Courage of Tenderness
The Body, Brain, and Books: Eleven Questions with writer Anne Boyd Rioux
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What are you reading now?
I just finished Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep. It is a perfect novel, wound tight with emotion, desire, and historical tensions, which unravel in the most satisfying way. I’m interested in how we write about women’s desires (or don’t), so that is what drew me to the book. I found myself utterly absorbed by the main character’s transformation as she allows her desires for someone she thought she hated to consume her. And then the book became so much more. But I don’t want to spoil it by saying anything else. I’m thrilled that the novel has been longlisted for the Booker, and I’d be surprised if it doesn’t go further.
Having reluctantly set The Safekeep aside, I’m currently in the first third of Magge O’Farrell’s Hamnet—because every time I tell someone that I love her work, they ask me if I’ve read Hament. So it’s time. My interest in her writing began with After You’d Gone, which I was amazed to discover was her first novel. It is so intricately plotted, pulling the reader through a maze of intense of emotions surrounding love and loss.
I’m very interested in how intense emotion is conveyed in fiction. Literature allows us more completely than any other art form, in my opinion, to get inside the heads and hearts of other people, who are otherwise such a mystery to us—even those closest to us. It is such a fundamental human craving to know what other people are thinking and feeling. Literature can shatter the illusion of separateness that Tara Brach says is the greatest cause of human suffering. And it does so through emotion.
But starting in the late-nineteenth century, evoking emotion in the reader made you suspect as a writer. As a scholar, I studied this shift away from emotion—and the rise of sentimental as an epithet. That is when the bifurcation of literature into thinking/feeling, masculine/feminine, literary/sentimental set in, and it carried through the twentieth century. Having left the study of literature to write my own, I want to figure out how to write about the intense feelings in a way that is genuine and literary. This is why I loved The Safekeep and After You’d Gone. They conveyed their characters strong emotions (desire, love, grief) so directly and deeply without sentimentalizing or flattening them out.
What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?
Growing up, I read a variety of Judy Blume and other books that I ordered through the Scholastic Book Clubs. I pored over the magazine-catalogs and circled all the books I wanted. I still do that, after a fashion, collecting books I want to read, tagging them in Libby or Everand, many more than I will ever be able to read.
In my early teens, I was particularly fond of the Betsy, Tacy, and Tib series. I wanted desperately to live in the simpler times in which they were set, when friends and family played the piano and sang for an evening’s entertainment. In my academic career, I went back in time as well, living pretty much in the 19th century for over two decades. I think it was a kind of escape for me, and I still find it quite difficult to live fully in the present. I don’t think I was made for such complex times. I don’t think many of us are. We have lost touch with the simple human activities of making music, singing, telling stories, making pictures. Now we are the listeners and the readers while we let the superior, talented few make art. As a result, I think we’ve lost an important part of what makes us human.
What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?
I have two re-reads, if you will: A.S. Byatt’s Possession and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. I didn’t read LW until I was in graduate school, but Jo March captured my imagination, and I later gave my daughter the middle name Josephine. It was the passage at the end of the book that particularly spoke to me in my twenties, where Jo, now Mrs. Jo, married and with children, running a school with her husband, says that she hopes still to write a great book someday, and she thinks it will be better for the family and pupils that fill her life now. The idea that that love, children, and a full life could enrich ones writing was a revelation to me. I wanted desperately to write books and have a family but had no idea, in the 1990s, how I would do that.
I ended up becoming a professor, marrying, and having one child, writing books about Alcott and other women writers of her era. Over the years, I ended up reading LW when I was a young mother and when my daughter was growing up, finding myself in Meg and Marmee more than Jo at those stages. Then I reread it again a few times as I was writing my last book, a cultural and literary history of Little Women. It’s titled Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters and was published by Norton in 2018 for the novel’s 150th anniversary. Now I’m finding my way back to Jo, who in the third volume (fourth in the UK) of the LW series, Jo’s Boys, becomes a novelist once her boys are grown. I’ve left my career as a professor and am spreading my wings as the writer I always wanted to be.
In recent years, I’ve revisited Possession, another favorite from my grad school years. I love how it makes the work of research and literary study dramatic and important—as if hunting around in archives, discovering the letters and diaries of once-fully-alive, passionate people can be life-changing. It can! It certainly has been for me at certain stages of my life. Most recently, my research on the largely forgotten novelist and short-story writer Kay Boyle made me want to live a different life—to let my passions guide me toward what is important. I was writing her biography but decided I had to live my own life—and write it—before I could write hers. Perhaps I’ll end up writing a Possession-style novel about her instead.
What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?
It’s an accessory rather than an article of clothing, but the purse I’ve had strapped to me for the past two years and carried all over Europe has been an extension of myself. It’s a Kippling bag, a brand that I’ve just discovered is actually fairly expensive and much-coveted. I bought it at Marshall’s or TJMaxx for a modest price, and I like its practicality. It’s made of nylon and fairly casual but also a little bit stylish. But it’s the color—dark teal—which is its greatest attraction for me. When I sling my purse across my body, I feel complete, and completely myself.
What’s the best piece of wisdom you've encountered recently?
I have recently discovered the work of Caroline Myss. What an eye-opener! I’m learning from her how vital it is that we tune into ourselves. We call this intuition, gut, guidance, instinct. Whatever we call it, it is in us—that part of ourselves that knows what feels right and what doesn’t. And when we go against it and do the things that feel wrong (conforming to what is expected of us, overriding our best judgment, letting fear direct us instead) we betray ourselves. I heard her say that the hardest thing we have to do as humans is listen to our gut. Why? Because then we have to act on it. And if we don’t, we suffer mentally, emotionally, and physically. We are killing our spirits little by little each time we do something that goes against our true nature. We are allowing our vital energy to drain out of us, and we end up ill in various ways—depression, autoimmune disorders, cancers. It takes great courage to listen to ourselves instead of other people or the culture around us. But if we want to live longer and healthier, if we want to feel that we have truly lived, we simply must do it.
Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?
Growing up, we had dogs, which were ostensibly for me but ended up attached to my stepfather instead. While my daughter was growing up, we got her two kittens, and they were fabulous cuddlers for her and for me. Merlin especially, a fluffy black cat with a true cat personality—equal parts love muffin and aloof prince, depending on his mood. I miss having furry friends in my life now, but I’m not settled enough. Maybe someday I’ll have a home of my own in the country, where a cat can roam and I can walk a doggie.
I was struck by something
said in an interview recently. She said that sometimes an animal can give you what no human can. And I thought, I’ve been too preoccupied, too distracted by the busyness of my life to really let an animal have that affect on me. It’s one of the many pleasures of being alive that my overfull life prevented me from experiencing. Now, I try to cultivate silence and gratitude and the pleasures of the senses. An animal would only enrich those aspects of my life.What's one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?
When I began my travels, after leaving my career and marriage, selling my home and belongings, and taking my daughter to college, I was looking for adventure but also, eventually, a new home. I gave myself a year to explore, visiting places where I had been before and loved, trying them out to see if I’d like to stay. I expected I’d end up in France or England, maybe Germany, but I fell in love with a place that wasn’t even on my radar.
About half way through the year, I needed to leave the Schengen Zone (basically the EU, where Americans can stay for only 90 out of 180 days). A new acquaintance recommended Edinburgh. There are lots of writers there, she said. As soon as I stepped off the plane, I felt I had arrived in a place I knew somehow, although I had only visited once, for two days, eight years before. I had come then with my daughter, to visit the town of Bathgate, where my Boyd ancestors had emigrated 100 years before my birth.
As it happened, it was very emotional to arrive in the land of my ancestors, at a stage in my life when I felt homeless and all alone. I began researching my Boyds and discovered they had lived all over the region and they were coal miners. What I’ve learned about the lives of coal miners has horrified me. Now I know why they left this beautiful country. But I’m convinced a piece of them remained connected to Scotland, and a fraction of that piece made it way down four generations to me. I’ve never truly felt at home anywhere before. To say that I’ve come home feels strange and so true at the same time.
I’m still working on being able to stay for the long-term, which is quite difficult. But even if I ultimately end up somewhere else, I know where my heart is. And that is what I had wanted when I left my previous life—to fall in love with a place. I had imagined it would be like a lightning bolt. You know that moment in the film Under the Tuscan Sunwhen Diane Lane sees a beautiful house for sale and yells “Stop the bus!”? In other words, I would just know the place when I saw it. But it wasn’t a house, and it wasn’t like lightning. It was a gentler, enveloping feeling. They say that falling in love should feel like coming home. And that’s what it felt like.
Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?
Both. I can’t not move/dance when I hear music that I really like. And I’ve recently rediscovered my pleasure in singing. When I was about 8, the director of the youth choir at my church asked me not to sing so loudly because I went off key. Ever since, I thought I couldn’t sing. But last year I signed up for a Scots Music singing group that was such a joy. Not only did I learn songs that my ancestors probably knew, but I also discovered that with practice I can learn to sing a song quite well, all on my own, without accompaniment even. This is what your 50s are for, I think, rediscovering the joys and talents that were drummed out of you when you were young.
9. What are your hopes for yourself?
I hope that I never stop learning and growing, that I remain as healthy, active, and alert for as long as I can, and most of all that when my time comes, I am ready to go, with few regrets and nothing but gratitude for the full life I was able to live.
What’s a kindness that changed your life?
Loving kindness is a phrase you hear a lot in the context of mindfulness and meditation. In that sense, it is a quality of thought and feeling, something you extend mentally to others, even to those you are least inclined to feel it towards. It’s a beautiful practice. But I’m also interested in another kind of loving kindness. You might call it tenderness. D.H. Lawrence wrote about the “courage of tenderness” in Lady Chatterly’s Lover, which I read earlier this year. And that phrase has stuck with me. It takes great courage not only to think lovingly but also to act tenderly. When I read Lawrence’s novel, I finally had words for how I have felt to be loved in this way by a man. It’s a beautiful, life-changing thing.
What’s a guiding force in your life?
I can finally say that it is my true self, my higher nature, my core being, my connection to the divine—whatever you call that part of yourself that knows, just knows. After years of confusion and feeling lost, fretting over the details of life, I have found my way to a more centered place, where I can listen to myself and let it guide me. I still have periods of doubt and fear, of course. They will always be with me. But I have learned to listen to my fears and console those parts of myself that are afraid. And then I ask myself, where are my desires leading me? That is where I know I must go. I am so grateful to have found this well of knowing inside me. Writing has helped me find it. I speak to it sometimes, but mostly I sit down and write, asking it questions and listening to the answers. Julia Cameron, in Living the Artist’s Way, calls this asking guidance. I see it more as a process of turning inward. But I’m not alone in there. Something higher, broader, deeper, infinite is alive there as well. That is where compassion, peace, and love live. And I try to remember to go there whenever things are feeling out of whack, when something inside me is hurting.
If you enjoyed Anne’s questionnaire, you may also enjoy this one with Amy Scher:
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This was so wonderful. As a devoted subscriber to Anne’s Substack and a recently divorced late midlife woman bent on reinvention (hello, Barcelona, where I’ll move next spring), her experience and words always speak to my own heart and journey at this stage of life. Anne, so glad you felt that sense of homecoming in Edinburgh. Here’s to continually growing and expanding into our truest selves.
Jane and Anne, you two make beautiful conversational music.