Ampersunder

Books Only Lead to More Books: Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li

May 28, 2019

Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life is a memoir about reading and writing and immigration and isolation and mental health. The title comes from an entry in Katherine Mansfield’s notebooks, a reminder to Li why she does not want to stop writing and what writing a book is about.

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li

Li had suicidal depression while writing this book, and the quote below encapsulates the heart of the book. For her, being a writer is important, but being a reader is much more so, and reading itself is connected to the choice to live or die.

“I do not equate writing with real life … but I am unable to articulate what real life is. … Of course writing is essential for a writer, and being read, too …. Writing is an option, so is not writing; being read is a possibility, so is not being read. Reading, however, I equate with real life: life can be opened and closed like a book; living is a choice, so is not living.”

(Li’s most recent book, Where Reasons Die, is a novel about a mother conversing with her son who died by suicide. Li’s son died by suicide shortly before she wrote it. I didn’t know this until after I read Dear Friend. I haven’t read the novel yet, nor any of her other books.)

This passage complicates the idea of being isolated and present in our lives only while reading:

“I spent my days reading novels whose characters crossed paths only in my mind; I was reading writers’ diaries and biographies connected by footnotes. I did not see people outside the household often; I did not talk with anyone but one friend by phone. Isolation, I was reminded again and again, is a danger. But what if one’s real context is in books? Some days, going from one book to another, preoccupied with thoughts that were of no importance, I would feel a rare moment of serenity: all that could not be solved in my life was merely a trifle as long as I kept it at a distance. Between that suspended life and myself were these dead people and imagined characters. One could spend one’s days among them as a child arranges a circle of stuffed animals when the darkness of night closes in.”

So much of the book is about how to connect with others and how much we can really know of each other. But are we achieving what we intend with what we write? Although books can provide so much pleasure, is it perhaps better to remain silent?

“I am aware that, every time I have a conversation with a book, I benefit from someone’s decision against silence. Still, I am greedy for what I am deprived: I have a friend who erases many sentences before putting down one; another friend keeps her thoughts to herself. Yet I believe that there is truth that is truer in the unexpressed; having spoken, I am apprehensive that I no longer have a claim to that truth. Why then write to trap oneself?”

There is nothing easy or conclusive in this book. However, there are sentences scattered throughout the book that read almost like aphorisms:

“To read oneself into another person’s tale is the opposite of how and why I read. To read is to be with people who, unlike those around one, do not notice one’s existence.”

“For years I have had the belief that all my questions will be answered by the books I am reading. Books, however, only lead to other books.”

“Uncharitably one writes in order to stop oneself from feeling too much; uncharitably one writes to become closer to that feeling self.”

“Is it really to express myself that I write? Not if I think about what it is in myself that needs to be expressed: hardly anything new. This tireless drive to write must have something to do with what cannot be told.”

“Writing is a confusing business. One’s inner clock, set to an exclusively private time, is bound only to what one writes. Life is lived in a different time zone. Caught in between one’s family. To protect them from the internal clock, one risks alienating them; to include them, one risks intrusion.”

“Writing, as long as it is one’s private freedom, will always be disloyalty.”

Finally, I love this counterpoint to Susan Orlean’s perspective in The Library Book, about writing a book being protection against being forgotten:

“The possibility of being remembered, however, alarms me — it is not from the wish for erasure, but the fear that people’s memories will erase something essential. Expectations met and unmet, interpretations sensible and skewed, understanding granted or withheld, scrutiny out of kindness and malevolence — all these require one to actively accommodate others’ memories. Why not turn away from such intricacy? The less I offer you to remember, the better I can remember you.”

My copy of the book came from the library, but when Scott checked it out for me (a belated credit to him for checking out nearly all those library books I mention borrowing in my last post), for some reason it didn’t register to my account, so in theory I could keep my borrowed copy forever. I stuck it full of sticky notes when I read it earlier this month, so now I have taken my notes and am finally ready to give it back. But not before having bought my own copy.

May 28, 2019

A Place to Soften Solitude: The Library Book by Susan Orlean

May 23, 2019

I’ve always been an enthusiastic user of the public library. Every time I visit a library, if I let myself wander the shelves even a little, I come out with a pile of books, no matter how many books I’m already reading or planning to read next. I borrow at least a hundred books a year, mostly through the genius hold system. I visit the online library catalog multiple times a week. I have my library card number memorized. My library account includes a large list of books to borrow one day.

But I don’t often physically go to the library. We do live a mere two blocks away from Hamilton’s Central Library, a large open modern space with lots of concrete and glass and white glossy surfaces. The Library Book by Susan Orlean made me appreciate the library beyond a collection of books, beyond its online catalog and marvellously efficient holds system, and as a community institution and social good.

The Library Book as a library book.

The book is primarily about a devastating fire at the Los Angeles Public Library in 1986, but it’s really about so much more. The whole book is a treat to read, but here are a couple of my favourite passages.

