Isla McKetta, MFA, Author at A Geography of Reading

Reading Edith Wharton Against Henry James

August 2, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

How many times in life do we really get to devote ourselves to tomes anymore? One of the projects I’ve been working on as I prepare to have my first child is getting through my to-read shelf, and, not surprisingly, some of the thickest hardbacks are the very last ones I’m getting to. That includes The Selected Short Stories of Edith Wharton (390 pages) and a collection of five novels by Henry James (Daisy Miller, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, and The Aspern Papers) (892 pages). Admittedly, I’m still working on the James collection, but after facing a truly embarrassing confusion between the two writers, I knew I had to write about it here.

Biographical Comparisons

Both transatlantic writers writing about a certain social class in the northeastern US and in England, I was a little surprised to learn (though I shouldn’t have been) that James (1843-1916) and Wharton (1862-1937) knew each other and that James was a mentor of sorts to Wharton. Both were American and spent considerable time abroad although I would have sworn that James was British. Their writing shares a similar sensibility cultivated by a social class where there are a lot of tacit rules to be followed and this gives the work of both writers a lot of subtext.

The Portrait of a Lady vs. The Age of Innocence

Was that biographical snippet included here just to absolve myself of the embarrassment I’m still feeling over conflating the two writers? Maybe. What happened was that late one night I started reading The Portrait of a Lady and, having watched more film adaptations of the work of Wharton and James than there could ever be books, I assigned Winona Ryder to the character of Isabel Archer. I was a little confused that the story was taking place on the wrong continent (in England) and eventually started to get annoyed that the introduction was so very long and became impatient to see the character of Countess Olenska.

I had completely conflated The Portrait of a Lady and The Age of Innocence.

My excuse (besides the fact that I’m sometimes a very poor reader) is that I strongly remember Ryder saying “Archer” a lot in the film (which makes sense because it’s her husband Newland’s last name). But it’s a pretty poor excuse considering I actually have read The Age of Innocence (though it’s been nearly a decade).

Not surprisingly, my relationship with The Portrait of a Lady changed a bit once I started reading it for itself. The book still feels overly long (I’m still reading it), although it’s a relief to read for what is happening on the page rather than what I think will happen. I can’t quite place Nicole Kidman in the book (that’s one adaptation I actually haven’t seen), and maybe that’s for the best.

I haven’t completely learned my lesson, though. I “watched” the miniseries for The Buccaneers this weekend while needlepointing a stocking for my son. God help us all if I ever pick that book up and try to remember if I’ve read it 🙂

Roman Fever

If I were to write a dissertation on James and Wharton, I’d no doubt find countless similarities (and differences) in their work. What struck me most, though, in reading these books so closely together is when they both brought up Roman Fever. I’d never heard of this curious thing before, but it seems to have been a fear that tourists had of Rome and particularly the area near the Colosseum that could prove deadly.

James wrote about the phenomenon in Daisy Miller, but Wharton’s treatment of it in “Roman Fever” is even more interesting where the fever has multiple meanings. The story really is quite wicked (in the most wonderful ways) and merits a re-read when I’m finally done with all these Jamesian novels.

Scary Stories

Both Wharton and James wrote ghost stories, they lived in a time where mediumship and the supernatural were part of high society. James is of course famous for The Turn of the Screw which I have not read but I’ve seen at least one film of. Wharton wrote enough ghostly short stories to devote an entire collection to them and while reading The Selected Stories I have to say that those ghost stories were still some of my favorites. “Mr. Jones” in particular chills me every time.

My Real Love

I’m probably always going to be team Wharton. Although both writers carefully observed the manners of their time, there’s something warmer and perhaps more human about the way Wharton portrays her characters. I believe she actually has sympathy for them, whereas I don’t think James always does.

It’s funny, I actually wrote about Wharton in my graduate school application essay because I so admired her work. I thought in my reading of all of this contemporary fiction since that I’d moved on from my somewhat archaic tastes, but in re-reading Wharton I found I still love and relate to her work whereas reading James feels more to me like wandering through a show of John Singer Sargent portraits—there’s beauty and I can relate to the pictures a little, but the characters and their time seem so far away.

