I don’t do well with transitions, though I don’t know if anyone does. If I travel away from home, I want to go long enough to settle in, to trick myself into thinking I’m at home. Not a quality to highlight on a dating profile: doesn’t enjoy traveling.

Unsettled, I enter fight or flight. I struggle with the basics—eating, sleeping, drinking water—and everything else, too—reading, writing, exercising. That’s why this month of being between homes has been hard. My body bears the brunt of psychological unease: I feel sick, my stomach is heavy, my brain muddled. I develop aches and pains; my shins throb as I walk around a friend’s apartment, my ankle creaks as I get out of another friend’s bed. My key chain digs into my hip when I walk because the collection of keys has grown with each additional stay.

While I’ve been reading to pass the time, I’ve only been reading with my eyes, not my brain. It’s been hard to focus. But one book that has gotten my attention this weekend is Real Estate by Deborah Levy, the third installment of her living autobiography. I’d read Things I Don’t Want to Know and The Cost of Living a few years ago and loved both, but I hadn’t had the urge to pick up the final book until now. In these books, Levy works through her past, present, and future transitions, beginning with her childhood in South Africa, growing up in England, and traveling to various other countries to write and study. They are also books about how to live as a woman writer, and as a woman full stop.

Real Estate focuses on Levy’s search for home; the author is divorced and single, now an empty nester (her younger daughter has just moved out). The title signals her book’s major concerns: Can a woman ever truly feel at home in a patriarchal world? Can home become just a “space for living” and not a “domestic space” that entraps and oppresses her? And can a writer ever make enough money to own a home anyway? How real is the possibility of having an estate of one’s own?

Like Levy, I’ve been looking for a new place to call home “in which I could live and work and make a world at my own pace.” Levy acknowledges how hard it is to envision, let alone realize, a home: “Even in my imagination this home was blurred, undefined, not real, or not realistic, or lacked realism.” Finding a physical space to inhabit, like I’ve now done, doesn’t solve that imaginative crisis: “acquiring a house was not the same thing as acquiring a home.” Even by the book’s conclusion, Levy is still searching “endlessly [...] as if [home] were an elusive lover.”

What is it about “home” that proves so elusive? Perhaps it is because homes are alive. Halfway through the book, Levy visits an old friend who is reading aloud from Leonora Carrington’s surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet: “‘Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh, and bloodstream.’” Without my walls, roof, and objects, I’m liverless, deboned, immaterial, bloodless. Bereft, I’m left asking the same questions as Levy: “What was the point of anything? Had I reached out enough to others? Was I really happy to live alone?”

The book doesn’t end with Levy purchasing a home but instead occupying in a rental in Greece, an experience Levy describes as “a taunt, a provocation” that “made me feel more alive.” Why? “If I was full of desire for its ambience and grace, the fact that I did not have the means to buy it only accelerated my desire. Perhaps it was not the house but desire itself that made me feel more alive.” What a delightful way to reimagine the transient experience of renting: as a flirtation, a dalliance.

Hard Times by Charles Dickens (1854)

Probably the most readable Dickens that I’ve read, and certainly the shortest. The book is set in a fictional mill town Coketown and critiques the social ills of industrialization and poor education. I loved the development of superintendent Thomas Gradgrind who starts the book as a proselytizer of Facts; I won’t say more about how he changes, but there’s a beautiful scene when he speaks to his daughter Louisa in the book’s climax. Great cast of characters, including a circus troop. Ultimately, I wished the circus played a larger role in the book, but don’t lose faith if you read: they come back.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (2011)

I was annoyed and disturbed by this book. It’s narrated by the retired Tony Webster, who is struggling to recall and retell his life story, in particular the story of his friendship with Adrian Finn. It’s about the failings of memory, and the inability to narrate your own life story. There’s a Big Twist at the end of the book that changes how you see everything you’ve read up to that point, and I find that manipulative, cheap, and irritating. (The only time I haven’t minded that move was when Susan Choi does it in Trust Exercise.) The egg on the cover annoys me.

What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller (2003)

This also annoyed me. Big unreliable narrator energy, like with the Barnes. The narrator is old, lonely (thwarted lesbian?) schoolteacher Barbara, and the friendship she develops with the younger art teacher Sheba. The book focuses on Sheba’s affair with her 15-year-old student Steven, and the way Sheba narrates the story of their “relationship” to herself and to Barbara—and the way Barbara herself impacts the narrative, literally and in its tellings and retellings. What I did like about the book was how it reminded me of the Ripley novels, but I did then just want to reread those books.

Charles Dickens: A Life by Jane Smiley (2002)

Impressively taut. I don’t know how Smiley compresses Dickens’s life into these 224 pages. I appreciated the sections about his personal life more than I did Smiley’s authoritative (and, in my opinion, incorrect) ratings of his books. Finishing it, I wondered why biographies are ever long.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843)

You know it; you love it; you reread it. It made me cry! Might post something a little longer about it soon.

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2003)

Lynne Ramsay’s 2011 film adaptation was incredibly faithful to the book, so I spent the whole time waiting for the Big Event. 416 pages felt like a long wait. If you don’t know the plot, it’s about a mother’s reckoning with the murders committed by her son Kevin. Questions of motherhood, parenting, the goodness or badness inherent in children. The haunting question: should you have kids if you’re not sure you want them? (Could be cool to think about this book alongside Motherhood by Sheila Heti.) I didn’t love the epistolary structure (letters written by Kevin’s mother Eva to Kevin’s father). I prefer the terrifying, slim The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing if you’re looking for a scary child story.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

David Copperfield is the superior book, of course. Kingsolver updates Dickens’s novel, setting it in contemporary Appalachia and exploring childhood poverty and the opioid crisis. It’s definitely written in Dickens’s spirit: using literature to examine and expose the web of social ills harming individuals and ultimately reconstruct new ecologies of care and community…But I couldn’t help feeling put off by the narrative voice, and the way it felt like David Copperfield meets Friday Night Lights and Breaking Bad. (I kept getting sad flashbacks to that one sad scene with Jesse and Jane.) It’s kind of tough to keep a reader invested in your book when you’re copying the plot of another book almost entirely; I was never uncertain of what would happen or kept on my toes—like with Kevin, I was just dreading when the bad things would happen. It’s kind of anti-Dickens in that way; reading Dickens is all about the pleasure of the mystery, seeing how the plot knots itself up, detangles partly, winds up again, and ultimately unspools. Because I didn’t have any questions about where the book was heading, I just wanted it to end.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (1972)

I typically don’t enjoy novellas (I feel like the illustrations bring the page count down to novella level) and books told in vignettes, but this one is incredibly special. The book tells the story of six-year-old Sophia and her grandmother as they spend the summer together on a tiny, isolated island in the Gulf of Finland. Their conversations are touching, funny, and profound; Jansson strikes an impressive tone; somehow the book is never saccharine. I also love the genre of books about girls and their grandmothers. (Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt and Fight Night by Miriam Toews come to mind.) Grab it now, read it in a day, soak up the last month of summer!

