"My Grandma the Poisoner" begins with a provocative title. The title itself suggests two possibilities: this could be serious or this could be fun. Reed sweeps us up in his journey, inhabiting both of these realms—the serious and the humorous—to a complicated effect. By the end of the second paragraph he has raised the stakes: "Today, when I think back on it, I don't wonder whether Grandma got what she deserved as a mother; I wonder whether she got what she deserved as a murderer" (162). Proving this statement through "pieces of circumstantial evidence and hunches that have coalesced over the years" (165) seems to be the driving force of the essay (though I would argue the question of the piece extends beyond the proof). We are left in a gray territory of suspicion and doubt. I would love for that space to be the focus of our blog discussion.
The task: to assemble the evidence for and against John Reed's grandmother, as a poisoner/murderer.
-Please provide a piece of evidence and state its significance with respect to the case for/against Grandma.
-Also, connect this piece of evidence (or the veracity of Reed's piece as a whole) to the structure of the essay as discussed in Bascom's craft essay "Picturing the Perfect Essay: A Visual Guide."
I'm curious to see how Grandma fares.
Thank you.
The “sleepiness” appears to be a pretty consistent symptom of Grandma’s potential “poisonings.” I think Reed introduces the possibility that Grandma’s philosophy “that everything was about saving money” could potentially tie into the drawbacks of eating her food. Particularly when Reed brings up the cans of beets she tries to pawn off on his family. The line, “everything she gave us should have been pulled from the shelves,” made me think, maybe she’s not poisoning him, maybe she just values saving money (170).
ReplyDeleteBut, I think Grandma’s guilty, and not of maliciously serving her family recalled food, but potentially lacing her food in a way that induces heavy sleep. My piece of evidence is the short paragraph at the start of the second section on pg. 165 paired with the line, “even in her old age, she was insightful and informed” (164). I don’t think the recalled food Grandma serves would consistently cause the same kinds of symptoms like passing out for too long, and knowing her history with “nutrition” makes me think it’s very likely that she was lacing her food in some way to keep people in her home longer.
My inability to really know for sure, though, and my general vested interest in this essay, I think relates to Bascom’s section “Narrative with a lift,” and “The whorl of reflection.” Rather than, following chronological order, Reed appears to rely on building tension and adding suspense behind a question of whether or not Grandma actually poisoned people or didn’t. I think Reed also uses Grandma as the center of a “whorl of reflection.” As he moves through the essay he shifts in varying perspectives of Grandma, until shooting out with the resolution of defining his relationship with his Grandma as “a cosmic bond” vs speculating on her responsibility for certain deaths (171).
This is the idea that stuck with me most from Bascom's piece: “While a fiction writer may need to invent from scratch, adding and adding, the essayist usually needs to do the opposite, deleting and deleting. As a result, nonfiction creativity is best demonstrated by what has been left out. The essay is a figure locked in a too-large-lump of personal experience, and the good essayist chisels away all unnecessary material.” It’s interesting to think about how structure could be created not by the content of an essay, but by what isn’t there. And that’s especially high stakes when what is and isn’t there leads the reader to a conclusion about whether someone is a murderer. I appreciate that Jackie points out that readers are “in a gray territory of suspicion and doubt” throughout, and Reed certainly has his doubts as well; he makes it known that he’s unsure after every accusation.. It might be important to note too, though, that our suspicion is informed by both what Reed has included and deleted. He disagrees with his mom that Grandma has Munchausen by proxy, but I mean...what if Reed has Munchausen syndrome? There’s just so much we don’t know, either because Reed didn’t tell us or because he doesn’t know himself.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, I really think Grandma is at the very least a poisoner, and probably because I have several murderous grannies in my family so this whole essay made a lot of sense to me despite the big gray area of doubt. The most damning “evidence” seems to me to be on page 170: “Before Grandma put me to bed she’d sometimes serve this really rich hot chocolate that looked oily and thin. And when I woke up it would be twenty-four or even seventy-two hours later. Three or four times we rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night because I was having trouble breathing.” This is the most specific and detailed description of what happened in grandma’s house. A seventy-two hour nap is just too long, and if they only happened at Grandma’s house after the weird hot cocoa...I’d be interested to learn about other things that could cause the reactions Reed had as a kid. At the same time, though, I have to acknowledge that this most specific “evidence” is probably the most unreliable: it happened the longest ago, and Reed only remembered it and started connecting the dots much later when he was already invested in the Grandma-the-poisoner thing.
