December 3, 2015
The Pickle Me This 2015 Best Books of the Year
It’s a bit arbitrary, our system for determining Pickle Me This’s 2015 Best Books of the Year. To begin, with “our” of which I speak is me, so it’s not as though choices have to be run through a committee. It’s mainly like this: if I liked a book well enough to read it and review it on my blog, that’s saying something about the book’s value. If the title seems like a stand-out to me, I add it to my Picks List, and then at the end of the year, I go through those picks to find which titles are still resonating with me after the book as been read. And this year, these are the books I came up with. PS I also really liked The Girl on the Train, but I think you’ve already heard about that one. So I am pleased to recommended any of the following instead.
**
After Birth, by Elisa Albert
“No, listen, though, the problem is with books, with novels about motherhood. Or even worse, those novels that purport to finally pull back the veil and “tell the truth about motherhood.” The problem, in addition to the fact that nobody cares about babies, is that a book about motherhood is rarely read (if it is read at all) as a book about a mother. Instead, it’s a manifesto. Read as a statement on an institution instead of a literary work about a fictional character. A story. We have a hard time grasping that there can be more than one story about motherhood, or if there is more than one, there’s just two then, always diametrically opposed. Two gals facing down on the cover of a magazine. One is always carrying a briefcase. When in reality, there are so many stories, and each of those stories comprise so many stories in themselves, the same way that a single day can hold more than one kind of weather.”
Read my review of After Birth, from March.
**
A God in Ruins, by Kate Atkinson
“Atkinson’s new novel, A God in Ruins, is not a sequel to Life After Life, she explains in her afterword, but “a companion novel.” It’s the life story of Ursula’s brother Teddy in a version of their family’s life that is slightly different than those portrayed in the first novel. Where Ursula died over and over again, Teddy shows a predilection toward survival, miraculously making it through a career as a WW2 bomber pilot. And it is the war upon which his story hinges—an experience both makes him and destroys him. An experiences that does not become less raw as the war itself fades into history, though those around put it away in the past. “You can only go forward,” is a line delivered again and again in the text, a winky joke at the premise of Life After Life, but also blatantly wrong in the matter of narrative because an author is free to put her story together anyway she likes—forward, backward, and round and round in circles. Posing the questions: what if history never entirely goes away? how does it change as we carry it with us? And how is a conventional existence not unlike Ursula’s in reality: “It felt as if he had lived many lifetimes,” Teddy remembers at one point, and who has not felt this way? What is the cumulation of these lives, these selves? What is the thing that connects them?”
Read my review of Life After Life, from May
**
On Immunity, by Eula Biss
“…While I have absolute trust in my doctor and her advice, and in the importance of vaccines for public health, I was one of the many people who put down that fear-mongering story in The Toronto Star last month on the HPV vaccine and said, “My kids are never going to get that.” And then the whole furor blew up, and I saw how we’d been played.
Which is the point at which I decided to read On Immunity by Eula Biss. Biss, poet and award-winning essayist, wades into the vaccine issue, not to seek a middle-ground—because she acknowledges that there isn’t one; the science is conclusive; her own child is vaccinated—but to seek context, to create something richer than a polemic. More than a book on “issues”, even, this is a book on language and metaphor, about how both frame the way we understand our bodies and our world, and about vaccinations and immunity might serve as a metaphor for America and the world today. “And it has vampires in it,” so notes the blurb on the back by Rebecca Solnit. Because, yes, this book is blurbed by Rebecca Solnit AND Anne Fadiman, which makes it basically a non-fiction holy book. And it is oh so very good.”
Read my review of On Immunity, from March.
