings Peppe out of her troubled
early life and into what she clearly considers a more-than-happy adulthood.
This sort of progress is what memoir writers inevitably strive for and what memoir
readers inevitably seek in reading books such as Pigs Can’t Swim. Peppe’s differences from her siblings and
resilience in the face of adversity are among her defining qualities, but they
are certainly not unique distinctions – they are, in fact, basics of memoir
creation (it is the different-and-resilient family members who grow up to write
books). Peppe’s animal-rights message, which is actually presented somewhat
heavy-handedly and with greater-than-necessary frequency, is clearly one
important thing she brought with her from childhood. Her love of books is
another. Her ability to love –
animals, books, out-of-control siblings, even the parental recipients of that
improbable dedication – is the most important element of all. If Pigs Can’t Swim is not foundationally
very different from many other memoirs, it is
very different in its specifics, in its portrayal of exactly where Peppe grew
up and exactly where she has ended up. Readers who have endured their own
difficult early lives and now find themselves at least moderately stable as
adults will understand just where Peppe came from, even if they came from
somewhere completely different.
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