In the damaging wake of Hillbilly Elegy, we need more contemporary Appalachian memoirs that capture life along the mountain region without sweeping generalizations of its people or glorifying the escape from poverty. Anya Liftig’s debut memoir, Holler Rat, gives us a refreshing perspective through her story of growing up with one foot in Appalachian Kentucky and one foot in affluent Connecticut.
A performance artist whose acclaimed work has been exhibited at TATE Modern, MOMA, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center and Performer Stammtisch Berlin, Liftig used her childhood roots to inspire and shape her work for twelve years, and Holler Rat gives us a deeper context behind that work. In her memoir, looking back from age forty-five, Liftig starts with her mother, Inez, who grew up in poor, rural eastern Kentucky (“the holler”), a place populated by a family so dedicated to preserving their land and legacy – their home – that inbreeding is simply a fact to be shrugged off. Her mother moves north for school, an act of betrayal that will continue to be shoved in her face the rest of her life. Liftig’s mother meets her upper-middle-class Jewish father at a Peace Corps volunteer meeting, they fall in love, and soon establish their family (Inez, Bob and their daughters Allyson and Anya). Liftig grows up spending her summers in Kentucky and school months in Connecticut.
There are two aspects where this memoir truly excels: structure and voice. Even during some of its darker moments, Liftig is gut-punch funny. While dating a bro-ish guy who wants to elevate her Goodwill style ahead of parents’ weekend, Liftig writes, “I pulled a boxy teal linen dress out of the bag, as sexy as a bucket of nacho cheese. I got the message. I would never be banker wife material without a Nancy Reagan makeover. So when I found out he was cheating on me, I didn’t even bother to be sad about it.”
The memoir is divided into three parts: the first chronicles her childhood summers in Kentucky all the way through graduation, the second part follows Liftig as she attends Yale on scholarship then moves to Georgia for graduate school where she begins to establish herself as an artist, and the third part captures Liftig’s complex daily life as she navigates the highs and lows of performance art as well as her tumultuous marriage. The book doesn’t linger any longer than it has to. Liftig thoroughly and unflinchingly paints a scene from her life and moves on to the next; chapters may span an entire summer or a single performance act within a couple of pages. Liftig steadily takes us through a linear timeline while every so often flash-forwarding us to the present to put us in the middle of one of her performances.
At the heart of a distinct cast of characters is Mamaw, Liftig’s grandmother and matriarch of the holler. Hardened by her own losses and struggles, Mamaw is harsh, opinionated, hardworking, at times unbearably cruel, unapologetic about her identity, and dedicated to the family in the holler. Anyone who leaves or isn’t from there is subject to judgment by the entire clan. The summer before Yale, as a group of them sits on Mamaw’s porch, Mamaw argues that Liftig should attend University of Kentucky instead because Yale isn’t their place. “In Westport, Yale was a big deal,” Liftig writes. “Not long after I started school, my father bought four identical Yale t-shirts so we could all wear them at once like the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night. In the holler, it felt more like a burden – just more proof that I was, once and for all, an outsider, an interloper, a fraud.”
Throughout their lives, Mamaw and Liftig circle each other like binary stars, distinct personalities gravitationally bound to one another, and the tension of their relationship is a physical representation of the tension Liftig experiences for most of her coming of age, not trying to reconcile these two class upbringings but learning to exist in the chasm. We watch as Mamaw softens while Liftig hardens through her own loss and struggle, and there is heartbreaking beauty in this give and take.
Liftig’s art becomes more distinct and more wild: “knitting” herself by wrapping her entire body in yarn until she is unable to move, applying gobs of lipstick and making out with a salmon before blending and drinking it, fellating a cactus (“pleasing it despite the pain”), laying perfectly still while an audience pours glue all over her, dressing up as Maria Abramovic’s doppelganger and sitting across from her for a whole day during The Artist is Present. “I wanted to smother, encrust, consume,” Liftig writes. Pieces of her performances – tiny plastic babies, Operation game boards – hint at the darker moments we learn of her life in the book.
At the end of Holler Rat, Liftig doesn’t stand on a soapbox and explicitly declare that one class or upbringing is better than the other. She subtly and masterfully lets the truth of each scenario speak for itself, never letting up and never slowing down, showing us multiple contradictions in one paragraph, allowing us to sit with it long after we are done reading.
One particular back to back chapter arrangement stands out: in one scene, Liftig describes her holler family’s tendency to hoard and mend items, building a solid storage of meaningful, useful things. Mamaw has a collection of dolls in the upper room of her house that she fluffs and cleans multiple times a day. “At Mamaw’s house, your belongings had to be above reproach, shining with care…being poor was nothing to be ashamed about. But being poor and dirty, that meant you had no self-respect, no inner dignity.” In the next scene, Liftig describes briefly dating a guy who brings her to his home on Park Avenue. His library is lined with leather-bound books, which he gleefully shows her are completely hollow inside save for pieces of Styrofoam. It’s apparently a common practice in the grand apartments of the Upper East Side. “It had all the prestige of book-lined walls without having to deal with the annoyance of text or paper or that incorrigible pest, symbolism. And they were so much easier to clean.”
Holler Rat: A Memoir
By Anya Liftig
Abrams Press
Published August 15, 2023
Southern Review of Books 