**
Come Away With Me, by Karma Brown
“I am intrigued by questions of how people survive the seemingly unsurvivable, which was the reason I picked up Come Away With Me, Canadian writer Karma Brown’s debut novel. It’s the story of Tegan Lawson who had everything she’d ever wanted—an amazing husband and a baby on the way—when the dream is shattered by a horrific accident. Five months after the tragedy, her husband implores her to pick up the pieces of their life (and perhaps begin to forgive him for the accident, as he was driving the night it happened) by embarking on the trip of a lifetime to Thailand, Italy and Hawaii. Reluctantly, she goes, though she is not sure she’s ready (and neither are their families). And the trip itself does not prove to be the salve it might have been in a lesser novel, all of their troubles simply melting away—Tegan’s not taking her anti-depressants, she’s regularly still overcome with despair, her anger toward her husband seems impossible to let go of. And here we begin to see that this dream getaway is not the end of Tegan’s story but it’s the beginning of new one that’s vastly different than the life she’d planned on and dreamed of.”
Read my review of Come Away With Me, from September
**
The Devil You Know, by Elisabeth de Mariaffi
“The stakes were high for Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s The Devil You Know. On Wednesday morning, I walked 2km at -25 degrees to get a copy, because I’d been hearing such good things about it and it seemed like exactly the kind of book you want to hang out with curled up warm while the blizzard howls. A mystery, a thriller, a book set in Southern Ontario during the 1980s and early ’90s, during which a series of young girls were kidnapped and sometimes found murdered, otherwise their faces depicted on posters for years afterwards under the heading, “Missing.” Years later, “aged-enhanced” images of these children would be updated, but we’d still recognize them. I’ve noticed that reviewers have been responding to the book personally, viscerally. There’s a whole generation of us haunted by these missing girls—I could plot my own history by theirs, from Nicole Morin to Alicia Ross. (I was too young to know about the disappearance and murder of Sharin’ Morningstar Keenan in 1983, though she was taken the very playground where my children play.)”
Read my review of The Devil You Know, from January.
**
Welcome to the Circus, by Rhonda Douglas
“Rhonda Douglas doesn’t miss a beat in her fiction debut, the short story collection, Welcome to the Circus. It’s a collection to be admired right down to its basic components—the sentences. “…our three hearts open and close like the mouths of tiny birds,” in “Nous and René Lévesque.” Later in the same story, “The future seems to yawn open, becomes something far less certain, all of plans swinging on their hinges.” In “Humanitarian Relief,” “Henry Jeans amasses flesh about his bones with the single-minded focus of a NASCAR driver eating up track.” Ten stories, each one based around a tantalizing premise: a fresh take on Two Solitudes and adolescence, inspired by a high school core-French teacher in rural Newfoundland; a story of three veteran humanitarian aid workers in a Kenyan refugee camp; a series of letters to one’s eighth grade self; a collection of documents based on the case of executed dancer and spy, Mata Hari, curated by a man whose father may have been among her paramours; “Still Life With Book” about a teenage boy who partakes to carve the works of John Donne into his flesh, inspiring his therapist to reinvigorate his sex life. In “Sounds of our Paleolithic Past,” a curator at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta mixes business with pleasure as she develops a complex relationship with a Neandertal discovered in the badlands; in the next story, a daughter considers her legacy working in the family porn business as she faces threats of violence and estrangement from her sister; in “Welcome to the Circus, Sooky Baby,” a grieving teenage girl finds solace in surprising places—including the company of an elephant; and finally, “Cancer Oratorio,” structured as a series of choral/orchestral movements from the collective perspective of a choir facing the loss of a member from cancer.”
Read my review of Welcome to the Circus, from April.
**
A Really Good Brown Girl, by Marilyn Dumont
“I hadn’t budgeted for books at The Stop Farmers’ Market at Artscape Wychwood Barns a few weeks back, but it turned out that Pedlar Press and Brick Books were vendors (and I met Kate Cayley, whose How You Were Born I loved so much!) so I couldn’t help but pick up something. And I am so glad that the something I got turned out to be the deluxe redesign of Marilyn Dumont’s Gerald Lampert-winning debut collection, A Really Good Brown Girl. A book I read in days, which is rare for me and poetry, but I was captivated by the narrative, the language, the brute force of these poems, as well as their sense of humour, their cheek. “Squaw Poems,” about growing up Metis on the prairies, a household surrounded by “The White Judges” who waited to pounce. And never really went away. But then—
“I am in a university classroom, an English professor corrects my spoken/ English in front of the class. I say, “really good.” He say, “You mean/ really well, don’t you?” I glare at him and say emphatically, “No I/ mean really good.”
