July 15, 2012

Slouching Towards Bethlehem for the 6th read

I do make a point of often rereading Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, but mostly because it’s just that quite often I get the urge to do so. And it’s usually summer when I do, like last week on the coattails of Valery The Great. I read Slouching last in 2010, and wrote quite a bit about it. This time, my reading around was coloured by having read Didion’s new book Blue Nights last fall. I’ve already written about how much her new book is a response to the voice we hear throughout this book, to her 32/33 year-old self who imagines (in “Goodbye To All That”) that she’ll never be so young again, who has figured that “someday it all comes” and that it even stays.

And yes, it’s jarring to encounter Slouching… with the perspective of Blue Nights. I’d never thought about Quintana in the context of the “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” essay, but I wondered where she’d been, and noticed Didion herself in the essay more than I ever had before: “Norris says it would be a lot easier if I’d take some acid. I say I’m unstable.” I think of the simplistic way that Quintana herself is described in so many of these essays: “Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singular blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up.” Quintana was one when that essay, “On Keeping a Notebook,” was written. It’s so odd that the normally astute Didion would ever imagine that any person, especially in their infancy, could be so known.

I reread this book with the perspective of Mad Men too, and Lucille Maxwell Miller in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” came right out of the world, even on the opposite coast. Same with the “Slouching…” essay, the disintegration the show begins to grapple with in Season 5, which ends with the beginning of 1967. And yes, this essay reminded me of the present too, as it probably ever will, but even more than it did when I read it two years ago:

“The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snaked shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together.”

I understand the “Personals” essays better and differently every time. I love “Notes from a Native Daughter” which is a preview of one of my favourite Didion books, 2002’s Where I Was From. I continue to find “The Seacoast of Despair” completely incomprehensible, every single one of its references a blank space for me.

And, mostly profoundly, I think I have finally grown out of “Goodbye to All That”. I still think it’s as lovely as I ever did, but it no longer makes me want to hang yards of yellow silk from my windows and cry in Chinese laundries. I no longer think it’s romantic. It’s dawned upon me that the voice of experience in that piece is still so absolutely, so tenderly young. Blue Nights, of course, emphasized this point, but I probably would have seen it anyway. I still love the part where she writes, “I would stay in New York, I told him, for just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed for eight years.”

But I’m started to realize that who we were at 23 means less and less as we get older, and that the decade we traverse to get to 33 is still absolutely nothing compared to the journey just beginning. That we shall be made so young and stripped of our illusions over and over again.

July 11, 2010

Rereading Slouching Towards Bethlehem for the fifth time

Rereading Slouching Towards Bethlehem for the fifth time, and it’s full of moments. First, my own moments– cracking the book open for the first time six years ago on a tram enroute to Miyajima, reading it again in 2008 after having been to California, that same rereading and the line from “On Keeping a Notebook”, “because I wanted a baby and did not then have one”, and rereading it again with the baby asleep in her room. It is like keeping a notebook, all the secrets this book holds about who I used to be, and it’s a different journey every time.

It’s curious that this is a book I can’t stop reading, a book that I long for when we’re parted too long. Because I like novels so very much, but this book of essays speaks to me in a way few novels ever have. Lucille Maxwell Miller and her volkswagen, and the fact of a man called Arthwell Hayton (who went on to marry the au pair, of course). The title essay, and a derailed social movement that Didion puts down to inarticulacy. The way she writes, the repitition and the cadences– her prose is music. Hypnotic. She describes “people of character”, which is a term we hear even less than when she hardly ever heard it anymore. “You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing– beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code– what is “right” and what is “wrong”, what is “good” and what is “evil””– which underlines everything she writes, how she appears to just let the pieces fall where they may, her facts and stories speak for themselves, and they do. She’s the most uninstrusive omniscient narrator I’ve ever encountered.

And oh, she’s cool. Her California (you should read her memoir Where I Was From), and her Hawaii, where she is sent to in this book not in lieu of a divorce, but because she was a “recalcitrant thirty-one-year-old child” (as am I!). How she cried in Chinese laundries, and her golden curtains flew out the  window and got drenched in the rain, and how the maid sulks when the wind blows (doesn’t she just?). The helicopter dropping the morning paper off on Alcatraz, and how she went to the grocery store in her bikini. And she spins and she spins and she spins– what a master.

I remember reading this book for the first time, and how it was nothing like what I had thought it would be, and how it was harder. To follow the circles of her arguments, to grasp the ungraspable (that things fall apart, the centre cannot hold). I remember how every time I read this book, I discover something new, and how it’s always summer. (“I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not.”)

June 28, 2022

Rereading Fear of Flying: On Not Being Pregnant in Mid-Air With Isadora Wing

“One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you’d opened your old diary…”

–Anne Fadiman, “On Rereading”

The flight from Toronto to London in September 2002 had been my third journey across the Atlantic in less than three months. The first had been in great expectation, the second in disgrace, and I can’t remember the third anymore except for the book in my hands—a mass-market paperback copy of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. To situate the journey, I will tell you that it was one year less a day after the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, which was a funny time to be flying, and also that three months and three days after arriving in London, I would meet and immediately fall in love with the man whom I would marry. All that was still a destiny I’d yet to glimpse.

