Unspeakable

March 15, 2019
A British filmmaker and journalist documents the mysteries of selective speechlessness.In her affecting debut, Shawcross charts the lives and struggles of people for whom interactive communication has become a virtually insurmountable feat. As a homesick exchange student studying English at the University of California, the author discovered the writings of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet George Oppen. She was fascinated by the fact that he abandoned poetry for more than two decades after serving in World War II. The author also reports on childhood selective mutism, following the unique activity and progress at a New York camp for mute teenagers, and she discusses how menstruation has been tabooed to almost mythical proportions in the mountains of far west Nepal. Shawcross chronicles her time at a Buddhist retreat and her visit with a silent order of nuns in central London where peacefulness is golden and ritualistic: "The...sisters have renounced almost all contact with the world....Their lives are dedicated to prayer." Shawcross refers often to Oppen's life and poetry, which serves as a kind of anchor to her narrative. She shares an enlightening interview with Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, a project the author participated in. Braided throughout these profiles and stories is Shawcross' moving personal history. As a child, she'd lost the ability to speak in conversation with others and retreated into her own silent world. This development was spurred by the permanent arrival of her grandmother into the family home and the shame of her father's sudden unemployment. "I never intended to stop talking....It felt safer, easier somehow, to say the bare minimum," she writes. Those years of self-imposed pseudo-silence shaped her as a future journalist and a pensive filmmaker but also plagued her romantic relationships with women. Though she slowly found her own voice again in adulthood, the author still admits to experiencing difficulty in saying what she feels even on the brink of marriage, an "alien" but welcome concept to her.A curious, intensive exploration of the eccentric world of silence and solitude.

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June 10, 2019
In this meandering combination of memoir, journalism, and literary analysis, British filmmaker Shawcross seeks to make sense of her impending wedding and of the year she spent basically unable to speak when she was 13 by investigating the causes and meanings of silence. Each section weaves together memories, the poems of George Oppen (who didn’t write for 25 years after publishing his first book), and an interview. The first section covers Shawcross’s year of silence and a trip to a camp in New York for children with selective mutism; the second her college experiences with sex alongside an interview with feminist playwright and activist Eve Ensler, drawing connections between silence and trauma, abuse, and shame; the third Shawcross’s youthful experiences in Kathmandu, where she first experienced desire for another woman, and a look at how trauma has affected the survivors of the 2015 earthquake. In the fourth section, she goes on a silent retreat and learns that silence can be communal. The final section recounts the author’s wedding and reckons with Oppen’s descent into Alzheimer’s and death. The connections between topics can feel tenuous, and readers may be put off by the implied parallels between, for example, Shawcross’s experience coming out and those of traumatized earthquake survivors. This meditative, idiosyncratic exploration of communication and intimacy is more a miscellany than a coherent whole.