“It is better to say ‘I am suffering,’” writes Simone Weil, “than to say, ‘This landscape is ugly.’”

I wanted to be more disciplined about the noise I was taking in so that I could be re-acquainted with my own thoughts, my own mind. Mainly this meant fewer podcasts, less scrolling. At the end of the school year, I told a colleague I had big plans for the summer and he said “is it lots of reading and writing?” and I said, yes, haha, it’s lots of reading and writing.

And while I’m still in full summer bloom, I am unable, ever, to fully stop working. I’ve been writing many essays and working on two novels, building a course on Modernism at a leisurely pace, prepping another course on Fascism, serving on a curriculum committee, taking a writing course for fun—and I’ve seen a lot of great films, gone on a UFO desert adventure, and gotten, for a moment, excited about soccer.

I’ve also been reckoning with some painful moral questions.1

Oppressed by the figures of beauty

In the early days of my grief and heartbreak, I left a note for myself as mantra to repeat when I woke in the morning: today you will be the most gracious and beautiful version of yourself that you can muster. Usually I failed, and every day I tried again.

By beautiful I did not mean that I would be the best-looking version of myself. I meant that I would make a great effort not to be ugly to others in my despair. I have often used the words “beautiful” and “ugly” in a moral sense, not a physical one, though I suppose this is strange or archaic.

But lately I was thinking that we often become similar to the images we take in—it’s mimetic desire, or it’s some kind of normalization, or it’s both—and it matters what we take in to our minds. Or sometimes we become the images we make. A kind of how you spend your days is how you spend your life2 kind of logic.

Like everyone else in my demographic I read Jia Tolentino’s recent New Yorker piece on plastic surgery. Tolentino uses the word “evil.” She writes that sometimes all this expensive and risky plastic surgery makes her want to return to the Christianity she grew up with, though she notes that contemporary religious women are not exempt from the pressure to fill, freeze, plasticize, starve, lift, etc. “The beauty ideal,” she writes, “has always been terribly evil.”

Tolentino wasn’t saying anything anybody doesn’t already know, and I’ve been loving what Jessica DeFino of Flesh World writes about all this, referring to the impulse of mimesis I waved my hands at above—

Contrary to the beauty industry’s favorite marketing line – “do it for you!” – no desire springs authentic and unbidden from the depths of one’s innermost soul. Rather, as philosopher René Girard argued in his 1961 theory of “mimetic desire”, all human desire is derivative. We want the things we want, in other words – the Labubu, the barrel jeans, the de-aged face – because other people want them.

DeFino makes a point that resonates with Tolentino’s talk of good and evil—there’s a moral component here:

Beauty functions as an ethical ideal in society. Some prominent pop culture examples: Grown adults think Anne Hathaway looks youthful at 42 because she’s a good person and Prince William went bald because he’s “problematic.” Beauty, or lack thereof, prompts a lot of (subconscious) moral judgement. Judgment of beauty is often entangled with judgment of naturalness. For example, studies show that we judge people who’ve undergone obvious cosmetic work as morally inferior — it’s associated with lying.

And I love (feel obsessed by) her question: “Who is beauty for?”

I was in the middle of a draft of this post when I saw that DeFino has things to say about Tolentino! I recommend reading that, too. That there is a difference between beauty and appearance—and she even mentions Iris Murdoch, the very point I was coming to.

We can more accurately describe the premise of the beauty industry, then, not as beauty, but as an error in beauty. And we could more specifically describe it not as beauty (which is multi-dimensional, sensorial, spiritual, and connects you to something outside of and larger than yourself ), but as appearance (which is flattened, two-dimensional, and individualistic).3

I am as afflicted by the beauty standard as anyone. I am also exhausted. Part of what feels quote unquote evil is that we’re asked to agree to a lie—that we ourselves confuse beauty with appearance. But do we all really agree on what’s beautiful? Do we not have more bizarre, interesting, unconventional views? Are we not capable of having our own eyes, developing our own tastes, seeing something other than what’s been served to us?

We are ugly but we have the music

Around the time I was reading the Tolentino essay I got into a ugly conversation with a friend. He was chastising me for my friendship to someone he felt was behaving hideously. I was complicit. Friendship signified agreement, he felt, and the only correct thing to do was to abandon the friend.

Perhaps the spiral I got caught in after this would be familiar to those of us who over-think, who have anxiety, who, for whatever reason, tend to doubt and blame themselves. I will not draw you into that line of thinking, but after the argument I startled awake from a nightmare at 2 a.m. Part of my distress was my inability to understand what had happened—how much of the argument was my responsibility, how much was his, and how much either of us had been wrong—I fell asleep again after having the thought: I should ask someone who thinks with absolute moral clarity to help me. Then the thought: crap, there’s no such person.

Then, randomly, an Iris Murdoch discussion ended up on my podcast queue, so I sought out Murdoch’s “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts.” To be good, one needs to get past the clouding apparatus of the self and to attend to reality:

The psyche is a historically determined individual relentlessly looking after itself. In some ways it resembles a machine . . . . It constantly seeks consolation, either through imagined inflation of self or through fictions of a theological nature. Even its loving is more often than not an assertion of self. I think we can probably recognize ourselves in this rather depressing description.

One of the ways to combat this “rather depressing” situation is to attend to what is beautiful in nature and in art. She warns that most art is falsely consoling, but that good art helps us to get beyond the self and to see reality clearly. It leads to real humility. Reading this essay by Murdoch was, actually, quite clarifying. I tried to keep it front of mind, even doing my old morning mantra routine—reminding myself upon waking and during many moments of the day to try to pay better attention, to quiet the part of myself that was not able to see clearly.

I thought of the few films I have seen that seem to demonstrate how to behave in this way—attending to reality. (Please send me recommendations if you have others!) I wrote about this a bit in an old post about Mrs. Dalloway. My list is Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days, and now Dag Johan Haugerud4’s Love. (The whole trilogy does this, but Love, especially). Each of these films has a character who seems willing to look lovingly and attentively at others, to behold the beauty of nature and of art and of other people…

But maybe I’ve misunderstood everything! Almost definitely I have an unphilosophical reading of Murdoch, and maybe thus an incorrect one? But as I said to someone I have loved for a long time, it’s okay with me to use this essay and these films in the desperate way a creature does when they desire to be beautiful.

(The quote at the top (Simone Weil) is from an essay by Christian Wiman on William Bronk. He writes, of one of my own favorite poems, that though it is one of the saddest things he’s ever read, “this minor poem brings me major peace. Why? Because it is beautiful, and beauty triggers an instinct for an order beyond the one it enacts.”)

Addendum

A little self- and other-promo: my story, “The Third Thing,” which is about the loneliness of a honeymoon, the bleak final moments of a marriage, about art monsters and ALSO about UFOs, is coming out in this anthology this fall alongside many other stories by writers I know and admire. More soon!

3

FLESH WORLD by Jessica DeFino

Really, Jia?

I’ve been vaguely annoyed with Jia Tolentino for six and a half years, through no fault of her own; it’s just that people credit her with coining the term “Instagram Face” and she didn’t. The New Yorker critic’s December 2019 treatise on the topic, “The Age of Instagram Face…

Read more

a month ago · 59 likes · 5 comments · Jessica DeFino

Here’s this instead. (CN: domestic violence)

Are you God, Bob? (a short essay filled with fury)

The first time I watched A Complete Unknown, I left the theatre and decided it was time for me to be more of an asshole on behalf of my own art. Enough with giving myself away in relationships. Enough with letting my time get wasted.

The fourth time I watched it was with the one of my daughters who has absorbed both my love of old folk music and my love of literature. My main thought was—god, what an asshole.

Several years ago, a writer I was at a residency with told me my “vulnerability” was a “flex.” My pose of vulnerability was a way to remain invulnerable, he wagered, though I didn’t operate in a way that could make any attempts at such power available to my own conscious awareness.

Though maybe it was my strength (often perceived and remarked on by others) that made it possible for me to be vulnerable, “authentic,” “present”—what have you.

When I moved to California, I listened to Joni Mitchell’s Blue on repeat. Could take as a mantra of the female artist “I could drink a case of you, and I’d still be on my feet,” an assertion of her dominance, her strength. About Blue, Mitchell said,

At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn't pretend in my life to be strong.

Mitchell was one of the vulnerable-strong artists I could draw on as a model: I often felt like the cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes.

My other mantra for a long time was from Fiona Apple: “Be kind to me, or treat me mean, I’ll make the most of it I’m an extraordinary machine.”

I first encountered some of this Mitchell-lore in Claire Dederer’s Monsters. Dederer writes,

Joni Mitchell was an asshole on behalf of her own vulnerability.

That Dederer included Mitchell in a book about what to do about the art of monstrous people (mostly men being rapists or abusers), made me furious. Mitchell is stuck in a chapter of abandoning mothers, where Dederer acknowledges the imbalance: there are very few monstrous woman, and usually the worst crime they commit is abandoning their children. So far so good. (Should I be reading her as facetious? Even when she describes that being away from her children for even brief periods of time causes her to feel pain and grief).

But to call Joni an abandoning mother (and to imply that she is monstrous or at least problematic) because at twenty-one, unmarried, poor, and an aspiring musician she gave her infant up for adoption? It was 1965. A difficult woman, though. Mitchell also left Graham Nash, despite loving him. Also, um, she’s kind of opinionated and abrasive?

Earlier in the book, Dederer writes “Pablo Picasso was an asshole.” Not the same kind of asshole, surely. Picasso was abusive and a predator. Picasso put a cigarette out on a woman’s face.

Honestly I’m still furious. Dederer writes “Even women who’ve done this terrible thing, who’ve abandoned their children, seem to agree that it’s the blackest of crimes" as an introduction to a quote from Paula Fox who neither abandoned her children NOR admitted that it was the blackest of crimes. What Fox actually describes is putting her baby up for adoption and longing to have her back.

In the chapter on abandoning mothers, Dederer includes Doris Lessing, whom, she writes, did the unthinkable: leaving behind two of her children in Rhodesia and moving to London for good with the third.

I’ve recently been reading The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem a book about artist-mothers that goes into Doris Lessing’s biography at length. Turns out that things were not as simple as leaving two children behind but keeping a third.

Lessing had left a difficult marriage and in so doing lost access to her children, an outcome she neither wanted nor accepted at first:

In March 1945 Doris described [in a letter] what ensued after she phoned to ask if she could have the children for Easter. First Frank said he wanted to see her in person. Then, as they stood outside on the street, he lectured her for ‘neglecting’ John and Jean after the divorce.

Me. Since I was forbidden to see them at all it is difficult to see what else I could do but neglect them.

He. Still, it showed lack of feeling.

Me. Apart from marrying you, or staying married to you I couldn’t do anything else.

He. Precisely.

8.

When I declared to myself that I would be more like Bob Dylan, be more of an asshole on behalf of my art, I meant that I would waste less time and energy on emotional labor. How to do this? I love to spend time with my children. I am delighted by their independence and strength and sense of humors and lovingkindness. Yes, I am a mother. Yes, in some sense, I work in a caring profession. And yes, I love to spend time with my friends.

I spoke to a friend on the phone recently, and he advised me: “I know you are governed by your mental life and by your relationships, but don’t give yourself away to everybody. If you don’t empty yourself, you get to keep it.”

Some Recommendations

1. read: The Baby on the Fire Escape, which was urged into my hands by another writer-mother-teacher, and which I have not finished as I’m taking so many notes.

