Perry Kantor on Lia Purpura's "Autopsy Report"

Opening the Body

            Lia Purpura's “Autopsy Report” was a visceral and detailed recounting of her first experience watching a human body dissected.

The first page is rife with details of the state in which the bodies are found. Details like  “Drowned men, bound with ropes and diesel-slicked. Their ears sludge-filled. Their legs mud-smeared... their lashes white with river silt,” set the tone of the piece very quickly and efficiently. Purpura also doesn't waste time with certain conjunctions or prepositional phrases, which gives the piece a very condensed and fully-packed feel. On the first page every paragraph also starts with the phrase “I shall,” which instantly helps set the tone for who the speaker is.

As I began I wondered what direction the piece would take, as so many morbid details so clinically discussed began to make me wonder if perhaps it was about murder, or something truly sinister. It progresses on to recount the actual visit to what I imagine is either a medical examiners office or the morgue. I think at this point my fears that it was going to be something more gruesome (than it already was) were assuaged but I wasn't fully confident the speaker wouldn't turn to be a serial killer or something of the sort.

The part that seemed most honest to me was when the speaker tells us that the first time she sees a body opened up her reaction is to laugh. I find this honest because I highly doubt that would be most peoples first reaction and it also seems borderline inappropriate, which makes it all the more believable that it actually happened. But the key to the essay is the speaker's admission that to her the entire process of human dissection felt almost as if it were natural knowledge to her, as if she had always known that things would happen the way they did, “Of course blood pooled each blue-burnt circumference. Of course, I remember thinking.”

I think as a reader it made me consider visual detail in a different way, because I had never had things so vividly recounted in such a gory yet dispassionate way, as if it were a textbook describing viscera. It made me consider tone in a whole new light as well, and how even things normally very intense can be reduced. Her pithy writing also made it much easier to simply take in, there was no fluff to distract the reader from the story or the details and I think I could incorporate more of this technique into my own work. I liked that I didn't have to re-read a single line to understand what she meant by it, everything was as plain as it could be. 

As a writer I want to experiment more with tone and detail as a result of this piece. I want to see if I can achieve the same density of detail without compromising the tone I’m trying to work with. Purpura seems to accomplish this balance perfectly. She manages to combine her accurate and almost poetic recounting with very truthful comparisons: “The bladder, hidden, but pulled into view for my sake and cupped in hand like a water balloon,” while still maintaining an easily believable, almost objective, viewpoint. More of these obvious and easily identifiable analogies might also be something worth exploring in my own work.