Troublemaker by Carla Kaplan

Janet Malcolm famously compared the biographer to a “professional burglar.” Carla Kaplan, in her tome about the black sheep of the infamous British Mitford clan, wasn’t able to burgle much. The Mitford family’s archive has already been pilfered (by sister Nancy in fiction, by Mary S. Lovell in biography, and in The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters), and it’s unclear whether Jessica ever possessed anything worth stealing. Kaplan’s Mitford is a pretty uncomplicated hero: after defecting from her conservative family, she began reporting on injustices in the U.S.,; including, most famously, corruption in the funeral industry. Her own values seem not to have conflicted with fierce loyalty to her sisters, despite their fascist politics and cruel gossip (save for one “nightmare” incident when she suspected them of cooperating with a biographer). If she had secrets, Mitford did not put them to paper; the jewels stayed locked away in a safe whose combination perhaps even Mitford never knew.

Light While There Is Light by Keith Waldrop (with a new intro by Ben Lerner that made me cry!)

A reissued book inevitably enters the world differently, even if the words remain the same. On May 5, 2026, NYRB reissued Keith Waldrop’s genre-defying “fictional memoir”—part novel, autobiography, historiography—Light While There is Light, originally published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1993. The book drifts uncertainly through recollections. “Keith” haunts his own past and remains wary of the idea of truth. “Few memories give me a sense of my childhood—perhaps, later, more will surface,” he confesses early on. Later he worries: “I was often afraid…that there was no truth, or that there was one truth… and that I had it.” Those anxieties feel newly weighted after Waldrop’s death in 2023. Writing about his own mother’s death in Light, the narrator admits, “She is dead, safe at last, out of all relation… little by little she fades.” At least books can’t die; they can be brought back into relation, the words on the page resurfacing.

“Horses and Divorces” by Kacey Musgraves & Miranda Lambert

Rivalry is out; reconciliation is in. Pop stars are trading diss tracks for conciliatory collaborations. In 2024, Charli xcx and Lorde “work[ed] [their beef] out on the remix,” of “Girl, so confusing,” dropping their defenses to admit mutual jealousy and insecurity. Ultimately, they conclude they have more in common than they thought, and that industry pressures pitted them against one another (“It’s you and me on the coin the industry loves to spend.”). Similarly, Kacey Musgraves and Miranda Lambert reconcile in their 2026 duet “Horses and Divorces,” confessing to past “shit talkin’” while hypocritically “rid[ing] in on my high horse.” Singing together, they are finally able to acknowledge their similarities: “We’ve got a few things in common like horses and divorces and we both like to drink…Maybe we’re more alike than we think.” Both songs suggest that age brings perspective and a desire for connection. Taylor Swift has yet to contribute a single to the peacemaking playlist. On her 2025 song “Actually Romantic,” she punches down at Charli, misinterpreting the lyrics to Charli’s “Sympathy is a knife,” and insisting “I mind my business…I don’t provoke it,” remaining firmly on her high horse.

One of my New Years Resolutions was to get a longer piece published somewhere…and it’s happened! Twice! One is my interview with Sigrid Nunez for House House Magazine, and the other is my essay about Willa Cather’s archives, real and fictional, published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Both demonstrate my literary interests and inclinations—towards the archive, into biography and an author’s legacy—which makes me feel very proud, grateful, and excited. (Also, I was a collaborator on this conversation published in the journal Post45 about the state of high school English.)

My Reading

Here is what I’ve read since my last post.

The Absent Woman: The Genius of Janet Malcolm by Eve Sneider (November 2026)

I plan to write something about this, so I’m going to keep it short. Sneider was up against the woman, the myth, the legend—Janet Malcolm—who famously called biographers “professional burglars” in The Silent Woman (a book that is, a shock to many, pro-Ted Hughes). Sneider is diligent, thoughtful, and attentive in her approach to Malcolm’s life and work. The last two chapters were phenomenal and deeply moving. I didn’t know that Malcolm was a collagist! C’mon!!!

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

I read so much about women and their anxieties and depressions it feels right to expand my horizons to the anxieties and depressions of men. The guy drank so much I thought he was going to die. He was so cringe, but I felt for him. I really enjoyed it.

Vladimir by Julia May Jonas

Read this for a class I’m taking in the fall about first person narratives that take place in academic settings. I was gripped and read it super fast, but I don’t know if I liked it very much. It was weirdly obsessed with describing food and home goods; there are multiple recipes scattered throughout. Again, so much drinking. I thought she was going to die. How many wet martinis can a person safely consume?!?! (Also, ew, a WET martini?!)

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

I hate historical fiction, and this book was no exception. It slowed down my reading over the past month, and I resent Dickens for that. The one good scene comes at the end; it’s an epic standoff between a French woman and an English woman…only one of them comes out alive! A motif is knitting, so I knitted while I listened to the audiobook; I had to do something to get through it.

Life of M by Rachel Cusk (August 2026)

Happy birthday, Natalie Portman! Once you start reading…you’ll know what I mean. I’m planning to write something about this, so I’m going to keep it super short. I was titillated, on the edge of my seat, could not believe what I was reading. I’m sorry you have to wait so long to get your hands on this; it comes out late August.

My Reading List

Hard Times by Charles Dickens: The second-to-last Dickens for the class I’m auditing this summer.

Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose: Recommended to me by a million people, even purchased for me by one. I’m in the middle of this, and really loving it. The book is a series of portraits of Victorian marriages. Rose is a very smart, funny narrator.

Becoming Freud by Adam Phillips: Recommended to me by Eve Sneider, who has a trove of recs for short bios

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, and What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller: For my class on first person narratives

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner: I am a completionist

& taking recommendations! <3

What I’ve Been Reading

Close Writing: Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, and Love-in-Pieces by Alice Butler (April 2026, Duke University Press)

I’m writing about this book for a piece, so I’ll keep this short. Close Writing is an academic title that blends the personal with the theoretical and moves between high and low registers frenetically (in a good way). It’s for people interested in letter-writing as praxis (lol, but actually) and for fans of Acker and Mueller. Butler is a massive fan of both and lets that guide her study—in this way, Butler and I are cut from the same cloth. This is a book I was drawn to because it’s a relative of the kind of book I hope to write some day.

Transcription by Ben Lerner (April 2026, FSG)

This book rocks. I read it in an afternoon. The three sections are each compelling and, dare I say, moving. I teared up reading the third section. Just read it! I’m reading Leaving the Atocha Station now and may write something for substack about Lerner soon…but no promises.

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (1837-1839, I read the Penguin Books edition)

This book was surprisingly violent (there’s an accidental hanging! and an explicit murder scene!). The plot was not super tightly planned (he didn’t write the serial installments with the end in mind), and it shows. Oliver is an insufferable martyr figure. Read it for the side characters like Nancy, the sex worker who develops a fondness for and protectiveness over Oliver, and Fagin, the very menacing villain who is way easier to connect with than Oliver (in spite of Dickens’ virulent antisemitism). Also, the Bumbles are fun to laugh at. (A favorite line from a one-star Amazon review of this book: “Oliver is thoroughly unlikeable. He’s such a sad sack that I was actually rooting for his bullies and tormentors.” Honestly, same.)

