a midweek roundup
(Step away from the news for a minute and read a book/roast the feta)
As I write this, I am five days on the other side of my second major shoulder surgery in five months, the first one having been botched by a doctor who assured me that I wasn’t in pain after I passed out. Twice. I still can’t travel or be in crowds, but on the whole this was a different ballgame: an incredibly competent, skilled, compassionate orthopedic surgeon and her team, excellent pain management with a bare minimum of narcotic intervention (as of two nights ago, none), and because I’m in an immobilizer that attaches to my waist, I can write at my desk for a few hours at a time. I’ve been almost weeping with gratitude, and the day after the surgery, I found myself walking gingerly around my neighborhood with Susan and Fergus, feeling very well. The only snafu: I was sent a teeny tiny medical recliner to sleep in — something meant for someone my diminutive height and moderate weight — and it was so snug that it was like sleeping in a royal blue electric casket with a footrest.
In preparation for being out of commission for a little while, two weeks ago I was back in the city, packing up my mother’s apartment in Manhattan — we still have a ways to go because it’s really just the two of us plus my cousin who are doing the work — and coming face to face with all manner of truth and history, some of which is incredibly rattling, but enlightening. Having spent most of my adult years trying to make sense of the kaleidoscope of our lives — how do children learn to live with deception? if we think we’re imagining a complicated truth what happens when we discover that we were actually not imagining it? — I am finding our reality in the objects I’ve been left with. And I have come away with this fact: I am not my trauma. I am not its embodiment. I have lived through it and carried it at the visceral level, but like hair that has begun to gray, who I am continues to change with the passage of time. I still want to understand us — I have to — but with the loss of my mother has come a difficult clarity I did not expect to find, but feels like the air after a strong rain has come through.
This week, I’m finding inspiration, beauty, and solace in these places:
In My TBR Stack
While reading the April 27th issue of The New Yorker, I came upon an installment of Book Currents, featuring Noguchi Museum Director Amy Hau’s favorite books that have had the greatest influence on the way she thinks about Isamu Noguchi and his work. One of the books is currently sitting on a shelf of my research bookcase — the one that holds the volumes I am using in the writing of my next book, Where You Used to Be, about the intersection of art-making and grief: Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes continues to compel me like few others, and demands an annual re-read. For those who don’t know it, it tells the story of the Ephrussis, de Waal’s family of wealthy European Jewish art collectors, through the pieces they acquired, most of which were confiscated by the Nazis in 1938. One group of pieces remained: a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke hidden in a mattress by a devoted family maid in Vienna during the war, and inherited by de Waal. A story of memory, time, art, and object, The Hare with Amber Eyes has re-wired my sense of meaning and the inanimate. Every week, when I stand in my mother’s vacant living room and I look around, I consider the pieces before me: the 1820s French mirror that I grew up with, sold for a song to a young couple who fell in love with it when they saw it, and hung it in their studio apartment a few flights down; my grandmother’s dust-rimed wedding china from 1934, now sitting in a Stickley cabinet in my dining room; a Lalique elephant given to my mother when she married my stepfather; a Hermes scarf, still in its box, given to her by her psychiatrist in the early nineties; my grandfather’s bright red change purse from the late 1920s, stamped WIEN. I suspect there are very few of us who are faced with the excavation of objects belonging to our ancestors, for better or worse, whose lives would not be profoundly touched by this stunning book.
I read Lena Dunham’s Famesick from cover to cover in about three hours, and I couldn’t put it down in the same way that you can’t look away from a car crash. (It is possible to mean that in a good way, and I do.) Dunham’s writing is very, very good here, and one gets the strong sense that she has taken a giant step back from telling the story of being pulled from pillar to post by seemingly unpleasable parents and an impossible industry that wouldn’t even let her grieve her beloved uncle’s death, and with that distance has come context, self-knowledge, healing, and the ability to craft a narrative rather than a tell-all. I’ll admit to not loving her Not That Kind of Girl (2014) when it came out, less because of its arguably salacious admissions and more because of what Annie Dillard once cautioned in the writing of memoir: You may not let it rip, which Dunham often did. Sometimes, more is not better; it’s just more. And in Famesick — a well-honed excavation of systemic addictions that run the gamut from chemical to personal and professional, and horrific chronic illness that is rarely taken seriously by the medical establishment — Dunham masterfully creates a narrative of too much that is also simultaneously restrained. I attribute what I didn’t like about it to my own prejudices rather than the author’s skill. After I read Famesick, I went back and watched five episodes of the first season of Girls, which we never saw when it first came out. Dunham was objectively amazing in it, but I found the characters unlikable, a lot of the behavior to be so heinous and beyond gratuitously provocative that I couldn’t watch, and I didn’t want to hang around to find out what happened to these people. But Famesick pushes the clock forward and unpacks the stories behind the stories, and does so in a way that is highly skilled and compelling.
Helen Garner’s How to End A Story: Collected Diaries arrived here yesterday morning after making a long journey from an Australian bookseller, and I cannot wait to begin reading it (although, at 800 pages, it might have to wait until my shoulder heals). For as long as I can remember, I have had a strong attraction to the diaries of writers (and generally, artists), falling in up to my neck in the private words of Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, May Sarton, Diane Arbus, Derek Jarman, Anne Truitt. I want to be able to examine the engine beneath the hood; I want to know what makes artists tick, creatively, and how they got from square A to square Z, and how it happened emotionally, psychically, even sexually. The difference with Garner’s diaries, though, is that they were published during her lifetime, opening her up to every manner of commentary, criticism, and mining. In Rachel Cooke’s words in The Guardian, First, this is a writer’s notebook. It is practice, and it is an outlet for all the agonies and contortions that are born of blank paper….These are the greatest, richest journals by a writer since Virginia Woolf’s.
Victoria Bennett’s beautiful The Apothecary By the Sea is just out now, and I am absolutely loving it. One part field guide through the world of wild plants and herbs that are a vital foundation of the Orkney ecosystem and from which Bennett makes healing teas, tinctures, and balms, and one part memoir of Bennett and her family’s move five hundred miles north from Cumbria to this remote Scottish archipelago, this book is about place and time, change and healing, and what it means to look to the earth for sanctuary and solace. These are the stories of sea and earth, writes Bennett. Nothing is ever truly gone, all energy moving towards chaos. We transform. We slip through. We change. We begin again.
A bit of excellent news from my friend, Oldster Magazine publisher Sari Botton: an anthology, coming from HarperOne! Good things happen to good people! Bravo, Sari Botton, on this very well-deserved news!
What else is waiting in my TBR pile this week:
Alicia Kennedy’s On Eating (which I have been waiting for forever)
Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything (re-reading in preparation for the arrival of her new The Things We Never Say, coming on May 6th)
Judith Newcomb Stiles’ Hush Little Fire (Disclosure: Judith is a longtime masters student of mine and a regular attendee at my Truro Center for the Arts and Fine Arts Work Center workshops, so I spent years watching this incredible story unfold. I won’t give away the farm, but if you pasted Elizabeth Strout onto Lily King and threw in John Irving for good measure, you will love these characters and their voices. It’s been out for a year, and this is the second time I’m reading it. A must, especially in the climate in which we are all living.)
