Life is hard. Here is someone.

i’m a bad girlfriend i guess

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 16:43:00 -0400

i’m a bad girlfriend i guess

everlane: We’re looking for our Peggy—someone to help create unforgettable ad campaigns and web...

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 10:53:21 -0400

We’re looking for our Peggy—someone to help create unforgettable ad campaigns and web experiences. This job would be in SF or LA, but we will pay moving expenses. Is it you?

[OMG] [emphasis mine]

They need a Peggy to tell them not to say they need a Peggy.

(or maybe it’s genius? who knows)

PEGGGYYYYYYYYYY.

Peggy is really just a terrible, terrible name isn’t it?

How tragic.

HA. I love the ridiculousness of this tweet. I mean in a way...

Tue, 28 May 2013 10:35:35 -0400

HA. I love the ridiculousness of this tweet. I mean in a way it’s completely unremarkable and standard trolling fare, we barely notice it. And the review is interesting (and, it’s worth noting, never once uses the word “against”). I like Alice Munro but certainly have never sat down and read all of her work at once, or interrogated it too much. I can imagine its potential to be tiresome, and understand the (relative) value of examining work that is deemed “unquestionably good” or whatever it is. (Speaking of: I’m reading Leaving the Atocha Station right now and I want to punch it in the face. Shut up already! Grow a spine! Stop whining! I hate this book, and yes, I hate this “unlikeable character.”)

But anyway, I love the underlying notion of this tweet, the bald-faced sincerity of it, that purporting to put work out into the world is entering into an argument w the reader over the worthiness of your work. As if when you publish work people are either for you or against you, and this critic has decided he is “against Alice Munro.” I don’t think he ever says that in this tweet, who knows who constructed this tweet, I’m sure people say this all of the time. But it is beautifully absurd, or lazy, or honest. Meet Alice Munro and her entire body of work, a big question mark standing before you, a shrugging of the shoulders, asking you what you think. “Are you for us or against us? Please tweet your answer!”

Ha, actually that sounds pretty right on. Maybe this is less reductive than a distillation.

"Why not shoot yourself, actually, rather than finish one more excellent manuscript on which to gag..."

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:17:27 -0400

““Why not shoot yourself, actually, rather than finish one more excellent manuscript on which to gag the world?””

- Annie Dillardddd

meaghano: this one is my favorite because we are I am so bad...

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:37:15 -0400

meaghano:

this one is my favorite because ~~we are~~ I am so bad at this game (and mostly for david’s face. [omg, do yourself a favor and view large]. by ian broyles.

nostalgic today!

To be of use.

Wed, 15 May 2013 15:59:31 -0400

I’ve been having a recurring dream, where I go into the office, sit at my desk, and start working. No one says anything to me, and I think nothing of it. I notice after awhile that most everyone is avoiding me, and if I speak directly to them they answer very delicately. In last night’s dream, it wasn’t until I was standing up at my desk and trying to corral people into going to get lunch with me, that I realized I didn’t work there anymore. I had left weeks ago but had forgotten, and by force of habit, through the near unconscious following of routine, I ended up back there at my desk.

In the dream, and now, I am struck by how sad this makes me, how I cringe at the thought of it. The thought of being a fool, of not belonging.

It is strange after all this time to not belong to something. I haven’t learned to not say, “we” when I refer to the company. I imagine people laughing at me in their heads when I do this. “She just can’t let go.” As if people care at all. I quickly correct myself. “They” or “you.” When we were a little bit drunk in the middle of the day over the weekend, I accidentally referred to D’s dad as “dad” instead of Will. IN FRONT OF EVERYONE. Which is hilarious but recounting it now makes me want to scream. But there was that same split second — that beat between the misnomer and the possibility for correction when you do a panicked calculation: does correcting the mistake only bring to it more attention? But you cant resist it.

“We, uh, they…” “The look on Dad’s face — uh, WILL! WILL!”

How embarrassing it is to sit here, my brain subconsciously tugging me back toward safety.

The strangest thing lately is the time between things when I am...

