a portrait of queer motherhood
Cherrie Moraga’s Waiting in the Wings (8.5x5.5.5x.5 & 127 pages)
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Piecemeal by design, orienting with helpful date markers, and dripping with immediacy: Diaries are ideal Purse Book Material. Diaries, by nature, face constant interruptions from life, just like us. And just like us, they are extremely on-the-go, extremely in-the-world.
For Waiting in the Wings, Cherrie Moraga—famed Chicana lesbian and coeditor of This Bridge Called My Back—excavated her diaries (1993-1996) for the years covering the conception, birth, and the first couple years of her son’s life. The diaries begin with Moraga coming to terms, as a butch lesbian, with a desire to give birth to a child at age forty. She becomes pregnant instantly, after her first insemination. She writes, at that time, that her child can’t wait to be alive. Then, he proves it. He’s born two months early, in a heart-stopping state of emergency.
Moraga’s descriptions of giving birth—a reeling, near-death experience—are unlike anything I’ve ever read, and I love reading about bodies in extremis. Entries about her son’s birth are clear-eyed and overwhelming, erotic (sorry!), hyper-present, and visceral.
Published diaries tend to incorporate two intermingling realms: the through-line of the writer’s life happening and the through-line of the world happening. Cherrie is pregnant in San Francisco in 1993. “This era of dying in which my baby will be born,” she writes. She visits Provincetown with him around his first birthday, and fixates on the emptiness of the scene devastated by AIDS, “the motionless humidity” of the ghostly summer. Moraga’s heart is always hyper-tuned to the agonizing void in this era. In recent decades, Moraga’s extended some simply grim perspectives on trans people, a particular disappointment from a writer who shows such expansive, empathetic queerness in this project.
The constant intervention of the immediate present in Waiting in the Wings reminds me of Tina Brown’s introduction to her Vanity Fair Diaries, which conclude the year before Moraga’s. “The author of a memoir or a history knows from the outset where this story is going and how it will end. The diarist doesn't have a clue what's around the corner.” Instead, with a diary, the reader receives “the on-rushing present. That's the feature of the form, not a bug. What you lose in omniscience and perspective, you gain in heedless immediacy and suspense.”
Diaries are the very best to carry around when you don’t know if you’ll have a chance to read. They’re present enough to keep your attention, they’re realistic enough to drop off at unpredictable moments, and then grab you by the shoulders when some life-changing force has suddenly happened, and neither of you know what will happen next.