During the worst dark nights of the soul, my smaller failings rise up one by one in a chorus of metallic voices: that unwritten, obligatory important letter; my tipsy, laughing, unintentional, klutzy faux pas booming into a sudden silence; the failure to speak when speaking would have helped someone…

These things are much worse to recall than any of my gigantic, life-changing mistakes. Those are boulders too big to see all at once, hulking, unmoving, and strangely safe, whereas the little things generate a cascade that turns into an avalanche. They’re all connected to one another somehow, neurochemically, so that remembering just one of them sets off a chain reaction sparking all the way back through the decades with increasing urgency until I’ve looped through my entire life, all the way back to the first one, which now seems worse than ever in light of all the others.”

Kate Christensen’s Blue Plate Special is out in July, and this is from the very first page, so you know you’ll want to devour it as soon as possible. (via maudnewton)

I understand that it is a healthy and worthwhile thing to read books that challenge your thinking, that “make you see the world” “in new ways” and “expand your horizons” and “broaden your thinking” and “take you out of yourself” and all that, but also there is nothing quite like reading a series of sentences that precisely capture a feeling or a thought or experience you have had but that you have not yet put into words, or that you tried and failed to put into words, or that you put into words but not quite the right words, or that you encountered in such an abstract way that you hadn’t quite got to the point of thinking about them in terms of language, but now you don’t have to, because they exist in the world in the form of someone else’s effort, pure comfort and reassurance that you are not crazy, or at least not alone. This is the same feeling I get when I go into a hardware store, sometimes. Thankful that someone else has done the work to invent all these bits and pieces to solve my problems and stop up my gaps. Which is to say, I’m really really excited about this book.

Imagine, superimposed on the gray-and-grainy screen of a floundering, slightly depressed twenty-something, the shimmery outlines of an idealized adolescent world. All drawn—I just had to color it in. I could pick any colors, as long as they were pastel! The characters were already invented. They had “histories,” personalities, but I could add nuances. The plots were already there. Who could have dreamed of such adventures? A plane crash in a Cessna. Hysterical paralysis following a bad break-up. The rich posing as poor and the poor as rich. The tennis star that longed to be ordinary, the ordinary girl that longed to be a starlet. Differences smoothed away by the sameness-machine of narrative. The teachers with secrets, the students with secrets, the secrets revealed, the revelations turned into new secrets. The core secret—the one I knew, and harbored myself, and saw in those around me—the bland central core of “sameness,” of normalcy. How different were any of us, despite our attenuated lives as graduate students, from anybody else? The darkest of dark secrets: how much I hadn’t read, and didn’t know. How little I felt I had to say that was different, or new, or mattered.

Kenyon Review Online | Amy Boesky, “The Ghost Writes Back” (via @EmilyGould)

So this is one hell of a lovely, melancholy essay about ghost-writing for Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley High series (and, as always, other things).

Source: kenyonreview.org

At times I am not just nervous about this work but frightened, and think I am going through a crisis, one that could be called existential. Then I realized the problem is much simpler—I have had no breakfast and too much coffee, and my nerves are raw, so tender that I am almost unbearably disturbed to look out the window and see a truck carrying one car on its back and pulling another behind it.

But at other times I am really confused and uncomfortable. For instance, I am trying to separate out a few pages to add to the novel and I want to put them together in one box, but I’m not sure how to label the box. I would like to write on it MATERIAL READY TO BE USED, but if I do that it may bring me bad luck, because the material may not really be “ready.” I thought of adding parentheses and writing MATERIAL (READY) TO BE USED, but the word “ready” was still too strong despite the parentheses. I thought of throwing in a question mark so that it read MATERIAL (READY?) TO BE USED but the question mark immediately introduced more doubt than I could stand. The best possibility may be MATERIAL—TO BE USED, which does not go so far as to say that it is ready but only that in some form it will be used, though it does not have to be used, even if it is good enough to use.

Lydia Davis, The End of the Story

Am I missing the corner of the internet where everyone is talking about this book all the time?

Lindsay Zoladz: Three Semi-Related Thoughts Upon The Occasion Of Getting Very, Very Old

Well, of course I love this post by Lindsay Zoladz about (open airquotes) being in one’s twenties (close airquotes).

Especially this:

As someone doing work that is very different from/not even sort of intellectually rigorous as (and, I am trained to think, “more subjective than”) that of the Great Russian Dudes, I find a lot of what Chekhov has had to say about writing profoundly comforting and surprisingly relevant to my particular creative anxieties. “I can only write from my memories, and I have never written directly from nature,” he once said. “The subject must first seep through my memory, leaving as in a filter only what is important and typical.” I read this on the subway last week, while a toddler across from me was laughing hysterically because she’d just put a sticker on each of her eyelids. I don’t know about you, but the word that jumps out at me in that Chekhov quote is “seep.” It implies a passage of time, a non-immediacy, a kind of patience. The internet has made me feel like I need to know and name the important stuff the instant I see it, and I’m not sure I’m very good at that. So this was comforting to me, this idea that the important and worthwhile stuff will just lurk somewhere between remembering and forgetting, and it will bubble up to the surface when I need it. Because that train was packed with other people, but what I remember is that toddler with the stickers. And I remember, tipsy as I may have been, the cashier who suggested that I might want a straw with my can of Rolling Rock. Chekhov loved clean, minimal strokes and that particular flavor of absurdity. He would have laughed.