Mon, 13 May 2013 15:57:00 -0400

The strangest thing lately is the time between things when I am deciding what to do next. I don’t mean on any grand scale, oh god. I mean in the smallest way, just the order of things (on many levels). I chant soothing things to myself as I go about my day now, small pep talks that go over and over how I would like to go through my day. “Okay now you will get up. Okay, or in a minute you will get up. You’ll get up and put on shoes and go to the coffee shop. Just go get a coffee. Bring a book. It’s okay, you don’t have to write anything.” Then I’ll go to the coffee shop and I’ll write my daily entry on 750words.com and I’ll get antsy and anxious and then I’ll say Okay you’re (we’re?) going to go home and make lunch and you’ll make this and that and then you’ll go to yoga. After yoga you will read in the park if it’s nice and then you will come home when you get sick of it and you’ll clean the kitchen and take a shower.” I’ll have my daily smallish thing I want to get done around the house and I will tell myself it’s okay if I don’t do it. I tell myself that if I write my words and go to yoga or go for a run that’s good enough. That is enough. And I take the next step and sometimes, after the shower or between places I’ll sit on the bed not knowing what to do next. I will walk over to the closet to put on shoes then stand still there not knowing where I should go. I stand there with my hands clasped in front of me (my “nun hands” as D calls them — a sure sign of discomfort) and I’ll walk back over to my computer, half lying in bed, propped up on an elbow and I’ll tab back and forth in a panic, and get distracted by something, and time will go by and I’ll notice and then stand up and pace around not knowing what I should do. The post office, a museum, the gym. This is probably when I should be writing. When the pacing sets in I should be sitting down to write. Running abates the anxiety — I come home and feel new and spring into action — cooking, the dishes, putting clothes away. But then I get back to where I was.

It was Dustin’s birthday this weekend so we went camping at a hike-in place. That’s the sort of thing he loves. It’s funny because sure I went camping a few times as a kid, for family reunions on the cheap and Girl Scouts and the like. I have some fond memories I guess but most of the memories involve scary walks in the middle of the night to go pee. This weekend of course was no different. I got what I think might be the worst night of sleep in my life. I sleep pretty well as a rule but still. I heard people unzipping our tent probably five times. I peed twice, not knowing where to flash my flashlight while I was doing it, because I damn well wasn’t going to turn it off.

Peeing outside though, while terrifying, remains a huge thrill. I guess that’s like any transgressive act. You approach the boundary and having this running thought about how this is not something people do and you are not “allowed” to do it and then you yank down your pants and everything is fine — thrilling even. You might have a little urine on your leg or in your shoes, but freed of the burden of having to pee and freed of the fear that you’ll get in trouble, it’s no doubt worth the price of admission.

We had so much fun this weekend. How to say that so it’s not so banal. We went for the five-hour hike but somewhere mid-downpour we missed a turnoff and never got back on the red trail. We laughed and laughed, marching through the rain, completely soaked through, stomping in the mud and staring at rocks and rocks and rocks, trying not to slip, imagining all of our heads hitting rocks and ankles twisting, estimating how long it would take to get one of us out there. My anxiety gave way to waves of euphoria and calm (they sort of feel the same to me at this point) and there was not much to say but, “wow.” Part of why, or how, Dustin and I love each other, how we manage to entwine our lives so effortlessly, (okay maybe “effortlessly” is a misnomer/fate tempter, but I mean to say it works, despite ourselves) I think, is that we both love to be quiet. We joked with his dad and sister on and off and Dustin led us and cheered us on again and again, but for long stretches we just quietly followed each other, punctuated only by my sharp stops, staring at wet rocks and trying to devise a way through. We found a pattern wordlessly, him going ahead of behind me, whichever way I needed, and putting out a hand. I don’t know why I freeze up so much, or if it’s tied in some way to my personality, if that is ‘the kind of person I am,’ or if it’s just that I’m afraid to die on a hike, but no one let me get far, or hang back.

When we went the wrong way for over an hour and ended up at the bottom of the mountain nowhere near our camp, we all just stood there in the rain in disbelief. We searched each others’ faces for a clue as to what the other person wanted, at the edge of four different losing-it’s. We walked into town and sat on the sidewalk of some neighborhood and ate pistachios. Somewhere in the middle of that the sun came out. Dustin threw his shells down the drain of a gutter. I hid mine in my pocket. His dad called a cab while cars slowed down at the stop sign and we looked the other way and looked for any dry spots on any parts of our body. We closed our eyes in the sun and laughed a little and were mad we didn’t finish. Dustin turned around, pointed to the mountain we just came down from and said, “Hey! We just climbed to the top of that thing and down from it, for no reason whatsoever!” It was a really weird thought. I laughed despite myself, impatient for this cab, who would drive us to the right spot and let us out so we could climb back up the fucking thing again, but from a different angle. We finally made it, though. I strung a happy birthday banner up and we put on party hats while Dustin was off buying bug spray. Arranging our campsite just so, surrounded by trees, made us feel calm and proud and together and powerful. What did we climb the mountain for, if not that.

