I think this is what Joshua Ferris’s work is, a song of this secret world. He writes about the isolation of modern life, our disconnect from the world at large and from the people around us. And he writes of the small, beautiful hopes of connection—through love, through hope, through body-breaking exertions.

The Unnamed is about a man named Tim who cannot stop walking. Tim comes home to Connecticut one night from his job at a high-powered New York City law firm and tells his wife, simply, “It’s back.” She bundles him in winter gear, packs a bag with provisions and a GPS. She finally falls asleep in the middle of the night and wakes up to find Tim gone, walked out of the house to who knows where. In the grips of this condition he is driven to walk, for hours on end, stopping only when he collapses, exhausted. No one knows why. No one has a cure.

Is it a metaphor? Maybe. Is it a conceit? Sure. But it’s a starting place. Every story has to start somewhere, and Tim’s starts with “It’s back.” For the first dozen or so pages, you don’t even know what “it” is, and the suspense builds like really good sci-fi: something is wrong, and you don’t know what. Ferris takes this conceit and builds a full, rich story about it. All of the rules—as in the best sci-fi—hold tight. All of the repercussions feel deep and true to the human heart.

Tim has a wife, Jane, and they have a daughter named Becka. Tim’s condition ravages his life, but their lives are intertwined, and so it ravages them all. Becka reads her father stories while he’s handcuffed to the bed. Jane picks him up from parking lots and police stations and curbsides, and waits for the next call when he’s gone. Worries the call will never come. And Tim is at war with his body, these legs that won’t listen.

I want to run away to live in the woods. I want to be surrounded by trees and birds and sky, to disconnect myself from the frantic bustle of city life, the frenzy the internet is pouring into my brain. I want to reconnect with my body, to do good hard work. I want my body to be tired and my mind to be calm. The Unnamed isn’t a cautionary tale against these desires, but it’s looking them in the eye. Sort of saying to them, “Okay, I hear you.”

Tim’s walking forces him to shed his attachment to his career, to comfort, to any sense of plan or control. His walking takes him out into the world, first within a radius of a seven- or eight-hour walk from his office or his home, but then farther afield. He is completely alone.

And all around him, the world is falling apart. It’s a world frighteningly like ours, with our superstorms and feet-deep snow and disappearing bees. I try not to think about it, but it feels like something’s wrong, right? Maybe everyone’s felt like this through the history of humanity—Armageddon seems to be prophesied once every few years—so maybe this is nothing new. But it feels wrong, so we try to ignore it. But it is right in Tim’s face as he moves out in the world. The winters are too cold, the summers are filled with droughts, fires, and floods. A carpet of dead bees falls on Madison Square Park. Birds fall out of the sky. The great cracks in the rightness of the world hover in the background of Tim’s life just as they do in ours. Maybe Tim’s story is set just a couple of years into our future. Maybe that’s what our world is really going to be.

The real reason I loved this book is that this world—Tim’s condition, the ailing planet—is just the backdrop of the heart of Ferris’s story to nestle into.

The heart of this story is big, bloody, and vigorously beating. It is Tim and Jane’s love, and the love of two parents trying to understand and connect with their daughter. It is Tim’s war with his body and the dark loneliness this takes him to, the flashes of beauty in the world it helps him find. It is the way we all fear losing our loved ones, losing our security—fear of helplessness, fear of change—nd how Tim, Jane, and Becka have to face this. They do. Because they have to, they can.

Little bits of The Unnamed are stuck in my head. A man clinging to a telephone pole in a flood. A daughter and her father on a bench in Tompkins Square Park. A sense of loss. A sense of isolation. A sense of love. For all its desolation, for all its characters’ helplessness, it’s a hopeful book. Because even when they can’t connect, can’t reach each other’s inner world, they try. They valiantly, desperately try.

***

This is part of an ongoing series, produced in partnership with Tumblr Storyboard, to highlight Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here. We’ll publish our favorites every Friday for the next three weeks.

Related Posts:

• The Last Book I Loved: A Time to Be Born
• The Last Book I Loved: Small Porcelain Head
• The Last Book I Loved: I Love Dick
• Jeva Lange: The Last Book I Loved, Life of Pi
• The Last Web Comic I Loved: Forming by Jesse Moynihan

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It’s an unglamorous metaphor, but I’ve long felt that a really good poem was like a car accident—surprising, shocking, and a terrifying exhilaration. The incisive poems in White’s manuscript were like a forty-car pile up if all the cars were filled with dismembered dolls all wearing the same suicide note. Muriel Rukeyser said of poetry: “We wish to be told, in the most memorable way, what we have been meaning all along.” That’s how White’s manuscript felt to me. Her poems that use dolls to embody the awful stillness of loss were intimates of my own grief. And she wrote about it with such tenderness, intelligence, and clarity that I understood my own losses better.

Within the bonnet, the two-faced head is
rotated by pulling a string from the torso:
one face calm, one crying plastic beads on
her cheeks—turning: peaceful, sad, peace-
ful, sad.

