Posted on by Asia Lenae

Alain de Botton on Real Love Stories & What Happens After Happily Ever After

“What we typically call love is only the start of love,” Alain de Botton shrewdly observes in The Course of Love, his part-novel, part-philosophical treatise.  In Hollywood movies and sappy love songs, love is often arrested in its development.  Our love stories preoccupy themselves with the first stage of love: infatuation.  Fairytales center around the first confession of love, the first breathtaking glance of the beloved.  They trace love’s journey from obsessive crush and culminate in a first kiss.  Then our princess marries the prince and they ride off into the sunset.  “And they lived happily ever after,” fairytale wisdom says.    

But what happens after the giddy couple prances off into the sunset?  Do Cinderella and Prince Charming remain enamored of each other?  Do Ariel and Prince Eric find martial bliss or does their relationship crumble under the weight of unequal sacrifices and grudge-bearing resentment?

Consider one of the most beloved love stories of the modern era, Titanic.  Like Disney movies and old Hollywood romances, Titanic concerns itself with love’s conception.  Jack and Rose’s affair only lasts a few days before the unsinkable ship fatefully crashes into an iceberg and Jack perishes.  Because of his untimely death, their story is imperishably frozen: their love is eternally perfect.  Almost a hundred years old, the aging Rose fondly remembers Jack Dawson as the life-loving, free-spirited artist, the man who saved her from a materially secure but loveless marriage.

But had Jack not frozen to death in the frigid Atlantic, would he and Rose really have frolicked into the sunset?  Would they have been able to sustain their steamy, sex-in-random-cars passion?  Or would they— like most long-term couples— settle into the monotonous routines of marriage?  After the terror of almost dying in the mid-Atlantic and thrill of escaping Rose’s gun-slinging almost-husband, would their forbidden relationship lose some of its excitement?  Would Jack become an inattentive, inconsiderate husband?  Would Rose have cheated?  Would she eventually resent Jack’s bohemian lifestyle and desire him to be something more than a penniless artist?  Would they have bickered about dirty dishes and unfolded laundry and who’s turn it was to take out the trash?

the course of love

In The Course of Love, sage of love Alain de Botton suggests real love is full of disappointment and sacrifices.  Had Jack and Rose’s love story continued after Titanic’s maiden voyage, they would have almost certainly endured periods of boredom and quarreled about what time to leave for an 8 o’ clock dinner reservation. 

The problem with most depictions of love is they conveniently omit love’s later stages.  We only see the bride and groom blissfully happy as they leave their wedding in a horse-drawn carriage— we don’t see the slammed doors and sulky silent treatment, the spats about forgotten anniversaries and the late night squabbles about finances.

The result?

Our real-life love seems woefully inadequate.   

Consolingly cynical, Botton sets out to undermine such detrimentally romantic conceptions of love and marriage.  A kind of sequel to his debut novel On Love, The Course of Love tells the story of a young couple, Rabih and Kirsten, who fall in love, get married and have children.  Conventional wisdom says their love story begins and ends the moment they say “I do” and Rabih kisses Kirsten.

But Botton argues what we think of as the story of love is really just an introduction.  Love is everything that comes after: the affectionate nicknames and cruelly, carelessly uttered expletives; the early rip-off-your-clothes passion and the later weeks (sometimes months) of obligatory, unimaginative sex.  As Botton so wittily writes: 

“He and Kirsten will marry, they will suffer, they will frequently worry about money, they will have a girl first, then a boy, one of them will have an affair, there will be passages of boredom, they’ll sometimes want to murder one another and on a few occasions, to kill themselves.  This will be the real love story.”

Rabih and Kirsten’s love story begins like every couple’s: with admiration.  In the prologue of their relationship, both feel they are fragmented and unfinished until the other completes them:

“He had fallen in love with her calm; her faith that it will be OK; her lack of a sense of persecution, her absence of fatalism— these are the virtues of his new Scottish friend who speaks in an accent so hard to understand that he has to ask three times for clarification on her use of the word temporary.  Rabih’s love is a logical response to the discovery of complementary strengths and a range of attributes to which he aspires.  He loves from a feeling of incompleteness— and from a desire to be made whole. 

