Two Thirds Terror, One Third Romance On vacations, my father encouraged me to keep travel diaries. These were less diaries than documents—drawings, descriptions, and artifacts recording our movements each travel day. You’ll treasure them when you’re older, he reasoned.…
This project started with a sound, low and guttural. Two years ago, I entered a summer memoir workshop with a trio of essays that touched the nerve of a secret. For years I had written about this secret from the lens of film or feminist theory or art criticism, hiding behind someone else’s words or objects. I was a journalist, after all, and I knew the importance of proof. I had seen what happened to women who failed to create a catalogue of their every move, who could not sufficiently produce evidence out of their own bodies. A decade after the #MeToo movement, survivors are living in an era in which pedophilia and sexual abuse are sanctioned by the media and the state. I fantasized about telling but instead, I behaved, playing the dutiful daughter for the sake of my father’s career. When I felt like screaming, I went outside and filled my mouth full of dirt. I stayed silent until, decades later, my body broke under its weight and I came to, coughing up earth.
In that summer workshop, there was no analysis to shield me. A fellow student made a simple, astute comment about one of my essays, forcing me to acknowledge the gravity of what I endured as a child and my obligation to keep the incidents hidden. I excused myself from the room, gripped the railing of the banister and Heimliched a sob out of my solar plexus, the sound emptying down the staircase, funneling through to the classrooms below. My shoulders heaved as I waited for whatever needed to escape my body to pass, the workshop instructors waiting patiently just a few steps behind me.
I am deeply grateful to the instructors and fellow participants in this workshop, who helped me ease away the silt and shame to write my memoir, A Mouth Full of Dirt: On Reckoning with Art and Erasure, a story about art and silence in creative communities.
I wanted to write about artists and power. I wanted to write about the fantasy of documentation and how the body becomes its own archive of sorrow. But most importantly, I wanted to tell my story on my own terms, through experiments with form and genre. I hope this book can be an offering in agency to readers, especially those who have experienced trauma, in recalibrating who gets to share their story and how. A Mouth Full of Dirt positions disclosure as an art form rather than an obligation and negotiates the double bind of loving the very thing that hurts you, be it art or a parent. I am a survivor. The abuser I survived taught me that art gives life meaning. How does one reconcile these two facts?
In writing the essay “Two Thirds Terror, One Third Romance,” I was thinking about the artist’s archive, how it can hide as much as it reveals.
ROSA BOSHIER GONZÁLEZ’s essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in publications including Guernica, Joyland, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Georgia Review, and The Washington Post. She is the recipient of a 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She has received scholarships and fellowships from Fulbright, Sewanee Writers Conference, and Vermont Studio Center. Boshier González earned her MFA from CalArts and her PhD from the University of Houston. She teaches creative writing at Rice University. Find her on Instagram @rosaboshiergonzalez.