This was a parallel journey to the one I’d taken the previous June, on a flight that had departed the evening before my birthday so that I turned 23 somewhere over Labrador. I must have had a novel with me that time but I don’t remember what it was, and I was paying more attention to my Lonely Planet Europe on a Shoestring, the Eurail pass tucked inside it. A few days before, I’d graduated from university and the rail pass was a gift from my parents. I was going to spend my summer backpacking around Europe by myself in a determined effort to become the sort of person who would do such a thing.

It didn’t work. Turns out that travelling alone is really lonely. I went to Switzerland, Hungary, and Austria, and it was in Vienna that I decided I would cut my adventure short and go home at the end of the summer, rather than carrying on into the UK as planned. It was also in Vienna, while touring the Schonbrunn Palace gardens, that it occurred to me that I was probably pregnant. I managed to cast the thought from my head and spend another week and a half in denial, the denial underlined by a pregnancy test I took in Salzburg whose results I chose to read as negative. Though really, the instructions were just German, which I couldn’t read at all.

By Munich, however, I was sick and practically dead from fatigue, feeling terrible in a way I could no longer blame on boring art galleries and a visit to Dachau. The only foods I could stand to eat were schnitzel and goulash, and my period had been overdue for ages.

Pregnant is such an ugly word when you are pregnant and don’t want to be, but even uglier is the German schwanger. I took another test in the toilet stall of a backpackers’ hostel bathroom, and there was no denying anymore.

Here is an interlude: I took a train to a place called Friedrichshafen, and from there, a plane to England. I stayed in England with a friend and tried desperately to cash in my open-ended ticket for a flight back to Canada, but it was height of summer and flights were hard to come by. By some miracle, not to mention tireless effort by my mother on her telephone at home, I managed to get one, and flew back to Toronto the same week that 500,000 young Catholics arrived in the city to picket clinics and celebrate World Youth Day. I had an abortion. Then somehow the stars aligned, and I found a place to stay for free, plus a six-week contract job at the university that would allow me to save up money for airfare back to Europe. Never mind that I’d spent all my time in Europe longing for home, but I couldn’t keep still a moment longer.

(From Fear of Flying: “Whenever I was home, I wanted to get away, and whenever I got away, I wanted to go home again.”)

So that is how I found myself in mid-air with Isadora Wing. And what I’d mistaken for a world in ruins would be the threshold to my life, but I didn’t know that yet. I thought I was running away.

My Fear of Flying is barely distinguishable from the other “over 6.5 million copies in print!” (as the banner at the top of its cover exclaims). The book reveals little about its reader except for my name and the date written on the flyleaf, September 10, 2002, marking the day—29 years after the book’s first publication in 1973—that I started reading it on that transatlantic flight.

What is curious though is that beside my name and the date is written a price: 75p, inscribed in pencil. I have several books with similar inscriptions, scooped up in charity shops during the years I lived in the UK. But I didn’t buy this book second-hand, and not in the UK, though I remember nothing else about the circumstances of its purchase. (Perhaps it came from the airport? It’s that sort of book). So what of the pencilled price in pounds sterling?

Then it comes back. Fear of Flying belonged to a box of books that in 2005, eager to streamline my possessions in preparation for another move across an ocean, I’d donated to a hospice charity. Donor’s remorse kicked in within hours; the books I’d picked up and carried had become part of my history and no history should be shed so lightly. So I returned the next day to buy my books back, 75p a small price for history reclaimed.

My book now smells like a charity shop, its pages redolent with age and must and bric-a-brac dust, tainted by association. But then Fear of Flying has always seemed tainted by something; it’s that sort of book. The cover reveals a triangular slice of a voluptuous woman’s naked body; was there ever a novel more destined to be turned around on a carousel, picked up then picked over?

My copy could only have been rotated a few times; it was in the shop for less than a day. Maybe charity shops are what all old books smell like. Maybe the charity shop smell is old books after all. And how strange it is that a book can be considered old after just 12 years.

Just 12 years. But then 12 years is so long ago that I no longer remember how most of it happened, how this iconic book found its way into my hands. I remember that I started to read it on that flight from Toronto to London, and I can imagine what it must have felt like to encounter the opening line, “There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them.” Not that I’d ever been treated by anybody—the novel’s references to psychoanalysis had struck me as part of its 1970s datedness—but I would have felt a spark of recognition at Vienna, and reading about a plane in flight from a plane in flight, lives and worlds in ascension. Or so I can speculate from here.

“You see, I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among the present, no longer could even improvise the dialogue,” wrote Joan Didion in her essay “On Keeping a Notebook.” My problem, however, is that I didn’t keep a notebook, or that I didn’t keep one properly, so even the scenes are missing now. There was a diary, but one that was never meant to hold the story that would fill it. There was an orange cat on the cover, and I wasn’t cryptic enough to write down anything I could bear to read again. Not for me Didion’s opaque notes or recipes for sauerkraut. I am sure I poured out my heart, no restraint, my terrible handwriting rendered in blue Bic pen. A few years later, I threw that book away into a black garbage bag filled with detritus from other past lives.