Read my review of A Really Good Brown Girl, from August
**
Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff
“I still vividly remember reading Groff’s debut, The Monsters of Templeton, for the very first time, and being bowled over by the book’s audacity, by the author’s talent. And with each subsequent book—the story collection, Delicate Edible Birds, and the acclaimed novel, Arcadia—Groff has surpassed all expectations. She’s a writer of huge ambition and even larger canvases, unabashedly literary, unabashedly story, traditional in her approach to crafting fiction, except that she seems to be reinventing the novel every time, pressing at its limits. I’ve spent the last week reading Fates and Furies and being particularly annoyed that anybody imagines Jonathan Franzen to be “a greatest living novelist” (?) when: Lauren Groff. Lauren Groff. Lauren Groff.
(If she were a man and a giant asshole, however, she’d definitely be discussed in those terms.)”
Read my review of Fates and Furies, from September.
**
The Folded Clock, by Heidi Julavits
“The Folded Clock is a book about the puzzles and mysteries of an ordinary comfortable life. For me, one of those mysteries is the way that a book—an object wholly apart from my existence, until I bought it—can appear to be reading my mind, stealing my life. (I have this experience also when I am reading Rebecca Solnit.) Like Julavits’ whole chapter about Wasted: The Preppie Murder, by Linda Wolfe, and being three fucks away from Robert Chambers—not that I have ever been such a thing, but I have a thing about that book. Or about abortions as women’s work, about how the boyfriends are always informed but they’re never there—abortions are something that happen between friends. About the internet and desire, about conscious attempts to resist the google-ization of everything—which is interesting because there is at first glance something so bloggish about Julavits’ approach, and yet the construction of her entries is so counter to blogging’s immediacy. The Folded Clock is a bit of a throwback, a project decidedly analogue.”
Read my review of The Folded Clock, from July.
**
I Take You, by Eliza Kennedy
“Within the first few pages it is clear that Lily drinks too much, swears religiously, and has no compunction about casual sex as long as the sex is excellent, and it was all so refreshing. That she was a bit silly, but not stupid. That she was empowered, interesting, and nobody’s victim. Which is not to say that she hasn’t herself in quite a pickle as the novel begins: Lily is engaged to Mr. Wonderful—it’s been a whirlwind—and she’s pretty sure she even loves him, but she still can’t kick her habit of picking up men in bars and in elevators, and, well, everywhere. Lily wants to marry Will, because he’s a smart choice and Lily is wise enough to be in the habit of making these. But she doesn’t seem ready to become domesticated—and now the wedding is just days away.
The thing about Lily Wilder is that she’s happy. In fact, she insists upon her happiness, her value, which is rare with comic heroines. She is not a problem to be solved, and she doesn’t want to be fixed. She just wants to have it both ways—but how?”
Read my review of I Take You, from July.
**
Her, by Harriet Lane
“Which makes Her so compelling, so beyond those other narratives which tire me whose only virtue is their honesty, is that the truths revealed about new motherhood are just the starting point. From here, Lane has created a psychological thriller so convincing in its reality, so ominous in its mundanity, so sippy-cup sinister in a manner I last recall reading in Emily Perkins’ excellent 2008 book, A Novel About My Wife.
Nina gets closer and closer to Emma, welcomed into her home, caring for her children, and while we know along she has nefarious intentions—presented in the alternating chapters which, like Emma’s, are written in first-person—we don’t know why she’s out to exact revenge from Emma, who doesn’t remember her at all. We don’t know either which form her revenge will take, though as the novel progresses, indicators emerge, signs and signals that are so terrifying, all hurtling towards the novel’s very end, which is completely and utterly devastating. Not to mention amazing. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Read my review of Her, from January
**
Rumi and the Red Handbag, by Shawn Lemay
“Rumi and the Red Handbag is a slim, heartbreaking and perfect read, rich with gorgeous prose, and depth and texture. Infused with allusions, explicit and otherwise, it’s a hushed and quiet celebration of women and their lives and their words and the secrets they carry. There is the Woolf, of course, and references to Clarice Lispector, who I’ve never read, but now I have to, and Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath. Plus vintage Harlequins—this is a book that permits great reverence to women’s stories and women’s spaces.”
