As If Knowing the Answers Ever Changes Anything, by Matty Byloos
“capable of loving beyond the categories of sexuality and gender”
A review of I Loved You More, by Tom Spanbauer (Hawthorne Books, 2014. pages.)
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One thing that happens when you live and when you love, is that you often end up getting hurt. And time goes on and maybe you get over it, or else you never really do. And another thing that happens with love and living and making memories out of all of it – when you find yourself in a difficult relationship, and then it’s over and you move on – well, time goes by, and chances are you only end up remembering the very best and the very worst of it.
But that’s not the truth (to quote Tom Spanbauer).
Really, the truth is more about the in-betweens, and the stuff you don’t yet know. The gray stuff that lives between those two extremes, between the hurt and the ecstacy – it’s the grind of daily living, the mercurial nature of love and loving, and the energy we spend finding another someone to share it all with.
In a recent interview, Spanbauer noted, “…let’s both dwell in this unknowing together, and maybe we’ll find a way.” To dwell in the unknowing: a metaphor for life, and for love, and for writing, too. So here’s the place where Tom Spanbauer goes when it’s time to tell the story about an experience of love. “I start with something that’s troubling me, something inside me that really won’t let go of me. I start to investigate what that is.” He goes in deeper, and he goes straight to the in-betweens. “I think I know all about it, but it’s not until you go back and start writing about it, that you realize how much you don’t know.”
In I Loved You More (Hawthorne Books, 2014), Spanbauer’s fifth novel, he tells the story of three people – three people in various forms of love with each other – and what happens when all three of their paths eventually cross. The novel’s narrator, Ben Grunewald, is a writer, raised in Idaho and educated at Columbia University in New York under the tutelage of a prominent minimalist professor and editor. It is there, during that educational experience, where Ben first meets Hank Christian, a beautiful young man and fellow writer for whom Ben discovers he has feelings. But feelings are complex, and love is never really just love, and Grunewald (and by default to some degree, Spanbauer), realizes this.
Further, and more importantly, Spanbauer knows that within the novel, there is ample room to unpack the deep complexities that are always living beneath the surface of our relationships. Man to man, woman to man, gay man to straight man, or straight woman to bisexual man. If not for the novel, where would any of us find the space to slow down enough, to pick apart the in-betweens to find something more precise, or else sufficiently slippery, to describe not just love, but also the residue that is left in memory by those feelings?
Grunewald ends up in rainy Portland, Oregon, sick with AIDS and scared to death, and it is during this time that he meets Ruth Dearden, the book’s other main character, the final corner of the triangle. Dearden falls in love with Grunewald, whose pain, self-loathing, and questioning inner person can only pull her to him, for the comfort that comes from healing, and then push her away again in disgust, sadness, confusion, and resentment.
Through another turn of events, Hank Christian ends up coming out to Portland. He’s been broken by life, his body also dealing with its own kind of loss and the onset of dying. And there, he meets Ruth Dearden. And because life can be strange and complicated, the two of them fall in love. Like Grunewald says earlier in the novel, “To speak aloud the things that are in my heart. The audacity of it.” If that doesn’t come the closest to describing the expression of love, I don’t know what does.
But no one ever said that love is a reasonable endeavor, and from the outset, Grunewald has warned us of the ancient truth that applies to situations such as these: “there you are the three of you, dancing the ancient dance whose only rule is with three add one, if not, subtract. If three doesn’t find four, three goes back to two. Add or subtract. That’s the rule.”
Nothing hurts more than losing. Wanting something so badly, spending all of your waking hours (and hours in dreamland too), putting your heart into the heart of another person whom you love, sometimes only to find out that the very little you were left with, may have been all there ever was to find. No great love that lasts fifty years, or the hot burning rush of a love affair that lasts a few short, explosive weeks. Either way, the end seems to come too soon, and someone is left to deal with the extraordinary sense of loss, and the thoughts of what might have been.
When Grunewald loses both Hank and Ruth to each other, the loss is double, and infinitely more painful. Left only with questions, Grunewald sifts through the complexities of his involvement with each of them, to try to figure out what it means to be a man, a gay man no less, who is capable of loving beyond the categories of sexuality and gender that we too often put each other in. Coming to terms with that kind of generosity of spirit is one of the central thrusts of I Loved You More, and Spanbauer does it with an effortlessness that can be both elegant and sufficiently messy at times, just like life.
There is a lot to love about this book, and having had the good fortune of being one of Tom’s students over the last year, the pleasure of the book is exponentially greater, knowing that so many of Tom’s “rules for writing” are not only abided by in this novel, but explored with grace and clarity. One such example – we talk a lot about doors. To cross over any threshold or through any door is to enter another space, and another world, and because of this, the moment deserves extra attention. It’s a time to slow down, to open up a scene, to show the reader everything in this new universe that is there to be shown.
In the latter part of the book, when Grunewald goes over to Ruth’s house to share a holiday meal with Hank and Ruth, there’s the threshold that must first be crossed:
Ruth’s front door is an arched alcove, a small porch you can step into out of the rain. On the flagstones, a fiber mat, bienvenue. Above, a Craftsman lamp hanging down. A Christmas wreath on the dark wood door. Ruth’s front door, just a damn door, but that night another portal. The step you got to take. […] A door I hardly ever walked through because Ruth always came to my house, because my house was the only place that felt safe, and when I did go to Ruth’s, no matter how hard I tried it always freaked me out and now that’s all I can remember about it. Freaking. And there I am standing in her doorway already the second time in one week.
It’s a universe of time, of all the things that happen in that moment, before you cross the threshold into another space, a portal you cross over and end up in another world. There’s every other time you’ve been in that space, and every other time you’ve walked through it. How those times were different from this time. All the things you know you’ll find on the other side, and how they might not be the same. The memories, the feelings, the things you pay attention to and the things you may never have seen before. And Spanbauer shows all of it to us.
In the same interview mentioned above, Spanbauer has said of I Loved You More, “What happened was my friend died. I thought I knew all the reasons why we had fought, and why we hadn’t spoken for so many years. Then I started to explore it. I didn’t know anything about it; I thought I knew, but it’s not until you start writing that you know something about it. I just go out there in that unknowing. There’s so much of me that didn’t want to remember, so I just sat there for a long time. Then I started lying.”
Memory is a fragile, fragile thing. And love is so much more complicated than the things we think we know of it. In I Loved You More, Spanbauer deals with all of that complexity and fragility, allowing people to be as unpredictable and cruel and beautiful as they are, treating the body as landscape and unpacking every perceived truth or looming question that passes through the narrator’s mind when it comes to understanding love – as if knowing the answers ever changes anything.
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To learn more about Tom Spanbauer and Dangerous Writing, read "Dangerous Writing Is Writing and Lying," here.
Interview materials quoted from: Tom Spanbauer: Truth Through Fiction at Lambda Literary, interviewed by Cathy Camper, from April 7, 2014.
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