Sara Benincasa

The Rumpus: Your book deals with some pretty heavy mental health issues in a hilarious way. What first inspired you to do comedy about such dark subject matter?

Sara Benincasa: I think laughing at the darkness is the best way to tame the demons that live there and turn them into cuddly pets. Well, maybe it’s the second-best way to do that. The first best way is to take the right medication.

Rumpus: What’s your writing routine like? Favorite place to write, your writing mood music, something you need nearby. Example: At a local coffee shop that only plays ragtime, with my cat in a baby bjorn. (This example refers to no one in particular. Definitely not me.)

Benincasa: Jesus, a cat would fucking shred a Baby Bjorn in a second. My favorite place to write is pretty boring: on my couch at home or, if I’m feeling super-productive, at a desk at home. But usually I’m just on my couch. Neil Gaiman told me he writes in a gazebo with a tombstone as the step to the front door. Fucking Gaiman and his better-than-everyone-else set-up. That dude is so awesome it makes my butt hurt.

Rumpus: Most writers have an “oh my god, this is terrible, what am I doing with my life?!” phase while working on any project. Did you have this? How’d you power through?

Benincasa: I lost my shit towards the end of the project, right around when final edits were due. So that was convenient. Thankfully, I have a very supportive, loving family that welcomed me back home in the Dirty Jerz with open arms and dealt with my amateur bout of near-but-not-really-suicidal depression as if it were a normal thing, which for me it actually is. My editor was also really supportive. So though I had loads of crying jags, we got ‘er done, and pretty soon I moved back into big, pricey New York City.

Rumpus: You have a fantabulous video series called The…Uninformed Reviewer? Where you review movies and tv shows that you’ve never seen. Please give me a short review of Glee. Or The Fast and The Furious franchise, if you’ve watch Glee.

Benincasa: It’s actually now called “The Uninformed Opinionist” and it’s on LOGO TV’s blog, NewNowNext.com. I have seen Glee, and I used to fucking love it. At this point, it’s like an old friend who I’m mostly sick of but who I would still go to the hospital for if he/she were in need. So instead I shall review The Fast and the Furious: cars go fast. People get mad. Bare chests happen, on ladies and on dudes. It’s terrible but fun. The end.

Rumpus: Does your writing process change when you write about personal subject matter, versus when you’re writing for something like “The Uninformed Opinionist”?

Benincasa: Well, I don’t write “The Uninformed Opinionist” per se — I just turn the camera on and improvise. It’s fast, easy, and fun, which is how I hope all my lovers describe me to their mothers. Writing personal subject matter takes more effort, more focus, and more emotional energy.

Rumpus: Your book description says the book contains some sexy parts, but that they’re really awkward. What celebrity do you think you’d have the most awkward sex with and how would it go down? Paint a cringeworthy picture for us.

Benincasa: I would have terrible sex with Mr. Clint Eastwood and his scratchy, edge-of-death man-voice. It would be pale on both sides, with more wrinkles on his, and probably he would have to take breaks to breathe, and that would just be sad. Also, I can’t picture Clint Eastwood eating pussy. And that is a requirement for me.

Rumpus: I heard you once accidentally dated a woman. Please tell us more.

Benincasa: I just felt like eating box would make me a better feminist. And it did!

Rumpus: We both give advice to teenagers on the internet via Formspring. If you had a time machine and could ignore the rules of time travel to talk to your younger self, what advice would you give to a young Sara Benincasa?

Benincasa: Start exercising and stick with it. Start stand-up as a college freshman, and then don’t put any of the video on the Internet for at least four years. Take your medication, and if it doesn’t seem to work, find other medication that does work.

Rumpus: Now, what advice would you give to a young Janine Brito? I’ll attach a really awkward picture of myself to convey how much awkward I was dealing with.

Benincasa: Janine, wearing a tampon means you’re not a virgin anymore. Use pads.

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Do you know what you’re saying? Do you really?

You may think you’re joking. I want to believe you’re joking, because haha, a man putting his hands on you is so funny in the reality from where you are communicating. Clearly, we have different definitions of funny, but perhaps you truly do find it amusing to joke about domestic violence. I am not here to judge you.

I am afraid you’re not joking. I’m afraid you are quite serious.

You are saying you are willing to be abused; you are willing to sacrifice your dignity.

For what?

You are impressed by some combination of a young man’s music, charisma, dancing ability, and/or good looks. That is understandable. Everybody’s got their something. However. You are also saying that suffering Chris Brown’s abuse would be a fair exchange for his attention, however fleeting you must know that attention would be. When you look past the image, a celebrity is just a person you know nothing about. Ultimately, you are saying you are willing to be abused for the mirage of fame in the desert of your life.

For people who enjoy S/M, there’s this thing called consent, which should always exist in human interactions, but which is exceedingly important when you entrust your body and mind to someone else in such ways. You can say, “I want you to hurt me,” or “I want you to humiliate me,” or “I want you to dominate me,” and someone else will do so. But, and this is important, when you say, in some form or fashion, stop, the pain or humiliation or domination stops, no questions asked. That is a powerful, perfect moment. There is nothing better than knowing the suffering can stop, than knowing you must endure but if you no longer wish to do so, you don’t have to because it is safe to withdraw your consent. There is nothing better than knowing you have some control in a situation that feels so far beyond your control.

When you tell a man like Chris Brown, at least the man he has shown himself to be, to stop, he won’t. With abuse there is no stopping. There is no consent. There is only suffering that will begin and end as he sees fit. You will never have any control. You will never know how good it feels to endure by your choice because that choice does not belong to you and never will. Do you understand? Do you see that distinction?

I don’t know Chris Brown. I have never met him and probably never will. I know his music. Sometimes, it’s catchy. Mostly, to my ears, it’s contrived and overproduced. I’ve seen him dance—he can work with choreography. He is reasonably attractive. I don’t really get it, to be honest, but I don’t need to get it. You likely wouldn’t understand who I find attractive, either. What I do understand is that Chris Brown means something to you, that he arouses you physically or emotionally. He arouses you to such an extent you are willing to do whatever it takes to be within his incandescent sphere for even a little while.

Courtesy of BuzzFeed

Did you read the police report from the infamous incident where Chris Brown beat his then-girlfriend Rihanna? The details are disturbing and graphic and leave the distinct impression that what took place on that night three years ago was not an isolated incident. If you were to “get with” Chris Brown, there’s a good chance he would hurt you and not in a way you would like because time and again he has shown he cannot control his rage. He would hardly be concerned with you at all. This is the man he has shown himself to be.

I am sorry our culture has treated women so poorly for so long that suffering abuse to receive celebrity attention seems like a fair and reasonable trade. We have failed you, utterly.

We failed you when Chris Brown received a slap on the wrist for his crime and was subsequently allowed to perform at the 2012 Grammy’s not once but twice. We failed you when he was awarded R & B Album of the Year at that same ceremony. This is not to say he has no right to move on from his crime but he has demonstrated not one ounce of contrition. Instead, he has flagrantly reveled in his bad boy persona and taunted the public at every turn. He’s young and troubled but that’s an explanation for his behavior, not an excuse.

We failed you when Charlie Sheen was allowed and eagerly encouraged to continue to star in movies and have a hit television show that basically printed him money after he shot Kelly Preston “accidentally” and he hit a UCLA student in the head when she wouldn’t have sex with him and he threatened to kill his ex-wife Denise Richards and he held a knife to his ex-wife Brooke Mueller’s throat. We failed you when Roman Polanski received an Oscar even though he committed a crime so terrible he hasn’t been able to return to the United States for more than thirty years. We failed you when Sean Penn fought violently with Madonna and continued a successful, critically acclaimed career and also received an Oscar.

We fail you every single time a (famous) man treats a woman badly, without legal, professional, or personal consequence.

Over and over again we tell you it is acceptable for men—famous, infamous, or not at all famous—to abuse women. We look the other way. We make excuses. We reward these men for their bad behavior. We tell you that as a young woman, you have little value or place in this society. Clearly we have sent these messages with such alarming regularity and consistency we have encouraged you to willingly run toward something violent and terrible with your eyes and arms wide open

I am sorry.

I’m not shocked by your willingness to suffer for nothing in return without the right to consent. That may be the saddest thing of all.

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Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing Cupid.

Cupid, or Saint Valentine as he is known, is the winged love-baby seen on Valentine’s Day cards and museum statues. I’m not 100% positive he’s a baby. In some renderings he looks more like a fat little man in a cloth diaper. If he’s the latter, that makes him a little less sweet and a bit more of a weird pervert.

Aside from being able to fly, his other super power is the ability to make people fall in love by shooting them with his magic love arrows. The arrows pierce the victim’s heart, which to me makes Cupid sound more like an assassin. I get the symbolism, but really? The heart? That’s just dangerous. Besides, I’m kind of surprised that his puny little arms can draw back the bow far enough to drive an arrow that deep. I guess that’s magic arrows for you. Even weaklings can shoot them.

