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Caroline Knapp’s “Drinking: A Love Story”

In her penetrating memoir Drinking: A Love Story, Caroline Knapp compares her romance with alcohol to a doomed, dysfunctional relationship.  In the same way that an infatuated lover overlooks the flaws of their beloved, Knapp ignores the many problems caused by her drinking.  “When you love somebody, or something,” she writes, “it’s amazing how willing you are to overlook the flaws.”

Like many alcoholics, she rationalizes her destructive behavior: yes, she sometimes drank too much and yes, she rarely went a night without booze but she never drank on the job or got in her car blacked out and killed someone.  She was what we call a “functioning” alcoholic: despite her excessive drinking, she (mostly) managed to keep up appearances.  Knapp had a car, a house, a job.  In fact, she had a prestigious job at the Boston Phoenix and even wrote her own column.  Yet despite having achieved impressive heights of success, for many years, she secretly struggled with alcoholism.

As an Ivy League-educated young professional, Knapp found it difficult to see herself as an “alcoholic,” a word associated with cheap malt liquor in paper bags and dirt-smeared homeless men.  She didn’t fit the prevailing conception of a drunk: she had never been homeless or incarcerated.  Most of her drinking was social: a few innocent glasses of Chardonny with dinner, a cocktail or two with friends.  “I’m not that bad” is the logic of the functioning alcoholic.  “I might drive my car while slightly intoxicated/instigate arguments with my husband/occasionally do things I regret, but at least I have a job and a roof over my head!”

What causes someone to descend into the hellscape of addiction?  What makes someone an alcoholic?  Is alcoholism a disease encoded in our DNA or the result of a dysfunctional environment?

Knapp certainly didn’t have the tragic upbringing of many alcoholics.  She was born in Cambridge into a well-to-do East Coast family: her mother was an artist, her father was a psychoanalyst.  Her privileged youth consisted of formal family dinners and summers at Martha’s Vineyard.  She excelled academically and graduated from Brown with honors.

This is why her alcoholism is all the more mystifying.  Alcohol didn’t travel through her family like “water over a landscape” or wash across whole generations in a “liquid plague.”  There was nothing particularly traumatic she could point to in her childhood— a bitter divorce, a history of neglect or abuse— that could explain her tendencies toward self-destruction.  Had her upbringing been defined by disorder and dysfunction, her addiction might make more sense.  But I suppose that’s one lesson of Drinking: anyone— rich or poor, a Brown graduate from an affluent suburb or a tough-talking construction worker from South Boston— can be an alcoholic.  No one is safe from the tentacles of addiction.

Knapp evocatively describes the sensations of drinking (“I loved the sounds of drink: the slide of a cork as it eased out of a wine bottle, the distinct glug-glug of booze pouring into a glass, the clatter of ice cubes in a tumbler.  I loved the rituals, the camaraderie of drinking with others, the warming, melting feelings of ease and courage it gave me”) and its torturous cycles of shame and self-loathing.  

But what I loved most about Drinking was her ability to express the agony and insanity of being addicted to something.  As someone who has struggled with several dependences (alcohol, cigarettes, stimulants, shopping), I could see myself in her story with excruciating clarity.  If you’ve ever been possessed by an irrational longing for merlot or martinis, you’ll recognize the countless rules Knapp imposes on herself to “manage” her drinking: “I never drank in the morning and I never drank at work…except for an occasional mimosa or Bloody Mary at a weekend brunch, except for a glass of white wine (maybe two) with lunch on days when I didn’t have to do too much.”

When I tried to manage my smoking, I made similar rules: at first, I said I’d only smoke in the morning with my ceremonial cup of coffee or on the rare occasion I went out to the bars.  But eventually, I made an exception to every rule.  I’d only smoke in the morning with my coffee except if I had a stressful day at work: then I could smoke as much as I want.  I’d only smoke when I was drunk except if my mom pissed me off.  The addict’s rules are violable.  No matter how much Knapp tried to “control” her drinking, she couldn’t stop.

Miss Knapp incisively captures addiction’s obsessive quality.  Throughout the book, she preoccupies herself with the whos, whats, whens and wheres of drinking.  Who should she invite for a casual cocktail after work?  What should she drink: a cucumber-infused gin and tonic or an ice cold glass of Budweiser?  When could she finally pop the cork on the celebratory champagne?  Where could she get a bottle of scotch if she was at her family’s summer home and the nearest liquor store was 45 minutes away?  

If she was at a social event— a dinner with her boyfriend’s parents, a family gathering— she rigorously monitored herself.  How much cabernet should I pour into my glass?  How much time should I allow to elapse before pouring a second?  Can Aunt Lucy tell I’m completely smashed?  Knapp, like all alcoholics and addicts, spends an inordinate amount of energy trying to keep her drinking to socially acceptable levels.

“A Love Story” is the perfect subtitle to Knapp’s cleverly-crafted memoir.  At the height of her addiction, alcohol is her lover, her best friend, her closest confidant.  Alcohol is her all-consuming passion, an intense infatuation that constantly intrudes on her thoughts.  She savors the smoky quality of Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks, the refreshing crispness of a glass of Sauvignon blanc.  Knapp obsesses over alcohol like a childhood crush.  But after 20 years of tormented love, she decides it’s time to file for divorce.

