Q: Zoë, who did you fall in love with this week?
A: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Listen to the ALOUD podcast, watch her TED talk about The Danger of a Single Story and read her NY Times interview.
I saw Adichie read and speak at an ALOUD event and after the reading, I turned to my friend and said, I feel heightened. Adichie spoke her truth so eloquently and humorously and radiated that there was no way I could not a) fall in love with her and want to read every word she’s written b) feel inspired to be authentic and c) keep writing and reading and visioning.
One of my favorite books is Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping and lighthousekeeping is one of my favorite acts, too. Teachers, writers and stories have always been my lighthouses. There are times when I attend literary events and feel as though the person in front of me is indeed a lighthousekeeper. I felt that way when I saw Cheryl Strayed and Jeanette Winterson.
Emily Rapp’s Does Our Culture Confuse “Healthy” People with “Good” People is my favorite thing I’ve read all week. Maybe it’s because I think/feel a lot about death and the body falling apart, so it’s a relief to hear someone speak about death in a matter-of-fact way. She writes, “Again, you will die. This is not a scare tactic. This is not a statement designed to make you tremble, although it probably has that effect. This is reality. If you are alive and reading this, at some point you will be dead.”
Have you ever seen zombies dance on a graveyard movie set? I recently watched The X-Files episode “Hollywood A.D.” and the episode ends with zombies dancing. The scene allowed me to imagine a gentler side of monsters, a gentler side of ourselves, as humans. The Dalai Lama is often quoted as saying, “As human beings we all want to be happy and free of misery.” Maybe it’s true that even at our worst we do just want to experience joy.
I’ve been on this trajectory of watching shows, reading books and looking at art that deal with the paranormal or metaphysical. I went from Twin Peaks to The X-Files, I just finished Journey to Ixtlan and started Hallucinations. I look at Moebius art in my spare time.
My friend said, The end of The X-Files is crazy. Just crazy. Similar to Twin Peaks, actually. Maybe when you tell a story about the metaphysical or the unexplainable, at some point, you must abandon the conventional narrative structure. Maybe you can’t tell a story about the unexplainable with conventional storytelling and that’s why the endings of these shows seem so crazy to my friend.
People often say Ben Loory’s stories are strange but he disagrees. In an HTMLGIANT interview, Loory explains, “I don’t think of my stories as weird. I mean, they’re classically structured and very straightforward.” He continues, “I think by far my biggest influence is simply an understanding of three act structure. People always tell me my stories are beyond logic, but for every one, I could draw you a diagram.”
Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping doesn’t rely on a neat structure. There is no beginning, middle and end. In a review, Charlie Lee-Potter says that her book is “structured like an old-fashioned sock knitted in an endless loop on a circular needle. The whole point of Winterson’s storytelling is that it doesn’t begin or end.”
Someone asked, How did you become friends with your favorite writer? I answered, Luck. Magic. Someone else said, You’re making waves in L.A. and I replied, Only the moon does that. In Lighthousekeeping, the narrator says, “It’s better to think of my life like that— part miracle, part madness. It’s better if I accept that I can’t control any of the things that matter. My life is a trail of shipwrecks and set-sails. There are no arrivals, no destinations; there are only sandbanks and shipwreck; then another boat, another tide.”
Q: Where the hell did this bruise come from?
A: The Actual Mystery Injury Pie
Three more things I want to share with you:
1. Flannery O’Connor reads A Good Man Is Hard to Find
2. Zadie Smith’s Rules for Writers
3. Elif Shafak’s The Politics of Fiction