2. read: Andreja Novakovic’s Chantal Akerman: Filmmaker and Philosopher, which felt very expansive and nostalgic and had me wishing I could find Akerman’s romcom (starring Juliette Binoche!) anywhere. Novakovic writes, in one of my favorite chapters: “Romance is supposed to bring us to a home from which we will then long to escape only to seek another home that would strike us as no less confining. This suggests that there is something about the structure of romantic love that makes it comical…”

   

3. watch: Novakovic (a dear friend) is also the reason I watched the Oslo trilogy Sex/Dreams/Love as I tried to settle into my first summer break in a very long time. Both Love and Dreams gave me the wonderful filled-up/attentive-person-in-the-world/ready-to-make-art-again sorts of feelings that I crave in films. Both are tender as well as funny; Dreams felt like reading a novel (since much of it was the voiceover of a novel written by its main character) and included many lines from poems I’d never read; Love was, by contrast, about growing out of the juvenile desperate love of teenage dreams and into the adult world of loving with far less abandon but no less sweetness.

   

4. do: prioritize your writing, especially if you, like me, have been busy rebuilding a destroyed life for the past few years. (see above…) this summer I’m taking a writing class on longform nonfiction, already paying me back, AND writing my novel with a friend in an accountability via reading along and Zoom check-ins AND writing a children’s novel with two of my kids. I feel like myself again.

A friend and I were talking about epistemic humility, about how absurd it was to imagine that we could understand the entire universe, like, from right here! I had been joking about the residue of my own credulity, joking about how it was Taurus season—my season—and wasn’t the moon up to something too? I was talking, too, about times in my life when I’d had feelings of dread thad had indeed prefigured some doom. How much did we know without knowing what we knew? (Even Alan Turing tried to leave room for the possibility that telepathic abilities would interfere with his tests).

Then, finally finished my last library school assignment of a pretty assignment-filled semester, I managed to finished a book for pleasure: I Who Have Never Known Men, which hammered home a kind of point about the absurdity of existence and all we cannot understand. I emerged from the book, which I could not put down for the entirety of an afternoon, feeling that I was forever changed.

A month ago, I managed to finish Moby-Dick and also read another book everyone had been talking about—Perfection, by Vincenzo Latronico.

Perfection is bleak and about the pointlessness of existence in a different and oddly less life-affirming way than I Who Have Never Known Men, which, on the surface, should be more depressing. The women in the book will never understand their lonely and difficult lives, while the characters in Perfection are “creatives” and ex-pat-millenials living in Berlin and, it seems, trying to live a meaningful existence in a world determined by economic forces, the internet, and boredom. I loved the experiment of this novel, which was heavily inspired by Things: A Story of the Sixties by Georges Perec, a book I immediately also acquired. The novel has no interiority, however; it is a novel of surfaces and what happens to us when we believe in them, and thus it just did not really trouble me. It is about people longing to live the sorts of lives they see in curated Instagramy-images, while also themselves determined to produce such images.

“Even their moods were new, which is why they had no commonly recognized name. Instead, they would be described in terms borrowed from other, vaguely related types of experiences, all of which fell short of expressing an inner landscape reconfigured by twenty years of the internet.”

Perfection frequently reminded me of Revolutionary Road, the part of that novel that has haunted me for years because I saw my own desperation as a young parent in it—the ordinary couple in an ordinary nuclear family decide that they should move to Paris in order to meet some vague ambition they both have to meet their true fates, which is to show themselves that they are not ordinary.

Both novels are slim but cover full decades. They each provide a lesson in how to make a novel move in that way. The characters in Perfection seem to live empty lives; the narrator of I Who Have Never Known Men is an empty vessel, a character who has, by accident, not been conditioned in the way everyone else on earth has.

I heard of both of these novels through the usual osmostic processes: it seemed everyone else was reading them last year.

And Also Living

And speaking of the internet and the desperation to somehow escape one’s ordinary fate, I have been reading Julie Phillips’ truly excellent The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem.

I’d been reflecting a great deal on the time in my life when I was a young mother as I struggle to work on a novel that is about motherhood and sanity and also cults. I’ve reflecting on my time as a dogmatic believer in the dictates of natural mothering. Each child’s birth, it seemed to me at the time, had taught me to have a kind of humility—each had humbled me in a different way. The first seemed, for a while, to be pure joy, pure meaning, pure self-annihilation in the name of other-love; I had learned something new, I thought, that I was meant, in some deep and destined way, to be a mother. That a thing could happen to reveal something new to me about love and life and the self; that the things of life befell you and you couldn’t choose for yourself what they were.

Then I fell into an incredibly deep and terrible depression after the second. I had learned something new, I thought, that I know nothing about who I am or what I should be.1 During that miserable time, someone I had once worked with expressed what feels to me know like a kind of schadenfreude directed at me when I posted about the difficulties of having two young children. She seemed happy to see that I was struggling and that I knew it.

There is a difference between an influencer cynically trying to sell you on a way of life and the rest of us, trying to live, trying, maybe, to sell ourselves on a way of life. When all five of us, Adam and me and three children under six moved to California for his miraculous academic job, someone I barely knew but who was a Facebook friend—and who had failed to get the sort of academic job she wanted—made some petty remark about our move. California was having a drought, and she wrote a series of self-justifying remarks about her own choices and scoffed at us, “oh, make sure you bring water!”

Maybe I was very annoying to others in the things I posted. It was early days of social media for me. I rarely find myself provoked by other people’s lives online anymore, and while I think I am not someone prone to envy—which I take to be my good luck—I do remember seething with resentment in university about a friend who seemed to get every single thing she applied for and then to brag about it. I’m sure many people felt something like schadenfreude when I announced that my long and seemingly happy marriage was over, and I remember how useful it was to me the way people’s reactions to your sorrows could reveal to you which were your friends and which really wished you ill. Or, more benignly: it was very easy to see who wanted gossip—those we gossip about are never really real to us, I think—and who really loved me. Divorce and heartbreak didn’t seem to reveal the worst in others, though; it revealed to me the best in them and in myself.

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One’s Own Patterns

If I list all the things I am doing, even I am surprised. It’s too many things. I’ve been in this pattern for a very long time: taking on more than anyone should humanly be able to do and then announcing to all that soon life will get easier and I’ll have more time. Clearly there is some part of me that loves this, that needs to be something like a workaholic but one without an obvious goal—not money, certainly, since none of the things I am doing seem to profit me much. It does make me feel more alive to feel that I am still challenging myself, learning new things (coaching a sport for the first time in my life!), but also living in a kind of economic desperation not to become wealthy but for there to be options if all the other options fall apart. It’s the workaholism of a person who has always had to work.

It’s very easy to see the patterns in other people’s lives that are holding them back, and, even if we can see our own patterns to tell ourselves a story about why we live the way we do.

I sometimes wish I was the sort of person who could write a self-help book and make a killing. I actually did go through some things! I rebuilt my own life and went on a genuine journey of self-discovery.

I guess a bit of hard-won wisdom a good thing for a high school teacher to have; I say things to my students about how little we control and that it’s hard to know which things at the age they are at will actually determine the trajectory of their lives—hard to remember if you are seventeen and applying to colleges and trying to squint into the distance of an uncertain future in a time that feels to most of us as particularly uncertain.

Once, bemoaning my life, I said to my husband, “I used to just be in my bedroom, making art and reading and writing—that was such a lovely life.”

And he quipped: “but that’s still what your life is like.”

It’s a life in which literature still surprises me. I got to fall in love with Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” because I was teaching it, as well as Emily Dickinson, whose poetry I memorized in high school but I thought I’d grown out of and whose poem

After great pain, a formal feeling comes —
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs —

gave me a gift I needed, marveling over the lines like they were jewels adorning my inner life.2

Mentions

“When are we most truly ourselves—?”

Susan Sanford Blades has been writing this incredible newsletter called Gurls to the Front! and made this version of the cover of Strange Loops & I felt that her description just really understood the novel and what I was trying to do.

I read Strange Loops, by Liz Harmer when it came out in 2023, but just recently reread it for the “Unlikeable” Female Characters book club I run at Books & Shenanigans here in Victoria. I loved it even more the second time. Harmer does such a good job of looping us into this tightening spiral of sex and power and lust and shame. I love it for its psychological depth and for all of the questions it brings up. When a teacher in her 30s has an affair with a rich, white, entitled 18-year-old boy, who holds the power? Is a woman with big feelings doomed to be blamed for everything by the more righteous, controlling people in her life? Is asking for and receiving consent in the moment ever true consent? When are we being most truly ourselves—when we act poorly on desire or when we do good in our sober moments? Is anyone ever aware that they’re grooming someone? When people, your family, judge you, how do you know if you’re ever being yourself or just reacting to their judgement? This book gets into sex, lust, power, religion, shame, and intense family dynamics. At around 240 pages, there’s a lot here, a lot to think about.

Monsters anthology

Also, this anthology of short fiction is coming out this fall, and I’ve got a story in it about the end of marriage (and also about art monsters and aliens). Can’t wait to share it and the extremely stacked anthology with you.

The Slip-Box Method

A colleague suggested a book to help guide the class we are both about to teach— “Literature and the Machine” — telling me that the book would change my life. As I am always hoping a book will change my life, I happily and quickly read it. How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens describes a technique developed by Niklas Luhmann called the slip-box method, or Zettlekasten, which allowed Luhmann to write dozens of books and hundreds (?) of articles relatively easily and quickly. It is also a book about how memory works, how the mind understands ideas, and how writing is a form of thinking. The slip-box method is also a good librarian method—taking notes while reading leads to an archive that can be indexed and connected in unexpected ways.

All this made my reflect on my note-taking style, how I had a practice for years of writing down quotes and ideas in a series of notebooks (I have maybe twenty of these) that has since devolved to a chaotic method of annotating books (and forgetting them), taking down notes haphazardly in my notes app or in word or google docs, and scribbling them down on slips of paper that I then post on my bulletin board as though this will make something happen.

I do need to change my life. Perhaps the slip-box method will do it. Because as I sit listening to the rain in my backhouse in a relatively wild area near the San Gabriel Mountains and try to reflect on my 2025 in reading I realize that I have not been taking the time to sit enough with my thoughts and ideas or even to reflect much on what I was reading. For months this year it seemed that one major life event happened on top of another I hadn’t yet recovered from. Letting myself take a real break this week—the first week I’ve had a break in that tumultuous year—gave me some space to see it.

On Falling for Melville

Soon I’ll be teaching American Romanticism and Transcendentalism, reading Thoreau again and Emerson, walking through the hills and hiking trails behind my house and listening to coyotes making terrible screaming sounds at night. I have been teaching American literature in a semi-chronological way and so right before the break, I got to read “Bartleby the Scrivener” with my students. I had taught it before but as though in answer to my longing for a sentence to delight me, strike me down, feel wild, etc, I found myself so enthralled by Melville that I decided that now was the time to read Moby-Dick.

I had never read it. Blame the lack of Americana in my mostly Canadian (and therefore British-y) education. I remember reading that Marilynne Robinson was converted to Calvinism (the theology I happen to have been steeped in for the first half of life) by this novel. And while people have been warning me that it can be a difficult slog, I think I must be in the right frame of mind for it now OR the slog is yet to come (I’m nearly halfway through).

I feel so warmly towards Ishmael—I love his narrative voice—but also this same affection I extend to Melville himself, and I’m afraid that I have started speaking in some kind of arch North Atlantic and weirdly verbose way under his influence.

My favorite chapters, so far, are the first, “Loomings,” and the forty-second, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” In this long meditation asking why the whale’s whiteness in particular should strike such “nameless horror concerning him,” he writes,

And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substance […]

And then

When we proceed further, and consider the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, forever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon the matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us like a leper.

That the whiteness represents to us the true meaningless of the universe, and that this is the most horrifying possibility of all—that every human reach for meaning, even love and beauty, is merely a subtle deceit laid on the true and totalizing reality of nothingness. This kind of despair or horror is not unfamiliar to me. Which brings me to

The Best Book I Read Last Year:

Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow.