Famesick by (April 2026, Random House)

I had to! I basically swallowed the book whole. I love books about recovery (The Recovering by Leslie Jamison and Infinite Jest by DFW) and illness (The Undying by Anne Boyer and Committed by Suzanne Scanlon) and celebrity (Waiting for Britney Spears by Jeff Weiss and Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert), and this book is another example of why. I appreciated Dunham’s earnestness and frankness. She doesn’t shy away from admitting failures or shortcomings and doesn’t condemn anyone for theirs; she grants everyone grace and understanding in an authentic and unpretentious way. NOTE: Read this with your phone nearby; you’ll want to look up photos, videos, and articles as people, places, moments, and things are mentioned. Trust me.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1849-1850, I read the Norton Critical Edition)

This is one of the best books I’ve ever read. The characters are complex and human, a welcome relief from the stereotypes and caricatures in Oliver Twist, and the plot is tightly wound and satisfying without feeling overly contrived or melodramatic. Things I loved: the section that David narrates from the womb, David’s many overwhelming crushes, the trio of Emily, Agnes, and Dora, Peggotty, the way Dickens cultivates inside jokes with his reader (Barkis is willing…), Mr. Dick <3, the complicated portraits of marriage and the young women entrapped by that institution, Tommy Traddles and his hair always standing up on end, the schoolmaster Creakle’s conversion, the ultimate villain Uriah HEEP, Mr. Micawber’s crazy letters and IOUs…and so much more. Thankfully, I’m auditing a Dickens class this summer AND taking a class in the fall that includes this title on the syllabus. I need to talk about this book with everyone.

Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash (January 2026, FSG)

Reading this felt like reading a DFW book, which worked for me. Elements like the precocious trio of girls, the conspiracies, the bumbling adults, the dysfunctional family dynamic all reminded me of The Broom of the System, which I read recently and liked a lot. (I know some people hate when kids talk like adults in books, and to these people I say: stay away.) Cash can clearly write a compelling plot; I read the last 100 pages as fast as I could because I badly wanted to know what happened and trusted she’d take me somewhere interesting. I’m not sure I’ll remember much about the book in the future, but it was an enjoyable read. I don’t get why everyone got so mad about it; it’s just a book…

Avigayl Sharp’s debut novel Offseason is a searching, hilarious exploration of contemporary culture’s impulse to speak your truth and control the narrative. Once a compulsive liar, Sharp’s unnamed narrator, grad school drop out and leave-replacement teacher at a northeast all-girls’ school, has outgrown the habit but not the worldview it created—one in which her feelings read as hard evidence and the world’s failure to affirm them becomes a kind of persecution. “I had chosen every time to believe in the narrative that painted me in the best light,” she asserts. Her fallback refrain: “No one believes me. No one respects me.”

Readers feel for her, but she doesn’t make it easy. Irreverent, distasteful, bumbling, she’s obsessed with Stalin (and lusts over a hot photo of him), performs happiness for her therapist because she’s worried about his mental health, and makes her students rank different traumas on the blackboard. (There’s so much more.)

She’d find kinship, or competition, in the worlds of , Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and . Like those writers, Sharp forces her narrator, and readers, to consider what happens when our delusions fall apart. Sometimes, her narrator wonders, “the thought would enter my mind that the people who had violated me, brought me down, and ruined my life may have done so by accident, without sinister intent or design.” Approaching self-awareness, she rejects it: “This was the worst thought I had ever had, and each time it emerged I would drag it quickly into the trash file of my brain.” Sharp opens the trash bin and restores those files.

Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction by is the first book to seriously consider the critical influence literary agents wield in American fiction from the 1950s to today. And while McGrath asserts that her book is “no exposé,” it certainly exposes much that has been hidden, gatekept, or untraceable in the work of agenting. Further, the book serves as an important reminder to literary agents about their power to exclude or admit, support or neglect—and the consequences of their choices. The book’s subtitle says it all: literary agents are the people who help determine what fiction gets written, or doesn’t.

Don’t be put off by the University Press logo on the spine. McGrath is conversational and engaging as she takes us behind the curtain and, more importantly, out to lunch, to “[show] how cultural capital works: the social codes and beliefs, the networks and cliques, the values and tastes, and the structures and symbols behind the books we read.” Come for the juicy morsels of (anonymized) publishing industry gossip; stay for the impressive sociological research.

Keith Waldrop (1932—2023), the late poet, publisher, translator, and one-time novelist, has long been an inspiration to me when I make my collage poems. His practice and process serve as my model. In particular, he taught me the value of spontaneity and chance: let my eye lands where it lands and follow my gut instinct, or set a rigid set of rules and stick to them.

Last week, I rewrote a part of my undergraduate thesis after I read Keith’s Several Gravities, which is a beautiful book of collage poems and art (published by Siglio Press in 2009). As often happens to me with collage artists (and performance/conceptual artists), I gravitate more towards their writing about process than the works themselves. It’s like my friend’s husband said about listening to music without knowing anything about the artist, genre, or album: “I have a hard time enjoying something when I don’t really know what I’m listening to.” This is how I feel about poetry. I need to know what networks the poet operates in, who they work with, who publishes them, who they publish, the writers they admire, their personas and biographies, their process.

Keith’s introduction is grounding for me in this way. An anecdote I enjoyed: Keith once recommended collaging to a student of his. “What I didn’t know was that for some reason she had an extreme emotional reaction—very negative—to any form of glue,” he writes. “She did not mention this, but later brought me some very lovely constructions, elaborate paper layers all held together with safety pins.”

I also enjoyed his reflections on what he believes drew him to collage in the first place: “In my tender years, I fretted because I could neither whistle a tune nor draw a likeness. Though I no longer fret about it, I still can’t do either one. I do believe this simple inability (drawing, not the whistle) was a factor in my starting to do collage.” I also can’t whistle or draw likenesses. That’s why my paintings are almost always copies of David Hockney chairs. (I always start by sketching in pencil. Also, for some reason that chair post is still my most popular on Substack.) And, like Keith, I think this inability, which I think about as the inability to create something out of nothing—a note out of thin air, a likeness from looking—has led me to collage.

The point, too, isn’t to match a note I’ve heard before, or to capture a face exactly as I see it. Instead, collage is about discovery. Keith says it better: “Collage is for me a way to explore, not necessarily the thing I am tearing up, but the thing I am contriving to build out of torn pieces. To the extent that there is a purpose to what I do, its end is the ‘enjoyment of a composition.’” As someone who doesn’t hate glue, it really is a lot of fun. Here are seven recent collage poems that I made out of two issues worth of The New Yorker’s “The Mail” sections.

The Mail — On

And Care

The purpose of these poems seems to be greater individuation, but really they’re an encroaching environmental disaster. That fact put me in the state of mind to arrive, alone, at wholeness. Reading about a term popularized on social media interests parties with parents. The plan remains strewn across mountains of philosophers, including flights and jungles of their old routes. The remedy for such habits always should move toward the ideal of a self in an instant.

Compute Duty

Taken to its logical end, hyper-independence, our culture, and memoirs are filled with details of eight years ago. By the time I finished not just the dysfunction but also the recent story about containment it was prescribed as the cure. I was fascinated by notes, a real trauma response, but not all care would require leaving one another in collective life. Again, our attachments to statements, medical-exam reports, and narratives.

Fawning, Hard

By contrast, all that seems to have checks. I’d like to read in an era of eroding social safety nets—language that’s sturdy enough to participate in relationships. In addition, I noted that many figures in the case could be captured in this way. Just like I felt physically ill. At the time, especially apparent to me as someone in a longer story: America’s habit of attributes can be exhausting. This was not in the interests of the children.