I don’t lament the loss. That summer I’d been a pitiful character, unattractive and sunburned, crying in phone booths across Western Europe. When the thing that finally happened did, it was so incongruous with the rest of my story, the kind of thing that happens to girls with something to lose, that I had difficulty believing it was true. So I’ve no doubt that anything I wrote down during that time would have yielded little insight. I don’t want to remember everything. My diaries have always been embarrassing and terrible, and some parts of history are better off shed.

Sometimes you get a say in how your life will be constructed, in the matter of what is retrieved and what is cast aside. Sometimes you get a chance and even a second one, which, incidentally, is the point of Fear of Flying. And so when I wrote, “no history should be shed so lightly,” maybe I was really just writing about books.

But then why does this one seem barely to belong to me? Apart from the name, date and price on the flyleaf, my copy of Fear of Flying is devoid of marginalia. No underlined passages, not even one emphatic YES! in the margins, or phone number scrawled on the inside cover. It’s uncharacteristic: I usually write in all my books, the mass-market paperbacks in particular, without compunction. For me, it’s my books that function as Didion’s notebooks do: “paid passage back to the world out there,” to the person I used to be.

For example, how I underlined “…because I wanted a baby and did not then have one,” in “On Keeping a Notebook” because when I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem in August 2008, I too wanted a baby and did not have one. A single line inside a story that tells a story of its own.

But Fear of Flying reveals nothing. Which is odd for a book with a naked woman on its cover, for a book that’s credited with finally telling the truth about female sexuality.

Although the book is widely known for its sex, a rereading of Fear of Flying confirms that there’s very little here to titillate. The protagonist Isadora Wing is trapped in a dull marriage whose sex is its only high point, but the sex is so taken for granted that it’s barely delineated in the text. Then she takes a chance and falls in lust with an English psychoanalyst called Adrian Goodlove who spends most of the book either unable to maintain an erection or farting. Or both.

But the reality, the farting, was never meant to be the point.As Jong writes in her 1994 introduction to the novel, “Fear of Flying became a rallying call for women who wanted the right to have fantasies as rich and as raunchy as men.” The fantasy, Isadora’s, was of the Zipless Fuck, a phrase which has since become part of the public lexicon, not that many people could properly describe what one is. Isadora Wing explains:

“The Zipless Fuck was more than a fuck. It was a platonic ideal. Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff… Your whole soul flowed out through your tongue and into the mouth of your lover.”

The whole thing strikes me as awful, as I am sure it did in 2002. Zippers like rose petals? Underwear breezes? No wonder nobody knows what this means. I’m not sure a thing has ever so utterly failed to live up to one’s impression of it as the Zipless Fuck, which, I suppose, is a statement about fantasies in general.

I’m still more concerned with what’s beyond the fantasy, that women continue to pay a price for being sexually liberated 40 years after Fear of Flying. I’m underwhelmed by the Zipless Fuck, as I think Jong always intended me to be, because the right to a fantasy isn’t nearly enough, because the fantasy still hasn’t come true. In a life lived properly, as Isadora comes to learn, nothing is ever so tidy as a fantasy’s promise.

There are passages in Fear of Flying that I would never have underlined the first time I read it, about marriage, academia, a brilliant passage on The New Yorker and longing. When I was 23, I didn’t know that I’d become a writer, and it is Isadora’s relationship to her art that I pay attention to now, when she writes:

“I wanted to write about the whole world, I wanted to write War and Peace—or nothing. No “lady writer” subjects for me… Only I didn’t know a damn thing about battles and bullfights and jungle safaris (and neither do most men). I languished in utter frustration, thinking that the subjects I knew about were “trivial” and “feminine”—while the subjects I knew nothing of were “profound” and “masculine.” No matter what I did, I felt I was bound to fail. Either I would fail by writing or fail by not writing.”

I’ve pulled out my pen and drawn a brace around the left-hand side of this paragraph now. The lady writer problem, which I’ve spent the past decade grappling with in conversations with friends and enemies, a problem Virginia Woolf addressed 44 years before Erica Jong in A Room of One’s Own. In 2012, the VIDA Count showed for the second year in a row that women writers make up less than 25% of contributions to most major American literary magazines written in English, and even scanter is the percentage of women’s books reviewed within these publications’ pages. The situation was much the same in Canada. Fear of Flying continues to be timeless, for both reasons that delight me and reasons that don’t.

So where has she gone, that girl on the plane? That girl who was braver than I’ve ever been before or since, with her one-way ticket to the world and just $400 in her bank account? “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be,” said Joan Didion about keeping her notebook, but I seem to have lost that girl altogether. She wrote her name on the flyleaf and that was everything she said. So I reread to discover her, to visit the world through her eyes.

I am quite sure that I bought this book because I had supposed it to be the literary equivalent of a steel-toed boot, tough as shit and good for kicking, and I was broken and looking to assemble some armour. And I must have known that I was onto something, and must have even been a bit creeped out when I got to page 37 and the line, “Why had I come back to Europe? My whole life was in pieces.” Maybe the connections were so obvious, no underlines were necessary.