Some books come to one in a way that does feel magical or fated, and I remember, vividly, the feelings that arose in me when I read an extract from Things in Nature— “The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons”—in The New Yorker, realizing that I had read a fictional account of the barest facts of this story—a writer loses first one son and then the other to suicide—months earlier, by accident, since as we all know it is impossible to keep up with The New Yorker. The excerpt, of course, made me weep, but it also made me feel enlarged—intellectually? spiritually? I was moved, too, by Li’s belief in respecting the autonomy of one’s children, and sent a link to my ex-husband and co-parent, warning him that he might want to be in a safe frame of mind before reading it.

Much has already been said about Things in Nature Merely Grow, which I immediately preordered and then read in its entirety the day that it arrived. It is not a book I can summarize, quote, etc, without doing the experience of reading it a disservice. But reading these three pieces—the story, the excerpt, the memoire—last year thrummed through me with a sense that I was reading something true, and terrible, and loving, and therefore which gave me solace.

And anyway, I think I lent out my copy and cannot find my notes. One of the things Li mentions that she wishes she had told her children was that the despair that feels unbearable in our youth never goes away, exactly: we only become better at living with it.

“I couldn’t think of words and I had no future”

As I walked over to my desk with the intention of writing this post, I saw a poem I had copied out and hung on my fridge last year, Linda Gregg’s “New York Address” (below). Not a cheerful poem, but I put it up as I put up many of the things meant to ease me through my pain. Another example is this (slight mis-)quote from Iris Murdoch, hanging on my fridge on a post-it:

You cannot magic yourself out of a situation. You've got to live it as decently and as grimly as you can.

And I was thinking about this thing you hear that, especially at a time like ours, readers and audiences don’t want darkness, they want escape, they want a happy ending, they are like the children in Donald Barthleme’s “The School”: they are frightened, and they require an assertion of value. I’ve been struggling against this, since I find such solace in reading even something dark, since I do not want to be lied to or to be asked to pretend things are fine when they aren’t, and since misery, I guess, does love company. I hope this means I am unlikely prey for a sycophantic chatbot.

Announcements/Recs

1. I also got the chance to read my friend Benjamin Schaefer’s beautiful essay on taking rest and living by our values—he is one of the wisest people I know and I recommend his whole series of essays at Lit Hub.

2. Entries are due February 1st for the Malahat Review’s Novella Prize, which I’ll be judging alongside Rob Benvie—fun fact: Tony Tulathimutte won this prize in 2010!

3. I’ll be presenting at AWP in Baltimore! Find me on Friday, March 6 at 3:20 for Bad Romance: On Writing Difficult Relationships alongside Sam Risak, Elissa Washuta, Ira Sukrungruang, and Melissa Febos. Here’s the description:
   
   ”There’s always more than one side to a story, and particularly when you’re in a destructive relationship, it can be hard to know if your side is the “true” one. In this panel, we discuss how to write about difficult relationships in CNF. How can you trust your story enough to tell it? How do you admit to your own shortcomings without causing the reader to lose faith in you? How do you write these stories knowing there are people out there who would object to them?”

Reading for a Good Sentence

On my recent trip to Montreal to visit my daughter, I was invited to a small dinner party with her new college friends and the parents of one of her friends. I knew my job there: be the sort of mother one is proud to have. Her friend’s parents, avid readers, asked me what sort of writing I liked and why.

“I guess that I read for the sentence,” I said. “For good sentences.”

Maybe this made more sense than to say that I read to encounter a surprise thought, a novel bit of wisdom, a sense of what the world feels like to live in. Didn’t matter the genre or the topic. I loved good prose. But what did I mean by good? I remember the time I interrogated a professor who said that one poem was clearly the work of genius and another was not. I asked him to show us what he meant. I genuinely needed to know. He told me that was a good question, but could not answer me. There was a naïvety in it, in loving a sentence or a poem, I thought, the work of faith and not intelligence, just like I cannot tell you whether food is good or not, only whether I like to eat it.

But maybe I don’t believe that value is merely subjective. I don’t think I do1.

There was a period during my mid-twenties, a stage I loved and am trying to return to, when I could rhapsodize about a sentence for days, weeks, even months. Like the line from Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees, which I wrote down and carried with me everywhere: “They became not constellations but corpses.”

On Being Read

After the launch of Now I Shall Leave You to Your Fate2, a quartet of long stories/short novellas, someone I loved read to me aloud all the sentences he admired in my contribution, “Lighthouse.” He had written down each one in a notebook. If you love a writer, this is a sure way to her heart. Part of it is ego-stroking, certainly, more like looking at a flattering picture someone has taken of you than like looking in the mirror. It is the communal in the solitary, the making objective the subjective, the sentence becoming the bridge between my mind and someone else’s; it is the feeling of being read, the final completion of the act of writing and the one the writer rarely has access to.

Each time I hear one of my own sentences repeated back to me or written out somewhere and shared, they seem to glow. One of my first publications was a short story for a newish online magazine, and several people I admired but didn’t know read the story and shared sentences from it in the way we once did, on Twitter. Each time someone shared a sentence I’d written, it sent me traveling back through the contours of the story, and I felt a new feeling. A new emotion that I did not have a name for! Exactly why I write, I thought, and I exactly why I read: because there were many things in human life that I did not yet have precise language for.

In the novel I’ve been revising, I’ve been thinking about what those early days of becoming a “serious” writer felt like. Yes, serious, even in scare-quotes, is a bit self-important, akin to the phrase that irked me at the time lobbed at others by a self-important writer I once knew, who referred to writers he took seriously but who maybe didn’t yet have obvious success as “the real deal.” But I knew what he meant, and I know what I mean—writers who take their own work very seriously. As a calling. Though this might seem ridiculous, even embarrassing, it is a necessary step.

In those days I took sentences extremely seriously. I was always writing down sentences I had found in things I read in the many notebooks that began to pile up. If I could have met the writers I admired then, I would not have had the guts to read these aloud to them. Why don’t I have the guts to perform this act of love?

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What does the machine know?

And do I find a sentence sacred? There are many things I once worshipped that I am trying to re-learn how to adore. And I am thinking about sentences again because of AI. Because that loved one said that there was a feeling of a thought forming and changing by the end of a sentence I had written. Because an LLM can produce a hundred sentences before I’ve finished any one minor thought. Because remember when we all became essayists? And we all pointed out that “essay” came from the French for “essayer,” to try, and so an essay was an attempt, and by writing it you found out what you thought?

I am a high school humanities teacher now. Just as math teachers have to field the question from teenagers—why should I have to learn something I will never use again for the rest of my life?—I have been hearing the question of use-value a lot lately. Since AI can write better than we can, one child said, and then another, and will always write better than we can, what is the point of us learning how to write?

I should have been equipped for such a question, but questions having to do with just what is the point exactly freeze me. Here are the things an adult can remember by spending time with adolescents. How hard it is to know the point of literally anything. (Another asked, in another class, what was the point of all that [suffering and labor]? He died. But we all die, I thought, but I did not say. She didn’t know that yet. She knew it but didn’t know it.)

The AI I’ve had to engage with does write well. If by well we mean grammatically and coherently. Even pleasantly, for the most part. I don’t see the em-dashes everyone was talking about with some of the early models, but this is the first AI I’ve engaged with.

And it’s true that most schoolchildren are not going to become brilliant writers. Is becoming brilliant and a star the only reason to do a thing? To one of them I said, when they asked why to bother doing something the AI could do better, “we cannot outsource our writing and reading to AI without outsourcing our ability to think, without losing that capacity to think our own thoughts.” To another I said, “would you quit playing [sport he loved] if you knew that a virtual version would always be able to perform it better than you?”

We write to find out what we think—this, the old writers3 used to say. We read—I read—to feel the thinking of another person. This kind of writing and reading is done for something even deeper than pleasure.

I was a bit chilled, seeing the sentences this AI could produce and the way it could be trained fairly quickly to write in one’s own style. I thought: maybe the remedy should be a return to wildness of sentence not just for us but for the children too, to let them write something weirder, to reject the formula, to be more like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary…

So, the Soul? is what I’m leaving for the next installment! I have lots of writing to do, and prep for my next unit on Melville and teaching the beauty of a good sentence! Would love to hear about sentences you love…drop a comment xo

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On the Emails I Have Not Responded to in a Timely Manner

People often ask me how I do it. Shorthand question asked of mothers everywhere, mothers who are working and writing and having it all—that shorthand that feels quaint to me now, even second-wave feminist, like something from the 90s, from the 70s. I even published a whole essay about it, years ago, where I joked that sure, I forgot to look in the mirror for about five years. And when I jokingly gave the answer, too, that I rarely clean my house or I don’t cook dinner—that what I had sacrificed were aspirations to be a certain kind of mother and to accept being the kind of mother I actually was—I was once eviscerated by a writer I admired at a dinner where she retorted, “oh, she doesn’t care if her children are clean, the way we do!”

I admit that right now, right at this moment in my life, I am somewhat failing to do it all. Because of moving, and starting a new, demanding job, and living through several enormous big life things happening around and beside me, and still being in school, I am reeling a little. The main thing is that I can’t really find time to respond to emails. I keep putting “catch up on email” on my to-do list and then pushing it back.

On Trying to Revise a Novel

But one of the pleasures of my current life is getting to teach interdisciplinary humanities—to teach history alongside literature—and so I’ve been jumping down rabbit holes and reading weird texts as I prep a class I’m teaching on the 1970s. I read Tom Wolfe’s extremely bananas prose for the first time in “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening.”

Here’s a sample:

The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold. The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self … and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!) This had always been an aristocratic luxury, confined throughout most of history to the life of the courts, since only the very wealthiest classes had the free time and the surplus income to dwell upon this sweetest and vainest of pastimes. It smacked so much of vanity, in fact, that the noble folk involved in it always took care to call it quite something else.

We’ve been looking, in that class, at US economic history in 20th century; started with the New Deal and moved through the post-war boom and into the chaos of the 60s and then into the further chaos of the 70s. We’ve also been looking at the start of the self-help industry while in the final months of 2025 I find myself feeling lucky to afford my rent and to have healthcare while most conversations I have end up touching on questions of spirituality and/or political chaos some fifty years after that decade.

Meanwhile, because of a fairly random choice I made for one of my required courses in library school—to research the ayahuasca/wellness information community—I am now stuck writing about the history of ayahuasca use in the counterculture for another class I’m taking. So I am also waist-deep in the history of psychedelics.

Which is why, maybe, while trying to find a way into the revisions of a novel I finished a draft of this summer I keep landing on themes of people searching for ecstatic experiences and some idea of the “good life”. I have been trying to think about what it is like to live in time—yes, I know this is an abstract and very boring way to put this—I am trying to write partial period pieces that touch on the events in my own life. Marriage and divorce are in it, and so is a move to the US around the time of the 2015 primaries, an HOA president, aspirational motherhoods, neo-hippies and a multitude of woo-woo types. But a novel cannot just be all the things you want to throw up on the wall—a novel needs a plot and a structure to hang all this on. A narrative that can walk us through the meaning in it.

I think that this is a pretty ambitious project—and how will I find the time to do it? Perhaps I should ask that former version of myself: how do you do it? But, more importantly, how do you write a novel, now, in the middle of an actual crisis in the humanities, an actual crisis of attention spans, in the middle of an AI boom that threatens art-making from all sides, in a time of doomscrolling and perhaps a return to orality?

But people write novels to cope with and reflect on and make sense of the time in which they live. Maybe it makes sense that the chaos of this time makes it hard for me to find a structure upon which to hang it all.

I have been teaching novel-writing and novel-revision for several years, and it only dawned on me yesterday that I have not been taking my own advice! This doctor is going to go try to heal herself now…

But first! Book news!

I just received my author copies for our ARP-Books-published Now I Shall Leave You to Your Fate, which, because of a variety of tariffs- and duties-related policies is very difficult to acquire in the US. And the US is where I live. Perhaps this stack of author copies is the only stack in the country, so let me know if you’d like one! And stay tuned for a California reading or two—but if you are in Toronto you will find me and two of my co-authors—Sophie McCreesh and Jean Marc Ah-Sen—at Flying Books on Monday, November 24.