Nothing in between, no transition—I don’t
remember why she is suffering, why she is
glad. It happens so fast: I am hopeless as I
pull the string in her torso, then sick with
wonder.

I was loath to send the manuscript back to the contest I screened for because I didn’t want to give it up. Of course I did, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the poems. Though I didn’t manage to memorize any full poems while it was in my possession, lines like “as if the motive to live was loneliness,” and “God only wants one thing: to multiply” and “This is the gift of violence: the head is dropped and broken so the world can get out” ran through my head. Although I needed those lines then and I still need them now, I’m glad I no longer have to recall this book one line at a time. Claudia Rankine chose Small Porcelain Head for Four Way Books’ Levis Prize and it is forthcoming in April 2013.

My love makes me inarticulate, or at least makes me choose terrible analogies to express my abiding admiration. Did I mention it’s utterly brilliant? Perhaps I should just say get thee to a bookstore or library. Buy it for your friends, your family, your enemies, your neighbors, or steal their copies, but read it.

(Four Way Books: 2013. 72 pages.)

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The first novel from art critic and experimental filmmaker Chris Kraus, I Love Dick was originally published in 1997 by Semiotext(e), an independent press which also happens to be co-edited by…Chris Kraus. Probably no other publisher would have touched it, and thank God (or Chris Kraus?) for that.

Let me give you some idea why. In the novel, a fictional version of the author spends one sexless night with the titular Dick, a well-known theorist, and becomes exponentially, embarrassingly, obsessed with him. She calls this nuit chez Dick a “conceptual fuck,” and one assumes it registers pretty high on the Conceptual Fuck Richter Scale because she goes on to write a terrific series of confessional letters to him in collaboration with another man: her husband. A husband she’s no longer sleeping with. The letters are ostensibly a game, until they’re not at all. And all of this coincides with a strange and, at times, emotionally exhausting ride across America from the California desert to the New York avant-garde art scene. It is a trip.

Salacious plot points aside, the chief thrill of reading I Love Dick comes from how inventively it rewrites representations of the dreaded female inner life. Books by women are sometimes condescendingly described as intimate, inconsequential, or limited to domestic subjects—like the rest of women’s work—making them the literary equivalent of a patchwork quilt. In I Love Dick, Kraus takes a seam ripper to those criticisms. “How much information about one subject can you juggle in two hands?” she asks. Importantly, her book isn’t an answer. It’s hypothesis—the fun part.

Fiction and autobiography, theory and scandal, humor and pathos, the diaristic and the dialectical—Kraus reaches for them all to test how much insight they can offer. No matter how “small” or “limited” the picture seems, “the trick is to discover Everything within the frame.” There are whole worlds in there.

If you think that great writing should be about more than intellectual gymnastics, you can exhale now. I Love Dick delivers practical life lessons too. Here’s one: in order to learn you have to fail, right? So I mean it in the best way when I say that Kraus has fashioned an ode to personal and professional failure, bolding and underlining the key notion that, in the eyes of history, if you’re a woman you are all but destined to be forgotten.

Take her description of an installation by artist Eleanor Antin:

Through the far-left window a middle-aged woman was painting on a large canvas.…It was an ordinary scene (though its very ordinariness made it subversively utopian: how many pictures from the 50s do we have of nameless women painting late into the night and living lives?).…I felt a rush of empathetic curiosity about the lives of the unfamous, the unrecorded desires and ambitions of artists who had been here too. What’s the ratio of working artists to the sum total of art stars? A hundred or a thousand?

Kraus counts herself a member of that unremembered constellation—always the plus one at art parties, never the guest of honor. In one of her letters to Dick, she writes, “I tried my best but [my film] still failed.” And then: “Is there any greater freedom than not caring anymore what certain people in New York think of me?”

I read the better part of I Love Dick during many long Toronto subway rides to and from my desk job. (I read faithfully, like a penitent, when I can’t or won’t make time to write.) It was just a book but with that title you might as well be hoisting a billboard. I received a few stares and practiced not caring. Mostly, I pretended to be Rihanna.

On one commute the woman across from me fingered her rosary and I imagined (hoped) that she was praying for my soul. Not because I needed to be saved but because I felt so strongly that there was nothing left worth saving.

Which is why, when I think back on it, it seems likeliest the woman wasn’t staring at all but looking right through me. Because if that’s true, what else is there to console myself with except the promise of freedom by invisibility? As Kraus puts it, “Once you’ve accepted total obscurity you may as well do what you want.” After that I started seeing last hurrahs everywhere.

One night while the fictional Chris Kraus was feverishly writing to Dick in an Oklahoma motel, I was watching two women named Thelma & Louise take another vital road trip across my TV. I was only going to watch the first half hour or so, just until Louise shoots Thelma’s rapist dead. (Later, a giddily deranged Thelma will spit one of the film’s most satisfying lines: “You should have shot him in the dick!”) Inevitably, I watched the whole thing.

