Read Dearer,
Many years ago, I was a bridesmaid at the wedding of an elementary school bestie (I’m a Leo, if we’re friends, we’re friends for LIFE), and I ran into our former school secretary, Carolyn Cuthbertson. We reminisced about the old days of second to sixth grade before she told me, “You know, I’ve never forgotten you because you were such a reader. You’d read so much that you’d run into walls because your nose was stuck in a book.”
Well, apparently, I haven’t changed much from my elementary school days, except I have more spatial awareness. I am still SUCH A READER. I read. Every. Single. Day. If I had my druthers, that’s all I would do, but things like work get in the way of my best laid plans.
And truly, when I dispense my best, most sage, and wisest advice to editors and contributors on how to become a better writer, the truth is: READ. Read everything. Read all the time. Read like your actual life depends on it. Nothing has made me a better writer than other people’s words. Nothing.
I remember once, decades ago, when I was living in India, that I ended up in this tiny hostel in Ooty. The shelves of its hearth-laden gathering place were lined with books. I assumed most of them would be in a foreign language but ventured up to them anyway. There, gleaming like a beam of light from the heavens, was a book by my all-time favorite author. Don DeLillo. It was Great Jones Street. It seemed like it had been placed there specifically for ME. I snatched it off the shelves in disbelief and dashed back to my room. I couldn’t believe my luck. Don DeLillo. This familiar voice from America out here in India. What are the chances?!
It started off with this earth-shattering paragraph:
“Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public's total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity-hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide.”
I opened that book, fireside, way up in the Nilgiri Hills of Ooty, read that opening paragraph, and then threw the book violently across the room.
Waning statesmen. Chinless kings. Long journeys across gray space. Erotic terror. Monstrous, vulval, damp with memories of violation. Who did he think he was with this brain-shattering imagery? I resented it.
I could never write anything better than that. Why try? I was distraught. All of my aspirations {when I was a kid, I used to tell people who asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up that I wanted to ‘write the great American novel’} to be a great writer seemed to shrivel like an ice-cold wiener. Literally retracted up into my body. I was bitter. Why did I try so hard when there were so many other – better – writers out there than me?
There still are. I suffer no delusions of grandeur. My childhood goals have never stopped haunting my conscience. But wanting to be the greatest writer of all time and being a writer in a way that pays the bills is very different. It takes a certain suffocating of self, while at the same time elevating the things in your writing that could have larger appeal. It’s nuanced and delicate in a way that you don’t plan for. You become a mollified version of the grandiose writer, a humble little trotter of supplicating words, a byline no one (really) pays attention to.
I trained myself in this world. But something strange has happened in prevailing years.
I haven’t read a fiction book written by a man in a long time. And it has been VERY FUCKING LIBERATING.
[Unless you count Bill Bryson, and I don’t because he’s Bill Fucking Bryson and not a mortal flesh and blood earthbound male. Or sci-fi, which I categorize very differently than other genres.]
It wasn’t a conscious decision.
It just kind of happened.
A lot of the protagonists in the books I read are straight-up mentally ill.
And the intensity of their observations and obsessions is unnerving, forcing self-reflection.
As if to demonstrate to the reader these are the true plunging depths, the atomic nuances, the labyrinthine complexities of a woman’s interior life. These truths have remain unspoken in polite society. These books contravene notions of polite society.
Truthfully, some of the books are not very good. But they are still valid for the perspectives they represent.
Some of them are brilliantly written and utterly terrible (see I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel, Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler, The Glow by Jessie Gaynor, or Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman)
Some of them are a slog to read or a total snooze (see Either/Or by Elif Bauman, Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley, and Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier).
Some of them are dark, disturbing tomes that I would not revisit (see A Secret History by Donna Tart and A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara)
Some of them are uncomfortably bizarre (see My Husband by Maud Ventura and Earthlings by Sayaka Murata).
But then again, some of them are brilliantly written and really good (see Salt Houses by Haya Alyan, Luster by Raven Leilani, No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July, Writers and Lovers by Lily King, Animal and Three Women by Lisa Taddeo).
The best are the brilliantly written and really good ones. Obviously. And they imbue me with some sort of hubris in my own writing.
I can sacrifice any sort of storyline of the prose is good.
Kind of like porn.
I don’t need a plot.
I need the beauty of the word on a page.
The kind that lights my mind up like fireworks.
That makes me want to throw the book across the room because it’s so good that I know I’ll never write anything better than this, so why keep trying?
Us writers are so dramatic, but only in private when no one is watching.
It’s weird and amazing and tingling to be sucked into this orbit of female authors without really planning to. I can reach a level of intuitive understanding with them that is harder to reach with male authors. There is so much said in what is not said. So much that seems innately familiar even if I have never experienced it myself. It is a common language. The language of being a woman in this particular world, of which I am sure there are many, but this is the only one I know.
Once, an ex – knowing I was a READER – recommended I try How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom. From the perspective of one of the world’s most renowned literary critics, the prescription for “How to Read” actually struck me as inane and hollow. THERE IS NO RIGHT WAY TO READ. Or conversely, wrong way. Reading is reading is reading is reading is reading is reading. Don’t tell me how to dance my eyes across a page or tickle my brain with words or devastate my heart with a certain passage. Old white men really want everything in predictable lock-step, don’t they?
Tonight, I was going back and forth with a friend on WhatsApp about sci-fi. Another friend and I are earnestly starting up a book club that is fantasy-genre specific. I love it all. I want to jam all the words in my brain that I can. A few years ago, I started really worrying about the human brain’s capacity to retain knowledge and information. I’ve read so much philosophy. Kieerkegaard and Kant. Hume and Hegel and Husserl. Aristotle and Aquinas. I’ve read so much psychology, and sci-fi, and graphic novels, and fiction, and biographies, and history, and poetry, and fashion, and art, and fantasy, and…..Is there a limit? If there is, it’s my strongest desire to try and exceed it. As a kid – and this is still true of me now – I had this weird and lingering instinct to know the most that I can. I want to see inside every house. Meet every person. I want to hear all of the music that has ever been performed. See every movie. Every show. Every play. Eat all the food. And, OF COURSE, read every book that’s ever been written. All the good and all the bad and all the mediocre just absolutely stuffed inside of one human brain.
I want it all. And yet…I am so finite. So limited. So earthbound. So so so human. If eternity exists, I hope it is as an ephemeral consciousness that gets to sproing around from experience to experience throughout all of space and time. Wouldn’t that be AMAZING? It sounds so much better to me than heaven or whatever.
But for me, it always comes back to books. The distillation of experience or imagined experience on a page. The drinkable quantity of words. The plunging into another psyche or consciousness. The foray into the myriad lives of other humans begins in words. We relay them to one another in an effort to preserve them. It is DELICIOUS. I can’t think of anything better. And I have tried.
Tell me your favorite books. I will read them all. And that’s a promise. When someone recommends a book or show or song or album or movie to me, I write it down, and then I follow through. I’m not one of those annoying bros that only thinks something is cool if I found it first. I want to hear all of your recommendations. Drown me in them. I will spend the next few weeks or months of years experiencing them all. In the words of Rick James, give it to me, baby.
I will get a list for you, but I think we have a lot of overlap, and that you read far more than I do! Mostly, I read romance for escape and my monthly book club book as something a bit more elevated.
I am not an avid reader, but I say with a strict view that 'reading' means with the eyes. It's more Audible and podcasts for me these days. I also don't really read or "read" fiction much (if ever) but I vaguely remember reading A Fine Balance, which is quite a sad book but one recommended to me by a friend. Therefore I'm passing it on as a suggestion. You've more than likely read the things I've read!