He isn’t alone in this.  Albeit in different areas, Kirsten is likewise seeking to makeup for deficiencies.  She didn’t travel outside Scotland until after university.  Her relatives all come from the same small part of the country.  Spirits are narrow there, the colors grey, the atmosphere provincial, the values self-denying.  She is, in response, powerfully drawn to what she associates with the south.  She wants light, hope, people who live through their bodies with passion and emotion.  She reveres the sun while hating her own paleness and discomfort in the rays.  There is a poster of the medina in Fez hanging on her wall. 

She is excited by what she has learnt about Rabih’s background.  She finds it intriguing that he is the son of a Lebanese engineer father and a Germain air-hostess mother.  He tells her stories about a childhood spent in Beirut, Athens, Barcelona, in which there were moments of brightness and beauty and, now and then, extreme danger.  He speaks Arabic, French, German, and Spanish; his endearments, playfully delivered, come in many flavors.  His skin is olive to her rosy white.  He crosses his long legs when he sits and his surprisingly delicate hands know how to prepare her makdous, tabbouleh, and Kartoffelsalat.  He feeds her his worlds.”

But the giddiness of love doesn’t last.  Like all couples, Rabih and Kirsten perform the best version of themselves in the beginning of the relationship.  But after years of marriage, both reveal they can be petty, selfish, and inattentive.  The differences they once found charming become exasperating evidence of their incompatibility and a source of resentment (why does Rabih tell stories so directly?  why does Kirsten insist on sleeping with the window open?).  Passion withers with baby bottles and mortgage payments.

Despite his deep love for his wife, Rabih eventually has an affair with Lauren, an urban planner from Los Angeles, while away at a work conference.

What drives people to betray their spouses?

Popular wisdom says a cheater cheats because he/she no longer loves his/her wife/husband. 

But nothing could be less true. 

According to Botton, affairs are driven by a desire for excitement, a desperate longing to recover first love’s exhilaration.  In the flirtatious first stage of a relationship, we’re released from the crushing realities of actually being with another person.  When we have sex with a stranger in a Berlin hotel room, they’re infinitely more charming than our significant other for the sole reason that we don’t know them.  Hands fumbling beneath blouses, wet tongues eagerly exploring each others’ mouths, we desire our late night lover with such intensity because we know nothing of their maddening habits and don’t split a phone bill yet (“The best cure for love is to get to know [someone],” Botton quips).

Ultimately, the appeal of an affair is adventure.  Over many years, our affection for our husband/wife becomes deadened by habit and custom: we no longer notice the considerate way they make us coffee without being prompted or ask about their day and bother to actually listen.  But in a foreign city with a stranger, we can appreciate the little things about our newfound lover because of the novelty of the situation.

A forbidden affair makes our humdrum lives feel worth living again.  Stealing kisses in strange hotels and sneaking away to make clandestine phone calls, we feel like James Bond in a spy movie instead of a bored housewife in rural Iowa.  Sleeping with Lauren frees Rabih from the tedium of his domestic roles as husband and father.  With her, he can forget about bath times and bedtime stories, his coming crows feet and his disappointing career.

Rabih finds himself pulled between two irreconcilable longings: safety and adventure.  On one hand, he finds comfort in the predictable domestic life he’s built with Kirsten: the quiet nights eating pasta and playing Monopoly, the tender intimacy of sitting in silence and watching a movie. 

On the other, he yearns for adrenaline, for adventure.  He misses going to crowded night clubs, electronic music blaring, technicolor lights flashing, tan women in barely there tops pulsating with sweat.  He nostalgically recalls nights in his youth when he’d go to a bar and have no idea where the night might take him.  Now at 31, his life feels so regimented.

Lauren represents all the other men he could be, all the other more interesting lives he could have.  During their Facetime calls, he imagines a parallel life with her in Los Angeles.  They would make love all day; they would have margaritas and shrimp by the ocean at sunset.  They wouldn’t fight in the glassware section of IKEA or squander whole afternoons giving each other the silent treatment.