And the essay ends with this, which I do see as evidence in a way: “...Grandma never would have hurt me. We had a cosmic bond.” This adoration for Grandma shows up all over the essay. Part of me wants to say that since Reed cares for her so much, and since (I think) she was alive when he wrote the essay, he wouldn’t publish anything that would vilify Grandma, especially if it wasn’t true. But he did publish it, and those final lines scream something that sounds like Stockholm syndrome to me. I just don’t think that Reed could have published this without serious suspicion that his Grandma is a murderer and a poisoner, and his special but complicated relationship with her indicates to me that he wouldn’t have come to any of these conclusions lightly.
I think Grandma is guilty to an extent and then the convenience of coincidence makes for a really good piece. This would be great fiction, really embrace the whole story line and not framed as a question. I think the sleeping element is pretty hard to refute. But I always pass out at my grandmothers too, not because she drugged me but because I eat and drink and her house is cozy and comfortable. I'm wondering how much of it is situational.
ReplyDeleteI think I am most interested in this piece less in the whether or no grandma did it but more so with the image of this house. I wanted that to come back around I suppose rather than the scene with the singing. But hey it's not my essay. I'm fascinated by this house and how it accumulated all these relics not only of her life but of so many others as well. I don't think so many people dying near her is strange. She is old and people die and as we grow older it simply increases the odds. When I think of my grandmother by the time she died, she'd lost three children and a husband. You are here long enough, everyone goes.
This craft essay is one of my favorite. I tried to refer to it the other week, these drawings, they make the most sense to me. The first time I read it I could only apply it after the fact and use it in revision because thinking about structure while trying to write just blew my mind. I'm happy to say I've taken a baby step forward. Is the whole grandma piece chronological. Or would we call it some well dipping because we have the present momentish with the nursing home and house being gone and this visit. That seems more right to me. I'm interested in combining some of these drawings to try and make sense of things. That might be fun.
Well to be forthright I think grandma poisoned everyone. Just looking on one page, 163 (to limit myself in evidence), these two mysterious things happen: finding the vial of red viscous fluid that needed to be disposed of by the Poison Control Center (163)—because why would anything other than a poisonous object need to be disposed of in a poison control center and the bag filled with dead animals (163)—were these all the animals she had ever killed or just the recent ones that bothered her garage. These examples precede mention of the sleepiness, miscarriage, and actual deaths of many close family members (counting husbands in the family category) that to an outsider feel too real and non-coincidental.
ReplyDeleteWhile I believe that grandma did have a hand in several of the deaths and/or mysterious illnesses, I am uncertain as to why the serial nature. As Ariel mentions, the reasoning that maybe it was accidental and brought on just because the expired or recalled—and therefore dangerous— food was cheaper. On just the second page of the story he writes that grandma wanted to remind everyone about money saving (163), and this is a mentioned statement/characteristic throughout. But the pretty believable cause and effect of visiting grandma, accidentally eating something, and that resulting in anything ranging from sleep to eternal sleep is a story that I am buying into. Well done Reed—you are either a master crafter of story and manipulating the reader to believe mere conjecture or, in fact, writing about familial murder… and either way I enjoyed the ride.
To me this piece comes full circle with the deviation into a maybe more than the my-grandma-is-a-murderer story—beginning and ending with their cosmic connection but ending with the knowledge that has been gained throughout the narrative and alluding to implications of whatever that may mean (don’t ask me—I don’t totally know the exact purpose of this, just commenting on perceived structure).
What a fun question, Jackie. I think it's quite clear that the narrator believes his grandmother is a poisoner if not a murder. What clinches it for me is his decision to go to the cops and tell them he thought his grandmother was involved in Joe's death, her last boyfriend (170). For someone with a "cosmic bond" to an alleged perpetrator this decision to go public with his suspicions seems significant. Far more interesting than this plot development, however, is the narrator's reaction to the police's indifference: "I feel like I'm supposed to care. Like there should be closure." In the end, he realizes that "there's not going to be any grand finale" and that nobody really cares what happened. That he didn't care. For me, this was the denouement of the essay. The dramatic narrative--did she do it or not?--molts away and is revealed as a mere husk of the work, and instead we are left with the idea that animates the essay: sometimes we must simply learn to live with the mysteries that haunt our relationships with people we love and who love us. There is no forgiveness, no closure, no "higher vibrational state." There is just that cosmic bond.