I’m not sure how Cupid decides who will get to fall in love, because there’s this one guy at the library who looks like he could really stand to have some love in his life. Other than the love he seems to have for getting mad at the librarians when they charge him late fees, I can’t imagine he’s felt much else.

It’s ironic that Cupid himself is single. He could have literally anyone he wanted, from a celebrity to the President, or just a girl next door. Maybe it’s because he knows that a love he induced would be a lie. I wonder if centuries of seeing others fall in love might ever drive him to attempt suicide by archery. That would be a fitting end to Cupid – to die just as he begins to feel love for the first time.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing needle-nose pliers.

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Ninety-eight years ago, Vienna was preparing for carnival. This season, which lasted until the beginning of Lent, was kicked off in style by Countess Jenny von Haugwitz, whose automobile-themed ball in the Directoire salon of the Hotel Imperial saw guests dressed as Rolls-Royces and Mercedes-Benzes. The Bank Employees’ Club threw a Banknote Forgers’ Fest, which turned out to be almost as memorable as its Bankruptcy Ball of the year before. Nor were festivities confined to the upper classes. The Laundresses’ Ball of 1914 was quite an affair, even if the girls did join a protest march the next morning rather than return home with eligible gentlemen on their arms.

Vienna on the brink of the Great War was decadent, decadent in something like the way that Berlin would be between the world wars, in the way that New York was in the disco seventies, in the way Istanbul is now under Erdogan. But Vienna outdid all these latecomers in the excess of its enthusiasms, and, uniquely among the foregoing examples, combined sociocultural ferment with the rigid militarism of ancient dynastic tradition. The Habsburgs endured. Indeed, in January 1914 the imperial family had just celebrated the birth of Archduke Franz Joseph’s daughter. It would have seemed even to the most astute and cultured observer that whatever radical energies were coruscating through the capital at the time were little more than St. Elmo’s fire playing about the unsinkable rigging of the ship of state. The seeming madness of carnival was thus a reassurance and reinforcement of empire.

Of course Princip’s bullet was soon to reveal how brittle the crystalline splendor of the Austrian Empire was, which in four years’ time would collapse in glittering fragments, leaving far-flung vassal states like Bucovina to fend for themselves. The end of empire spelled an end to old certainties. The febrile art of Kokoschka and Schoenberg then seemed to express the spirit of the time, and in the coming years the lethal politics of Hitler and Stalin (both of whom sojourned in Vienna before the war) increasingly took center stage.

The central character of Gregor von Rezzori’s novel, An Ermine in Czernopol, now available in English in a handsome paperback from NYRB Classics, has no place in the new order, or lack thereof, that prevails following the war. An officer in a vanished army, “the manly ideal from a supposedly bygone epoch,” Major Nikolaus Tildy clings to the double eagle of the Habsburg order he once served. He is the ermine of the title, and, as we are informed by the frontispiece quote from the Physiologus, “The ermine will die should her coat become soiled.” Tildy’s coat is his reputation. Throughout the novel, it’s in danger of being soiled—in fact, it is soiled—by his sister-in-law’s constant indiscretions. But rather than turn against his family, Tildy rounds on those who call her what she is. He goes so far as to challenge his commanding officer to a duel over the point. He tilts at the windmills of plain truth.

Rezzori, though, is too subtle and mischievous an author to plunge us immediately into the drama of Major Tildy. First, he introduces us to Czernopol, a mean-spirited ethnic melting pot that stands in for Czernowitz, the capital of his homeland Bucovina. It’s a city that has made of schadenfreude a national pastime. Here the reader, like Rezzori’s youthful narrator who speaks as a “we,” is exposed “to a rich gallery of people, as colorful and aromatic as a bouquet of grasses and fresh meadow flowers.” These include the cynical and wise prefect Tarangolian, the eldritch Widow Morar, and the witty writer Năstase, whom Tildy in vain challenges to a duel.

Gregor von Rezzori

But a shadow lies over this circus. “Back then it wasn’t unusual for us to be afraid,” says the child-narrator, “since our hearts were still burdened with the memory of the war”:

houses destroyed by shells, soldiers’ graves scattered across the country, and dead horses with hideously bloated bodies, limbs jutting out stiff as wood, ants trickling through their eye sockets like red tears.

Tildy has been through this vale of tears. His bearing is that of the camp, and derives from a close familiarity with boot and horse. He is proud, inflexible—a living embodiment of “the glory of the sunken Austro-Hungarian Empire.” To the children of the novel, this makes him “the angel dressed in armor, the imperial sword-bearer”—but in Czernopol, aesthetics count for little. Recent history is, if not buried, then laid out on a slab in the open air. We are given to understand that Tildy does not belong. In this new world, the old forms and usages can only impede him, but he refuses to give them up.

His repeated attempts to defend the honor of his wife and sister-in-law by resort to martial means are terribly funny and also tragic, as are the actions of all men who have been carried out of their proper time. He is diminished when he becomes entangled in farcical events. The context of his actions changes from one of high drama to one of low comedy, and this dislocation irrevocably alters their meaning: “The hussar had dismounted and was rooting in the mud.”

There are many examples in European fiction of the noble-spirited, virtuous and slightly priggish hero who is set against a vulgar reality. In this tradition, which includes The Sorrows of Young Werther and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Rezzori’s novel stands somewhat apart, not only in its large and insistent cast of secondary characters but in its humor. One looks in vain for real humor in A Portrait of the Artist. Stephen takes himself seriously, as lonely intellectual young men will do. Gales of black laughter sweep through Rezzori’s novel. Only Tildy abstains from the general merriment.

Another swerve from the tradition is that Tildy is not an extraordinary individual. “His one great virtue was something beyond his own control; it was the legacy of the world he came from, a vanished world.” The children finally must accept the illusory nature of their outsize vision of the hussar. His one great virtue dooms him in a world that has no use for him or his principles. Horse and rider are lost for want of a kingdom.

Rezzori’s novel is enjoyable for the sly elegance of his language and for the lively rogue’s gallery he peoples his Czernopol with. It’s valuable for the baroque, nostalgic, ironic yet clear-eyed recreation of a world now long gone, stamped to death beneath the Nazi jackboot. But literature of the first rank must speak to us of our own time as well, must in some way convict or console us in our humanness, and this Rezzori’s novel does; for our world, like the profane and achingly beautiful one he depicts, is a world of uncertain values, a world of upheaval, “a world that has too many claims to validity, too many equivalences, too many relativities.” To revive this novel for a wide readership, there’s no time like the present.

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Whoever leads a solitary life and yet now and then feels the need for some kind of contact…

In the late 1990s, I taught Anglo-American law at Charles University in Prague. The law faculty is a dusty, gloomy building that squats on the bank of the Vltava River. Everything about the place is huge, the height of the ceilings, the doors, especially the doors. I’ve never seen rooms with such heavy doors. You had to yank them open with two hands. Kafka got a law degree at the faculty in 1906. It wasn’t hard to imagine him swallowed up by that building, and I spent a lot of time that year thinking about him wandering those halls not built to human scale. I had a lot of time to think. My job wasn’t very taxing. Even showing up to teach seemed optional. Sometimes I had five students; other days it was just me and a guy named Jan. Jan had a cousin who lived in East Lansing.

A lot of people pass through Prague and dream up some dopey kinship with Kafka and I took the fact that not only was I irrelevant – a key thing – but was also doing time in the very same building as he once walked as a kind of license. I am as lost here on the face of the earth as he was. Maybe one of the reasons we always return to him is because nobody writes about loneliness like he does, and loneliness is something we desperately seek. I often look for it and can’t find it anywhere.

I once went to one of those naked spa-like retreats they have here in California. God only knows what the hell I was thinking. To get away from all that noisy flesh, I fled, proudly fully clothed, up to the top of a mountain and sat alone on a yoga mat in a strange little hippie hut. Then – I was joined by a very chatty guy wearing nothing but hiking boots and a thong. Hey man, what’s with all the layers? You want to discuss this?

But here’s the thing, as much as I wanted to bludgeon the guy to death with my yoga mat, I was grateful for him, too, because as much as I told myself I wanted it, needed it, being lonely is not only scary, it’s work. As long as he was there to loathe, I didn’t have to be completely with myself. Which is exhausting.

Kafka, I was talking about Franz Kafka. I guess what I’m getting at is that true loneliness is a rare and difficult thing and we want it, we don’t want it, we want it.