Read my review of Rumi and the Red Handbag, from November
**
Martin John, by Anakana Schofield
“Anakana Schofield’s Martin John, a novel about a sexual deviant and the follow-up to her award-winning Malarky, is primarily a book about language. It’s about sexual violence is able to happen because of words and ideas that are never articulated or defined, and how these ellipses in our understanding go on to create further damage and harm. “It was a time when people didn’t ask as many questions. That’s the time it was.”
And so in order to fill in the blank, to ask the questions, to define the it, Schofield has to reinvent the shape of a novel. Eschewing chronology, point-of-view, objectivity, artifice itself for something that more resembles a case study, a long-form incident report. Just the latest for Martin John, the reader supposes, who has been in and out of the care of psychologists, social workers and other medical professionals for much of his life. Though he makes a point to stay out of their way—meddlers—and to keep to his routines, essential. He’s holding down a job as a security guard, lives in a nondescript shabby house in London (albeit one cluttered with the detritus of his media habits), visits his Aunt Noanie on Wednesdays, under specific instruction of his mother back in Ireland. (D’ya hear me, Martin John?) But it’s clear that, no matter his circuits and refrains, this centre (a precarious arrangement orchestrated by the mother) simply cannot hold.”
December 2, 2015
The thing on my chest
Oh, it only gets better and better. That thing that’s been sitting on my chest for the last twenty-four hours has turned out to be pneumonia. Which has certainly undermined our plans to have me all up and repaired by tomorrow at the latest. But it’s also a relief—hooray for pneumonia, because finally it’s a non-vague diagnosis AND it has antibiotics. But no one has responded to the news by sending me platform shoes and a gong to bang. Apparently pneumonia is no fun? Oh boy. But I have started reading Elena Ferrante’s The Story of a New Name. I read My Brilliant Friend when we were away in the spring, and while I liked it well enough, I wasn’t nuts for it. It’s possible it’s not the kind of book for that kind of vacation, when you don’t really want to tote around something heavy and when you only have a few minutes here and there throughout the day to dip in and out of the story. But pneumonia is kind of the opposite, because where I don’t really have anywhere to go now. And there is something about this second book that has hooked me much more immediately than the first one did. By which I mean that if do end up getting Ferrante Fever, on top of everything else, the time is probably right now.
December 1, 2015
Two more things
Stuart emailed me from work after reading yesterday’s post to inform me that he likes zero things about me being sick. And I see his point of view. While he hasn’t had to contend with fever dreams or coughing until his lungs hurt, he’s being doing everything to keep our household running—it’s been very hard. So hopefully he won’t be too bothered that I add a couple more items to my list, which are a) Vicks VapoRub, the magic elixir, the stuff of childhood comforts, and b) I am have ample time this morning to read the first instalment in my 2015 Short Story Advent Calendar!
And yes, I am getting better—two nights with no fever has helped a lot. The cough is improving. I just need to work on getting energy back (i.e. being able to walk upstairs without having to follow up the journey with a nap).
November 30, 2015
Ten Things I Sort of Like About Being Sick
Okay, I am going to do it, because I’ve done enough moaning for sure. My own version of Ten Things I Sort of Like About Being Sick.
- Not thinking about food all the time: It is true that I am usually preoccupied by planning my next meal. And conspiring to bake a cake. Plus I have to feed the people I live with, and have the shopping done, and make lunches, but in the last week I’ve not cared about any of this at all and it’s been kind of freeing.
- My bedroom. I like my bedroom a lot. It’s huge and quiet and has an en-suite bathroom. My bed is comfortable. This is not a terrible place in which to spend a lot of time.