She describes the impetus for writing the book, and how she wrote the book in part as a way to get closer to her mother, who had dementia:

“Right before learning about the library fire, I had decided I was done with writing books. Working on them felt like a slow-motion wrestling match, and I wasn’t in the mood to grapple with such a big commitment again. But here I was. I knew part of what hooked me had been the shock of familiarity I felt when I took my son to our local library — the way it telegraphed my childhood, my relationship to my parents, my love of books. It brought me close, in my musings, to my mother, and to our sojourns to the library. It was wonderful and it was bittersweet, because just as I was rediscovering those memories, my mother was losing all of hers. … Each time I visited, she receded a little more — she became vague, absent, isolated in her thoughts or maybe in some pillowy blankness that filled in where the memories had been chipped away — and I knew that now I was carrying the remembrance for both of us. … The reason why I finally embraced this book project — wanted, and then needed, to write it — was my realization that I was losing her. I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it. Is the circuit broken, the memory darkened? My mother was the one person besides me who knew what those gauzy afternoons had been like. I knew I was writing this because I was trying hard to preserve those afternoons. I convinced myself that committing them to a page meant the memory was saved, somehow, from the corrosive effect of time.”

She explains how writing a book is a form of protection against the fear of being forgotten:

“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten — that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. … But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected it subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose — a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.”

There’s a passage about the expression used in Senegal for death: his or her library has burned. Like our brains and bodies and memories and consciousness is a library, and when we die it’s all gone, but that books are one way for those stories to have their own lives.

The Library Book ends on a beautiful note:

“I went to the library late one day, just before closing time, when the light outside was already dusky and the place was sleepy and slow. Central Library and the Bradley Wing are so big that when the crowds thin out, the library can feel very private, almost like a secret place, and the space is so enveloping that you have no sense of the world outside. … The silence was more soothing than solemn. A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don’t need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage — the writer’s belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past and to what is still to come. … I thought about my mother, who died when I was halfway done with this book, and I knew how pleased she would have been to see me in the library, and I was able to use that thought to transport myself for a split second to a time when I was young and she was in the moment, alert and tender, with years ahead of her, and she was beaming at me as I toddled to the checkout counter with an armload of books. … I looked around the room at the few people scattered here and there. Some were leaning into books, and a few were just resting, having a private moment in a public place, and I felt buoyed by being here. This is why I wanted to write this book, to tell about a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine, and how that feels marvellous and exceptional. All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.”

For more library goodness, check out Robert Dawson’s The Public Library: A Photographic Essay and his photo galleries of American and global public libraries. And I’ll leave you with a poem: “Don’t Go Into the Library” by Alberto Rios.

“The library is dangerous, full
Of answers. If you go inside,

You may not come out
The same person who went in.”

May 23, 2019

First Drafts Forever

April 17, 2019

I’m beginning to think I might write first drafts for the rest of time. When I last checked in about my writing, I was just about ready to begin revising. That was last October. I spent November putting 25,000 words into a second draft, and then I read The Westing Game and My Sister, the Serial Killer and How Fiction Works and realized that I wanted to try something else.

So I started again. Another first draft. (Hm, does this sound familiar yet?) A fresh take on the central idea I’ve been working on for my last several first drafts. And I’ve been working on that for months now, since December. I’m nearly 80,000 words in and still going, not quite sure how to finish. One day I’ll call it done, and — then what’ll I do?

For a while it felt ridiculous that, after all the build-up to the second draft, I started something new. And I wondered if I’d ever get to the next stage. But then I read Joseph Scapellato wondering what a draft is anyway.

“Every writer is going to have their own approach (or set of approaches) to the question of what constitutes a draft. These approaches might change with every phase of every project; the way that you wander through your first draft could be quite different from the way that you wander through your final. The hope, of course, is that your conception of drafting, whatever it is, can serve as a perch — a perception-changing post, slightly above the page, from which you’re better able to see your work and your process in a useful way.”

I considered my progress over the last two years or so as work on several separate first drafts, new project after new project that never got done, but maybe I can think of them as several successive drafts of the same work. The stories all have a similar context, a few characters in common here and there. Each draft is a new experiment, a way of playing with different types and forms of relationships, different configurations and perspectives and voices. Perhaps they’ve each been a way of finding my way to whatever it is I’m trying to write about. So maybe I shouldn’t think of the latest draft as its own thing. Maybe it’s really the fifth or sixth iteration of what all along has been the same novel.

“A draft is a single step. Your steps — how they look, what they do, how you take them — don’t have to be like anybody else’s. They don’t have to be beautiful or memorable or brave. They can be awful or ridiculous. They can even be unsure. But they have to help you trick yourself into spending the time and doing the work. And you have to take them, all of them, one by one.”

I also like the idea of approaching each draft as if it’s the first, no matter how many have come before. The tiniest thing can result in the biggest changes. All the first drafts I’ve worked on have influenced this one. Not just the ones that have a little bit in common with what I’m working on now. Every draft is the first one, and the multiple novels I’ve been drafting are really just one novel. Can I have it both ways?

In the end it’s as Scapellato says — the important thing is the tenacity to keep working on it, keep putting in the time, keep putting down more words. “The secret ingredient,” he writes, “if there is one, is the willingness to spend what time you’ve got.”