Longreads Guest Pick: Meaghan O'Connell on Ted Thompson and the Making of a Novel

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:56:29 -0400

longreads:

Meaghan O’Connell is the editor-in-chief of meaghano.com:

“I regard novel-writing with a heady combination of awe and dread, so when debut novelist Ted Thompson wrote about his book’s eight (eight!) year journey to completion last week, I opened it in a tab and walked away from my desk immediately. ‘The Evolution of a First Novel’ is as fascinating as it is generous, and takes us along as his book about a retired Connecticut divorcee went from plausible deniability, to short story, to MFA application, to self-doubt, despair, long dog walks, and longer grant applications. The story ends as all real stories should, with an air of peaceful resignation and a book deal. The people mentioned (Thompson most of all, I suppose) seem to be from a bygone literary era, but aren’t—or so we’ll keep hoping. I took from it what is either a reminder, a threat, or a revelation, depending: that people will forgive you when you get in your own way, and make way for you when you get out of it.

Okay my bio looks a little more sad than funny here — but if you haven’t already, check out Ted’s post about his novel, which Longreads let me blurb for their newsletter.

tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:52:32 -0400

Tonight is my first Sunday without a job to go to tomorrow in awhile. I really like it. In fact, this whole weekend, while being nothing out of the ordinary, has been wonderful.

I had a really good job that I think shaped me into a full adult human with mad skillz, a fire within me, and a new seriousness I know is important. Knowing when to turn these things on and off will be, I imagine, something I never truly master (whether or not I want to is still up for discussion).

The past few weeks have felt like a big breakup, like graduating college, or moving away, or getting a divorce, or going on a permanent vacation. The whole thing has been complicated and I am walking away from it without ever solving it, or winning, or “being right.” Because oh boy have I argued about this in my head a lot but ultimately it doesn’t matter, because it’s not what I want, however enthralling I find, and found, all of it. However engaging and difficult and thrilling and important and FUN I know it to be. No matter how much I straight up adore most of the people I worked with, it never will be how I want to spend my days, if given the choice. And I know that about myself.

So however wildly ambivalent about this decision I was initially, or more truly, wildly afraid I was of making it, I did it. I don’t know with what grace I pulled the whole thing off, though I do know I walked in on my last day and my coworker blared “The Final Countdown” on the office speakers, and then Bonnie Raitt (and then famously, later, “Wind Beneath My Wings”.) I know when I finally said I was leaving I felt power in myself I barely recognized. And I know that younger and newer people in the company told me how important to them my point of view was as they figured things out, or how inspiring my constant speaking up was to them as a woman, or just that they’ll miss my sass or my jokes in too-serious email threads. So I know I wouldn’t take any of that back, however much it may have chipped away at my credibility or indefensibility. And I know it sounds grandiose but being anything but that would have broken me much sooner.

I just hope the void I leave is felt and then filled with better insight and more humility, more detachment, and more grace than I had.

So tomorrow the whole thing will go on without me, and I will be on a park bench reading Infinite Jest for the first time ever, finally. Then I’ll go running midmorning, make lunch at home, and with any goddamn luck, spend the rest of the day writing for my life.

And eventually someone else will have my job, and possibly do it better, or at least have a much easier go of it. And all of the why of this will matter less and less. Less and less and less.

Because, and here is the important part, for the first time in a long time, I don’t have the nagging feeling that there is something else that I should be doing.

And I’ll deal with all the anxiety and pressure and self-doubt and unfathomable luck and privilege of that situation tomorrow. Tonight, I am happy I don’t have to go to work in the morning, though I know I’ll miss it.

affirm me!

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 21:29:00 -0400

“This is so brave.”