- Doing nothing. Like nothing, nothing. For most of last week, I couldn’t even read. Sometimes I would close my eyes, and when I woke up, then whole afternoon had disappeared. I have spent hours staring into the middle distance. I don’t ever, ever do nothing. It’s kind of interesting to know I have the capacity.
- My husband. Not that I needed him to demonstrate that a) he loves me or b) that he’s a really really good partner. But as ever, he’s stepped up. Not so much that he hasn’t had moments of frustration, demonstrating that he’s human after all, but he’s an amazing human, taking our kids to school, making those meals I can’t be bothered with, keeping our house tidy, the children happy, and getting his work done.
- My mom. For coming and bringing us meals, and picking up my girls from school, and playing with them so they are not watching TV all the time. So profoundly grateful for what she does for us. She’s been a lifesaver this week.
- Popsicles. And smoothies. Okay, it’s possible that I’m still preoccupied with food.
- Christmas is doomed. Okay, fortunately, I’ve bought all my children’s presents, and I’ve even bought the presents that need to be send across the country and across an ocean…but they’re still sitting in their packaging. I think we’re running out of time. I also haven’t done any Christmas cards. All this is going amiss. And it’s just going to have to…
- That everything has stopped. It is true, this fall has been a perpetual motion machine. And for a few days I tried to outrun my illness, but it turned out to be faster than I am. I also kept reading articles about people who’d been put into medically induced comas after ignoring illnesses for long periods of time and then nearly dying. So I decided to give myself the rest I needed. Oh, okay, I didn’t decide, I had not choice. But everything has stopped. And that’s okay.
- My bedside table. I love it. It’s its own universe. It has a tea pot, an a telephone, and a water bottle, and books, and a smoothie, and kleenex, and painkillers, and a lamp. What else does one need in the world?
- Getting better. It’s starting to happen. I just have to be patient to win this game.
November 29, 2015
Nothing restful
A photo like this suggests I’ve spent the day reading, which isn’t true. There was also all the time I spent staring at the ceiling, and when I slept from 1-4. The Long Secret is so good though. Yesterday I read The Westing Game. And things are progressing—yesterday I sat up in a chair for a few hours, but then I had to go and lie down. I’ve also started eating food, though less today than yesterday. Progress seems to be a trickly slow and very unsteady thing. So does my brain power. Basically I’ve had a fever for a week and when I close my eyes to sleep at night, my brain launches me into some bizarre narrative constructed of everything I’ve ever thought or seen, and there is nothing restful about it. It’s like playing a game whose rules are dictated by the whims of Harriet. Which is as close as I can come to putting these fever dreams into words.
November 26, 2015
Be. Sick.
I don’t think I knew the definition of giving in. Okay, now I really give in, getting in bed and staying in bed and someone else has to take the children to school, and never mind that I can’t even read, I can’t write, I can pretty much just take staring at the ceiling. This morning I laid in bed and experienced the bedsheets becoming drenched with my sweat. When I came home from the doctor, I was freezing and got tucked into bed whilst wearing a toque. The doctor says that I have is not the flu, and at least it’s not pneumonia or bronchitis, but instead a virus that will go in about 10 days from its start. Which is a while from now. Sometimes I feel better, but I mustn’t use this as an excuse to suppose I am better. I have to continue to stay in bed. And in a way, it’s a bit like pregnancy—everything is interesting. All the sweat, and shivers—new bodily functions—and I’ve become gaggingly sensitive to scents. But it’s terrible, which one is not really allowed to complain about because it’s temporary—there are people with worse lots. There is light at the end of the tunnel, but not tomorrow or the next day. Patience and faith. I need to relax. I need to be wait and be. Sick. Okay.