Maybe it’s always been this way. Here’s a totally unprovable theory I’ve been developing in my garage over the past couple of hours concerning Kafka. Franz wasn’t lonely at all. Take a look at his diaries. He makes my social life in 2012 look dismal.  The last time I went to a party was an Obama fundraiser in 2008. Kafka? We’re talking about a guy who was at the café all the time. He was a serial engager who never married. A man who constantly ran to people as well as away from them. My thought of the day (it is now late dusk, the kitchen has changed colors, and I haven’t turned on the light yet) is that Kafka wrote so much about loneliness because he so often dreamed of attaining it – not because he had it.

His work affirms the bizarre contradiction that as much as we talk about it we are actually very rarely by ourselves in this crowded universe.  This may have seemed wrong to Kafka given how much time, he knew too well, that all of us will be spending companionless, in a dark hole.

Of course our proximity to other human beings doesn’t mean we actually connect to them. But the gulf between us when we are in the same room is a different story altogether. If only Gregor was able to speak to his sister and thank her for everything that she was obliged to do for him…

I’m talking here about this more fundamental question: Alone, or with others in the first place?  The noise of ourselves versus the noise of our brethren.

He wrote some of the greatest brief stories ever written, stories that sometimes unfold in a single paragraph like a fist opening. Often they are about this weird and endless struggle between our desire for loneliness and our horror of it.

One tiny story is “The Streetwindow,” written not long after his graduation from law school. It’s about how all a lone person has to do is look out the window at a city street and he can’t help but be carried away by the messy parade of humanity.

And even if his state is such that he is not seeking anything at all and merely steps to the window-ledge as a weary man, letting his eyes wander up and down between the public and the sky, and he is reluctant to look and has his head titled back a little, yet for all that the horses down below will drag him into the train of their wagons and their tumult and so in the end towards the harmony of man.

At some point, much as we talk a big game about going it alone, we can’t help but be pulled to the window. Come on into my hut and talk things over with me, thong man.

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The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without. . . Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life–is the source from which self-respect springs. . . People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt . . . They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds . . . To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent.

–On Self-Respect, Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

In 2007, my mother and I traveled to New York to see Vanessa Redgrave portray Joan Didion in “The Year of Magical Thinking.”  We had been through a lot in the few years prior, including my younger sister’s diagnosis of inflammatory breast cancer at 28.  From the outside, I guess it would appear strange that we traveled across the country to see a play about death not long after my sister survived a cancer she shouldn’t have.  But there were myriad reasons we went — our shared love of literature and Didion, her memoir of the same title (we had both been floored by her exploration of grief after her husband suddenly died), not to mention the fact that my mother had never been to New York.  And then there was Quintana. I vividly remember when we found out Didion’s only child had died within two years of her husband, just weeks before Magical Thinking was published, my mom and I looked at each other and said, “How is she going on? How is she still here, writing and living?” The one-woman play was proof of her survival, a tangible message that Didion was indeed still here.

I imagine, too, we were still wondering about our own grief, as my mother had nearly lost her youngest child; me my only sibling. We still carried vestiges of this almost loss with us as we adapted back to post-cancer life, and moreover to my sister’s new rules.  She was understandably so anxious to leave cancer behind that she seemed to be trying to move forward as if it had never happened, acting at times if my mother, stepfather and I hadn’t been right there at her side for a year, fighting to save her life. This manifested in declarations that we had taken away her privacy when she was sick, and she needed it back.  Her marriage was new, and it needed protecting, she claimed, and going forward, she would see us on her terms and her terms only. It was as if a switch had been flipped and we were no longer the protectors, we were the interlopers. This too, is why we went to New York. In the face of losing her again in a wholly different way, we wanted to understand what the shape of our lives would have been if my sister hadn’t survived and how to cope now with her absence. In part, we hoped Didion could tell us.

~

Didion has been a thread through both my mother’s life and mine, one I didn’t fully realize the impact of until I read Caitlin Flanagan’s recent essay, “The Autumn of Joan Didion,” in The Atlantic. Although at times reductive about Didion’s talents as a writer and downright snarky about her recent work, not to mention her mothering skills, Flanagan does clearly illuminate Didion’s effect on young women.  We come to Didion at a certain time in our lives, she writes, in late adolescence or that abyss that is the early 20s, when we are no longer girls but not yet women. Didion was herself at that awkward stage when she wrote many her most famous essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. Her piercing presence in these pieces, coupled with her fragility and vulnerability pulled us to her as she seemingly overcame her flaws of personality (and ours, at least on the page) with sentences that transcended – from images you could taste and smell to people famous made familiar, the whole world boiled down to a kind of sense we’d never seen before.

I read her for the first time in 1993, as an undergrad at Berkeley. I was 22.  Her essays have been a part of my conciousnesss ever since, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” in particular.  Didion was reporting on a murder in 1964, that of wife killing husband in the nether lands outside of Los Angeles, that hot, cookie cutter world full of promise that somehow gets lost in the desert winds. She writes, “This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew. . . the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers school.” The wife, Lucille Marie Maxwell Miller, was accused of drugging her husband, dragging him into their VW, dousing him and the car in gasoline, then lighting everything on fire. I could see the Lucille, her twisted, mascara-stained face and sagging beehive, her sweat-stained dress. Moreover, I could feel her: her desperation, her hatred for her depressed dentist husband, her delusional hope about a new life with a lover. I could smell the gasoline. Didion’s tricks on the page were nothing short of magic.

Reading Didion was a revolution to me not only because of the beauty and depth of her prose, but because it also opened up the idea that I could be something more than what I was — a white girl from suburbia who had done nothing in college (or life) beyond pledging a sorority and getting drunk at frat parties. During my time at one of the most famous universities in the world, I had joined no causes, protested nothing. For this, I was deeply ashamed. Then I discovered that Didion and I had a few things in common. She was a self-proclaimed nobody from Sacramento. She pledged the Tri-Deltas at Cal and wasn’t sure what else to do with herself there. She famously writes that when she started reporting, she was so small and quiet, people forgot she was in the room. I wasn’t small or quiet, but I felt just as invisible most of the time. Reading Didion hinted at the possibility that I was perhaps more interesting than I realized, that eventually I might have something to say. It would take me years to manifest this idea, but in the meantime, I spent many afternoons staring out my bedroom window of my sorority at the Tri-Delt house across the street.  I used to imagine Didion there, back she was lost and still a girl. I could almost see her hiding behind her signature sunglasses on the front porch, smoking cigarettes while absentmindedly smoothing out the wrinkles of her pale pink shift dress, waiting for the rest of her life to happen.

My mother read Didion in 1969, when she was 23. She was working at the dean’s office at Berkeley while my dad was pursuing his MBA. (He would later quit before finishing his thesis and enroll in the Writer’s Workshop at Iowa.) Didion was an even more powerful influence on my mother, in part because she appeared just at the beginning of the woman’s movement. Even if Didion doesn’t align herself with the feminists of the time, she was an almost singular voice rising above the din of her male counterparts in journalism, and like me, my mother found her writing all-encompassing, engrossing, magic. In 1978, long after Berkeley and Iowa, a few years before they divorced, my mother calligraphied the opening quote to this essay from Didion’s “On Self-Respect” for my father. By then he had been depressed for years, having never recovered from the suicidal despair he experienced while writing his thesis at Iowa. He had long abandoned writing and had stopped reading as well, my parents’ main sources of connection. Instead, he worked in sales and drank. By 1978, his drinking was steadily increasing and he often didn’t come home at night. When they divorced in 1980, he had moved my mother 17 times in 15 years; each new place holding an illusive happiness that evaporated the moment they arrived.

My mother has told me that she couldn’t write in her own voice for most of those years, that her journals from that period are full of quotes from other people: writers, philosophers, artists. “You can tell by what I’ve written down what I was going through,” she said. “But I was still too terrified to put my feelings down on paper in my own words.”

In that light, the lines she chose to calligraphy from Didion’s essay are especially poignant to me. They seem at once a plea for my father to look inside and find himself, to somehow resuscitate the vestiges of the man she used to love and take responsibility for his life.  I believe, too, they also represent my mother’s changing perspective on her marriage and future. I have no doubt as she made the deliberate and delicate brush strokes that brought those sentences to life, she was acknowledging her own growing self-respect and the strength of character that would soon make it impossible for her to stay with him.

My father left this piece of calligraphy behind in the divorce. I found it many years later in 2001, not long after I had been accepted at an MFA program.  My mom had it framed and sent it to me. It has hung above my desk in every place I’ve lived since.  I read it over and over again during the darkest times of my own writing and/or failure to write. It serves as a pointed reminder that I cannot follow my father’s path, that I have no choice but to gamble everything to do what I love. I’m aware of the odds of success, but as Didion writes, anything worth having has its price.