I have started to notice the way people say that when women write memoir-y things. This is a thing people do and it’s annoying but now I can’t stop seeing it. And I like to write these memoiry things, on whatever small scale (does twitter count?). I absolutely have that compulsion, and am fairly aware that I have a knack for it, and I find it really rewarding to do. It’s so funny to me though because, while I can’t speak for others, it seems to me like the least brave thing.

I guess any courage I have is just knowing that everyone is really fucked up, and we’re usually fucked up in similar ways, so who cares. That’s not bravery so much as self-awareness? And it’s really not narcissistic so much as it requires empathy. It’s narcissistic to think you are the only idiot with money problems or love problems or work problems. If you look around and realize everyone else has variations on your same theme, it’s very liberating. And true!

And so from there, writing about something crappy that happened to you - especially if it was your fault, if you did it! — and making it funny and compelling and entertaining? That is just advantageous, on a lot of levels — that’s just opportunity, baby. And it’s such a human compulsion to me, to confess. It so transparently satisfying on the basest level. Not in a bad way — I don’t think it’s boring (when it’s good), or any more self-involved or indulgent than anything else. I love reading this shit, and so does pretty much everyone else. It’s about the human fucking condition and it teaches about ourselves and the world. It helps us cope. It’s all there is.

But brave? Come on. You are taking something crappy and either making literal money from it, or sharing it with the world, who will then tell you they love it. You are benefitting from the bad thing! You have fulfilled the great promise of writing: you have transcended the crappy thing by imposing a narrative on it, you have made art from it, and you are loved more for it.

Everyone wins.

You took a risk that people would hate you for it, sure, but the promise of their love for you outweighed it. Your desperate need to be loved by everyone in the world outweighed it.

“So brave!” Oh shut up. Unless you are a whistleblower or calling out a tyrannical government or a murderer or something (all legitimately brave!), say it’s good or funny or deft or revelatory or fascinating or compelling or “I just really love knowing that you fucked up and it gives me great satisfaction and makes me relate to you even more, and feel less bad about my own human self.”

That is enough! That is all there is!

Know that while you may feel it’s brave to overcome the fear that others will judge you, once you get over that, it is really fun and really a thrill and really psychologically satisfying to be loved for all the reason you fear you’ll be hated. It’s a great, desperate delusional shtick. “Oh you think you love me? Well, let me show you the worst parts of my brain and my self. Oh, you still love me? Ha! Wow!” <— not brave. Kind of pathological actually.

It’s fun to do, though, and fun to read. It really helps people — readers — sometimes. I believe that. But I don’t know about brave. You’re a fucking writer. You basically are inept enough that you can’t function in your life without mediating through your own brain and then imposing it back on the world and expecting to be loved for it. Ha!

Brave is getting out of bed in the morning and just living your life, and living with your choices. Brave is making choices without asking the public to affirm you for making them.

Or at least right now I am convinced of that, though I am kind of drunk tbh, and really having a hell of a time lately.

I just don’t think it’s fair to hold writing to “brave.” I don’t think that’s necessarily what it sets out to do. If we were brave, we wouldn’t need it.

I'm thinking of switching my major to English. Right now I'm majoring in design and it's not going very well. If I'm an English major, will I be forever unemployed/sad/homeless? Also, do you have any advice for young (ish) writers?

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 14:16:00 -0500

Listen, designers have a magical skill that if you are a writer you will very often wish you had. If you are at all interested in design, please try to at least learn Photoshop or something. If for no other reason that it’s a real selling point when you are applying to be a writer for some terrible, demoralizing blog.

It seems like you will probably be unemployed unless you go into nursing or something? And yeah you’ll be sad, for sure, no matter what your major, ESPECIALLY if you are an English major (correlation does not equal causation, but like: correlation is real).

And no, I do not have any advice for young writers. I really don’t. I am wondering if young writers have any advice for me? But if the answer is, get up at 6AM every day before work and write, I will say: No. I am too tired.

But also I will say that college is your last chance to not worry about making a living — not that that’s always the case, but if it *is* the case, then it’s your last chance (well, uh, unless you are independently wealthy or marry someone who is? in which case, you won’t have to worry about money but you will still worry about your life, believe me) — so if you like reading books and talking and thinking and writing about books, do it while you can! It’s very hard to find a way to do that and also be a person in the world at the same time (and when you’re in college you’re not quite yet a person in the world, except for the people who are activists in college, who i do not mean to offend).