However, Knapp’s neurotic love for alcohol doesn’t just dissipate when she decides to quit drinking.  In a hilarious moment after she gets sober, she wonders if she’s really an alcoholic— then she realizes only an alcoholic would wonder if they were an alcoholic at 2:30 in the morning.

A reporter and daughter of a psychologist, Knapp often approaches her subject analytically.  Because of her journalistic background, she connects her experience to larger issues; at different times, she examines the ways we glamorize alcohol in our culture and includes statistics and facts about alcoholism.  As a fanatic for non-fiction, I appreciated how Knapp masterfully balanced confessional memoir and fact-driven journalism.

Intelligently written and unfalteringly honest, Drinking: A Love Story is a vitally important addition to the addiction memoir genre.  

 

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Ursula K. Le Guin on Why We Should Pay Attention to the Music of our Sentences

“A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences,” Strunk and White wrote in their seminal writing guide The Elements of Style in 1959.  For the last half century, their philosophy on writing has reigned in newsrooms and classrooms nationwide.  Modern sensibilities prefer minimalism to ornamentation: critics praise the muscular prose of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver; high school teachers plead for their students to strip their sentences of superfluous words and fancy flourishes.

However, in her warm, witty Steering the Craft: A 21st Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story, Ursula K. Le Guin revolts against the Strunk and White idea that good sentences are always short sentences.  A clean, concise sentence, Guin concedes, can be impactful, especially after a string of elaborate prose.  But too many short, Hemingway-esque sentences can start to sound as tiresome as the not-yet-developed thoughts of a five year old.  As Guin writes,

“…very short sentences, isolated or in a series, are highly effective in the right place.  Prose consisting entirely of short, syntactically simple sentences is monotonous, choppy, irritating.  If short-sentence prose goes on very long, whatever its content, the thump-thump beat gives it a false simplicity that soon just sounds stupid.  See Spot.  See Jane.  See Spot bite Jane.”

If we are to seduce our readers, Guin suggests, we must become attuned to the music of language.  At the word level, we must choose our words carefully and pay attention to the symphonies they create: the rhythm and cadence of single syllables, the romance of vowels, the flowy, melodious “r,” the harsh, percussive sounds of consonants like “p” and “t.”  At the sentence level, we must remember one word: variety.  Too many succinct sentences and our writing sounds like it belongs in a newsroom or child’s story; too many fussy, flowery sentences and our readers inevitably get lost in a maze of syntax and have trouble deciphering our meaning.  Balance is key.  

In his indispensable Murder Your Darlings, Roy Peter Clark complies the collected wisdom of fifty of the best writing books ranging from titans of the genre like William Zinsser and William Strunk to gentle, encouraging voices like Brenda Ueland and Anne Lamott.  Murder Your Darlings is like speed dating literature’s most iconic figures: the profile of each book is brief, but immensely instructive.  If you’re a professional writer, a diligent wordsmith or just a lover of language, you’ll delight in your dates with these literary legends. 

In his chapter on Ursula K. Le Guin, Clark distills Steering the Craft into 4 practical writing tips:

1. Read your drafts…out loud.  Pay attention to the sound of your sentences and watch out for passages that have a “monotonous rhythm.”

2.  Vary your sentence length.  Too many terse sentences one after another?  Add a longer sentence to give your writing a more pleasing melody.  Too many lengthy, meandering 20 word sentences?  Introduce a brief 2 or 4 word sentence for variety.  As Janet Fitch once said in “10 Rules for Writers,” switching up your sentence structure will keep your reader from going crosseyed.

3. Be purposeful in your repetition.  The rules of the English classroom often take the inviolability of edicts.  Avoid the passive voice.  Never use “I.”  Never end a sentence with a preposition.  Despite what stuffy English teachers may have told you, you shouldn’t always avoid repetition.  Often times, the most talented literary stylists use repetition to underscore a theme or reveal a message.  Take Sylvia Plath’s genius first line from The Bell Jar, her harrowing classic:

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”

After this first image of a pair of Jewish spies being executed in the summer of 1953, the motif of electrocution is repeated throughout the story.  Why?  Because Ms. Plath was an incompetent hack who was too lazy to vary her word choice?  No, Plath intentionally repeats the image of electrocution to foreshadow the novel’s disturbing climax, the protagonist Esther’s botched electro-shock treatment.  Bad repetition is a result of oversight or sloppiness.  Good repetition serves a purpose.

When a reporter asked the late great Joan Didion why she repeats certain words and phrases, she replied, “I do it to remind the reader to make certain connections.  Technically it’s almost a chant.  You could read it as an attempt to cast a spell.”

So be a sorcerer of sentences.  Feel free to repeat…so long as you’re harnessing the incantatory power of language and casting a spell.