For a few reasons lately I’ve been dwelling on the ideas of memory and distance and time, and what distance and time do to memories, and the usefulness/worth of memory (especially in relation to writing, and memoir, but also in terms of constructing an idea of a self). Two things I’ve read have lodged in me, both from the prologues of other memoirs—two hugely different books that have both reached into my brain and knuckled it around like a raw pile of dough.

One, from Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay, which I bought on a Sunday and had finished by Tuesday (I’m an almost embarrassingly slow reader so this is significant):

“I waited seven years to forget just enough—so that when I tried to remember, I could do it thoroughly. There are only a few things to remember now, and the lost things are absolutely, comfortingly gone.”

And this from Natalie Kusz’s Road Song, which I’m still working through:

“To write of those years, I climb a high bluff and look down. From this height, only shapes are visible, broad green swaths of pattern and sequence, with moments like small white houses pricking the edges.”

These books are both devastating and electrifying in their own ways, but I think they get their great power not just from recognizing the presence of gaps in memory, but relishing those gaps and working with them as if they’re at least as integral to the story as what is remembered. (Here I’m straying from Lindsay’s point about memory “seepage”—but maybe not?) (It might be worth noting that both Manguso’s and Kusz’s books are both recollections of lives/events far more traumatic than “being in one’s twenties.”) This is what, I think, burns me up so much about “non-fiction” that consciously generates new details for itself, composite characters, broadly approximated scenarios—the beauty of memory, for me (as a writer and as a reader and as a human), is that not everything makes the cut, and it seems like such a basic denial of the human experience to trade those gaps and fractures for the cool smooth putty of narrative tidiness.

I’m saying this all as a person who is terrified of forgetting, who occasionally thinks of the piles and piles of spiral notebook journals she kept from fifth grade through one year post-college and feels a tightening at her chest for all the weird secrets recorded for posterity, but then thinks about how she hasn’t kept a steady private journal for the past five years or so, and the tightness gets tighter. I don’t know what’s scarier, forgetting or remembering.

But I think also of a line in this letter John Steinbeck wrote to his teenaged son, which my friend Amanda sent to me earlier this year when I was in some kind of panic about writing, which has stayed with me for months like a kind of mantra. It’s a quote about love, and feeling the need to rush it, but it helps with a lot of things.

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

We had prepared for this road trip as we had for all the others, the weekend drives to Mexico, the “explorings” into mountains, the rides to look at Death Valley, where we had stood together listening to the vast, breathless sound of infinite space. We readied ourselves first by choosing food: packing hard rolls and butter in a bag, buying mustard and onions and cheese or some ham, adding at last the apples, cold soda, a thermos of water. When it came time to eat, Dad passed his pocketknife to Mom and she slit open rolls, filling them first and then passing them back to us children, and we all shared the same soda, drinking from the bottle and wiping off the rim. On those old drives we had felt temporarily whole and apart, out food and money measured to last out the trip, and whatever we’d brought we used up completely, for it would have seemed unfaithful somehow to save anything, to arrive back home still holding a part of what we had promised ourselves we could squander.

Natalie Kusz, Road Song

Is page 13 too early to declare deep, abiding love for a book? I hope not, because here I am doing it.

I @?#$!askflkaldj! NY

Over the past year or so I have been reading a lot of memoir-ish essay collections written by women in their twentywhatevers and here is what I have to say about that: I am so tired of New York City.

I am so tired of New York City as a default setting. I am so tired of New York City as the psychological home turf. I am so tired of New York City as an aesthetic choice. I am so tired of the assumption of New York City’s fundamental interestingness. At this point it is actually the most boring thing in the world to me. Oh, you’re a writer? In your 20s? Living in New York? Writing about being a writer and being in your 20s and living in New York? Tell me more! Wait no, do not tell me more, because that is almost literally all I am ever ever told about. 

It’s not that I haven’t enjoyed some of these books. I mostly really enjoy them! I am so into ladies being into their own subjectivities. I am into ladies writing brutally and affably and beautifully about their own lives.