When it seems like the two friends have exhausted every mile of open road, Thelma tells Louise that she can never go back to the banal indignity of her old life. “Something’s crossed over in me,” she says. “I can’t go back. I mean, I just couldn’t live.”

Well, she didn’t go back. She didn’t live either.

But she tried.

I Love Dick detonated something in me, but it’s been a slow demolition. With each quiet, contained blast I grow more sure that by recognizing our own billboards of desire and failure, and perhaps even finding some dignity there, we are also moving the culture towards the “subversive utopia” that so many women, artists or not, hoped and hope for. When I quit that desk job in November, with no real plans to speak of, I remembered I Love Dick. That Kraus, who considered herself a failure, could write this book at all gives me a shot of courage, and makes me less willing to wait my turn to really live.

***

This is the first of an ongoing series, produced in partnership with Tumblr Storyboard, to highlight Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here. We’ll publish our favorites every Friday for the next ten weeks.

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• The Last Book I Loved: The Unnamed
• The Last Book I Loved: A Time to Be Born
• The Ghost of Mary MacLane
• The Last Book I Loved: Small Porcelain Head

I, on the other hand, raced through the book as soon as it was passed on to me. I was ten years old at the time. Perhaps as a result, my takeaway was not a rich allegory, but rather a story about a boy stuck in a boat for a long time with a tiger. I was likely disappointed that, as Pi had been billed as a fantasy, there hadn’t been dragons.

Life of Pi, as I remember, was the book of the new millennium. I read it two years late, on its second wave of popularity after it had won the 2002 Man Booker Prize, about the time it was crossing into the realm of seven million copies sold. It also came highly recommended by word-of-mouth, although not, of course, from the mouths of my parents.

If you missed the boat (so to speak), Life of Pi is nothing more than a survivor story of a zookeeper’s son stranded in a lifeboat with a zebra, orangutan, hyena, and, of course, a Bengal tiger. Life of Pi is presented by Martel as something of a “true” story through a factious/fictitious author’s note preceding the actual bulk of the novel. In this author’s note, Martel claims that the narrative in Pi was actually received from an Indian who promised that the story could “make you believe in God.” Which god was unspecified. The particularly notable attribute of the titular character Pi is that he is a Christian, Hindu and Muslim all at once.

I recently reread Life of Pi, not to rediscover what I missed at ten, but to prep myself for the adaptation. Inspired after I watched the eleven seconds of CGI tiger that were released as a teaser last summer, I buckled down.

2012’s second half is not lacking in literary adaptations (The Perks of Being a Wallflower, On the Road, Cosmopolis, Cloud Atlas, The Hobbit, The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina, Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights, Lawless…) but November 21^st’s Life of Pi is of an entirely different caliber. To begin, director Ang Lee probably has some idea what he’s doing. Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain found itself beautifully re-imagined in his 2005 rendition, losing an Oscar Best Picture win only to the less-daring Crash.

On the other hand, Pi is not an easy story for any director to take on. The novel lingers 227 days in a raft adrift in the Pacific, with a set no larger than that of a lifeboat. But oh, is there promise. The eleven seconds released in promotion last summer of course featured Pi’s seaworthy companion, the tiger from his father’s zoo whose name (via a small mix-up) is Richard Parker. The computer graphics looked both terrifying and beautiful, as 21^st century graphics tend to be.

Despite appearing to be brilliantly original however, Lee’s adaptation is not the first time Richard Parker, or Pi, have been imagined in a visual image. In 2007, a Croatian artist by the name of Tomislav Torjanac won an international competition to illustrate a new edition of Martel’s Life of Pi. Torjanac captures Richard Parker expertly, such as in the image of his eyes boggling at fish, and a particular angling of all the pieces cleverly suggests Pi’s point of view (which, readers of the novel would know, turns out to be a very important detail). While enchanting, the images lack the same symbolic richness and poetry that Martel’s writing in fact paints, and that I dearly hope Lee has made a point to capture.

It is this poetry in Pi that perhaps attracts all seven million of us to the story. Although the adaption is twelve years late in coming, Life of Pi is already being billed as potential Oscar bait; as a result, the novel is finally having a third surge of attention. Martel has certainly been at work in the meantime (publishing a Holocaust novel Beatrice and Virgil in 2010 and conducting the What is Stephen Harper Reading? project between 2007 and 2011), however, when it’s all said and done, Pi is truly the piece that continues to be the most productive and effective. It’s actually somewhat spectacular; a resurgence of Life of Pi a decade later practically insists on a different way of reading it.

But that’s just it. Pi is timeless. Reading with new eyes, in a changed, ten-year-older nation and world, not a whole lot can actually be approached differently. It remains nothing much more than the survivor story it was when it was written a decade ago.

