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Redux: The Runner Trying to Disappear

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

The author at his jazz club, Peter Cat, in 1978.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re tuning in to the Olympics and thinking about feats of athleticism. Read on for Haruki Murakami’s Art of Fiction interview, Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “The Weirdos,” Gary Gildner’s poem “The Runner,” and Leanne Shapton and Charlotte Strick’s art portfolio “Swimming Lessons.”

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Haruki Murakami, The Art of Fiction No. 182
Issue no. 170 (Summer 2004)

INTERVIEWER

How is your typical workday structured?

MURAKAMI

When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long—six months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

 

Photo: Comitetul Olimpic si Sportiv Roman. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

The Weirdos
By Ottessa Moshfegh
Issue no. 206 (Fall 2013)

He had a theory about how to stay in shape. It was to tense your body vigorously during everyday activities. He walked around with buttocks clenched, arms rigid, neck and face turning red. When I first moved in, he ran up the stairs with my suitcase, then stared down at me as though I would applaud. And once, when he saw me glance at his arm, he said, “I’m basically an Olympic athlete. I just don’t like to compete.” He had a crudely drawn tattoo of a salivating dog on his shoulder. Underneath it was written, COMIN’ TO GETCHA!

 

Photo: National Media Museum, UK. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

The Runner
By Gary Gildner
Issue no. 58 (Summer 1974)

Show the runner coming through the shadows,
show him falling into a speckled rhythm,
and then show the full expression of light,
there, where the trees quit and the road
goes on alone, marked by the moon-glazed gravel

Show the runner trying to disappear
where sky and road meet far in the distance,
show him always a step too late,
show a train going by hauling a long silence,
and show the runner leaving the road
where the killdeer starts from a charred stump …

 

Mária Švarbová, Pool Only for Swimmers, 2016, digitally manipulated color photograph, 19 4/5  X 19 4/5 ”.

 

Swimming Lessons
By Leanne Shapton & Charlotte Strick
Issue no. 217 (Summer 2016)

When I was little, I would paint water as a low blue stripe along the bottom of the paper. Not much different from the sky—a high blue stripe across the top. Maybe a darker blue. Then I learned how to swim and the waterline moved up, over my head. It became the whole page.

 

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The Silver Age of Essays

A new essay anthology, The Contemporary American Essay , collects works by forty-seven American writers that exemplify the diverse styles and subject matters explored within the form throughout the past twenty-five years. In the excerpted introduction below, the editor and writer Phillip Lopate considers the boom of literary nonfiction amid times of uncertainty. 

Henriette Browne, A Girl Writing; The Pet Goldfinch, ca. 1874, oil on canvas, 22 x 36 1/4’’. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The first quarter of the twenty-first century has been an uneasy time of rupture and anxiety, filled with historic challenges and opportunities. In that close to twenty-five-year span, the United States witnessed the ominous opening shot of September 11, followed by the seemingly unending Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the effort to control HIV/AIDS, the 2008 recession, the election of the first African American president, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the contentious reign of Donald Trump, the stepped-up restriction of immigrants, the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, and the coronavirus pandemic, just to name a few major events. Intriguingly, the essay has blossomed during this time, in what many would deem an exceptionally good period for literary nonfiction—if not a golden one, then at least a silver: I think we can agree that there has been a remarkable outpouring of new and older voices responding to this perplexing moment in a form uniquely amenable to the processing of uncertainty.

When the century began, essays were considered box office poison; editors would sometimes disguise collections of the stuff by packaging them as theme-driven memoirs. All that has changed: a generation of younger readers has embraced the essay form and made their favorite authors into best sellers. We could speculate on the reasons for this growing popularity—the hunger for humane, authentic voices trying to get at least a partial grip on the truth in the face of so much political mendacity and information overload; the convenient, bite-size nature of essays that require no excessive time commitment; the rise of identity politics and its promotion of eloquent spokespersons. Rather than trying to figure out why it’s happening, what’s important is to chart the high points of this resurgence, and to account for the range of styles, subgenres, experimental approaches, and moral positions that characterize the contemporary American essay.

Of course, roping off a period like the year 2000 to the present and calling it “contemporary” is somewhat arbitrary, but one has to start somewhere. At least this artificial chronological box allows for the inclusion of older authors who made their mark in the twentieth century and had the temerity to keep producing significant work in the twenty-first (such as John McPhee, Joyce Carol Oates, Barry Lopez, Thomas Lynch). Just as set designers of period films make a mistake in choosing only articles of clothing or furnishings that were produced in that era, forgetting that we always live with the layered material objects of previous decades, so it would be wrong to restrict the literary flavor of an era to writers under forty. Indeed, what makes this period so interesting is the mélange of clashing generations and points of view. There are still tightly reasoned sequential essays being written in the classical mode, side by side with ones that resist that tidiness.

The essay has always been an adaptable, plastic, shape-shifting form: it may take the form of meditation, reportage, blog, humor piece, eulogy, autobiographical slice, diatribe, list, collage, mosaic, lecture, or letter. Contemporary practitioners seem bent on further testing its limits. For instance, Lia Purpura, Eula Biss, and Mary Cappello are drawn to the lyric essay, which stresses the essay’s associational rather than narrative or argumentative properties. Cappello has shrewdly spoken about essay writing—“that non-genre that allows for untoward movement, apposition, and assemblage, that is one part conundrum, one part accident, and that fosters a taste for discontinuity.” In line with Modernist aesthetics, a mosaic essay with “a taste for discontinuity” may be constructed from fragments, numbered or not, with white space breaks between pieces that connect intuitively or emotionally if not logically. It is up to the reader to figure it out. The list essay, which is highly generative of disparate materials, by its very nature evades an argumentative through line, and can seem initially as random as a poetic inventory by Whitman, though it may deepen subtly and organically. (For example, Nicholson Baker’s charming “One Summer,” which crisscrosses periods of his life, nevertheless builds to a revealing self-portrait.)

While the influence of poetic technique on the lyric essay has been largely acknowledged, less recognized is the short story’s impact on the contemporary essay. Many memoir essays exist in a kind of fictive space, progressing through scene and dialogue and a sensory-laden mood that stays tied to the moment by moment. The piece itself may be entirely factual, but the sentences give off a Minimalist frisson that shows the influence of short story writers such as Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, and Lorrie Moore.

Nonfiction has been agitated in recent years by certain ethical questions, such as, “How legitimate is it to insert fictional details in nonfiction?” or “Is it proper to appropriate the voice of some- one of a different ethnicity, sex, or social class?” That both can be done successfully can be seen in Hilton Als’s “I Am the Happiness of This World,” which channels the silent film star Louise Brooks’s ruminations, as though Brooks herself were dictating an essay to Als from the grave.

The role of technology—the internet and social media—in altering our rhetorical lives may even affect the typography of an essay (as evidenced in Ander Monson’s unshackled “Failure: A Meditation”). “Are we merging with our computers and turning into ‘spiritual machines’?” wondered the essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn. The blog, once viewed as a debasement or poor relation of the essay, has proven itself a useful invitation to free-flowing, self-surprising displays of consciousness (see Ross Gay, Eileen Myles). Some feminist essayists have expressed a desire to arrive at a “post-patriarchal essay,” implying that the very structure of linear argumentation is authoritarian and reinforces status quo sexist power relations. (Maggie Nelson’s influential Bluets and The Argonauts offer clues for shaking up the old model.) Yet all these ways to challenge and subvert the classic essay are in the tradition of the essay itself, whose very name bespeaks an attempt, an experimentation, a stab in the dark. All this is to suggest that the essay remains the most open-ended of forms. (It has even spilled out into other media, as witness the essay film and the graphic essay, subjects for another day.)

Perhaps nothing has so shaped the contemporary practice of essay writing as the rise of the personal essay. It scarcely matters whether the subject be illness (Floyd Skloot), loitering (Charles D’Ambrosio), or prisons (Joyce Carol Oates): some insertion of authorial character is likely to invade the text. Much the way journalism has increasingly surrendered its claims of objective neutrality and allowed reporters room for subjective voice, so the essay has come to rely more and more on an “I.” With that has come an infusion of raw honesty, vulnerability, and awkward admission such as would scarcely have been seen in earlier essays. Younger essayists are often willing to acknowledge confusion, psychological distress, thralldom to contradictory drives and uncontrollable desires. There is often a trade-off: more heat, urgency, diaristic excitement, less perspective. Younger essayists might struggle to resolve questions about their authentic nature and perplexing disparities, while older essayists might feel more at ease with the self’s mutable, impure, self-betraying nature. Those who are entering middle age will often situate their “I” characters on a moving platform that begins in childhood or adolescence and transitions into adulthood and sometimes even parenthood. The personal essayist can accommodate these chronological shifts between life’s passages more easily than the short story writer (unless you’re Alice Munro). As the essayists age, they are less likely to be writing from the midst of distressed confusion and more from a place of wry self-mockery and detachment. The younger the essayist—not all, of course—the more likely an identification with a generational perspective. Popular culture, rock music, or TV programs may be convenient markers for that shared membership. The sense of being part of a generation tends to fade as one grows older: one sees one’s unshakable limits and singularities, for better or worse.

It has long been the province of the personal essayist to turn one’s narrator into a character by asserting defining autobiographical facts, eccentric or contrarian notions, odd tastes, behavioral tics, and so on. Having done so, the essayist might then wish to parry that Crusoe-like separateness by analyzing to what extent he or she belongs to a larger group or tribe. Ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, physical or mental disability, national origin, generational awareness, social class, and political alignment are some of the categories increasingly tempting contemporary essayists to situate themselves in the midst of a group or at an ambivalent angle from it. This is especially true when the minority to which you belong is asserting its rights or finds itself under attack—when the question becomes unavoidably topical.

The hyphenated American often experiences self-division: “One ever feels his twoness,” in W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous formulation. Thoughtful African American essayists such as Teju Cole, Darryl Pinckney, and Clifford Thompson, who have found broad acceptance in white academic circles, have felt called upon to reflect about the police actions visited on Black people. Depression among minority groups is a subject taken up by Margo Jefferson and Yiyun Li. The tightrope situation of biracial individuals (Alexander Chee) or of immigrants who continue to inhabit two spheres (Aleksandar Hemon) guarantees a tension suitable for an essay’s exploration. The outrage that the #MeToo movement produced regarding the sexual harassment, condescension, and mistreatment of women in the workplace is given sharp expression in Rebecca Solnit’s “Cassandra Among the Creeps.”

