About the Author
REMEMBERING LIFE
Norma V.L. Clarke, author of "Post Mortem"

"I got into writing because I really wanted to and sometimes when you really want to do something unconsciously you keep pushing along the lines that take you to what you want, so that some part of you that you aren't listening to has figured out you want to do it and keeps making life difficult for you. And sometimes I am very thankful for that, very thankful that there are parts of you that wish to stay alive, even when you don't recognize them."

When she closed her practice in 1995, she sat home for nine months and wrote. "I had no idea what I was doing, I just thought of writing." She went back to psychiatry for six months when it occurred to her that she still had to make a living. But she says she heard herself bitching and "whining like a fool," so she left her practice again, this time to read. She says another positive step she took was a Hurston writers workshop in her hometown of Richmond, VA, and that introduced her to nonfiction writing. Then she re-taught herself grammar.

"Post Mortem" evolved over a long period of time. She says she often has too many ideas for an essay and forces herself to know her main theme before she begins. "I tend to think in links. I have to figure out which links are the strongest and if I don't come up with a theme, I can't write, which is unfortunate." When compiling "Post Mortem," she recalled most strongly how awful medical school was. "One was the separation from my mother, the second was just the awfulness of medical school, the third was that the country was falling apart." From those three ideas she deciphered the main theme of death and destruction. She didn't necessarily want the piece to be about her mother, but the essay didn't work until she went back and wrote her mother in.

Clarke asks herself why and for what time frame she is writing a piece. She doesn't think about who her audience is, she simply searches for the best, most economic way to tell the story. "I start editing a story when I think who the audience is, start editing for the audience. What I do think about is what does the reader want to know and what questions are they going to ask. This has to do with issues of truth."

Truth of memory is the most seamy element in "Post Mortem". She admits in the essay her confusion of the way she remembered medical school, and even her mother. "I knew that the split from my mother is what made me fall apart but I didn't know that then so how could I write from the moment, and not say things like I felt horrible, because that is not what I felt at the time." She tries to go back and stand in the moment and as much as possible to remember what she thought, what she said, and how it felt.

She worried about portraying her mother as a mean person. "I 've gone through times when I wrote her as a monster and she really was not." Because of that she has wondered how much of the story is actually true. "I had a brother who called me who was very annoyed because he wasn't in the story, the way I wrote it makes it seem as though I have two other siblings and I really have three. But I didn't think he belonged in the story. She [her mother] ran out of energy by the time he came along seven years later and she didn't manipulate him in the same way." Clarke is unclear why her mother controlled her the way she did. "Unfortunately I don't know what drove her. So I worry about making things up."

Before Clarke writes, she makes sure that she clearly understands what her theme is. "I find that when I am not clear what I want to write, the whole process is mud. For me the process of writing is about being clear about where I am writing from." She chose the beginning and the end of medical school to use as the frame of the essay, and that helped her formulate the actual time span. "I happened upon the idea of the anatomy lab and I originally tried to use that as a starting point. Then I decided I couldn't. I realized that I had to take myself all the way through medical school. So that gave me a structure.One of my troubles as a writer is that I sprawl. And for me right now as a beginning writer I need to contain things and the way I do it is to have very fixed themes. That is also how I organize an essay."

She found that it was the smaller aspects of her life during that time that were harder to remember and to write about. "I had to find anchor points in between." Logical questions came up for her as she worked out the theme of death, like "didn't anybody die in your life?" She recounts two deaths in the essay that show her grappling with the randomness and chaos of death.

Her field of psychiatry gave her the insight to write about death and emotional complexity. However, she did not use her psychiatric information in the essay itself, though she admits that her knowledge was felt if not heard in the piece. "No way you can do this and pretend that there is a huge gap between you and the people you re writing about." She also deliberately chose not to use the word "control" in the essay because she does not like its connotations and did not want to use the word to describe her mother.

Clarke reads constantly and analyzes other people's writing. This is how she gained an understanding of her own style and voice. "I don' t know what to write if I don't read, it sort of greases the wheels, loosens up ideas. I can come to a halt [in writing] and reading helps solve that process."

Corrine Platt