But I don’t really know. I’m rereading Fear of Flying now like it’s the first time I’ve encountered it. Perhaps everything all around me was so heightened at the time that I couldn’t really process the experience. And so as I read the book, what I feel instead of a connection to my former self is such profound gratitude for this book and for what it must have held for me. 29 years after the fact, Isadora Wing was still a revelation and I needed her. A woman who chooses herself instead of motherhood, who chooses to go instead of stay, whose own revelation is that, “You did not have to apologize for wanting to own your own soul.”

You would think that by 2002, I wouldn’t have needed a book to tell me these things. You’d think that after 40 years of second-wave feminism, these ideas would have stolen into the ether to be the air that I breathe, and that we’d all know about them the same way I know there is a thing that is called the Zipless Fuck. But, as Michele Landsberg notes in her book Writing the Revolution, “Because our history is constantly overwritten and blanked out…. we are always reinventing the wheel when we fight for equality.” There are some books that have to be discovered over and over.

Not just discovered by each generation either, with every wave of feminism that comes along. A person also faces the task of rereading to rediscover the same books for herself throughout her own life.  It turns out that there’s a different selfish motivation for rereading, not merely to retrieve past selves, but to realize that some books are made new with every encounter. That familiar first sentence (“There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna…”) is actually a whole other point of departure—a woman never steps into the same novel twice. However much I might read to go back, I’m forever moving forward.

On that flight in September 2002, I would have read the line on page 299: “So I wasn’t pregnant after all. In a sense, that was sad… but it was also a new beginning. I was being given another chance.” Fear of Flying matters because in 1973, Jong dared to create a fallen woman who wasn’t. As she writes in her introduction, “my heroine… does not die at the end… She lives on despite having reached out for sexual pleasure—a thing [in fiction] usually punishable by death.”  So you could fail, you could fall, and there would be other chances, resurrections. I would be allowed to fly back across the ocean so I could do it right this time.

(First published in The Toronto Review of Books, April 2014)

March 4, 2021

Let Me Tell You What I Mean, by Joan Didion

For years, I kept a photocopied piece of paper pinned to a cork-board that hung on my wall, the following lines from Joan Didion’s essay “Telling Stories”: …it was at Vogue that I learned a kind of ease with words, a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toys, weapons to be deployed strategically on a page.” And it’s strange now to think about piece of paper, because I don’t write like that I at all. I never learned that ease, or such strategy, and my reverence for this passage (and for Didion in general) has always been mostly aspirational. I never ended up writing anything at the desk that the cork-board hung over, eventually writing my books while lying on the coach instead, far too reclined to be deploying weapons.

“Telling Stories” is the only essay in Didion’s new collection, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, that I have read before—and I had to visit the sub-basement of an archive to find it, so if my experience is anything to go by, these pieces aren’t so widely known. Though my expectations for the book were pretty low—Joan Didion is 86, and hit the height of fame with her 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, a book that doesn’t really typify what Joan Didion’s work is all about. Written in the throes of grief as well, it would have surprised me if anything written and published afterwards could have been as sharp and pointed (“tools, toys, weapons to be deployed strategically on a page”) as her previous work. I have appreciated every one of her releases since then, but there does seem to be a lack of urgency in all of it, they’re mainly obligatory, though always interesting. But of course, this is a writer who has been looking back on things since her early thirties, at least, who was born supposing that the best of everything was well behind her, so maybe it’s all just in keeping.

I read a review of this book (somewhere! Can’t remember where) that remarked upon the strangeness of the title, incongruous with Didion’s work, whose words were so strategically deployed that such explanations were usually unnecessary. Interestingly, the title itself does not come up in the book, and instead is (I assume) altered from the far more typically Didion-esque “Let me show you what I mean by pictures in the mind,” from her essay, “Why I Write.” Always a shower not a teller, in her introduction to her 1968 collection Slouching Toward Bethlehem, she writes about the advantages of being so physically unimposing as a figure that the people she’s writing about scarcely notice she’s there.

But in this collection, perhaps to satisfy readers seeking …Magical Thinking levels of disclosure, she’s more of a presence than I’d been anticipating, and the title does not seem so unfitting indeed. I get a sense of how a writer is formed and of her process, and not just simply her observational eye (which is eviscerating in her essay about Nancy Reagan, then First Lady of California). She’s also very prescient, in a 1968 essay about parental expectations that anticipates parenting fixations of the 20th century, or her 2000 piece on Martha Stewart, and branding, and the World Wide Web, and the expectations for women to succeed in a culture that is always going to hate them for having done so.

July 18, 2018

Astral Weeks

We were away last week and we brought our portable stereo and listened to the same CDs over and over, which are the same CDs we always listen to when we’re at a cottage—Bon Iver and Kathleen Edwards’ Voyageur, and the Beach Boys, and I bought Joni Mitchell Blue. And also Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, which I would listen to when I was in the cottage alone in the morning when I was drinking my tea and not ready to get dressed yet and my family was already down by the water.