~

I have only a handful of photos from that trip to New York. My favorite one is the theater’s marquee at dusk, The Year of Magical Thinking in bright lights. Regrave’s performance was by turns brilliant and devastating as she regally channeled Didion’s grief.  A simple set of charcoal canvas backgrounds undulated gently behind her, symbolizing the surf in Malibu or the river outside Quintana’s room in the ICU or the view from Didion’s apartment.  One line from the play stayed with me for days; it had also been in the book: ”I love you more than one more day.” It was something Quintana and her father used to say to one another. This is how I feel about my mother. I took her hand at some point during the show and didn’t let go.

We sat silently when the curtain fell.  Then my mother said, “It makes me think of her. Do you think she will regret this? What if she gets sick again and we have missed all this time? I know she needs the space, but–” Her voice trailed off.

My mother was careful not to say all that much about my sister’s choices, other than to support her attempt to find herself, her new true self post-cancer, a self that my mother understood needed to be formed, in part, outside of our influence. Everything my sister was doing played into what our mother had taught us our whole lives: be honest, ask for what you need, take care of yourself, fight for who you are, don’t surrender your power to anyone. However, the truth as I saw it was this: my sister was acting like an asshole. This was not something I said in that moment, because I too wanted our family to make sense again, the way it had for so many years. I wanted to say that my sister would snap out of it, she would come back to us and we would all get back to that place of good. We could get back to that place without another illness or catastrophe, I was sure of it. But the words never came.

~

Now, it is five years later and my mother has cancer, the terminal kind, where there will be no remission, no time for us all to regroup and regain our privacy.  Now, Didion is with us again, come full circle with Blue Nights. My mother and I have waited years for this book, and we read about death in the midst of her dying for much the same reason we went to New York — Didion’s words help us to traverse the darkness together, provide clues as to how to survive the seemingly unsurvivable.  From the very opening lines of the book, I understand that my mother embodies the eerie blue light that Didion writes about, and the nights so long and full of this light that you believe they will last forever and so will you; but these nights are really about the fading, the change of summer to fall, of lightness to dark.

Whatever your opinion of the book, it is a powerful meditation on death, aging and loss.  Many readers are disappointed with it, as they expected a book solely focused on Didion and Quintana, a dissection or revelation about that relationship. I think the answers are there if you look closely enough. Their connection, while real and devoted, was mysterious, tenuous, and for whatever reason, nearly impossible for Didion to put on the page. She does tell us, however, that she herself was distant and Quintana troubled. She remains consumed with guilt about what she could and couldn’t do to ease her daughter’s pain, perhaps in particular the chronic alcoholism that some speculate caused Quintana’s tragically early death at 39. I also can’t help but consider Didion’s most infamous line: “Writers are always selling somebody out.” I wonder if it was simply too much to sell Quintana out. She wouldn’t, didn’t want to, can’t or won’t.

We may never know, but what I can discern amidst Didion’s signature descriptions of white peacocks and stephanotis blossoms and plumeria blossom tattoos and red-bottomed Christian Louboutin shoes, is the fierce, endless love a mother has for her child. I recognize it because it is the love my mother has for both my sister and me. My sister has remained distant from us these last few years, and has separated herself almost entirely in the midst of our mother’s illness. She has done this for reasons I both do and don’t understand. What I do know is that our mother is dying and she is not here. We have not come back to good. None of it stops my mother from loving her entirely and unreasonably, much the way I think Didion loved Quintana.  It is all there in those last few lines of Blue Nights. She writes, “The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.”

Although barely able to speak because of the growing tumor in her brain, my mother can still read. I read Blue Nights aloud to her anyway, as I want us to experience it together.  It is hard to read my mother many parts of the book, but those last pages, those lines where Didion’s laments her ultimate loss, that moment, due old age or death, when she is no longer able to see her daughter in her mind, this seems to me the most devastatingly true. I feel I will live much the same haunted way when my mother dies.

Towards the end of the book, Didion describes the production for the stage version of  The Year of Magical Thinking.  She tells us about the cocktails and fried chicken and green beans they ate most every night backstage, at a table with a checkerboard cloth, complete with an electric candle and a menu that read “Cafe Didion.” It seems she was there for every performance, and she tells us why: “I liked being up there alone with the lights and the play. I liked it all, but most of all I liked the fact that although the play was entirely focused on Quintana there were, five evenings and two afternoons a week, these ninety full minutes, the run time of the play, during which she did not need to be dead. During which the question remained open. During which the denouement had yet to play out.”

My mother interrupts me as I read this part, signaling with her good hand that she needs to say something. She fights to get the words out, and I offer up phrases, questions, about the book, about Didion.

“I didn’t know,” my mother gets out. “She—She–” It takes the better part of 10 minutes before I figure out what she’s getting at.

“Didion was there that night,” I finally say. “The night we saw the play. Wow.”

My mother nods and smiles, and we sit for a few minutes in quiet awe. Didion was there, and she has been with us all along. She was with us when we were each lost girls trying to become women, when I began to write and my mother left my father. She was there the night my mother and I were in New York, looking for the answers. The three of us sat in the darkened theater together, during that time when Quintana did not have to be dead and my mother did not have to be sick. She is here now as my mother slowly fades, our days together full of nothing but blue nights.

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Born in 1936, Marge Piercy has made decisions that serve as scaffolding for her poetry and fiction. She has stayed actively true to her progressive, feminist convictions. She has returned, with depth, to Jewish traditions she was born into. She has maintained a complicated appreciation for the natural world, especially the environs of her Cape Cod home. She has remained in a long, loving marriage of encouraging equals, to Ira Wood, her sometime collaborator, and co-instructor when leading writing workshops. She’s also kept her sense of humor.

She harnesses worldly concerns with matters of the soul, with a straightforward beauty that provides many examples from The Hunger Moon—New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010. It is her eighteenth volume of poetry.

“The visitation,” from What Are Big Girls Made Of? weaves in and out of the moment, making it exquisitely current :

The yearling doe stands by the pile of salt
hay, nibbling and then strolls up the path.
Among the spring flowers she stands amazed,
hundreds of daffodils, forsythia,
the bright chalices of tulips, crimson,
golden, orange streaked with green, the wild tulips
opening like stars fallen on the ground.

This, and more, before Piercy makes her point with language that is as right to see and hear as the deer is both lovely and a symbol of rough reality :

Graceful among the rhododendrons, I know
what her skittish courage represents : she
is beautiful as those sub-Saharan children
with huge luminous brown eyes of star-
vation. A hard winter following a hurricane,
tangles of downed trees even the deer
cannot penetrate, a long slow spring
with the buds obdurate as pebbles,
too much building, so she comes to stand
in our garden, eyes flowering with wonder
under the incandescent buffet of the fruit
trees, this garden cafeteria she has walked
into to graze, from the lean late woods.

Never be misled by forthright declarations in a Piercy poem. Each reverberates music it was meant to sound, as in “Wellfleet Shabbat” from The Art Of Blessing the Day:

The hawk eye of the sun slowly shuts.
The breast of the bay is softly feathered
dove grey. The sky is barred like the sand
when the tide trickles out.
The great doors of Shabbat are swinging
open over the ocean, loosing the moon
floating up slow distorted vast, a copper
balloon just sailing free.
The wind slides over the waves, patting
them with its giant hand, and the sea
stretches its muscles in the deep,
purrs and rolls over.
The sweet beeswax candles flicker
and sigh, standing between the phlox
and the roast chicken. The wine shines
its red lantern of joy.
Here on this piney sandspit, the Shekhina
comes on the short strong wings of the seaside
sparrow raising her song and bringing
down the fresh clear night.

“Shekhina” represents devine, female spirit in Jewish life, making this and other poems in the collection, read like prayers one’s foremothers might have wished for, had they time, not to mention a loving spouse who no doubt helps with the meal so that all at the table can be lit by the “red lantern of joy.” Generations of Jewish women fought to learn the language and rituals reserved for men, making Wellfleet Shabbat and its neighbors in these pages a kind of altar of acknowledgement and remembrance, sacred bricks and mortar.

Love poems. Poems confronting war. Poems about cats. All are notoriously difficult to write without falling into dogmatic babble or trite traps. Piercy avoids this, in selection after selection, as in this from “Implications of one-plus one” from Available Light:

Ten years of fitting our bodies together
and still they sing wild songs in new keys.

She suggests they’re still singing even after watching football together, deliciously possessing him and the game, announcing “Football is mine,” in “Football for dummies” a recent composition. The poem is pure fun, and you cheer for everyone.

“Peace in a Time of war,” quoted in part, makes my point about war poems and highlights Piercy’s versatility once more :

Ceremony is a moat we have
crossed into a moment’s
harmony as if the world paused –
but it doesn’t. What we must
do waits like coats tossed
on the bed for us to rise
from this warm table
put on again and go out.

