Under My Bed and Other Essays

“I know women who enjoy being alone in their homes at night. A single mother at my daughter’s preschool, for instance, says she lives for uninterrupted hours of André Watts’s piano playing when her children are elsewhere. Another, a former student of mine, binge-watches Breaking Bad on Netflix while her girlfriend works overnight shifts as a nurse. And a third, whose husband regularly disappears for weekend hunting trips—not regularly enough, she says—spends her alone time absorbed by home improvement projects. These women celebrate having the house to themselves. But I don’t. At least, not during the hours when the sun goes missing. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, when I’m home alone after sunset and something triggers me, which happens often enough, what I experience is the antithesis of pleasure. It’s closer to terror.”

Writing compelling memoir requires more than just the ability to write well and to construct a believable narrative arc and interesting characters. For memoir to reach from the author’s life and interior world to the hearts and minds of readers requires the courage to be authentic on the page and the insight to explain what our lives mean. Jody Keisner has both in spades. The paragraph above, which opens this memoir in interlinked essays, leads into the first section of the book, a lyrical look at the background of her fears in the context of being female in a world that includes far too much violence specifically targeting women.

Keisner moves seamlessly from that global context to her personal story and back again through the essays, recalling her childhood adopted into a blue-collar Midwestern family, her father’s alternation of love and rages, her mother’s denial of anything wrong, and then examining her marriage and motherhood with clear eyes, carrying readers along as she seeks to understand the roots of her fears, her complex love and anxiety for her young daughter, the bumpy growth of her marriage, and her diagnosis with a serious autoimmune disease, one more possibility for fear to immobilize her.

The wonder of that journey is that Keisner won’t allow fear to commandeer her life and cripple her spirit. If she never vanquishes her fears, she comes to understand and accept them, and to find her own way to live with who she is and the forces from her past that have shaped her, as well as how the world is. Keisner is able to stare violence in the face and decide to live fully anyway. Under My Bed is a tender book, an honest book, and a rich tale of learning to thrive just as we are–flawed and imperfect, yet still fully capable of risking both growth and love.