Of course, revisiting Pi is not lacking in all forms of discovery. On its first wave, critic James Wood pointed out the curious lack of religious questioning brought about by the very-religious Pi during his period in the boat. I suggest, perhaps, that this is not the point. Martel, although boldly claiming his novel could “make you believe in God,” is not using Pi as a tool to bridge from fantasy to philosophy. Yes, Life of Pi is a book about faith and belief, but faith and belief in who is irrelevant. It is not a god, but Pi’s trust in zoology and his faith in the symbiotic interlacing of his fate with Richard Parker’s that ultimately keeps him alive.

Thus, we are left to question larger things; that is, to reflect that Life of Pi is, in fact, a contemplation of the art of storytelling itself. This requires faith in Martel’s story, as well as faith in Pi’s.

In fact, the biggest problem Lee faces in his adaptation of Martel’s novel is not the small set or the CGI animals. The biggest problem is that, at its heart, Life of Pi is a story about stories, a sort of beautiful circularity that is made more beautiful by the fact that it is written on a page. As readers, we must question our own faith in a story, and ask ourselves what makes us believe in it. A debate over the ending of the novel is senseless; what matters is that we ask ourselves, What do I believe, and why?

A story that will make you believe in God. Well, perhaps the claim is not entirely false. If you find that you can trust Pi’s story is true, you might find yourself trusting in the larger questions—ah, rather, in the larger stories—that haunt us as well. Despite this particular wording, however, Martel does not set out to answer our questions. He sets out instead to ask those that are the most timeless.

Martel assures us from the beginning that Life of Pi has a happy ending. Rather, we must agree, it has no ending at all.

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• The Last Book I Loved: A Time to Be Born
• The Last Book I Loved: Small Porcelain Head
• The Last Book I Loved: I Love Dick
• The Last Web Comic I Loved: Forming by Jesse Moynihan

With prose writing, everyone seems determined to fit stories into predefined boxes. A work must be “literary” or it must be “genre,” it must be “science fiction” or it must be “fantasy,” it must be “serious” or it must be “comedy,” etc. The boundaries of various genres get argued with the same passion and vitriol found in political debates.

However, people don’t seem as concerned with boxing in comic works. Perhaps this is because readers still do not take comics as seriously as “literature.” Perhaps it is because the artform is new enough that it hasn’t been codified and drained of blood by academics. Perhaps it is because the visuals literalize the action and trick you into accepting any direction the narrative goes in. Whatever the case, some of the most unique fictional narratives are being written (and drawn) by comic artists such as Michael DeForge, Lisa Hanawalt, and Daniel Clowes.

Serapis saved by a stranger

This brings me to Jesse Moynihan’s brilliant science-fiction-soap-opera-comedy-cum-action adventure-mythological-origin-story, Forming. I started reading Forming at midnight when I needed to wake up early the next day. I told myself I’d just read the first few pages and get to bed. Then I told myself, well, I’d read the first 20. Then just an even 50. Then 75. 100. A few hours later, I’d read the entire thing.

Forming begins with an alien named Mithras (named after a Zoroastrian deity) traveling to ancient Atlantis to start a mining operation. Mithras, thanks to his advanced alien technology, is taken for a god by the early humans. His operation is going well until he falls for the earth woman Gaia. Gaia—acting on directions from the gnome king Ghob—sleeps with Mithras and gives birth to the Titans and Cyclopses of Greek mythology. These children soon revolt against their alien father.

And this is only a fraction of a story that also includes intergalactic transgender assassins, a time travelling struggling artist, a skeezy hippie version of Noah, the proletariat struggles of giants, and Lucifer unwittingly forming the world during a sword battle with the Archangel Michael.

Noah meets his creator

Forming is all over the place, but Moynihan ties everything together with gorgeous full-color art and subtle yet wicked humor. The story combines bits of mythology from a dozen civilizations with Moynihan’s own inventions. Forming’s expansive narrative vision is mirrored in its writing and illustration. Dialogue alternates between philosophical meditations on existence and juvenile insults. Characters dressed in t-shirts and athletic shorts stand beside aliens in bondage costumes. And yet it all works, and combines into one of the most exciting stories I’ve read in any genre.

Forming is serialized each Thursday on Moynihan’s personal website. There are currently 144 installments. In addition, the first part of the story was published by NoBrow Press in gorgeous book form. Read it here.

Arges talks with Lucifer via a disembodied head

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“Earlier in my career, I was neurotic enough to let this bother me,” he admits. “When I started out as a writer, I regarded fiction—novels, especially—as the supreme achievement of the human imagination. While I still hold fiction in very high regard, and continue to write it, I no longer believe in genre chauvinism. Life is difficult enough.”

Such allusion to personal hardship is reassuring given what comes next: fourteen essays, originally published in the likes of Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker, that range in subject from the German filmmaker Werner Herzog to Polish literary journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski to video games, sitcoms, and cult film. The essays are ferociously intelligent, nearly evangelical in their belief in culture, and, as with any great artwork, appear to have come easy.