And those mornings listening to Astral Weeks when I was all alone were like a time machine, taking me back to 2004, when I bought the CD. My friend Kate had mentioned it in an email, I think, and I looked for it at Tower Records the next time we were in Osaka. We were living in Japan at the time, which is why my copy of Astral Weeks comes with Japanese liner notes and lettering on the CD case. I bought the CD, and immediately fell in love with it, and “Sweet Thing” has been my favourite song ever since. That lyric, which I really understood having not long before undergone a season of tumult: “And I will never grow so old again.” (I also liked that the “garden all misty wet with rain” from “Sweet Thing” is referenced in Caitlin Moran’s new novel, How to Be Famous, which I read last week in less than a day…)

In 2004, Stuart and I lived in a tiny apartment and slept on a tiny platform below the ceiling that we had to climb a ladder to reach. We were both working as English instructors and had the same work schedule, except for Tuesday mornings when he worked in the morning and my shift was in the afternoon. So on Tuesday mornings I was by myself, and I’d put on Astral Weeks, music that I am quite sure was not long after encoded into my DNA. It’s partly the flute, something about the flute. I don’t know that I know another pop song with a flute in it, or at least that I’ve noticed, but the flute on “Astral Weeks,” the opening track, is one of my favourite sounds. And that lyric, “To be born again. To be born again.” I could relate after getting my life back on track, and beginning to move forward. That momentum—it was exhilarating. And the memory of all that possibility is what overwhelms me when I listen again to Astral Weeks.

The album is the soundtrack to all my memories from 2004 (except the ones where I’m singing “Bad Bad Leroy Brown” at karaoke), though I’m not sure this was really the case. It could have been though, because I had a mini-disk player and later and iPod shuffle, and I’d possibly downloaded “Astral Weeks” onto both these devices, and perhaps it was Astral Weeks that was playing the very first time I read Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, on a trolley ride from Hiroshima to Miyajima. It might as well have been, the two are so connected in my mind—they actually came out in the same year. I feel like Joan Didion would have known something about being caught one more time, if not up on Cyprus Avenue: “And I’m conquered in a car seat. Nothing that I do.” (She probably had a migraine from the Santa Ana.) Madame George also seems like a character from one of her essays—one of the ones where the centre does not hold.

I was also discovering Margaret Drabble for the first time in that period, so her books are connected to Astral Weeks as well for me. The first novel I read was The Radiant Way, whose Esther Breuer lives at “the wrong end of Ladbroke Grove,” which is where Van Morrison saw the subject of “Slim Slow Slider” walking, and maybe he even saw Esther too. And falling in love with Margaret Drabble (and Joan Didion) was such a big deal for me as began to discover who I was as a reader and writer. It was a period in which I developed a habit that I’ve never been able to get back again—underlining words I didn’t know in books and looking them up in the dictionary. I kept a list, and one of them was “avarice,” and I’m not sure whether I encountered that one in a book too, or else it was just the line from “Astral Weeks.”

I was keeping the list because I had been accepted to graduate school for the following September, and I was hoping to improve myself enough in order to be smart enough to warrant being there. (It didn’t really work. Do you know what it is to arrive at graduate school with absolutely no knowledge of critical theory? It is NOT FUN.) I was looking forward to moving back to Canada, and I was also planning my wedding (to someone who never mentioned driving his chariots down my streets of crime, but I know he would do it if I asked him), and really, we were on the verge of everything. I knew it, so it was overwhelming to be there in 2004, the sun shining through our window and rendering everything golden, and outside a pachinko parlour on the horizon. Not long ago, I found our old apartment on Google Maps, and the parking lot next door had sprouted a building, so the sun doesn’t shine through that window anymore, but I’m so glad I was there when it did, listening to Astral Weeks.

“And I will raise my hand up into the night time sky, attract the star that’s shining in your eye, ah just to dig it all and not to wonder, that’s just right. And I’ll be satisfied not to read in between the lines.”