One dilemma for the contemporary essayist is how to tackle a social problem while avoiding self-righteousness or strident virtue signaling. To oversimplify: many younger essayists, armed with a checklist of deplorables (racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, homophobia, ethnocentrism, speciesism), set out to denounce these prejudices by recounting how they have witnessed or been victimized by them. They show a commendable sensitivity to the discomfort of minorities and a perhaps overactive desire to restrict any speech that might offend, in line with the trigger warnings, safe zones, and checking of privilege that many campuses now invite. There has been some pushback from older essayists, such as Lynn Freed and Camille Paglia, against the ideological policing of literature: these authors issue from a more skeptical, ironic tradition, and insist on the writer’s and instructor’s freedom to question, provoke, complicate, argue, and dispute orthodox ideas. Somewhere in the middle may be found, for example, Wesley Yang’s “We Out Here,” which seeks to balance the stoical acceptance that life will always bring pain and indignity with an admiration for youth’s idealistic opposition to such slights.

In times of calamity, it is only natural for writers to respond to the crisis as concerned citizens. “These days,” observes the poet Gregory Pardlo, wistfully, “we feel pulled out of our private selves and called to perform our public accountability.” On the other hand, Harold Bloom warns that, whatever the impulse writers might feel toward commitment to social change, “The pleasures of reading indeed are selfish rather than social. I am wary of any arguments whatever that connect the pleasures of reading to the public good.” So each essayist must find a way to navigate between commenting on the times, opportunistically or otherwise, and mining the secrets of the interior self for the reader’s pleasure and enlightenment.

Of course, there are many impressive essays that have nothing to do with topical controversies or identity politics, but that grapple with eternal questions of life and death, suffering and illness, love and joy, family life. Religion and transcendence are examined in Anne Carson’s brilliant analysis, “Decreation.” The mortician-essayist Thomas Lynch displays an expert’s take on death in “Bodies in Motion and at Rest.” Love and loss are movingly explored by Bernard Cooper in “Greedy Sleep” and David Lazar’s “Ann; Death and the Maiden,” while relationship’s perils are enumerated in Laura Kipnis’s sardonic “Domestic Gulags.” The complicated ties that bind parents and children are demonstrated in Rivka Galchen’s “The Case of the Angry Daughter” and Meghan Daum’s “Matricide.” Then there are simply the pleasures of wasting time leafing through interior decorating magazines, as in Terry Castle’s “Home Alone.”

Humor will always have an honored place in the contemporary essay: David Sedaris (represented by “This Old House”) has mastered the form, as have Sloane Crosley and Samantha Irby. Finally, there is writing about one’s own literary practice: Patricia Hampl assessing the guilt of writing about others, or veteran John McPhee taking us through his messy stages of composition in “Draft No. 4.” In a world that often makes little sense, sometimes the only way to face down uncertainty is to write. What better vehicle to process shifting hunches and anxieties than the essay, the ideal form for tracking one’s thoughts? If some larger pattern or resolution can be teased from the effort, so much the better. If they don’t add up in the end, maybe that is its own valid truth, matching as it does the spirit of our deeply unsure and divided age.

 

Phillip Lopate is the author of To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction and four essay collections, Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and Portrait Inside My Head. He is the editor of the anthologies The Glorious American Essay, The Golden Age of the American Essay, The Art of the Personal Essay, Writing New York, and American Movie Critics. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He is a professor of writing at Columbia University’s nonfiction M.F.A. program and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

From The Contemporary American Essay , edited and with an introduction by Phillip Lopate. Copyright © 2021 by Phillip Lopate. Published by arrangement with Anchor Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

A Great Storyteller Loses His Memory

Rodrigo García’s new memoir, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes , recounts the ailing health and eventual passing of his father, the writer Gabriel García Márquez, in close detail. Amid family discussions and trips to the doctor, García explores the challenge of writing about grief while living within it. In the below excerpt, García documents the aftermath of his father’s dementia diagnosis and considers the emotional weight of the memory loss upon the renowned writer. 

Gabriel García Márquez at the Festival Internacional de Cine en Guadalajara, 2009, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Writing about the death of loved ones must be about as old as writing itself, and yet the inclination to do it instantly ties me up in knots. I am appalled that I am thinking of taking notes, ashamed as I take notes, disappointed in myself as I revise notes. What makes matters emotionally turbulent is the fact that my father is a famous person. Beneath the need to write may lurk the temptation to advance one’s own fame in the age of vulgarity. Perhaps it might be better to resist the call and to stay humble. Humility is, after all, my favorite form of vanity. But as with most writing, the subject matter chooses you, and so resistance could be futile.

A few months earlier a friend asked how my dad was doing with his loss of memory. I told her he lives strictly in the present, unburdened by the past, free of expectations for the future. Forecasting based on previous experience, which is believed to be of evolutionary significance as well as one of the origins of storytelling, no longer plays a part in his life.

“So he doesn’t know he’s mortal,” she concluded. “Lucky him.”

Of course, the picture I painted for her is simplified. It is dramatized. The past still plays a part in his conscious life. He relies on the distant echo of his considerable interpersonal skills to ask anyone he meets a series of safe questions: “How is everything?” “Where are you living these days?” “How are your people?” Occasionally he’ll venture an attempt at a more ambitious exchange and become disoriented in the middle of it, losing the thread of the idea or running out of words. The puzzled expression on his face, as well as the embarrassment that crosses it momentarily, like a puff of smoke in a breeze, betrays a past when conversation was as natural to him as breathing. Creative, funny, evocative, provocative conversation. Being a great conversador was almost as highly regarded among his oldest group of friends as being a good writer.

The future is also not completely behind him. Often at dusk he asks, “Where are we going tonight? Let’s go out to a fun place. Let’s go dancing. Why? Why not?” If you change the subject enough times, he moves on.

He recognizes my mother and addresses her as Meche, Mercedes, La Madre, or La Madre Santa. There were a few very difficult months not long ago when he remembered his lifelong wife but considered the woman in front of him claiming to be her to be an impostor.

“Why is she here giving orders and running the house if she is nothing to me?”

My mother reacted to this with anger.

“What is wrong with him?” she asked in disbelief.

“It’s not him, Mom. It’s dementia.” She looked at me like I was trying to pull a fast one. Surprisingly, that period passed, and she regained her proper place in his mind as his principal companion. She is the last tether. His secretary, his driver, his cook, who have all worked in the house for years, he recognizes as familiar and friendly people who make him feel safe, but he no longer knows their names. When my brother and I visit, he looks at us long and hard, with uninhibited curiosity. Our faces ring a distant bell, but he cannot make us out.

“Who are those people in the next room?” he asks a housekeeper.

“Your sons.”

“Really? Those men? Carajo. That’s incredible.”

There was an uglier period a couple of years earlier. My father was fully aware of his mind slipping away. He asked for help insistently, repeating time and time again that he was losing his memory. The toll of seeing a person in that state of anxiety and having to tolerate their endless repetitions over and over and over again is enormous. He would say, “I work with my memory. Memory is my tool and my raw material. I cannot work without it. Help me,” and then he would repeat it in one form or another multiple times an hour for half an afternoon. It was grueling. That eventually passed. He regained some tranquility and would sometimes say, “I’m losing my memory, but fortunately I forget that I’m losing it,” or “Everyone treats me like I’m a child. It’s good that I like it.”

His secretary tells me that one afternoon she found him standing alone in the middle of the garden, looking off into the distance, lost in thought.

“What are you doing out here, Don Gabriel?”

“Crying.”

“Crying? You’re not crying.”

“Yes, I am. But without tears. Don’t you realize that my head is now shit?”

On another occasion, he said to her: “This isn’t my home. I want to go home. Home to my dad. I have a bed next to my dad’s.”

We suspect he was referring not to his father but to his grandfather, the colonel (and the inspiration for Colonel Aureliano Buendía), with whom he lived until he was eight. The colonel was the most influential man in his life. My father slept on a small mattress on the floor next to his bed. They never saw each other after 1935.

“That’s the thing about your father,” his secretary says to me. “Even ugly things he can talk about beautifully.”

 

Rodrigo García was born in Colombia, grew up in Mexico City, and studied history at Harvard University. His features as writer and director include Nine Lives, Albert Nobbs, and Last Days in the Desert. Garcia has directed for television series such as Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, and Big Love, for which he received an Emmy nomination. He also directed several episodes of HBO’s In Treatment, where, in addition to directing, he served as writer, executive producer, and series showrunner. Garcia currently resides in Los Angeles with his family. 

Excerpted from A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha , by Rodrigo García. Published by HarperVia. Copyright © 2021 HarperCollins.

Read Gabriel García Márquez’s Art of Fiction interview, which appeared in the Winter 1981 issue.

Staff Picks: Melancholia, Music, and Meaning

Cynthia Cruz. Photo: Steven Page. Courtesy of Cruz.