I tweeted this post yesterday, from the blogger Pip Lincolne: “Ten Things I Sort of Like About Being Sick.” I think some people thought I’d written it. I most definitely hadn’t, but I’d starting to think I could. Or something like it. So I will put my mind to it. Will proceed at a snail’s pace, of course,
November 24, 2015
I give in
Late Saturday night, illness arrived, packing a wallop. I was feverish, sore and achey, and my skin hurt. I felt better on Sunday, and put in a good show at the Draft Reading Series 10th Anniversary Celebration, reading from Mitzi Bytes for the first time and participating on a panel. But by the time we were home, I was sick again. So totally exhausted, and yet unable to sleep either, because my brain was totally loopy and not settled. Yesterday, I was too unwell to take the children to school. I was determined to fetch Iris at noon, which I did, but I was a terrible mess—hunched over because my stomach hurt, only able to take slow stilted steps. She ate Corn Pops for lunch out of a plastic cup. I had a nap when she did though, and woke up finally feeling better, and for the first time, it seemed like not cancelling my class that evening was not a terrible mistake. I was even able to finish Stuart’s birthday cake, fetch Harriet from school, taught my class respectably enough (albeit in jogging pants), and bought NyQuil on the way home. So that last night I finally slept, but I awoke this morning still feeling terrible, and as it seems I’m unable to outrun this cold-fluey ailment of mine (and I don’t have to make a presentation in front of a group of people today—thank goodness), I’ve decided to submit and spend the day in bed. The rarest luxury for a mother, I realize. Crossing my fingers that rest brings recovery. Being sick is terrible.
November 19, 2015
The Story of Snowflake and Inkdrop
The Story of Snowflake and Inkdrop is written by Pierdomenico Baccalario and Alessandro Gatti, illustrated by Simona Mulazzani, and translated from Italian by Brenda Porster. It’s a gorgeously illustrated picture book about yearning, desire, and storytelling, with beautiful intricate die cuts that make it a book that might be better be kept up on a hight shelf, and perhaps best suited for grown-up picture book lovers. Although my children, with their grubby little fingers, like the book as much as I do, and are as adept at getting lost in the illustrations, and perhaps even better at picking out its perfect details, at noticing things. And there is a lot to notice here, in a book about tiny particles and what it means to be part of something larger than oneself. And also about what it means to see the world and want to be a part of it, and the amazing, serendipitous way that this (that love!?) can happen.
At first, this is the story of some wind and a snowflake drifting over the rooftops of a European town. The snowflake, we’re told, has been travelling for a long time. He feels, however, that he’s finally on the cusp of arriving somewhere, and the world below is glimpsed through the snowflake’s crystals, revealed altogether when the page is turned: we see a city street in one image, a circus in another, and then children playing in a park as the snow begins to accumulate.
In none of these scenes does the snowflake fall, however, and he begins to despair that he ever will… When he sees a tiny ink drop flying resolutely toward him, and the snowflake is overwhelmed by the desire to hug it tight. BUT WAIT!
Turning the book around and starting from the other side, we encounter that storm from an altogether new perspective. A single drop in a bottle of ink watching the wind rattling the world outside.
Although the Inkdrop has her own concerns—for days, she’s been waiting for her artist to finally carry her to one of his paintings. Her longing is intensified as a gust of wind from the window blows the paintings around the studio, so that they “flew up, dancing in front of Inkdrop like so many dreams.”
She sees each painting, and wishes deeply to be a part of the scene.
And yes, it is a picture of a teapot. Naturally, we are delighted. We see also a portrait, a bucolic scene. (Clearly this is an artist with a diverse set of approaches!)
When the wind blows so strongly again, unleashing a chain reaction that sends the ink bottle tilting, Inkdrop herself flying out of the window. And then we’re back at the moment we’ve seen before, the ink drop and the snowflake heading for each other in a dazzling cataclysm.
And both books end in the same place, the two parts coming together to have their stories blend, this final image testament to the beauty of contrast.
Truthfully, I am not entirely ensure what the endings means, the snowflake and the inkdrop landing in an embrace “that lasted forever.” When one considers physics, it does not seem entirely plausible, and there is the matter of the inkdrop in the jar—what then of the rest of the ink? Where did one drop end and another begin? And why is the artist so scattered in his style—is he perhaps a forger, I wonder? (Although he looks quite innocent and rosy-cheeked when we spy him out buying a baguette.) One suspects, however, that physics aren’t quite the object of the book, except perhaps those involves in the die-cutting process. For The Story of Snowflake and the Inkdrop is to be looked at and admired and even roughed up a bit by those aforementioned grubby hands, and perhaps this one is the single way that the book should be torn apart at all.