4. This last tip is my favorite.  Clark recommends close reading one of your own passages that you think works well.  Like Joan Didion who counted the words in Hemingway’s famous opening to Farewell to Arms, you should take a mathematical approach to your analysis: count, literally count, the words in each of your sentences.  What do you notice?  Most likely, you’ll see that you use a variety of sentences: simple, compound, complex.  Some of your sentences will be as condensed as a hurried p.s. at the end of a note; others will seem as epically enormous as a Donna Tartt novel.  Next time you go to write, use your passage as a model. 

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 2 Comments

Arnold Bennett on Why We Should “Use” Our Free Time

“Life feels so mundane,” my college friend confessed the other day, “I just go to work and pay bills.”  Sadly, as we get older, every day comes to seem the same: wake up, have your morning coffee, wait for the (yet again) late 8:30 train, do monotonous, meaningless work under the harsh fluorescent lights of a grim office that is relentlessly gray, come home, repeat.  Little— if anything— breaks up the tedium of our days.  “Adulting” is living in an eternal Groundhog Day. 

In his 1908 masterpiece of self-help How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, Arnold Bennett prescribes a potent medicine for the mundanity of modern living.  According to Bennett, the greatest tragedy of our times is that we regard 8 hours— a whole third of our existence— as simply something to “get over with.”  Though a great fraction of our time is spent working, few approach their jobs with a sense of fervor or eagerness.  As Bennett writes, “In the majority of instances he does not precisely feel a passion for his business; at best he does not dislike it.”

Worse still is the fact that we treat the other 16 hours of our day as “free time” to waste.  Of course, 8 of those 16 hours are spent sleeping but what about the other 8?  After work, we fritter away these precious moments in some trivial activity: relaxing but ultimately random reading, zombified scrolling, superficial conversation, T.V.  And so runs the unfortunate course of our finite lives: 1/3 spent sleeping, 1/3 spent working at a profession we find divorced from a transcendent cause or greater meaning, and 1/3 spent in trifling activity.  

Bennett believed our gravest mistake was making our jobs the focus of our day.  Though many of us dislike if not outright despise our jobs, we organize our lives around what we do for a living.  For most— Bennett claims— the hours from 9 to 5 constitute the day: “the ten hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue.”  We use the hours before and after work like money in a foreign country: we insist this time doesn’t “count,” so we spend it frivolously.  After all, it’s easy to spend extravagantly in Greece if the concept of a euro means nothing.

Rather than squander our finite time on Earth, Bennet argues we should use time wisely.  The forefather of self-help recommends we devote an hour and a half every other evening to some “important and consecutive cultivation of the mind.”  

But why only an hour and a half every other night?  Certainly we have more free time.

If we work a traditional 9-5, we probably have around 5-6 hours every day of “free time.”  However, we must account for our other obligations.  After commuting and grabbing our morning coffee, grocery shopping and going to the post office, making cereal for our kids and reading them bedtime stories, we probably have less than 3 hours of free time. 

So why still only commit an hour and a half every other night?

As with any worthwhile endeavor, we must start small.  An hour and a half every other night is a manageable amount.  After a few weeks of dedicated practice to our “cultivation of mind,” most of us will spend several evenings a week engaged in our activity and prefer it to the hollow pleasures of social media and T.V. watching.

But what, exactly, constitutes a “cultivation of mind”?  What should we use our hour and a half every other night for?  

Watch AFI’s 100 Greatest Movies of All Time.  Read all of Leo Tolstoy’s works.  Train for a half marathon. 

Our goals may be physical or intellectual, spiritual or emotional, the only important thing is we have a goal and that goal personally resonates with us.  We can work to realize a lifelong ambition (write a novel) or revive a long neglected hobby (collect midcentury furniture).  We can learn to speak Italian or play the piano or master the art of Szechuan cooking or aim to expand our knowledge of 18th century literature.  The only requirement is we choose something meaningful.           

Why is learning a skill or cultivating a passion or taking up a hobby so crucial?  As Bennet so eloquently explains, if you learn, say, how a symphony operates, the next time you go to a concert, you’ll have an “astonishing intensification of interest in it.”  That is the beauty of hobbies: they renew our fascination and rekindle our zest for existence. 

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 2 Comments

Olivier Burkeman on the Reality that You Never “Have” Time

Much of our mortal lives is a struggle against the clock.  We’re obsessed with managing time, with breaking it down into concrete, controllable blocks.  We streamline our lives and regiment our schedules with military precision.  We treat our days like assembly lines, something to be made more efficient.  We pencil and plot and plan.  We book doctor’s appointments, write agendas on the boards of our classrooms, schedule coffee dates with our friends three weeks in advance.  A date scribbled in our calendars gives us the illusion of certainty: if it’s written in ink— we believe— our plans will unfold accordingly.

However, as most of us know, life almost never goes according to plan.  Though you “plan” to go on a coffee date with your friend, Olivier Burkeman writes in his philosophically-minded masterpiece 0f self-help Four Thousand Weeks, any “number of factors [can] confound your expectations, robbing you of the…hours you thought you had.”  You might get a flat tire on the way to the coffee shop.  Your friend might cancel because she’s sick.

