Ellena Savage - Blueberries: what kind of body makes a memoir

Sometimes I think its possible to live with anything. That were wired to survive-survive-survive, to grip onto the gnarliest thread until life is pried from our bones. Other times I think, its not possible to live at all. Not at all.

Blueberries could be described as a collection of essays, the closest term available for a book that resists classification; a blend of personal essay, polemic, prose poetry, true-crime journalism and confession that considers a fragmented life, reflecting on what it means to be a woman, a body, an artist. It is both a memoir and an interrogation of memoir. It is a new horizon in storytelling. In crystalline prose, Savage explores the essential questions of the examined life: what is it to desire? What is it to accommodate oneself to the world? And at what cost?

For Dominic.

1 February 2017

A worn-out black turtleneck, skin-tight black jeans. The same clothes I wore when I travelled here alone, eleven years ago. I notice this only while sitting in the back seat of the taxi into Lisbon with Dom. Now, however, I am one-and-a-half dress sizes larger. Now, my jeans are tailored and my sweater has a designer label. Now, I dont wear whimsical fur-collared coats or charming hats from the 1920s to suggest the possibility that I am interesting.

The last time I came to Lisbon, eleven years ago, I could talk to any person in the world. I had fast learned how to sleep in any number of positions: between the farts and fucks and snores of adolescent adults in hostels; on a row of couch cushions laid out by earnest Belgian students on their Erasmus year; with my head resting on the shoulder of a fleshy Brazilian on an overnight bus. I saw no problem in taking time from others, or accepting their hospitality, because I was paying it forward. I was a general, all-purpose, adaptable person. All my unrealised potential suggested that I might become exactly like any one of the people I encountered.

In becoming specific, narrower, more difficult, you, you dont have much left to give.

But its true. We dress the same, she and I. And we didnt get any better.

2 February 2017

This is where it began. Lisbon, May 2006. Outside the club at the Santo Amaro docks, I dangled my legs over the edge of the wide river, my feet swinging like a purse at the end of a long strap. Above me, Lisbons big bridge, red and hung, just like the Golden Gate. I puffed smoke into the air excessively, the way I always do on long boozy nights, though I hadnt had a drink for a couple of hours.

Shes lying.

I drank water from a flimsy plastic bottle!

Or vodka lime soda? Though you might still have been on your caipirinha bent, after Coimbra.

The girl I had gone to the club with, the woman, was kissing her new man inside while I waited. They had brought me here, in his car, from the bar with pink fairy lights that he owned in the Bairro Alto.

The woman with whom I had come was a stray I had saved several hours earlier. She was walking, alone, with a brawny shadow behind her. Locking eyes with me, she called out, Its so good to see you!

Its good to see you, too, I replied. Like that, I rescued her from a man who might have hurt her. We struck up a conversation. We kept it going. Later, she said, Im going to meet a friend; would you like to come?

She might have helped the woman find a cab.

It was just a twenty-minute walk. And the glorious amber of Lisbon at night.

Its trueothers were with us. To celebrate the womans escape, we stepped into a bar that smelled of yeast and bought a round of frothy beers. Her hair was long and wavy and she laughed at all my jokes. She was smaller than me and more beautiful. I wanted to follow her.

A night opens up. Who are you to say no to it?

Dont go.

Too late.

The man she was kissing inside the club was in possession of a figure that didnt support his gut. Tall and fine-boned, he would have been slim but for the soft pouch of his belly, his hangdog chin. I couldnt imagine what my new friend saw in him.

Why had she not chosen you?

But then, I was fresh out of high school. What did I know about sex? Sitting by the river I talked loud-mouthedly to two young men, nineteen-year-olds with faces theyd one day grow into. Lit with vexation,

The woman with wavy hair had dropped her.

I endeavoured to make my own way through the night. Conversation unfurled between the two young guys and me as we shared a diminishing supply of cigarettes.

I was on a break from school, working in bars and maxing out my credit cards for the privilege of seeing a world that wasnt mine. I was enrolled in a law degree, which I was to start the following year (which I never did). Law, of all things.

No more second-hand bedsheets.

You thought you could evade me.

Her feeling of entitlement, of significance, not yet knowing that it doesnt come.

The boys with callow faces, were they business students? They longed to visit Australia. We swapped email addresses, just as I had swapped them, dropped them, in every city I stepped through. Did anyone ever email? Yes. But only the boys who thought Id come with them to Corsica.

The Corsicans were the worst.

It was light, now. I looked across the Tagus at the harsh stare of Jesus, Christ the King, the grand monument, arms outstretched from the mountaintop across the river. Christ the King, installed there by the fascist government, was in no position, I thought, to judge me. The boys promised me breakfast, the best pastel de Belm in Belm. I accepted. I went to say goodbye to my new friend. She told me not to go with them.

She was right to sense danger.

Did she think that instead youd go back with her, to his place? Watch them screw?

Just one chance. One more in a series of chances that had led me to her, to this.

Ill go with them, I said. Its fine. Im a big girl. The woman with long wavy hair wrote her number on a piece of card that I slipped into a fold in my wallet.

You didnt have a phone.

3 February 2017

When I am asked what the first news story I remember isand because I cannot organise my memories in such a wayI say Princess Di. Other people my age say this, and so it has become my first news memory, too. Though it may have to do with the film Amlie, which romanticises the princess-death. The Thredbo disaster was a month earlier, however, and I remember that perfectly. I was nine.

She, the blonde princess, didnt mean all that much to me, and so in her death I didnt lose anything personal except perhaps a belief in the myth that blonde princesses live happily ever after. What I gained instead was a sensation of hot metal folding into my body, of boiling black oil spilling over my arms and face. Unlike the funerals of elderly family members, their peaceful grey bodies packaged smartly in timber boxes, Princess Diana, Lady Die, gave me the flesh knowledge of violent death. A useful memory to hold within your skin, as any one of us might take our last breath in a state of absolute terror.

Today I will call the police. I mean, I will call the tourist police, who take down tourists statements on official stationery and stamp them, so that tourists may claim the value of their stolen purses with their travel insurance companies. When I last came into contact with Lisbons tourist police, eleven years ago, I had to wait for an hour against a wall lined with orange plastic chairsor maybe they were blue?as an endless parade of dusty-haired English and French couples reported acts of petty theft against them. I was there to report an almost-rape.