But I resent how the city sneaks into even places I wasn’t expecting. At this point I should know it’s almost as essential as commas and semicolons but somehow it still surprises me. Two examples from my weekend reading: All I’d heard about Chloe Caldwell’s Legs Get Led Astray was about the orgies and the babysitting and the frank, frank funniness, but there was New York, right there in chapter two. I pick up Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land, a very very different sort of book, and there it is; that first piece, which is beautiful and deeply smart and elegantly done, a few pages in, suddenly draws into focus in on her life in her 20s in New York City, and I begin to wonder, what in God’s name have I done?

What I have done is more what I have not done, and what I have not done is move to New York City. I have never even more than halfway considered it through one squinted eye for more than two minutes. I have been to New York City one time, in eleventh grade, on a class trip, five months after 9/11, ten years ago last spring. I occasionally think about visiting again. Probably I will. I’m in no real rush.

At any rate it has played only the slightest of walk-on roles in the grand scheme of my life, and has hardly ever poked itself into my writing.

And yet I know so much about the city, know neighborhoods and their general whereabouts and characters, know of bars and restaurants and subway stops and bookstores. Part of this is because of the way New York exists in pop culture at large. But its presence, its omnipresence, in Woody Allen movies, in reality shows, in whatever else, doesn’t bother me quite like this. I know all these things without trying. I know these things without reading guidebooks or articles or maps. I know them like someone might know the names of places and things in Middle Earth or Narnia—just from reading, just from repeated prolonged exposure to that world. I know that I know these things because of these books.

Some people I do think read certain kinds of books because to them New York City is a Middle Earth or a Narnia—a place they want to absorb and come to know like it is a real place—only it is a real place, and then they go there, and then they do all the things they’re supposed to do, then they have their own “Goodbye To All That” moment. And then they write about it, too. And there’s that sense, always, that whatever happened to them in New York City couldn’t have happened anywhere else and yet the very fact of it having happening there somehow renders those happenings universal.

I am not saying no one should live in New York or no one should write about living in New York—obviously! And of course there are varying degrees of how well it is done. Even within the same book. But what I do wonder is—these people, these women and also these men, though the women who do this are more of what I am referring to generally here… Is there not ever some moment of gut-thumping shame when they realize how often this has been done before? Is part of being a woman who Has A New York Story some kind of mind-erasing confidence that obscures all other New York Stories that have come before?

Or am I just projecting? Is there some element of jealousy here, a suspicion perhaps that I would be a few steps closer to a book of my own if only I lived in New York City? Of course, yes, probably so.

Certain female writers I know, we talk and think a lot about how the default position is male (straight, white male, of course). Esquire and GQ are considered general interest magazines; men writers are not called men writers, they are writers, while women writers are women writers almost always; male writers do not have to answer to their maleness because it is considered a basic state of being, while femaleness is the variation, the deviation. This is similar to how I’ve come to see New York City writers versus all other kinds of writers, at least when it comes to writers of the personal-essayish sort, but more generally too. New York is the default, is male; everyone else—but, I want to say, especially the South—is the exception, is the other that has to form to the standards set by the default, despite those standards inherently priviledging against it.

And, at least in my own brain, I find similar patterns emerging in how I give myself permission to write and think about writing (because, if it wasn’t abundantly clear already, I have been thinking about this kind of stuff a lot because I am in the midst of the very weird slow hard process of wanting to, of trying to, write a book of my own). I know of female writers who see other female writers doing something similar to what they want to do but rather than feel empowered or challenged by that they see it as an affront, as a slot being filled—because sometimes it is a slot filled, sometimes a female writer getting to do a certain thing means that is one less chance you actually have. But mostly that’s not what it means. And of course this isn’t the dominant way of thinking for men. And I also don’t think it’s the dominant way of thinking for New York City writers. (I should say that I don’t think all New York-based writers are New York City writers, just a certain kind.) But anything so much as vaguely resembling a Southern twentysomething female memoir-ish/critical essayist I’ve found has disappointed me, in a way—scared me, maybe—because it’s felt like, well, she did it, so maybe that’s my lost chance. Which is ridiculous. Because of course it doesn’t work that way. But also, I feel like perhaps it does work that way.

I just know there is so so much life elsewhere. I guess I just wish that all that other life could sell books, too.

The Decatur Book Festival is this weekend. I helped on the programming board this year so I’m especially excited about this one. There will be books and smart people talking about books and dogs and babies and popsicles. It is free. Decatur is adorable and right on MARTA. It should be raining only somewhat torrentially.  On Saturday, I’ll be moderating a panel with authors Lisa Zeidner and Lydia Netzer, who both have new novels about what it means to be human and weird and in love. I’m going to try hard not to confuse their names. (Event info) On Sunday, there’s a launch party for the book produced by this year’s KIPP Scribes. The book has a perfect title—Read After Burning: Post-Civil War Stories Set In Atlanta—and it’s all historical fiction written by some of the most hilarious and remarkable and stunningly wise sixth, seventh and eighth graders I’ve ever met. Not sure if this is on the main schedule, but it’s at 2 PM at CORE Studio on the square.  That night I’ll also be introducing the great Austin Kleon as he makes his second stop in Decatur this year to talk about his book Steal Like An Artist. I think that’s one of the final events of the weekend, so please, come wring the dredges out of the festival with me (well, me for like two minutes) and one of my favorite blogger-people. It will be great. (Event info) Here’s the full schedule. SEEYA THERE, NERDS.
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The Decatur Book Festival is this weekend. I helped on the programming board this year so I’m especially excited about this one. There will be books and smart people talking about books and dogs and babies and popsicles. It is free. Decatur is adorable and right on MARTA. It should be raining only somewhat torrentially. 

