Knocking on Heaven’s Door with Darcey Steinke
The playwright Tom Stoppard died last November at age 88. In his career he’d written more than 30 stage plays and was a polisher of screenplays for television and film. He’s also credited with the saying, “age is a high price to pay for maturity.”
That sentiment pinged around inside me as I read This is the Door, published February 24. It is Darcey Steinke’s eighth book, and her second in a row to examine the physical form, following 2019’s Flashcount Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life.
Her new book begins with a series of ruminations on bodily failure. In the chapter “Spine,” we learn that Steinke’s back gave out when she was in bed one evening—she felt a “muffled snap, like a wet branch breaking” while shifting to make room for her husband. The pain is debilitating, and long-lasting; she doesn’t find relief until back surgery removes a “chunk of disk wedged into the nerve.”
Next, in “Knees,” Steinke writes about her husband’s osteochondritis dissecans, a knee ailment where a “small sliver of bone or cartilage from the thigh or tibia breaks off and floats in the synovial fluid.” In “Heart,” Steinke writes of her mother, who in 2012 was found “on her living room floor days after her heart shut down.” Worried that she also has an imperfect heart, Steinke visits a doctor and is put through a battery of tests and learns that, indeed, the artery to her left ventricle is 67 percent blocked. In "Brain," Steinke recounts her stepmother’s brain cancer and her father’s quickening, terminal decline, his skin “now as thin as Bible paper.”
Twisting through the family's turbulent health narratives are spans of academic writing—research into Frida Kahlo’s long life of suffering, quotes from Nietzsche, and trips to the rare book room at the New York Academy of Medicine to investigate disease. Ingesting all this pain and misfortune can add up on a reader. Or anyway, it did for me. I found myself recalling the time I blew my back out in college, thinking of my torn meniscus and worrying if my grandfather’s prostate cancer would manifest in me.
It added up on Steinke, too. One day she arrives at the rare book room to conduct research but holds off. “Fear keeps me in the lobby snack bar, drinking milky tea,” she writes. When her husband asks her to check minor skin irritants—a rash, a blister, a red spot—she blanches: those things encroach “on my own precarious sense of wholeness,” she writes, “and reminds me we are both creeping closer to the end.” After visiting an anatomy professor who lifts the heart out of a cadaver and places it in her hands, she has a delayed reaction: driving home afterward, through “yellow leaves and the rain stabbing the window,” she realizes, “I was very freaked out. My own heart crashed against my chest as if the sight of its dead double had made it insane.”
So it’s good for her—and the reader too—that the second half of the book focuses on spirituality. Her father is a former minister—she wrote about him in her memoir Easter Everywhere—and Steinke grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, a “place in the mountains where religious belief runs high.” But her faith is broad and evolving; the book explores Christian themes around death, but mixes in concepts from the Dalai Lama and Hinduism, among others.
She writes beautifully about her father’s last days on earth. He has cancer, and his fear of death as his life winds down mostly centers on not wanting to “leave everybody.” Steinke sits bedside vigil with her brothers as their father’s end nears, a fentanyl patch coaxing him in and out of consciousness. Once, when he wakes, the drug either has him confused, or he seems to know they will soon be parted. “When you get in,” he says to Steinke, “try to find me.”
That felt like a perfect afterlife directive to me, an almost wounding sentiment. This is the Door is filled with that kind of poignant writing. In the book's final chapter, "Healing," Steinke travels to Lourdes, France, to witness the throng of pilgrims who gather there in search of medical miracles. It’s “as diverse a crowd as I have ever seen,” she writes, and after revealing to the communications office at Lourdes that she’s doing research for a book, she gains access to the baths, where she eventually helps fill pitchers with holy spring water. In this role, she hears each person explain why they have come: wounds from a car crash, HIV, dementia, alcoholism, leukemia, breast cancer.
These are the ailments of the masses, and in some ways This is the Door functions as a kind of witnessing. But I think there is something else going on here, too, and it has to do with Steinke’s journey as a writer. I found myself thinking of Suicide Blonde, Steinke’s second novel. It was published in 1992, before she was 30, and is set in the gritty areas around San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. The pages are filled with bars, drugs, sex and young people psychologically adrift. I read Suicide Blonde about a decade ago and vividly remember the book’s apex, in which the nihilistic, damaged and beautiful Madison all but kills a male client in a brothel. The john is there to be debased, but Madison fists the man’s rectum so deeply that he “splayed his arms and legs wildly like a bug with a pin through its belly.” Jesse, the book’s protagonist, watches in horror as Madison reaches even farther. “She wants his heart,” Jesse thinks, “because she doesn’t have one of her own.”
Reviews of the book were mixed—The New Yorker rather flippantly disregarded it, for instance, which was a source of pain for Steinke—but over time the book gathered a devoted following: Grove Press put out a 25th anniversary edition in 2017, giving Maggie Nelson reason to gush.
She wants his heart came floating back to me when Steinke holds the cadaver heart in This is the Door, and I began to think about how these two books occupy opposing positions in Steinke’s career. If Suicide Blonde was a book of voyerism, a tale of “debauchery written with one eye bulging through the peephole,” as The New Yorker suggested, then This is the Door—published 34 years later—is an empathetic, communal look at pain from an author who has had her fair share.
Steinke artfully details how we lose our vitality, our stamina and our abilities, bit by bit, organ by joint. After the book’s tour through disease and misfortune, I’d come to feel lucky for my health. Still, there is no escaping what is coming; the one certainty of life is that it ends. Some version of what This is the Door has shown me—pain, suffering, heartache, death—will find Steinke, find me, find you.
But pain has served a purpose for Steinke. It's opened her up, broadened her thinking. After she’s come out the other side of her back surgery, and stopped fearing that her pain might return, she finds herself “more permeable, more empathetic.” When she sees people “limping, using canes or walkers” on the street, she now knows “they don’t just have mobility issues; they are also in pain.”
I somehow doubt Steinke would write Suicide Blonde at this point of her career. The edginess of the scenes, the drugs and alcohol, the body as a sexual machine, all feel like the topics of youth. But she wouldn’t have written This is the Door 30 years ago either. The loss of her parents and her own health issues have brought wisdom and a greater understanding of humanity. This is the Door is indeed a book about the body, but it’s also concerned with the soul. Mixed into the chapters on suffering and illness are thoughts on faith and creativity, and they work as a salve. By book’s end, I felt almost pleasantly resigned. The declining body is a high price to pay for all that maturity, Stoppard is right. But if it also fosters a more expansive heart, I’ll take the deal.