June 21, 2017

Places I’ve Gone With A Book in My Bag

1. Our neighbours’ backyard party last Saturday evening. This was the event that occasioned this list, as it made me consider whether I might actually have a book-in-the-bag problem. I was definitely not intending to read at this thoroughly enjoyable social event (and I didn’t) but when I considered the slight prospect of one of my children having to go the hospital (perhaps after falling out of a tree?) and a five hour wait in the ER waiting room, not bringing a book just seemed dangerous.
2. Hospital waiting rooms: Oh, the splendid hours I’ve been reading in such places. The best ever was when Harriet poked me in the eye during a heat wave in August 2010* and I left our sweltering apartment to spend hours and hours in air conditioned splendour, rereading Slouching Toward Bethlehem for the zillionth time and waiting for the doctor to tell me that I would not be going blind. *Note that I have all the details on this matter because I wrote a blog post extolling the virtues of waiting rooms as places to read back when I had a one-year-old and life was harder.
3. The park. Always, in the park. My worst nightmare, in fact, is not of anything involving hospital waiting rooms, but instead the prospect of a sunny day where my children don’t want to go home but I’ve got nothing to read save for the organ donor card in my wallet (and I’ve already read that). I will never forget the summer day when Harriet was two and I spent a whole afternoon sprawled in the backseat of the climbing frame that resembles a jeep at Huron Washington Playground reading the entirety of Alice Thomas Ellis’s novel The 27th Kingdom while Harriet pretended to “drive.”
4. Out for lunch. Sometimes because the book is to be my lunch companion (oh, and what a joy is that!) and even if my companion is to be actual human being, a book in your bag means you can read while she goes to the bathroom.
5. On the subway. First, because the subway is a very good place to read, but also because what if your subway car gets stuck in a tunnel for three hours? How would you bear it without a book to read?
6. The Bookstore. This is where it gets really stupid. I always have a book in my bag, but half the time the only place I ever go to is a bookstore anyway. But still, if I went to a bookstore without a book in my bag, I’d have nothing to read in transit. And think about if the subway got stuck in the tunnel, right?? But then, what if you were fifteen pages away from the end of a book? This is when things get complicated. Because you need to bring a secondary book to start reading when you finish the first one, and perhaps a tertiary book just in case that second title turns out to be a bit of a dud. I could possibly come up with a very good reason why you should never go to a bookstore without thirty-seven novels in your rucksack. Anything less would be reckless.
7. Harriet’s birthday party. We took eight small girls to the movies. Sadly, I didn’t get a chance to read at all.
8. Playschool co-op shifts. I don’t know why I ever thought I’d have the chance to read on a playschool co-op shift, particularly since I never ever have. But still, you don’t want to take a chance like that.
9. The Shovels and Rope concert at the Phoenix in October: I was reading Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth before the show while Stuart was in the loo. The security guard who checked my bag thought it was weird that I had a book.
10. My own book launch. I was reading Big Little Lies. I didn’t get a chance to read it though.
11. The hospital, where I gave birth to my second child. This is not so weird, but it is weird when you consider that I brought nothing else except for a pair of shoes to wear in the shower. I was hoping to give birth at home, and perhaps thought packing clothes would jinx this. Instead, it just meant I spent a lot of time naked. But at least I had a book.

September 9, 2014

In Which I Meme: Ten Books….

I don’t meme much. I don’t like memes. I like the internet best when everybody is doing her own thing, but I got tagged twice on Facebook, and I’ve been thinking for awhile about how I don’t know how to answer the question of what are my favourite books. For me, the books all blend together, their connections to each other and to the facts of my life all cumulating to pave the path of my progress. It’s not about the book but about the reading. I love books more than I love any one book. But I also love rereading, and so my list of books that have stayed with me (whatever that means—I think any book that’s any good would do such a thing) or a list of my favourites would be a list of books I’ve read more than once, and will continue to revisit to find out how they change as I do. They’re the books I’ll never get over being over.

• Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple : Partly circumstantial—I read this in the hospital after Iris was born, and had a very visceral connection to everything was reading then, but I just loved it so completely. It was so funny, smart, and fresh, and I’ve been longing for a book to love this completely ever since. Will definitely reread.

 

• Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion: I’ve read this book about six or seven times, and return to it to fall under the spell of the rhythm of Didion’s prose, and to admire the precision with which she arranges details in order of giving her stories the illusion of telling themselves.

 

• Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala: I was so afraid of this book, my worst nightmare, the story of a woman who loses her entire family in the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004. I finally obtained a library copy and was bowled over by the brilliance of the book, and so I had to buy my own copy. I haven’t reread it yet but I will. It’s a a heartbreaking tragedy, a litany of sorrows, but also beautiful, magical celebration of love and life.

 

• The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble: This was my first Margaret Drabble novel, which I bought at a used bookshop in Kobe. Had no idea what to expect, but fell in love with its writer, and the book too, for its vividness and how it reflected and engaged with the world.

 

 

• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: The one book I’ve read more times than Slouching… and it just gets more and more profound and lovely. I read it most recently in July, having replaced my battered and stupidly marginalia’d university copy. It’s the thinking woman’s beach read.

 

• The Crack in the Teacup by Joan Bodger: I’ve read this one twice, and think about it all the time. It’s about being a woman in the 20th century, about loving books, about heartache, about this city. And about the life of an extraordinary woman who was of her time and also never quite, always in a way that was fascinating.

 

• Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood: (And also The Robber Bride). Of all the books on my list, I was youngest and stupidest when I first read these, but also so young that they became foundational in my understanding of the lives of girls and women.

 

 

• We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver: This was one of those books I was never going to read, because I found all the hype at the time annoying, but I came to it somehow, and have read it five times since. I discover a whole new layer of complexity every time, and have determined that it’s just about marriage and womanhood as it is about motherhood. Also worth noting: still a gripping excellent reading when fully aware of its great twist, which is quite a literary feat.

 

• Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson: I will never forget the moment of Ruby Lennox’s conception, which was also my introduction to the inimitable Kate Atkinson, whose boundless enthusiasm for pushing the limits of what a novel can do makes her one of my favourite authors. Have read this a few times. It contains the seeds of every single wonderful thing she’s written since.

 

• Unless by Carol Shields: I’m a bit of a zealot when it comes to this book, which I’ve read so many times that its pages are covered in scribbles, and whose subtle tricky complexity continues to amaze me.

*And don’t get me started on the children’s books, Anne of Green Gables, Tom’s Midnight Garden, Charlotte Sometimes, A Handful of Time, Booky, etc. Plus Flowers in the Attic. And so many more…

 

July 1, 2013

The Flame Throwers by Rachel Kushner

“A funny thing about woman and machines: the combination made men curious.”

