When Blair Braverman and I finally managed to get each other on the phone to talk about her new book Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube, she was huddled in a stairway, the quietest place she could find at O’Hare, just a short while before her flight to Anchorage, where she was scheduled to pick up her sled dogs, nine puppies and four adult huskies, and then drive them home to northern Wisconsin.
In order to make the story feel more true, Braverman realized she had to go back and explain the origins of her love of the arctic and why she needed to prove she was a tough girl in the first place. The answers to both those questions were in Norway, where Braverman first visited as a ten-year-old, spending a year living abroad with her parents. Their home was Davis, California: hot, dry, and uninspiring. “I spent my whole childhood knowing that my real home was yet to come,” Braverman writes. And then, upon arriving in Oslo, “just like that, I had a place to love.”
Braverman is aware of the controversy over memoirs, particularly those by young women who, some essayists have argued, are encouraged to emphasize various traumas in their lives. “I was wary of writing a traumoir,” she says. “I used a journalistic process. I did a lot of interviewing and transcribing conversations about the village, and history and psychology. I was always seeking things out. I never had a sense of just sitting in a chair.”
