According to Christopher Benfey, literature has a long history of writers including characters’ personal struggles in parentheses within the text. To learn how that worked in Nabokov’s “Lolita” or Virginia Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse” (and to discover that there’s an entire study on the subject), check out Benfey’s essay on the New York Review of Books‘s blog.
A Parenthetical Suffering
Guia Cortassa
Guia Cortassa was born, lives, and works in Milan, Italy. After working as a Contemporary Art curator, she went back to writing. She is a contributing editor for Ondarock and her writing has appeared on Rivista Studio, Flair and the Quietus. She compulsively tweets @gcmorvern.