Author Note: Jane Eaton Hamilton

Jane Eaton Hamilton is the author of the poem “Game Show,” which appeared in The Puritan Issue 47. As part of our Author Notes series, they share some of the background that went into the writing of the poem.

“GameShow” came about after I heard about a Japanese televised game show where contestants had to guess whether they were looking at, say, a table leg or cake. I couldn’t shake the image as a way to process life: had the life I’d been leading been cake, as it appeared to others, or just a single table leg that wouldn’t hold up a thing?

I was ruminating about my lost marriage. During the time I was inside it (until it became too dangerous), I pushed down every instance of abuse, hard and fast, because if I acknowledged even one of them fully, I would have to leave, and I was desperate not to leave. I had committed to my ex, and that meant the world to me. I took my vows seriously. Better and worse. Also, I was disabled, and I needed her help. We had kids. We were complexly intertwined. I loved her; it’s certainly fair to say I also adored her. In a way, I cherished her good side even more because of how terrified I was of her when she hurt me. The good wife was a reward for being able to take on the bad one. The bad one was the price I paid for the compassionate, sweet, exciting woman everyone else saw, and whom I saw, too, most of the time. We laughed a lot. We danced. We played with language. We supported each other through grievous life circumstances. We had hobbies together. We traveled the world.

I was strong. I could handle her enraged or silently pressing her hands into my body.

Still, there were dozens upon dozens of late nights in my office, covered in arm bruises, asking myself Which person is real? There was such a sweeping disconnect between the two. I shuddered, there in front of my computer—what if the bad wife was the real one? Was I in trouble?

The bridge she used between good and bad was gaslighting. I never said that. I never did that. You bruise too easily.

With gaslighting, she could turn table legs to cake. Her gaslighting was so powerful that she might even bring people we’d lost to life again—her dad, who was “dead” because he’d cut us out of the family after we’d supposedly killed his wife by being gay, and my mother, whom we lost in 2003. It could bring Spunky the cat back to life, couldn’t it, and take away her pain, her tumour.

The poem is right, though. Spring does happen more often than you’d expect, here in the northern hemisphere. Where I live, on the west coast, bulbs push up from the cold ground in January or February and as soon as they do, I know I’ll be okay again. I know I can go on for another year, and I know the next spring and its beauties are going to come around before I’ve even really acknowledged winter and death.

Maybe bulbs and our excessive spring are like an abusive marriage, where the abuse is hidden, where police should be but are never called? Bulbs and their promise, all the manufactured beauty of the garden, are not true (or not only true). Really, climate change is hard upon us. Sometimes we get summer heat now in March or April. Summer is too long and hot, all of it spent in drought.

Finally, I was thinking of poet Ali Blythe, who used the word “zoosia” in a poem.

Jane Eaton Hamilton is the queer, non-binary disabled author of nine books of CNF, memoir, fiction and poetry, including Love Will Burst into a Thousand Shapes. They have won the CBC Literary Awards in fiction twice and have Notables in Best American Essays and Best American Short Stories. Their essays appear in places like The New York Times, The Sun, and Gay Magazine at Medium.

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