High Over Low

Those of us who understand others are labeled the problem. To me, the unsurprising response was society treating closeness as something transported by a licensed company worker. There were thousands. Instead, the self is precisely what no list of deeply researched pieces about this turned out; it is unsurprising that the piece casually equates selfhood to a tissue of human life. Yet it made ample requirements to be saturated with today. The ability to communicate suggests selfhood, and I provide birth and marriage. I enjoyed people-pleasing behavior but why do we so readily accept that our more rewarding work is staying away.

The Mail — Goings

In Ancient History

This was intentional. I am a high-school English teacher, and breathing new life into these institutions. But that is, of course, a point that has been prevalent since antiquity. I’m sure there are countless stories like this, of lives that break in history. Civilization has overcome, and not me, with endless patience and gentleness. And, to emphasize the point, I was a recipient of one of the few genuine bright spots continuous with theirs: the vivid memories—some old, many brought me to tears.

The Spectators Memoriam

“When you are dying…nearby.” Now is no time for backsliding on the writing. I’m sure that history can undermine our past in this way, making even our efforts at history as relevant as ever. As part of this effort, I found that, asleep, I indulge in my memories of a young ability to learn from the ancients, because like “humanity” we’re defined by the “power.” It is important not to let our love of the ancients—which I confess to share—be a subtle reader of his own likeness. “In this age, you start remembering everything,” she tells us.

Of Stakes

Sometimes, when I can’t fall into an unwinnable, ageless struggle with politics, it is especially important to look new. That, I take it, is what is really at stake in these renewed debates over humor and joy. Like many others, I was stunned, and I want to thank many readers for a long time to come. Much that I have ever read will live on.

If you like these poems, here are some more:

• The Still Photo

• I’m Looking for a Black-and-White Shot

• Made One After Another

• Years and Years (includes a note on my process)

• In the Mail (includes a longer section on process)

• Everything Else is Pathetic (rare source material: my diary)

• The Gospel of Mary

Poet, translator, and publisher Rosmarie Waldrop isn’t just being figurative here—emphasizing the way we write into an inherited literary legacy, always in dialogue with the works we’ve read or written before—she’s being literal too. Her bibliography proves it. Rosmarie co-wrote many poems with her late husband, Keith. (The two also ran Burning Deck Press together from 1961 to 2017. For a while, Keith designed the covers, and Rosmarie set the type.)

When I interviewed the authors at their home in Providence in 2018, I asked about their co-written poems, how they wrote them and why. “[Collaboration] was a process we enjoyed tremendously,” Rosmarie reflected, “partly because it allowed us to play with each other’s way of writing, which normally is a no-no for each of us. But in collaboration I felt freedom to play with the way he [Keith] does things.” Elsewhere, in her portion of the jointly authored autobiographies Ceci n’est pas Keith/Ceci n’est pas Rosmarie, she quotes Michel Foucault saying something similar, “‘One writes to become other than one is.’” Even further, in this collaboration, one writes as another.

Keith described how the process worked, “[Rosmarie] would write something, give it to me, or the other way around,” and Rosmarie jumped in, “Keith would write a line, hand it to me, and when I got to it, I would write the next line.” While Keith’s account sounds as though they are teens secretly passing notes in class (Do you like me? Do you want to go out?), Rosmarie’s comment explains the process as almost like a chore (“when I got to it”), like the two were co-writing a grocery list (Did you remember to add milk? Do we still have eggs?).

The result? A kind of verbal collage, in which the creators can’t recall what the original materials were or where they came from. “When we put [all the lines] together and arranged them as we saw best,” Keith noted, “we found that we couldn’t always remember who wrote which half.” While they each contributed equally to the poem, neither voice dominates; further, neither voice is even recognizable on the page anymore. Instead, someone, or something, else speaks.

Barthes might argue that the author disappears entirely; in “The Death of the Author,” he claims, “It is language which speaks, not the author.” Jacques Roubaud claims that these coauthored works “are the poems of a third poet, whose name and gender and origin and language we do not know. But what we do see, and hear, are the poems.”

It’s true that their coauthored poems foreground sight and sound, throwing sense out the door. Some of my favorites come from their 2008 chapbook Flat With No Key. The collection is made up of twenty-six poems for the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and moves from A to Z. Each poem has numbered stanzas, and these numbers determine the stanza lengths. Further, every line contains at least one word that begins with the focus letter, and each stanza repeats words and phrases from the previous ones. Funny and disorienting, the poems play with how meaning changes in different compositions. (“Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different everything is not the same,” as Gertrude Stein says.)

“It is the form, not the content / that you feel all the way down to your foot,” asserts “F.” “K” begins, “Let’s perform something in a flat with no key.” Twisting idioms and employing puns, this third poet multiplies and divides meaning; they shake language upside down to take its lunch money. They are defiant, assertive, impulsive. Between writer and reader, they care more about making than they do about making sense. The splice of life, indeed.

I’ve been writing a lot of pitches recently that haven’t gone anywhere.

Or, I pitch somewhere and get a response that says, Maybe, but once I submit more materials, they pivot: Actually…We already agreed to publish someone else’s…Scheduled through to July…

One piece has been sitting with an editor since August 2025; each of my follow-up emails is tinged with desperation: Please, before it’s too late!

This move towards writing, and pitching my writing, has been changing the way I read. Now, I pick up forthcoming titles with urgency, gripping onto them tightly, reading closely, making annotations like whispers. I beg, Be relevant. Allow me to intervene in current conversations with a sharp point of view.

I light on passages that speak to the now and write frantically, channeling that intensity into the pitch: This is the first book to…the first-ever short story collection…a new, important voice…

This is a new way of reading and writing for me. Before, I’d follow my whims, picking up any title that struck me. But, like I’ve written about before, this made me feel aimless and sad. It was a kind of overconsumption that ultimately left me unsatisfied.

Now, I feel greedy in a different way, like an oil baron drilling into texts hoping to extract liquid gold.

I’m trying to find a balance, and a way to continue sharing what I’m reading here rather than hoarding it on my Google drive. So, in the meantime, here are some of the things I’ve been reading so far this year. I’d love to know what you’ve thought of these books if you’ve read them too.

Night People: How to Be a DJ in ‘90s New York City by Mark Ronson: I love a dispatch from a scene and a celebrity memoir. The fact that this one is both made it impossible for me to resist. Here's my full review.

Killing Stella by Marlen Haushofer: The one time I’ve cried in front of a class of kids was during a discussion of Rufus’s suicide in Another Country. I’d framed the discussion around how Rufus’s white friends failed to emotionally support him when he was suicidal, and somehow the conversation veered into students saying there was nothing that could have been done to stop Rufus’s death. I rarely shut down conversations with students, but this was a moment when I felt I had to. It was really hard. I was reminded of that moment when reading this book because it’s primarily about the way a family is complicit in (to blame for?) the suicide of Stella, a friend’s teenage daughter who comes to stay with them. It’s a domestic horror, a page-turner, and super smart. I wished it was longer (novellas aren’t for me), but maybe not as long as Another Country.

The Strange Case of Rachel K by Rachel Kushner: I can’t remember anything about this book except for the detail in one of the stories about the woman who draws the design of fishnet tights onto her legs.

Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford by Carla Kaplan: I may have something short about this biography of Jessica Mitford coming out somewhere…If that doesn’t pan out, look out for a mini review on here soon.