All four of us wrote novellas that are in a semi-autofictional mode on topics around mental illness/dissociation. I only learned late into the writing of my own memoir on the topic of my long-ago psychiatric emergency that I myself had real moments of dissociation. I hadn’t allowed myself until very late in the processing of that experience to understand that it had been a traumatic event. This breakdown and my hospitalization happened in 1999; it wasn’t until the 2020s that I began to understand that I had symptoms of PTSD.

In any case, “Lighthouse,” my novella in this collection, is a fictionalized account of some of that. My narrator tries to write about the events but keeps circling the major ones.

Here is the opening paragraph of “Lighthouse”:

On the plane, I thought my usual thoughts. Should I have children, was I lonely, was I still hot—maybe I was bisexual, pansexual, was it too late to find out—a quick glance at my reflection was enough to unravel me in my body’s direction—not to mention all the people looking at me as I looked at them. At LAX I had wandered around indecisive as always. Henry loved spending money at airports and on planes, and when we were together I loved this trait, the generous overabundant love of blowing everything on a shitty treat. I wanted a drink. I wanted a donut. I wanted to buy a trashy magazine, but it was eight a.m. and I’d been raised by misers, so I compromised and ordered a large green juice and eavesdropped on a couple getting sloshed on Bloody Marys.

And here’s an excerpt from the second section :

I wanted our place to behave as beacon from any distance, where everyone I loved would come to feel at home. Suzanne, I said, we could make our place a lighthouse, you know? But Suzanne was very practical. She reminded me that lighthouses were only beacons to warn ships away. To warn them away, she said, emphatically, as though I wasn’t just as much the university-bound A-student as she was.

The point was, I wanted to be someone’s home, and to fill the home all up. I would have married everyone.

Been a minute—and I have so much news. Such life-altering news that preparations have crowded out all the inessential things in life. Which, in this case, is keeping up with social media or publicizing things I need to publicize or writing this newsletter. BUT FIRST some news & invites, both sort of memoir-related:

Event News

If you are in or near LA, I hope you’ll come to an event at Book Soup on Sept 5th at 7 pm. I’ll be in conversation with Karleigh Frisbie Brogan about her harrowing, beautiful memoir Holding. Not only is it a wise and impossible to put down story of addiction and recovery, but it is absolutely filled with lines like “Shame’s enterprise is the self” and “A safety net has to assume a fall, but it never prevents one.”

Publication News

Secondly, I have a novella coming out soon in an anthology alongside novellas written by Fawn Parker, Sophie McCreesh, and Jean Marc Ah-Sen. I’m proud of this anthology—titled Now I Shall Leave You To Your Fate—and to have my novella “Lighthouse” among such a group. I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering with ARP books or your local bookstore (though it will be impossible to buy via Amazon).

As most everyone who has met me knows, I’ve been working on a memoir for about two decades in an attempt to think through and interpret a pretty serious psychiatric event I lived through as a teenager. One thing that’s fascinating about writing such a book over such a long period of time is that it’s enough time for a complete pendulum swing around beliefs and treatments of mental illness; things that felt almost impossible to say about a diagnosis in 2005 seem like obvious old hat in 2025. One of the things the memoir became was a way of thinking through the ways that the costs of psychiatric research and experimentation are borne by its patients. In any case, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with all this material I’ve amassed and one is that I’ve fictionalized a bit that memoir in “Lighthouse.”

Also hoping that there will be an event upcoming to launch the book, maybe in Toronto.

Enormous Changes, Last Minute

And in the middle of all if it, I’m about to move to a new city about 25 miles closer to Los Angeles to be in walking distance to my new job as a boarding school teacher. My domestic arrangements with my kids is fully upended, too, and so I find that I am in the middle of several of life’s most stressful events all at once. In the past two weeks, while I’ve been boxing some things and getting rid of others, changing my address and cancelling memberships, finishing up one and then another of my part-time jobs, I’ve also been going to conferences for independent school teachers and then for, specifically, boarding school teachers and being initiated into a new life. I am also still working away at library school, and thinking about all of the lovely and positive things one can find oneself investing in during a very dark historical period. Both librarianship and teaching feel this way. Working at libraries is to believe in accessibility of information and to be of service to communities, to people. And at the first of these teaching conferences we were asked to do things like to articulate our personal core values as teachers and try to make some kind of artwork to represent those values.

The values I settled on, cheating by describing all the sub-values I thought came along with them, were humor, art, and curiosity. “By humor,” I said, “I also mean friendship.” “By art,” I said, “I also mean awe and beauty and meaning-making.” “By all three,” I said, “I also mean humility and kindness.” “I’ll add to these,” I said, “my core belief in being okay with a little mess.”

I wish I had more time, but I have to go lead a workshop in an hour, and then I have to work on packing up this apartment and prepping classes. Hope to see some of you in LA in September—please say hello—and to talk more (more often) in this space about the novella, the memoir, and writing. Part of hatching in wholesomeland is to be filled with even delusional optimism!

1. I will be in LA for AWP next week! I’m hoping I’ll see some of you writers there; send me a note.

2. In late April/early May, I’ll be opening some spots for coaching and manuscript evaluation; please get in touch if you’d like to book me.

3. Who has time for a substack?

The Way I Live Now

For five years I lived with my husband and kids in a nice house with a large yard in a neighborhood with mature trees. I would go on long walks and runs through the neighborhood, down a paved trail and into a lovely park. Now I live with my kids (half the time) at the bottom of that hill, in a nice enough apartment complex directly across from that same park. I’ve come down in the world.

Lately when friends start to talk or even try to joke about what’s happening politically I zone out and think planes are falling from the sky.

I have too much to do. I have always had too much to do. The other day a friend asked me whether I took performance-enhancing drugs. She was joking, but also she was like, how? Because now I am not only working at two precarious jobs and several other gigs but I am also going to graduate school for library and information science. And I have three children. Is it a superpower to be capable at all times of running oneself ragged?

But also something life-affirming swept into my life last weekend and the relief felt like a deep kindness.

I am trying to revive my ambition, the final god of the three once-dear gods I’ve lost my devotion to. So I’ve written a story that made someone cry. I’m working on a story about a political group I was part of in 2017. I’m researching the history of slapstick.

To console myself about the political situation, I read scraps of Adorno.

To console myself, I watch reality game shows like the Traitors.

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Heartbreak as Ecstasy

On this season of the Traitors, a woman from the only season of the Bachelor I’ve ever watched, an extremely charming and funny and smart woman—Gabby Windey1—is a contestant. And I suddenly remembered that I had watched that season of the Bachelor during my year of excessive pain and heartbreak as though it really would explain something to me about love. I had forgotten. How the pain was so acute, in that first year of loss, that I felt a breeze could sear my skin. I told a man I dated near the end (or sometime in the middle?) of that time that I thought the feeling of heartbreak was exactly like the feeling of being in love. My sensitivity to everything was overwhelming. The trees were greener than they had ever been. Any person’s kindness unbearably tender2. It was a peak experience—an ecstatic one?3—I lost track of time—there was transcendence in the misery. How was it possible that I got to be alive to experience this?

I look back at this time now glad for what it taught me, and this only means, as it is with childbirth, that I am no longer in pain.

Personal Heartbreak Catalogue

1. I watched Gabby’s Bachelor season (26) during the last months of my marriage. Each week the teasers promised catastrophe: a woman collapsed, sobbing, on very long set of stairs. I watched this woman (Rachel) process her heartbreak on TV and I said to myself, as though it were both wise and true, “now she has experienced everything it is possible to feel.”

2. I listened to “Landslide” many times, I’m afraid. Can the child within my heart rise above?

3. I tried and failed to watch the new version of Scenes from a Marriage. It was too close. Oscar Isaac played a bearded philosophy professor, like my own ex-husband, and I felt near the edge of the cliff as I tried and failed to watch it.

4. I read Sharon Olds’s poetry collection after her divorce. Stag’s Leap. I love Sharon Olds. I love a heartbreak poem. A friend thought it might give me solace. This book gave me no solace.

   

5. I watched Mia Hansen-Løve’s film Things to Come with Isabelle Huppert and was so moved by the ending that I listened constantly to “à la claire fontaine” and then the version played here of “Unchained Melody” by the Fleetwoods.

6. And finally, I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being and felt absolutely harrowed by its final section. I thought of something I’d read in a John Gardner book of writing advice years ago that one must keep in mind that sometimes their readers are going through something wild, like having just had a baby, or a real hardship, like divorce, and so young and so naïve was I then that I thought divorce is a hardship? There is a passage at the end of Unbearable Lightness in which the wife character, in pain but still loving her husband, has a dream about a rabbit she knows represents him. When she holds the animal, she weeps “until blinded by her tears.” Then I underlined this phrase, which had the force of deepest truth, of prophecy, and which I thought I would definitely get tattooed to my body: But for now, she wanted to be alone with her animal.

A Library as a Site for Intellectual Ecstasy

But yeah, I’m trying. I’m trying, as one friend put it, to stay attached to my sincerity. I love library work. I love working on this library degree.

I’ve been thinking about the winter before my teenaged mental breakdown when I worked at the library and kept “rescuing” newspapers and magazines from the recycling bin. I thought maybe given the eternity I’d been promised, I could try to read everything, clip everything, understand everything.

I wanted to share again, then, this piece of memoir I published about five years ago, which I remain very proud of, and about which Joy Castro said “has a library ever been so blatantly erotic, a site for such intellectual ecstasy?”

[Adam Phillips] asks “what a person’s life might be like if they were unfrightened of their own complexity, or refused to determinedly narrow their minds, or were unintimidated by their unbidden curiosity.”

—quoted by Jessa Crispin

I am feeling a bit opinion-avoidant lately, at least in any public space, since there have been costs to my relationships in this past year as far as social media and political ideas have gone, and I am trying to write about these things the only way I know how—in a long-simmering and novelistic way1. However, I do know that many of my thoughts about marriage and divorce and heteropessimism and feminism converge with some of those political opinions, and I guess that’s might be the theme of this late-coming substack, which I haven’t been able to get to because I’ve absolutely exhausted myself trying to cobble together gigs for pay, getting ready to go back to school for retraining, and trying otherwise to do nourishing things like spending time with my friends and my children and reading a lot. Also, in my ongoing efforts to live unproductively in the midst of this highly productive living I am participating in little romances and just finished revising a 10 000 word story no one asked for and which I labored over for months!

But first, I’ve published a story about an open marriage

between exvangelicals called “Missionaries” at the Notre Dame Review. It is, I guess, also a story of our time, since the protagonist, a former social worker turned podcaster, has begun using dating apps during early COVID and she and her husband have lost their faith in Christianity (and God) post-first-Trump-round. You can read the whole story online (the print issue has an unfortunate misprint), but here’s a snippet:

She woke up in her own bed, wanting to teach Jeremy a lesson. She wanted to teach him all the old lessons she herself was trying to unlearn: about God, about love. Such as: sometimes grace should give you a thrashing. Such as: sometimes love could take you out at the knees. Jeremy believed that because she didn’t know what she wanted from him, that because she already had a husband, he could treat her however he wanted.

Jo and her husband have landed on polyamory as part of their attempt to “deconstruct” their faith. “Sex and love,” she thinks, “were the first thing every cult had to deal with. Feminism. The sixties. Fundamentalists.” Her own sister is a complementarian Christian who, in an act of Godly devotion, will not use birth control.

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My thoughts about marriage could fill a book

and probably will. I also have a lot of opinions about polyamory as the solution to the ills of monogamy, which I will also hedge about here. But I will offer that even during my very long marriage to a man I loved and was devoted to, I suspected that being married didn’t suit me, even going so far as to propose divorce when we were only a few years in and still deeply in love with each other, since I thought I might feel less burdened by a situation in which we were just great lovers.