Reading Magic Hours was an at once exhilarating and strangely nostalgic experience for me. Like Bissell, I moved to New York in my early twenties; like him, I held undefined, somewhat conflicted notions about becoming a writer; like him, I loved fiction. But, unlike Bissell, who claims to have largely ignored magazine journalism before deigning to write it, I was enamored with the reportage of writers like Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, and David Foster Wallace. In my early twenties, wading into the snake pits of politics, sports, and popular film in holy pursuit of literature seemed like an endeavor worth aspiring to.

The first essay in Magic Hours appeared in the Boston Review when Bissell was only twenty five. That’s younger than I am now, but older than when I made my own first attempts at literary journalism. Recently graduated from college and massively unaware of how I was going to make my living—reading and marking up literary essays didn’t, it turn out, pay particularly well—I decided to take the Chinatown bus from New York, where I graduated, to Washington D.C., where Barack Obama was about to be inaugurated president.

Jouncing and lurching to D.C., I couldn’t help but feel like a writer on assignment. A few months earlier, I had written a personal essay about Obama’s candidacy tracing my own experience with race as a child in Seattle. I sent the article off to a local arts monthly, which promptly published it. Over the next few weeks, I watched the article race around the Internet. Someone from the Obama campaign even contacted the paper. At the absurdly young age of 22, I felt for the first time that “my work as a writer,” as Bissell describes an analogous, if much more impressive experience, “was greater than my computer, my bedroom, my mind.”

In truth, however, no assignment had been forthcoming. My editor at the arts monthly agreed to “take a look” at whatever I managed to produce, but made no promises. Unfazed, I spent the weekend interviewing people selling souvenirs, making notes about attendees, and attempting to document my own internal response to the spectacle. If the first piece had been almost willfully naïve (“Call Me Naive: A Love Letter,” I had called it), the second, I thought, would serve as a dramatic counterweight. There was much sadness about the crowd; I felt, a sense of cultural dislocation and despair badly masked by the enthusiasm of the festivities. We had elected a biracial president, yes. But we were still the same.

The Brooklyn publication turned this second submission down. They didn’t even bother to respond, in fact, until a couple of weeks later. The editor was terse, his tone coolly dismissive. At the time, I was in the process of moving out my New York apartment and relocating to Mexico, of all places, where I had lined up a short-term work exchange. Slightly crushed by the dismissal, I forgot, temporarily, that I had ever wanted to write about culture, and turned my attention back to writing fiction and poetry.

Reading Magic Hours, I was reminded of this early ambition. The book is a tour de force of erudition. Its vocabulary alone reflects a very serious man. Toward the end of an essay about television show creator Chuck Lorre, for example, Bissell emerges with the following insight: “It may be the sitcom’s consistent avoidance of any final, dramatic catharsis is its accidental strength. If so, that would make this least lifelike form of entertainment the most comfortingly similar to real life.” It is a startling moment. Where some of us may have been tempted to write the sitcom off as mindlessness for morons—or, if we ourselves succumb, to redeem it as temporary relief from the rigors of an intellectual life—Bissell, in this case, at least, is more democratic, and wiser.

If there is an aspect to Bissell’s character that I do not particularly admire, however, after reading Magic Hours, it is his almost bellicose intellectual elitism that feels familiar from my time in New York. Indeed, it is part of the reason why I ultimately left. I did not grow up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, like Bissell did, but in Seattle, a significant cultural center in its own right. Yet I, too, felt conflict about coming of age as a writer in New York. Entering “that world”—the world of urbane, globe-trotting, cultural sophisticates—felt to me like an abandonment of the community that had raised me, which was comparatively parochial and non-literary, and which I loved.

I eventually made my choice, moving back to the Northwest, where I continued to write stories, poems, and occasional reviews. Finishing Magic Hours, though, I couldn’t help but feel some measure of regret. Regret that I have not read more over, with greater seriousness. Regret that I have not been harder on myself. Regret that I ever left New York.

The last essay of the book finds Bissell living in Portland, Oregon, and doing what is perhaps his best work: the profile of fellow Upper Peninsula native and American national treasure, Jim Harrison. So I guess he left, too.

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I Am Ozzy turned out to be a pretty good read, at least that’s what I thought. A week after finishing the book I got curious about what other people were saying about it. The reviews came in and the literary outlook was bright for rock’s Prince of Darkness. Critics from the blogosphere to mainstream print agreed with me, and lauded the book for its authentic voice and startling revelations.

When I first saw Black Sabbath at the top of an eclectic 1970 bill at Bill Graham’s Fillmore West, I didn’t even know what I was looking at. I was eighteen and had gone to see local favorite Santana, a band more in keeping with the peace/love ethic I had been weaned on as I was coming of age in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was pretty much struck dumb when the demonic, sludge-laden Brits launched into a punishing set.

The peace/love mantra–precursor to the progressive ideology that would characterize the decade–had been stood on its head. There wasn’t much of either in the band’s leaden repertoire. And yet, in the lyrics to “Children of the Grave” and other downer songs, I got a visceral dose of the kind of societal horrors my hippie friends had warned about: devastation of the environment, mutually assured destruction, and capitalist exploitation.

