This is the other book I’m reading and it is DEVASTATING. AND ENTHRALLING.
The premise, if you haven’t heard about it yet (it’s a few years old), is this couple has broken up and are auctioning off all of their crap/memories: photos, letters, clothing, gifts, ticket stubs, you get the drift— and what you read is the inventory of the auction.
There is no actual story but there is actually a story. Clearly to pull this off you have to be very deliberate but also not appear so. And she does, almost the entire time (although to be fair I am totally picking it apart and trying to understand the author’s thought process as i read it) and you get sucked in so quickly, despite the fact that you know- you know! like the titanic!- that they are going to break up, you are still pulling for them / coveting their belongings / nostalgic for the days of letterwriting and travel assignments and NY Times letterhead and books with song lyrics written in the margins.
This I am also not finished with yet, and this I also sometimes feel self-conscious about reading on the train— I mean it is laid out like a catalogue for God sakes (the twee-est, yuppiest catalogue imaginable, ie WET DREAM), but damn guys.
There is something so, erm, viscerally appealing about it— I think we all hope the ephemera in our lives tells a story, that we can weave a narrative out of metro cards and hotel keys and stickie notes— all of this new sincerity and curation and documentation, we hope it adds up to something. We’re really fucking sentimental. And this book validates that— it tells us exactly what we were secretly hoping all along— There’s a story here. Everything meant something. When you arrange the contents of your toiletry bag in a line, it all makes sense.
Also: cool lives. Fucking polaroid-before-Gaga-hotel-stationary-vintage-paperbacks-postcards-from-Europe-homemade-valentines cool.
And the bonus? You get to spend the whole book wondering if this is actually real.
I TOTALLY THINK IT IS.