ReplyDeleteThe narrative structure of "My Grandma" seemed more like Bascom's stairs, with each additional revelation of the grandmother's suspicious involvement in the health of the people around here escalating the tension, all leading toward the question that Jackie asked: is she a poisoner? Such fun to read, mostly for the stories, but also because of Reed's persona. There's a comic touch but the narrator is serious, too, as he tries to sort all this out and figure out what it means to have such suspicions of his "charming" grandmother who is now reduced to a "loose jawed" shadow of herself.
I just love Reed’s essay. The stairs Bascom discusses make the most sense to me in terms of the structure of the piece, and it works so well. We get a hint of grandma’s potential complicity in the deaths, but I actually went into the piece thinking maybe grandma just had an unfortunate habit of knowing people who died. Until, of course, the line, “I wonder whether she got what she deserved as a murderer” (162). But then it takes a bit to get more information about this, and Reed drags us up the stairs, building tension, making the reader want to know more but also highlighting his own confusion about what did or didn’t happen. Sure, you might get the shits and be exhausted if you stayed at her house for a length of time, but she cooked weird stuff, or overfed, or whatever. I get sick nearly every time I visit my mother because she force feeds me and cooks elaborate, rich meals.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I’ve read enough about Munchausen by proxy to be convinced that grandma is in fact a poisoner. Even without that background knowledge, I still think I’d believe her to be guilty. There is a gray area, sure, but it’s a tainted gray area because Reed presents his circumstantial evidence with a hefty side of his own doubts about her innocence. A line like, “Or…Again, it could have just been the cancer” uses the silence and the feigned uncertainty to ensure the reader leans towards a guilty verdict as the essay progresses.
But, the essay isn’t really about her guilt or innocence. Those last two lines say so much.
Tbh, I was really uncomfortable with this essay. If there is any sort of sense of fun or play, it is dependent on somewhat justifying the murders. Like that the first and second husbands were assholes, or that people didn't like the son (not a whole lot of people are subject to horrible abuse and come out able to have great relationships with ease). In the end, with such difficulty proving anything, the real problem isn't the impossibility of justice (as Reed says he "didn't care what had happened,... nobody cares what happened"); what is at stake in this essay is their "cosmic bond" and whether or not grandma could have really hurt him. This lack of any sense of empathy for the victims of torture and murder beyond some basic level that makes their deaths matter as plot points because it's fun to play armchair psychopathologist is a major fault in this essay.
ReplyDeleteAs far as structure, there's the braiding of the current time frame, visiting Grandma at the retirement home, and the semi-chronological returns to the various deaths throughout the years, and the essay "comes full circle both beginning and ending with the question of the "cosmic bond" between the author and the grandmother, and whether or not he was in danger.
Everyone has already offered up some really great evidence against Grandma, and I agree that I think she is guilty. The evidence that made me lose any possible sympathy for Grandma (which was minimal at best by that point anyway) and made me feel like Reed is way too easy on her is his description of how she treats Norman, especially in this sentence: “Once I saw Grandma punish Norman by standing him in front of the open stove, turning up the broiler flames, and threatening to burn off his dick” (168). I know kids can sometimes be pretty terrible despite their upbringing, but I agree with June; it seems like Norman was probably a “piece of shit” because of how he had been treated, and Norman may have targeted Reed because Reed was given better treatment (only poisoned, in other words). This evidence makes me think that any explanation of Grandma focused on her wish to save money, keep her family close, or anything else that implies some sympathetic motive driving her actions ignores the evidence that she was probably a terrible person who did not get what she deserved.
ReplyDeleteI do think Reed is struggling with this realization, though, and the structure I find most interesting for this piece is the idea of coming full circle. As Nicole and June mentioned, Reed tells us about his “cosmic bond” with his Grandma before telling us she is a murderer so we see her as he saw her as a child, and then he complicates that statement with all of the evidence against her before returning to it again in the end. And in the end, that statement does open the conclusion up , as Bascom says, because it seems that Reed will continue dealing with everything he has shared with us in his essay.