At the vortex was Ozzy, who, in the context of Vietnam, Kent State, and the 1968 Kennedy/King assassinations, captured my intense need for some kind of male archetype, preferably apolitical. I’m not claiming there weren’t some intoxicants involved, but it was Ozzy who made me a head-banger, and less of a hippie. I never looked back.

A common theme in the critical assessments of I Am Ozzy is that the autobiography reads as if Ozzy himself is telling his story while sitting across from you in a pub. No doubt the Godfather of heavy metal can spin a good yarn, but reviewers also praise ghostwriter Chris Ayres for his likely role in smoothing out the narrative. For me, reading it was like a vicarious fiction; as if just once in all the scores of times I’d seen Sabbath and Ozzy solo I’d gotten backstage.

If you thought Ozzy’s offstage legacy began and ended with headless bats and a piss on the Alamo, you’ve got another think coming. In this profanity-laced tell-all, no behavioral headstone is left unturned. He’s upfront about his blunt-force epiphanies, hard-won and usually inebriated truths, and failures as a father, husband, and man. The episodic prose erases any doubt as to why genetic researchers are now interested in taking a look at Ozzy’s genes.

Greg Barbich, writing for Blog Critics, calls Ozzy’s recounting of the early Sabbath days as “pretty incredible.”  It’s true. Hearing about how these progenitors of doom rock cooked up slabs like “War Pigs” and “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” fills blank spaces in the minds of millions whose adoration made the band one of the most successful in rock history.

The first time I saw Ozzy solo was at the Oakland, Coliseum circa 1981. My idol had been kicked out of Black Sabbath and nobody really understood why. No matter. He rocked his way to vindication like a hellion on speed, soon eclipsing the Sabs in terms of celebrity and gross receipts. Listening to new and fabulously heavy tunes like “Crazy Train” I couldn’t have known that it was unlikely Ozzy would remember playing that night.

The tragic end of guitarist Randy Rhoads is seared into pop culture’s collective consciousness, but Ozzy’s befuddled and grief-stricken reminiscence should stand as the final word on how the madness came full circle that day.

Writing about the religious avengers who hounded him from arena to arena he admits, “The funny thing is I’m actually quite interested in the Bible, and I’ve tried to read it several times.” In some Faustian bargain with my own Christian God, I found a way to love Ozzy Osbourne, and, truth to tell, sinfully coveted his life while still keeping the faith.

In the memoir we learn about his estranged first family, follow him through the multi-platinum years of drug and alcohol driven dissolution, and mark his redemption at the bosom of the fiery and devoted Sharon, his ultimate savior.

My first reaction to Sharon was negative. It was similar to when Yoko Ono appeared on the arm of John Lennon. The last thing I wanted was some myth-busting woman taking charge and diluting the power of my cherished, transgressive male archetype. This resistance to Sharon was ameliorated when I learned that she had rescued my idol off the floor of a rented Hollywood cottage.

I stuck around through the MTV series, The Osbournes, though many of my metallic brethren had jumped the shark on Ozzy. I was in my fifties, and though I still liked metal, other music, past and present, provided an alternate–some would say more sophisticated–soundtrack to my life. And on some level, after loving and affectionately envying Ozzy forever, it was edifying to see him schlepping around in a bathrobe, yelling about pet accidents, entrapped, however lavishly, in recognizable domestic mediocrity.

Simon Garfield of the London Observer notes that: “the shadow of an over-primped Sharon Osbourne is everywhere {in the book}, her ambition smoldering backstage and at Ozzfest until it burnt through on television.”

Ozzy keeps his tale from degenerating into another litany of rock excess by the same disordered perseverance and dumb luck that has seen him through more lives than the cat in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. The last time I saw him was in early 2000 at Portland’s Memorial Coliseum. I was too old to risk the pit, but was absolutely dumbstruck again, this time by the images appearing on the massive stage backdrop.

Lyndon Johnson warning, Richard Nixon escalating, napalm falling, and Brezhnev threatening were but a few of the nightmarish captures which towered over the devil sign affirmations we head bangers offered up to the cosmos. It was just like old times.

No spoilers here. Suffice it to say that the Christian/anti-Christian ethos which characterized both Sabbath and solo Ozzy permeates this memoir. Beloved and deplored, Ozzy Osbourne as self-described is at once a dream-come-true superstar and magnificent accident nobody can look away from.

There’s more I could tell. I’ve followed Ozzy since the very first Sabs record in 1969, and truth be told, into more than a few places I probably shouldn’t have. But I’m content to give the last word to Kirkus Reviews, which also noted the memoir’s readable and darkly illuminating prose: “An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.”

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My cheeks flushed with shame as I thought of my recent Facebook stalking—clicking through photos of high school classmates to see how much weight they’d gained, whom they had married; tracking which friends went from one relationship status to another and with whom; and predicting which friends perhaps wanted to change relationship statuses based on the comments they left on another’s wall. It is exhausting, in a very dull sort of way.