Offseason by Avigayl Sharp: I’ve been pitching a review of this forthcoming debut novel anywhere I can because I love it so much. It’s laugh-out-loud funny (as my dad would say), incredibly fresh, and full-hearted…If no one ends up taking me up on a review, I’ll post one here.

Heartburn by Nora Ephron: This was fun to read, though unmemorable. I liked the gimmick of her being a cookbook writer, and we’re her typical readers who would probably feel confused about why there are so few recipes and instead so many stories in this book. The robbery scene was entertaining.

Among Friends by Hal Ebbott: This was the first book I’ve read in a long time that made me cry. It’s possible that other reasons could account for my tears (getting an IUD, having a mucousy cough for a long time, other things), but I also think the plot and characters resonated with me. Without spoiling anything, a lifelong friend betrays another’s trust and hurts someone he loves. The relationship between the father and daughter in this book really touched me.

Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth: I love anything Hjorth writes, and this book is no exception. Read my review of the book here.

The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace: It’s no Infinite Jest, but it was really funny. Fewer heartwarming, tender moments in this one. Read my thoughts on DFW here.

Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction by : This is another one I’ve been pitching reviews and essays about. It’s a conversational, academic title for anyone with an interest in the publishing world. More soon if I don’t have any takers.

Jazz by Toni Morrison: I read this because of the way talked about it on the recent Toni Morrison episode of ’s Critics at Large. He’s right; the descriptions of New York City in this book are evocative, beautiful, and compelling. I especially love the part in the book when Morrison says we feel more desire (and I’d add crushes) in the city than in the suburbs or the country.

Currently, I’ve just returned to Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, and I’m loving it. I think I’ve been avoiding reading it because I’m jealous of the archive Wade gained access to and became the first to write about.

In any case, it’s comforting to read about Stein, who is so often characterized as an egomaniac with an overblown sense of self and an unshakeable conviction in her own genius, saying things like, “One does so badly want to be published that one is unreasonable.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

David Foster Wallace is having a moment. People are finally reading and admitting to enjoying Infinite Jest. This reader is thrilled.

I read the book in 2014, the summer after I graduated from high school, and met up with two of my high school English teachers once I finished the book so we could talk about it. There was simply too much to say! I loved how it reminded me of the picaresque ridiculousness of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces and the communion I felt with the characters when I read Anna Karenina. There’s something to be said for spending time with a set of characters and immersed in an author’s world and voice.

But when I got to college in the fall, I realized I shouldn’t be proclaiming my love for DFW so loudly. I didn’t want to be associated with the litbros who mentioned DFW at Eclectic parties or in Olin library because they were (usually) annoying, self-important, and arrogant.

So when I saw Hermione Hoby’s recent article in , I was delighted.1 In it, Hoby challenges our cultural allergy to this brilliant, compassionate work of fiction that has been criticized as performative, masturbatory, and sexist (not to mention annoying, boring, and self-indulgent).

I especially appreciated Hoby’s claim that the novel’s length is “a central feature of its ethic: not bigness as brag but duration as discipline” because it reminded me of Leslie Jamison’s reflections on reading Infinite Jest in her book The Recovering, which is part literary criticism, part memoir accounting the author’s experiences with alcoholism and treatment. She begins reading the book not long after attending AA for the first time and writes, “I approached my reading like a recovery program, by reading fifty pages a day–showing up for them whether I wanted to or not. At the top of each page, I took note of what had happened…These notes were a way of taking my own attendance, a way of saying I’ve been here.”

After reading Hoby’s essay, I felt the desire to reread the book, but unfortunately my copy is sequestered in my parents’ basement, a sign that I was one of many who felt they needed to hide their admiration of Infinite Jest. It also felt tough time-wise to commit to rereading it. So I settled for the next best thing, Wallace’s debut novel The Broom of the System, which came out when he was only 24(!).

Things I liked:

• The talking bird

• The rival baby food companies

• The telephone wires being crossed

• The manmade Great Ohio Desert

• This one scene where the sister of the protagonist(? Is Lenore Beadsman the protagonist, or is it Rick Vigorous, her incredibly jealous, creepy older boyfriend [and boss] who always wears a beret?) leads her family through a truly bizarre postmodern theater piece about their relationship to one another and to the objects in their life (they wear masks of their own faces, then in the performance’s climax they switch their masks)

• The Wittgenstein stuff; it didn’t really make sense in terms of the philosophy of the book, but I love that guy

• The character Norman Bombardini who decides to consume the entire world, obliterating the distinction between self and other, and starts literally eating everything and even tries to eat Lenore

• The protagonist’s grandma, also named Lenore Beadsman, who has lost the ability to maintain her own internal body temperature so she must always be in spaces that are calibrated to exactly 98.6 degrees (this matters later in the book)

• The quack therapist that Lenore sees, Dr. Jay, who always smells a breakthrough and has his patients strapped into moving chairs like they’re on a carnival ride (there’s also apparently an eject button for when a patient gets too angry with him; we never see it in use)

• The way Rick Vigorous reminisces about college: “It occurs to me now in force that in college things were never, not ever, at no single point, simply all right. Things were never just OK.”

• Many other things

I don’t think it’s as good as Infinite Jest, but he literally wrote this as an undergrad, so who am I to judge? If you decide to read any DFW, let me know. Let’s talk about it.

In an essay responding to the 2024 revelations about Nobel-winning short story writer Alice Munro—how the author knew but did nothing about the sexual abuse of her child by her partner—Rachel Aviv describes Munro’s writing as “almost traumatized.” “Denial is built into the structure,” Aviv writes, “She captures what it feels like to live next to pain and shame without ever looking directly at it.”

The writing of Norwegian novelist Vigdis Hjorth does just the opposite; indeed, she writes in reaction to denials like Munro’s. Instead, Hjorth’s novels present winding, recursive testimonies; her narrators continually confess what it feels like to represent pain and shame and live alongside a family that refuses to look directly at her trauma.

In Repetition (translated into English by Charlotte Barslund), Hjorth takes her title literally. The book is another variation of the story she tells in her 2016 novel Will and Testament, which is about the childhood sexual abuse a young girl suffers at the hands of her father—abuse her parents and siblings ignore and deny, time and time again.

The book is full of repetitions; full scenes, replete with dialogue, reappear in this new title. We reread, for example, the story of the night her parents read her diary, in which she fictionalizes the story of her first time having sex—the violation that leads to the discovery of even more violations. We listen, again, the haunting question her dad asks, “Did you bleed?”And we overhear her father, drunk and sobbing, telling her mother, “It isn’t easy being human.”

It isn’t easy to reread these stories, much less retell them. “Trauma tends to lead to a kind of unknowing repetition,” Aviv writes in the same article about Munro. In this line of thinking, trauma presents like reflux, bile rising in the throat, regurgitation filling the mouth.

But Hjorth’s Repetition asks readers to consider what might happen—what can be restored, challenged, or repaired—if one consciously, knowingly, chooses to repeat oneself.

That’s the major difference between Will and Testament and Repetition: the narrator now seems to accept her need or compulsion to repeat herself.

In Will and Testament, the narrator bitterly reproaches herself for her failed attempts to distance herself from her “stupid childhood” (“That should be my epitaph: All because of my stupid childhood.”). She even accepts the criticism of her partner Lars, who says “I cultivated and wallowed in my pain, rather than working to put it behind me.” She tries and fails to self-censor, “I invariably ended up talking about The Thing….I knew I was being tiresome, but I couldn’t help myself.”

