Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

Yet it would have happened, and the unhappy girl would retain the consciousness of it with double bitterness . . . she would constantly have to contend with the doubt that the whole thing might only have been imagination.

“Well, Selin talked to him too, and then he terrorized her with ambiguous emails about sex, even though he already had a girlfriend, and led her on a wild-goose chase to a Hungarian village, and then he disappeared, and now he won’t talk to her.”

Me

When I persisted in talking about Ivan, the psychologist said that I was in an imaginary relationship with an unavailable person, because I was afraid to be in a real relationship with an available person.

In that way, I understood that a novel would explain all the things I still wanted to know, like why Toad was the way he was—why Toad was essentially unwell, and why Frog helped Toad, whether he really wanted Toad to get better, or whether he benefited in some way from Toad’s unwellness.

I understood that novels, unlike children’s books, were serious and important and that, just as my parents’ job was to treat patients in a hospital, so, too, was it someone’s job to write novels. Every civilized country had such people. They were in some way the very mark of civilization.

used to laugh about Mommie Dearest, a book written by Joan Crawford’s daughter, which neither of us had read, but which my mother often invoked, saying “Mommie Dearest” in a high-pitched voice, whenever she made me do anything. Then I remembered another joke my mother used to make, when she did anything she thought was wrong, like telling a white lie over the phone, or unbuckling her seat belt while driving: “Don’t put this in your novel.”

One song had the line “I’d sooner chew my leg off”: a subjective statement that nonetheless struck me as so cosmically true that I couldn’t believe I had heard it correctly.

Love wasn’t a slumber party with your best friend. Love was dangerous, violent, with an element of something repulsive; attraction had a permeable border with repulsion. Love had death in it, and madness. To try to escape those things was immature and anti-novelistic.

There was something about crying so much, the way it made my body so limp and hot and shuddering, that made me feel closer to sex. Maybe there was a line where sex and total sadness touched—one of those surprising borders that turned out to exist, like the one between Italy and Slovenia. Music, too, was adjacent. It was like Trieste, which was Italian and Slovenian and also somehow Austrian.

I tried again to put in a tampon. ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING WAY.

I didn’t want to become a doctor, but sometimes I worried it was the only way to avoid being a patient.

I checked my watch. It was only four in the afternoon. How was I going to survive until bedtime? I wondered, not for the first time, whether it was possible to knock yourself unconscious by banging your head into a wall. But I knew that, if banging your head into a wall was a solution to the problem of consciousness, I would have heard about it by now. I decided to just go to the river and run until I got tired. (Was that what running was?)

My mother had used to speak gloatingly and enviously about my cheeks, always clarifying that hers weren’t the same, she didn’t have “baby fat.” I had never liked it when she emphasized our differences. I had always wanted to look more like her.

The word “precious” made me think of Gollum in The Hobbit, who represented all that was the most base in human nature. Why was “precious” bad? Why was it an insult for writing to be “precious”? Was it wrong to value things—to want to keep them? If so, how did I get free from it? If this guy was telling me to not value something, wasn’t he obliged to offer me something better?

When he leaned in to kiss me, it was like sliding back into the water on one of those long days at the beach, where you just get out so you can go back in again.

It was happening again now: some pieces of some larger story that I could barely make out were flying into new positions, and I was remembering things I had forgotten, and putting them together differently, and all while I was sitting still and not going anywhere or doing anything—though in another way I was hurtling north at five hundred miles an hour.