I do wonder if one day there will be a literary genre distinguished by its treatment of women whose broken dreams are symbolized by their dissatisfaction with their kitchen renovations. I noticed this first in Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk, whose middle-class preoccupations were redeemed by Cusk’s Woolfian narrative, and then recently in Krista Bridge’s The Eliot Girls which was more Picoultian than Woolfian and left me frustrated with narrative in general. And so I turned to Rachel Kushner’s The Flame Throwers next, because it promised to be not Picoultian in the slightest and featured a female protagonist who never went into the kitchen at all.

Though to call her a “protagonist” is not entirely accurate, because Kushner’s narrator is more of an observer, and a cypher than one who the story happens to. We get a sense of her internal monologue, but not of her self–we don’t even know her name. (I am careful not to refer to her as “Reno” [um, for the city, not the abbreviation for “renovation”] though she is referred to as such in the book’s copy. But in an interview, Kushner remarks, “Twice, she’s referred to as Reno, and so reviewers have latched onto this.” And I don’t want Kushner to think that I am a latcher. Never.) This is a novel about motorcycles, motor racing, rubber manufacturing, Fascism and terrorism, which is the kind of novel that generally wouldn’t appeal to me, except that it’s also the book that everybody is talking about and for once I wanted to get in on that action. Plus, it’s a novel about all of these things from the point of view of a female character, and I was curious about that. And so I picked up The Flame Throwers, and perhaps I’ve got a thing for speed and crashes after all because I was hooked by page 21 with the story of a legendary American racer whose parachute failed and had to stop from 522 miles per hour on the salt flats of Utah.

Of course, to call Kushner’s character an “observer” is disingenuous, because while the novel doesn’t happen to her, her voice and perspective are certainly key to its construction. She has more agency than we can really understand. The story begins with Kushner’s character on the salt flats in 1977, riding her Valera motorcycle (which had come from her boyfriend back in New York, Sandro Valera, the estranged heir to the Italian motorcycle/tire manufacturing fortune). Her aim is to race her bike, and also to photograph other races. She is an artist, we learn, who has moved from Reno to New York where she met Sandro. Her racing plans are curtailed by an accident, however, and she, previously the lone wolf, ends up with the Valera racing team by virtue of her motorcycle’s make. She ends up setting a world record for female drivers in the Valera car, the Spirit of Italy, and a scheme is concocted wherein she will travel to Italy on the coattails of her racing fame.

And then the narrative takes us to New York nearly two years before, the girl from Reno arriving in the city to make herself (though we learn a few peculiar details to suggest she’s not entirely formless–she’d been a success as a ski racer years before, and once acted in a McDonalds commercial. She grew up in a household with two motorbike-mad cousins, and an uncle who watched TV in the nude. And even the most mundane detail begins to seem conspicuous because there are so few of them). She tells us, “I thought this was how artists moved to New York, alone, that the city was a mecca of individual points, longings, all merging into one great light-pulsing mesh and you simply found your pulse, your place.” But she fails to, remaining estranged from the city itself, from its art scene. She is young and naive, and through a cast of eccentric characters (“I once went to a house in the Hollywood Hills that was a glass dome on a pole, its elevator shaft. Belonged to a pervert bachelor and he had peepholes everywhere. He was watching me in the toilet. Some guy drugged me without asking first. Angel dust. I was on roller skates which presented a whole extra challenge.”) she meets artist Ronnie Fontaine, and falls in love with his best friend, Sandro Valera. She makes her place on the scene as Sandro’s girl, but overrides him when he resists the idea of her trip to Italy.

In chapters involving Sandro’s father, we learn the sordid details of how he made his fortune and these suggest just why Sandro is so uncomfortable with returning to Italy and why he is determined to remain distanced from his family heritage. When the trip finally happens, it is the disaster he predicted, as Sandro’s mother shows disdain for his American girl, and the whole family is troubled by political uprisings by their factory workers, which were part of a movement sweeping the country in 1977. And finally, our character is faced with the truth about her boyfriend’s intentions toward her, and in an instant she makes a decision that embroils her in Italy’s underground radical social movement.

Kushner’s prose thrums with a Didion-esque rhythm, and her narrative concerns read like a combination of “Good-Bye to All That” and “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”. Her sense of time and place is stunningly evoked, and while details waver in a few places, the overall impression is of remarkable realization. There is a reason everyone is talking about this book, and that’s because it’s a great American novel in the grand tradition but as rendered by a female hand, but then this novel with all its masculine concerns is a treatment of the feminine as well. What is the place of Kushner’s female character in this kind of story? Is she the I or just the eye? Does anybody hear her voice beyond us, the reader? We hear her, but what are the impressions of those who can see her? In a way, she is as invisible as the “China Girl” appearing among the first frames of movie film, ever present but anonymous and glimpsed by almost no one. Is this the extent of possibility for the woman artist? (“You’re not supposed to evoke real life. Just the hermetic world of a smiling woman holding a colour chart.”)

So much of this book’s impact comes from its evasive approach, which is summed up in its final sentence: “Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.” And that’s why so many people are talking about this book–because it’s a difficult one from which to draw tidy conclusions.

