Guts: A Memoir
Ralph Bowden. Rev. Guts: A Memoir by Janet Buttenwieser. Melbourne, Victoria, Australia: Vine Leaves Press, 2018.
Guts is Janet Buttenwieser’s impressive memoir, written in middle age. Janet grew up in suburban Boston in the 1970s. The household was educated and liberal, with a psychiatrist father and social worker mother. Off to college in Colorado, she falls in love, her first serious relationship. Post graduation, she and her partner travel for several years, trying different locations, finally settling in Seattle, where they join the trendy, young, idealistic culture. But at twenty-six Janet suffers pains, initially misdiagnosed as Crohn’s disease. She suffers for several years with the ailment and unpleasant side effects of the drugs that control the pain. Finally, after a correct diagnosis (a growth) and two surgeries, she is able to live a more normal life, though with a colostomy. Breaking the liberated code of her culture, she marries her now long-term significant other. They want children but cannot. In vitro almost works, but a miscarriage, the decision to adopt, and the stressful adoption procedure are all emotionally draining. Meanwhile, her assertive and upbeat special friend Beth, who had been a steadfast support through everything, develops brain cancer and after surgery and several years of remission, eventually dies at thirty-eight.
Nobody should have to endure such Job-like trials, physical and emotional. But Janet grows and learns to at least partially overcome her native shyness and insecurity. Always organized, disciplined, and a stickler for finishing what she starts, she begins training for triathlons while mothering two small children, stressing over Beth’s deterioration, and grieving over her death. The memoir’s initial and final scenes describe failing the bicycle part of a triathlon, yet another crushing blow. Will her mature guts, tempered by the multiple adversities she has suffered, see her through?
The writing is full of detailed descriptions of everything—what people wore, how they looked, the weather and the urban and natural settings associated with watershed events, and especially the nuances of human interactions. That she should remember all these details is amazing. Including them lends the narrative a real-time immediacy and intimacy. The other salient feature of the book is the understandably thick emotional content that turns the reader’s pages. Finally, and especially, this is not some fictional, and steamy, tear-jerker romance, but an actual life, retold.
Janet Buttenwieser’s memoir, Guts, was published by Vine Leaves Press in February 2018 and was a finalist for the University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize. Her work has appeared in Under the Sun, The Rumpus, Potomac Review, The Pinch, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. Under the Sun nominated her essay “Laws of Motion” for a Pushcart Prize. Visit her at janetbuttenwieser.com.