Even so, she accepts others’ repetitions. At her father’s funeral, she listens patiently as her family members tell the story of his death, “every detail repeated over and over”: “And no wonder…that’s how you process dramatic events by retelling them over and over.”

She continues to have compassion for those who wrong her in Repetition. The title refers not only to her retelling of her trauma, but also her mother’s habitual attempts to control her as a teenager. Checking for the smell of smoke, calling friends’ homes to track her down, combing through the laundry, patrolling her every move. The narrator can’t determine if her mother’s attempts to control and catch her are “ritual[s] or compulsion[s],” if the repetitions are her mother trying to find proof that she’s gone to the bad or an overcorrection for “[failing] to protect me the way a mother should protect her child.”

In Repetition, the narrator tries to understand her mother, wondering what she would have done in her mother’s shoes, and extends more compassion and patience to herself.

“Anything you want to forget will come back to you,” the narrator begins the novel. Past trauma can’t be erased or repressed, it will always rear its horrific head. So, she urges herself and her readers to listen, because it “came back…in order to tell you something.”

This time, Hjorth seems to be trying to get her narrator and her readers to understand that tuning into these repetitions is a way to honor and tend to her past self: “Why do I write you when I mean me?”

At the novel’s conclusion, the narrator asks (Herself? Her parents? The reader?), “Will you never let it go?” “No,” she quickly asserts, “I repeat and recall and relive and retell and redress…[to] chip away at [the mind’s walls]” and “change myself.” And, I’d add, be there for herself.

Repeating her story isn’t just an unconscious trauma response; it’s a conscious act of care that allows her to greet the ghost of her past self with kindness rather than reproach. “Repetition,” as the narrator says, “is like a durable garment that hugs you tenderly.” The novel ends, “I put my arms around her, she lets herself be held.”

In the final minutes of the first episode of podcast “Private Life,” novelist and critic Darryl Pinckney reflects on his longtime teacher and friend Elizabeth Hardwick’s voice: “The sound is living within her all the time…you know she is herself no matter what she’s writing…a letter, a laundry list…the sound is her.”

A gift that Susan Sontag never had. Still Pinckney: “Poor Susan knew what it sounded like and labored to get there, but it’s not the same…Lizzie had to tame hers…because she had it.” (Brutal!)

My final sign. I’ve been wondering who to focus on next for a single-author study, and now it’s decided: Elizabeth Hardwick.

Everything points me in her direction. I’ve owned her postcard for quite some time (from the same series as the Sontag one), and she completes the triangle connecting Sontag and Sigrid Nunez. Indeed, both Sontag and Nunez have blurbs featured on the back of Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights.

Read and listen with me! (List is subject to grow…)

Books:

• Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature by Elizabeth Hardwick, introduction by Joan Didion: An essay collection that “considers the careers of women writers as well as the larger question of the presence of women in literature.”

• Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick, introduction by Geoffrey O’Brien: A fusion of autobiography and fiction that Sontag dubs “a novel of mental weather.”

• The New York Stories by Elizabeth Hardwick, introduced by Darryl Pinckney: A collection of stories, praised by Joyce Carol Oates: “Hardwick is, characteristically…a gifted miniaturist biographer.”

• Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan by Darryl Pinckney: A memoir recounting the author’s relationship with Hardwick and his early experiences of the New York literary world.

Podcasts, Articles, Etc.:

• “Private Life” Podcast Episode 1: Darryl Pinckney on Memoir, Friendship, and Elizabeth Hardwick

• “Private Life” Podcast Episode 2: From the Archive: “Working Girls: The Brontës” by Elizabeth Hardwick

• Articles on NYRB

• Maggie Doherty’s New Yorker review of Cathy Curtis’ biography of Hardwick, A Splendid Intelligence

In the acknowledgements section of Night People, Mark Ronson offers a perfect review of his own book: “the Mark Ronson book nobody asked for.”

Indeed, the book is superfluous, unnecessary, disposable. I asked for it for Christmas because I didn’t want to spend my own money on it; for some reason the thought didn’t occur to me to rent it from the library.

And yet, I read the book—even the acknowledgements section, for God’s sake—in full.

I first came to consciously know Mark Ronson through his album Late Night Feelings, one of my favorite pop albums of all time. But before that, I unconsciously knew him, for his production of Amy Winehouse’s album Back to Black and his ear worm “Uptown Funk,” to name a few.

What I love about Ronson’s music is that he’s an artist of association, compilation, and collage. He sees value in things others have made and creates his own art out of that devotion; in each sample, listeners can feel his elbow at our ribs and hear him whispering (or more likely shouting over the beat), Isn’t this amazing?

Is it that he’s not enough on his own? Ronson himself may say so; one part of his memoir recounts playing guitar with best friend Sean Lennon (yes, that Lennon) and realizing that he’s not a natural musician or innately talented like Sean.

But what can be acquired is knowledge and skill. To be sure, Ronson is a dedicated student of music; he’s constantly researching, practicing, learning. He’s devoted to locating vinyls and following musical trails, finding his way to the original sounds other DJs and musicians sample.

Unfortunately, Ronson’s writing is like his guitar playing, unnatural and forced. The more “literary” moments are written in second-person (“You’re at a house party packed with people rolling up from the club…Now you’re in the club…”), implicating readers in something they’d rather not admit to being a part of. Plus, he uses plenty of onomatopoeia (“ZZZZZRT! KRRRKKKKK!!!!”) to imitate the sound of records scratching or beats misaligning.

At best, this is a well-written, albeit long, personal statement for admittance to undergrad (Ronson attended, then dropped out of Vassar). At worst, it is an ambivalent reflection on being a white DJ who desperately wants to be a part of Black culture (in Ronson’s defense he doesn’t shy away from this discussion).

But I didn’t come for the writing; I came for the gossip. I love dispatches from a scene (like Jeff Weiss’ Waiting for Britney Spears, Griffin Dunne’s Vegas, etc.), learning about celebrity run-ins and feeling like I’m infiltrating the inner circle. Some juicy tidbits I learned: I didn’t know about Rudy Giuliani’s hatred for nightlife or how, Footloose-style, DJ’s would cut music and people would stop dancing as soon as the police arrived if the place didn’t have a dancing license. I also didn’t know that Samantha Ronson (of Lindsay Lohan dating fame!) is Mark’s sister.

While I will certainly be disposing of this book (I don’t think Unnameable or Troubled Sleep will let me trade this one in for store credit), I didn’t expect to feel such affinity for Ronson’s spirit. Like him, I often feel overcome with excitement about, and exhibit unabashed enthusiasm for, books and writers I love, unable to contain myself when I see a stranger at a bookstore pick up one of my favorite titles.

Ronson knows this feeling well and isn’t too embarrassed to express it. In the final section of his book (not including the acknowledgements lol), “One Last Song” (I know, bear with me), Ronson describes a recent DJing experience:

“Digging through my crates, I find it—like a needle in a haystack—the perfect record. It’s exactly what I need to crack the room open—to give people a reason to be alive. My pulse quickens as I cue it up. This song—like a gift I can’t wait to give, the kind where you can barely contain your excitement knowing it’s exactly what they need but don’t know they want…And the beat drops.”