Despite our hubristic belief that man can move mountains and has dominion over all beasts, time is one thing man cannot control.  No matter how neurotically we try to squeeze the events of our lives into predictable schedules, we can never force Father Time to submit to our will.  The vet’s appointment that was supposed to take a quick 50 minutes will become an interminable 3 hours.  The languid summer afternoon we “had” to spend working on our novel will get rudely interrupted by the unwelcome sound of the doorbell.

In the cleverly titled chapter “We Never Really Have Time,” Burkeman calls into question the very idea that we “have” time in the first place.  Though we worry and obsess, project and plan, our “plans” are intentions for the future— nothing more.

Our calendars offer consolation in a chaotic world: when we pen an appointment in poised cursive in our planners (doctor’s appointment @ 2pm), we feel in command.  We don’t have to confront the disturbing, rather distressing fact that much of life lies outside our control: how and when we’ll die, whether democracy collapses across the globe, the rise of the alt-right, the rate at which polar ice melts, the rise and fall of the Dow Jones.

In many ways, we’re not the directors of our lives: we can’t force our marriage-wary on-again, off-again boyfriend to propose, nor can we cast our ceaselessly critical older sister into a less nitpicking role.  Life is a movie, but we can only partially write the script.  If we want to lose weight, we can eat bananas and granola, we can exercise 3-4 times a week, we can drink water instead of soda and other sugary drinks, but ultimately we can’t change our body’s fundamental shape.  If we’re naturally more curvaceous, we’re never going to be Kate Moss-skinny— even if we do 100 crunches a day.

Our obsessive planning deludes us into thinking we can control the future.  When we assert that our doctor’s visit will— in fact— occur at 2 pm, we feel we can assert other things with confidence: that we’ll drive to work without getting into an accident, that our troubled son will graduate high school and not fall victim to drug addiction, that that the lump in our breast is benign, not malignant, that we’ve been silly to lose sleep over a possibly terminal cancer diagnosis.  Like William Ernest Henley in his rousing poem “Invictus,” we insist we’re “captains of our souls.”  But we’re not captains of our fate— we’re more like helpless life rafts bobbing in a storm-tossed sea of forces beyond our control.  

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Oliver Burkeman on the Myth of “Doing it All” & the Secret to Making the Most of Your Harrowingly Short Life

We live in a time-obsessed age.  We want to control it, to conquer it, to use it wisely.  If you’re a reluctant self-help enthusiast like me, you’ve tried everything to streamline your schedule and increase efficiency: read books like The Checklist Manifesto and The 4-Hour Work Week, used apps to track your calories and your sleep, been convinced by tech bro podcasts that the key to success was to emulate billionaires’ morning routines.

Sadly, most self-help convinces us we can optimize our lives as if humans were nothing more than yet-to-be-perfected machines.  In his part how-to guide, part philosophical treatise Four Thousand Weeks, British journalist Oliver Burkeman rallies against such misdirected self-help and suggests there’s more to life than crossing items off a to-do list in the name of productivity.  

The New York Times observes Burkeman’s work can sit comfortably on the “shelf next to the books published by Alain de Botton, literary-flavored advice on love, friendship, work and other conundrums.”  The comparison to Botton is apt: both are British, both are charmingly cynical, and both fuse together the wisdom of the ages into how-to guides for modern mortals.

Though its premise (life is short— we should make the most of each day) seems unbearably commonplace, Four Thousand Weeks manages (for the most part) to escape self-help’s empty cliches.  In fact, I dare say Burkeman will inspire you to look at time in a whole new way.

A self-proclaimed “productivity geek,” Burkeman was at one time a devoted believer in the religion of productivity: he used highlighters to color code his planner, broke down his day into 15 minute increments, and tried countless efficiency systems such as Inbox Zero and the Pomodoro technique.

Then one winter in 2014, he had an unsettling epiphany: he was never going to scale the mountain of all his “to-do” tasks and blissfully arrive at the summit of “being on top of everything.”  

According to Burkeman, the problem with most time management philosophies is they rest on the erroneous premise that we can do everything.  If only we could find the most efficient way to structure our day/tackle our inbox, we could launch our 6-figure business, have a happy marriage and regularly run marathons.  If only we could find the most aesthetically-pleasing Pinterest-worthy planner, we could systematically prioritize our to-do list and “get it all done.”

But the reality is we can’t do it all.

Staying late at the office means we can’t have game night with our family.  Opting to go with our friends to a bar Friday night means we most likely can’t go running early Saturday morning.  If we only have 2 weeks of vacation a year, we can’t possibly go to every one of our “must-see” destinations: we have to choose between the endless excitement of New York and the majestic turquoise waters of Bali.

The problem with the be/do/have it all mentality is it encourages us to say “yes” to every opportunity: social invitations, networking events, more and more responsibility.  The result?  We have full calendars of other people’s priorities.  Because we said “yes” to Sarah’s dinner party, we spend our Saturday night nibbling on quiche instead of working on our 3 act play.  And because we said “yes” to yet another project at work, we can no longer take a romantic holiday to wine country.