America: land of the free, home of the brave. A country, as our cultural mythos would have it, sans the social restrictions of the Old World. A country, thanks to the competitive fervor of meritocratic capitalism, without class. But we know this isn’t true: the idea of the United States as a land of the Protestant work ethic and the righteously rich is a fantasy, one especially relevant in the world of the arts. As the poet Cynthia Cruz painstakingly illustrates in her new book The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class, an expansion of her 2019 essay of the same name, the working class is more often than not shut out of the arts in the contemporary U.S., reliant as this world is on low wages, credentialism, and social networking. In chapters that combine her own personal experiences as a working-class writer and the work of many American and international writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers—including Clarice Lispector, Barbara Loden, James Baldwin, the Jam, Cat Power, and more—Cruz explores the “melancholia” that results when a working-class artist abandons their origins and is subsumed into the middle and upper classes. In a world that denies their very existence, she argues, the working-class artist is a ghost: “neither dead nor alive, the working class exists between worlds.” Drawing on theoretical frameworks from Mark Fisher and Freud, as well as some good old-fashioned proletarian internationalism, Cruz makes a convincing argument as to how the working class can best resist assimilation and instead continue to make provocative, formally experimental work that transcends the borders of both class and country. —Rhian Sasseen 

While much of the world turns its attention to Tokyo for one of the most ill-advised sporting events in recent memory, I’ve been spending my time in a different iteration of Japan’s capital: the lovingly crafted, densely packed world of Yakuza 0. I’ve played only a few chapters of the game so far, but much of it takes place in Kamurocho, a light fictionalization of the Tokyo nightlife district Kabukichō. The year is 1988, the Japanese economy is booming, and Kazuma Kiryu, a low-ranking member of the Tojo Clan crime family, has just been framed for murder. As Kiryu, the player works to clear his name, dredging deeper and deeper into the city’s muck of criminal activity. The main story is one of the most thrilling crime dramas I’ve encountered, which is all the more surprising given that a good portion of it revolves around a real estate dispute. But where Yakuza 0 shines most is in the downtime between plot beats, when Kiryu is free to roam the neighborhood and encounter the strange characters who populate its streets. An earnest back-alley mushroom merchant struggles to understand why his customers think he sells drugs. A dominatrix fails to grasp the authority needed to perform her job well. An enormous man named Mr. Shakedown proclaims his ambitions of standing “at the apex of ALL organisms.” In each and every situation, the comically straitlaced Kiryu does his best to help. Yakuza 0 is something wholly unique: a perfect blend of intricately plotted prestige drama and slapstick, thoroughly bonkers comedy, all of it undergirded by some of the best writing in modern video games. —Brian Ransom

 

Camille Roy. Photo courtesy of Nightboat Books.

 

“What is Honey Mine?” asks Eric Sneathen, coeditor of the short story collection by Camille Roy, in an interview with the author. “Truly, I’m not sure I’ve read a book like this one before.” I’m not sure I’ve read a book like this, either. The stories in Honey Mine, which loosely follows the coming-of-age arc of a young lesbian and “explores what it takes to survive as a young sex and gender outlaw in the heart of America,” are utterly unpredictable. The various plots continually catch me off guard, but even from sentence to sentence, I can never tell what’s coming—Roy’s true staying power lies in the line. Coeditor Lauren Levin calls this phenomenon “the Camille sentence”: “Like pornography or delight, I know it when I see it. It’s often deceptively clear, but its translucency glows with obscure depths. The Camille sentence has a touch of the aphoristic, the gnomic: it prefers the suggestive to the interpretable. It’s wise and brash. Mordantly witty, it never outstays its welcome. Instead, it snaps shut on its moment, then stays open in the mind.” The Camille sentence is, in short, provocative—not necessarily in content but in the sense that the reader is poked and prodded to go somewhere they would not have otherwise gone. I find myself particularly taken with Roy’s highly self-aware and mind-bending meditations on writing. Take this short excerpt from the first story of the collection, “Agatha Letters”: “This paragraph, for instance. I think it’s a dwelling place for a sort of ghost, one who whines, craves visitors, is erotically frustrated. Into the eternal present (which is eternal because it never arrived in the first place), the hapless reader stumbles, turns around in confusion, then crashes through the rear exit. Reading is a kind of crashing through meaning—as the ghost is my witness.” Reading Honey Mine, I am constantly crashing through meaning and emerging on the other side—as the author-specter Camille Roy is my witness. —Mira Braneck

Over the past few days I’ve been pulled into Venita Blackburn’s How to Wrestle a Girl. Blackburn’s voice is so nimble, toggling cooly between narrators and forms; she is a writer obviously in control of her craft and playing with its limitations. Blackburn can also be quietly vicious, breaking your heart with such a clean blade of controlled style that you don’t realize it’s happened until you’ve reached the end. —Lauren Kane

Streamed pandemic concerts in which my favorite artists launch their new albums from remote locations, even—perhaps especially—if they’re well filmed, simply aren’t the same thing as live music, not by a long shot. I miss the heat in the room, the bass rumbling through the floor, the tall guy standing in front of me who took the place of the other tall guy who was standing in front of me until he went to get a beer. Live music, like friendship, is best experienced outside the confines of a tiny digital box. The closest I’ve come to seeing live music in a year and a half is watching the amazing new documentary Summer of Soul, directed by Questlove, that jack-of-all-musical-trades. The film brings to light extraordinary footage, captured with multiple cameras in still-brilliant color, of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, a several-weekend concert series produced the same summer as Woodstock. The festival was filmed with the intention of broadcasting the result, but according to Summer of Soul, nobody wanted to air it, so the reels stayed hidden in a basement until now. The documentary is utterly immersive; this is as close as you’re going to get to attending live performances by Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Mahalia Jackson, Gladys Knight and the Pips, a nineteen-year-old Stevie Wonder, and many others. All of the performers are visibly energized by playing before an overwhelmingly Black audience at a time when the U.S. was a powder keg of racial tension—you can feel that they feel they are doing something important. And beyond enjoying the music, I felt that, as a viewer, I was doing something important, too, by bearing witness to this document of an event that took place during a moment when music was a balm and essential community-building force. The 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival should be just as legendary as the other music festival that took place that summer. —Craig Morgan Teicher

 

Sly Stone performs at the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969, featured in the documentary Summer of Soul. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2021 20th Century Studios. All rights reserved.

On the Faces of Strangers: Michaël Borremans’s Pandemic Portrait

John Vincler’s column Brush Strokes examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world. 

Michaël Borremans, Study for Bird, 2020, oil on linen, 14 1/4 x 11 3/4″. © Michaël Borremans. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.

I didn’t understand how much I needed to look at the faces of others until I drove into Manhattan this past December to stare into a stranger’s unmasked face on my birthday. The sole reason for this trip was the stranger’s face—a portrait by Michaël Borremans, an artist I had taken to describing for nearly a decade as my favorite painter whose work I had never seen in person.

I knew Borremans’s work mostly from the giant monographs and exhibition catalogs on his work I’d check out from the Mid-Manhattan Branch of the New York Public Library several years ago while I was working as a rare-book librarian a few blocks south at the Morgan Library & Museum. I’d lug these giant books from one library to another and then home in my backpack on the train from Midtown back to Brooklyn, renewing them over and over until they could be renewed no longer, sometimes requesting them again immediately, repeating the cycle. These paintings, or at least their reproductions, had a special resonance for me then. In the Morgan’s reading room, I routinely looked at the miniatures painted in the medieval manuscripts requested mostly by visiting academics. And when I would reshelve the printed books housed in J. P. Morgan’s former study in the old library, I’d always take a moment to look upon Hans Memling’s panel painting Portrait of a Man with a Pink.

 

J. P. Morgan’s Study (West Room) showing Hans Memling’s Man with a Pink, May 2016. © The Morgan Library & Museum. Photo: Graham S. Haber.

 

This day job rhythm fueled an almost ambient thinking about the relationship between medieval manuscript illumination and what I still think of as “early Netherlandish” panel painting, to use the art historian Erwin Panofsky’s now-antiquated phrase for this work created during the transition from the late medieval to early modern periods. In Borremans’s paintings, I saw a contemporary inheritance of this dawning moment. Borremans lives and works in Ghent, home to the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece. Begun in the 1420s and completed in 1432 (probably primarily by Jan after Hubert’s death and following his initial design), this landmark historical artwork was one of the first paintings to use oil paint and a series of transparent glazes to create radical effects with light. Ghent is some twenty-five miles from Bruges, where Memling was the leading painter in the second half of the fifteenth century. In Memling’s work, the uncanny renderings of skin tones alive with light and paired with lushly textural treatments of often brocaded and jeweled clothing captivated me with their detail. Skin and clothing, faces and postures are also essential elements of Borremans’s work. As I pored over the reproductions of his paintings in those giant library books, I sensed a genealogical connection across generations to his geographically proximate forebears. This is not to say that his paintings are antiquarian-seeming curios; rather, he takes on figuration as if in a sort of dare, rendering his subjects with a freighted ambiguity. In Borremans’s work, it is as if the Catholicism of the early Netherlandish painters’ cathedral setting has fallen into ruin and been replaced with a desolate absurdist stage set. The people in his portraits often seem as if they are playing a role in some mysterious production, adding a layered tension to an existential question they ask of both themselves and the viewer: What am I doing here?

 

Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, The Ghent Altarpiece (or Adoration of the Mystic Lamb), 1432, twelve interior panels, open view, 11 × 15′. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

On that blustery Saturday in December, I put on my mask, left the shelter of my car parked on the mostly empty streets, and ran across the pavement through the freezing rain to the David Zwirner Gallery, where my partner, Kate, had booked me a timed socially distanced appointment for my birthday. The trip to Manhattan to see the single Borremans was my second attempt to reengage with looking at paintings after the onset of the pandemic. I appeared to be the only visitor in the gallery that morning. In the large skylighted room farthest from the entrance, I was able to gaze upon the smallish canvas I had come to see. Measuring less than twelve by fifteen inches tall, Study for Bird is an intimate work painted by Borremans during the pandemic. In scale it echoes that Memling I spent years looking at in the Morgan. Returning to the Zwirner gallery was entering a familiar but seemingly altered space, not abandoned but haunted by the too-real fullness of the year’s history. It was a rare gift of solitude. Kate stayed with our baby still asleep in the car, as my eldest finished drawing on a birthday card. I had the gallery to myself, except for two attendants, one at the front desk and another in the gallery itself. They had pointed me in the right direction to see my first Borremans in the flesh.

What did I see? A human face, a stranger’s, unmasked. Settled, contemplative, resolute, yet melancholic. An inward look. Softly femme. Slight makeup, most noticeably blush high on the cheeks. Or perhaps they were pink with exertion. A touch of gloss on the lip, which caught the light, but so did the bridge of the nose and the peak of the left brow. A ballet dancer, a player onstage? Or maybe, as the hooded costume suggests, a pilot or a fencer. The collar floating, otherworldly, tracing a circle below the neck.