I’m officially on maternity leave right now and it’s about 90 degrees in Seattle, so while I have loads of time (at least until the little one decides he’s ready), I can’t really go outside and no excuse not to read. I might actually finish this James collection. Although I’m not sure I’ll make it through that Peter Nadas book I’ve been looking forward to (1100+pages)…

If this review made you want to read turn of the last century literature, pick up a copy of the Henry James collection or The Selected Short Stories of Edith Wharton from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Legacy of Family and I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson

June 21, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

When I pulled I Married Adventure with its rough, zebra-printed cover from my rapidly-thinning to-read shelf this week, I did it because I remember my dad loving the book. I remember how he’d buy copies and sell them along with his other Africana at gun shows. I remembered entering and re-entering that book into his sales database back when Lotus 1-2-3 was a thing.

But on opening the book, I found torn pages held together since long-ago with cellophane tape. This could not have come from my dad’s inventory. I flipped to the inside cover and saw this:

That’s my Baba’s (my father’s mother’s) bookplate. In her maiden name. It had never occurred to me that the love of this book could have had a deeper origin. I started thinking about the quiet, gentle woman my Baba was and how once when I told her that a picture of my Djiedo (grandfather) looked like trouble, her eyes glimmered.

As ever, there was so much more to her than she showed on the surface, and suddenly the image of her reading about a small-town Kansas girl who marries a small-town Kansas boy and sets on a life of real adventure made a lot of sense. I kept this feeling throughout the book and so I felt like I was rediscovering my Baba as I was discovering Martin and Osa Johnson.

A Loving Memoir

I confess, part of the reason I’d avoided reading this book all these years is a niggling fear that the book would be filled with doting accolades from a wife who never felt like she could equal her husband. I’m all for sweetness, tenderness, and love, but overt fawning and the failure for a woman to see her own value make me uncomfortable.

This is not that book. Instead, while Osa Johnson clearly loves and admires her adventurer husband, she devotes equal energy to telling of her own exploits and triumphs. Although Martin was a world traveler before he met her, you get the sense that much of what they achieved together was due to the magic of them as a pair. I loved that. I loved how much they loved each other. I loved what each of them contributed to their adventures from the South Pacific to Africa.

Undiscovered Savages

The one part of this book that’s harder to read in the “modern” age is the way other cultures and races are viewed. This book, although very much of its time, is far less offensive in that way than say Travels With Myself and Another. The Johnsons do traipse into almost undisturbed tribes and they have some uncomfortable adventures along the way. The language is not always politically correct, but she does have respect for the cultures she encounters. And it’s educational to read into how much our perspectives and the way we talk about things have changed in the last 100 years.

There’s also a tension in the book between the Johnson’s love of the animals they are filming. Although they want to educate the world about these animals so they can be preserved, there are moments when they must kill them or be killed and others when they bring friends in to “complete a museum’s collection” with a few key trophies. But Johnson’s un-glossed look at survival among large and sometimes dangerous beasts like elephants and lions helped me realize how complex some of these issues are and the meat from the animals they killed was never wasted like I throw out a steak left in the fridge for too long.

My Father the Adventurer

It felt wonderful to read this book in the few days leading up to Father’s Day. Partially because I finally got to see what he loved in this book. Partially because I gained this warm vision that maybe my quiet, unassuming Baba had encouraged him to become the man he is. And partially because I realized I might be able to do the same for my own son.

My dad has always been a bit of a restless adventurer. When I tell people what he does, I sound like a liar because I say only the part that is relevant to the (always shifting) conversation. While all true, that means I sometimes call him a pilot, forester, economist, woodcarver, bookseller, and more. He took my family to Chile for a year when I lived in second grade. He threatened to take us to Rome when I was in high school. His stories are as big as his laugh and most of them are at least partially true 🙂

My Son, the ?