April 17, 2019

From Movement and from Stillness

March 1, 2019

In an essay as much about disability, weather, and inheritance as it is about writing, Lucy Schiller explores learning to write while being still:

“There is a type of essay I love called a ‘walking essay’ in which the writer moves through space, allowing those things she sees and encounters to ‘jog,’ so to speak, her brain. To encounter a pear tree in an alley might mean open a digressive exploration on the taming of things. To watch a couple arguing on a street corner might prompt a few musings backwards into the emotional space of her own life. …

“In general, to be able to move physically through space prompts and justifies otherwise aerobatic leaps of the mind, and it can be a mode of resistance, to be able to amble. But it strikes me … that sometimes the mental movement that accompanies walking essays can feel a little too convenient: the way happening upon a spotted dog, then a shouting man, then an old, broken fountain might allow for a lengthy meditation.

“On days like today, and in seasons like this one, when movement is limited, of course I can’t write a walking essay. The task of ‘journeying,’ of connecting ideas, feels particularly difficult: I’ve been staring at the same things for minutes, days, years. The similes that come to mind are all movement-oriented: wading, struggling, thwacking. And yet here I am, stagnant, in my chair.”

I have nothing like the author’s health issues, and our winter weather has not been quite as severe as she describes, but I have been dealing with an injury for the last few weeks, with no clear end in sight, and walks of any length are painful. A walk amongst and between our heaps of snow is appealing, especially as the days get longer and the sky is often clear with the cold, and I wonder what I’m missing by staying indoors.

A winter sunset, featuring the reflection of ceiling lights.

The lack of walking has probably not impacted my writing, although a few more weeks without exercise might do its own damage. But I like the idea that what you write might be something that moves as you move or remains still when you do. And the idea of an essay (or any piece of writing) not as something that must always be moving forward, but as something that might stay in one place, fixed and constant, and still be good.

The essay ends with an encouraging thought: “There are ways of sitting static, of finding meaning and even a sense of possibility without going on a walk and searching for a pear tree, an argument, a plot.” I will need those ways as spring approaches, unless I’m ready by then to take long walks again.

March 1, 2019

Making Yourself Disappear: Machine Without Horses by Helen Humphreys

February 23, 2019

In the first half of Helen Humphreys’ novel Machine Without Horses, the narrator (who very much resembles Humphreys herself) is preparing to write a novel. She is inspired by Megan Boyd’s obituary, which also caught the eye of Maira Kalman (a devotee of obituaries) in The Principles of Uncertainty.

Megan Boyd's obituary, a page from Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman

The first part of the novel has a lot to say about writing: about doing research, about approaching the story, about deciding what and who to write about and how. I found it so absorbing that when the second part began — the story which the narrator was working to tell all this time — I wasn’t ready for the first part to end.

“The trouble with writing a novel is that there are so many ways to make mistakes that you just have to give up on the idea of getting it right. Instead, you have to choose a few aspects to remain faithful to and do your best to make everything else as believable as possible for the reader.”

The narrator is in mourning for a series of deaths in her life. She reflects on how being a novelist has affected her life and has given her a way to deal with her losses:

“I have been writing for so long now that I can no longer separate myself from the act of writing. I don’t know where one begins and another ends. There was a time when it bothered me that I had become what I did, that I tended to look at everything in terms of story or image, that while I was experiencing my life, I was also apart from it. But I have made peace with that now because what I know about writing is that it will take everything I can throw at it, and that is a comfort. I can fall into it and it will absorb my sorrow, my ideas, my restlessness. It has become a process for making me whole again whenever the world breaks me down.”

As she learns how to make salmon flies herself, as she lives her quiet life in the wake of loss, she works carefully through what it means to write a novel:

“There are three main questions to consider when beginning a novel: What is the story, whose story is it, and how are you going to tell that story? Of these questions, the third one is the most interesting and deserves the greatest amount of thought.

Most stories have, quite frankly, been told before. Most themes have been touched upon. So, it matters how you choose to tell a story. And it pays to spend a long time trying to figure out what the optimum way to do this is going to be. Often, the first thing that occurs to a writer is just the most overused trope. Turning approaches over, spending days, weeks, months, considering all the elements of your story and how they will best be served, will yield up more interesting options for the narrative.”

Considering these questions brings up a new question, a more serious one:

“There is another question to ask yourself when you set about writing a novel, perhaps the most important question of all: Why? Why do it? The world does not really care that you tell this particular story. There are always plenty of other stories that can be told, ones that are more interesting, more politically or socially relevant. Stories that address the moment of time that we stand on and therefore have greater imperative.

It is hard to write a novel, to make something out of nothing. And it gets increasingly harder, not easier, the longer I do it. I find more challenges with writing now than I faced when I was younger.”

But the challenges are overcome. The first part of the novel ends with her declaration that she is ready to write the story:

“Whatever is preoccupying me at the moment needs to be synthesized into fuel for the narrative, but it has no place in the actual narrative. This is the sleight of hand that comes with writing a novel. It is all about making yourself disappear.”

And then she does disappear. The novel begins (though in fact it’s barely a novella), and every trace of the narrator is gone, except what seeps through in the character she has created of Megan Boyd. But the novel is not stronger for the narrator’s absence.

February 23, 2019