Book Review

A spirograph is a tool that enables users to produce drawings of tight, interlocking spirals known to mathematicians as hypotrochoids and epitrochoids. English architect Peter Hubert Desvignes first designed the tool in 1827, and by 1840, he created a version of the tool that produced designs so intricate they would help prevent banknote forgeries as the spirals were nearly impossible to reconstruct. Since then, the spirograph has taken a more playful turn, and no more than sixty years later, “The Marvelous Wondergraph” emerged: a children’s toy version of Desvignes’ tool. Several plastic iterations of the spirograph marketed toward children have appeared since then.

Rather than the freewheeling use of a crayon against construction paper or the even wilder permutations akin to Play-Doh, the spirograph is unique among children’s toys in that it aligns itself to a mathematical ideal of perfection far more complex than most eight-year-olds could comprehend. Yet, if the spirograph user applies enough pressure while tracing the lines, they are rewarded with a tidy, intricate design created using no measurements or calculations. The children’s version of the spirograph is a paradox in this way: both simple in its usage and complex in its totality. In Cara Stoddard’s debut memoir Spirography: A Memoir of Family, Loss, and Finding Home, they employ and complicate the metaphor of the spirograph. Stoddard uses it as a symbol to trace the legacy of Stoddard’s father and their respective cancers. But they also probe how other lines in the spirograph of Stoddard’s life intersect: sometimes running with breathtaking proximity, other times simply striding parallel. Working in these two modes, Spirography is a stunning testament to language’s capacity to heal and what it means to surrender to the questions we cannot answer.

The book hinges on Stoddard tracing their relationship to their father, who died of cancer when Stoddard was in their early twenties. Yet, Stoddard themself was the first in their immediate family to have been diagnosed with cancer. In childhood, Stoddard developed a pediatric germ cell tumor. In Stoddard’s teenage years, their father developed a brain tumor that led to a six-year journey with cancer, ending in his death. These plot points are not surprises; Spirography’s early pages announce their father’s death. Cancer and their father’s passing (and, in turn, his unknowability) present mysteries that Stoddard pursues throughout the manuscript. Stoddard wants to, as they say, “line up all the events of my life and regard them in gestalt” and “decide they add up to something logical.” Such a pursuit manifests in various forms: tracing the possibility of an environmental contaminant that caused their cancers, pursuing the mysteries of Stoddard’s father’s life, and rendering childhood memories with exquisite lyricism.

Stoddard sees themselves caught in a kind of spirograph, a compulsion to follow the legacy of cancer that befell both Stoddard and their father. There is a kind of non-negotiability with the spirograph of their illnesses, forever caught within the possibility of relapse, further complications, or death, unable to lift their pens and choose a different path. While the pressure of this never-ending spiraling line is a uniquely adept metaphor for illness in Spirography, Stoddard isn’t content to only chronicle disease. Instead, Spirography is also interested in exploring life beyond illness in its recursiveness, misremembrances, outliers, and contradictions. Stoddard close reads the spirograph of their own life from childhood through adulthood, not by tracing a single line but by seeing how the lines interact.

Two intersections that function most potently through their uncanny proximity are the silences Stoddard holds around their cancer and sexuality, respectively. Once in remission, Stoddard writes, “I felt responsible for proving to my parents that I was a normal kid, that we were fine now, that we would stay fine, that there wasn’t any more unexpected bad news lurking inside me.” Childhood became a performance of strength and normalcy. Yet, Stoddard also had to navigate gendered expectations around what “survival” and “strength” looked like for them. Stoddard writes, “To let my illness define me was to embody fragility, to be cherished . . . out of preciousness, a conflation of frailness and my feminine body.” Yet, “to reject cancer as the most formative component of my identity was to undermine its significance.” With heartbreaking precision, Stoddard elicits the oft-unspoken bind of a childhood cancer survivor.

Likewise, Stoddard writes that when they noticed their desire for women, they held it within them like something “clandestine.” While Stoddard may have felt inklings, they didn’t feel they had the words to express their desire, only to shut the feelings away as shameful. Stoddard is compellingly unafraid to reveal themselves as once naïve when narrating pivotal moments of their journey. In a particularly poignant passage, Stoddard reflects on their mother’s response to their coming out, a response that, at the time, Stoddard “resented.” Their mother made it “something she had to endure rather than minimizing it or reassuring me that it was nothing for me to be ashamed of.” Their mother also sent them a Marianne Moore poem, “The Paper Nautilus,” in response to Stoddard’s announcement, a thing that further irritated Stoddard.

Yet, upon returning to the poem years later, Stoddard sees it not as a moment of obtuseness on the part of their mother but, instead, as “the only way she knew how to communicate to her English-major daughter.” The poem was about how their mother ultimately “wanted to imbue me with protection by having loved me,” like a shell protects its mollusk. Through Stoddard’s narrative of coming out as queer, they discover that, in contrast to the seeming protection of silence, “language is a kind of salve that rescues us from our propensity for feeling singular and alone in the same way that having a diagnosis, even when it’s not good news, is a kind of mercy” both for Stoddard and those around them.

This form of “mercy” comes in being able to name Stoddard’s illness and desire but also the nuances of their grief. Among other aspects of close reading the spirograph of Stoddard’s life (including their present-day experience of parenting their partner’s child Lucia), Stoddard discusses the erasure surrounding their experience of “ambiguous loss,” a concept they learned about ten years after their father’s passing. Coined by Pauline Boss, ambiguous loss is the experience of “grieving for loved ones who are physically present but effectively gone.” Such a concept mirrors Stoddard’s family’s experience when caring for their father. Stoddard writes, “I felt I should not be grieving for someone who was still very much alive, that, for his dignity’s sake, I needed to pretend as if nothing had shifted.” Yet such a feeling is typical for family and friends caring for ill loved ones. This reality and its definition frees Stoddard from the isolation and guilt of their experience.

Several questions remain unanswered at the end of Spirography. Why did Stoddard and their father both get cancer? What is the relationship between Stoddard’s desire and grief, if any? How do we reckon with the memories that pain us? Stoddard doesn’t arrive at answers, nor do they make excuses for not providing any. Easy solutions or platitudes were never Spirography’s goal. Rather, Stoddard points to how the pursuit of an answer and the articulation of experience through language is often the balm we truly need. In this way, Spirography is mercy for any reader who has ever held a secret that felt too big to tell.