In contrast, while I’ve traveled extensively on four continents and lived on three, I feel like a homebody. Like my Baba, I do most of my exploration through the pages of books. She visited over 100 countries in her life and saw many things, but I think she was most at home at her melamine breakfast table in Austin, Texas watching the birds, squirrels, and deer feed off the treats she left for them.

So although I am most at home on this couch in our living room snuggling with our dog and listening to the neighborhood birds (all while reading a book and wearing a sweater from Martin + Osa, a brand I only today realized was named for the Johnsons), I now have faith that I’m not limiting my son’s opportunities. Together with my husband, we’ll find new adventures and, I hope, provide a strong platform for this kid to become whoever he wants to be.

There are many ways to adventure, and there are many ways to raise an adventurer. I hope my son finds a life that excites and enriches him. I will take him abroad, eventually, but mostly I will try to emulate Martin Johnson’s mom and just keep my worries about whatever explorations he undertakes to myself. I will trust him to find his way and trust that he knows he always has a safe place to call home. I think that’s part of what worked for my dad as he signed up for the Marines at 17 and flew charters out of Santa Fe in the 1960s.

Conclusion

I Married Adventure ends far too abruptly, but such is life. After all of their adventures abroad, including small plane travel, Martin Johnson was killed in a plane crash on a flight from Utah to California. Osa intimates that they were about to start a new chapter in their lives and maybe settle down. I wonder what that would have looked like. I took comfort in thinking about the richness of their life, though, and the closeness of their connection. We should all be so lucky.

I’m feeling lucky this Father’s Day to live a life filled with adventurers of all kinds. I am grateful to my dad for teaching me how interesting and exciting it is to be abroad in the world. I am grateful to my Baba for showing me that there is adventure at home. And I am grateful to my husband, on his first Father’s Day, for sharing this adventure of life with me. It will be whatever we make it, and there’s nothing more extraordinary than that.

Wishing you a happy Father’s Day too.

If you want to explore the world with I Married Adventure, pick up a copy from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Narrative of Genius in Chef’s Table on Netflix

June 7, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

I started watching Chef’s Table because of the “cover” art—a beautifully constructed and impossibly tiny dish of food. Like many Americans, I’ve become enraptured in our recent conception of food as art and this show seemed like the culmination (or at least a new level) of that art. What I didn’t realize is how much I’d learn from this show about our culture of genius worship and how that translates to the characters we seek out in fiction, nonfiction, and life.

There are many sides to the genius character and his narrative, and it surprised me how neatly each of these chefs fit into the categories (or how neatly they were edited into them anyway).

The Misunderstood

I still thought I was watching a cooking show when Massimo Battura showed up on screen in the first episode. Although the voice of a food critic had already been introduced to help me understand that this man was special. We see him in the kitchen of his restaurant, Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy. We see him in the market gathering the best ingredients. We see him in the fields chatting with farmers. But it isn’t until we meet his wife, Lara Gilmore, that we really get to know Massimo. Because she is literally interpreting his actions for the people around them. Don’t get me wrong, their relationship is actually very charming and their love for each other is palpable, but it is their very closeness that highlights how far the rest of the world is from understanding him. At one point, I’d swear Bottura admits that he’d be nothing without her explaining his vision to others.

Bottura is the classic misunderstood genius. Filled with ideas too big for his small town, he has to travel to New York and then Paris to get recognized. He comes home with even bigger, more refined ideas and then he’s really too obscure for those at home who just want their Italian food the way it’s been cooked for thousands of years. A critic comes in and demolishes him. Finally, at long last, an even bigger critic comes in and sees the genius of the man.

Doesn’t sound too bad, does it? In some ways it’s what we all strive for—to be extraordinary and to have the world finally recognize it. You get the feeling that the world will never fully understand Bottura, but once we accept that he’s beyond us, we can worship at his feet and trust in his genius (now that it’s been recognized if not fully understood). In fact, he might lose some of his charm if we did understand him. He might become more like one of us.

