Elizabeth Marcus

Elizabeth Marcus grew up in Manhattan, the only child of a dentist and a Macy’s dress buyer, the Zeus and Hera of Apartment 2B. After escaping to Boston, she ran a small architectural office for 20 years, when she wasn’t traveling to far-flung places with her psychiatrist husband and rambunctious children. Eventually, she decided to concentrate on writing, which allows her to pursue the many, quirky questions that fascinate her: Why are butterflies called ‘butterflies’? Why can’t she recall the taste of wines? Why are first-love memories so potent? Her essays have appeared in The New York Times and Boston Globe, on online sites like Cognoscenti, and in essay anthologies like Travelers’ Tales. “Don’t Say A Word!”: A Daughter’s Two Cents, in 90,571 Words is her first book. She lives in Boston.

Twitter: @eLizMarcus

What’s your favorite comic strip or graphic novel? 

This is an easy one: Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? 

My attachment to this book goes beyond “favorite.” The back cover describes the book as, “the story of an only child watching her parents age well into their nineties and die.” The story of my memoir (Don’t Say a Word!: A Daughter’s Two Cents) exactly! Furthermore, it is the only other memoir I’ve found that focuses on the very human experience of watching our parents approach death—how they succeed or fail to deal with it, how we ride that emotional rollercoaster. On top of which, Chast's memoir similarly mixes hilarity and poignancy in equal measure. Her book is the perfect version of what I aspired to do.

I had written several drafts by the time I read Chast’s book, but, when I did, I didn’t think, “Drats! She got there first!” Just the reverse; I was thrilled. Chast validated what I was trying to do and gave me permission not to sugarcoat my story. In many ways Chast’s book and mine are completely different. Hers is a graphic memoir, and mine obviously isn’t. In her book, the parents’ unraveling is the plot, and Chast and her parents are the only characters, unlike in my book. And then, her parents and her upbringing were nothing like mine (well, maybe her mother…). But in other ways, she’s my twin. She, too, wears her neurosis on her sleeve and is compulsively honest. She, too, failed to get her parents to listen to her. She, too, dealt with her parents’ end-of-life by writing about it—and with humor.

Even if this book did not have special resonance for me, it would still be my favorite graphic novel. It is Chast, herself, on the page. She portrays her parents with all their flaws, doesn’t mince words about her desperation to escape them, and yet, despite all the humor, never makes fun of them. She brings her parents to life in the most finely detailed particularity imaginable, and yet her story is universal. 

Have you ever experienced Imposter Syndrome? 

Is there anyone who hasn’t? I was sure that my parents only loved me in so far as I was their good little girl. I arrived at college convinced I’d been accepted by mistake. The sense of being an imposter has infected almost everything I’ve ever done. 

But the syndrome is finally losing its grip. I have to write the word ‘I’ often, because I almost always write from personal experience. When I first started writing, the ‘I’s on the page looked aggressive, as though I had typed them in bold or in a larger size than all the other words. They seemed to invite the anonymous reader to ask, “Who do you think you are to seek attention or to take a stand on something?” Seeing the ‘I’s popping out of the text, begging to be squashed, gave me waves of anxiety. Eventually, I got over it. The more you put yourself out into the world and don’t receive the crushing, humiliating response you fear, the more the fear diminishes. 

Do you collect anything? If so, what, why, and for how long? 

My husband and I are collectors. I think it’s actually a neurological condition; something you are or are not born with. I studied industrial design before I went to architecture school, and I love “stuff” and can’t help but desire beautiful examples. Chairs, for instance. To support a sitting person: a simple design problem with an amazing range of historical and stylistic responses. Or corkscrews. To get a cork out of a bottle: a simple challenge with an extraordinary variety of solutions. I don’t like to admit to all the things we’ve collected. Luckily the limitation of money to buy the stuff and space to store it held us back—otherwise we’d be drowning in our collections.

In the last twenty years or so, though, we’ve narrowed our collecting to photography. We initially got into it because we are also travelers and were fascinated by the first images taken of places we’d visited. It felt like time-travel. So we started with the 19th century and worked forward, all they way to contemporary photography, which comes with the exciting potential for meeting the photographers. All art is the expression of its moment (as are chairs and corkscrews), and so photographs from each era give a direct view into the perception and thinking of that time period. I love that. 

Do you have another artistic outlet in addition to your writing?

I closed my architectural practice many years ago to focus on writing, but I still love designing. I enjoy designing a label for the honey from my son’s hives, or a game for my daughter’s baby shower, or working on the cover of my book. 

Adding to the abstract pleasure in these tasks is another component that goes way back. When I was little, I adored my bedroom, with its rose-colored furniture and wall paper of trellised roses and a four-poster bed painted with vines of more climbing roses. And then, when I went away to camp for the first time, I returned to find that my mother had replaced it all with a complete suite of dreary furniture she’d bought from a friend whose daughter was leaving home to get married. Ever since then, I have needed to control my physical world, down to the smallest detail. Essentially, I curate my surroundings, which, I argue, is very much an artistic outlet. 

And then, I also love to bake. 

What brings you great joy?

In short, solving a problem. I think this, too, is a matter of neurological wiring. I don’t love crossword puzzles and am not good at them, but I do love jigsaw and logic puzzles. I tend to see everything as a problem to be solved: baking bread in a new way, planning the table setting for a party, even something so banal as figuring out the best route for completing a list of errands. I get a visceral charge out of finding the answer. And the harder the problem, the bigger the charge. Architectural design was a set of problems to solve, obviously—but so is writing. 

Everything I write starts from a question that has been bedeviling me, and digging out the answer is always a great joy. The book I just published, Don’t Say a Word!, is the answer to the mystifying puzzle of what was behind my parents’ wacky metamorphosis at the end of their lives. It took years to figure it out, but when I did, I was practically airborne for days. And then there is the challenge of creating a narrative thread in whatever you write, and developing characters, and bringing them to life, and building momentum, and on and on. There’s no end to the problems and no end to the potential joy to be had in solving them.