A Review of Jody Keisner’s Under My Bed and Other Essays

By Jeannine Ouellette

When I was ten years old, my mother’s boyfriend, Spider took my sister and me to the Rialto Theater in downtown Casper, Wyoming. My mother had recently divorced for the second time, life was bleak and increasingly violent, and I was in it for the popcorn. I could never have known—and to be fair, neither could Spider have known—that John Carpenter’s Halloween would gain notoriety as the most boundary-breaking horror film of its time for, among other firsts, the fact that the killer Michael Myers never dies. I could also never have known that I would, for months and months to come, arm myself with a giant kitchen knife during the latch-key hours before and after school, during evenings alone when my mom was at class or out with Spider, and sometimes in the dark of night, when I found myself wakefully alone in a sleep-hushed house. During this era of my mom’s second divorce, I was gripped by terrors I couldn’t possibly name or understand, but Michael Myers gave them a grotesque and unmistakable masked face from which to run—or wield a knife against.

Jody Keisner understands both the power and danger of giving outlines and heft to our otherwise amorphous fears. In her luminous new collection, Under My Bed and Other Essays, Keisner interrogates fear—personal and collective—from one sharp angle after the next, with a special acuity for the fears known best by women and mothers. As Keisner’s essays build through the book’s three parts—Origins, Under the Skin, and Risings—their themes reflect and refract elements of one another, creating a prismatic experience of how it feels and what it truly means to be afraid, as well as the impossible yet necessary quest for resolution.

Keisner shares my history of an arguably too-early introduction to horror—in her case, the “chest chomp” scene in the classic horror movie, The Thing—and she analyzes the horror genre itself as she traces her path forward toward the point, during young adulthood, when she develops an urgent and years-long compulsion to check under her bed each night. Both the protagonist and the narrator seek, through facts and figures, to simultaneously assuage and validate the persistently frightening reality of being female in the United States:

I understand statistics. The probability of a serial killer breaking into my home and murdering me is exceptionally low, currently 0.00039 percent…. Serial killers, though, are cagey. According to the algorithms produced by members of the Murder Accountability Project (map), the number of serial killers walking around the nation on any given day is likely in the thousands (if a serial killer is defined as someone who murders two or more people in ‘separate events’).

But Keisner does not limit her excavation of fear to intruders, attackers, monsters, or even the degradations of the human body, such as the chronic illness she eventually endures. Rather, she looks unflinchingly at her own roots—starting with the working-class Midwestern family into which she was adopted, with a loving but volatile and hot-tempered father: “After my eighteenth birthday, I moved away for college. I never lived full-time in my parents’ home again. If it wasn’t a holiday, I didn’t make any effort to see or speak to my father. I ran like hell.” Through both the storms and the silences, Keisner’s mother, caring but willfully passive, stands by.  

Keisner also attends to an array of more subtle yet profound fears, including the shadow of trauma from previous generations, the impact of words both spoken and withheld, and the worries that commonly emerge during the course of a long relationship, such as, do I still love this person the way I once did, and, if not, will I ever again? That’s essentially the question, in the inverse, that Keisner’s husband poses to her one day in her stunning essay, “The Neural Pathways to Love,” in which Keisner plumbs the depths of neuroscience to better understand the transformations in her decade-long relationship:

[W]hy, late at night, do I sometimes sink to my knees in the kitchen and put my face into my hands and weep silently so that Jon and Lily won’t hear? It has taken me a while to recognize these moments on the kitchen floor for what they are. Expressions of grief. Of loss. Of fear. Our relationship is changing. The ‘true love’ stage is over and I mourn it. I hope for something else in its place, but what? And when? How long should I wait? I don’t have answers to these questions.

When I first read “Neural Pathways” in 2019 in The Normal School, I was so wowed by its intelligence, honesty, and grace that I reached out to Keisner directly to tell her so. In Under My Bed, Keisner’s writing about motherhood is similarly dazzling—from the intense anxiety that plagued her after the birth of her first daughter to the resurfacing of her own unresolved adoption grief upon the adoption of her second daughter:

There is a deep, wide space inside of me where a birth mother’s love, reassurance, shelter, and genetic likeness should be—the in-between space where closed meets adoption. After this realization, I am determined to allow my child-self to grieve these feelings of loss, not just for what for I’ve lost, but for what Amelia has lost, too.

Ultimately, the most mesmerizing quality of this probing collection was the way in which the essays and passages, no matter their ostensible subjects, gathered luminously round the single dramatic question of Keisner’s love for and fear of her father, and the heartache spanning the divide between those poles. Like moths in the glow of a flickering porchlight, Keisner’s essays flutter stubbornly toward the origin of their own existence. In “Runaway Daughter,” the book’s penultimate chapter, Keisner and her family attend a railroad event with her now retired parents. She writes with wrenching precision about the reality of truces, of compromises, of imperfect forgiveness:

And I’m here with my husband, six- year-old daughter Lily, and infant daughter Amelia, standing next to my father in a rail yard that I don’t think is much to look at, because I’m trying. I’m trying in the way people do when a relationship is damaged, yet still meaningful, in the way that finding meaning isn’t always a straight path or pretty once you get there.

Later in the same essay, Keisner points to an old photograph of her family taken during her father’s railroad years:

In the picture, the railroad ties my father uses to prevent yard erosion are visible behind us, but only because I look for them. The coal tar creosote on the railroad ties melts, smelling of burnt rubber. Years later, I will read that the creosote is toxic, silently seeping into the soil and water, causing cancer in the bodies of railroaders who frequently handle the railroad ties. But on this day, bad news is not yet something I’ve grown accustomed to and we smile like people do in photos, like this is who we are.

Keisner no longer checks under her bed at night (and I no longer wield a kitchen knife), but her relationship with fear is not over. After all, life without fear is not only impossible, but ill-advised. Yet, her relationship to fear is undeniably transformed, in the way all relationships must transform to survive. In the way we ourselves must also transform to survive, in a continual process both delicate and harsh. As Keisner aptly observes, “It’s dangerous work to love another human being. But we love anyway, knowing that we will fear for our children, parents, loved ones, and for ourselves. Knowing that, as it is with all fears, this one too, burns.”

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Jeannine Ouellette’s memoir, The Part That Burns, was a 2021 Kirkus Best 100 Indie Book and a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award, with starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly.  Her work appears widely in literary journals such as Narrative, Masters Review, North American Review, Calyx, and more, and in many anthologies such as Ms. Aligned: Women Writing About Men; Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives; and Feminist Parenting. She teaches writing at the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, Catapult, and Elephant Rock, a writing program she founded in 2012. She is working on her first novel.