Ah nuts, people have mostly taken the big pointers to her at the very least acting suspiciously and having a shady past. It's clear--from the author's POV--that his grandma was a bit off an oddball and has several bad relationships and treated her son poorly. For me the vial that said to be taken to Poison Control, the going to of the police, the crystals on the cake (?). Everyone in the family refusing one by one to eat her food (could have just been bad though), the bag of dead animals. It was like a detective story that built and offered us clues. The fact the house was bullzoed and that he's stuck from resolving this was quite interesting--and in so course he needed another ending. The cosmic bond being the one he went with. I though he was going to end with something like because she loved me
ReplyDeleteOne thing to bear in mind is the place of publication--Vice, which is known for its immersive journalism and an emphasis on unusual stories. Sidebar: This cool Guardian essay about story and the concept of fiction/nonfiction being more applicable to Western (actually more English language)tradition and how other culture deal with the idea of story: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/24/fiction-nonfiction-english-literature-culture-writers-other-languages-stories
PS. I would agree with Bruce and say Reed uses the narrative with a lift, ie the stairs as the structure. I thought it worked very well. In due course, therefore, I found the essay/story to be gripping and entertaining--which as June suggest might be problematic.
ReplyDeleteI loved this week's essay because of the playfully creepy nature of this topic. I cannot definitively say whether she is a murderer or not, but there are a couple of significant moves that Reed makes that trouble me and make me wonder if Grandmother isn’t a Nazi or a witch—to be quite honest.
ReplyDeleteFirst--the Anti-Semitic undertones weaved throughout the essay seriously unnerved me as a reader. During the nursing home reflection, we're told that Grandma says singing German songs "returns her to childhood" but immediately following that Reed tells us about his visits as a child to Grandma's house--extended stays with her talking about "Jews"..."she'd tell me that Jews invent things, that Jews don't drink, that Jews are smart because the philosophy of the Jews values thinking, and that I'm not supposed to call them Jews" (164). These characterizations along with the theme of poisoning and death are what led me to see her as perhaps a Nazi sympathizer. But, then I felt she was more likely a witch by Reed's reflection of her reaction to his engagement to a Gentile. Her blonde hair and blue eyes are mentioned a couple of times so I assume that the family is ‘Gentile’ so why would she insist on their nuptials outside of a church? The image of her as the ‘belle of the ball’ during his weeding out on the tennis court along with the nutrition/cooking details cemented this witchy image in my mind. But I couldn’t shake the Nazi-sympathizing as I continued to read.
But the moment that truly gave me the shivers was how Reed depicted Grandma through his Uncle Norman. Eight years his senior (not weirded out by this at all, my family has similar geneological complexitites--my dad's youngest step-brother is exactly six years older than me, and many of the hundreds of cousins on my mother's side are older than my parents) I clearly felt the assholery and douchyness of Norman in his behavior toward Reed. That said, this felt like classic abused child retaliation. The complexity of characterization (Nazi or witch) was muddied even further by what Reed said about Norman's purported envy of him, "he was chunky and Jewish-looking, so Grandma, with her blue eyes and blond hair, found him repellant...a fleshy failure" (168). Referring to his own looks as "Gentile" and "therefore her favorite" just prior to the image of Norman being punished before Grandma's open stove, with her turning up the broiler flames and threatening to burn off his dick, Reed successfully made me want throw the book across the room. This motive reeked of allusion to the Holocaust but also is reminiscent of classic the classic fairytale about Hansel and Gretel….like I said, creeped out by the witchy Grandma.
Reflecting on the structure of the piece along with the content that profiles this person in his life, I wonder about Buscom's stair structure as well, but ultimately feel (probably due to my twisty perspective on this piece) that the “whorl of reflection” best captures the structure. With Reed’s ‘cosmic bond’ to his grandmother, I can’t help but see him stirring the pot…
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble
I think grandma is certainly guilty of slipping something to her family members, although I don't think she ever meant it maliciously. This seems clear in the second to last paragraph where Reed is listening to a friend's thoughts: "She wasn't trying to hurt you, she was trying to manage you, but she could have hurt you" (171). I think grandma really did love her family, and when she slipped them something to put them to sleep she was simply trying to help them relax. Still inexcusable, of course, but the a key difference between murder and involuntary manslaughter.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Bruce and Emery that this essay seems to resemble Bascom’s stair structure most closely. At the beginning, after being introduced to the idea that grandma might be responsible for or have contributed to some of the deaths around her, Reed presents us with various scraps of evidence, each more shocking than the last. His “funerary procession” (168) especially exemplifies this, as each death heightens the tension of the story and builds us toward the conclusion that she must be in some way culpable.