In my early twenties, how was I to know which life I wanted and which visions of life had influenced me? How was anyone? The greatest influence on me was, obviously, the extremely serious Christian subculture that had shaped nearly every aspect of my life since birth, a very pro-hetero-only-marriage culture where, when I was a teenager, elders in the community began to express concern that my intellectual “ambitions” and perhaps “ability” might get in the way of me marrying a “good Christian man”. But I had sought out other exemplars in the seams and was influenced nearly as deeply by images of Leonard Cohen in some austere apartment in Montreal smoking cigarettes and being a so-called ladies’ man. I had bohemian/artistic fantasies of freedom which were the opposite of the settled married person I became out of, perhaps ironically, an act of romantic recklessness when I was still an undergrad and madly in love.

How lucky I feel to have been madly in love when I was young enough not to doubt it! How lucky I feel to have lived with this love through its many other incarnations, to have had children young, even though all of this was extraordinarily difficult, to have grown up with someone who was in a relation with me of mutual respect and adoration. I was torn all the time while being married—I was always trying to get a glimpse of the ghost of the other person I might have been in my 20s—I used to quip that I was trapped in a happy marriage—and now that I’m not married anymore and have lived through the hell of catastrophic heartbreak—now I’m trying and probably failing to see it all clearly. To see what it all might have meant.

But, reading some of the divorce memoirs and novels that seem to have proliferated lately, I feel the difference between myself and many other former wives of my own demographic, and I will be trying to figure that out for a while: what it means to be part of historical trends and the desire to continue to believe in your own particularity and whether the other options, where you don’t get caught in some lifestyle groove someone else has prepared for you, are merely illusions to make you believe you are free.

Brief aside with links on the 4B movement, heteropessimism, etc

I have been reading about heteropessimism (and the problems with it) and marriage abolitionism quite a bit, and I’ll direct you to a couple writers who have more interesting and thought-out things to say about it than I do.

• Jessa Crispin, whose podcast I now devotedly listen to, writes in her substack on this topic:

  As Adam Phillips writes in Attention Seeking, curiosity about what else is possible is often experienced as a psychic threat. People kill off their curiosity and sense of possibility (outside of the consumerist experience of shopping for better products, of course) in order to survive without the underlying tow of regret and disappointment. He asks “what a person’s life might be like if they were unfrightened of their own complexity, or refused to determinedly narrow their minds, or were unintimidated by their unbidden curiosity.”

• and I’ve also really been enjoying reading Tracy Clark-Flory's substack; here is a great interview with Sophie Lewis called “A feminist utopianism”. Here’s Lewis:

  We allow people to have sole responsibility for the care of dependents—of children and also partners, who are expected to have all of their needs met by their partner or spouse. This is actually bonkers. It’s a backwards way of looking at things to say: “Who has the time for polyamory?” Who has the time for monogamy? How are you supposed to get all of your needs met in an isolated dyadic household? Our needs need to be met more collectively. I want to see a return of things like public or common kitchens, recreation spaces, maybe even laundries or pantries—things that recognize that nobody needs to be doing the same exact tasks over and over and over in their tiny little boxes at the end of a day.

The book discussion segment of this letter

Maybe when one goes through something like a divorce one is looking for one’s own experience reflected back as a way of getting an explanation for the thing that has passed through unrelentingly and with such a storm of factors it’s impossible to make sense of it. A novel might make sense of things. A memoir might. A film, even, like “A Marriage Story,” where an impasse about geography rang true.

But some of the novels/memoirs I’ve read recently that I found unsatisfying on this topic were Sarah Manguso’s Liars, Miranda July’s All Fours, and Leslie Jamison’s Splinters. Liars and Splinters annoyed me for some of the same reasons, to do with the way the narrators seemed to self-aggrandize or at least to make themselves into perfect victims of circumstance while remaining ideal mothers2, and Miranda July’s novel stuck with me in a bad way, since I loved it at first and then later felt somehow discomfited by it out of what might have been a bit of my own class resentment3.

On a morning after my marriage collapsed I found myself in the middle of a new, doomed relationship, and I lived out a perversion of a scene from Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage,” waking in tears after a nightmare. Near the end of “Scenes”, the Liv Ullmann character wakes after a nightmare in horror and tears and says, clinging to her ex-husband,

“Are we living in total confusion? All of us? Do you think that secretly we're afraid we're slipping downhill and don't know what to do? . . . Have we missed something important?"

But I did read a couple of books recently that I loved.4

1. Emily Witt’s Health and Safety: a breakdown was one. I had read another of Witt’s books, Future Sex, years ago, and it influenced me a great deal. Health and Safety is a book about rave culture and positive views of drug use but also about the political atmosphere of the past few years—it takes us through Trump’s first election, COVID lockdowns, and the protests of the summer of 2020. It is also about a woman trying to find a way to live outside of expectations and the breakdown of a romantic relationship. I ate it right up, though it is certainly not a book to make anyone feel less apocalyptic.

But for the previous five years I had tried to figure out how to live life outside of the kind of family I had grown up with. I had withstood the discomfort of changing my expectations. . . . A wedding now seemed like a dumb pageant. I watched my friends believe they could find protection and care in an institution that had given women the legal status of brood mares. Their belief that marriage had been modernized and reformed and that one could enter into it without becoming another person’s servant. . . . [Simone] de Beauvoir was one of the few women who had articulated her resistance to this false promise and who had done so with a determination to be happy. Even if it meant I would end up alone, even if it made my life more difficult, something in me resisted, too. I knew there would be a cost, but I could not believe the lie that if I mimicked the patriarchal model of family I would receive comfort and safety in exchange. That was the lie of fascism. I knew I would never be able to cosplay as a wife. Not after all that learning.

I will say that I do not find a wedding a dumb pageant—or maybe it’s that I like dumb pageants. Forever I’m Lydia Bennett saying “I long for a ball.” Anyway, I loved Health and Safety and would love to hear from anyone else who’s read it!

2. And, I finally, thankfully, found Eve Babitz. I had been told to read her by multiple friends and acquaintances and even one student, but found I had no urge to—I was sure she would have nothing for me, since I believed she was an LA type of cool girl I had no aspiration toward and no interest in. And then, probably because Babitz is in the air because of a recent release pitting her against (or at least putting her in contrast with) Joan Didion, a writer I’ve never especially loved, I read Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A.

And then I read it a second time. I was immediately rapt by her voice. I was laughing while I read. The greatest surprise to me reading this book was that I saw myself there, a surprise because I had been alienated by the facts I’d read beforehand and thought (perhaps out of that same class resentment referenced above) I’d be alienated by her. After all, I have never played naked chess with a Dadaist idol of 20th century art, I don’t have any godfathers at all, let alone famous composer ones, and I don’t even live in Los Angeles! I just live near enough to Los Angeles to sometimes go there!

A friend recently told me how strange it was that I was so extroverted and people-oriented but that I had made such introverted career choices—novelist and, now, librarian. And I told her, well, look at Eve Babitz! She’s so smart and reads all the time and her sentences are wonderful, but she loves to be among people. She loves an adventure. And she’s a romantic.

And everyone who writes about her seems to reference how she hasn’t been taken seriously. I recognized, too, that in my own desire to be a person who remains open to experience, a person of exuberance and romance, I might be mistaken for not being a serious enough mind as well. (I thought of a person of my acquaintance who often accuses me of performing things for the benefit of men, and then I’m lost wondering what it might mean to be charming without trying to charm). Even Slow Days, Fast Company is framed as an attempt to seduce a particular lover—look at this opening!:

This is a love story and I apologize; it was inadvertent. But I want it clearly understood from the start that I don’t expect it to turn out well.

I am at risk, in my enthusiasm, of quoting the whole book to you, so maybe just go read it. But what I was struck by, even more than her adventurous spirit, was the way this narrator seems capable of really loving people and having buckets of fun with them—her friends and her lovers and her acquaintances. It seems to me a lovingness and openness to others which reminded me of the spirit of Mrs. Dalloway and her “talent for friendship.” She’ll go to a baseball game on a lark because a lover wants to go and get so caught up that very quickly she’s like “omg do i love baseball???”

Well, I’m getting off track. Who cares. But here are some pertinent quotes to end on:

Women are prepared to suffer for love; it’s written into their birth certificates. Women are not prepared to have ‘everything,’ not success-type ‘everything. . . . There’s no precedent for women getting their own ‘everything’ and learning that it’s not the answer . . . . They’ll only give you ‘everything’ if you appear to be totally confused.

And:

She had always been conventional, that was what was so great about her. She was almost thirty. I had thought about it myself; getting married and calling it a day, but then, after San Francisco, I knew those songs of love were not for me. There was very little precedent for not getting married, I’ll admit…

Okay, and, lastly, a quote from Melissa Anderson’s Bookforum review of Lili Anolik’s previous biography of Babitz (will I still read Anolik? maybe…):

What Anolik appears to really love is the idea of Babitz. . . . . But that awe is disingenuous. Later, Anolik seems to pity Babitz for not being Anolik—that is, a wife, a mother, financially secure, ambitious. Never married, forgoing the conventional path Anolik has followed, mostly dormant since her accident, Eve is labeled “a child,” one who will never grow up: “She was beholden to nothing and no one—not a man or kids, or a piece of property, or a boss, not even to an audience. Adulthood was a condition she simply wouldn’t submit to, and that was that.”

This is narrow-minded, condescending, and sanctimonious. I doubt Babitz will care.

Quickest note before I delve into thoughts on suppleness and silliness: I’ve been teaching a 10-month Novel Revision Program through Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop, where Joy Baglio has created an incredible community of writers, and applications for next year are open. I’ve also been doing increasing one-on-one coaching, editing, and manuscript consultations—while my website is still in progress, feel free to get in touch if you are interested in working with me.

And now,

How to be a Supple Leopard…

Don’t forget, I like a mess!

—a line from a micro-story by Diane Williams I used to have written out and pasted to the wall & have lost & cannot remember the title of1

Attempted Sports Metaphors

A few years into my long marriage, my ex-husband got into weight training. He had once been a young athlete before turning to philosophy as a profession, and he loved the things about sport that I hated. He loved tiny incremental changes and doing drills to perfect technique. I loved to play and throw myself around (being able to fall or dive for a ball wholeheartedly is one of my favorite plays), and I hated to be stuck near a barbell, which seemed an anchor. I hated to be trapped. I liked to think I could escape and get somewhere with my body, on a run, say, or a very long bike ride, and if not I would at least like the opportunity to win. I refused to to get into weight training the way he did, despite how strong he was getting, and despite how strong I got when I tried CrossFit for a while. I didn’t want sport for sport’s sake. I wanted it to give me other pleasures besides.

We compared this difference to a clear difference in our personalities: I preferred the scrimmage and he preferred the drill.

In fact, I despised the drill.

When I want to get better at something, I like to get better accidentally, holistically. Probably making more mistakes than necessary. I did well at school not through discipline but through engagement. I was not a person who could learn using flashcards. Mostly I think you acquire technical abilities as a writer by immersion and by play. Maybe you could cross-train, a bit, by learning a second language to become acquainted with the grammar of your first.

I have been wondering about my trait here, that I love when things befall me, that I long for an accident of love or luck, that I wait for the world to surprise me. I was raised in a strange fatalistic belief system, so perhaps that is why it is difficult for me to be in a situation where I feel trapped or too much in the know or certain that if I just complete particular steps I will achieve particular results.

I hadn’t meant to write about sports, or to tell you that lately I have been taking tennis lessons, forcing me, a person who loves tennis, to learn how one is supposed to hold a racquet, how to approach a ball and hit it, and forced to do drills. (And I mean forced—our coach makes us practice holding the racquet “for your own good” when I keep hoping for a game and tells me I need to break myself of the habit of “love taps",” my favorite bad move).