June 12, 2013

The benefits of being bedridden

“Charles can no longer pay attention to one source of information at a time. He is Modern Man, programmed to take in several story lines, several plots at once. He cannot quite unravel them, but he cannot do without the conflicting impulses, the desperate stimuli. Perhaps he hopes the alcohol will simplify them, will stick them together and fuse them all into one consecutive narrative. The narrative of his own life, of his place in the history and geography of the world.” –Margaret Drabble, A Natural Curiosity

“‘No,’ I answered. “I don’t agree with that. I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It’s hollow.” –e.l. konigsburg, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

Isn’t Margaret Drabble’s 1989 novel eerily prescient of the internet? I enjoyed the konigsburg book as well, though it was a curious one. I’m now finishing reading Lisa Moore’s novel Caught, and will be rereading Slouching Towards Bethlehem afterwards. And I think I’m going to miss being bedridden… Other books in the horizon are The Eliot Girls and The Flamethrowers. And truly, this is the reason that breast is best.

November 1, 2011

Blue Nights by Joan Didion

“When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children,” writes Joan Didion in her new book Blue Nights. And in fact, when Didion is talking about any one thing in this book, she is usually talking about something else, a point which she spends much of the book considering– her struggles of late as a writer to be direct, to get to the point. In particularly in regards to her daughter Quintana, and when Joan Didion is talking about Quintana, she can’t avoid talking about mortality, about the “death of promise”; Quintana died in 2005 at the age of 39, not long after her father’s sudden death one evening at the dinner table (the year after which Didion chronicled in her previous memoir).

When Didion is talking about Quintana, she’s not only talking about her daughter’s mortality, but about her own. The years since her daughter’s death have brought about a general ill-health, a growing frailty that she has struggled to address with various health professionals with very little success. And then it occurs to her– she is 75 years old. Perhaps this alone is the problem, and there is no “fix”. And this has never occurred to her before, that she would eventually (or quite suddenly) get old. “Time passes… Could it be that I never believed it?”

This from a woman whose writing has always been drenched in nostalgia, who from the time she picked up a pen has been eulogizing the way we don’t live anymore and the “all that” she’d said good-bye to. That Joan Didion has never believed time to pass is impossible to consider, except that maybe she never considered herself passing along with it.

“The common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I,'” wrote Didion in “On Keeping a Notebook,” from her 1968 collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, except now she’s 75 and that common denominator seems less a sure foundation. In the same essay, she’d also written, “Remember what it was to be me. That was always the point.” And now more than 40 years later, she doesn’t want to remember anymore.

She writes that well-meaning friends try to assure her through her loss: “You have your memories”. She writes that for many years, she fetishized these memories, saving everything– drawers and cupboards stuffed, mementos pinned to the walls– believing that they would help keep people “fully present”. And when she most important people in her life are lost, she’s left with “detritus of this misplaced belief.” She writes that remembering the past only reminds her of how much she failed to appreciate what she had in the first place.

And when she writes about failing to appreciate what she had, she’s writing about Quintana. She’s writing about her own relationship to her daughter (who happened to be adopted), which is similar to any mother’s relationships to her child, adopted or otherwise. Contemplating that newborn bundle: “What if I fail to take care of this baby? What if this baby fails to thrive, what if this baby fails to love me?… what if I fail to love this baby?”

Except that Quintana doesn’t just “happen to be adopted”, and Didion has realized that failing to acknowledge this was a significant failing of her own as a mother. That Quintana’s mental health problems (which are referred to obliquely; this is no expose) could have been rooted in her own fears of abandonment. That what the “choice narrative” so favoured towards 1960s adoptees left unsaid was the underside of adoptive parents’ choosing, why a child was up for choosing in the first place. And Didion notes that she could never treat this underside, that she chose to avoid it because to highlight her daughter’s origins would be to expose her own terrible fear– that this miraculous child who’d been placed in her arms would somehow be stolen away from her. To acknowledge Quintana’s fear of abandonment, to acknowledge the fact of Quintana herself, would have been to clarify her own feelings and fears about her daughter, which Didion could never bring herself to do.

Except that she’s lost her now, a worst fear realized, and her daughter’s death has served to bring her own death closer. And without her daughter to survive her, when she dies she will “Pass into nothingness,” a phrase from Keats’ she discovers in one of Quintana’s high school exercise books. A phrase that had resonated with the teenaged depressive Quintana, another side of her that Didion had never allowed herself to understand. A side that she’s coming to understand now as she contemplates the end of her own life, and how much her daughter’s sense of mortality and her actual mortality have illuminated her own.

She finds it hard to be direct now. She offers a passage from her novel The Last Thing He Wanted to show the way her prose used to come so easily, that she wrote it like the rhythm it was. But she can’t do that now. She can’t find the right words, she can’t get to the point, she keeps falling, and forgetting, and getting frailer all the time. The point is slipping farther away. But it’s not that she is afraid to die. She writes that she’s getting so she’s afraid not to die, but it’s not that, and it’s not the writing either.

She writes, “The fear is for what is still to be lost,” and she’s writing about her memories of her daughter. “How could I not still need that child with me?” She writes, “there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.”