In that moment of shame I decided to channel all of this effort, instead, into reading. And if you, too, are looking to cure your Facebook stalking with some particularly varied characters, ones who open you to the details of their rock bottom experiences and don’t demand you keep them a secret, ones who allow you to carry their wisdom with you like the most intricate, ancient flower pressed into the pages of an old Bible, then Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America is what you’re looking for.

There’s Mack, a trying-to-be recovering alcoholic whose wife left him and took their five-year old son along. For a living he’s a house painter, and a crappy one at that. Olena is a first-generation Eastern European-American learning to survive as an adult after the death of her parents. She misses them, and who she was with them, terribly. And Adrienne (my personal favorite) who accepts the practical marriage proposal of her boyfriend when, at age 35, still unwed and skittish around babies, she falls off a picnic bench while holding her friend’s child, killing the young boy.

These characters have issues.

They also surprise you—with their humor, their grace, their ability to remember and wish and desire, and in the midst of all of the heartache, to choose. And in choosing to continue stumbling forward, they find themselves again. There’s a section of dialogue in one of my favorite stories, called “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” where the mother of a baby with cancer bargains with the make-believe manager of a Marshall Field’s store (this is a different kind of “bargain shopping,” the kind that comes from grief). She pleads for a different way for her child (she’ll take a sixteen-year old in a car crash, “Sixteen is a full life!”). The manager—or the voice in her head, or God, or the universe, however you read it—responds with insight that uncovers the theme of the story and, in my opinion, of this collection of stories:

What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and amusing things they do: who can say how anything will turn out? Therein lies the only hope for redemption, discovery, and—let’s be frank—fun, fun, fun! There will be things people will get away with. And not just motel towels. There might be great illicit loves, enduring joy, faith-shaking accidents with farm machinery. But you have to not know in order to see what stories your life’s efforts bring you. The mystery is all.

These are the kinds of stories I want to read, the kinds of characters I want to spy on. The ones who do fateful and amusing things, ones who move, however haphazardly, (in fact, the more clumsily the better) toward redemption. I don’t want an album of professional wedding photos or a status telling me only about the perfect cake, the perfect baby, the perfect new house. I want to read a story that echos with my own humanity and points me forward because that’s the only way to get home. One that shows me how to let go because that’s the only way to receive. One that teaches me to die because that’s the only way to live again.

As I said, Adrienne’s journey is my favorite. I saw in her the clumsy me, the withdrawn me, the me that’s unsure how to build intimacy with the ones I want it most with, especially with myself. And so it was from her that I felt I could learn the unsure path through death to new life. “In Terrific Mother,” after causing death, she is learning to live with herself again. Adrienne attempts to escape the scorn of her family and friends, and all of her self-inflicted shame, by traveling to Italy with her new scholar husband to accompany him on an academic retreat. Instead of finding herself in her painting (that was the plan), she loses herself in the healing hands of a masseuse. She returns several times each week, and after one particular massage, Adrienne walks through a meadow, strips down naked and lies in the grass. There, “A shadow fell across her, inside her, and she could feel herself retreat to that place in her bones where death was and you greeted it like an acquaintance in a room; you said hello and were then ready for whatever was next—which might be a guide, the guide that might be sent to you, the guide to lead you back out into your life again.”

In knowing Adrienne, and in knowing all of these characters, we understand that allowing death into our lives won’t kill us. In fact, sometimes it helps us to live. And we learn a deeper graciousness, a kind of compassion for others that invites us to look beyond the murky surface of their lives and into the complex and beautiful ecosystem of survival and balance just below.

You won’t find this stuff on Facebook.

I am a voyeur to the core. Keep your house lit at night and I will peer in to see how you spend your time alone, or what colors you’ve painted your walls. Invite me in and I will pick through your bookshelves and look at all of your family photos on the mantle while you make me a drink. Ask me to stay and I will rummage through your things for what you’ve been hiding in those closets of yours. Write me a book with characters who are so real and precisely drawn that I can feel their warmth in the seat next to me, and I will sign out of Facebook and devour it.

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At that time I was beginning to write, trying to find my voice. Three years before that, I had moved from the Midwest to Colorado with the boy I would much later marry. I took a gamble then: I didn’t know what the future would bring, but I had an inkling that it would be in the West. We moved to arid Colorado at the height of summer, when the grasses were dry and brown. But when we drove up the Rockies, along rivers curling at the bottom of deep canyons and snowy peaks that dissolved into the sky, I knew this was where I needed to be.