November 19, 2015
My review of Split, by Libby Crewman
My first professional book review was of Libby Crewman’s The Darren Effect in Canadian Notes & Queries in 2008. It was a good book, but a messy one, and I suspect my review probably achieved a similar effect, which sadly was not an aesthetic statement, but was just me figuring out my way. But it also meant that I was looking forward to Crewman’s follow-up, Split, which was published by Goose Lane Editions in September. I read the novel twice as summer turned into fall, and it’s a story that has stayed with me since, in its oddness and perplexities, its curious sideways appeal, but also in the vivid moments that Creelman so stunningly evokes.
A remarkable feature of Split, Libby Creelman’s second novel (after 2008’s The Darren Effect; she is also author of the acclaimed 2000 story collection, Walking in Paradise) is that it isn’t split. Whereas Creelman’s previous book was an impressive tangle of multiple storylines suggesting this short story writer was still finding her way into a different literary milieu, Split—for the most part taut, controlled and smartly plotted—signals Creelman’s arrival proper as a novelist. This new book is an ambitious, assured and most accomplished whole.
This wholeness is doubly (ha!) impressive considering the novel’s movement between two moments in time—2008 on the eve of both Barack Obama’s first election victory and widespread economic meltdown, and during the hot summer of 1975, the year after Nixon’s resignation and just months after the last American troops were removed from Vietnam. The former is the novel’s present day, during which Pilgrim Wheeler returns to her hometown in rural Massachusetts to find her childhood world drastically changed, and must finally reconcile with a tragedy that had wrenched her family apart decades before.
November 17, 2015
The Principles of Imperfectionism, and its Inherent Contradictions
Truthfully, I have little patience with notions of perfectionism. Partly, this is because I’m so far from perfect that I’m envious of anyone who could purport to such an affliction, but also because most perfectionists aren’t enacting perfection in the slightest, but rather using it as an excuse for artistic paralysis. Which I always take as kind of a slight, like those people who’d write if they only had the time—”I’d like to do what you do, but I can’t because I have much higher standards for my artistic output than ordinary mortals.”
In my blogging course, I encourage my students to eschew perfectionism. There is no place for perfectionists in the blogosphere. Blogs are inherently raw, wild and unpolished. The important thing is to write the best you can, get to Publish, and then onto the next post. There will be spelling errors, and sloppy grammar, and things will be formatted weird. You’ll get facts wrong, and often you will change your mind. (Ideally, you should always be changing your mind—or at least entertaining the possibility. The resolute blogger will quickly learn that he is ridiculously low on material.) But no matter. For the blogger should not get hung up on these things, instead remaining forward-facing, putting one post in front of the other, ideally getting better and better at blogging all the time. The journey the very point, you see, because the blogger never ever arrives.
I mean this literally, in one sense. A blog, like a life, is inherently a work-in-progress. Being done is being dead. But also because blogging itself is not a path that leads to somewhere. Although it can be—we all know the examples of bloggers who’ve quit their day jobs and now live off the fruit of their blogging labours (although that’s a path with its own curious trajectories). Certainly blogging has delivered me tremendous rewards, not least of which are (recently) lupine seeds and other surprise parcels in the post from kind readers. And also contacts and experience that have led to professional gigs, and it’s true that I have blogging 100% to thank for your pretty solid writing career at the moment. But note this: my blog worked as a tool (a path to somewhere) because I wasn’t deliberately trying to make it so. I was blogging for blogging’s sake, rather than to write my way to somewhere better, and that I actually managed to get anywhere at all is kind of incidental. It’s the blog that I keep returning to anyway. Warts and all. It will never be perfect, and I will never be done.