The Intellectual

I didn’t understand what rankled me about environmentalist/chef Dan Barber until my husband started talking about him. The man, at least as edited for this series, comes off as a condescending prick. See, he knows things about food and the land that the rest of us are failing to see. He wants to educate us through his food (at two restaurants named Blue Hill in New England) and to help us save the world by eating good ingredients that are actually in season and good for the earth.

I can’t disagree with his basic premise, what tastes best about a strawberry in January is the memory of strawberries past, not the greenhouse grown, artificially huge one in front of you. But the way that Barber positions himself as a preeminent thinker (espousing ideas that got lost somewhere between my great-grandparents and me) drives me nuts. And I think it’s because I’m preconditioned to want to be this type of genius‐so I want to take down others I see as false.

It wasn’t until my husband remarked on how awful he was to the people around him that I realized both the fault in Dan Barber and how closely it relates to my worst days.

The Loner

The most beguiling genius of the series so far is Francis Mallmann—Patagonian-raised, French-educated. When I saw him make a panqueque con dulce de leche over open flame on an island surrounded by snow-capped peaks hundreds of miles from anywhere, I nearly bought a plane ticket.

Mallmann’s narrative focuses very much on him as a restless loner. It’s the only episode where we barely see the inside of a restaurant. The mother of his youngest child lives a country away and they see each other for maybe ten days a month. He espouses the open relationship and likes his freedom. But there are holes in this narrative, because out on La Isla (yes, I love the name of his island), he’s surrounded by acolytes. And it seems that he never actually stays out in that paradise of “isolation” for more than a few days at a time. Mallmann is a loner, but he is never alone. Because what is genius in isolation?

By far the most beautiful of the episodes of Chef’s Table, I wrestled with the distance between the image of his life and the actualities and this is the episode that got me thinking I need to write about this series. I needed to understand what was the call of these geniuses. I needed to know if their lives were really what I should strive for.

The Masculine

Niki Nakayama is the first female chef to be featured in the series. So why did I put her under the title “The Masculine”? It’s because in the world of genius (and even much more so in the world of chefs), the true genius is expected to be male. Nakayama has fought against that perception, but very quietly. She comes from a patriarchal family (her brother was supposed to succeed, they let her play at chef to get it out of her system) and was educated under sexist conditions (every one of her mentors, even the proudest, is still a little shocked that she’s a woman). There’s even stories of people walking out of her restaurant when they find out that the chef is a woman.

So what does Nakayama do? She closes the shoji screens and cooks quietly in the background. According to the critic assigned to her episode, she is no less of a genius chef than any man, but she fits outside the narrative enough to actually highlight how constrictive our expectations of greatness are.

The Cult of Genius

What I found interesting about each of these four types of genius is that each of these people actually has all of the characteristics to some degree. Nakayama is deeply misunderstood, Bottura is an intellectual, Mallmann fits a wide range of male stereotypes. It made me wonder if there are actually different types of genus, or if there is one archetype sitting atop a mountain that we’re striving for.

I also began to wonder why we’re striving to be at the top of that mountain and if we should be. There is great joy in the lives of some of these chefs (especially Bottura and Nakayama) but there also appears to be great pain either in getting where they are or in staying there. And there are so many people working with and for them who will never achieve those heights. Are we creating a culture of Captain Kirks when we really need are more Uhuras, Boneses, and Scotties?

The Genius in Literature

And of course the genius ties in so closely to literature. Our archetypal hero (and writer for that matter) is so often this brilliant, misunderstood loner—so beguiling, so out of touch with the world. He’s a godlike figure we strive to get to know even when he cannot know himself. Why do we worship this?

My Family, My Son

I was raised in a family of geniuses. Brilliant, highly educated parents, aunts, and uncles. Even more brilliant cousins and siblings. Our intellect and superiority was cultivated and honed (often at the expense of our emotions and communication skills). I like this world. I like the idea of mastering something and using that to express what’s deep in my soul. But I wonder, too, if that expression would feel even better, more natural, if it wasn’t such torture to access it and then express it. Could I be satisfied with good enough?