Ultimately, time management isn’t about “doing it all” (which is impossible)— it’s about coming to terms with the fact that you’re never going to.  You’re never going to have a bustling social life and work 60 hours a week.  You’re never going to have the picture-perfect marriage and a high-powered career.  You’re never going to be a world-class pianist and a Harvard PhD.  Perhaps a few super humans among us can do many things, but the rest of us mortals must make choices.  Time management requires you face your finitude: as Burkeman asserts, “your time is finite, doing anything requires sacrifice— the sacrifice of all the other things you could have been doing with that stretch of time.”

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Joan Didion on How Detours Bring Us Closer to Our Destiny

Most of us have clear ideas about how our dreams should unfold.  If we want to be movie stars, for example, we imagine our breakthrough moment will be an Academy Award or a critically-acclaimed starring role.  We dream our big break will manifest in a very specific way: a major director will notice us while we’re waiting tables; after a single audition, we’ll land our ideal part.  We imagine we’ll be “discovered” in some romantic fashion like Lana Turner, casually sipping a coke at a malt shop.  Our initiation into Tinseltown will be the legendary stuff of Hollywood lore.

But sometimes our “big break,” doesn’t seem big at all.  This, we think, wasn’t how it was supposed to go!  We were supposed to be “serious” actors— not amateurs in a 30 second McDonald’s commercial!

If we’re about to pass up an opportunity because it isn’t as glitzy or glamorous as our fantasies, because we think it’s a roundabout detour on what should be a straight and narrow path to our destiny, essayist and journalist Joan Didion would say one thing: don’t.

Didion understood that dreams don’t always come true the way we hoped.  After graduating from U.C. Berkeley in 1956, she moved to New York City to become a writer.  Her first gig was writing merchandising copy for Vogue.  Though Vogue is certainly a prestigious publication, Didion didn’t exactly imagine her “dream job” would involve writing compact 1-line captions for patent leather pumps.  Another writer might have dismissed this type of “writing” as frivolous.  But Didion saw fashion writing as a way to perfect her craft and polish her prose.  In her landmark 1978 essay “Telling Stories,” one of many characteristically clear-eyed pieces from Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Didion realizes that her time at Vogue played a formative role in shaping the writer she’d become:

“It is easy to make light of this kind of ‘writing,’ and I mention it specifically because I do not make light of it at all: it was at Vogue that I learned a kind of ease with words, a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toy weapons to be deployed strategically on a page.  In a caption of, say, eight lines, each line to run no more or less than twenty-seven characters, not only every word but every letter counted.  At Vogue one learned fast, or did not stay, how to play games with words, how to put a couple of unwieldy dependent clauses through the typewriter and roll them out transformed into one simple sentence composed of precisely thirty-nine characters.  We were connoisseurs of synonyms.  We were collectors of verbs.  (I recall “to ravish” as a highly favored verb for a number of issues and I also recall it, for a number of issues more, as the source of a highly favored noun: “ravishments,” as in “tables cluttered with porcelain tulips, Faberge eggs, and other ravishments.”)  We learned as reflex the grammatical tricks we had learned only as marginal corrections in school (“there were two oranges and an apple” read better than “there were an apple and two oranges,” passive verbs slowed down sentences, “it” needed a reference within the scan of an eye), learned to scan the OED, learned to write and rewrite and rewrite again.  “Run it through again, sweetie, it’s not quite there.”  “Give me a shock verb two lines in.”  “Prune it out, clean it up, make the point.”  Less was more, smooth was better, and absolute precision essential to the monthly grand illusion.  Going to work for Vogue was, in the 1950s, not unlike training with the Rockettes.”

It was at Vogue that Didion developed her distinctive style and terse, tough-minded prose.  Lesson?  We never know how the seeds of our dreams will blossom and grow.  For more from this stellar sentence stylist, read Ms. Didion on writing as a process of discovery and the pains & perils of self-doubt.

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 2 Comments

Joan Didion on Self-Doubt

Oscar Wilde once said, “The artist’s life is a long, lovely suicide.”  Though Wilde could be dramatic, the idea that writing is agonizing is certainly not an overstatement.  Writing is torment.  Writing is laboring all day on a single page only to toss it in the trash.  For every day of creative bliss, there are countless days when you want to quit.

To go to the blank page is to meet your demons.  When we write, we must battle that barbarous inner voice who whispers “you’re not good enough” at every turn.  Still, we write songs and sonnets because we possess a primal urge.  Writing is a way of saying “I was here.”

All writers struggle with self-doubt, whether they’re toiling away in anonymity or are widely renowned.  It’s hard to imagine someone as influential and iconic as Joan Didion questioning her own talent.  But much like Virginia Woolf— who felt inconceivably inferior compared to her idol Marcel Proust (“Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out a sentence,” she wrote to a friend in 1922)— Didion believed she was hopelessly dull compared to her infinitely more interesting peers.In “Telling Stories,” one of many incisively-observed essays from Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Didion offers a glimpse into the writer’s fragile psyche.  In the fall of 1954, Didion, who at the time was a junior at U.C. Berkeley, earned a coveted spot in writer and literary critic Mark Schorer’s English 106A.   “An initiation into the grave world of real writers,” English 106A was a writer’s workshop that required students to write five short stories.