So do that, but also learn Photoshop, is what I’m saying. Also: your major in college really does not matter, at all, hardly ever. So just try to learn about something you like. As a bonus, learning about something you like is a good thing to practice doing (if that makes any sense). It’s a way of living / an approach that is rarer than you think.

Also this very act of taking a step back and considering what you want to spend your time on bodes well for you, sadness-wise. Just try to brush off some of the underlying anxiety — you will have the rest of your life to make choices from a place of fear. Woo!

Nine Months

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 22:43:00 -0500

(lol not a pregnancy announcement)

On my way out to Los Angeles on Friday I was reading To the Lighthouse (as I mentioned), during which I got hit with a terrible, but blessedly quick to pass, cold. Cut to me in the spare bedroom of my friend’s mother’s weekend cabin at Lake Arrowhead, lying there, wanting to die, ostensibly going to get into my pajamas before we all drank margaritas and watched WALL-E by the fire. My friend’s mom eventually came upstairs and put a blanket over me (she’s a real mom’s mom) and told me I didn’t have to come back down. Have kinder words e’er been spoken? And so there I was with little to no internet service, lying in the dark in a tiny twin bed, staring at my phone. Fortuitously (fortuitous in the way that if you are on vacation, in the mountains, in a sunny warm place, you start to think that everything really is going to be okay) I had the Emily Books book Nine Months, by Paula Bomer, waiting in an email. *cue angels of feminist vulnerabilty singing*

The premise of this book is a woman (a lapsed/frustrated painter / sort of frustrated/exhausted housewife / feminist cool mom woman type person) gets accidentally pregnant with her third child just as she was gratefully and gloriously exiting the baby-having phase of her life, and she basically freaks out about losing more of her life, debates having an abortion, and runs out on her family. And so from that I might not have to tell you that it is riveting, but it is. And I recommend you read it!

Long story short I am really enjoying it, and somewhat begrudgingly enjoying reading on my phone (I guess I begrudge this because I stare at my phone so much already? And feel like I am living in a Chris Ware comic. But ya know, it is convenient and I am most of the time already holding my phone in one of my hands anyway), and found this passage hilarious and perfect, considering I am at the same time reading (and worshipping) Virginia Woolf (you can bookmark things in your phone! Wow!):

And then there are the childless women who for some reason Sonia despises as well. The whiney, self-absorbed ones who remain perpetual children. Who still fucking blame it all on their mothers. Who have no idea. Who reads Virginia Woolf without smelling her forever-a-maiden status? Interior dialogue? Sounds great, if you don’t have kids, which thankfully keeps you from such self-absorption.

Ha! I mean: fair.

Oh, I also bookmarked this.

He’s home so late. It’s nine thirty. He looks ruined and Sonia feels very sorry for him. This job, sometimes, seems as if it’s sucking his very soul out. It seems like he goes to an office where they stick a vacuum cleaner on his chest and turn it on, without any nozzle, no, just the round metal pole, one of those kind of vacuum cleaners, where the body of it is attached to a long tubular thing, and they put it in right where his heart and soul is and suck out its very life essence.

Woo! I am really, really into this book. If you read a lot of mom blogs and are kind of obsessed but horrified all at the same time. And/or you just like really urgent, honest, funny writing: I think you will like it! And if neither of those apply to you, I am unsure what we have in common but thank you for reading.

"…if you put a baby near a cliff, you’re not saying that all babies live near cliffs. You’re..."

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 15:05:13 -0500

“…if you put a baby near a cliff, you’re not saying that all babies live near cliffs. You’re just saying: what if there was a baby near a cliff? And/or you’re saying: isn’t it the case that, sometimes, babies get near cliffs? And/or: doesn’t life sometimes feel like you’re a baby and you’re near a cliff?”

- geeeeorge

"There is a code of behavior, she knew, whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of..."

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 13:40:00 -0500

“There is a code of behavior, she knew, whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of this sort it behooves the woman, whatever her occupation may be, to go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs of his vanity, or his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty, she reflected, in her old, maidenly fairness, to help us, suppose the Tube were to burst into flames. Then she thought, I should certainly expect Mr. Tansley to get me out. But how would it be, she thought, if neither of us did these things? So she sat there smiling.”

- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

How would it be, indeed. I am reading this book for the first time, and I am glad I am only reading it now. It seems, halfway in, to be all about ego and social pressures and insecurity and loneliness and regret and failure and bitterness, and our choices in the face of other peoples’ choices. And how finding a bit of time to think to yourself, and a stubborn insistence upon your own happiness amid all of that, is an ongoing battle. I’m not sure I could have fully appreciated all that until fairly recently. (Ha?)

Or maybe that’s not at all what it’s about but I’d see that in every book I read.

In any case, above all it feels wonderfully rebellious in its long sentences and refusal to make any sacrifices at the altar of absolute clarity of communication. Reading this after spending my days writing clear, concise, economical, defensible sentences day in and day out — it’s sort of like how I felt watching this 60’s-ish woman in the airport security line this morning. They told her her bag was to big too carry on and she flung it around the snaking line, slammed it on its side, yanked out her pearls, and yelled at the poor airport employee. All of us were a little embarrassed for her, wanting to say, hey, you can’t behave this way. You can’t do that. But also a little bit thrilled. She did look great. Her husband remained stoic, picking her purse up off the ground and staring straight head, moving forward in the line.

A few minutes later they called final boarding for my flight - I was still taking my shoes off, putting my laptop in a bin — and I paced nervously, whispering c’mon c’mon c’mon under my breath, panicking, wishing I could fling my bag onto the ground and scream at someone.

But Virginia Woolf: she gets to do it. She can write the long winding sentences that are hard to follow, and we follow her. Or some of us do. And I like that.

This is from my grandma’s (Grammie!) wedding day. HA....

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 22:27:00 -0500

This is from my grandma’s (Grammie!) wedding day. HA. Who are these people? I am obsessed.

important.

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 21:10:04 -0500

The other night I was trying to explain to my boyfriend what it felt like when the urgent need to take off my bra flooded over me.

This is a thing that men don’t understand. Though it is pretty related to the urgent need to take off your pants. Do men have that?

Gram! (this actually is my grandmother) (for real)

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 22:54:00 -0500

Gram!

(this actually is my grandmother) (for real)

I don’t read much writing by men these days. I guess I am pretty...

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 20:27:00 -0500

I don’t read much writing by men these days. I guess I am pretty unapologetic about that fact, considering I dunno, the CANON and what have you, but I don’t even do it on purpose. I am a woman writer and I write like a woman and look up to women writers and are fascinated by how they do it. And this is very gender essentialist and so pretty problematic, not to mention limits my point of view fairly significantly. So no. Try again: what I try to do in my reading is follow a thread. Trying too hard to follow it is a mistake, too, so I won’t attempt to articulate it here. But given the kinds of books I tend to gravitate towards, deliberately or no, I don’t often read books that are so primarily concerned with, or concerned at all with, um…

DAD STUFF.

If I had to call this book anything, that’s what I would call it. A dad book. Not in its intended audience but in who it breathes life into, sheds light onto, spends time with, thinks inside of, moves in, etc etc. I mean, it’s all about feelings and language and interiority so in sensibility, not a dad book — hi! sorry! problematic again! — so much as reckoning of dads book. Revisiting your childhood through the eyes of a man who has his own children. Revisiting your young father self through the eyes of your older father self. You having-not through your having. All that trying and how much it meant, and what you couldn’t admit then, gone back and admitted. Pathos all painted over people who we thought just had no time for pathos, but it turns out were fucking swimming in it, were busy treading water and had no time to stop and write about it in their daily dad journals or whatever.

Duty, dignity, status anxiety, striving, looming failure, then super looming failure, then failure in real time, then the after-effects thereof. Inability to please wife, make wife proud, make wife safe — understand wife seemed to be there, which was nice — make kids feel loved, inability to fucking cope, to be okay, to feel good about how things are and were and will be.

From the story, “Puppy” (which: fuuuuuuck):

“And then, because she hadn’t made his life harder by being a smart-ass, they had lain there making plans, like why not sell this place and move to Arizona and buy a car wash, why not buy the kids Hooked On Phonics, why not plant tomatoes, and then they’d get to wrestling around and *she had no idea why she remembered this) he’d done this thing of, while holding her close, bursting this sudden laugh/despair-snort into her hair, like a sneeze, or like he was about to start crying.

Which had made her feel special, him trusting her with that.”

(Which made ME feel special, George Saunders, you trusting me with that.)