I had wanted to write about this book my ex bought many years ago. Becoming a Supple Leopard. I loved this title. I loved to laugh about this title. The word “supple,” first of all, but the sound of the word “supple” with the word “leopard,” those Ls and Ps, and how poetic I determined such a book might be.

What a thing to aspire to be, secondly. I too wish to be a supple leopard, I would say, in that yapping shorthand of marital noise. Let’s be supple leopards!

If the book is poetic it is accidentally so.2 It lays out a doctrine of mobility, things one must do for one’s body to remain capable of withstanding the strains of extreme fitness. Often, in those days, my ex would patiently explain if you press a lacrosse ball painfully against a muscle, or use a foam roller a certain way, and if and only if you do this consistently (the horror) you can prevent all the injuries that are otherwise inevitable.

Alas, the injuries remain inevitable.

Becoming a Supple Writer

People keep telling me how much I appear to be thriving. It’s true I’ve weathered things with capacities I had not known myself to have. What I thought of for a while as mettle I think may really have been suppleness—flexibility, pliability. I have been seeking both suppleness and silliness. I am trying to live life well in the present—hence, foolishly taking tennis lessons during a time of financial super-precarity. I am burdened by difficulties and by tasks and instead of thrashing around in response I’ve been meeting them with a kind of hm, I guess that’s life?

The many tasks have eaten into my time and left less for reading and writing. But I am trying—perhaps delusionally—to see all the things that I do in my life—my little jobs, my little job applications, my little oil changes and too-frequent grocery trips—to see all of them as worthy of interest.

Still, actual writing is medicinal for me. The time I took off this week from worrying about money and health care and the myriad other troubles in this leopard’s thorn-addled paw to sit for two straight hours to read and to write offered me this old reliable physical relief. The balm seems to be writing a sentence that I find beautiful or interesting or true, one that I hadn’t thought before writing it because writing is a way of surprising myself, of pulling up and out of the straight-line results-orientation and into a slowly revelatory vista. Why should it feel so? Like the opposite of a barbell, of an anchor.

It’s the advice I’ve been giving constantly to writers I’m teaching, and it’s advice I take myself: play, try things out, don’t hold too tightly to what you think a thing should be. Don’t clutch!

Giggle Theory Life Hack

A twelve-year-old was last week scolded by her teacher for giggling in class. The teacher told this child to “grow up.” I was astounded, since I had that same day gotten the giggles about something one of my students did and have been known to sometimes get lost to them, even in class, even when I’m supposed to be the grown up, in charge. Getting the giggles has always had a positive effect in those situations. True silliness bonds people to each other and makes us feel at ease. Earlier that week we had played Fortnite, which I am terrible at and so the laughter is inevitable, when I fail to aim, or drive my car into a building, or walk right into a more agile player who proceeds to slay me with a chainsaw. Another twelve-year-old said to my kid, “it’s nice that you have a silly mom.”

I laugh easily, as I cry easily, as I feel all my emotions easily and fully. I used to hate this about myself. It certainly seemed to worry everyone. I have been reflecting on this again, as I’ve been writing about my lifelong question: what does it mean to be mentally well or mentally ill? I found an essay I was working on a few years ago about the anxiety support group I was in after my third child was born, and something terrible that happened in the group (but comical later) was that we were always asked to talk about our biggest anxieties and provoke new anxieties in each other. I wrote in that essay, which was called “How to Make a Decision,”

People, including my mother, were always telling me to calm down and to stop taking everything so seriously.

Sometimes other people would tell me that I didn’t take anything seriously.

You can hardly trust people.

During high school, when I went through a mystical depression, I also was in a deep Monty Python phase and found a key to living in the final song of Life of Brian (as well as a huge girlhood crush on Eric Idle):

The irony is part of the pleasure of this scene, obviously, and as with the Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” played during horrifyingly apocalyptic “12 Monkeys.”3

I don’t think this is toxic positivity. I hate toxic positivity. But I am a pleasure seeker, now, finally, after years of painful religious guilt. As I said to one of the translators I was working with in a classroom last week, when two kids were having a bout, “We should just let them be for a minute. Getting the giggles is one of the great pleasures of life.”

(This is perhaps why some people call me chaotic.)

Writing/Reading Recommendations

• I loved this craft lecture by Torrey Peters on “Strategic Opacity” and why Hamlet makes no sense, as I love everything David Naimon puts out with Between the Covers.

• I also recently happened on a story I hadn’t read in an anthology I’ve owned for years called Object Lessons: the Paris Review presents the Art of the Short Story. The story was “Lying Presences” by Norman Rush from 1982. It’s about two brothers who have had a lifelong disagreement about how one ought to live, and one has run into some problems because of UFO society he’s been part of and is not on the outs with. Here are a few bits I loved:

(Roy believes you should brush your teeth with salt, Jack can’t stand it):

Jack did some deep-breathing exercises to calm down. Of course Roy would never say anything about salt. You’d just have him wandering around the kitchen in the morning with a toothbrush, saying could he trouble you for some salt? And the salt would be in plain sight.

And:

Jack wondered when Roy’s yes-yeah copula was going to show up. Yes was what Roy felt comfortable saying, but yeah was what he thought he really ought to be saying, being a man of the people. So he would say yes (yeah), with a slight diminuendo on the yeah. Stress would do it. Jack wondered whether the fact that nobody really changes was encouraging or tragic.

It’s put me into a Rush-dive since.

• I’ve just started reading Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, a copy of which I bought at the thrift store I’ve been frequenting with my children and which copy is filled with endearing marginalia that mostly consists of definitions of words. It’s the essay I needed right now, an essay that helps me understand some of what is happening to us online right now in the midst of our witnessing.

For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war.

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Mother/Writer

A Room of One’s Own is so much stranger than I remembered. Here’s Woolf’s description of the costs of having children:

Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children: no human being could stand it. Consider the facts, we said. First there are the nine months before the baby is born. Then the baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there are certainly five years spent in playing with the baby. You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets.

Yesterday, an ordinary day on the weeks I have my kids, I woke very early to get myself and them ready for school (mostly badgering them and muttering to myself about the time), drove them to school (one starts at 7 am), pumped gas, drove to the other school where I was substitute teaching in PE (a dream gig), read snatches of a novel during breaks, overheard gossip, arranged for my oldest daughter to pick up the younger two, got home and ate a very quick bite and then took the youngest on a very unnecessary errand to Target, picked up food one had ordered, ranted about the Target errand in the car, apologized for ranting, arrived home again, attempted and failed to silence several bouts of bickering, scolded someone about socks, said and heard the sentence “I’m very overstimulated right now” a few times, took the younger two on another errand (now it was dark), was shocked by the nearly cartoonish appearance of the low-hanging and enormous moon, which one googled to find “waxing gibbous” and the other googled to find “harvest moon,” returned home again, had a fit of giggling begun by the youngest over the way I had refused a cookie before making more food, tidying the dishes, offering a life lesson about not counting one’s chickens before they hatch, insisting it must be bedtime soon, braiding some hair, and feeding the cats.

Absolutely none of this was productive. It’s just life, the constant task of living, the care for others that isn’t really care but is just being in life together, is just doing an unexceptional job of being a parent.

I’ve been meaning to write this letter for a few weeks, and have in the meantime been mulling over all sorts of things—books about divorce I’ve been reading and a related dive into the question of how to configure lives more unconventionally (the problem of marriage, of the nuclear family), the various challenges of rebuilding my life, in a time that at least feels world-historically bleak and I don’t even want to talk about the election, and now find that I’m reading books that are disturbing in different ways, but both of which seem to touch on the abyss—When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut and The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector.

And I’ve been meaning to write about A Room of One’s Own, an essay I dismissed entirely as an undergraduate. I think at the time I believed it was reasonable to reject any claim about “woman,” which I thought had nothing to do with me. I didn’t think it would have much for me on this re-read, and instead I found a bizarre, meandering, enjoyable, and rich text, the central quotable premise of which seems to me, now, nearly, beside the point. Instead this is a lesson in reading—how a point you glean or reduce from a text cannot give you what immersion in the text can.

And, also, the point finally hit me. I understand my material conditions and limitations now. I am a mother. I have been a wife. And I do not come from money1.

In my attempts to rebuild a life in a more unconventional way, to try to continue to have a life filled with friends, and art, and ideas2, and to try to do all this while also having three children with no partner or financial safety net, I have also been looking at myself and my own doggedness, my own refusals, my own, perhaps, feral qualities, a seeing a person, when I view myself from the outside, who seems naïvely insistent on trying to live a life that might not be possible.

So much of the reasoning of Woolf’s text gets at how difficult it is to make great art when you are facing personal or domestic challenges in a way much more refreshing (to me, I’m sorry) than anything I’ve read on the subject of parent-writers/art-monsters for years.

Plus other things so obviously true I hate to note them: that the way we live right now affects whether people find it possible to be writers—or the way in which they will pursue writing—just as it affects our choices about becoming parents—and this has a massive effect on the art we, the whole of us, are making.

“What effect,” she writes, “poverty has on the mind, and what effect wealth has on the mind.” What effect is everything having on our minds! Yesterday, during my lunch break, I also read this beautifully done essay by Thea Lim in The Walrus, which considers, among other things, what effect the digital age is having on the mind, and what effect late-capitalism is having on the mind. To make art, one needs space, one needs money, and, for Woolf, one needs these things because without them one is so bound—if not by actual constraints then by mental ones—they cannot make art that tells the truth about experience.

Art Monster (forgive me)

Woolf takes fiction-writing very seriously, and her idiosyncratic views on what it should do and how the novelist might be able to manage this thrilled me. That to write a novel is important work and requires a great deal from its writer gives a person permission to care about her work3.

Imagination—freedom of mind—openness—energy: these are some of the things she talks about when describing the qualities of the best novelists, which are evident to her in their work. Since I am a person with nothing but material impediments at the moment, I’ll pretend that these things are not only available to those with money and space and time.

(I refuse to accept it, actually, and this refusal does connect also to a refusal to accept the call for productivity in all things, because the people in our lives, our children and our friends and our beloveds, offer us something so far outside of that terrible call, as to be, at this point, basically divine.)

This passage in particular was instructive to me about how one might write in the way Woolf believes we have to:

Thus when I ask you to write more books I am urging you to do what will be for your good and for the good of the world at large. . . What is meant by ‘reality’? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us. So at least I infer from reading Lear or Emma or La Recherche du Temps Perdu. For the reading of these books seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an intenser life. Those are enviable people who live at enmity with unreality; and those are pitiable who are knocked on the head by the thing done without knowing or caring. So that when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.

I mean, her own novel, as I wrote last month, has this very effect on me: I saw more intensely afterwards, the “world [seemed] bared of its covering and given an intenser life.”

If we are to be ambitious for anything, couldn’t it be that? To live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, whether one can impart it or not.

“The mind is certainly a very mysterious organ”

I want to speak, here, at the end, about mental illness and writing and to attempt to leave aside pertinent facts of Woolf’s biography to do so. In my Woolf reading group, we read A Room of One’s Own alongside Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic of early feminist literature, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a gothic horror story of what happens when a woman is forced to take the “rest cure” for her psychological ailments, and this rest from reading and writing only serves to unhinge her completely.

And here’s Woolf, on the horrors that might have faced her imaginary sister of Shakespeare:

For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.

And I thought of a quote I heard many years ago, which may be apocryphal, Carl Jung saying that James Joyce would have been as incurably insane as his daughter Lucia was if he hadn’t written Ulysses4. This comment struck me at the time because I had gone through my own madness, and found writing to be something I needed to do, and found it frustrating when I saw people call this “using writing as therapy” as if this is what this meant. One of the members of our bookclub said that Jung had also written something about the fact that when we are meant for something being thwarted in that effort—whatever it might be—can lead to all sorts of miseries.

Well, without drawing a conclusion, I’ll just leave all that here. For the sake of my writing and my mind, I’ve been trying to do things that are unproductive. Hence this substack. Thanks for reading, if you are reading still.