It’s something I think about more and more as my son’s due date approaches. I hope he’s brilliant and creative. But most of all I hope he’s happy and fulfilled. I wrestle with what happens if he decides that frying potatoes is his highest ambition and he gets really good at it, but I also think I’d envy some of that inward looking satisfaction.

I’m going to go eat some strawberries from my back yard now (Barber sank in a little), but I’d love to hear your thoughts on genius below.

Spiraling through The Incredible Sestina Anthology

May 31, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

I have a confession to make. I’m only halfway through The Incredible Sestina Anthology so I really shouldn’t be reviewing it here yet, but my brain is so wrapped up in the book and the form that I wanted to share my feelings about it now both so I don’t lose the threads of what’s so exciting and so I can delve deeper into understanding the nature of that excitement. Since it’s a book of poetry, let’s bend the rules a little today, shall we? At least I know the plot won’t shift radically when I turn the next page.

What’s a Sestina?

If you’re like me, you did not get much of an education in the forms of poetry in school so “sestina” aside from being a pretty word, could sound a little like gibberish. I feel that way about a lot of poetic forms—especially the ones I haven’t read many examples of yet. A sestina is based on repetition of the last words of a stanza in a particular order. There are six stanzas in which this occurs and then a final, shorter stanza where those end words are mixed up all over again. Cribbing from Daniel Nester’s intro, that form of repetition looks like this:

Stanza 1: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Stanza 2: 6 1 5 2 4 3
Stanza 3: 3 6 4 1 2 5
Stanza 4: 5 3 2 6 1 4
Stanza 5: 4 5 1 3 6 2
Stanza 6: 2 4 6 5 3 1
Envoi: 2/5 4/3 6/1

But you only really need to know the form in that kind of depth if you’re going to write one. To enjoy sestinas, it’s more essential to understand that the repetition is intentional and that there’s no other set rhyme or rhythm in the form (although most poets find their own rhythm. As with most formal poetry, the fun in being a spectator is seeing what each poet unleashes from within those walls.

Relishing Repetition

Blah blah blah stanzas, right? It’s hard to appreciate the form of a poem without getting inside it so let’s look at the first stanza of “Mother Worries” by Shane Allison:

Lord, how we gon’ pay these bills in this
How we gon’pay these bills,
Lord. How we gon’ pay these bills in
We gon’ pay these
We gon’ pay
Lord how we gon’ pay these bills in this house?

Looking at just the last words of each line, the end words that will repeat (in a different order, of course) in the next stanza are: this, bills, in, these, pay, house. Poets take a lot of leeway in how they repeat their end words and sometimes substitute the noun version for a verb or shift the tense of a word or use a homonym. The lines can be short or long.

What I love about Allison’s piece is that the entire poem is really built on the repetition of the line “How we gon’ pay these bills?” It takes many many forms, but if I counted how many different words he uses in this poem, I wouldn’t guess it’s more than 30, which, in a 39 line poem, is not a lot of words. This total repetition (and the subject matter) lends the most gorgeous lament to this poem.

Variations on a Form

There are poems by sestina purists in this book (Like Ashbery, Auden, and Bishop), and that’s all well and good, but where I started to learn most about the form (and what can be done with language) is from poets like Geoff Bouvier and Casey Camp who redefined the form for themselves. Bouvier’s “Refining Sestina” condenses the entire stanza structure down into six lines where the end words are instead repeated inside the lines. And Camp turns his poem into a graphic sestina where each line of the poem gets its own illustration.

Others, like Denise Duhamel, use a double sestina form where they’re playing with twelve end words. This means they get thirteen stanzas in which to explore their topic. I found, because I’m not the best reader, that I actually lost the end words in these longer sestinas and would sometimes be surprised halfway through with thoughts like “Have I really already read the word ‘seesaw’ six times? How did that fit in.”

There’s also an incredible variation in subject matter in this book. Some poets take their work so seriously as to write ars poeticas – sestinas about writing sestinas. And some, including writers I have admired in other contexts like Steve Almond and Jenny Boully, are obviously playing as they are writing about Elton John and the missed connections part of the newspaper (respectively).

