Ortiz: It actually didn’t feel like an overwhelming task because my intention was to show both of us as full characters. How hard was it to show that much restraint?
You just tell the story, and the reader is allowed to draw her own conclusions-and it works, in the way the great literature does. The Rumpus: One of the things I think works best about Excavation is that you don’t outright blame your teacher for pursuing you and crossing serious boundaries time and time again, nor you dive into psychoanalysis or offer explanations for anyone’s behavior. We chatted on a recent afternoon about how her first book took shape and why telling this story was so important to her. She goes there, and it’s the kind of honesty that’s needed in discussing subjects we have long discarded as unspeakable.Īside from working on another memoir, Hollywood Notebook (due out this spring), and running the Rhapsodomancy reading series in LA, Ortiz is now also a marriage-and-family therapist intern. Ortiz goes on to explore these shades of gray with a trusting, collected voice, reminding us that our less-flattering appetites are human, natural. I was thirteen, and this had been a solitary, secret act, not something I wanted to be guided towards by a voice on the phone, though I was intrigued by the intimate details he described.
I didn’t really know if masturbation was a true sin or not. I was suddenly privy to the details of an oft-imagined scene that involved him and me, where he was pressing his “hardness” against me….When he asked me to touch myself, I sighed and murmured in the right places, but refrained from laying a hand on myself. He told me of my beautiful mouth, intense eyes, the way he watched my body at school. Ivers purring in my ear, because it was peppered with things I did understand. Instead, she honors the skeptical, desirous 13-year-old girl enraptured by a charming creep of a man who showered her with praise not just for her body, but for the writer and young woman she aspired to be.
Ortiz’s memoir Excavation because it seemed like a lofty undertaking: In a story about an affair between a teenager and her 15-years-older teacher, was it possible to not to slip too far into overtly salacious or preachy, finger-wagging territory? But from the very first chapter, Ortiz doesn’t succumb to the Dateline-ready predator-victim stereotypes we’ve come to expect, nor does she shy away from the complexities of such a dynamic-the power, the manipulation, even the sexual chemistry.
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