But Rabih soon realizes you can’t have both the adventure of an affair and the safety and security of a long term relationship.  They are diametrically opposite:

“Adventure and security are irreconcilable, he sees.  A loving marriage and children kill erotic spontaneity, and an affair kills marriage.  A person cannot at once be a libertine and a married Romantic, however compelling both paradigms might be.  He doesn’t downplay the loss either way.  Saying goodbye to Lauren means safeguarding his marriage but it also means denying himself a critical source of tenderness and elation.  Neither the love rat nor the faithful spouse gets it right.  There is no solution.” 

His fantasies of a life with Lauren are just that: fantasies.  If he left his wife for his mistress, he almost certainly would encounter the same problems he has in his marriage.  In time, Lauren would reveal she has just as many flaws as Kirsten, though they might be different.  His wife might irrationally demand they arrive at a restaurant an hour early for a dinner reservation— Lauren might have an irritating habit of using the word “literally” every other sentence.  Inevitably, Rabih and Lauren would have disagreements about where to spend the holidays and whose turn it was to pack the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  As Botton writes, 

“Infatuations aren’t delusions.  That way they have of holding their head may truly indicate someone confident, wry, and sensitive; they really may have the humor and intelligence implied by their eyes and the tenderness suggested by their mouth.  The error of infatuation is more subtle: a failure to keep in mind the central truth of human nature: that everyone— not merely our current partners, in whose multiple failings we are such experts— but everyone will have something substantially and maddeningly wrong with them when we spend more time around them, something so wrong as to make a mockery of those initially rapturous feelings.” 

Botton concludes marriage isn’t complete understanding, perpetual passion, perfect compatibility or absolute faithfulness.  Often times, it’s making serious compromises.  Or as Botton asserts, it’s “identifying which variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.”  “Happily ever after” will always involve being deeply happy in some ways and exceptionally unhappy in others.  By choosing to remain with Kirsten, Rabih forfeits the dopamine rush of infatuation but gains the steadiness of a shared life that comes with forever committing yourself to one person.  

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Alain de Botton on Ikea Glassware & the Appropriate Time to Leave for an 8 o’ Clock Dinner Reservation

vintage couple fighting

A disgruntled couple sits on opposite ends of a flower-patterned coach.  The woman looks livid: her thin lips are pursed, her arms are crossed.  Rather than gaze affectionately at her husband, she looks into the distance as if she were contemplating why she married such a moron.  The tweed-suited husband is sitting at least four feet from his paramour.  One arm lays across his lap, the other is bent and resting against his head.  His expression is one of defeat and resignation.   

So what caused this contention?

Though an assessment of their sullen faces might suggest the couple is fighting about a missed mortgage payment or the discovery of an affair, they’re actually quarreling about something quite inconsequential: the best placement for their new accent chair.  While the wife feels it would be best in the left most corner of the room next to the window where it will catch the most sunlight, the husband insists it would look most natural nestled next to the bookshelf in the opposite corner. 

Why do couples bicker about such trifling matters?

In his insightfully observed novel, The Course of Love, British philosopher Alain de Botton examines the many silly, insignificant things serious couples squabble about.  In a hilariously relatable scene reminiscent of the iconic 30 Rock episode, the novel’s protagonists, newlyweds Rabih and Kristen, decide (against their better judgement) to spend their Saturday morning in IKEA.  In the unforgiving glare of the Scandinavian home goods store, the most minuscule matters— the appropriate length for living room curtains, the proper shade of brown for dining room chairs— become a metaphor for the myriad ways two people may not be right for each other:

“Not long after entering the cavernous homeware department, Kirsten decides that they should get a set from the Fabulos line— little tumblers which taper at the base and have two blobs swirling blue and purple across the sides— and then head right home….But for Rabih it swiftly becomes evident that the larger, unadorned, and straight-sided glasses from the Godis line are the only ones that would really work with the kitchen table.” 