Your Brain on Sestinas

I read about thirty pages of sestinas last night (approximately fifteen separate poems) and another seventy pages this morning. What I can tell you is that those end words, which sometimes feel very random, become embedded in your mind. They suddenly feel very important. And, if you read them before bed, you might compose dreams that pull together all that randomness. It’s a wonderful exercise to shake up those sleeping hours.

In general, reading sestinas is making me pay more attention to the ways language can be worked and how very much can be accomplished within the constraints of form. I suppose that’s why poets across the ages have continued to write in particular forms (at least some of the time).

I don’t know if I’ll be writing a sestina in the near future. But I am carefully thinking about the way I use repetition and enjoying the possibility of writing in a new form. Because The Incredible Sestina Anthology is arranged alphabetically, I’m looking forward to seeing how the rest of the poets can surprise me and stretch my thinking.

I’d love to hear about your investigations into form and repetition. Please tell me more about your projects or what you’re reading in the comments.

If this review made you want to read sestinas, pick up a copy of The Incredible Sestina Anthology from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Clarice Lispector and A Breath of Life into Characters

May 17, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

The act of writing is one of expression as much as it is an act of creation. An author finds something within him- or herself that feels worthy of saying or investigating and then spends hours, months, years delving into and perfecting that expression. At the end readers like to think we see the author in the finished work, but sometimes it’s difficult to tell what’s polish and what’s raw glimpses of the author. With A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector, the mystery of author remains, but even as we ponder who she was and what of her remains in the work, she gives us a surface story to contemplate.

In fact the entire book is a meditation on authorship and what it means to create and we readers watch Author (a male character) struggle to give life to (and to control and also to free) his character, Angela. It is a struggle that will be familiar to anyone who has ever created a character and this story reveals more about why and how we create than any plot about a writer ever could.

Battle Between Author and Character

“I had a vivid and inexplicable dream: I dreamed I was playing with my reflection. But my reflection wasn’t in a mirror, but reflected somebody else who wasn’t me.” – Clarice Lispector

Are our characters part of ourselves? Are the opposites we explore through writing because we cannot, will not live their way in life? Or are they some hybrid on which we work out those inner struggles? The answer is probably different for all writers, but I’d imagine that it includes some measure of all three.

In A Breath of Life, Author writes of his character Angela, “I got along well with her. But she started to disturb me and I saw that once again I’d have to take on the role of writer in order to put Angela into words because only then can I communicate with her.” This implies some sort of externalization of self whether it’s the actual self or the desired self. But later he writes, “It’s no use asking her to avoid recklessness since she was born to be exposed and go through every kind of experience.”

It’s fascinating to watch Author struggle with his relationship with Angela as it evolves. He knows she is a part of him: “I’ve been wanting to write about a person I invented: a woman named Angela Pralini. And it’s difficult. How to separate her from me? How do I make her different from what I am?.” But at times he cannot stand her: “I’ve discovered why I breathed life into Angela’s flesh, it was to have someone to hate. I hate her. She represents my terrible faith that is reborn every single morning.”

What’s truly brilliant about this relationship is the moment that Angela takes control from Author. He’s declared early on that she cannot write and that he abhors her style, but still she grows stronger than he does: “I don’t know what the climax of this book will be. But, as Angela goes on writing, I’ll recognize it.” And eventually (at least for a few moments), he cedes to her completely: “I realize with surprise but resignation that Angela is controlling me. She even writes better than I do. Now our ways of speaking are intersecting and getting confused.”

My Battle with Characterization

I don’t know how familiar this push-pull between writer and character is to other writers, but for me it brought back so many memories of writing Magda in Polska, 1994. A young girl of my age but a different nationality than me, the only year we experienced of her life is one that I too experienced in Poland. I remember poring over my diaries from that year for pertinent historical details to include, and at times some of my own angst and experience slipped in. But there were times, too, that Magda surprised me—even shocked me with things I would never dare say. As I wrote, she became her own person. And though I still tried to control her at times, she would not let me and I learned from her.