And then there are the poems about cats. As someone who likes dogs and shares a bed with a man and one or more felines, I’ve written my share of terrible cat poems and am always on the prowl for good ones by others. In “Old cat crying,” as in all topics she seizes, Piercy is empathetically masterful, and in this case the mastery connects feline need to human need and loss :

He should not have died
before her. She cries
for him to come. She
sniffed his body and knew,
but she has forgotten
and he does not come.

Piercy apprehends what conventional wisdom sometimes disdains. We humans show emotion in ways, like sniffing (who among us has not sniffed a garment recalling scent of a long-gone love?) that can seem both feral and genuine.

Not surprisingly, for someone whose prose includes Sleeping With Cats, A Memoir, Piercy ends with a poem about the death of a cat. Like this entire collection, and like Breaking Camp, her first volume of poetry, published by Wesleyan in 1968, and well worth repeat visits, “End of days” engages the senses and enlarges them. Cats “see clearly/through hooded eyes, “we are informed, before being reminded how terrible it is to face the end of life while confined in “the silent scream of hospitals.”

Marge Piercy’s unflinching clarity of vision continues to be the kind of sturdy example so vital to literature. She has long been teaching and in the public arena, on the humane side of almost every contemporary issue. Lesser poets, lesser citizens have been appointed United States Poet Laureate. It’s her turn.

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Dear Sugar,

Please oh please help me. I’m so mixed up and in so much pain that I’m beginning to be afraid I might kill myself, though I have two small children and basically know I can’t and would never, and I definitely know how crazy and self-dramatizing that is. The very fact that I think of killing myself when I am a mother is scaring the shit out of me.

I am somewhat unhappily married to a complicated man, who is also a wonderful man in many ways—aren’t we all both monsters and nice people? During my last pregnancy I very unwisely started an inappropriate correspondence with an ex from high school online. (Thanks, Facebook!) I knew what I was doing was wrong. I knew I was lonely and angry at my husband for all the reasons people in their 30s with little kids get angry at each other (just a little more so in our case). Somehow I thought I could get away with crossing a little line without it turning into anything. I was faithful, a good wife, a good person, a pillar of her community, a good friend, “I would never,” etc….

Well, this ex and I fell in love. I turned out that he is a cross-dresser (I didn’t know about it in high-school) and I’ve always been kind of wanting to be a lesbian, but not really into girls (I’ve tried). We both have serious abuse in our backgrounds. We both feel like together we could be complete, ourselves, intimate in ways that we’ve never even imagined being with another person. I know how cliché that is, though it feels different in this case (another cliché!) because of the fetish and power-exchange aspects of our relationship.

I’ve only been aware of the extent of the physical and psycho-sexual abuse in my childhood since starting therapy a few years ago. (I originally started therapy with my husband, pre-affair, and it sort of improved things until this….) The affair has been mainly virtual, though my love and I have seen each other once. Though it has now been going on for over a year, the “active affair” have been only for short periods of time. I can correspond with my love for about a month, before the guilt and pain and horror and fear make me stop.

As I said, I have tiny children. I’m so afraid of leaving my husband to raise them on my own or without my husband’s emotional and logistical support. I’m so sad to hurt and abandon my husband, whose life has not been easy either. He’s done shitty things to me in the past few years, but he doesn’t deserve this. I’ve gone for periods of one to three months totally out of touch with my love, but I just feel sadder and more depressed and darker and more lonely without him. He can and would move to my city and be with me. But if I left my husband I would be in uncharted waters.

I often fear that I’m losing my mind. I am in therapy, and have discussed medication with my therapist, but it’s hard to believe that my problem is medication-requiring when it seems so situational. My therapist hasn’t come down strongly one way or another. I’m currently in another it’s-finally-over phase with my love, but it doesn’t feel over at all. Also, I feel so miserable around my husband that sometimes I can barely talk. I’m drinking, I’m smoking, I’m watching TV. I’m hiding behind the children. I want to just tell my husband the truth and then let everyone deal with the situation like adults, but I have received legal advice that says that it would be foolish and crazy to give my husband information about the affair and the fetish aspects (which I feel like is crucial to any of this making sense and being true) when facing a custody battle.

My husband works long hours and I am the primary caretaker of our children (see: how we got ourselves into this mess in the first place), but he has already told me that he’ll fight me for custody to his last breath if I try to leave him. He’s a powerful guy and very tenacious. I’m trying to love him and get over these feelings and absorb and accept that this is my life and I can’t change it, but, again, the darkness….

What can I do? Can you help? The last piece of semi-relevant information here might be that though I know I sound hysterical and dramatic and possibly dangerous, this is so out of character for me. I’ve always been the person with her shit together, self-sufficient, there in other people’s times of need and so on.

I really pray you answer my letter. Thank you.

Despair Girl

***

Dear Despair Girl,

The only time I’ve ever felt certain that I was about to die was on the last day of the year in 1991. I was 23 years old and sitting in the passenger seat of a borrowed SUV that was being driven by my ex-husband along a cold country highway at eight o’clock in the morning. We were heading north on an hours-long drive to a New Year’s Eve gathering with a small group of our friends who’d rented a cabin in the woods. We’d left our apartment in the city just after dawn in hopes of reaching our destination in time to go cross-country skiing before the sun went down.

There was no traffic. In fact, only occasionally did another car pass by, going the opposite direction. The road was set slightly above the rest of the terrain, the ditches dropping off steeply before flattening out and giving way to the woods beyond, all of it covered by a few feet of snow. Winter in the Upper Midwest. We were moving along at something like 58 miles an hour until suddenly the SUV was careening sideways toward the ditch on the other side of the road, having hit, apparently a patch of black ice.

“Get control of the car,” I said to my ex-husband calmly and quietly as we swerved perilously from one side of the road to the other, each correction an over-correction that sent us lurching horribly on. “Get control of the car,” I repeated in the same tone, as if I could will it to happen.

But he could not get control of the car. There was no relationship between what he was doing with the steering wheel and brakes and what the vehicle we were in was doing with us. We seemed to pick up speed instead of slow as we swooped sickeningly from one side of the highway to the other until finally, in one excruciatingly long glide, we left the road and became airborne.

I’ll never forget the feeling of that—flying in the car—and also how long that moment was, though I’m sure it was over in a flash. In this strange span of time, I understood that I was probably going to die in something like five seconds and my feelings about that moved from so deeply sad to so deeply accepting so quickly that it’s astonishing to remember it now. No! Please! Okay! is what I thought with breathless clarity. The other thing that happened in that glimmer of time between leaving the road and landing wherever we’d land was that neither my ex-husband nor I braced ourselves. Instead, we simultaneously reached to clutch each other with both of our hands and, together, in the same instant, shouted I LOVE YOU!

And then, instantly, we went down. Nose first. There was a tremendous slow motion thud followed by a ferocious blur as we tumbled end over end over end over end until at last we came to a stop among the trees.

It was so silent then. I don’t know if there’s ever been a moment so silent in my life since. Me. My ex-husband. The road somewhere like a mute film of a far off dream. We looked at each other. It took me a while to understand that we were upside down, hanging by the seat belts that had saved us. We were covered in tiny blunt shards of glass and drenched with a red liquid that I later comprehended was wine—bottles we’d brought along for the evening’s festivities that had shattered in the tumult. But we were alive.

I was shaken by the accident, but not for the reasons it would seem I’d be shaken—not the frightful careening or the terrifying flight or the violent tumbling. I was shaken by the beauty of that moment when my ex-husband let go of the steering wheel and we both did and said the exact same thing without thinking about it or agreeing upon it or hesitating. In the end, we clutched each other and shouted our love. I didn’t want to die, but if I was going to, I was glad to be doing it with him. It’s one of the purest revelations of my life.

This, even though I was already aching to leave him. Even though a little more than two years later I did. Even though it’s been more than a decade since I’ve even spoken to him.

You may wonder what any of this has to do with you, Despair Girl, and I’ve wondered the same thing. But in the eleven weeks since you wrote to me it’s the story that keeps surfacing when I ponder your conundrum. Maybe it’s because I can feel you almost viscerally sliding down the empty road, knowing you’re going to crash but not knowing what it is you’ll crash into. Maybe because the question you’re up against is who you’re going to grab when you go airborne. Maybe it’s because at the time of this car accident I was basically where you are, in the gnarly thick of transformation, and I didn’t know where I was going to land or how.

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I used to see a butterfly in my mind’s eye every time I heard the word transformation, but life has schooled me. Transformation isn’t a butterfly. It’s the thing before you get to be a pretty bug flying away. It’s huddling in the dark cocoon and then pushing your way out. It’s sitting there in your pajamas, pregnant with your second child, flirting on Facebook with someone you dated in high school. It’s imagining you might leave your husband for a man you’ve seen only once during the most stressful time in your adult life and thinking it will work out. It’s the messy work you have ahead of you, Despair, of making sense of your fortunes and misfortunes, desires and doubts, hangups and sorrows, actions and accidents, mistakes and successes, so you can go on and become the person you must next become. The one who doesn’t wallow in her own despair.