As an inexperienced nineteen-year-old, Didion swiftly sunk into the quicksand of insecurity.  “Who am I to write?” she wondered, “Do I even have anything meaningful to say?”

Her classmates had met famous people and travelled to far-flung places.  Her own life felt uneventful by comparison.  She had never been in love or known real difficulty.  She had never had an affair in Cuba or danced all night in Harlem or sipped wine in Tuscany.  Her short life was circumscribed within the 100 square miles of her native Sacramento.  Certainly, she believed, there was nothing in her unremarkable life that could be transmuted into a short story or novel:

“I remember each other member of this class as older and wiser than I had hope of ever being…not only older and wiser but more experienced, more independent, more interesting, more possessed of an exotic past: marriages and the breaking up of marriages, money and the lack of it, sex and politics and the Adriatic seen at dawn; the stuff not only of grown-up life itself but more poignantly to me at the time, the very stuff which might be transubstantiated into five short stories.  I recall a Trotskyist, then in his forties.  I recall a young woman who lived, with a barefoot man and a large white dog, in an attic lit only by candles.  I recall classroom discussions which ranged over meetings with Paul and Jane Bowles, incidents involving Djuna Barnes, years spent in Paris, in Beverley Hills, the Yucatan, on the Lower East Side of New York and on Repulse Bay and even on morphine.  I had spent seventeen of my nineteen years in Sacramento, and the other two in the Tri Delt house on Warring Street in Berkeley.  I had never read Paul or Jane Bowles, let alone met them, and when, some fifteen years later at a friend’s house in Santa Monica Canyon, I did meet Paul Bowles, I was immediately rendered as dumb and awestruck as I had been when I was nineteen and taking English 106A.”  

As a fellow English major at U.C. Berkeley, I can relate to Ms. Didion’s plight.  I—too— had to navigate the notoriously labyrinthine halls of Dwinelle as a shy, self-conscious girl in my early twenties.  As a transfer student from junior college who barely graduated high school and never dreamed of going to a prestigious four-year university, I had to constantly battle the debilitating sense that everyone in my class was somehow more qualified than me.  In the stately lecture halls of the Wheeler building, I felt unforgivably less than my bookish classmates who wore oxfords and chinos and had impressive internships at magazines.  Like Didion, I never spoke for fear my words would reveal my stupidity.  As Didion writes, 

“In short I had no past and, every Monday-Wednesday-Friday at noon in Dwinelle Hall, it seemed increasingly clear to me I had no future.  I ransacked my closet for clothes in which I might appear invisible to the class, and came up with only a dirty raincoat.  I sat in this raincoat and listened to other people’s stories read aloud and I despaired of ever knowing what they knew.  I attended every meeting of this class and never spoke once.  I managed to write only three of the five required stories.  I received— only, I think now, because Mr. Schorer, a man of infinite kindness to and acuity about his students, divined intuitively that my failing performance was a function of adolescent paralysis, of a yearning to be good and a fright that I never would be, of terror that any sentence I committed to paper would expose me as not good enough— a course grade of B.”

Paralyzed by fear, Didion didn’t write another story for ten years.  For a decade, she lost the battle against her merciless inner censor.  The irony, of course, is that— despite her insistence that she wasn’t interesting/intellectual/experienced enough— she would go on to become one of the most vital voices of her generation.  

Lesson?  Even great writers suffer writer’s block and fear rejection.  For more from Didion, read about her ideas on art as expression & discovery, her time at Vogue, and her famous sense of fashion.

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Is it Useful? Is It Beautiful? William Morris on How to Declutter Your Space

In our crazed, capitalist society, we are what we consume.  Because our standing in the social hierarchy depends on how much we buy, we strive to accumulate more: more money, more real estate, more cars, more clothes.  We’re obsessed with “getting and spending” as William Wordsworth observed over two centuries ago.

The tragedy of our times is that the shopping mall has become our collective cathedral.  Rather than develop a deep interconnectedness with our fellows or believe in something greater than ourselves, we worship the material.  Ultimately, we believe the answers to our spiritual problems can be found in the racks of department stores.  

Feel isolated and lonely?  Forget connection and community.  Find consolation in the luxurious leather of Gucci.

Uncertain of your life’s purpose?  A glamorous fur coat or pair of vintage Jimmy Choos will cure your existential dread.

But this excessive cycle of “getting and spending” has serious consequences.  We are collapsing under the weight of consumer products.  Today, the average American household contains 300,000 items.  Though the size of our homes has nearly doubled over the last fifty years, nearly 10% of Americans still have to rent some sort of self–storage.  Indeed, self-storage has boomed in recent years: in 1984, there were only 6,600 storage facilities across the United States; today, there are an astounding 50,000.  In the internet age where anything can be delivered to your doorstep with a click of a mouse, it has become all too easy to accumulate more junk.