“I just think the coolest things come naturally. Even in high school, I’d enjoy that.” So it was. Let me see if this is still something I said.

“So I would go home and write out sequined gowns, feathered fascinators, the feeling I didn’t like. And I thought, It’s the truth of where I’m at. I’m looking for me,” she said. “So be even more perfect. But, then, that’s it in the world. That’s the saddest I’ve ever been in years; it veers through musings on the night going the way I wanted it to.”

He kept busy in the interim. Since evening, his eyes were dewy. He was sitting, and she aimed to write, too. Narratives down her nose. “Oh, my God, look how surprised,” she said. “But I was, and still it all works, and every woman on the line is good at it,” he said. “That was the era of rigidity, and we were allowed out, but nothing would transpire,” she said, moving to the music.

There’s nothing like the culminating event in a weeklong of archival photographs. But her aspirations were elsewhere. She was in a shirt and jeans, and was in town to talk to be a little more individualized.

“But I would have friends over, like, get up, have a crush on a guy, and we’d hang—pretty, that is,” he marvelled.

She has always been instinctive and more than four hundred of them have the personality this attracts. You’d have to be into this; nobody in my personal life was.

There’s a pleasure in watching a music video in which someone else lip-syncs for the lead singer. It shatters the illusion music videos already operate under: artists are nearly always lip-syncing too. The displacement also creates a friction between what you see and what you hear, undercutting “who” the song is even for. When you sing along, the switch-up suggests, it’s like you star in the video too.

Some videos use many people to lip-sync (like “Rockstar” by Nickelback), while few feature just one person. Chevy Chase steamrolls Paul Simon in “You Can Call Me Al,” pissing Simon off. Rupert Grint stands in for Ed Sheeran in “Lego House,” absurd given how similar they look. (Maybe the director asked Sheeran what actor he wanted to play him in a biopic.) Robert Downey Jr. lip syncs Elton John’s “I Want Love” like an amateur; he’s clearly moving his lips without making a sound.

This author’s guilty pleasure? Justin Bieber in Drake’s “Popstar,” a video that gently mocks both artists. If you know the song, there’s a lyric that references the teeny bopper (“​​Shit don’t even usually get this big without a Bieber face”), which sounds perfectly silly coming out of Bieber-as-Drake. Ultimately, the video suggests, being “Drake” is a performance anyway, so the artist saves himself the trouble.

The most recent addition to the genre is Amiture Music’s “Memory Sequence,” casting Regina Melady as Amiture’s Jack Whitescarver. The choice creates a delightful dissonance; Whitescarver’s rumbling deep voice slips out of petite Melady’s mouth. Unlike “Popstar”: while Bieber seems to have been rapping the entire time (made clear in the video’s epilogue), Melady’s director warned her: speak, don’t sing.

The Still Photo

I’ve always been especially moved there—and on the case—when the stimuli you give to a person. (Open now). Four years showed me what was what, and occurrences that led to my ability to perceive them. “I’m just saying, ‘This is every day.’”

The stark moments: eating, taking out the trash with an almost divisive intent, turning what humanity is. It seems to me that many of the fifty-four photographs on view fully consider the fact that our minds miss him every day.

“Perhaps the reason has been erased,” he said, “and what we mind is the ability to learn not only learning.” I don’t feel that way at all, especially when I contemplate becoming an artist.

In a recent conversation, he described a sweeping mountain—or any of the tableau and candid portraits of the mind of a toddler.

Thinking About Off and On

“I’m not saying, ‘This is us,’” he explained. “We talk about our culture vacuum—and how it’s formed by people around us caught in mundane traditions. The words resting on their backs, sunlight blazing like neural networks. Don’t exist in a pan; be happy to be proved wrong.”

He discovered an ability, extending it to examine what, even now, the more pious members of mine run away from to go skiing or surfing or simply flake.

What a loss his “ability to ‘get’ what someone is talking about” and his understanding that those “know now from the past.” I would recommend his work, but when I first learned of this new voice I sensed something demonic afoot.

Yes, it’s about one’s own experience, but there are also inputs based on physical experience.

Before digging in, we took a step back and considered our associations with her prior to the reading group. Many of us had read her work in college (“Against Interpretation” in a dance theory course, “Notes on Camp” in queer theory, etc.) or simply recognized her face and figure from photographs.

We talked about how challenging it often is to read her work; her sentences are so rarely pleasurable, her references highly specific and obscure, her ideas often unnecessarily heady. At other times, her work seems so obvious and cliche; the ideas in On Photography and Illness and Its Metaphors are so ubiquitous that when reading those texts one often has the thought: “No, duh.”

What was most fun to discuss was the creation of Sontag’s persona, the project of her lifetime. I brought in three passages that pull on this thread.

The first is Sontag’s description of the Saturnine temperament in the title essay about Walter Benjamin (one of Sontag’s idols) in Under the Sign of Saturn. “The mark of the Saturnine temperament,” Sontag explains, “is the self-conscious and unforgiving relation to the self…The self is a text—it has to be deciphered…The self is a project, something to be built…And the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.”

In writing about Benjamin, Sontag is really writing about herself. Reborn, the first collection of published Sontag journals, is packed with “marks” of such a temperament. The entries are self-conscious and unforgiving; Sontag alternates between chastising and encouraging herself, especially when it came to her writing.

In the December 31, 1957 entry titled “On Keeping a Journal,” she proclaims that in her journal she doesn’t just “express” herself but also “creates” herself. She saw herself as a project to be built, much like Benjamin, and was often frustrated with the painstaking slowness of this process.

In the same entry, she criticizes herself: “Nothing prevents me from being a writer except laziness.” Then interrogates herself about the value of writing in the first place (“Why is writing important? Mainly, out of egotism, I suppose.”) and then her motives for achieving it: “I want to be that persona, a writer…not because there is something I must say. Yet why not that, too?”

She is truly in arrears with herself, sensing she is overdue in payment to her persona. How to keep going? “With a little ego-building—such as the fait accompli this journal provides—I shall win through to the confidence that I (I) have something to say, that should be said.” Her self-schism happens between the parentheses; here, her double is born.

Days later, in 1958, Sontag follows up on her pronouncements and introduces the metaphor of the mask: “More interesting than the mask as…disguise is the mask as…aspiration. Through the mask of my behavior, I do not protect my raw genuine self—I overcome it.”

The cost of this mask, though, is the potential to be mistaken for someone or something you are not.

In the opening chapter of his biography of Sontag, Moser writes about how her performance, which was supposed to set her free, ultimately trapped her. “Sontag sought recognition and cultivated her image,” Moser writes, but she was ultimately disappointed by what she felt was the “price of her double.” She wished “being famous would be more fun,” for one.

Worse, though, was that she felt that her person had been replaced with her representation, the worst fear for Sontag—a critic against interpretation, against metaphor, against the lure of the photograph. But perhaps this representation was an embodiment of her camp theory. Moser quotes Sontag, “‘Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman,’” and inserts an addition, “What better illustration of camp than the gap between Susan Sontag and ‘Susan Sontag’?”

After our discussion, we watched a few videos (Sontag on Charlie Rose, Sontag refusing to answer questions about pop culture [linked on r/cringe because that’s what we did when we watched it], Sontag’s screen tests with Andy Warhol) that illuminate her persona. She discusses her love of divas and actors and acts the part of a diva herself. (A favorite line: “I’m sorry. Excuse me. Are we not speaking English?”)

