By SUSAN JONES
It wasn’t exactly her life flashing before her eyes, but more like a collage of momentous and mundane moments that passed through Lori Jakiela’s mind four years ago as she waited to hear if she had the breast cancer she feared.
Those thoughts are at the root of the Pitt-Greensburg English professor’s latest memoir, “They Write Your Name on a Grain of Rice.” The first half of the book, her seventh, are selected essays, while the second half deals more with her thoughts awaiting a diagnosis, what she calls an assemblage.
“When you’re waiting for a call about cancer, your mind wanders.
I hope you don’t know this. I’m sorry if you do.
Strangers in bars. Childhood. These are the kinds of things you think about. Or I think about. I say you because I want not to be alone in this. I have lot invested in believing I’m not alone in this because I feel alone in this.”
Jakiela, who has been at Pitt for 23 years and is now cancer-free, compares this book to the time capsules that Andy Warhol created: “He'd put in a sandwich and then he'd put in a postcard and all these mundane seeming things that make up a life and I was really interested in that.
“I wasn't interested in writing about cancer directly or when people talk about the cancer journey, I really wasn't interested in that, because I feel like cancer, in my life, it's everywhere. … Everybody's life has been touched by it in some way. And to me, it's like what else could be said; there are better people than me that have said it already.”
Instead she wanted to focus on “how our minds move when we really are thinking about, in very real and literal ways, our own mortality.” She said she likes that “I gave myself permission to do that. And I like that people have told me that they can follow it and like it.”
Many of her reflections focus on her two children and her husband, David Newman who is an assistant professor of creative & professional writing at Pitt–Greensburg. But Warhol makes frequent appearances as does a stranger in a bar, Lynyrd Skynyrd, her experiences as a pre-9/11 flight attendant and the Tree of Life shootings. There also are many references to Pittsburgh and to her hometown of Trafford, where she now lives in the house she grew up in.
Jakiela said unlike her previous memoirs, she started writing this one as she was going through the experiences. “For writers and artists, I think, when you feel vulnerable, or when you don't understand something or when you want to get some control, you start to use your work like that. And so I think I started writing this immediately because it was giving me some sense of order and some sense of control.”
Both of Jakiela’s parents died from cancer and she was their caregiver — something she wrote about in “The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious.” Even though she was adopted, it was easy to associate her cancer with theirs. For instance, her mother got a lumpectomy and radiation, but the cancer came back, so Jakiela knew she didn’t want that.
“But the other side of it is because I was thinking about them so much, it was kind of comforting too,” she said. “Because when I write about people that I've lost, you kind of bring them back and they're in a room with you. And it was kind of kind of comforting to revisit their stories.”
Her 2015 memoir, “Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe,” looks at Jakiela’s search for her birth mother coupled with the parallel story of her own motherhood. The book was winner of Stanford University's 2016 William Saroyan International Prize for International Writing, finalist for the 2016 CLMP Firecracker Award and the 2016 Housatonic Book Award, and named one of 20 Not-to-Miss Nonfiction Books of 2015 by The Huffington Post. She has written other memoirs and books of poetry.
Her teaching at Pitt–Greensburg revolves around creative nonfiction and memoir writing, “so I teach what I do,” she said. Jakiela thinks its important for professors to do what they teach. For her it allows her to “tell them all the horrible things that I did that they shouldn't do, and I can save them a lot of time, because I bumbled around for quite a while. But I can also understand the struggles that they have in doing certain things.”
She said her next project is a novel of literary fiction. She’ll be on sabbatical next semester to work on that. She’ll be attending the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference in February and “then in the spring, I'm on the faculty of the Erma Bombeck Writing Workshop (in Dayton), which is like my dream.”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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