"The semester following my engagement I began writing about my trauma for the first time. If becoming a wife wasn’t going to change me, the work I was about to unlock in my creative nonfiction class certainly would. And I had no idea. The assignment was to write a personal essay exploring our most traumatic memory. It took me a weekend and a bottle of wine to complete the assignment."
Most reviews of this book—both positive and negative—categorize it as a memoir about trauma survival. While LaPoint covers more than just the traumatic event to which she alludes here, the rest of this excerpt could be taken out of context and placed on the book jacket blurb. This autobiography essentially originated in that "creative non-fiction" class that the author attended. "Creative non-fiction" is a rather ambiguous term for a literary sub-genre in which actual events are presented within a structure more traditionally associated with fictional storytelling. In other words, the class which the author attended instructed students on how to tell a true story as if it were a fictional tale with a starting point, rising action, climax, and denouement. That personal essay which attempted to transform the event stimulating trauma would likely have read more like a short story than straightforward history. The essay is also the originating event leading to this memoir. The mention that an entire bottle of wine was ingested over a weekend in order to complete that originating essay may give some indication of the extent of the trauma which it described.
"The wounds I carried inside my body, the aftermath of historical trauma, of sexual assault, the generations of ancestors that came before me who had faced violence, disease, and genocide, were distilled down into something small, reduced."
The full title of this autobiography is Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk. "Coast Salish" refers to a group of indigenous peoples who occupied the Pacific Northwest long before the arrival of Europeans. The definition is important to understand relative to the author's referencing "generations of ancestors" facing their own trauma. This quote situates this book as being about not just individual trauma being suffered by the author, but a broader and more deeply penetrating story of the trauma of those once called Indians and then Native Americans and now Indigenous Peoples. That there is not even just one simple ethnic reference like Italian-American or Chinese-American to describe this segment of the American population is illustrative of the cultural trauma to which the author alludes. Experientially, this autobiography of a single individual is a metaphor for the broader implications of cultural trauma. What the author is referring to specifically with the idea of distillation is the strong suggestion that her story is replicated, to one extent or another, throughout the existing population of all Coast Salish people as well as other native peoples.
"Ever since I had curled my teenage body along the yellow linoleum of a bathroom reading the liner notes and lyric sheets of Bikini Kill’s Pussy Whipped , I had wanted badly to sing in a band. I knew it the first time I heard Kathleen Hanna’s girl-like voice scream lyrics about date rape and the aftermath of assault, of being betrayed by a boy who had claimed to be a friend."
The Pacific Northwest which the author calls home is famous for its native tribes, its lumberjacks, and a very particular punk rock movement. Kathleen Hanna is famous not just for being the powerful lead singer of the punk band Bikini Kill but also for giving Kurt Cobain the title of the unofficial anthem of grunge rock: "Smells Like Teen Spirit." The punk rock scene which gave birth to Nirvana and Pearl Jam also birthed the riot grrrl movement of which Hanna is the godmother and LaPointe an acolyte. The specific reference to Hanna's song alluded to in this quote can be fairly spread across much of that powerful punk sub-genre which sought empowerment in standing up to misogyny and patriarchy by refusing to keep quiet. The author very directly addresses the scream-like effect of Hanna's voice as an event that links directly to her writing this memoir. LaPointe's own story aligns quite closely thematically with that titular figure being described in Bikini Kill's signature song "Rebel Girl" which plays as she ritualistically throws her bouquet at her wedding reception.