Our epidemic obsession with stuff has sparked new professions and entire industries.  Today you can hire a professional organizer to sort through your mountains of clothes and classify them by color and type in a closet worthy of Good Housekeeping.  International bestsellers like The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up teach us how to let go of things that don’t “spark joy” while retailers like the Container Store promise their orderly storage bins can contain the disarray of our lives.In her compact, befittingly uncluttered Clutter: An Untidy History, Jennifer Howard examines our relationship to the things we bring into our lives.  Interweaving her own personal experiences with meticulous research, Howard traces clutter from its beginnings in the lavish drawing rooms of the Victorian era to the overcrowded American homes of the modern day.

As we embark on a new year, many of us (myself included) have resolved to declutter our space.  How— Howard wonders— can we distinguish what to toss from what to keep?  How do we know what things to bring into our homes in the first place?

To answer this question, she turns to English designer, activist and poet William Morris (1834–1896). Morris was a central figure in the Arts & Crafts movement, which revolted against the mass production and cheap consumerism brought about by the Industrial Revolution.  Deeply troubled by the declining quality of goods, he rejected the mechanization of modern manufacturing and championed careful craftsmanship.  

The core tenets of his philosophy?  Beauty and utility.

The Arts & Crafts movement wasn’t just an artistic revolution— it was political as well.  “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion in my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization,” Morris wrote rather pessimistically in 1894.  Like the Romantic poets, who shared his distaste for modernity, Morris romanticized the past, particularly the Middle Ages.  Unlike modern factory workers on an assembly line, who were alienated from the fruits of their labor, the artisans of the past took pride in their work and felt deeply connected to the things they made.  Morris envisioned a future where the people who made our goods were artists rather than cogs in a machine.

The master of minimalism, Morris believed in quality over quantity.  He rejected the popular design trends of his day: while most Victorians favored excess and extravagance, he disliked ornamentation.  For him, a single statement piece was preferable to a mantelpiece cluttered with random tchotchkes.

So to return to our central question: when it comes to our personal space, how can we distinguish what to toss from what to keep?  

In his iconic 1880 “The Beauty of Life” speech, Morris created a handy rule of thumb.  An object should only remain in our lives if it is either beautiful or functional.  Or as Morris writes, 

“Believe me, if we want art to begin at home, as it must, we must clear our houses of troublesome superfluities that are forever in our way: conventional comforts that are no real comforts, and do but make work for servants and doctors: if you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: HAVE NOTHING IN YOUR HOUSES THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW TO BE USEFUL OR BELIEVE TO BE BEAUTIFUL.”

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 2 Comments

Seneca on How To Remain Calm Amidst a Sea of Troubles

Life is a sea of frustration: we can’t seem to find our car keys when we’re already 20 minutes late for work, we pour a bowl of cereal only to discover we have no milk.

How do we react when things don’t go our way?

Most often, with flames of anger and red-hot rage. 

We hurl our coach cushions while we desperately search for our keys; we curse the cruel universe (and our inconsiderate roommate who never refills anything) for making us have to go to the grocery store first thing in the morning.  The most minor mishap can send us into a tantrum, though we should be far more mature for someone of middle age.

Why do the smallest, most insignificant things possess the power to make us so angry?

According to Seneca, father of Stoicism, anger is not an explosion of uncontrollable passions— it’s the result of an error in reasoning.  We rant and rave when our expectations collide with reality.  For example, when we were expecting to spend our Saturday soaking in the sun only to learn that the weather forecast predicts gray skies and relentless rain.  Or consider the romantic arena: we only pout and lock ourselves in our room when our husband forgets our anniversary because we expected him to romance us with extravagant gifts, a diamond necklace perhaps, or two round-trip tickets to Tahiti.

In his ever-edifying The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton suggests anger isn’t an inextinguishable wildfire— it can be contained.  According to Botton, who famously finds solutions to contemporary problems in the wrinkled pages of art, literature and philosophy, Seneca’s stoicism can stamp out our embers of exasperation before they burst into full-blown flames of rage.  Rather than expect too much from the world, we would be wise to lower our expectations and take a grimmer view of reality.

To illustrate his point, Botton uses one of Seneca’s acquaintances, Vedius Pollio.  A wealthy man from ancient Rome, Pollio lived in a world of grand gardens, gold-gilded palaces, extravagant feasts, and elaborate frescoes.  Like many rich men, Pollio was accustomed to getting his way.  When one of his slaves dropped a tray of crystal glasses during a party, Pollio was so enraged that he ordered him to be thrown into a pool of lampreys.  

Was Pollio’s reaction a tad bit extreme?  Of course: most of us wouldn’t toss someone into a pool of eels for such a silly mistake.  

So why did something so trivial (a bit of broken glass) catapult a dignified man of refined manners and good breeding into such a blind rage?

His anger seems disproportionate to its cause.  Certainly, a man of his class could have replaced the crystal.  With the commanding wave of a hand, Pollio could have had one of his hundred servants come and sweep up the shattered dishes.  Logically, there’s no reason a few broken glasses had to ruin the revelry of the evening.

