You know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. A well-scrubbed, hustling rube, with a little taste. Good nutrition’s given you some length of bone, but you’re not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, MacLean? And that accent you’ve tried so desperately to shed—pure Cape Breton. What does your father do? Is he a coal miner? Does he stink of the lamp? And oh, how quickly your uncle found you. Never knowing which corner held another camera, while you could only dream of getting out. Getting anywhere. Getting all the way to—university…
This passage is an altered version of Hannibal Lecter’s monologue to Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs. I have inserted myself into it completely shamelessly. I am not Clarice Starling, and I don’t think my life is uniquely important or representative of anything larger.
This isn’t sociology, and I have no intention of pretending I can objectively dissect my own life with citations and footnotes. I only want to write about what it felt like to move between different class and cultural worlds, and to realize how much of what other people seemed to simply know, I had to learn consciously.
I feel shameful and conceited, treating my own life as something worth examining. Who am I to present my life as meaningful enough, worth enough effort, to think I have a unique enough perspective for at least one person to perhaps skim and think ‘hm, interesting.’
I’m nothing but some no-name rube from the armpit of Canada, who cheated their way to literacy, when, if the dice hadn’t landed so particularly, I’d have been nursing three kids while my husband is out west in the oil fields.
That discomfort is probably part of what I’m trying to examine.
Nevertheless, I am strongly compelled to. So I’m writing about it anyway.