At age five, Marcia Meier was hit by a car, losing the left side of her face and eyelid. Over the next 15 years, she underwent 20 surgeries and spent days blinded by bandages, her hands tied to the sides of her hospital bed. Scarred both physically and emotionally, she survived and went on to create a successful life as a journalist, a wife, and a mother. But at midlife her controlled world began to fall apart, and she began the journey into the darkness of her past that resulted in the creation of her just-released and very remarkable memoir, Face.
In addition to Face, Marcia is the author of several other award-winning nonfiction titles. She has worked as a newspaper journalist and has freelanced or written for the Los Angeles Times, Seattle Times, Arizona Republic, The Writer magazine, Santa Barbara Magazine, The Huffington Post and Thrive Global, among others. She is also a developmental book editor, writing coach, and publisher of Weeping Willow Books. We’re so pleased to have been able to sit down with Marcia here at Occhi.
Thank you for taking the time to talk to us. After your first chapter, which describes your accident, most successive chapters begin with a summary of your surgeon’s notes describing the various surgeries you underwent over the years. These summaries are in chronological order, but the narration within chapters moves back and forth through time. How did you decide on this format for your memoir?
I struggled for a long time trying to come up with a structure for this story, and it wasn’t until my final semester of graduate school that Brad Kessler, my adviser at that time, suggested using the surgeon’s notes to open most of the chapters. After that, it all just came together. The braided movement through time within each chapter is experimental in many ways. It combines both braiding and a circular structure similar to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, in that she returns again and again to her husband’s death throughout the narrative, and I return to the surgeries.
You were a journalist for many years before you wrote Face. Did you always know you would write it one day?
No. Actually, it wasn’t until I turned fifty and many things in my life were falling apart that I began therapy and realized I had to go back in time to process and understand all the trauma I had experienced.
One of the joys of reading Face is your ability to alight on a person or event and tell us just what we need to know without ever overexplaining. Is this a consequence of your years as a journalist?
Yes, I think so. I spent many, many years as a newspaper writer and editor, explaining difficult subjects in straightforward and clear prose. I’m sure that influenced the writing of this memoir.
One of the most striking images in your memoir is waking up from surgeries and other treatments to find your hands tied to the rails of your hospital crib and your face, including your eyes, covered with gauze. You can hear voices in the room, but they are disembodied. Can you talk about other events in your life that produced the same sensation?
There’s never been another time in my life that I have experienced that sensation, nor the experience of seeing my body floating near the ceiling when I knew I was clearly lying in a hospital bed. I have learned since that out-of-body experience is common in people who have suffered severe abuse and/or trauma.
Even as a small child you were able to move from consideration of your own sufferings to a consideration of the sufferings of the people around you, and from there, to the nature of suffering generally. What is it about the fluidity of identity that causes so many people so much anguish?
That’s an interesting question. The concept of self is, indeed, fluid, flowing from one sense of self to another depending on what is happening in one’s life and with whom one is interacting. Sensing what might be going on with others has been something that has always come easily to me, perhaps because I was so attuned to my own suffering, even if I didn’t understand it at the time.
Your mom had to come to terms with her own identity issues at the age of 48. How did she handle that?
She was devastated when she found out she had been adopted by my grandparents, and that my grandfather’s sister was not only her aunt but her birth mother. Plus, this was an aunt my mom never knew about. After she gave my infant mom to my grandparents, she disappeared. My mom had never heard of this woman before she found out she was adopted. It caused, for a time, a serious rift between her and my grandmother.
You write about the fluidity of memory as well, especially regarding the details of your accident and the reactions of the people around you. Can you talk a bit about that? And how does the act of writing about events impact your memory of them?
There is a lot of research about the fallibility of memory. I have tried in the memoir to acknowledge the things I remember clearly—for example, the hospitalizations—while also indicating there were things I didn’t remember or things I imagined, as in the recounting of the man (and his wife) driving down the street before he hit me. That said, the specific things from the various surgeries, the things my mom and others said to me, and my interactions with my surgeon I remember like it was yesterday.
All of what happened to you happened because a man who was blind in one eye had been behind the wheel of the car. Later, in the courthouse, your parents appear to easily forgive him for “not seeing” you. Yet you blamed yourself for the accident for many years. Why?
Ahhh. Why do children take on the blame for the things that happen around them? For their parent’s fighting and divorce? For Fluffy their bunny’s untimely death? That’s what children do, sadly. My mother said something to me when I first woke up in the hospital that made me think it had been my fault, and I took that to heart for 45 years.
How did you finally come to terms with the fact that you were abused and what impact did that realization have on you?
That was a huge revelation to me, and it only came when I was in my fifties and undergoing therapy. My therapist was the first one to suggest that I had suffered physical and emotional abuse—well-meaning and medically necessary—but abuse nonetheless. It was a turning point for me and how I had considered what had happened to me.
Just before your wedding, your beloved father presented you with a folder of all your hospital bills and also pictures from just after the accident. Why do you think he did this?
I think he believed that since I was getting married, perhaps it was time to pass on the legacy of what the folder represented. At the time it confused me, and I put it away for another twenty-five years until I began therapy and started to realize I needed to confront my past.
You say that yoga is one of the things that saved you. What do you mean by this?
One of the issues I struggled with most of my life was body image (common with trauma survivors). So when I started yoga, I had no idea that it would help me finally sink into my body. I had spent most of my lifetime in my head, intellectually processing everything at that level. After several years of yoga, I started to appreciate my body, and “embody” myself. It made the difference for me in terms of learning to accept myself, and to accept that I might actually be attractive to men, which I had never believed was possible. It was life-changing.
Please tell Occhi readers how they can learn more about your work.
Thank you so much, Joan! Folks can find out more about me and my work at www.marciameier.com and www.weepingwillowbooks.com, and can find out more about Face, A Memoir, at the Saddle Road Press website, and, of course, they can buy it on Amazon, Bookshop, and it can be ordered at your favorite local bookstore.
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