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…when the sentence was finished something had happened. —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

I encountered a few surprising things while I was trying to write down my thoughts here. First, I was for my Woolf bookclub re-reading A Room of One’s Own, an essay I had last read very ungenerously and without any understanding when I was an undergraduate but which this time led me to a whole bunch of thoughts about what we call the “craft” of writing. Second, a friend sent me a paper by Daniela Dover on what Dover calls “erotic curiosity”— love, curiosity, attention, and also Mrs. Dalloway1. I will try to talk about some of this in the next installment.

Mrs. Dalloway Take One (this book has changed my life!)

Years ago, a friend and I were discussing the art that had changed us, and wondering whether it only could when you were young. Some works of art are formative, we say. Some relationships are, too. In your youth you have an openness of mind, a spongey-ness of self, and can you cultivate this in a self once she has gone through decades of real living?

Since I am an optimist, and a romantic, and, unfortunately, a strong will, I refuse to believe that you cannot be affected as you were when you were, say, 16 and 17, years when several books blew my mind and changed it; when you were 23, the age I was when, nearly two years married, I watched Before Sunset and decided I no longer believed in marriage2; when you were 25, even, the age I was when I read Mrs. Dalloway and then dropped out of my PhD in English Lit and burned as many bridges as I could on the way out.

I was reading Dalloway for a class I loved during that first semester of my PhD. I had gone through a de-conversion experience or two already—after multiple conversions-to-Christianity in my childhood and early adulthood because I kept hoping that one of these would finally, actually stick, and change me—and had hoped I might be able to write a dissertation on conversion narratives, but also I was unsuited to academic work: passionate about things, but, like Simon Peter, easily wooed to forget that passion. Easily converted, easily de-converted.

I read Dalloway quickly, almost in a single day. I read on the long bus commute I took from Hamilton all the way to York University, in the very north end of Toronto, gobbling it up like a page-turner. I was nearing the end when I stopped at the campus coffeeshop for breakfast; sitting on a bench near my classroom, I read the final page.

I described the experience of reading those final lines as feeling the ghost of Virginia Woolf breathing on my neck3. The ghost of someone.

“I will come,” said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?

It is Clarissa, he said.

For there she was.

Nearly 100 years after Mrs. Dalloway was published, I sat on a bench and felt chills all over my body. What is this terror, what is this ecstasy. What was it? Something had happened to me beyond what was intellectual, and beyond what was emotional. It was, I concluded, so spiritual I could not put words to it.

Yes, I saw the light. I could find no way to talk about this moment in my class, where I instead presented a paper on the words “Proportion” and “Conversion” in the middle of the text. I saw that I would not go on trying to analyze books and find new angles on old books or pore through archives to find a gap no one had before in order to get the SSHRC-funding one would need if one had any hope of getting a job: I would devote myself to my real love, which the cold breath of Woolf’s ghost had recalled to me, the way a man might call someone to leave behind his livelihood as a fisherman in favor of the uncertainty of discipleship. I would devote myself to writing.

Briefly: On Conversions, here in the middle

I have far too many disparate thoughts I’ve amassed over these years of not having written that dissertation on conversion narratives, which grew to include the question of the transformative experience, which was how I experienced motherhood. But I will offer a caveat to undo the little tale I just offered: conversion narratives, like the testimonies one gives at church, are performative and selective.

Mrs. Dalloway really did have this mystical effect on me, but maybe it is not really a story of a changed person but rather a story about how art can affect us along the nerve endings, bypassing the intellect, and how this is worth devoting oneself to. But this was no Road-to-Damascus conversion. There were about ten other things going on that year that caused me to leave academia in favor of art, many of them far more reasoned and less sudden.

After divorce—I am speaking of my own experience of the way it shatters the self as well as the experiences of myself and others who discover a stranger in the place of a person who was once intimate and beloved—it is easy to look at people in wonderment at how they’ve changed. But I don’t feel changed by divorce, exactly; I feel that something in me, always there, has been revealed.

What might it mean to change, to learn from one’s epiphanies, to take the humblings one has been dealt and be transformed?

Mrs. Dalloway Take Two (Love, Attention, Mystery)

When you give a book this kind of formative power it is a bit scary to return to it. What if the magic was dulled? Reading it had been a private memory of an ecstasy I’d once felt, and when people asked me my favorite book, Mrs. Dalloway, which I’d read only once all the way through4, was my answer.

I had felt the pain of finding a beloved work of art changed because I’d changed when I re-watched Magnolia some twenty years after seeing it at the end of high school. So moved was I then by the Catholic cop John C. Reilly character’s bumbling plight as he begs God in the rain to help him find the gun he’s lost that I would cry a little even to recall the scene days later. I bought the soundtrack; I bought the two-cassette VHS and carried it from apartment to apartment to house to apartment without rewatching.

Decades later, finally watching it again, it wasn’t that I wasn’t at all moved by the film, but of course I was moved by different things. And this character I had felt so much for left me cold. It lost some of its luster in this translation across time. I had, rather obviously, changed.

The week I spent re-reading Dalloway, my life was different in every way from the one I was in when I first read it. But the novel did have a strange effect on me, again. That week, the moments of my everyday life seemed overfilling with richness and abundance and light. I have had these experiences, too, watching Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days, and work by Agnès Varda. That life is delightful—plentiful—beautiful?—not only because at any moment something could happen or someone could come along and change absolutely everything but also because so much is happening around us all the time.

I guess it’s about the mind. It’s about many kinds of love. It’s about how we experience time. It’s about attention. (Simone Weil: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”).

I felt, to rather dramatically paraphrase Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” that I would have been a good woman if this book had been there to talk to me every day of my life.

As I got to the final scene, at the party, when Septimus dies and Clarissa has her life-affirming revelation of connection to him and then disappears for several pages, I felt myself anticipating. What would happen to me when I re-read the final lines?

I was surprised that, again, I felt those bodily chills, that mystical feeling that something was expanding in me. But this time I did not think: ghost. And this time I was able to put words to it to myself, to understand what had happened. Something happens in the pages where, after her revelation, Clarissa disappears and we wait for her to re-appear. My bodily (spiritual?) response had to do with something I’ve been thinking through and chasing for all these years, the moment that feels mystical because it is a moment of the real peeking through the layers of nonsense and self-absorption and habit.

And on top of that, the feeling a work of art can give you, that something meaningful can be communicated by a woman long dead to a woman now living. And probably the feeling that a work of art that changed you when you were young will be a work you always love.

So perhaps I am still open enough. Perhaps I am still spongey. To be open is to risk being influenced or even hurt, badly, by others. Still, the struggle has been, I think, these last few years, not to change but to remain open and soft and silly and passionate. To remain myself.

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A few related reading/writing recommendations

• Any of my fellow Dalloway-freaks would be wise to acquire the incomparable Merve Emre’s The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway. She describes, in the introduction, retyping the entire novel herself, and I was (am) all envy.

• Joseph Earl Thomas’s God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is a novel of this year written in a stream-of-consciousness in a single day, and it offers some of the same pleasures that Dalloway does. Real acquaintance with a mind; real acquaintance with daily life. One of my favorite passages is one in which the narrator describes, in detail, lovingly cleaning someone else’s body:

“The pleasures of cleaning so thoroughly, so exactingly, someone who cannot do so for themselves. Really taking one’s time and getting into the crevices, the butt holes, under the balls and titties, underarms, back fat and fupas, tender flesh creases behind the kneecaps, inside the crusty ears and under the fingernails, between those emaciated flaps of flesh, into the sunken jowls and worn down shoulder pockets. Everything: I want it all.”

• I loved this essay “The New Age Bible” by Sheila Heti in the latest Harper’s about the strange book A Course in Miracles. She talks about the feeling of mysticism one can have while writing, among many other fascinating things.

• And, finally: one of the members of my Woolf pack sent us a link to this substack from George Saunders,

  Story Club with George Saunders

  A Question of Rhythm

  Happy Fourth of July, everybody. I am biting my tongue here, trying my best to not write about politics after this very fraught, concerning week. So I’ll just say that the work we’re doing here is, in my view, an honorable pre-politics: we’re trying to hone our reading (and therefore thinking) skill, so as to be more present, human, powerful, and compassionate, in all things, at all times…

  Read more

  2 years ago · 286 likes · 175 comments · George Saunders

  which led me to this interview with Ursula K. Le Guin talking about Virginia Woolf and finding the rhythm in your prose.

First, some news/links:

1. I’ll be reading at a virtual event for the Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop on August 15th alongside some of my brilliant colleagues there:

2. My gushing review of Diane Seuss’s new book of poetry is up at Southern Indiana Review

3. My novella “Lighthouse”—to be published in an anthology of four thematically- and stylistically-linked novellas with three other (brilliant) writers—has been announced and will be released in 2025 with ARP books.

4. Be in touch if you’d like to work with me. I’m still getting my act together website-wise, but am open to clients who need help with manuscripts of any length or at any stage—both fiction and nonfiction—as well as available for coaching.

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Old Homesickness and its Return

The typo in this title appeared in a draft of student work I was reading this week, and I thought about it for a while—the way our memories are files, the way time files memories—and possibly it can pull together a few of the thoughts I’ve been having over the past month. I’ve finally finished an essay I started on New Year’s Eve about a time capsule my childhood best friend and I made as children—and also it’s about time and childhood kin and about being a writer (and whether being a writer is worth it). And this week marks the ten-year anniversary of my arrival in Riverside, in California, and in the States.

Anyone who has spoken to me at all in these ten years knows that this was not a happy move for me. I have shared too much on this account. I had left behind everything in my life and not for my own projects or reasons. I had left it behind, and I had no way back.

I used to joke to my husband: “happy anniversary to my tears!” I described the feeling of flying over the deserty-looking mountains when we arrived as flying over a gash that seemed to sever me from my previous life. I felt despair, once, looking at the rows of children’s backpacks hanging in the outdoor hallway at the school where I knew not one person, not one teacher or child or parent. I glared at palm trees; I hated the blue sky. I missed thunderstorms, and trees, and, especially, winter. It was homesickness. I was sick with it.

That first end-of-July-beginning-of-August we did some touristy things in LA for a few days, taking a holiday with the kids, and then drove in a rented van all the way to Riverside, which, like the flying over of the gashes in the landscape, appeared to me to represent some kind of geographical disaster, as the heat was 20 degrees (F) higher in Riverside, and the feeling on my face when we opened the van door was as though I had opened the door to an oven.

(a photo I took in 2014 at the citrus park in Riverside)

Anniversary Feelings

Because of my divorce, I have had several experiences of anniversaries the last few years that really rattled me. My subconscious knew—and my body was upset—before I was conscious of the date when my wedding anniversary was on the way; the same thing happened around my birthday, the anniversary of the month our marriage took a turn toward irrevocably ending.

So I have been thinking about the body’s recall of dates or times of year. Every year at this time I go through a small bout of near-depression1, and it occurs to me now that this may not be just the heat or the lack of moisture or the freeways or the unrelenting sun or the feeling of being marooned indoors for most of every day but is also an experience of emotional return. I am returned to the feeling of being trapped. I am returned to the feeling of hostility—that California wanted me out of it, and that I wanted out of California, but that I was stuck.

It is no longer my predominant feeling of living here—a place that now actually feels like home—but I do feel it, every year, at this time. And so I’ve been thinking about the way a body is tuned to time.

For over twenty years, I experienced the days around the clocks springing forward in early March as a time when I feel very happy and hopeful. Something changes in the light and suddenly I think everything will be okay. When we are moving toward the longest day of the year and have not yet peaked, I am like a flower in a garden in a bliss to feel the sun on my leaves. It’s not just the light, though; it was in early March in 1999, that, in a euphoria that turned to mental health crisis, I saw the world as overwhelmingly gorgeous and good and walked around saying to everyone with a look on my face that became more alarming every day, all of us in our snow boots and coats, that it is finally spring, isn’t spring so wonderful.