The problem here seeking a solution by the painter is the face the hood encloses, part transcribed realism and part affective invention. The figure is set before a dark ground; the darkness is drafted, filled as an afterthought. There’s something cursory, vague about this darkness, which serves to hold the figure in a field of contrasting tone and then get out of the way, to be the shadow uninvolved in the otherwise complex play of light across the face and its surrounding costume. The bit of darkness in the space behind the neck creates an area where the image peels away or falls apart, but just for a flash, a blip, just for a moment. (Maybe this is where long hair is secreting out the back of the hood.) This ambiguous bit of fabric or hair behind the head flares slightly up from the body and creates an area of just enough strangeness to reveal the plasticity and thus the inventiveness of the painting itself, as if the painting were paused just before the stroke of completion.

The attendant, maybe curious that I seemed principally interested in the Borremans painting, mentioned that it related closely to another by Borremans, titled The Pilot, that was concurrently being shown at the Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp. I had seen The Pilot online along with paintings of rockets and people dressed in rocket-like costumes. Of Study for Bird, she said the figure looks to be playing a pilot, “like Amelia Earhart.” It felt awkward and exhilarating having a conversation with a stranger about painting, attempting to remember how to do that, keeping our distance, wearing our masks.

 

View of “Coloured Cones,” 2020, Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp. From left: The Pilot, 2020; and Large Rocket, 2019. Photo: We Document Art. Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp.

 

Thinking back on that moment before the painting in the gallery, I now realize I would usually have taken the subway. I have only just started taking the train again, which has reminded me that the experience of New York usually is an experience of a sea of innumerable faces. Taking the subway means daily having at least one person’s face across the aisle and many faces in your line of sight. You can’t help but study the concentrated face of a reader, the elsewhereness of a daydreamer, the sadness here, the exhaustion there, the twitchy concentration of a game player, the open face of the tourist, and even the practiced but not quite impervious shell of the city dweller, lightly armored in sunglasses or headphones. In staring at the face in Borremans’s portrait, I wasn’t left thinking about the history of early Netherlandish panel painting. I was instead reminded of the experience of moving through a city, the mix of intimacy and alienation that comes from incessant, packed proximity with strangers. It was okay to stare there in the gallery, to contemplate the dignity and complexity of this subject, with the strange costume, the visage part mask and part portal, suggesting something as awesome and truly unknowable as an individual person. Isn’t this a paradox, to be made to remember the faces of strangers?

 

John Vincler is a writer and visual artist who has worked for a decade as a rare-book librarian. He is editor for visual culture at Music & Literature and is at work on a book-length project about cloth as subject and medium in art.

A Literature on the Brink of Dawn

Fernando Pessoa. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

One afternoon while browsing in the English bookstore, located midway between two of the offices where he worked for a few hours nearly every day, Fernando Pessoa spotted a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The scandal generated by its partial publication in The Little Review, between 1918 and 1920, may not have reached Pessoa’s attention, but by 1933 he knew all about its celebrity status as a banned book, judged obscene and still unavailable in the United Kingdom and the United States. The copy he saw—​and purchased—​was of the two-​volume Odyssey Edition, published in December 1932, in Germany. Both volumes have come down to us in pristine condition, without so much as a fleeting pencil mark. The only evidence that Pessoa actually read Ulysses, or enough of it to know that he wanted to read no more, is the laconic commentary he scribbled, in Portuguese, on a scrap of paper:

The art of James Joyce, like that of Mallarmé, is art preoccupied with method, with how it is made. Even the sensuality of Ulysses is a symptom of intermediation. It is oneiric delirium—​the kind treated by psychiatrists—​presented as an end in itself.

A literature on the brink of dawn.

Pessoa’s less than enthusiastic reaction to the book recalls Virginia Woolf’s comment in a diary entry written shortly after the complete novel was first published in Paris, in 1922: “When one can have cooked flesh, why have it raw?” It might also remind us of Edmund Wilson’s much more positive reaction in the book review he wrote for The New Republic: “Mr. Joyce manages to give the effect of unedited human minds, drifting aimlessly along from one triviality to another, confused and diverted by memory, by sensation and by inhibition. It is, in short, perhaps the most faithful X-​ray ever taken of the ordinary human consciousness.”

Woolf, who had a few other snide things to say about Ulysses, may have been rattled because Joyce had so brilliantly realized her own ambition, soon enough revealed in performances such as Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), her most stunning novel. Unlike either of these writers, Pessoa was not interested in representing human consciousness in literature; he wanted to analyze and, if possible, expand it. His Book of Disquiet often meditates on the nature and limits of consciousness, and on its relationship to the unconscious. Bernardo Soares repeatedly reminds his ideal reader that consciousness deceives us, by solipsistically taking itself to be the measure of reality. We are largely ruled, he insists, by unconscious instincts, and our life, as for any other animal, is contingent on the external dimension. For Pessoa there was also the reality, or the real possibility, of a spiritual dimension, with the whole of our human drama being a mere analogue of some other sort of life.

Joyce and Pessoa had an unusual trait in common: brontophobia. If a storm broke out while he and Nora were going somewhere by car, Joyce would immediately order the driver to turn around and take them home. Pessoa, on the other hand, did not feel safe from the convulsions of weather even when safely indoors. One afternoon he and the painter José de Almada Negreiros were calmly conversing at the Café Martinho da Arcada when a rainstorm hit. Almada Negreiros, assertive in his art and impetuous in his behavior, ran to the door so that he could revel at the sight of rain gushing down over Praça do Comércio as lightning crackled and thunder resounded. When he turned around to say something to Pessoa, he stopped midsentence, astonished to see nobody there. Looking more closely, he noticed a black shoe poking out from under their table, where his trembling friend had taken cover.

Joyce and Pessoa, who had both rejected Catholicism early on, still retained a feeling of awed humility vis-​à-​vis the vagaries of nature, and both were inclined to see mystical signs in life’s odd details, symbolic meanings in everyday coincidences. Joyce made use of this inclination in his writing, which is interwoven with signs and symbols, to convey the wondrousness of life and our perception of it. He read a number of books by mystics and Theosophists, and his own books, especially Ulysses, are seeded with allusions to the doctrines of Hermeticism, Kabbalah, and alchemy; yet he also ridiculed those who, like Yeats, put great store in the occult. Esoteric symbols and doctrines served Joyce, it seems, as metaphors for the hidden side of human consciousness and for the hard-​to-​decipher mysteries of life on Earth. He had no patience for the idea that this world is but a shadow of some other, more perfect place. Pessoa, on the contrary, used his writing to go in search of something before and beyond symbols, words, and the life we know.

*

Pessoa’s search for God was a search for language, and his search for language was a search for God. But he was not a linguistic innovator like James Joyce, who invented thousands of new words and even new forms of syntax for his most challenging work, Finnegans Wake (1939). Pessoa pushed gently against the boundaries of Portuguese and English, coining occasional neologisms and using words in new ways, but he made no attempt to reinvent language. He aspired, more simply, to use received vocabulary and grammar with precision, to make language stick close to the things it denotes. His linguistic project bears some resemblance to that of another contemporary, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Alberto Caeiro, in particular, sometimes sounds like the compulsive clarifier of Philosophical Investigations. In poem 45 of “The Keeper of Sheep,” for instance:

A row of trees in the distance, toward the slope … ​

But what is a row of trees? There are just trees.

“Row” and the plural “trees” are names, not things.

In another poem, Pessoa’s poet of nature reproaches Saint Francis of Assisi for the anthropomorphism that runs through his “Canticle of the Sun”:

Why call water my sister if water isn’t my sister?

To feel it better?

I feel it better by drinking it than by calling it something—​

Sister, or mother, or daughter.

For Pessoa-​Caeiro, words are properly used only when and to the exact extent they are necessary.

After Caeiro stopped poetizing, in 1930, Bernardo Soares continued his campaign on behalf of limpid and accurate, radiographic language, though with a rather different outcome. Caeiro had celebrated the outer world, all that is knowable through vision, hearing, and the other senses. He prided himself on being “superficial,” asserting that reality has no inner “depth” except in our confused thinking. Soares, while seeing everything with no less clarity, internalized the world and then—​in an instantaneous turnaround—​externalized his sensations of it. His world included dreamed and imagined things as well as things seen. Caeiro, standing to one side, had said: “Behold the world!” Soares used his science of language to become the world that he closely contemplated, transforming himself into the exquisitely composed passages that form The Book of Disquiet: “I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write. I unroll myself in sentences and paragraphs, I punctuate myself. […] I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads.”

It was a painful metamorphosis, achieved at the price of an uncompromising solitude. The assistant bookkeeper’s attempt to live a completely independent life, dedicated only to his sensations of what he saw, he felt, and he dreamed—​without concessions—​proved to be almost unbearable, though by no means unfruitful. “All this stupid insistence on being self-​sufficient! All this mocking awareness of pretended sensations! All this imbroglio of my soul with these sensations,” vents Soares in a moment of exasperation, linguistically molding yet more sensations into another scintillating passage of his sumptuous diary, left for whomever it might move, inspire, or at least amuse.

Lurking behind the relentlessly solitary Soares was the not-quite-as-solitary Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet tends to be distortedly autobiographical, but sometimes Pessoa and Soares perfectly coincide. Whether the experience described in a passage for the book written on September 8, 1933, happened in fact or only in Pessoa’s imagination makes little difference, but I will suppose it to have been factual.

Pessoa’s sister and her family were spending this summer, like the previous summer, at their house in São João do Estoril and would not return to Lisbon until October. Pessoa’s small bedroom, situated in the middle of the apartment on Rua Coelho da Rocha, was overrun by books and papers—​papers in his wooden trunk, and books as well as papers piled on the table, the dresser, and the nightstand next to his bed. When staying at the apartment by himself, he and his papers and books would spread into the dining room, covering almost every inch of the oval-​shaped table. Four or five ashtrays overflowed with cigarette butts. Here and there an empty glass still smelled of brandy. Late into the night, after he had finished writing and for as long as his insomnia kept him awake, Pessoa would either pace or sit still in the darkness, smoking. On such a night in September, looking out of a window onto the sleeping city, the poet sees—​or imagines Soares seeing—​a single lamp lighting up a high window in the distance. All the other windows are black rectangles. Without mitigating his solitude, that one light makes him feel at least tentatively pertinent:

An invisible thread links me to the unknown owner of the lamp. It’s not the mutual circumstance of our both being awake; in this there can be no reciprocity, for my window is dark, so that he cannot see me. It’s something else, something all my own that’s related to my feeling of isolation, that participates in the night and in the silence, and that chooses the lamp as an anchor because it’s the only anchor there is.

