To have someone understand our story, to know what we’ve...

To have someone understand our story, to know what we’ve suffered,
experienced, endured, and to sing it back to us, isn’t this, in the end,
what we long for? Is this, then, the ultimate seduction? Is this what’s
so terribly irresistible? To have our own story told to us? As Daniel
Johnston, another sort of Siren, sang, “To understand and be understood
is to be free.” It is to be released, unbound, to return to the place we
belong.

I wrote about Sirens for The Paris Review.

My new book, Wake, Siren, a re-telling of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is out today.

[Gustav Wertheimer, The Kiss of the Siren, 1882]