That story is a devastating one and they all are in their way, so baldly open and urgent yet banal — often written in the most familiar, trite voices (oh my god), filled with likes and funny turns of phrase and sounding often like reality television, or high school. But it’s not a distraction somehow. Or ever too cruel (to me at least, though my tolerance for cruelty in pretty, uh, high (catholic school, ya’ll)).

I read this book very slowly, as my psyche seemed to demand, only able to take in so much fucking pathos and bitter reality at once. I read a little bit each train ride, then every night before bed (laughing quietly, remarking out loud, driving my essentially male partner crazy — I haven’t read a book that’s this funny in a really long time), and then, I read it once at lunch, alone. I sat by myself at a restaurant for an hour during the work day for the first time in my life, thinking, Oh, so this how people get by.

Long lunches and then reading books by people also concerned with getting by and how we do it — people who write sentences like this,

“Coatless bald-headed man. Super skinny. In what looked like pajamas. Climbing plodfully, with tortoise patience, bare white arms sticking out of his p.j. shirt like two bare white branches sticking out of a p.j. shirt. Or grave.”

HA. #dead

Or conjure images like this, that are so on point they’re still with me weeks later,

“When Eva tiny, had big head of black curls. Would stand on couch, eating cereal from coffee mug, dancing to sound in head, flicking around cord from window blinds.”

[Mostly because YES: aren’t kids always flicking around the cord from window blinds? How much time did you spend with that cord and the plastic thing at the bottom of it when you were a kid? The straight up MAJORITY of your time? Exactly.]

Death-renderingly hilarious and accurate turns of phrase aside, the final story (and by far the best, anyone who disagrees is wrong and needs to learn how to READ, obviously) transforms from a confusing experiment in fucking Virginia Woolf-type of switching POV, stream of consciousnesses, into fucking “This is why we have art” levels of brilliance (IMHO!!). I haven’t been wrecked so, uh, significantly (??) by a story, nay, book since WILD (page 29ish of Wild is now the barometer for crying-while-reading).

And yes I would like this guy to write me a novel, as if that were how art works, as if we were owed anything. It’s not and we aren’t, but yes a novel would be cool. THAT SAID, George Saunders could print out a packet of beautiful, exacting sentences he’s written and I would pay $28.00 for it*.

Take this little passage, for example, which I read out loud to my boyfriend as he got ready for bed, prefaced with the fact that it’s a scene with a guy cleaning out the dregs of a pond with a shovel and accidentally killing a bunch of almost-frog tadpoles, flinging them about the yard. Soon he becomes complicit in it, and so:

“It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.”

I read that out loud to Dustin and he was like BOOM and I was like, “And there it is. The secret of the universe. What underlies everything, revealed.” And he’s like, yep, and wow and I’m like, “The reason why you ate the entire bag of cookies while I was at work today!” And he was like, “Actually I was thinking more of the Holocaust!”

So think about THAT.

* Actually, come to think of it, maybe ideally George Saunders would have a talk show, and there would be a live audience, and we could go to it (too much energy / fear involved in actually talking to him one-on-one). It would just be him sitting there and thinking really hard with a white board and maybe his wife (I mean, this is my fantasy ok let me go there) and they cry and talk about their lives and show pictures of their kids and talk about all the hard decisions they’ve made and we could just sit there and watch him and maybe submit a question every once in awhile.

Guilt! Shame! Duty! Failure! Dad stuff!

"I’ve always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that were not normal or..."

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 19:55:37 -0500

“I’ve always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that were not normal or bland. I used to feel that there were situations and actions and mind-states that were too “banal” for me to describe them well. Now I feel that there is nothing that can happen to a person that is banal. Feeling that way was a failure of vision on my part. Everything that happens to us is interesting. That’s our job: to feel that way. And an interesting thing has started happening: feeling that way (or at least trying to feel that way), I am finding that non-banal prose will always present itself. Or the prose is banal at first, but if you start poking at it, with the confidence that the underlying reality is not (is never) banal, then the prose starts to rise to the occasion.”

- george saunders

2012 through books.