Writing: Raising Ourselves or Parenting?

“I am alone in the world. Angela is my only companion. You must understand me: I had to invent a being that was entirely mine. But it so happens that she’s becoming too powerful.”

I’m thinking a lot about creation of character these days, but from a completely different angle. I’m trying to imagine who this fetus growing in my womb will become. My husband and I are dreaming of activities and names for him, and we’re trying to maintain a space around him too to see who he will want to be.

Still, I imagine some of the struggle with raising a child will be some of the same struggle I had with Magda. As creator (and adult), I think I know best, but I will have to remain open to letting this little guy determine who he is and how he sees the world. I will have to resist telling him how it is because that closes him and me off to the opportunity of me learning from him. And I will have to restrain myself from putting my baggage onto him because he’ll have his own struggles and his own life and it’s up to me to work out mine in my own space.

I imagine this teeter-totter of shaping a child and allowing him to become is something I’ll struggle with for the rest of my life, but I’m glad I’ve had this perspective of the wonder of seeing a character become herself to look back on and remember the joy that can happen when I loosen my control.

The Act of Writing

“Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.” – Clarice Lispector

In many ways A Breath of Life is about the act of writing more than it is a story. Lispector was dying as she wrote it (and in fact died before it was finished) so we’ll never know if the book was truly meant to be seen in this form. But I love the rawness of the struggle Author goes through both with Angela and with himself. Like most of us, he sometimes hates writing. He’s digging inside of it to see why he even does this to himself. And yet he doesn’t stop.

Moments in the “dialogue” between Author and Angela end up feeling like character sketches rather than exposition:

“I’m not—I hope—judging myself with excessive impartiality. But I need to be a bit impartial or else I succumb and get tangled in my pathetic form of living. Besides physically there’s something rather pathetic about me: my big eyes are childishly interrogative at the same that they seem to ask for something and my lips are always half-open like when you’re surprised.”

And it’s easy to wonder if Lispector would have gone back and rewritten Angela once she had worked through this kind of information on the page. I would have. Most people would have. But I’m very glad she didn’t, because I really enjoyed seeing her process, even if I cannot know the sequence of it. Because of that rawness, this is not a book I’d recommend to most people, but if you’re a lonely writer toiling away in your garret and wondering how others do, it’s a great book. You may see yourself in it, you may not, but it will make you think more deeply about your craft and about the act of writing.

The Importance of Fiction

It’s been easy to assume throughout this pregnancy that I feel wonky because of hormones and this totally new experience that’s changing my relationships and my whole life. But I realized the other day that I’d given up an essential part of myself along the way. I stopped reading fiction that challenged me. I was reading through discards on my to-read shelf that were only okay and I spent more hours reading nonfiction about labor and delivery than I’ll ever spend in labor, but I wasn’t reading Lispector and Calvino and Pamuk (or any of the other favorites old and new). And I didn’t see, until they were missing from my life, how much books like that help me process the world.

We’ve probably all seen the articles on the internet about how reading fiction helps us empathize. It wasn’t until two friends posted an article about 11 novels expectant parents should read instead of parenting books that I understood how much I need space to process. I don’t need a parenting book to tell me that my baby will try and communicate with me to tell me he’s hungry. I need to see an illustration of the relationship that happens when a child’s needs aren’t met. I will not remember any of the words I read about breathing or birthing positions, but reading Edan Lepucki’s California profoundly affected my idea of what birth means.

So I’m back on the fiction. I don’t know if that will mean I’m blogging more frequently (I hope so, I miss communicating with you in this way), but it will mean a return to a semblance of balance in my life. At least in the mental sense, carrying around this big belly is doing nothing for my ability to stand upright 🙂

Thanks for reading. If you have a moment, I’d love to hear your thoughts on controlling characters and letting them go (whether the characters are on paper or in your home).

If you want to commune with Lispector by reading A Breath of Life, pick up a copy from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.