It’s a cliché, but I can’t deny etymology: The word “essay” derives from the French “essayer,” or “to attempt.” In “Can’t Elope,” author Miriam Camitta layers hindsight and a twenty-first-century understanding of schizophrenia in her observations about her older sister Margot. She explores and reexamines childhood scenes and adulthood interactions with her sister, using them to illustrate a complex relationship between siblings and an ever-present mental illness.
The Necessity of Memory
The personal essay necessitates some form of recollection, or at minimum the use of memory, a notoriously fallible resource. The author—some version of whom is often the narrator, as in “Can’t Elope” with Camitta—must forge an understanding with the reader, asking for suspension of disbelief for the duration of the piece. These recollections are real, the piece says, and if the narrator is doing their job, the reader will believe it.
Recollection also requires a careful hand from the first-person narrator, to build the recalled scene without overcompensating. Camitta makes deft use of sensory detail to do so—“my mother setting a large yellow bowl of potato salad, a specialty of hers, with chunks of hard-boiled eggs and pimento stuffed olives on the picnic table” in childhood; later in life, Margot’s “muttering, laughing, shaking, twitching, chain smoking, butts and ashes piling up in the ashtrays…lipstick smearing her tobacco-stained lips and fingers.” She writes of Schubert and Chopin from the family piano, Margot’s flowery scent, and the voluminous skirt of a dress their grandmother made. The use of sensory detail always renders images more clearly, but what is most important here is that the writing avoids embellishment. The images don’t need playing up to be believable.
In sharing these details, Camitta also calls attention to the fact that these are perhaps constructed recollections: In recalling a Sunday afternoon from childhood, she says, “Likely, this memory is a composite of several summer afternoons, some peaceful, some unpleasant.” She tells us that her memories come in scenes and uses the phrase “I remember.” It’s a reminder that memory itself is built and rebuilt, that the next time a memory surfaces it appears the way the brain has recalled it and not necessarily as it happened. Memory is fallible, but it is still real to Camitta’s narrator, making the recollections that much more tangible and rendering them truthful for the reader.
Throughline and Narration
An essay still needs a throughline, some form of narrative arc to guide these memories from start to finish. Throughout “Can’t Elope,” Camitta builds her recollections of Margot around how her perception of her sister evolved from childhood to the present. Though there are two voices here, she manages the past and present voices well; one stays in recollection, the other in reflection. The present-day Camitta steps in to discuss how Margot would have been branded had she developed schizophrenia in the Middle Ages and how twentieth-century scientists describe their schizophrenic patients. She also appears to adjust the past’s version of Margot, giving her sister’s character room to expand on the page.
Camitta’s first-person narrator is present without being overbearing. She does not shy away from her role in conflating Margot’s schizophrenia with Margot’s humanity, but she never berates herself for it, nor does she villainize her sister in the present-tense voice. She shares that she viewed her sister as a demon, a tormentor, a monster to vanquish until she was an adult living independently, but she does not analyze her observations, nor does she absolve herself. She keeps them on the page in direct contact with her amended perception, forcing us to face her earlier, more unsavory thoughts—and perhaps quietly prodding us to ask ourselves whether our understandings of people with schizophrenia have evolved alongside hers, or if we are still trapped in the past.
Camitta opens us up to the other facets of Margot’s person, alongside her disease: her previous engagement, her humor, her inner strength. She includes scenes from childhood and adulthood with dialogue, highlighting the importance of bringing Margot’s voice—as close to truth as she can recall—to the foreground. As she brings the piece toward its conclusion, she shares what she says she was too late in seeing: that her sister was “a suffering human overwhelmed by disease,” intelligent, capable of kindness and love. In giving space to the voices of past and present, Camitta builds Margot into a well-rounded character, reconstructing the memories around this acquired understanding of the shape of her schizophrenia.
Framing
Unlike the academic essay, the personal essay may not come to a definitive conclusion; it is, after all, “an attempt.” But it still needs to get from one point to another, to end at a different point from where it started and contain conclusive elements. In other words, something needs to happen, even it is only a change in the narrator.
A lot of pieces use a framing device: beginning and concluding the short story or essay in the same scene where it started. For Camitta, it’s how she didn’t invite Margot to her wedding, fearful that her disease might cause her to do any number of things to disrupt the celebration. A frame can be difficult to pull off because there are many clumsy or cliché ways to execute it. By the end of the piece, we need to see the point of its deployment: the storylines that led the characters to this scene or the ways the balance between characters could shift from this point onward; or in this case, how the frame doesn’t actually look the way it was presented.
At the piece’s conclusion, it is still true that Camitta did not invite Margot to her wedding, but the frame shifts: Their father goes home and brings Margot to the party after the ceremony. A friend captures a photo of them together. “The photograph offers me some consolation,” Camitta says. She understands now that outside of her disease, Margot still wanted to attend the wedding, to celebrate a marriage, to be a sister. In this case, the frame allows us to see Camitta’s evolution from beginning to end—as Margot’s sister, as one who has truly sought to understand her.
Topics of mental health can be difficult as engines for short-form writing, because there are many ways to broach them. Often, the piece can tip into romanticization, or there might be too many attempted narrative threads to achieve cohesion. Camitta approaches her subjects with a balanced and sensitive hand. “Can’t Elope” is an essay about schizophrenia, but the piece’s drive comes from the relationship between two sisters, where one learns to understand the other, and we come to understand them both.
by Karina Cheah