Pessoa, who had always cringed at the mere idea of belonging to a collective, any collective, configured in The Book of Disquiet an absurdly tenuous form of solidarity: isolated individuals who, enveloped by silence and mystery or perhaps mere nothingness, realize that there are others immersed in that same mystery or nothingness. He had reached a point in his life in which he identified with a “community.” It consisted of the world’s solitary, ill-​adapted, and invisible people.

 

Richard Zenith is an acclaimed translator and literary critic. His translations include Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems, which won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. The recipient of Portugal’s Pessoa Prize, Zenith lives in Lisbon, Portugal.

Reprinted from  Pessoa: A Biography . Copyright © 2021 by Richard Zenith. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Things We Hide: An Interview with Megan Abbott

Photo: Drew Reilly.

“Ballet was full of dark fairy tales,” Megan Abbott observes in her new novel, The Turnout, noting that “how a dancer prepared her pointe shoes was a ritual as mysterious and private as how she might pleasure herself.” These mysterious and private rituals of young women—these “dark fairy tales”—are at the heart of Abbott’s work. Over the course of ten novels, she’s explored the violence and crime that pervade American girlhood. In Dare Me, competitive cheerleaders become suspects in a murder case. In The Fever, an outbreak of illness is tied to the “enigmatic beauty, erotic and strange” of a small-town high school. While undoubtedly one of our best crime novelists, Abbott has also always struck me as akin to an anthropologist; she not only explores the hidden subcultures of teenage girls but reveals the coded language and shared ethos of their cliques and sects, the way their secrets are not merely secrets but a means of expressing forbidden eroticism, dreams, and rage. In The Turnout, Abbott delves into the rarified world of ballerinas, astutely noting the symbols and signals underlying the romantic image. “There was such a boldness to this girl, a barbarism to her,” she notes. “This pink waif, her tidy bun.”

While she may have the gaze of an anthropologist, Abbott, in fact, began as a Ph.D. student studying film noir at NYU. Her first book, published in 2002, was a prescient work of critical theory, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir. Reading Chandler and Hammett, she’d often wondered, What would happen if the femme fatale told the story? She wrote her first novels, including Bury Me Deep and Queenpin, as sly, meta takes on pulp fiction, with alluring, often menacing women as protagonists. With 2011’s The End of Everything, Abbott began to write about the violence of seemingly all-American girls in seemingly all-American suburbs, gaining not only a wider audience but numerous Edgar Awards and admirers among crime writers. The Wire’s David Simon invited her to be a staff writer on The Deuce, alongside Richard Price and George Pelecanos. More recently, she wrote and coproduced a television adaptation of her novel Dare Me and is now doing the same for The Turnout, while also working on a television series with The Queen’s Gambit’s Scott Frank.

I caught up with Abbott over email during a sultry, tense summer, a summer that felt increasingly Abbott-esque. Boldness and barbarism were everywhere. Heat waves and wildfires seared and scarred. A mysterious illness continued to cause infection and fear, a former America’s sweetheart vowed revenge against her father, angrily confessing a desire to “send him to jail,” while in the music video for the song of the summer, an eighteen-year-old singer posed as a cheerleader easily turns a boyfriend’s bedroom into a sea of flames.

INTERVIEWER

What drew you to write about ballerinas in The Turnout?

ABBOTT

When I was seven or eight, I took ballet classes at this strip mall dance studio where two sisters—twins, actually—were the main teachers. They were so beautiful, in that classically ballet way, and seemed to contain mysteries. I was fascinated by them, their bodies, their rigor, their coolness and elegance. And their wordless exchanges with each other. I wondered what they were like out of the studio. Did the coolness ever slip? Did they have grand romances? Were they close? Growing up in suburban Detroit, I was always yearning for a glamour that felt just beyond, and they seemed to embody everything I longed for—mystery, exoticism, self-containment. And they looked like they held secrets. They became the spark.

INTERVIEWER

Did the coolness ever slip?

ABBOTT

Never. At least not that I saw. But it also seemed so hard to imagine how I—as one of those pigeon-breasted, awkward little girls—would ever become that. It felt unreachable.

INTERVIEWER

I wish I’d had a glamorous teacher! My ballet teacher was very plain and just incredibly unforgiving. I was knock-kneed and shy, and she gave me such a hard time that I dropped out. Meanwhile, my best friend was confident and stuck with it, but later she struggled with anorexia. The rigor and cruelty of ballet are pretty hidden from the public, who just see the tutus and plies. I can see how that contradiction would also interest you.

ABBOTT

Exactly! I was just writing something about that same tension. The idea with ballet, as it is with femininity or womanhood itself, is to hide your work. Keep the fantasy alive.

INTERVIEWER

You showed me a photograph of yourself as a ballerina. How old were you?

ABBOTT

Gosh, maybe ten?

 

Photo courtesy of Abbott.

 

INTERVIEWER

What do you think when you look at it now?

ABBOTT

When I found that picture a few years ago, I had to laugh. That costume, that pose. The eighties were a different time. What I remember, of course, is how excited I was. And how disappointed I was when we got the costumes. They didn’t have the big colorful frills of the cancan dresses in the movies. I’d been expecting something in bright satins with ruffles. I remember our teacher assuring us the light would hit the netting inside and it would look very dramatic! But I was also just old enough to sense a slightly queasy feeling among a few parents.

INTERVIEWER

And when you hit your teenage years, was your rebellion external or internal?

ABBOTT

Mostly internal. My parents were so great and smart and encouraging—big readers, movie lovers, consumers of culture. But my Michigan town and high school were very conservative, and in a very conservative time, the Reagan-Bush years. I just didn’t want to participate in any of that. I was biding my time until I could get to New York City and become Edie Sedgwick or Joan Didion.

INTERVIEWER

You mentioned being inspired by your own ballet teachers, whom you found secretive and glamorous. The teachers in the novel, Dara and Marie, seem to be antiglamour, a bit wounded and angry.

ABBOTT

I guess for me they are glamorous. One of the weirdnesses of writing fiction, for me at least, is how much I love my characters—not despite their messinesses but because of them. And that’s an adult kind of glamour to me. The extremity of their desires, the shame they carry, the intricate blend of rivalry and deep love in their relationship.

INTERVIEWER

And that rivalry and love is complicated by the fact that they’re teaching young girls—they’re mirroring their mother, who taught them when they were young ballerinas. It allows you to explore these cycles of girlhood and adulthood in a very specific way.

ABBOTT

I’ve always thought that was one of the most compelling things about teaching—how you can see versions of yourself. See yourself in the students, as they see a possible future self in you. It’s almost like a haunting. It can be dangerous—as in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie—but I suppose it can save someone’s life, too. It’s a tricky mix of mentorly support and identification. In the case of The Turnout, when it’s familial, too, it’s doubly charged, doubly dangerous, a kind of prison for Dara and Marie—especially somehow for Dara, who hews closer to her mother, who nearly merges with her.

INTERVIEWER

There have been a number of iconic, but very different, films about ballet. In The Red Shoes, for example, ballerinas are the epitome of grace and sophistication, whereas in Black Swan, they’re depraved and masochistic. What do you think of these films?

ABBOTT

Well, I adore The Red Shoes, but I guess, to me, ballet functions more as a stand-in for artistic commitment. Moira Shearer must decide between love and dance and is, in a way, driven mad by it. I love Black Swan, too. In that case, I think ballet is more the director’s vehicle to explore a split self. But I suppose in fiction, ballet is almost always used—consciously or not—as a metaphor for other things. Ballet as body horror, ballet as metaphor for the artist’s plight, ballet as vehicle for backstage drama. It feels inevitable—and I do it, too. It’s so funny, isn’t it, one art form about another art form? A particular challenge. But ballet will likely always be tied up in our culture with ideas about femininity—both potentially confining ones, such as the exacting and specific physical “ideals” of, say, the Balanchine type, and potentially liberating ones, such as strength, discipline, and physical power. And for me, it became a way to explore not just the demands placed on women but the way women are judged, including by one another—as Dara judges her sister Marie for her sexual choices, her erotics. But it also became a way to explore what women demand of themselves and what might happen when they start to free themselves of some of those demands.

I remember my agent reading an early partial draft and saying, But there’s nothing about the beauty of the ballet. And I remember thinking it felt both untrue and beside the point. Because everything, especially beauty, feels different from the inside. When you don’t have to translate it for an audience. When it’s inside you.

INTERVIEWER

The young dancers, like Bailey Bloom, seem to be striving for beauty, but the adults seem warped and broken by age and life—they don’t seem to be fighting for beauty anymore.

ABBOTT

Oh, gosh, for me they are. I guess I define or evaluate beauty differently. For me, the struggle and battle scars are beautiful, far more so than ethereal grace. And I don’t consider them warped or broken but beautiful survivors. They came out of a harrowing childhood, they saved one another, and they’re still growing and changing. For instance, Marie’s desire for freedom is moving and lovely. And Dara’s efforts to keep things the same forever—well, that’s the threshold she has to cross, but she’s not ready yet. How do you give up all the things—order, solidarity, discipline—that kept you alive and whole?

INTERVIEWER

The novel has some very startling twists. Do you plan these with outlines, or are you surprised by where the story goes?

ABBOTT

I planned the big “plotty” ones early on, but there’s one that surprised me, too. Something emerged for me as I wrote, as I figured out the “between” years of Dara, Marie, and their brother Charlie’s early adolescence and the present day. I realized it had to go in the novel or I’d be cheating. Teasing without risking going into the dark center of it. So I just went for it.

INTERVIEWER

Language around the body in The Turnout is very unsentimental and direct, often unsettling. Dara calls her sister “this little pervert” and refers to her own body “down there” as “pink, accordioned … a beetle hole.” She describes a seven-year-old ballerina as “pigeon breasted.” Can you talk about the language? It feels like a subversive choice to avoid being lyrical or adoring about the female body. Was that purposeful or just intuitive?

