One could eschew social media, send postcards, and buy groceries with cash, and still never truly avoid the digitally isolating modern world. Despite the convenience and ubiquity of FaceTime and Microsoft Teams, it’s hard to argue that humans have ever been so removed from one other. In the span of less than a generation, we’ve replaced much of the tangible world for the digital, millennia of socialization forgotten—to say nothing of the pandemic’s acceleration of this phenomenon. In Marrow Memory: Essays of Discovery, Margaret Nowaczyk yanks us back to reality and gives us a much-needed chance to re-ground.
The sum of Marrow Memory far exceeds its parts—which is saying something. Each essay could very well stand on its own but would lack the threads that tie them together. Ultimately, what gives this self-examination such depth and nuance is its effortless oscillation between the scientific and the holistic. No matter how you view the world and how it works, Margaret Nowaczyk comes at a range of topics from either side: facts versus feelings, analysis versus intuition, all in an attempt to answer, both very literally and otherwise, what it’s all about—that elusive why. Nowaczyk, with her substantial experience in pediatric genetics, is more than capable of explaining, in a strict biological and clinical sense, the functions of the body and mind. But she also manages to examine memory, sex, love, genealogy, and nature through this lens—all indispensable to the human experience—without ever sounding removed from the subject.
Nowaczyk gets to the heart of the matter in the final essay, titled “What Was Missing.” Written during the height of the pandemic, when video calls suddenly supplanted in-person meetings, the piece captures the radiance of fear, anxiety, and worry during those months of 2020. When stripped of the non-verbal cues communicated in person, she struggles to discuss delicate, sensitive topics with her patients. How does one express sympathy to grieving parents when a hug or touch on the shoulder is impossible? Never mind the spotty WiFi connections, accidental muting, and poor on-camera manners that make video calling both isolating and intimate. “I wish I could have been there with you,” sums up her feeling of helplessness when separated from people by screens. Even adjusting to the new norm of “WFH,” there’s no comparison to “examining a baby under the warmth of the overhead heater, feeling the soft newborn skin under my fingertips, smelling that smell of freshly laundered hospital linens …” that happens when everyone is the same room. This is “what was missing.”
What really brings life to the text and threads the narrative together is Margaret Nowaczyk’s unmistakable voice and, especially, fascination with language. In “Metanoias: On Nature and Language,” she chases meaning in words that evoke memory-based feelings. She writes, “The names we learn in childhood, the ones that grow with us and with use, that acquire layers of meaning, smell the sweetest to us. They hold memories and stories in a way that a name studied, learned later in life does not ….” (Even within that quote, there’s some wonderful wordplay going on: “with us and with use,” is almost Beatle-esque.) Nowaczyk’s feelings toward a certain Polish flower exemplify this connection between memory—of scent, particularly—and language:
The scent. From the recesses of my olfactory memory, maciejka wafts into my consciousness. I wonder what it is called in English and whether it would grow in Southern Ontario. The name found in a gardening manual—evening stock—disappoints. Its Latin name, Matthiola, honouring Pietro Andrea Mattioli, an Italian Renaissance physician and botanist who first described the plant, echoes the Polish, but the English is dry, scentless.
This examination highlights one of the central themes of Marrow Memory—the emotional dynamic of language and its connection to our senses. While naturally all words convey meaning, certain words, ones inseparable from a memory, place, or feeling deep within us, intertwine with our souls. And it is simply impossible to “translate” that essence of our humanity.
In a world where the actual craft of writing seems to matter less and less, and the product, now simply “content,” more and more, Marrow Memory reminds us why writing (and reading) still matters. Machines and programs may have the ability to, at times quite convincingly and others perhaps less so, replicate human thought but that’s all is—replication, imitation. It is impossible to read these essays without hearing Nowaczyk’s voice through the pages. It is what makes this voice hers that elevates every single one of these essays.
Beautiful tributes to nature and family, thoughtfully articulated examinations of love, growth, and language itself—Marrow Memory is one of those reads that, if nothing else, will leave you with something to think about. Nowaczyk masterfully delivers page after page of prose that brings memories to life and invites us to explore our own relationship with the past.
Marrow Memory: Essays of Discovery, by Margaret Nowaczyk. Hamilton, Ontario, Canada: James Street North Books, June 2024. 186 pages. $19.00, paper.
Kevin McMahon is a writer from Illinois. He received his B.A. in International Business from North Central College, where he also studied German and contributed to the International Brecht Society’s Communications. A native of New Hampshire, he lives in Chicago’s southwest suburbs with his wife and two cats.
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