One of my first attempts to write was of the San Rafael Swell in Utah, on the road to Los Angeles. We assumed that that Utah and Nevada would be desolate and planned to speed through at a hundred miles per hour. Instead, we found ourselves in the red lands where canyons scallop to the horizon and rocks form towers and arches. The land is stark and arid, dotted with tiny shrubs and the occasional juniper. I tried to write about the openness of this land, the clarity of the light, and the sense of expanse and disorientation. I had no idea how to say what I wanted to say, but it was in these efforts that I began to write. I continued trying to write about the western landscapes, but I kept finding myself at the gates of Nature. Nature, as I knew then, was a paradise to be fenced off from the ugliness of the world.

I had seen Solnit’s byline in magazines such as Orion and The Nation. Her wide range of subjects, unorthodox conclusions, and the beauty of her language had all impressed me. In an Orion piece published just before the Beijing Olympic Games, she writes not about China’s human rights abuses or intrepid celebrations of athletics, but that the sleek beauty of athletes’ bodies are “co-opted by a culture that wants to be seen as natural, legitimate, stirring, beautiful.” Nations use the bodies of their athletes as masks to cover up abuses of power elsewhere. These themes of the politics of nature and the body had begun to surface in my work, so when I happened upon Storming the Gates of Paradise on the shelves of the Boulder Bookstore, I picked it up without hesitation.

“It was a place that taught me to write,” Solnit writes in the introduction. In the late 1980s, she had gone to the anti-nuclear demonstrations at the Nevada Test Site. There she camped in a spectacular desert, made friends with artists and visionaries, and played tag with the authorities, an experience that led her to make the connections between nature, politics, history, and memory. She wrote of her experiences in a polyphony of voices we often think of as disparate: as a journalist, an art and cultural critic, and a memoirist. She wove these voices into a compelling portrait of a place we think of as desolate, and investigated how our stories of this place reflect who we are.

In Storming the Gates of Paradise, Solnit writes of the Nevada desert and the histories of San Francisco, where she has lived for most of her adult life; she wonders what our stories about the sky and about America’s heavily militarized border with Mexico have to say about us; she explores the impacts of mining and of the constraints on women’s freedom to roam. She writes about thunderclouds gathering above the New Mexico prairie, promising rain that never seems to arrive, as well as about the existential wastelands of suburban Los Angeles. “Paradise,” she writes, “is a Persian word that originally meant an enclosed garden.” In these essays she explicates the ways we fence off our gardens and seeks ways to tear these fences down.

The first essay, “The Red Lands,” is set in the Nevada desert. I have read this essay a dozen times and I still find surprises. She begins at Lee Vining, in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada, where she overhears a man on a pay phone trying to make amends with his wife. From here she segues into the desert ecology, the scale of the landscape, the effects of nuclear testing, the ongoing wars in faraway deserts, the cowboy mythos, and the seductiveness of it all. “The evils in this country tend to generate their opposites,” she writes. “And the landscape of the West seems like the stage on which such dramas are played out, a space without boundaries, in which anything can be realized, a moral ground, out here where your shadow can stretch hundreds of feet just before sunset, where you loom large, and lonely.”

Solnit does not expound. She invites the reader into the conversation. In the weeks after I first read the essays, I walked around disoriented, as if the ground under my feet had turned to quicksand. I felt as if I had been gifted with lenses with which I could begin to see below the surfaces of things. The trees and rivers and grasslands, the roads and buildings and alleys of my everyday life became rich with meanings and associations. I tried to respond, to engage with Solnit. In these scribblings my voice and opinions were tentative, but I began to understand my beliefs and find the subjects about which I wanted to write.

My breakthrough came when I visited Alcatraz Island the following spring. On that trip I had wanted to go to Angel Island instead, the immigration station and detention center on the West Coast in which, from 1910 to 1940, Chinese immigrants were detained under the provisions of the 1886 Chinese Exclusion Act. Under this law, only Chinese who already had immediate family in America were allowed to enter the country. These immigrants were detained on Angel Island for weeks and sometimes months as they tried to prove their blood ties. In this limbo, many of the detainees carved poems into the barrack walls.

My friends and I missed the ferry to Angel Island that day and went to Alcatraz instead. Despite the different itinerary, I still had the Angel Island poems in mind. I was then in the middle of my own immigration journey, one fraught with the possibility that no matter how hard you work and adhere to the rules, your visa could be denied solely based on a lottery or quota. On Alcatraz, as I stood at the top of the prison block and looked at the San Francisco Bay from the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge, I saw the connections between landscape and belief. The cold bay waters were the walls of the maximum security prison, and by extension, the immigration station.

Each time I come back to Storming the Gates of Paradise, I feel like I am returning home. I find nuances I have not noticed before. I find answers to questions I have been asking. I find new ways to ask the questions that matter most to me, about place, about identity, about journeys. Many times I start to write a new piece in my head. Sometimes I read an essay or two for inspiration. In reading this book I began to build my own encyclopedia of images and meanings, a ground upon which I can venture into the world. Lately I have been writing pieces that riff off Solnit’s aphorisms, pieces that I hope make the connections between nature and culture, cities and landscapes, the personal and the political, pieces in which I wrestle with the complexities of my journeys.

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