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 22:11:00 -0500

I’ve never taken a step back from my life and said, “I need to spend more of my life sitting indoors reading books.” Instead I want to wake up earlier, to run more, to write more, to cook more, to go on dates, to see my friends more, to call my mom. All of these things make me feel like I am taking initiative and control of my life and my happiness and all other sorts of deluded things. The thing is though I do want to read more, but when I say that and am really meaning it, I mean that I want more to be transported and feel known and have my conception of how people move in the world expanded, or at least I want to put cracks in it, more. Reading is basically just the easiest way of doing that, and it’s very important to me. It buoys. And this year it kinda sucked.

Dustin stopped working at a bookstore halfway through the summer and I only like books that I pick out MYSELF and you see, there all these baby blogs out there of women talking about their lives in this hopeful, alien way, and sometimes great tragedies befall them and it’s all very compelling. Anyway I fear I’ve lost my mojo. I think my book-Saturn is returning. Something.

Luckily the good thing with the book thing still happened a few times, for which I’m very grateful. Here is what stopped me this year, what made things feel right and preordained or just were a great comfort/distraction:

I inhaled Sarah Manguso’s Two Kinds of Decay and felt swept up in it and needed more. Luckily she had a new book out this year, The Guardians. The first one I liked better, because it is more deeply terrifying and personal, and affecting (at least according to my brain). The death is closer! Though rest assured they are both about death. Everything is about death, people. Everything I care about. But I read both of these immediately, and felt lucky to have them. Decay on Saturday and The Guardians on Saturday night. Life had meaning!
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home I also read quickly, and I was ecstatic the whole time but also somehow at peace, on my work retreat (just to take a minute to clarify: “work retreat” is actually an oxymoron and some sort of childhood nightmare come to being). Everyone tie-dyed shirts and did yoga and paddled in paddle boats and I sat in a corner reading this, relishing it. It was the kind of book where you are off doing other things and remember you have it off in your room, just waiting for you to get back to, and you feel great comfort. “I may hate myself and not know how to play ping pong or talk to people but I have this book!” You have your life then you have this other life, one which makes the first one easier (the book is the other one, the consolation). Her new book is not as good (what a cruel sentence, as if I’m some sort of agent or hollywood producer). An echo of the first one. Which is really, I think, what it sets out to be. And so it’s still really interesting, and I wasn’t ready to leave Alison Bechdel and there you go. I am happy to hang out in her brain.
I read the Grace Paley book I hadn’t read yet, Later the Same Day, and I think there may be one more, but all of her titles sound the same. Anyway I am utterly convinced this woman is brilliant, a cut above, and her voice and her writing feels so utterly familiar, as if it were in itself part of what writing is — central to it. I just adore her. I do. If you haven’t read much of her, do it, and know you will be schooled. I am afraid to really pin down what I have read of hers and what I haven’t for fear there is nothing more.
I read a Jo Ann Beard book and a Bobbie Ann Mason book — both short stories, too — and they sort of blend together for me. Not because they both have these three-word southern names, which, okay yes, probably that is why. But they are both deeply feminine voices in a way that is familiar to me and in a way that I love. Bobbie Ann Mason is the very southern poor, a little quirky, domestic one. Really fucking on point. And Jo Ann Beard is also trenchant, but more urgent, crying out. Maybe I want them to fuse into one. They both carried me, though, and I want more of both of them. And more like them.
Also Laurie Colwin, Laurie Colwin, Laurie Colwin. Growing up I didn’t let my mother teach me anything, at least not explicitly. In fact I would lose my shit when she tried to tell me how to do anything or offer me help in any way. I’m sure this does not reflect accurately on my character in any way whatsoever. Ha! Anyway now that I understand my own inherent weakness and mortality, I actively seek help and crave wisdom and know-how and I want women to teach me things, I inhale books like this. I read Home Cooking and went back to Word the next weekend for More Home Cooking, feeling so happy and filled with purpose. Maybe soon I will swallow my pride enough to ask my own mother for advice, cooking and otherwise.
And in the interest of admitting when I am wrong, I started out really mad about and annoyed by D.T. Max’s David Foster Wallace biography (do I just hate biography? The jury is still out), I got totally sucked in and really loved it. This happens to me all the time with reading, actually. I start out hating it and then by about 50 pages I have “met the writing on its own terms” (I put quotes on it not because someone else said it but because I know I sound shitty when I say it) and accepted it for what it is and really enjoyed it. Not every book needs to be the book I would write. Right? Agh.
I need to chill the fuck out this year.
You’re all wrong about How Should a Person Be.