She Sees the World From a Waist-High Perspective

Puffing on a cigarette, a soft felt hat set on her head, Nancy Mairs maneuvers her black Quickie P-100 briskly through the sunny streets around the University of Arizona. She is headed for her favorite coffeehouse.

There are few ramps onto the sidewalks, so Mairs must roll in the roadway, hugging the curb and watching warily for traffic. She knows well that few motorists notice a person in a motorized wheelchair. She has grown familiar with invisibility.

In “Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled” (Beacon Press, 1996), Mairs describes the experience of increasingly being confined to a wheelchair by the slow progression of multiple sclerosis--and how she has become “marginalized” by the able-bodied.

In her new collection of autobiographical essays, she tells of passing through airports with her husband, George, studying all the busy travelers who are oblivious to her existence. She writes, “You may well have hurtled past, in Denver or Des Moines, in Seattle or Salt Lake City or Sacramento, never noticing me down here; but I, no doubt, have seen you.”

That’s vintage Mairs: sharply observed, deeply personal and always direct. In six collections of autobiographical essays published in the past 11 years, Mairs has probed the most intimate topics, including her illness, her husband’s infidelity and his bout with cancer, and her decades-long battle with depression.

Mairs, 53, writes with fierce, harrowing honesty. The reader squirms uncomfortably, wishing she wouldn’t expose quite so much of herself, yet her essays are redeemed by wry, self-appraising humor. Her unsparing portrayal of her life is bracing.

Mairs manifests the same qualities in person. Safely arrived at her coffeehouse, she speaks unhesitatingly about how her life and writing intersect.

“I am now the woman I thought I could never bear to be,” she says matter-of-factly as she nibbles at cookies and sips an iced mocha. “I really mean that. I thought I would kill myself before I ever reached this point.”

Found to have MS at age 29, Mairs has gradually seen her mobility restricted by the illness, which destroys the myelin sheath protecting the nerve fibers. The first symptoms were a slight limp and some clumsiness. Now, she has no control of her left side and has only limited movement on the right. Since a fall in 1990, she uses her motorized wheelchair to get around.

Mairs writes in a tiny one-room casita behind the palm-shaded university-area bungalow she shares with her husband, a high school teacher who is her primary caregiver. She pecks at a computer keyboard with her right hand one letter at a time.

“What it feels like is weighing an unbelievable amount,” Mairs says in the broad Brahmin accent that hints at her New England roots. “I suppose I live on Earth the way it would feel to live on Jupiter. Effectively, the way I live my life is against inertia.”

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She was born Nancy Smith in Long Beach, where her father was stationed as a naval officer during World War II. (He died when she was 4 1/2.) Both her mother and her father were from old New England families.

“I have four Mayflower ancestors,” she says with some embarrassment. “I am a life member of the Mayflower Society of Arizona.”

Growing up in small New England towns, she showed an interest in writing and still has a poem she wrote at 8. She majored in English literature at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., and married George Mairs when she was a junior in college.

After graduating in 1964, she worked as a technical editor. “That was my career--one that I was very fond of,” she says. “But there was always this nagging feeling I was supposed to be writing.”

Throughout her life, Mairs has been shadowed by the demon of depression, which led to her being hospitalized for a few months in 1967 and ’68. She now manages to control the condition with the help of antidepressants.

Mairs started writing poetry while raising her two children, Anne, 31, who teaches English literacy to the mothers of children in a Tucson-area Head Start program, and Matthew, 27, a network engineer for a computer firm.

Mairs enrolled in the prestigious University of Arizona writing program in 1972. Her MS was diagnosed shortly after the family moved to Tucson.

She earned a master’s degree in fine arts in 1975, with a doctorate following in 1984. Considering herself a poet, she grew to enjoy nonfiction while teaching it to undergraduates. She first tried writing autobiography in a course with the late Edward Abbey, author of the Southwestern classics “Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness” (McGraw-Hill, 1968) and “The Monkey Wrench Gang” (J.B. Lippincott Co., 1975).

“He made us write three to six pages a week,” Mairs recalls. “I got going on this thing about cats. Finally, he scribbled in the margins, ‘Enough about cats. Let’s just say you’ve written enough for the semester.’ ”

But on Oct. 31, 1980, she had tried to commit suicide. Trying to understand why, Mairs wrote an essay about her experience called “On Touching by Accident.”

She read it aloud in class. “It blew everybody away,” she says. “So you write another essay and then you write another essay . . . and you find your form.”

The essay became the core of her dissertation, which was published in 1986 as her first book, “Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman’s Life” (University of Arizona Press, 1986). Mairs has found a small but devoted audience for her musings about her illness, suicide attempts and other misfortunes.

“Part of the reason I write as intimately, as frankly, as I do is because of experiences like that,” she says. “I really would like to have people not have to have some of those terrible experiences.”

As Mairs’ mobility grew more restricted, she had to modify her lifestyle and career choices. She taught at UCLA for six months in 1988, but the experience left her exhausted. As much as she loved teaching, she had to give it up. The advantage is that she now has more time to devote to her writing.

“Some part of my response to MS is to be very angry and sad,” Mairs says. “There are a variety of possible responses. I try to choose the ones that seem most life-enhancing to me.”

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A recurring character in Mairs’ books is George, 56, a bearded, professorial-looking man to whom she has been married for 34 years. Her portrayals of him as caregiver, companion and occasionally straying spouse have earned him a following among her readers.

Nancy Mairs has meticulously documented her husband’s medical problems, particularly the melanoma that was diagnosed in December 1985. After nearly dying from a recurrence in 1990, he now seems to be disease-free. Mairs is candid about her despair at the thought of losing the man upon whom she depends both emotionally and physically.

When he was having intestinal problems three years ago, she nearly ended it all. “We thought it was a recurrence,” she says. “And I was really very suicidal at that time.” It turned out to be only colitis induced by antibiotics.

When he feared he would die, George confessed a years-long affair with a family friend. “He just dumped that on me,” Mairs says. “He needed to tell me. I didn’t need to hear it, but he needed to tell me.” But from that trauma emerged a remarkable essay, which Mairs says is about “coming to some understanding of grace through the process of forgiveness.”

George says he gave Nancy permission to write about his infidelity, but when she read the essay in public for the first time, “I probably cringed more than I’ve ever cringed at anything in my life,” he says. “Now I’m inured to it. It’s my essay.”

Another aspect of his literary self is St. George, the husband who tirelessly feeds, bathes and clothes his wife.

“I have a lot of problems being Nancy’s caregiver,” he says. “It’s the most rewarding thing that I do--I take pride in doing it. But it’s the hardest thing that I do. It’s probably more fun to be ‘George the Unfaithful,’ because it’s spicier.”

And although many readers ask about “George the Cancer Victim,” he says, “I get tired of that. That’s really not who I am anymore.”

*

As her strength has waned, Nancy Mairs has devised work-arounds that allow her to function. Unable to shampoo her hair by hand, she grips a spaghetti fork to do the job. She keeps her keys attached to a plastic handle that gives her the leverage to turn keys in locks.

She candidly admits that her life is not what she would wish it to be, but after a lifetime of toying with the idea of killing herself, Mairs has learned to embrace the life she has.

“We’re all going to die,” she says. “The more readily I’ve come to be able to acknowledge that, the freer and more joyous my life has been. Once you really know this, you realize you don’t know how much time you have left, and damn if you’re going to pollute it.”