And finally, we all left with our own representations of the critic: stickers, printed on my new thermal sticker printer. She would have hated it.

“Susan Sontag was America’s last great literary star,” Benjamin Moser claims in the introduction to Sontag, his biography of the critic. “She created the mold, and then she broke it.”

It’s true; Sontag’s singularity is unmatched. How else did I come to choose her as a subject to study? I love the writings of figures like Janet Malcolm and Joan Acocella, but their names, their biographies, don’t captivate me in the same way.

I’m not alone: “‘At no other writer’s name can I stare entranced for hours on end—only Susan Sontag’s,’” writes Wayne Koestenbaum in 2005.1

Not only her name, but also her face, her figure. I knew her body before I knew her mind. I’ve owned a postcard version of Peter Hujar’s photo of Sontag for years—purchased at Labyrinth Books in Princeton, NJ, in high school (another, unintentionally related one I acquired features Elizabeth Hardwick) before I’d ever read anything by her. I loved, and then owned a copy of, her ribbed turtleneck. I admired the flatness of her chest, her jet-black hair greying at the temples, her defined chin, prominent eye brows. I can’t resist a star.

And she was one, cemented in Andy Warhol screen tests. But while her image, her postcard, can be reproduced, her spirit and celebrity cannot—or so Moser claims.

And it’s true; the position of a cultural critic is at risk. Over the summer, the New York Times reassigned four of its culture critics to new positions, prompting outcry at the New Yorker, Variety, and New York Magazine (among other places) about the broader devaluation of cultural criticism. Richard Brody’s New Yorker essay warns that devaluing criticism in this way will ultimately lead to a decline in enthusiasm for the arts itself.

This debate isn’t new. Even “[Walter] Benjamin thought the freelance intellectual was a dying species,” writes Sontag in the title essay of Under the Sign of Saturn. “Indeed,” she continues, “he felt that he was living in a time in which everything valuable was the last of its kind.”

Perhaps there is a lesson for Moser and for all of us in Benjamin’s fear, re-articulated through Sontag, who proved he wasn’t the last of his kind. Maybe she isn’t either.

What would it take to produce another? Sontag had an idea; in an interview with the Washington Post: “‘It’s not so much to own an apartment and have all your books out of storage and have time to write. These are not unreasonable demands; they’re not corrupt.’”2

On a Prediction

The article was greatly entertaining—especially when it was snarky. Consider why readers might be drawn to their phones. “Enrichment” refers to the process that cheats death, crossing the desert and publishing house in New York. As a checker, I knew the art of fact checking.

I speculated that a name was coming, but not yet known. I hope it’s possible to re-create this essay. It became even more enjoyable to criticize, to embody “the needs of” me.

I had a long laugh about the irony error did for my ego.

Made One After Another

In my time as a writer and an editor, I had fun—apart from finding the essay about how music went out for delivery. This is a friend of mine. I, too, live in an uncertain address. Who are you? he asked, but I couldn’t give an answer that pleased him.

Rock and roll, he said, is sung, played, used to signal to one another that fundamental issue. Then it comes to me coming back to him.

But he skims over one of the ecologies, and I need spaces that have stood shoulder to shoulder. Building codes certainly—words that cultivate all people who have the same feeling in the same way today.

Mistakes Quote Nicely

I listened to her harrowing account of the woman with elegant shoes. In a crucial moment of the story, she called out the main issue. However, not exactly in that way.

Recently, she was relieved to reach the burn zone; after the evacuation, I have evolved with fires. Cities are human to me—inspired, safe, and housed. A much larger fraction of this resource was delightful prose like this that kept me on the scene.

It can’t last. I tell her to compete with the positive reviews that he wrote. What structures threaten the stability of the poetic human being she is.

These collage poems were constructed using multiple sections of the New Yorker’s “The Mail.”

I’ve been struggling with this problem since I’ve started pitching my work to publications because I’ve also been tending to my Substack.

At first, I wrote pieces with a destination in mind: publication or Substack. But that line is murky, the boundary wavering depending on a piece’s focus, voice, style, argument, timing. Not necessarily an issue of quality but one of classification.

(Plus, the advice of a celebrated critic echoes in my head: “Focus on writing book reviews about forthcoming titles instead of spending time on Substack.”)

When I first started posting here, I would alternate between publishing newly written pieces and essays or poems that had been long-saved on my google drive, gathering dust.

Now I sense myself shifting, frustrated by trying to keep these pieces alive long enough for somewhere to want them. So as soon as I got a first rejection on these micro-reviews, I decided to gather them together for a Substack post. I suppose that means what these pieces have in common is rejection, but at least they’ve found a home.

Bringing Up Baby

Patricia Lockwood and Miranda July have much in common: off-kilter, quirky protagonists, and books that fall within a new sub-genre of fiction that has emerged in the past ten years: “A Baby Arrives and Changes Everything.” In July’s The First Bad Man (2015), protagonist Cheryl Glickman is an oddball outsider seeking the romantic love of her life, only to find that the most fulfilling love is the kind she feels for her adopted child. Lockwood’s protagonist is equally odd but more frantic in No One is Talking About This (2021). In this book, the protagonist’s sister has a child who is born with a rare, ultimately fatal disorder that throws the world’s chaos—both online and IRL—into stark relief. Certainly, the novels are valuable for their honesty about the before and after, but they also attest that the babies can be brought up within these weird worlds/works—no new genre required.

Mothers on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Lynne Ramsay’s shift from depicting troubled children (We Need to Talk About Kevin) to difficult mothers (Die My Love) reflects a broader literary movement from the 1980s to today. Earlier works centered on evil, almost demonic children (Doris Lessing’s haunting novel The Fifth Child [1988] and Susan Sontag’s creepy short story “Baby” [1978]).

Now, it’s mom who has the problems. In Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch (2021), a stay-at-home mom literally transforms into a dog; in Szilvia Molnar’s The Nursery (2023) postpartum terrors manifest in the protagonist’s fierce protectiveness and intrusive thoughts of harm. Ramsay’s adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s novel of the same name perpetuates this trend of moms-on-the-brink.

Really, this trend began with “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s horror story of postpartum depression. Ramsay reminds viewers of this lineage: in one scene, Jennifer Lawrence frantically rips down her bathroom’s wallpaper. But in the next scene, nails bloodied and raw, she clutches her picture-perfect baby.

Object Impermanence

Nothing much happens in Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series. Despite its science-fiction premise—protagonist Tara Selter is stuck in a time-loop, reliving November 18—the books read like prose poems. Tara mostly thinks; the pages are full of meditations on love, work, seasons, objects.

There’s little conventional conflict, but one major struggle unfolds between Tara and things: groceries vanish overnight, and journal entries disappear from her computer. The basic psychological lesson of childhood—object permanence—must be unlearned.

When, in book III (spoiler ahead), Tara meets others also stuck in time, their first real discussion concerns their unsettled relationship to objects. “Objects need to become accustomed to us,” some argue. “But things are all different and we are all different; we can each make different things stay.” Clutching their blankets close, the group moves in together, huddled like children at a sleepover after a scary movie.

This post is a follow-up to an earlier one about books I and II, which was actually my first Substack post ever.