It doesn’t surprise me everything seems like its unraveling for you right now. These recent years during which you’ve become a mother have been radically transformative, for both you and your marriage. Having children is the greatest joy for most parents, but it’s also a major mindfuck. All the terms change. Some are rewritten for you, others you rewrite yourself—personally, practically, professionally, romantically, sexually, financially, logistically and otherwise.

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My own marriage to Mr. Sugar during those first few post-partum years was not so different from yours. We were more bonded than ever because we needed each other like never before, but there was loneliness and anger too. After our second child was born we slept in separate beds for months so I could dedicate my nights to tending to our newborn while he tended to our toddler. One time I got so mad at Mr. Sugar about the fact that every time he goes to the grocery store he only manages to remember half the stuff we need, I stabbed him in the thigh with my toothbrush. One time I brought our kids to their preschool and I came home and told Mr. Sugar that I had the impulse to ask one of the preschool dads I’d chatted with at drop-off to go with me to a hotel, where we would spend the morning fucking each other’s brains out. Not because I had any real desire for this other fellow. Not that I wanted to cheat on my beloved and hot Mr. Sugar. But because I wanted to spend the morning with someone who wanted to fuck my brains out who was not also someone whom I’d stabbed with a toothbrush in the course of a conflict about groceries.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you began your online emotional affair while you were pregnant with your second baby and mothering your first. Nor is it surprising that you reached back in time and sought solace and excitement with a man who knew you long ago, who desired you before you were a mother and clobbered by all that being the primary caregiver of two small children entails. You say that you’re aware that your outsized feelings for your ex and your justifications about the affair you’re having with him are cliché, but your self-awareness does not let you off the hook. Instead, it tells me you already suspect what you don’t want to know: that this ex, as particular as he seems, could be anyone. That what you have with him is so steeped in fantasy it might be made entirely of smoke. That your affair with him is not about you and him, but rather you holding up a mirror to yourself, your every desire for a different life reflected back to you.

And that the whole shebang is stoked by lust. Which is famously unreliable as a life plan.

I feel sort of like an asshole saying this to you because I know your feelings for your ex are terribly real. I sympathize with your heartache. But I would be remiss not to tell you in the most direct terms possible that pretty much nothing you said about your husband makes me think you can’t work it out with him if you want to and everything you said about your ex sounds sketchy to me. Not because he’s sketchy—I trust he’s a perfectly lovely human being—but because you, Despair Girl, hit a patch of black ice and right now you’re careening around, unsure where or when you’ll stop. Do any internal alarm bells go off when you hear yourself say that a man you’ve known almost exclusively online in the course of a year-long off-and-on illicit affair makes you feel “complete”? Anything go beep, beep, BEEP! when you review the portion of your letter in which you mention in passing that you and your husband had “sort of improved things until” you began your affair?

I think the answer is yes. I think that’s why you wrote to me. I think your lusty virtual fantasy love is your delicious escape from a marriage strained by too much drudgery and resentment. And yet, where has this delicious escape brought you? To the place where you’re in so much pain you ponder crazy things like killing yourself, that’s where.

You have to go somewhere else, sweet pea. You have to move beyond despair. You have to find the next version of yourself, the more evolved iteration of the woman you used to be.

You don’t do that by choosing between accepting your misery with one man you love or giving way to the fantastical idea of another. You do that by coming to terms with who it is you’ve become and doing the emotional work it requires to let that woman fly. That’s where I was on that day in 1991 when I truly thought I was going to die: a woman about to lacerate the shit out herself while pushing away her own cocoon. When that SUV left the road, it wasn’t just any day. It was the last day of the year in which my mother had died and everything that year had changed.

I was on the brink of being forced to change too. I left a man I loved so much I was content to die beside him. I did it because my purer revelation—more pure than my love for him—was that I couldn’t be the person I’d become while committed to him. In another time, in my marriage with Mr. Sugar, I’ve had transformations that led me in the other direction—toward a richer, more profound commitment, and a happier one too.

I can’t say which it’s going to be for you—whether you should reinvest in the intimacy you have or squander it for the promise of a new love. But I know you have to work harder to find the answer that’s within you. The truth will come to you once you stop careening. Don’t brace yourself. Clutch onto whatever you love the most when the tires leave the road.

Yours,
Sugar

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***

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A collection of short pieces written by Rumpus readers pertaining to the subject of “New Beginnings.”

Edited by Susan Clements.

***

Paris with a typewriter on a five-dollar wooden canoe languidly pinging its way along the Seine as more experienced boatsmen yell at my typing head and a young Harvard student I know taking a break from Germany spots me and is embarrassed; a newsroom that says, “Well, why not?” and sets me loose in New York or Oakland to write like a slightly impudent variant on Gay Talese, filing—say—a report of things that were only muttered at press conferences, but nothing about the press conference itself; having one of the many colleges in my state, Massachusetts, say, “Sure. You can open our mail. Stick around,” and I’ll spend every afternoon stopping by the Out of Town News kiosk in Harvard Square and pick up The Guardian, El Pais, or Le Monde, and I’ll catch up with the world in the shade of buskers, collegians, and professional brains—all these represent “new beginnings,” variants on something you can hear murmuring just offstage, and—since there are no stage hands—I spend my time in a kind of Recession-borne vacuum—a vacuum that—from what little experience I’ve had—seems to disavow comments, attention, and acts of memory like something on the level with Iran-Contra or Guantanamo—and so I prowl about, sending up little flares that attract attention, looking for the rope I know can lift the curtain.

– Evan Fleischer

* * *

This morning in Wisconsin I braid my hair, pulling the wet strands into French pigtails while he sits on the cigarette-burned sheets and watches Animal Planet. We aren’t staying put. We’re driving across the country, Kerouac pilgrims in our early twenties. His red Subaru wagon, with less than one thousand miles on its odometer, is packed so full—and the sticky mid-June heat is so penetrating—I can’t fathom climbing back in, sitting still for so long, as the exhaust pipe pumps blue smoke from the full-force air conditioner. I haven’t even known him a full year yet.

Along I-90 past Madison, there are massive red rock outcroppings. They tower dangerously high and appear ready to collapse, like those games where you stack logs on top of each other, carelessly. It’s a delicate balancing act, an exercise in distance; take love, divide it by three thousand miles for six months, then add in three months together in the foothills of the Rockies. I’ve never seen red rock before, and the largest pieces of stone I’ve ever seen were the White Mountains, where you can barely see the granite for the trees. The precipice of summer looms ahead of us as we drive. Neither of us knows what to expect of this summer, the first time for both of us playing grown-up, sharing a house and a bed and bills. Neither of us knows whether we will survive the mountains, but both of us know this is our chance to try.

I know only from pictures the enormity that lays ahead—the wide, flat expanses of prairie, the massive grey of the Rocky Mountains, the fields of amber wheat and yellow corn. I am so curious about the Midwest, so conscious of this transitory landscape; I know the hints of Eastern hills still lingering are the last I will see for awhile, and the promise of a longer, larger horizon is just beginning to show. Wisconsin is both the first and the last: a new, rocky landscape sprouts from the ground while the old, humid weather of my Atlantic childhood sticks to my still-wet, bare arms, echoing home. I stare at my inner forearm, seeing how far I can trace the blue veins until the red blotches of sunburn and freckles obscure them. We’re in Central Time Zone, headed for Mountain.

– Melissa Landrigan

  * * *

Sometimes I feel the songs I write are like children. My children. Mostly because their conception is accidental. And very few are perfectly formed from the start. And I’m embarrassed to show them in public. And they always disappoint me, even though I see so much potential in them. And you can tell they’re all related. And I don’t love them all equally.

When recording, I sit on a piano bench and plug in things and I listen with my big studio monitor headphones and I try to get sounds down as soon as possible to keep things simple. If I can’t play the whole track flawlessly, I’ll stop to drink tea or water, so if you really listen you can hear me swallowing with a soft, contented “Mmm, ahh.” The best part is when I’ve been working for what seems like twenty minutes, but if I check a clock I’ve actually lost four hours.

I write music that no one wants to listen to. Sometimes I think it’s because I tend to take off my clothes when things aren’t going well. Like, I’ll be playing my guitar, trying to capture this really intricate section and it’s not working for whatever reason, so I’ll throw off my shirt in frustration. Then I’ll be standing in front of the microphone, recording vocals, and after five botched takes I convince myself that my pants are too constricting and they’re cutting off the flow of blood to my head, so I’ll take them off. I don’t know why —maybe I just need to be exposed physically to make myself emotionally vulnerable in order to express my innermost feelings. Anyway, I’m convinced that people can subconsciously sense that I was nearly naked when recording, which is off-putting to any reasonable person, so no one will ever want to listen to my music.