I’m comfortable with all this, so much so that I’m so looking forward to speaking on a panel about mistakes on Sunday at Draft 11.1. But then yesterday, while walking down the street, I had a devastating revelation. Which involves Rohan Maitzen’s review of Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, Big Magic. Now, keep in mind that I’m Elizabeth Gilbert-agnostic. I’ve never read a single thing she wrote, but I AM an avid Rohan Maitzen fan. And I loved her smart and thoughtful review of Gilbert’s book on creativity. She’s clear about the book’s strengths (“Gilbert’s advice to just get on with it, without excuses or apologies, is rousing”), its wackiness (the part where Ann Patchett steals her book idea by osmosis?), and, yes, its unrelenting banality. But the big problem Maitzen stumbles upon is Elizabeth Gilbert on the topic of perfectionism, which, she says, is just a manifestation of fear:
“Done is better than good,” [Gilbert] proclaims; “you may want your work to be perfect …. I just want mine to be finished.” Don’t bother interrupting what she proudly calls “the Song of the Disciplined Half-Ass” with cavils about aspiring to excellence: it turns out that along with the all-purpose permission slip she offers us comes an injunction against judgment or evaluation. And that’s where, for me, Gilbert loses her magic.
And this is what stopped me, as I was walking down the street. Because I too am a disciplined half-ass, although I haven’t written an actual song about it yet (and once I get around to it, the song will probably be a bit crap. And I won’t care). So am I basically Elizabeth Gilbert after all, but just not rich or successful, or generating Ann Patchett novel ideas? And the reason why this matters is because the very best part of Maitzen’s really excellent review is when she recalls recently reviewing Gilbert’s novel, The Signature of All Things. The novel that, Gilbert writes in Big Magic, is decidedly imperfect (including, in her words, “an unfortunately underdeveloped character”) but which she decided was “good enough.” The novel that Maitzen sat down, read, and spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about in order to write her review (which was, shall we say, mixed). Maitzen writes:
I suppose on balance, then, mine was one of the “bad reviews,” but I certainly didn’t toss off my opinions lightly before moving on. I assumed Gilbert had put everything she had into her novel and that it was my responsibility to take her writing seriously in return—to read and think as hard as I was capable of, and then to be scrupulous in reporting my conclusions. It never occurred to me to approach The Signature of All Things as a novel that wasn’t intended to be anything more than “good enough.” I’m not sure I know how—or even whether—to review work by a self-proclaimed “half-ass” … but here I am, doing it again.
Here is the flaw in that great liberator, imperfectionism, then: because do you know how many hours it takes to read a book? Moreover, do you know the value of a dollar, or twenty, or thirty of them? And so how dare to any of us expect a reader to make that investment if the work that you’ve produced is not the very best it could be. (This is my big complaint about self-published books too. The number of self-pub’d books I’ve read that aren’t conspicuously imperfect is less than a handful. This is even more the case with e-books, which can be put into the world so rapidly. It drives me crazy when I hear about authors rewriting/editing versions of their books after I’ve actually bought them and read them—could I have my time and my money back please?)
So here I’ve come full circle. And spent the hours since my revelation in the street trying to reconcile my philosophy of imperfectionism with my aversion to bad books. And my conclusion this: eschewing perfectionism is about getting out the draft. And it makes sense in blogging, because a blog is only ever just a draft—certainly, if you’re going back over your posts and ever polishing and changing, what you’re doing isn’t really blogging (which is raw and wild, remember?). Or sustainable. And this is why blogging is useful for a writer, because it’s practicing the habit of putting your ideas into words, one word after another, which is the same way you write a draft of a novel after all. A draft that is rarely going to be wonderful (although who hasn’t dreamed of the editor snapping up your first draft, saying, “There! You’re a genius. This is done.” So easy!). The draft is your chance to go wild, trip up, make a mess, and experiment. To see what happens next.
And after that is where the work comes in. Where the perfectionist’s tendencies come to be advantageous, and the best part is that no one even expects you to do it all on your own. When you get back to your manuscript, and—with the help of a few good editors—make it the most perfect book it can be. Which you’re always going to fail at, but you’re a blogger, well-versed at and most comfortable with imperfection anyway.