On Saturday, I’ll be moderating a panel with authors Lisa Zeidner and Lydia Netzer, who both have new novels about what it means to be human and weird and in love. I’m going to try hard not to confuse their names. (Event info)

On Sunday, there’s a launch party for the book produced by this year’s KIPP Scribes. The book has a perfect title—Read After Burning: Post-Civil War Stories Set In Atlanta—and it’s all historical fiction written by some of the most hilarious and remarkable and stunningly wise sixth, seventh and eighth graders I’ve ever met. Not sure if this is on the main schedule, but it’s at 2 PM at CORE Studio on the square. 

That night I’ll also be introducing the great Austin Kleon as he makes his second stop in Decatur this year to talk about his book Steal Like An Artist. I think that’s one of the final events of the weekend, so please, come wring the dredges out of the festival with me (well, me for like two minutes) and one of my favorite blogger-people. It will be great. (Event info)

Here’s the full schedule.

SEEYA THERE, NERDS.

All through my dorm I heard typewriters. Maybe it was nothing new, maybe I’d just lost my filter, the way every voice around you will suddenly flood into your head, each with its own rhythm and tone. One machine went off in high crackling bursts like strings of cheap firecrackers. Another, even lower than George’s, grumbled and surged like the engines of a ship. I tried not to listen for them.

Tobias Wolff, Old School

(This book! I’m not quite finished with it, but—have you ever thought of yourself as a writer, or nursed ambition or overconfidence or worthlessness or any amount of creative or personal or professional or romantic or economic jealousy? Of course you have. And therefore I recommend this to you.)

Have you read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy? Have you seen the movie version of The Golden Compass? Be prepared: It’s terrible! Really really terrible. Perhaps the only reason I would suggest that you watch it (Joe and I saw it last night for the first time) is if you love Mr. Carson on Downton Abbey but feel as if he needs more dreadlocks, eyeliner and facial tattoos. I literally shrieked—or maybe it was a yelp? or more specifically like a high-pitched startled choking sound?—when he appeared, totally unexpected. Numerous other vocalizations occurred during our screening last night but mostly they were of the “OH HELL NO” variety. (SERIOUSLY HOW CAN YOU DOWNPLAY THE TRAUMA OF INTERCISION LIKE THAT, MOVIE. HOW CAN YOU DO THAT. ALSO YOU TOTALLY SQUANDERED SERAFINA PEKULA. AMONG OTHER THINGS.)
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Have you read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy? Have you seen the movie version of The Golden Compass? Be prepared: It’s terrible! Really really terrible. Perhaps the only reason I would suggest that you watch it (Joe and I saw it last night for the first time) is if you love Mr. Carson on Downton Abbey but feel as if he needs more dreadlocks, eyeliner and facial tattoos. I literally shrieked—or maybe it was a yelp? or more specifically like a high-pitched startled choking sound?—when he appeared, totally unexpected. Numerous other vocalizations occurred during our screening last night but mostly they were of the “OH HELL NO” variety. (SERIOUSLY HOW CAN YOU DOWNPLAY THE TRAUMA OF INTERCISION LIKE THAT, MOVIE. HOW CAN YOU DO THAT. ALSO YOU TOTALLY SQUANDERED SERAFINA PEKULA. AMONG OTHER THINGS.)
Zoom Info

Have you read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy? Have you seen the movie version of The Golden Compass? Be prepared: It’s terrible! Really really terrible. Perhaps the only reason I would suggest that you watch it (Joe and I saw it last night for the first time) is if you love Mr. Carson on Downton Abbey but feel as if he needs more dreadlocks, eyeliner and facial tattoos. I literally shrieked—or maybe it was a yelp? or more specifically like a high-pitched startled choking sound?—when he appeared, totally unexpected. Numerous other vocalizations occurred during our screening last night but mostly they were of the “OH HELL NO” variety. (SERIOUSLY HOW CAN YOU DOWNPLAY THE TRAUMA OF INTERCISION LIKE THAT, MOVIE. HOW CAN YOU DO THAT. ALSO YOU TOTALLY SQUANDERED SERAFINA PEKULA. AMONG OTHER THINGS.)

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