Or maybe I’m just a terrible songwriter.

I used to wish for a normal life that didn’t require isolation and the creation of melodies over chord progressions in order to make daily existence bearable, but never thought it would be possible. When I had a free hour before sitting down to type this out, I picked up my guitar, strummed a few chords and put it away. I don’t think I need to play music anymore.

– Jesse Corona

 * * *

I really fucked up this time. This is the last time I sell all my shit online and frighten old girlfriends into thinking I’m entertaining suicidal ideation. So went the thinking a year ago before I moved out. “Just trying to lighten the load.” When you kill yourself, you are travelling light, you are light. But I just wanted to get rid of the unnecessaries, the torn novels, the scratched albums, the taxidermied frog, and all the psychological tchotchkes I couldn’t bear to bring with me. A year later I’m in New Orleans and I’m thinking of selling all my shit online and etc.

My desk is a velvety green banquet chair, a handout from the neighbors who were smart enough to leave. The woman I’m courting is busy tonight, sorry, but there is an earring under the stove and whose can that be. I can’t decide if I should buy the $30 shit desk from the dollar store or the $120 antique shit desk from the junk shop. I can’t seem to shake myself from myself. A High Life for the low life, is how they order beer here.

Maybe I can stay. I think the purchase of an antique says something about healthy and meaningful long-term commitment. It also says, “I am a rescuer, a humanitarian.” But I know I’ve never rescued anything except runaway coins and expired food from the dollar store.

I’m not that broke. I fancy myself clever and destitute, probably a response to my solid middle-class childhood in New England. I drink a quart can of pineapple juice and throw my thrift store flatware in the can, for example. The headlines are sexy and lurid, man beds dog kind of stuff. I don’t know if I can stay, cool it, or blow. Today it’s not at all uncommon to pursue viable life philosophies developed by small-town bloggers.

If dusk is the hour of poetry, then dawn is the hour of craftlessness. My other neighbor, a feral rooster, legit, knows this. He hasn’t crowed in weeks. Can’t remember how, can’t sing for the spheres. I found him cooped up in a large tree, strutting a bough, like: How did I get here? Fuck it.

I raised my cup of coffee in tribute and withdrew into my shack.

I wonder if all of God’s creatures are like this.

– Derick Dupre

* * *

Call it women’s intuition, a pinging in your gut, a hunch or whatever you’d like: I just knew. But I needed irrefutable evidence.

So off to the drugstore I went. I placed my surprisingly expensive purchase between other nondescript items, paid for them and headed home.

I did the dead-woman-walking march to the bathroom. I sat down and cradled the First Response box. I took my time, carefully unwrapping the cellophane. I glanced at the instructions, already knowing how this worked. I removed one white plastic stick, unzipped my jeans and completed step three. I did not time the test for two minutes as recommended. Instead, I did what every woman has done as long as these kinds of tests have been around: I stared the thing down with baited breath.

One faint pink line began to fill itself in. I anxiously peeked at the stick again, hoping to see an abyss of white space next to that first line. I couldn’t deny the shadow of a phantom line. Another deep breath, and there it was: two lines. I was suddenly sickened by their misogynistic shade of Pepto pink. There was no reality at that moment, just hard evidence. My life, plus one. The future was staring me dead in the face.

Some women save these tests and keep them in a memory box as mementos. I threw mine out, covering it under tissues, and tore open the second package. Fast-forward, same result. Not that I had expected anything different, but I wanted to be certain. So there I had it: irrefutable proof.

After burying the second test in the trashcan beside its used partner, I fell to my knees and cried. I cried for what felt like a long time, though in reality it had only been fifteen minutes.

They say it takes thirty days to break an undesirable habit. Here’s another fact: it took me roughly fifteen minutes to come to terms with the fact that I was pregnant. I went through Kubler-Ross’s famous five steps in record time! I denied (despite confirming twice), I got angry (“my life is over”), I bargained (“if I misread the test, I will never buy anything I don’t need  again”), I got depressed (since I’m already depressed, I bypassed this step) and I reached a place of what could vaguely be called acceptance. Fifteen minutes and my life was no longer my own. Nothing would ever be the same again.

– Lisa Rufle

 * * *

Last Thursday I took a scalpel and dug the letter “m” from my favorite novel, because I know that you like the aesthetics of it all. I am not a writer.

You will never know me the way that I know you. I’ve read you trying to find what truth I could in the wilderness of your words. The only truth I found is that I want to lay you down and write curse words across your body with my tongue.

My father taught me that true love waits, but that only applies to straight people anyway. I don’t want a gay marriage. I want to fuck you. We will pretend we’re characters from the magazines they keep behind the shelf, but we’ll be shameless. No black bags. We’ll even leave the door unlocked.

For now, I will stand on overpasses thrusting bottles with love letters overboard and bellowing into Orion’s Belt hoping that one day you’ll come into me and paint pictures of our lust on my face. This is all new to me. And it’ll be all new again when the bottles let out cries as they crash against the waters below.

– Michael Patrick

 * * *

Not changed, no—nothing so unsubtle. Nothing at all except a lingering mist of significance, coloring the familiar scent of after. He kissed her forehead before standing to wash up, and when he came back she hadn’t moved. Like those women in horror movies, eyes glassy and lips slightly parted, wrists splayed, or in misogynist 40s comics, thought a part of her brain that sounded quite alien to her. She felt split, body and mind talking at cross-purposes until she realized all that had happened was that she recognized her body as a presence, now. Nothing changed—but revealed. This other being was in her this whole time, she marveled, which had to mean she wasn’t precisely the person she’d considered herself, and is that why she was thinking of death imagery— these thoughts circled distantly in her head (like vultures?—the question mark there too, uncertainty in her own marginalia) but they were fading into irrelevance, she could tell, beneath the encroaching tyranny of her limbs chill as in protest of his absence, though she knew it was just sweat evaporating, her body doing what it was supposed to do (is this what it’s supposed to do).

Her breathing was still shallow. He climbed over her, his warmth like the shadow cast by an impending storm. Something felt broken and something felt joined which meant that nothing had changed but his movements were so much more significant than they had been, registering to her skin with the shaky definition of seismograph lines. Is this what it is to be in love, she thought; is this what it is to be with someone who knows what he’s doing, she thought. A shame, she thought, that she had never tried either individually and so could not isolate the crucial variable; then he was holding her and it didn’t matter. Nothing changed, but his arm around her waist occupied a space she was only now noticing, whose contours she was only now beginning to explore.

–Isabel Cole

* * *

Things are not going so great for me here at this college. Probably because it’s cold and there’s too much snow. I would be happier in California. I should just put all my stuff in my car and drive to LA.

I can go down to Florida first and visit my best friend. After a few days, my best friend will decide she wants to leave her college and move to California too! She will pack incredibly quickly and we will leave that very afternoon and pick up her friend in Pensacola to help us drive our cars. Her friend will ride with her, which makes sense because they know each other better.

We will stop for the night at the Texas/Louisiana border. We will share a hotel room and I will write my college essay, because transfer applications for my new California college are due tomorrow. The topic is “Write about a time when you experienced a feeling of accomplishment.”

We will sleep late the next day and be stuck in traffic for hours in Houston. I will submit my college application at the last minute from the parking lot of a La Quinta, “Spanish for free Internet!” I will experience my first feeling of accomplishment in a very long time.

We will drive through the night. I will be alone but that is fine because I can listen to classical radio. I will hear Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” for the first time when we pull over at a gas station parking lot to rest at three AM. I will not be able to fall asleep though, as usual.

The sun will rise as we drive through El Paso, look over into Mexico but not stop, then leave I-10 in Phoenix to take a two lane desert road that goes directly to Las Vegas. The road will be completely empty. I will be very sleep deprived and see a lot of cactuses.

I will get separated from my friend’s car, and see a lot of signs for Andy Devine and no signs for anything else. Who is Andy Devine?

I will find them again in the next town, at a Subway. I will think they are making fun of me because they’re laughing so much. I will find out later that they got high in the car and didn’t tell me. They will say they’ve seen Andy Divine.