ABBOTT

Intuitive and shifting. When I write in close third person, I really try to capture the voice, almost as I would in first person. When Dara is upset, angry, frustrated, scared, disgusted—the language flows from that. But I guess, too, I tend to find more “beauty” in messiness, in contortion. It’s a funny thing, but more than one person has noted the recurrence of scars in my novels. I think our battle wounds, and the things we hide or hope to, have a singular beauty.

INTERVIEWER

In my first two books, I found it quite natural to write from the perspective of teenage girls. With my new one, it took me a while to get the tone and style of an older woman’s voice. I guess it’s because there’s such a richness to the voice of someone who is experiencing everything for the first time. How was it for you to write from the perspective of the adult Dara?

ABBOTT

She came very naturally to me. That doesn’t always happen, but I felt I knew her from the start. Her discipline, her need for control—well, perhaps that’s easier for many writers since discipline is required and we love having complete control, even if it’s illusory.

I also wanted to use Dara to animate one of my other inspirations for the book—the way women judge other women’s desires. I’d been very affected by the response to the wildly popular Dirty John podcast and the ensuing TV series, about a woman who becomes unknowingly involved with a serial con man with a string of women in his past who were similarly duped. And I was struck by how listeners frequently laid the harshest judgment on the women for believing him. It was so curious and troubling. An implicit notion that men can’t be expected to be good, so they’re off the hook, but it’s a woman’s duty to see through all this, to never succumb, to conduct herself a certain way, et cetera. In The Turnout, Dara can’t accept Marie’s desires, her willingness to give herself over to desire. And it can make Dara cruel—though really, and I think this is often the case, it’s merely her own anxiety about her own choices, or the leaps she failed to make.

INTERVIEWER

You started out as an academic studying noir, and your first four novels were in the noir genre, albeit from the female point of view. What drew you to noir as a field of study and form of fiction?

ABBOTT

It was entirely the books. I read James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely in grad school, and I was completely hooked. I’d always loved the film adaptations, but the books rocked me. They were so much more ambiguous, ambivalent, strange, humming with the writers’ own idiosyncrasies. And so full of anxiety—especially about the other, frequently embodied in the so-called femme fatale. They were also just such glamorous books to me, everyone acting on their longings, all the primal emotions, and that moody atmosphere of sex and dread. I was hooked and never really left. I’m still writing my way into that world with every book, even if the trappings change, because those original books just felt like they came from my own weird insides.

INTERVIEWER

The femme fatale, in noir film particularly, is endlessly fascinating to me. She’s allowed to be dangerous and alluring, and yet, she’s almost always punished.

ABBOTT

Often she’s punished, but that’s really predominantly in old-school noir. Though I’m not sure the punishment matters because the hold she retains over those stories and the popular imagination is far greater. And as Mary Ann Doane famously said, the femme fatale isn’t really a person anyway. She’s a projection of male anxiety.

INTERVIEWER

I teach a seminar at Columbia called “Anti-Heroines.” We look at the work of authors like Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, Nella Larsen. Aspects of their work—the unlikable woman, for instance—were unsettling or new to my students, but in recent years, there’s definitely been a shift. These kinds of characters feel less subversive because they are so common in popular films and books—which is a fraught evolution. I worry that the bad mother or the troubled teen have become clichés. Have you noticed this shift, in both popular and literary culture?

ABBOTT

I’ve noticed the former, which I love. So many of my favorite books in the past year or so—foremost Raven Leilani’s Luster—have been thrilling to read. The narrator of Luster is such a rich, complicated figure, and the other prominent female figure, who typically would be written as a good wife/mother, is full of her own passions and wildness. I’m not sure I’ve quite seen the latter. Or do you mean the one has turned into the other in the way that everything gets watered down? Last year’s evasive, cruel mother has become this year’s flattened-out, cartoonish “bad mother”?

INTERVIEWER

Yes, that’s a perfect way of analyzing it. We move from one cartoon to another. Are there any recent films or TV shows you’ve seen where the “bad” woman has the complexity of, say, a Don Draper or Travis Bickle?

ABBOTT

It depends how we’re defining bad. Let’s just say women who, by our strict cultural standards, misbehave. There’s been a rich trove of them, from Promising Young Woman to Search Party, from The Queen’s Gambit to Hacks. Elisabeth Moss in almost anything. It’s been an exhilarating moment. Any year when we get to see female-centered and female-crafted works of art as great as Nomadland or I May Destroy You is a good year indeed.

INTERVIEWER

You certainly deserve credit for really taking risks early on in your career and paving the way for other authors to explore the violence in the all-American girl.

ABBOTT

I don’t know if I deserve any. I’m far from alone—in fact, I count you as one of the most eloquent voices in that regard. But if I’m honest, I didn’t even know they were risks. I was just writing girls as I knew them and as I was one. The strength of the taboos about girls and women were far greater than I’d guessed. That need to believe girls and women never have aggressive or violent feelings, never lose control of themselves or are driven by desire.

INTERVIEWER

How was it to move into writing for television, first as a writer with David Simon on The Deuce and then in creating your own show, Dare Me?

ABBOTT

TV writing is so intensely collaborative, and that turned out to be exhilarating. I can’t imagine a more creatively satisfying experience than Dare Me. To have the chance to create this whole shimmering world with others, with the directors, the cinematographer, production designer, costume designer, a room of writers, the brilliant cast and crew all bringing their own ideas to it—it was incredible. But then, after wrap, to get to return to the subterranean world of novel writing is also a relief.

INTERVIEWER

Did you encounter any resistance to your vision of the teenage girls in Dare Me?

ABBOTT

Some, yes. Mostly before we sold it. In the development and selling stages, we would hear things like, Can’t Addy have a romantic interest? If you’ve seen the show or read the book, you know that Addy has two romantic interests—one past and one current—that consume her. But because those interests are women, it was as though they didn’t count. But I think that says less about the feedback and more about that moment in TV, a few years ago now, when shows with teens were supposed to go a certain way—hetero romantic triangles, proms, et cetera. In just a few years, that’s all changed for the better.

INTERVIEWER

I love the interloper character. It’s definitely a noir staple. In The Turnout, the interloper is a contractor, which is a really brilliant way to get at the menace and greed that’s so prevalent in our real estate–obsessed culture. He’s such a villain! It feels like a fun character to write.

ABBOTT

Yes, I loved writing him. Because, like many interlopers, he’s right about many things. He sees things that Dara, Charlie, and Marie can’t see. And he’s mostly right in his taunting guesses about what’s really going on between Dara, Charlie, and Marie, even as his aims are mercenary. I also love these kinds of stories because the question always becomes, Is he the real danger, or are they?

INTERVIEWER

In The Fever, you drew on the true story of “mass psychogenic illness” or “the twitching epidemic” among girls in upstate New York. Can you talk about the role of research in your work? Did you do any investigating or reading for The Turnout?

ABBOTT

Tons. But I always do. It’s really a consuming and exciting process for me. In this case, it was mostly about ballet—memoirs, biographies, nonfiction books, documentaries—and the history of The Nutcracker, but I’ll research anything that makes the story feel more real, its spaces more lived in. I read an enormous amount about renovations gone awry, for instance. The contractor-client relationship can be so fraught. It’s a surprisingly intimate experience, letting someone into your home, giving them reign over it. Or, for the contractor, being in someone’s homes, dealing with their demands and insecurities, getting a bird’s-eye view of everything behind closed doors.

INTERVIEWER

Derek’s intrusion is really chilling. He’s repulsive to Marie, but utterly appealing to her sister. He reminded me a lot of Trump in this way, the perverse charisma, the impossible promises, the shady secrets he is able to conceal. Was Trump on your mind?

ABBOTT

I never thought of it, but how could he not have been? He was on all our minds. Like the pressure of water, you can’t fight it. It gets in.

INTERVIEWER

You will be adapting The Turnout for television. In terms of what we have been talking about, this seems like a really exciting way to break some more boundaries by delving into this world where women can be both graceful and vicious.

ABBOTT

Fingers crossed. Like any dancer, or athlete, or writer, I’m full of superstitions.

 

Rebecca Godfrey is the author of The Torn Skirt and Under the Bridge.

Ring around the Archive

A jeweler appraises a ring, 1960. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I recently proposed to my girlfriend, and so I spent much of the past few years thinking about engagement rings. In Western culture, at least, the ring has taken on such symbolic significance that we casually and almost exclusively refer to a part of the human body in relation to its function as ring carrier—the one true purpose of the digitus quartus. Spend enough time shopping for engagement rings and one might come to believe that every aspect of a person’s being exists only to honor the extra-human perfection that is the ring. But spend some time in The Paris Review archive and one might find that the ring is as multifaceted as any radiant cut diamond, as subject to human frailty as the promises, ideals, and bonds it has come to symbolize, and as individual as the hand on which it rests.

In issue no. 225, Cristina Rivera Garza’s “Simple Pleasure. Pure Pleasure.” (expertly translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker) is a story built around the desire for a particular ring:

She walked around the decapitated body and paused to look at the dead man’s left hand. There, around his ring finger, right above the edge of a large pool of blood, was the jade ring. Two entwined, green serpents. An extremely delicate thing. The Detective shot her hand out toward the object but stopped short of touching it. There was something about the ring, something between the ring and the world, that blocked her contact. It was then that she looked at her own hand, immobile and large, suspended in the dawn air.

Stephanie Danler also employs serpentine imagery in “The Unravelers,” which appeared on the Daily in 2015:

Sometime between Edward Church with his doomed oil ship and her reign as resident tart of the old-folks home, Adelaide took all of the diamonds from her wedding and engagement rings and turned them into a new ring. A snake.

“It’s a phallic symbol,” my aunt said to me. The ring had been hers, the eldest girl of her generation.

“It sounds cursed,” I said. I was eighteen.

“Of course.” She dropped it into my hand. “The curse isn’t the marriages. It’s Adelaide’s sex drive.”

From sex drives to “Instruments of Seduction,” Norman Rush’s short story for issue no. 93:

She was ringless. She had put on and then taken off her scarab ring. Tonight she wanted the feeling that bare hands and bare feet would give. She would ease off her sandals at the right moment. She knew she was giving up a proven piece of business—idly taking off her ring when the occasion reached a certain centigrade. Men saw it subliminally as taking off a wedding ring and as the first act of undressing.