I am trying to find a way to see this as beautiful. Something fascinating and tenderly moving the way our bodies file events and keep track of time.

Attacks of Nostalgia

When my kids were very small, I was overwhelmed and exhausted and having a hard time getting through a single day. I felt I would never be the good kind of mother I had idealized, the image I’d internalized, and knew myself to be flawed in some way that would affect not just me but my children. I had a Catholic friend then I told I was praying for patience, and she said that one should never pray for patience because God will only give you more tests of your patience.

One day in August, with the other moms who lived in the student family housing in Toronto, I trekked with my baby and my toddler one kilometer to a public park with a big wading pool. My memories from inside my life and my experience were not happy or easy. This was just another day I was trying to find my way to the end of. The pool was cool and the area was shaded, but most of the time I remember being worried that my newly walking baby and my spirited toddler would fall in or wander off or otherwise get hurt. I was so worn out that on the way home—merely one kilometer!—I had to stop in at a bank to cool off in the A/C and sit down for a minute.

Someone had taken a picture of a mother at the park that day, crouched with some children over a chalk drawing, laughing happily with them, a long arm reaching for some chalk, a loving expression on her face, hair tied up in two cute buns—a beautiful image of an ideal mother—and the photo was of me. I marveled over the photo for so long I remember all of its details; first of all, seeing all the perfection of motherhood the image seemed to see, and how happy her children looked, and secondly, seeing that this mother was pretty, which I did not believe I was. But I was the mother in the image!

(This is not that photo)

I thought of this when I saw someone posting an image of a tradwife family—maybe ballerina farm—saying something like “are you telling me you don’t want this?” It is a commonplace to say you shouldn’t compare someone else’s outside with your own inside or something—some reminder of the poison of envy—but how often do we and maybe now more than ever believe that the aesthetics and beauty of some image of life could, if we inhabited it, make our lives feel fuller or happier or…

I had an attack of nostalgia for that old life, though, this month, when first I took a visit to Winnipeg and stayed with one of my dearest friends who has very small children and the beautiful happy life I felt I’d lost when we moved to Riverside. Walkable neighbourhood, enormous shade trees, and a toddling baby that I could spend time with unencumbered by my maternal exhaustion and anxiety. I had a second attack of wistful nostalgia when my oldest child—now about to be in her final year of high school—started baking constantly for a week, because when I was baking and listening to the CBC in a kitchen in those days I felt closest to some ideal of a mother. And then we visited my family in Hamilton, and a friend who owns the bookstore near our old neighbourhood took us for a walk through the woods that used to be just steps from the kids’ school. We lived just steps from a forest.

And in those days I knew I would miss the days I was in when they were over—everyone told me so—and I tried desperately to love those days, to be present for them—why couldn’t I do this?

But then am I in danger of missing the life I’m in now, by getting caught in nostalgia, by getting caught in that old feeling of being trapped?

Yer Not the Ocean

Yesterday, I took two of the kids and one of their friends to the beach, and with my twelve-year-old I swam and jumped and was thrown around by the waves for hours, and my daughter mentioned that during our trip to Hamilton she had swum in a lake for the first time in her life. I had spent my childhood swimming in lakes, while her life—her home—is southern California. Her beaches are Pacific: cold, vast, filled with waves and salt and surfers. Not placid or ringed with trees in full green.

I was grateful to remember in my body what it was like to be twelve, fully present for in the physical joy of swimming for a whole day, unaware yet of my body as an object or aesthetic image (or an image that was lacking in grace and beauty, which was what I mostly felt) and just being in my strength. Whenever I am at the beach, I am moved by a much-needed feeling of what’s good about human beings. Later, I told the teens with me that “the ocean is a kind of medicine,” and they both giggled and asked me what was wrong with me. But look at us all here—the families with adults at play, the joggers, the group of girls on blankets, reading, another group of girls burying themselves in the sand, me singing that song from Moana to annoy the teens, the couple staring out into the expanse holding hands, and even the people who come to do their photoshoots, sometimes even a staged a wedding proposal for such shoots. It’s not expensive to come to the beach and you can stay there all day.

As the sun was beginning to set, I was so cold, and, like a young mother at the park with her children, gave her a ten-minute warning. I said, “you are going to want more time after that but I need you to listen. It has to come to an end.” She tried to negotiate with me that it was the last time they’d have at this beach this summer, since school was starting soon, and they’d be at their dad’s, and it was so fun. I agreed with her, but could not make the time not pass. It was so fun and then—we had no choice—time passed, it had to—that day had to end—it was over.

Consider donating to Doctors without Borders.

Cult of Natural Motherhood

When my children were very young, I was prone to joining cults. I use the word “cults” loosely, and what I mean is that I was very vulnerable to answers to the only question I was asking: how is one supposed to live? In my mid-twenties, living with uncertainty in every direction, responsible for young lives, I felt that I went through every day asking the question. Maybe it was more like how am I supposed to live? A religious question, and I was still religious then, but I was already partway into the long process of losing my faith and was married to—and deeply in love with—an atheist.

I could track the devotion I felt to certain answers to this question with each child. With my oldest, I was shocked epiphanically by the love I felt for her and thought that meant I should devote myself to motherhood, and I did so with gusto, turning to what we called “natural mothering,” joining La Leche League, and trying to model myself after one particular blogger who was homeschooling her five children and knitting things from hand-dyed, hand-spun wool she’d sheared from animals on her hobby farm. By the time I had my second child, though, 22 months after the first, I was hit with the question again—how to live—because I was also walloped with postpartum depression. I realized I needed feminism again, the new epiphany rewriting the old one, which, when I had my third child and another life-changing epiphany, I discovered was a process that might never end. (My favorite quote from literature had long been from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: “I am losing my illusions, she thought, taking her taper. Perhaps to acquire new ones.”)

It was around that time that I made friends with a woman from La Leche League. Her influence on me was strong, because her certainty was also strong. A yoga teacher, a raw vegan1, a person who once stopped me talking when I was telling her about a book I’d just read but which was really dark—

—to tell me that she wouldn’t read something like this or any world news of any kind because knowing too much about misery would only add to the misery of the world. This comment woke me up, when I was already having my doubts about the cult of natural motherhood, because it went against the principles I held more deeply and would never give up. That one should not choose, in the way of Millet’s mad narrator, to spin terrible things as good things. That one ought to try to tell oneself the truth. That the only way to avoid falling into the void was to stare into it? Without flinching? That, in fact, if I was going to be a writer, this was kind of my whole job?

But also I was in a genuinely miserable state, deep in that postpartum depression, just trying to get through the days. She told me that whenever I felt like that the best thing to do was “legs up the wall pose,” where you just lie on your back and put your legs straight up a wall.

This advice seemed so silly to me and to my husband that for years we had a little joke about it—anytime something awful happened we would say to each other “hey, why don’t you just put your legs up the wall?”

My Toes on the Wall

One thing you lose when you lose a person—in my case, via a wrenching break up and eventual divorce—is that whole catalogue of inside jokes.

My second birth was extremely difficult, and a life lesson, too, since I insisted on not using anything for the pain and emerged from it at first triumphant and soon realizing that maybe if I’d been a bit less unrelenting, shall we call it, I might have had a restful birth that didn’t set me up for such a bad emotional outcome. (Maybe the cult was wrong?) Afterwards, my doula told me that she’d never been at a birth like that, that even during the worst part of it, when I was attached to multiple wires and machines, and they were having to hold me up so I could do lunges, and I was falling asleep in the 30 seconds between contractions, Adam and I were making jokes and laughing.

A year into the breakup of this marriage, my father told me, “well, one thing about you, Liz, is you can find the joke in any situation.” I was delighted by this view of me, one I hadn’t known he’d observed, and when I looked into it later I found that being able to joke about the really bad things that happen to us can be a coping response. A new friend told me his favorite thing about me was how I could laugh at myself.

By then, I had been so humbled by heartbreak I tried absolutely everything just to feel better for a few minutes at a time. I had to learn something I’d never learned: I had to learn how to cope. I didn’t and couldn’t wallow, since I was also facing the enormous logistical and material challenges of dismantling the kingdom of our marriage, but I was not proud. I wrote down a list of things I needed to repeat to myself when I woke up in the morning, like today you will be the most gracious and beautiful version of yourself. Today you will remain soft and open. I extended this grace to myself: when I failed—sending, say, a series of angry texts to Adam—I told myself you didn’t like how that felt, so you will not do that tomorrow. I went for long walks. I called my friends and asked for help. I went to a sound bath. I got my Tarot read. I fell to tears in public. I wrote poems. I became addicted to nicotine. And I started doing a lot of yoga.

And so it was that I found myself lying on my mat on the floor after a grueling yoga session, all the feelings wrung happily out of me, my feet flat against the wall. I stared at my toenails, hot pink from a pedicure someone I was dating had paid for as a birthday gift, then wiggling those toes, thinking how lovely it is to have toes and thinking how lovely to have a body and thinking this is my body, the body of my beloved, since the effect yoga had on me was to turn me briefly into to my own beloved, my own little baby, my own sweetheart, and I remembered the pose that friend had suggested to me all those years ago.

The joke was, as always, on me.

But the void

When my kids were babies and I was trying also to become a writer—those were often very dark years. Some pain somewhere deep in my body was triggered, something mysterious to me and to do with my family of origin. I wrote a short story around then that I described later as a weird little miracle. I sat down to write and blacked out for the duration of the writing, then emerged from this trance with the best story I’d yet written.2 It was about a single mother whose teenaged daughter is having a mental health crisis—yes, it was based on my life—and at the end of the story the mother holds the daughter thinking, but I don’t know how to love. No one ever taught me how to love.

I was delighted to have written a story in a trance, to have channeled something, but also writing it seemed to have unsettled me in some frightening way. We tried that night to watch a movie, but the movie had a rape scene I couldn’t bear to watch, and I couldn’t sleep at all that night, felt a familiar bodily sensation I often felt during such insomnias and which I called, to myself, since I was a child, because I cannot convey what this feels like in words, the marshmallow feeling. The kind of unsettled I felt was triggered in a similar way by the Harlow monkey experiments; once, trying to watch a documentary about these experiments, I had such a bad physical reaction that Adam remarked on it with alarm.

I knew all of it had something to do with mothers and failures of mothers and the awful distortions that can occur between mothers and their children. In fact, during many of those years, I would become annoyed reading work by people grappling with the difficulty of motherhood, since they were so far from expressing what felt like the true horror of existence it seemed to me a lie.

Maybe it would have been nice if I could have afforded psychoanalysis.

So when the Alice Munro news came out this weekend3, more than two years into my efforts at healing, my attempts at starting over, my realization that I might be a better mother now that I’m divorced, something was triggered in me that had me lost for a few days. Global crises and personal events had already been sources of anguish for many months, but I was filled with a visceral rage about what Munro had done, and not because she is particularly dear to me as a writer—though I’d had a harrowing experience reading Runaway several years ago, another set of stories about motherhood and pain—but merely because of the facts of it, because of the evil of it.

And then I couldn’t sleep. And then I was angry, again, about the Abandoning Mothers chapter in Claire Dederer’s book on the art of monstrous people,4 and then I felt helpless and scared.

I was trying to be a writer and I was also trying to be emotionally healthy, good to my loved ones, a person of courage and grace and mercy. And I also believed that my sensitivity was what made it possible for me to be an artist; or: that I had to be an artist to make something meaningful of this sensitivity.

If art is my cult, my god, where does that leave my relationships? Because does being a writer mean having to really face what is most awful in the world? Does being a writer mean having to go through all this as I romantically believed as a young person? As I still believe? Didn’t writing make me better? What if being a writer wasn’t, as I’d told myself for years, the only good thing about me? What if it isn’t the thing that has redeemed me or anyone? Can I put my legs up the wall and solve that? Where is the joke here? How will I sleep?