Mama's Boy Jamie T

University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014 2010 Mama's Boy Jamie t. Berger University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/theses Part of the American Literature Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Other American Studies Commons Berger, Jamie t., "Mama's Boy" (2010). Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014. 438. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/theses/438 This thesis is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014 by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. MAMA’S BOY by JAMIE BERGER Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS MAY 2010 ENGLISH © Copyright by Jamie Berger 2010 All Rights Reserved MAMA’S BOY A Thesis presented by Jamie Berger Approved as to style and content by: _______________________________ Sabina Murray, Chair _______________________________ Chris Bachelder, Member ___________________________ Alexander Chee, Member ___________________________ Sabina Murray, Director M.F.A. Program for Poets and Writers ___________________________ Joseph Bartolomeo, Chair Department of English ABSTRACT MAMA’S BOY MAY 2010 JAMIE BERGER, B.A. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY M.A., CITY COLLEGE OF NEW YORK M.F.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Sabina Murray “Mama’s Boy” is a collection of fiction and nonfiction by Jamie Berger. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Anja, for an infinity of help and love and ideas and reading and patience. Mark Berger. Pop, you’re all over these pages, even if only you and I know it. “Peep Show” previously published in the The Sun magazine and in the anthology, Flesh For Fantasy: Producing and Consuming Exotic Dance (Thunder’s Mouth, 2006) “Close” previously published in In Posse Review and Watchword. “Shaken, Stirred” Previously published in the anthology Fucking Daphne Exerpts from Bo’s Arts Previously Published in Bo’s Arts: Visual Interpretations of a Soft Dog (Evil Twin, 2006) v CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1 PEEP SHOW .......................................................................................................................8 FROM THE BO’S ARTS MANIFESTO ..........................................................................24 LEAVING ..........................................................................................................................35 MONEY ............................................................................................................................37 SLEEP ................................................................................................................................50 CLOSE ..............................................................................................................................75 EPIPHANY ........................................................................................................................90 LETTERS TO WENDEROTH .........................................................................................94 SHAKEN, STIRRED .......................................................................................................105 RAIN SONG ....................................................................................................................114 WATCHING ...................................................................................................................115 AFTER .............................................................................................................................121 HOMING ........................................................................................................................149 ITCH ITCH ITCH ...........................................................................................................162 vi INTRODUCTION Scribble Scribble Scribble (Note: After a bunch of revisions, I realized I had no idea who my audience was for this introduction, so I’ve decided to address it to just about the only people likely to ever read it, my committee: Chris Bachelder, Alex Chee, and Sabina Murray.) “Scribble scribble scribble!” -Sheila Berger “Make sure you address the inclusion of fiction and nonfiction,” Noy advised me, before she fled the country. Why? I asked and quickly answered myself: because my mixed genre manuscript is unorthodox for an MFA thesis and very likely unpublishable as a book. When I left San Francisco and headed off to MFA school, as we like to call it these days, my literary-agent friend Jandy Nelson said, “Write me a novel!” She had read and had very complimentary things to say about some of my stories and essays, but among the nice things was definitely not that she could find a publisher for a book of them. Well, five years later, what I’ve produced at Umass is the dreaded collection of stories and essays, fiction and non-. It is, in all likelihood, unpublishable as a whole indeed, although I do hope to publish a portion of it (the very closely related pieces 1 “Close,” “Peep Show,” and “After,”) as a chapbook, and, of course, to publish some of the individual pieces. In Fall of 2005, when I got to UMass, I started my work here by taking a creative nonfiction class with Tony Giardina. In it, I reworked my personal essay “Peep Show” for an anthology called Flesh for Fantasy (Thunder’s Mouth, 2006), and began work on a follow up piece, “After.” Around that same time, scandals about the veracity of supposed nonfiction were popping up left and right. From smaller peccadilloes of respected memoirists like Vivan Gornick to the wholesale fraud of James Frey and several others, fictionalized “nonfiction” seemed to be everywhere. As someone who’s both obsessive and maybe a tad moralistic, I really latched on to the Frey story (some would say, joined the lynch mob), even going so far as to keep a blog for a few months called “Memoir Is Not Fiction,” in which I ranted and raved and posted every news story about the scandal I could find, right up to Frey’s public flaying on Oprah, after which I more or less let it go, which was lucky for me in that if I spent much time thinking about Frey’s continued success as a writer and public figure (there really is no such thing as bad publicity), I’d be a bitter, bitter man. Point is, I am very interested in/concerned about the similarities of and differences between and grey areas shared by between fiction and non-. In my own nonfiction, I struggle, often too hard, to make sure that what I recount is as close to factually true as I can make it, even vetting my work with corroborating witnesses whenever possible. In my fiction, I often explore directions that a guy a lot like me might’ve taken. In nonfiction, I explore actual events and their importance to me. In fiction, the situations are not “actual,” but the explorations are still very real. And 2 sometimes a piece will mix the two. But what I can call nonfiction, and what I must call fiction, well, they’re really fairly simple to distinguish. Well before my mother became ill (she died in December 2008), I wrote a story about a man returning home to care for his dying mother (“Sleep”). When my mom was sick but not yet dying – when we both still held out hope of her getting well again – I wrote a story about a man driving back and forth on the highway to visit his ailing mother (“Homing”), which was the closest I’ve come to fictionalized reality – the situation was mine. But the scenes, the characters, the mother, the son, they were not us, not true to life. And as my mom was dying and in the year since she’s been gone, I’ve written about that time in the essay-as-journal “Itch Itch Itch.” To write about her death in fiction wasn’t a choice for me, not yet anyway. Oddly enough, “Homing” is one of the last pieces I wrote before my mother became very ill, and it’s one of the few pieces I never showed Sheila Berger. But she managed to read it anyway – found it in online in Crate after googling my name. Good old mom. The story upset her greatly because the mother was such a “type.” I tried to explain that it was both fiction and still a work in progress, and that I’d focused thus far on the son (the “Jamie” character, she might’ve corrected me) but she had a hard time with it nonetheless. As she saw it, the mother was her, and inaccurate, lacking all nuance. She was wrong and right, of course; the mother was a flat character, but she wasn’t finished, and she wasn’t Sheila Berger. At that point, I found I could more deeply explore my stand-in’s consciousness in fiction than I could my own in nonfiction; once my mother read the story I hadn’t been ready for her to read and voiced her opinion, the 3 boundary between the real and imagined became very blurry indeed as I wrestled with the need to make the character I did and didn’t see as my mother more like her. At times, I’ve been able to approach issues in fiction that I wasn’t ready to address head-on (most pointedly, my fascination/obsession with porn, strippers, etc.), first in private, then finally testing the waters with a story “Close,” which then let me tackle

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