In lieu of the post I had planned to publish this week, here are some traces of one life:
I’ve been working, off and on, on a piece about Sarah McLachlan, but I’ve been reluctant to share it because I’m not sure it really has a point, or at least one that resonates for anyone other than me. Does it matter? I think not, actually. What I love about this space is that it feels just like a blog did in the early days of blogging, except that this form is something I need now in a way I didn’t then. I will schedule my piece on McLachlan in the name of just doing.
I recently accepted and signed a publishing contract for my first book!!! I’m very happy about it, obviously, and I’ve learned a lot of hard lessons about just how much you can get in your own way. I plan to write a lot more about this after I finish up with this book, with the intention of helping someone who might need it, and also to try things a bit differently next time. Namely, to share written work more widely when it is in a rough state. For those who don’t know, my book is about Iranian cinema during the 1960s and 1970s, and its preoccupation with ideas of collectivity. The “elevator speech” that reduces the book to one line in simple language is “these somewhat obscure films imagined better ways of living together.”
This morning I finished reading Oh William! I truly don’t understand how Elizabeth Strout does what she does, but I find her books so moving. There is just so much to sit with and it all does sit, so heavily, with the barest trace of plot. We’re disturbed imagining what has happened to Lucy, the narrator, and we’re told almost nothing. I was only vaguely aware of Strout after seeing the HBO adaptation of Olive Kitteridge, which I enjoyed a lot, but didn’t think about after. During the pandemic, I bought and read her first novel Amy and Isabelle (astonishing and published when she was 42) and My Name is Lucy Barton (exceptional), but really only because I was supporting my local independent bookstore. The Lucy Barton book was published before Oh William! and is the first to feature the character Lucy. Crushed when I reached the end of Oh William! I was elated to discover there are two other books featuring this character—Anything is Possible and Lucy by the Sea. I cannot wait to get my hands on them. I suspect that some people, like me before I had read her books, somehow think Strout is cheesy or not serious literature, but it would be very sorry if they let this wrong impression prevent them from reading her work.
Lucy is scared, often, and Strout makes the reader accept and understand this essential anxiety with which the character lives. I understood, viscerally, the dread and lack of security she feels driving through bleak, abandoned towns in Maine. The way that she feels a simple slip or fall away from being swallowed up by a life she has only barely tiptoed out of, despite the decades away. I’ve been understanding, lately, how much fear there is in me, how I have tensed and clenched and waited. This, despite thinking myself fearless and open. This, despite a life that would / could be a montage of many ill advised and dangerous scenes. At least one version of the story would be that, anyway. But the undercurrent of fear isn’t so easy to hide anymore, and I guess that’s a good thing, even if it’s also sad to understand one has never felt safe in an enduring way.
Despite all this, I felt this week, on a walk, a glimmer of understanding that some things I was previously very afraid of, I can now tolerate and imagine without terror. If this were a Lucy Barton book and I was Strout, now would be the place to say something like: Oh life!
But also this: I received this week more good news that made me feel truly understood as a writer and scholar, and with it a very generous and inviting invitation. And I wondered about these impressions versus my own.
I’m feeling the need and desire to slip fully into work right now, so I’m holding close Austin Kleon’s advice to hold banker hours, eat well, get plenty of sleep, and go for lots of walks.
In the interest of keeping this a space that is free and freeing for me, I might begin to put some future posts behind a very modest paywall.
XOXO
A week late, but wanted to say: Congrats on your book contract!!! Very excited to read it.
Also resolving to read Elizabeth Strout now. I was among those who vaguely associated her name with not-serious books, or thought she wrote YA maybe? So thank you for the correction!
Congratulations on the book deal! Excited to hear more about it.
I too love - and don’t understand! - how Strout’s books make me feel so much and so deeply.