In “Poetry Rx: And You Want to Be Liked,” Kaveh Akbar summons the image of the ring for a bit of relationship advice from Eduardo C. Corral’s poem “To Robert Hayden”:

It’s one of those magical pieces where silence feels like the poet’s true medium, language is just the negative space around it. You have been forced to build a new life out of such negative space, and it sounds like you’ve done so admirably: your happy friends are evidence of as much. But now, miracle of miracles, someone is in love with you again!

I tossed
my ring—gold,
inscribed—toward a pile
of clothes.
But the ring
dropped in the small
of your back
where it rattled
& rattled like a coin
in a beggar’s
cup.

The narrator of Allan Gurganus’s clever and tender story “A Body Tends to Shine” struggles to recover her wedding ring after her baby swallows it, from issue no. 95:

Tell me: How do you usually get your valuable rings out of your Baby’s sweet gullet?

I don’t plan to make you ill with the crudest details of my ring-search. Let’s just say: Motherhood! Let’s say I borrowed many old newspapers from the neighbors. These unmarried people hoarded papers for just such family emergencies. But, not having no families, they lent their bounty to us instead. Seemed our house stirred up troubles enough to keep a radio soap show in daily episodes forever. Times, it felt like I had more problems than Dick Tracy. I asked neighbors not to tell the ring news to our well-meaning pharmacist, the human P.A. system. Folks agreed but grilled me.

And the plight of the missing wedding ring also plagues the eponymous hero of Robert Pack’s poem “Clayfeld Renews His Vow,” from issue no. 99:

Clayfeld attempted to recall
the pattern etched so clearly on his ring:
the hieroglyphs suggestive
of departing birds above a stream whose flow showed
only as an undulating line.
Twelve birds—for each month of the year—
that’s more, he thought, than he
remembered being there. And yet how many rings
could have designs like that?

The extended image of a wedding ring breaks up a list of short answers to the title question in Nina MacLaughlin’s “What Color Is the Sky?,” from the Daily:

Garnet. Lavender. Turmeric. Charcoal. Periwinkle. Dirt road. Yarrow. Powder. Bruise. Rice. Absinthe. Piss. Shadow. Mussel shell. Ash. Blood clot. Clementine. Pistachio. Mauve. Faun. Inner thigh. Midnight. Cantaloupe. Underblanket. Honey. Olive. Orgasm. Peppermint. Raisin. Sapphire like the wedding ring my mother wore, a thin band of tiny flat sapphires so dark it looked black, but off her finger, where always it is now, marriage done, held up in the light, deep dark blue. Heather. Smoke. Yolk. Bone.

Similarly, a ring works as an anchor point for “They Called Her the Witch” by Fernanda Melchor, translated with all its beautiful momentum by Sophie Hughes, from issue no. 231:

… they told the Witch that she had until the next day to pack her bags and leave town, that she was mad if she thought they’d let a slut like her get her hands on their father’s assets: the land, the house, that house that, even after all those years, was still unfinished, as lavish and warped as Don Manolo’s dreams, with its elaborate staircase and banisters decked in plaster cherubs, its high ceilings where the bats made their roosts, and, hidden somewhere, or so the story went, the money, a shedload of gold coins that Don Manolo had inherited from his father and never banked, not forgetting the diamond, the diamond ring that no one had ever seen, not even the sons, but that was said to hold a stone so big it looked fake, a bona fide heirloom that had belonged to Don Manolo’s grandmother, a certain Señora Chucita Villagarbosa de los Monteros de Conde, and that by both legal and divine right belonged to the boys’ mother, Don Manolo’s real wife, his legitimate wife in the eyes of God and man alike, not to that slut, that conniving, homicidal upstart the Witch …

For Frederick Seidel, the ring serves as both an indictment and an invitation to the divine in his poem “Now,” published on the Daily in 2017:

I’m trumpeting the most dazzling imitation
Diamond ring you’ll ever see,
Set by the expat genius jeweler JAR in Paris,
Whom nothing ostentatious can embarrass,
To celebrate the catastrophe of America, the American catastrophe.
The only possession of mine
God will want to grab

Is on my pinkie
When I’m laid out naked on the slab,
And here comes God—who’s of course a she—
Who removes the ring,
And slides my corpse
For cremation
Into her big hot thing.

To close, Hollis Summers tells a whole story with just these few ring-centric lines from “Mister Joseph Botts,” way back in issue no. 8:

The bandaged ring was replaced by a silver basketball, a fraternity pin, and then another ring, diamond this time.

Then no ring shone. Suddenly no ring shone.

 

Christopher Notarnicola’s work was featured in The Best American Essays 2017 and has been published in American Short Fiction, Bellevue Literary Review, Consequence Magazine, Image, North American Review, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. Find him in Pompano Beach, Florida, and at christophernotarnicola.com.

If you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe to The Paris Review. In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives. Or, choose our new summer bundle and purchase a year’s worth of The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for $99 ($50 off the regular price!).

Redux: Anyothertime, Anyotherplace

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

Kenzaburo Oe in 2002.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re redrafting, rewriting, and revising. Read on for Kenzaburo Oe’s Art of Fiction interview, Sigrid Nunez’s “The Blind,” Aaron Bulman’s poem “The Revision,” and Lydia Davis’s essay “Revising One Sentence.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Or, choose our new summer bundle and purchase a year’s worth of The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for $99 (that’s $50 in savings!).

 

Kenzaburo Oe, The Art of Fiction No. 195
Issue no. 183 (Winter 2007)

INTERVIEWER

Many writers are obsessive about working in solitude, but the narrators in your books—who are writers—write and read while lying on the couch in the living room. Do you work amid your family?

OE

I don’t need to be solitary to work. When I am writing novels and reading, I do not need to separate myself or be away from my family. Usually I work in my living room while Hikari listens to music. I can work with Hikari and my wife present because I revise many times. The novel is always incomplete, and I know I will revise it completely. When I’m writing the first draft I don’t have to write it by myself. When I’m revising, I already have a relationship with the text so I don’t have to be alone.

I have a study on the second floor, but it’s rare that I work there. The only time I work in there is when I’m finishing up a novel and need to concentrate—which is a nuisance to others.

 

 

The Blind
By Sigrid Nunez
Issue no. 222 (Fall 2017)

There are things I’d like to know, too. For example, why, when these two girls want to talk, do they keep getting into their cars and driving to each other’s houses? Why do they never use their phones, not even to text to find out first if the other one is home? Why do they not know things about each other that they could easily have learned from Facebook?

It is one of the great bafflements of student fiction. I have read that college students can spend up to ten hours a day on social media. But for the people they write about, though also mostly college students, the Internet barely exists.

“Cell phones do not belong in fiction,” an editor once scolded in the margin of one of my manuscripts, and ever since—more than two decades now—I have wondered at the disconnect between tech-filled life and techless story.

 

 

The Revision
By Aaron Bulman
Issue no. 66 (Summer 1976)

I still liked anyothertime,
anyotherplace. which means most
of my life, but it was now,
here, so I felt my life becoming sad.
and I was thinking this
too shall pass into later.
somewherelse. but I was getting sadder …

 

 

Revising One Sentence
By Lydia Davis
Issue no. 229 (Summer 2019)

I write it down and then immediately revise it. Today I revise this sentence immediately; sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. Maybe it depends on how interested I am in what I write down, or maybe I don’t revise it if the writing is so simple or brief that it comes out exactly right the first time. Today it isn’t quite right and I must be interested because I revise it: I want it to be exactly right. I will work on it until it is exactly right, whether or not the observation is important and whether or not I think I’ll ever “use” it.

 

If you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives. Or, choose our new summer bundle and purchase a year’s worth of The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for $99 ($50 off the regular price!).

In Plain Sight

Still from Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970). Photo: AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo.

I was living in Hollywood. Somehow, I’d found my way back to the city of my birth at forty-one. Each morning, as I rose to consider the wreckage of my life—divorce papers, boxes of books I had brought home from New York, a visitation agreement for my three-year-old daughter—I felt as if I had been lost inside a tiny Bermuda Triangle, one whose points were visible from my apartment window. Across the street was a complex where F. Scott Fitzgerald, my adolescent hero, had been sitting one morning in 1940 when he keeled over and died. Next door was the Director’s Guild of America, where my mother, herself an unhappy, alcoholic screenwriter like Fitzgerald, had once thrown a drunken fit and then peeled off in her Mercedes, leaving me, at the time a sullen and supercilious teenager, to hitchhike home. From where I stood it seemed like I could almost see it: the dark scar my mother had left on the asphalt, the print of her tires where she’d gunned the accelerator and took off in flight from herself.

*

What makes Iago evil? For some years my mother and I had stopped speaking—throughout most of my adulthood, in fact—but we’d recently resumed after she had at long last gotten sober. My mother’s favorite writer when I was a teenager was Joan Didion, who had been our neighbor growing up. For some years our families had shared a housekeeper, a woman named Maria Camacho. My mother, I suspect, had then wanted to be Joan Didion, her radiant and successful doppelgänger. On my fifteenth birthday, she gave me a copy of Play It as It Lays, a book that exerted a scriptural pressure across the remainder of my adolescence. Years later, at a revival house in San Francisco, I caught a rare screening of the film adaptation, which had remained largely out of circulation since its release in 1972. Its script was written by Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne—their second screen collaboration of what would be many, after 1971’s The Panic in Needle Park—and the film was directed by Frank Perry.

*

Frank Perry. The name came back to me as that of one of those fabled “New Hollywood” auteurs, albeit one whose career, like my mother’s, had never quite achieved its optimal shape. After a striking commercial success with 1970’s Diary of a Mad Housewife, adapted from Sue Kaufman’s bestseller, there was … not much, a series of lower-key flops and then 1981’s legendarily risible Mommie Dearest, whose most famously absurd line (“No wiiiire haanngerrrs!”) my own mother too had enjoyed mimicking when she was in her cups. My mom’s failure had been decidedly her own: to write her single produced Hollywood feature she’d crossed a picket line and her subsequent blackballing from the Writers Guild of America rendered her unemployable. Still, there is a sense in which ruptured movie careers are all alike.