However, Botton argues there’s rationale behind Pollio’s seeming irrationality: “Pollio was angry for an identifiable reason: because he believed in a world in which glasses do not get broken at parties.”  In other words, his reality (my clumsy slave tripped and smashed my precious crystal) didn’t meet his expectations (my party will proceed smoothly).  

If we want to be calm and generally content, we must learn to expect less of life.  Rather than expect circumstances to unfold according to our carefully-orchestrated plans, we should rip a page from the Stoic survivalist handbook and prepare for the worst to happen.  If— like Pollio— we’re hosting a dinner party, we should anticipate things will not go smoothly: guests will arrive that didn’t RSVP, we’ll run out of champagne, our guests will inevitably have trouble finding topics of conversation and suffer a few awkward silences as they nibble crackers and brie.

Ultimately, Stoicism suggests we relinquish rose-colored romanticism and accept reality.  No matter what, our time on this planet will be filled with rude people, interminably long lines, stolen credit card information, delayed flights, flat tires, and human stupidity.  If, as Botton writes, we reconcile ourselves to life’s necessary imperfectability, we’ll be less angry (and less likely to fling a helpless servant into a pool of lampreys). 

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Schopenhauer on Art as an Antidote to our Greatest Affliction

What is philosophy for?  For many, philosophy is a lofty subject only meant to be studied by tweed-jacketed professors in the university hall.  The word “philosopher” conjures images of men in ancient Greece or Rome who have white beards and wear long, flowy robes.  Philosophy isn’t for ordinary people like mailmen and school teachers— it’s reserved for great intellects like Nietzsche and Socrates and Plato.  Philosophers are a privileged class who have the time to ponder life’s big questions (who am I?/what am I meant to do?).

However, in his charming The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton argues just the opposite: philosophy is simply the study of how to live well.  A delightful little volume organized by afflictions such as “heartbreak,” “unpopularity,” and “not having enough money,” The Consolations of Philosophy rests on the premise that philosophy is a form of medicine.  The words of a great thinker can have restorative properties.  In this 2000 classic, the irresistibly intelligent Botton sifts through thousands of years of collective wisdom to find the wisest minds’ remedies for our most common problems.  

Do you only have $5 in your bank account, but long for luxurious pleasures such as Birkin bags and champagne-soaked meals at Michelin star restaurants?  A dose of Epicurus will remind you that happiness isn’t always found in the extravagant excesses of materialism.  Have you been driven to the brink of insanity by such tragic events as losing a loved one or such petty frustrations as losing your car keys?  Dr. Botton would write you a prescription for the Stoic philosopher Seneca.

Of all the difficulties in the modern world, loneliness is probably our most widespread problem.  In a recent national survey of American adults, 36% of respondents reported feeling lonely “frequently” or “almost all the time.”  More Americans are spending time alone than ever before.

Why do rates of loneliness run rampant?  Some blame our modern alienation on the advent of social media (after all, why bother with complicated, occasionally dull human interaction when TikTok provides dizzying dopamine-fueled hits of cheap entertainment?); others blame the capitalist rat race for money and status.  Certainly, our sense of isolation only worsened during the pandemic.

Luckily, there is a cure for our loneliness.  If we’re lacking connection in real life, we can find companionship in the fictional worlds of art and books.  Books are medicines for our maladies, slings for our spirits, salves for our wounds.  To read a book— or observe a painting or contemplate a poem— is to see our own lives reflected back to us.  By expressing their particular experience, the artist illuminates an aspect of the greater human experience.  Though Tolstoy wrote Family Happiness using his own experience of marriage, the modern woman who finds herself disenchanted with domesticity can still see herself in Masha’s tale.  Books remind us other people have felt our feelings and thought our thoughts, even if it was many centuries ago.  Referencing the great German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, Botton notes:

“We do have one advantage over moles.  We may have to fight for survival and hunt for partners and have children as they do, but we can in addition go to the theatre, the opera and the concert hall, and in bed in the evenings, we can read novels, philosophy and epic poems— and it is in these activities that Schopenhauer located a supreme source of relief from the demands of the will-to-life.  What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language, or image.  Artists and philosophers not only show us what we have felt, they present our experiences more poignantly and intelligently than we have been able; they give shape to aspects of our lives that we recognize as our own, yet could never have understood so clearly on our own.  They explain our condition to us, and thereby help us to be less lonely with, and confused by it.  We may be obliged to continue burrowing underground, but through creative works, we can at least acquire moments of insights into our woes, which spare us feelings of alarm and isolation (even persecution) at being afflicted by them.  In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.”  

Ultimately, art dispels the illusion that we are alone in our struggles.  The dispirited can discover hope in the Letters of Vincent Van Gogh; the love sick can find solace in sonnets written by a Renaissance man nearly a half millennia ago.  Or as Botton writes, a snubbed suitor can find consolation in Goethe:

“By reading a tragic tale of love, a rejected suitor raises himself above his own situation; he is no longer one man suffering alone, singly and confusedly, he is part of a vast body of human beings who have throughout time fallen in love with other humans in the agonizing drive to propagate the species.  [By reading], his suffering loses a little of its sting.”