Reviewed by Jerry Levy
Eve Krakow’s Voice Lessons might very well have been called Life Lessons. For as much as the short, individual essays amount to a memoir, they are, fundamentally, philosophical expositions centring around overcoming debilitating shyness and around self-actualization, becoming the person one was always meant to be.
Voice Lessons is told in a non-linear, unique fashion. For example, we learn about Eve when she uses flashbacks. Memories. The narrative includes sudden jumps in time, and we come to understand aspects of her personality in a crossword puzzle she devised. In the essay Songs of my Childhood, we attempt to follow along as paragraphs slide on to the opposite side of the page. Images of a garden journal are shown in one essay, diary entries in another. And the little-used second-person pronoun ‘you’ is seen at times (in addition to first-person POV). All of this amounts to a risky proposition; after all, most memoirs are told in a linear, first-person POV. Certainly, in the hands of a lesser writer, this could have resulted in a muddled mess. But Krakow is an excellent writer, in command of her craft at all times, so it all works wonderfully well. Perhaps most importantly, her personality reveal, using these interesting and unique literary devices, can be said to be in keeping with her shy demeanour. In other words, a slow reveal, in dribs and drabs.
In the first essay, "How to Summarize Your Life in Three Metro Stops," we are introduced to the unnamed main character (Eve herself), as she rides Montreal’s subway system. When the doors open at one stop, in prances someone she hasn’t seen in ten years. She desperately wants to prove herself, to talk of singing lessons she has taken, her travel plans, her dreams. Basically, to show she is no longer the awkward geek she was back in high school. And yet, she reveals nothing at all, she’s simply too inhibited. Still, the encounter is dotted with punches of insight as Eve detects a “shimmer of condescension in the corner of his eyes, an arrogant awareness of his personal success.” That her old high school acquaintance fits into “neat little sentences,” moulds of a sort (something totally foreign to her). In effect, a certain stereotype. One must ask: Really? All this is discernible within a mere three metro stops? To the shy, the highly sensitive, the perpetual outsider looking in, nothing would seem to escape acute observation. According to many psychologists, it may very well be that these individuals are more attuned to the subtleties of the environment, their brains processing and reflecting on information deeper and quicker than others.
The second essay, The Understudy, uses the more traditional pronoun “I” as its POV, and it is here that we are introduced further to Eve and her foray into singing, how free and unencumbered she feels when she sings. But she’s an understudy at a community theatre group, not in the spotlight, and this too gives the reader an indication of her character. Not only has she retreated into the background, but she is also, at 32, unsure what exactly she wants to do in upcoming years—she studied journalism but veered off and ended up as an office assistant; now she pitches stories to newspapers and magazines. From her place as the perpetual observer, the understudy, she scrutinizes Amy, the star performer. She studies her movements as the latter glides across the stage, imitating them “in a faint echo, trying to etch them into my being.” She mouths the same words Amy does, loud enough only for her own ears. It’s as if she’s turned into Amy’s doppelgänger, the archetype of a shadow entity (although unlike most double characters in literature, such as in Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson, it can hardly be said of Eve that she is a usurper of Amy’s life!). Still, it is in this essay that we see how singing, despite being very difficult at times, enlivens Eve, gets her out of her shell, and brings her immense joy.
Eve’s proclivity toward singing (and writing) should hardly be surprising. Many shy and highly sensitive people use art as a therapeutic outlet, a catharsis, to process and release pent-up emotions. As well, various art forms such as painting, dance, singing, writing, and others, provide a means to express one’s unique identities and personal narratives. They allow those who are shy to step outside their comfort zones, seemingly crucial to well-being. And many actors, musicians and other artists, similar to Eve, report being shy as a child, or even still as an adult. Actor Melanie Lynskey talked about being really shy as a child: “I walked around with a constant fear that I’d say something stupid and be laughed at, or that people were looking at me and thinking I wasn’t pretty enough, interesting enough, smart enough. When I discovered acting, I felt an immense freedom. I felt like I could explore different aspects of myself without fear of judgment. I was able to be brave in a way that was really hard for me in real life.” And actor Emma Watson echoed similar sentiments: “The truth is that I’m genuinely a shy, socially awkward, introverted person.”
Of course, there’s a paradox inherent in a shy person gravitating toward the arts. It requires confidence, a thick skin (Krakow lists multiple writing rejection notifications), and immersing oneself in an extroverted, celebrity-driven world…things shy people normally struggle with. It can actually be debilitating, as a young woman named Agatha Miller found out as far back as the early 1900s. Her dream of being a concert pianist was painfully offset by her crippling stage fright. The anxiety made her ill and she could not perform. She eventually chose another artistic pursuit and under her married name, Agatha Christie, became one of the world’s best-selling novelists. Still, her “miserable, horrible, inevitable shyness” continued and as her literary success pushed her further into the limelight, she often refused to speak in public and found literary events hostile and hellish. "Nobody in the world was more inadequate to act the heroine than I was," she revealed.
In wide-ranging essays, Krakow discusses her mother’s death when she was only 10 years old, the fact that she was never close with her father, her very accomplished older sisters, the family’s country home in Vermont and the joy it brought her, playing in the foliage and picking wild blackberries there, her father’s love of building and flying model airplanes, gardening, libraries, cycling accidents, Parkinson’s, cancer, death, her first husband Étienne, her current husband, Michael, her uncle David (the only one in her family who gave great hugs), other family members, European trips, the joys and difficulties of motherhood, her Jewish roots (retracing same as when she went to a rabbi to discuss mezuzahs, the small parchment scrolls rolled up and affixed to the doors of Jewish homes), taking chances, connection and belonging, and about the merits of walking.
Despite that fact that Eve and her father were never close, they did share one thing: walking. She says that summer evenings after dinner, he would invariably ask: “Who’s up for a walk?” It was Eve who always accompanied him, looking for any excuse to go walk. She says of their excursions: ‘We didn’t talk. Each of us lost in our thoughts, content that way.’ She further says that she walks to be part of the world. To work out problems. Se changer les idées, a French saying she embraces (it translates to change or clear out the ideas in one’s head, to make way for others). Latin has a similar phrase—Solvitur ambulando, which correlates to, “It is solved by walking.” Walking, the most democratic activity in the world, available to almost everyone, the rich or poor, young or old. Certainly available to anyone who wishes to problem-solve. And to Eve and her father, each immersed in their own thoughts as they walked side-by-side, it allowed them to be together, at least for a little while.
Eve Krakow’s Voice Lessons is a moving, charming memoir, and a highly recommended read. It is published by Guernica Editions.
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