Place as Character

If you’ve listened to the Memoir Nation podcast, you’ll know I grew up in a small town in Iowa, and that I have a complicated relationship with my hometown, Oskaloosa—or a fascination might be a better way to put it, an endless fascination.

As a result, Oskaloosa—or just the “small towness” that has formed me—is somehow a character in so much that I write. It’s like a ghost that haunts every room of a story. An unseen force of nature. A protagonist and antagonist at once.

I often say that growing up in a small town is the best habitat for a budding writer—because a small town is a fish bowl full of drama. It’s like a never-ending mini-series, rife with characters playing out all sorts of dramatic desires on the stage.

The smallness of a place can hem people in, but it can also magnify their sins and frustrations and hopes and dreams because of its smallness. There is no way to truly hide yourself in a small town.

I grew up in the 70s and early 80s, a permissive and somewhat wild era by definition. I remember hearing stories of key parties, even as the daily farm reports rattled on radios through kitchens across town. Drunk driving was a norm (among adults and we teens). Divorces, which were rare in previous eras, swept through the town and affected most of my friends’ families. The summer after seventh grade, I watched as one good friend after another started smoking pot, leaving me behind (for a while).

On the other side of things was a rigid morality. Conservative Christianity was just beginning to burgeon, and the local evangelical churches forbid the kids in their congregations to go to school dances (hello, Foot Loose), and protested when the choir dresses for the girls had slits.

One of the most interesting things about small towns for me, though, is how a small town is a peculiar kind of family. I feel close to the kids I went to kindergarten with, even though I haven’t seen or spoken to many of them in decades—because of this past that has shaped us, as if we grew up in the same house, with the same parents.

Somebody Somewhere—and Jeff Hiller

This is all on my mind because our featured guest this week on the Memoir Nation podcast is Jeff Hiller, who played Joel on my favorite TV show of the last year, Somebody Somewhere, a show about people living ordinary lives in an ordinary small town. The New York Times describes Joel as “a sweet, middle-aged, gay Richie Cunningham with a wry wit he saves for his friends and a dreamy optimism he pours into his homemade vision board.”

Hiller grew up in small religious towns in Texas in real life. One of the most poignant elements of the show is how it navigates the intersection of queer identity and small-town life, an experience not often shown on television.

“There are lots of out queer people living in small towns, and they find their community,” said Hiller. “That’s the point of the show.”

Somebody Somewhere celebrates small-town quirks and kooks, but it’s about something more; it’s about the bigness of our yearning, aching, creative souls—and what a difficult matter it is for us to find belonging and express ourselves. Especially if you’re “different” in a small town.

Small town as character

The small town the show takes place in is Manhattan, Kansas, and it’s a type of character in this show (and also where the show’s creator and star, Bridget Everett, grew up in real life). In fact, you might say the small town has as tough of a time belonging as its characters because our culture tends to look down on small-town life as unsophisticated, boring, and full of narrow-minded yokels.

I have heard so many misguided, disparaging comments about small-town life over the years from big city people who are afraid to spend more than 15 minutes in a small town. Yet, at the same time, I have to confess that I’ve been guilty of similar snobbery because I’ve internalized a lot of those big city judgements in my own flight away from my roots.

I bring all of these complications and contradictions to the characterization of Oskaloosa when I write about it.

Like Bridget Everett’s Sam character, I didn’t find belonging in my small town. And yet it’s my home. A home that’s a cauldron of both rootedness and alienation—the same existential state Sam finds herself in as she sleeps on a couch for all three seasons (such a great metaphor for her life).

Like Sam, I once returned to my small town as an adult in desperate straits and spent a year sleeping on people’s couches and wondering each day if I should sell my boyhood baseball card collection, my only possession of value at the time (I didn’t).

Sam is a gifted singer, but is full of self-hatred, and she only begins to find a new home when she finds Joel, a co-worker at the test center where she initially works, who was in high school show choir with her. She doesn’t remember him, perhaps because invisibility was a survival strategy for him as a gay teen. “It’s all good,” he says. “A lot of people don’t remember me.”

Joel treats her like the star he sees her as, though. When he invites her to “Choir Practice”—a semi-sanctioned cabaret soiree held after-hours in a mall church that draws gay residents and other free spirits from the community—she begins to find her voice and her place.

Part of the characterization of this small town is how somehow there is a place where gay people and “different” people can find each other and gather, even if it is in a church mall they’re not supposed to be in. The town can somehow be cruel and kind at the same time.

Somebody Somewhere is a show about connection in a world that seems depleted of it—which is why it’s a radical show. It illuminates a humanity we often overlook in our widening divisions, a humanity we often don’t even begin to recognize.

That’s why it was a treat to have Jeff Hiller, our first “celebrity,” on the Memoir Nation podcast (for more, see below).