Why You Want to Read Emma's Journal . . .

. . . by Juli Loesch Wiley:  let me start over with what I wrote about it the other night.

[Emma's Journal is] a feisty, forlorn diary of marching for life and peace and looking for love in the 1980s that I devoured as if it was a thriller:  will Emma find a man to love and marry??  I especially want to recommend it to my Catholic friends, because it so beautifully portrays someone swimming upstream, insisting quixotically on the sacredness of sex and love in the midst of the recreational free-for-all our culture has become. Karen and Funky will feel reaffirmed; others may feel "naïve" old ideals and longings uncomfortably stirring.

You don't have to agree with her to love this book.  Her voice and spirit, with its spark, wit, appetite, wistfulness, and honesty, will win you over and make you laugh, cry, and think.  In this journal from the '80s, in which I think only the names are changed, she's lonely and strong; she's desperate and funny, celibate and lusty.  I'll quote a little, just to show you.

I'm selling articles (and speeches) that are less and less marketable as they become more and more true to my heart.  Real of heart.  Truly true.  I am literally a hand-to-mouth intellectual.  Maybe some day I'll tell the Absolute Truth and my income will reach Absolute Zero.

*  *  *

I felt as if I'd done a lifetime's-worth of warding off guys by the time I was 18.  I was heartily tired of it; and I was lonely.  I was living 1800 miles from home in a United Farm Workers volunteer house promoting the boycott of non-Union grapes with a real nice crew of social-justice-oriented ex-Franciscan- seminarians, and pretty soon I got coupled-up:  me and Danny.

'"And I detest all my sins..."  Do I detest this?  No.  Yes.  No.

I don't detest sleeping with Danny.  In so many ways it was lovely and funny and dear:  blessings of warmth and breath.  We were both drifting.  We were living in the same household.  I made myself pharmacologically sterile.  We fit like hand in glove. [...] But we were intimate without commitment, he gave me lilacs and Rod McKuen poems, we lived together for 8 months, and we broke up under the predictable stresses, just as everybody around us coupled and broke up in the early 70's.

No commitment = sex was insignificant.  Did not signify.

Infertile = sex was inconsequential.  Deprived of its gifts, its consequences.

Broke up = unfaithful.  Nuff said.

But what made it "lovely and funny and dear" is that it seemed we were being faithful friends and comrades true, you for me and me for you.

"And I detest all my sins..."  Do I detest the time I spent with Danny?  Be a truthful girl here, Emma:  no.  Not "the time I spent with."  Euphemism and evasion, even in my own head:  what audience am I attempting to huckster here?

Do I detest, specifically, becoming his sexual consort?  Intercourse?  I think if I had more love in me, I would.  I'd detest it for the seeds of cynicism and callousness it planted.  I'd detest it for the way it mimicked but insidiously undermined what it was we both really wanted.  Real nakedness.  Real openness.  No barriers.  Honorable lifelong love.

And our little amour was part of a much bigger thing, and the much bigger thing (which we didn't see) was, I am convinced, detestable.  It was the early 70's.  Lots of screwing going on:  insignificant and inconsequential and unfaithful.  Which is to say:  sex was going to hell.

She's a fine poet, too.  The book ends with a poem that'll break your heart, but only if you earn it along with her, by laboring through the desert.  Here:  you want this book.

Comments

[Ruth Anne]

'Detest all my sins' is a phrase from the act of contrition. One even needs grace to make a good examination of conscience. This one sounds like a doozy. And you know God can handle brutal honesty.

I think I might enjoy this book. Thanks for the recommendation.

[karen]

I thank you, as well. I wish i'd had the fortitude to not give into- so much of what that small snippet says of sexual relationships.

[Shmuel Ben-Gad]

This is a very interesting and well-written book.

[carol crossed]

If this is like Juli, then this has got to be pithy and earthy and sassy. I am ordering me a copy!

[amba]

pithy and earthy and sassy.

You got it!