bookworm
Blood work
Allison Moorer confronts her haunting past in a new memoir by BECKY CARMAN
A
t 14 years old, songwriter and author Allison Moorer awoke to the sound of gunshots outside her Alabama home. In the pre-dawn dark, her father shot her mother and then himself, leaving Moorer and her then-17-year-old sister orphaned. Moorer’s new memoir, both the book and its companion record, are called Blood. In them, she recounts her parents’ turbulent marriage, a childhood full of both music and fear, her ironclad relationship with her sister and fellow acclaimed musician Shelby Lynne and how that earth-shattering early morning altered her life forever. The book is a heart-piercing work of heady prose told with astonishing detail and candor, touching on witnessing abuse, praying for the safety of her family and even reading her parents’ autopsy reports for the first time as an adult. The companion album is a case study in processing trauma through art. Combined, they’re a career-defining release of poetry found in mystery, in human complexity and in unhappy truths. Immediately following a battery of interviews including high-profi le features on CBS This Morning and NPR’s Fresh Air, Moorer embarked on a cross-country tour to speak about the book and perform a few selections from the record. She’ll be at the Woody Guthrie Center on Dec. 5 for a free reading presented in partnership with Magic City Books and the Bob Dylan Center.
BECKY CARMAN: What kinds of conversations did you have with Shelby before you started telling your story, since this is her story as well? 30 // ARTS & CULTURE
you going to explain this to him?’ And I didn’t have an answer for her. That put the idea in me to start writing it down. CARMAN: Unpacking a traumatic childhood event is one thing, and writing about it is another. Are those things separate for you, or was the writing a tool to work through this?
Allison Moorer will have a free reading of her memoir Blood on Dec. 5 at the Woody Guthrie Center. | HEIDI ROSS
ALLISON MOORER: I didn’t talk it over with her; I just started the work. When I got into it, I let her know that I was doing it. I needed her in some instances to check my own memory, or I wanted to get her perspective. We did communicate about it some but not as much I guess as some people might think. It’s just about this very specific place and time in my life. I do feel like I am the witness for my immediate family, the four of us. I do feel a responsibility, especially to my sister, to make sure I get it as right as I can. She has told me that because I did do this work, she has been able to see her own experience in a different way and to see her own trauma in a way that she had maybe not allowed herself to see it before. That’s the biggest reward I can ask for.
CARMAN: Why was now the right time to tell your story? MOORER: I’ve had some people ask me, ‘Why did you wait so long?’ And I don’t even really know how to answer that other than to say I certainly wasn’t prepared to write a book about this when my first record came out. I wasn’t even prepared to talk about this part of my life. What led me to write this—and this is crazy—but in 2010, about six weeks after my son was born, I was asked to be a guest on Maya Angelou’s radio show. Of course, I said, ‘Of course.’ She asked me about my childhood, my upbringing, and she said, ‘Well, now you have [your son] John Henry, so what are you going to tell him when he’s old enough to ask? How are
MOORER: I think I’m a person who processes through art. The exercise and the discipline of writing helped me uncover a lot of my feelings and a lot of detail about this subject. There were places I put myself to recall things that I had maybe not thought about since they happened, but I had my tools: I had made my stack of index cards with memories on them or topics that I wanted to look into or just words that seem to trigger me in some way. I’ve got a lot of photographs that I would look at, a lot of artifacts. I have to tell you, I remembered some things that shook me to my core. I remember several times just holding on to the side of my desk thinking, ‘How am I going to write this down? This is too painful, or this is too complex, or this is too much to try to put into a paragraph.’ I did my very best. I know that. And I wrote and rewrote. I think I wrote this book four times. CARMAN: There’s a song on the record where your sister wrote music to your father’s words. Did you have to ask her to do that? MOORER: She found the lyric in his briefcase shortly after they died, and she put music to it, so it’s been with us all this time. Neither one of us have ever officially recorded it, so I thought this record
November 20 – December 3, 2019 // THE TULSA VOICE