One afternoon, I found myself at the Iliad Bookshop in the Valley where chance intervened. I was browsing the aisles, lost in the shop’s yellow blur of whirring fans, torpid cats, and parchment smells, when a book fell into my hand. I may have been reaching for something else, but the book I grabbed by mistake was Blue Pages, by one Eleanor Perry. It had a bone white cover, with a bubbled, seventies-style typeface. There were no blurbs, only a taut excerpt on the back that told me a story about divorce. It looked like one of those books that had lived on my parents’ shelves when I was a boy, like Judy Blume’s Wifey or John Irving’s The 158-Pound Marriage: one of those chronicles of mid-70’s conjugal torpor that seemed to bloom on every suburban shelf. I found this consoling. What better way to shake off one’s own postmarital despair than by reading about the incompetence of the previous generation? I tucked the book under my arm, then went to ring it up. It wasn’t until I got home that I noticed the bio on the dust flap: “Eleanor Perry is an acclaimed Hollywood screenwriter whose credits include … Diary of a Mad Housewife.” A bit of googling revealed what I immediately suspected: that Frank Perry had worked with a collaborator. The director may have stood out front, as Hollywood auteurs and Hollywood husbands were so often then wont to do, but every movie the director made in his young career’s prime—six films in all—was scripted by his wife. Or rather, from the looks of the novel I’d just brought home, his ex-wife.

*

Vincent and Lucia Wade are the names of the couple depicted in Blue Pages, a male director and a female screenwriter, the woman much older than the man, the man announcing in the book’s opening scene that he no longer loves the woman. It’s a familiar enough scenario: my father had once left my mother that same way, and my ex, me, likewise. But as Perry began to describe how the screenwriter, Lucia, fell in love with Vincent, I found myself charmed by her depiction of an animated, overweight man who looked like Balzac (“with his plumped-out cheeks and rolls of chin and shaggy hair and beard”), and by Lucia’s cool, gimlet intelligence.

Further googling confirmed some biographical correspondence between Lucia and her creator (as well as the fact Frank Perry, too, looked like Balzac). Like Eleanor herself, I discovered, the younger Lucia has been married once before, to a conventional-sounding man in Cleveland; like Eleanor herself, younger Lucia has a thriving life as a New York playwright just as young Vincent, like Frank, works as a theatrical producer’s assistant. Lucia has no real need for a love affair, for this puppyish importunate man, even as she rides alongside him in a taxi uptown, thinking of her childhood, her mother’s disappointing preparations of strawberries and cream: “She is almost a middle-aged woman, neither good nor bad, who doesn’t believe in God, her father and mother have long ago waged their wars and parted, and too many times these days the strawberries taste like damp cardboard.” Reading these lines, homely but intimate, concrete in a way that feels somehow specific to the writer’s own experience, I felt myself touch down in the person of Eleanor Perry. I found myself moved by their modesty, by their specificity and simplicity alike, and by the plainness with which they gaze at loss.

*

All of their films Eleanor adapted from outside material: five from novels or short stories, and one, 1963’s Ladybug Ladybug, from a McCall’s magazine article. She and Frank were to split on the eve of what would have been their seventh collaboration, Play It as It Lays, a book it appears Eleanor may not have cared for. During the argument that kicks off Blue Pages, Vincent brags about some film rights he’s recently acquired, for what will be his first movie free of Lucia. “You didn’t even like the book!” he snaps, to which she responds, “I admired the writing—I didn’t like the heroine. She seemed so paralyzed, so numb.” Eleanor saw her role as that of an interpreter, whose primary duty was to remain scrupulously true to her source material. In the preface to Trilogy, the published version of the three short scripts she adapted with Truman Capote for a film released in 1969, she wrote, “When we say an adaptation is good we can mean that it is faithful to the book and has all the virtues of the book.” All good. But I cannot help but wonder whether Eleanor’s modesty didn’t work against her, if along with her talent there came a corresponding impulse toward self-erasure.

*

Diary of a Mad Housewife is the film for which both Perrys are best remembered, adapted from the novel by Sue Kaufman. The story of a Manhattanite named Tina Balser (played with an astonishingly dry wit by Carrie Snodgress) caught between the numbing pomposity of her husband and the even more numbing self-absorption of her lover, the movie nails the New York establishment affluenza of its time. But it also nails something else: the radically destructive nature of habit, the ways in which two people who’ve ceased to listen to each other—if indeed they ever did—can run completely off the rails.

“Why didn’t I pay attention?” My mother and I were talking one afternoon, and I was pouring out my woes, hashing out the question of my divorce. “Shouldn’t I have seen what was going on?”

“Beats me,” she said, almost serenely. “When you were a teenager was I paying attention? You’re talking to someone who’s spent her life overlooking the obvious.”

“Yeah, but I should have seen it.”

“Nobody sees it. Your attention is always somewhere else.”

I laughed. Sobriety agreed with her: my mother had become a great listener. I tried to be, as she told me her shoulder had been bothering her for a few months (“Really?” I asked. “Did you strain it lifting your dog?”), but I couldn’t help but feel I was missing something. When my ex told me she’d been having an affair and wanted to separate, I was flabbergasted. As if what had happened should have occurred right in front of me. Or as if my own blindness was itself the fault.

It’s always there in plain sight: the loss you are about to suffer. It is in plain sight even when you find yourself fixated on other things. In the Perrys’ case, Eleanor and Frank were preparing a follow-up to Diary of a Mad Housewife, a picture called Expensive People based on a Joyce Carol Oates novel. But instead, Frank peeled off to make Play It as It Lays alone. Eleanor found out when she bumped into Joan Didion’s brother-in-law, Dominick Dunne, and he told her Frank was in LA scouting locations. According to her divorce deposition taken in May 1971, Eleanor had thought her husband was out finishing their deal to do Expensive People. She certainly didn’t know he’d already committed to Play It as It Lays, or that he was sleeping with someone else as well. While her deposition doesn’t spell out how she felt, within the context of an industry that wasn’t exactly renowned for its support of women I can guess. Eleanor, well, she surely felt discarded. Like she had climbed a mountain only to find another, more forbidding peak at the top.

*

I didn’t feel this way. But then, I was a man. My mother’s injuries in Hollywood may have been self-inflicted—like that little problem with her shoulder she kept complaining about, I thought, for which she’d agreed to see a doctor—but I know she felt the same: that being a woman made her career an uphill climb besides. Eleanor had plans for features—an adaptation of Alix Kates Shulman’s novel Memoirs of an Ex-prom Queen; a take on Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case—but nothing came to fruition. The problem was always the same: men, or more specifically, the way men failed to understand stories about women. Memoirs of an Ex-prom Queen? Forget about it, she was told, over and over. No one wants to see that. She began to gain a reputation as a troublemaker, simply by virtue of being a feminist. In a gesture that would come to define her career almost as much as anything she ever wrote, she was arrested at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival for defacing a billboard. She’d glanced up at the advertisement for Federico Fellini’s Roma—which depicted a three-breasted she-wolf—and decided it was demeaning, so she climbed up a ladder with a bucket of red paint.

“To hold a pen is to be at war.” Eleanor had these words, from Voltaire, typed out on a card that hung above her desk. But, of course, merely to be alive is to be at war as well. As I finalized the terms of my divorce, an adversarial process even at its most polite, and as I tried to repair my fractious relationship with an abusive parent, I found myself at war, most often, with myself. I read and reread Blue Pages, scouring its portrait of a marital wreck for clues. The novel was well-received upon its publication in 1979, though there were those who imagined it was merely an exercise in score-settling. Eleanor anticipated this (“If Saul Bellow or Philip Roth complains about his relations with women, that’s OK—they’re writing a novel,” she said. “If a woman does it, it’s ‘hell hath no fury.’ ”), but it must have abraded her to pick up People magazine and see another fawning profile of Frank, another picture of him beaming beside his new bride. Still, the book was a success. Eleanor was into writing another—according to the fragment that survives, it would have been called “An Old Wife’s Tale”—when disaster struck. On her way to vacation in Italy with her daughter, Eleanor reached Montecatini Terme only to turn around and fly home. She’d fallen ill. A lifetime of smoking—those fifty thousand cigarettes she’d once estimated it had taken her to get through the writing of Blue Pages alone—had caught up with her. In March of 1981, a year and a half after her novel’s publication, Eleanor died of cancer.

*

Pay attention.

I was on my couch one afternoon, staring at the photo of Eleanor that gazed back from Blue Pages’s dust flap: a cool, concentrated portrait of a woman in her sixties, half smiling in a way that seemed to let me know that she could see me, too, that the keen prow of her intelligence ran steeply into the future. She looked a little like my mother, in fact: fine-featured, amused, her dark hair shot through with silver.

Sun splashed on my hardwood floor. The light was spiking at the end of the day. Did Eleanor get what she wanted out of Hollywood, I wondered? Was her career, truncated as it may have been, fulfilling? There were those who may have felt she was a minor talent, but to me she seemed, on evidence of her novel and her screenplay, the equal of her generational peers: Hollywood legends like Polly Platt, Barbara Loden, and Elaine May; novelists like Rita Mae Brown and Sue Kaufman. Gifted women whose lives had at times been occluded by egomaniacal men.

My telephone rang. I leaned over to my desk to grab it. I might have gone on raging over the decline of my marriage, just as my mother might have had a career as long as Eleanor’s if she’d been able to stay out of her own way. I picked up my flip phone. Outside the day was fading: the light had a bronze, autumnal cast.

“Hi, Mom.” My forehead pressed against the window’s glass. I gazed out at the skeleton of a condominium complex rising on the opposite corner, beyond it those landmarks of a Hollywood boyhood: Greenblatt’s Delicatessen; the Chateau Marmont; other places long vanished, or transformed beyond recognition. (Nothing is real. And yet time winds away, our attention everywhere except where it ought to be.) “What did the oncologist say?”

Matthew Specktor’s books include the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, and the memoir The Golden Hour, forthcoming from Ecco Press. He is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Adapted from the book  Always Crashing in The Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California , by Matthew Specktor. Copyright © 2021 by Matthew Specktor. Published by Tin House. All rights reserved.