– Alison Carey

 * * *

At the end of every year, as that huge gaudy ball reminiscent of Times Square’s more glorious past descends down to the Disneyland that block has since become, a million drunk idiots freezing their asses on the streets of New York and seventy million slightly less drunk idiots fattening their asses in front of their televisions will start conjuring up all kinds of ridiculous and impossible plans called “New Year Resolutions.” These “New Year Resolutions” are founded on the premise that new beginnings not only exist, but that they come, conveniently, at the start of every New Year. But new beginnings don’t exist. You only get one beginning, and that’s when you escape from your mother’s womb and enter this world. The life that follows—the bullies of grade-school, the pre-ejaculations of teen-hood, the stresses of college finals, the injustices of jobs, the onslaught of bills, the burden of children—is the middle. And then the end comes when you die some painful death probably a result of overindulging in those substances that made your dreadful life even a little bearable. But I have good news: Mayan historians, conspiracy theorists, Jesus freaks, and suicidal hopefuls promise that at the end of this year, 2012, the new beginning you’ve been waiting for will finally arrive, and all those New Year Resolutions you’ve been failing to accomplish in the past will be met with ease. You’ll finally make a career change when the Plague arrives and you become, out of necessity, a full-time ditch digger. You’ll also get that exercise you’ve been promising your body when a personal trainer with an abnormally large head—even for a personal trainer —uses its laser gun to force a never ending marathon upon you. Even your appearance will improve because the sun will advance upon the Earth and bless you with a tan on par with Hollywood’s greatest has-beens. That tan will then, for at least an hour, help you fulfill your sex fantasies when everyone starts throwing their nude bodies at you, desperate for one last orgasm. Best of all, that deadbeat dad will finally vanish from your children’s lives when the Earth opens and he falls into it.  And, if you believe in an afterlife, you’ll finally start spending more time with your children when you’re both dead and stuck together for all eternity. But I also have some bad news: Even when the world ends and that new beginning you’ve been waiting for becomes a reality . . . you still won’t be able to quit smoking because the erupting volcanoes will engulf you in flames, making you smoke more than ever before.

– Christopher Forsley

* * *

I don’t particularly believe anything “happens” to us when we die. Not heaven, not reincarnation. But every year, on Day of the Dead, I set up an altar for my ancestors. I bring out the pictures of my grandfather, the World War II vet and spontaneous songwriter; my grandmother, who learned how to make enchiladas while growing up in New Mexico; my cousin Steven, who died of Leukemia at age 9; my college friend Carolyn, who was struck by a bus days before her boyfriend was about to propose to her. I surround the photos on my bookshelf with sugar skulls, dried chilies from my garden, and marigold blossoms. 

I’m following a tradition I didn’t inherit, but adopted while living in the Arizona desert. Although I’m drawn to the poetry of haunting. I don’t expect my traveling Baptist ancestors with names like Happy Weed and Olive Branch to hang out at my altar and eat the bread I made with overripe Trader Joe’s bananas. I did in my “Devout Christian turned Zen-Buddhist-Christo-Pagan” days, but my mind’s gone fairly empiricist since college. 

Still, there’s what we know, what’s factual, and then there’s the meaning we can construct from it.

Here is what I know:
1. Matter cannot be destroyed. My skin cells were once birch bark was once a cat’s fur was once stardust. What made your body made my body. What was once your body could now be anything.
2. We are also made of stories.

Meaning I am who I am because of the people that were here before me. From my grandmother, through my mother, I inherited English hips and a love of cooking, DNA and enchilada recipes. Like my grandfather, I write songs for family birthdays and weddings. Tonight, I’ll leave a piece of bread in each room of my new house in Los Angeles, “for the fairies,” because this is what Carolyn always did, and I continue the tradition in her memory.

In Tarot, the “Death” card really means change. Death changes our relationships to our memories, to those still living, to the earth, and to our very bodies. The dead leave us physical and emotional markers, shared preciously among us. There is nothing we know for sure about how we begin again once we die. But scientifically, nothing ends so much as changes form. That’s my secular creed. That’s my empirical spirituality.

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George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” begins with a setting, “a cold but stuffy-bed sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea.” A man in “a moth-eaten dressing-gown” sits at a makeshift desk surrounded by papers. We are told he is a:

a man of thirty-five but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak he will be suffering from a hangover.

A page later our man’s vocation is revealed: “Needless to say this person is a writer.” Almost reluctantly does Orwell decide to be more specific and call him a book reviewer; it is of no real consequence to him what kind of writer he is because “all literary people are alike.”

So much for the average writer. Virginia Woolf sketches the average reader in an essay from 1916 entitled “Hours in a Library”. This person, again male, is “a man of intense curiosity; of ideas; open-minded and communicative.” On the negative side he is:

a pale, attenuated figure in a dressing-gown, lost in speculation, unable to lift a kettle from the hob, or address a lady without blushing, ignorant of the daily news, though versed in the catalogues of the second-hand booksellers, in whose dark premises he spends the hours of sunlight.

Orwell’s writer is unkempt and disorganized. Woolf’s reader is hungry to learn but socially gauche. Both wear dressing-gowns, perfect attire for people who prefer to be indoors.

The Orwell essay is famous, the Woolf less so. Hesperus Press has raided Woolf’s volumes of critical writing and rescued four lesser-known literary essays, grouping them under the title On Fiction. Each essay brims with insight and interpretation that is conveyed stylishly and authoritatively. Here is a writer expounding on the secrets of her craft. In one essay, “Women and Fiction”, she classifies criticism as one of the few “sophisticated arts”, something seldom practised by women, at least in 1929. She foresees more women tackling and mastering it, albeit in a “golden” future when they will no longer have to protest to be heard, being enfranchised, financially and socially independent and with “a room to themselves” – a reference to her most celebrated critical work, “A Room of One’s Own”, published one year earlier. The essays are bound by ideas that are perceptive and prophetic. She scrutinizes the worth of literature past and present but goes the extra mile to consider if it, and its practitioners, can improve and increase in value in the future.

That first essay, “Hours in a Library”, focuses more on the reader. After her generalized image of him she adds, somewhat surprisingly, that “the true reader is essentially young.” Woolf was prone to bold pronouncements but she was always able to convincingly corroborate them. “The great season for reading,” we learn, “is between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four.” This is a sobering fact certain to make some of us feel we have passed our prime; but it also conjures up an image of the young self-taught Virginia Stephen, losing herself in her father’s vast library. Later in the essay she asserts the power the classics have on contemporary literature – that a schooling in the past is vital for appreciation of the present – but by the same token the more modern books we read, the greater our realization that some classics are not as imperishable as we previously imagined.

Classic writers throughout the ages are revisited and scrutinized in the longest essay here, “Phases of Fiction”, originally serialised in three parts in The Bookman in 1929. Woolf praises and takes down canonical authors in equal measure. It is refreshing to read of the shortcomings of the exalted: Proust mires the reader by surrounding his characters with clutter, an “accumulation of objects”; Walter Scott’s plots are too often “scamped, botched, hastily flung together”; Dickens, while hugely inventive, created “substantial, lumbering worlds”. This last point is typical of Woolf’s appraisals in that a writer’s strengths are examined alongside his faults in the same sentence. “Substantial” is apt for summing up those Victorian doorstop novels, but “lumbering” can equally fit the bill. George Eliot’s mind, she tells us, is both “clumsy and powerful”. Only Jane Austen escapes complete censure. We pause when we finish Pride and Prejudice and turn our mind back to what we have just read, “rather than forward to something fresh.”

In “The Narrow Bridge of Art” (1927) Woolf writes on fiction’s limitations. Compared to poetry, and the “glories” of the Elizabethan dramatists, prose is relatively hamstrung when dealing with “the common and the complex”. For all that fiction writers can experiment (Woolf herself a good example) they cannot fashion their prose to “chant the elegy, or hymn the love, or shriek in terror.” In short, prose, for all its elasticity, cannot “say the simple things which are so tremendous.” This is Woolf at her most opinionated and certainly her most contentious, and we could argue that fiction has more than adequately managed to say simple and tremendous things in the last eighty years. But she is unquestionably spot-on when, in a better bid at prescience, she talks of the fertility of the novel, how it is a “cannibal” form that will devour other forms to create new ones so that “in ten of fifteen years time prose will be used for purposes for which prose has never been used before.’

“Cannibal” is a wonderful description, one of many in these essays. It succeeds on two levels. Firstly it opens up Woolf’s line of argument in an original and eye-catching way; secondly it reads beautifully. The main problem with these essays is not that we wrestle with any opaqueness of thought (each is remarkably lucid) but that there is a temptation to underline every second sentence, such is her dexterity with words. This, of course, is the great advantage of reading a critic who is primarily a writer. She writes of “the foam and flood of language”. Poetry “has remained aloof in the possession of her priests.” Henry James helps us explore “endless filaments of feeling” whereas Dostoevsky leads us down “miles and miles into the deep and yeasty surges of the soul.”

This fine collection reminds us of Woolf’s binary genius as fiction writer and fiction critic. In these essays her judgement illuminates and her descriptions sparkle. James Wood has noted that her essays are “written in the language of art, which is the language of metaphor.” It took her a while to be entirely satisfied with this language in her novels – it was only her last novel, Between the Acts, that she considered “more quintessential than the others” – but in the essays the language, like the thinking, consistently impresses.

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