“However compatible a couple might be over certain things, compatibility doesn’t extend indefinitely,” Botton wrote over 30 years ago.  Even the most well-suited couple is more like a Venn diagram than two completely overlapping circles.  While Kirsten prefers embellishment to characterless minimalism, Rabih is partial to stark simplicity and clean lines.  Despite the seeming silliness of the matter (after all, who really cares what glasses they buy?), the couple proceed to very publicly fight about which is better, the Fabulos or Godis line:

“Though both equally are aware that it would be a genuine waste of time to stand in the aisles at Ikea and argue at length about something as petty as which glasses they should buy (when life is so brief and its real imperatives so huge), with increasing ill-temper, to the mounting interest of other shoppers, they nonetheless stand in an aisle at Ikea and argue at length about which sort of glasses they should buy.  After twenty minutes, each one accusing the other of being a little stupid, they abandon hopes of making a purchase and head back to the car park. Kirsten remarking on the way the she intends to spend the rest of her days drinking out of her cupped hand.  For the whole drive home they stare out of the windscreen without speaking, the silence in the car interrupted only by the occasional clicking of the indicator lights.” 

And it’s not just Ikea glassware that becomes an occasion for a fight.  One night when Rabih and Kirsten decide to treat themselves out for dinner on a weeknight, the couple discovers another irreconcilable  difference in their personalities: their sense of time.  While Kristen is a methodical planner who prefers to leave at 7 for an 8 o’ clock dinner, Rabih thinks there’s no logical reason to leave so early:

“Kristen thinks: the reservation is for eight.  Origano is approximately 3.2 miles away, the journey is normally a short one, but what if there were a hold up at the main roundabout, she reminds Rabih, like there was last time (when they went to see James and Mairi)?  In any event, it wouldn’t be a problem to get there a bit early.  They could have drinks at the bar next door or even take a stroll in the park; they have a lot to catch up on.  It would be best to have the cab come by for them at seven.

And Rabih thinks: An eight o’ clock booking means we can arrive at the restaurant at eight fifteen or eight twenty.  There are five long emails to deal with before leaving the office and I can’t be intimate if there are practical things on my mind.  The roads will be clear by then anyway.  And taxis always come early.  We should book the cab for eight.”

The result?  What was supposed to be a romantic evening ends in yet another silent, sulky car ride:

“I’ve married a lunatic, [Rabih] thinks, at once scared and self-pitying, as their taxi makes its way at speed through the deserted suburban streets.  His partner, no less incensed, sits as far away from him as it is possible to do in the backseat of a taxi.  There is no space in Rabih’s imagination for the sort of martial discord in which he is presently involved.  He is in theory amply prepared for disagreement, dialogue, and compromise, but not over such stupidity.  He’s never read or heard of squabbling this bad over such a minor detail.  Knowing that Kirsten will be haughty and distant with him possibly until the second course only adds to his agitation.  He looks over at the imperturbable driver— an Afghan, to judge from the small plastic flag glued to the dashboard.  What must he think of such bickering between two people without poverty or tribal genocide to contend with?  Rabih is, in his own eyes, a very kind man who has unfortunately not been allotted the right sort of issues upon which to exercise his kindness.  He would find it so much easier to give blood to an injured child in Badakhshan or to carry water to a family in Kandahar than to lean across and say sorry to his wife.”

As anyone who’s been one half of a couple knows, there’s nothing worse than having a pointless argument ruin your night. 

So the question remains: how can we resolve such disputes? 

Botton recommends we contextualize our needs and wants.  Rather than insist that it’s “right” to leave an hour early and criticize her irresponsible husband for being perpetually late, Kirsten might explain why she’s so concerned with punctuality.  Perhaps her obsessive nature has its origins in a dysfunctional upbringing.  Kirsten tries to plan for potential traffic and methodically calculates the distance from their home to the restaurant because it’s a way of exercising some semblance of control in a world of chaos.  In childhood, planning and plotting and preparing eased her anxieties and made her feel safe when so much of her life felt unstable (her father had abandoned her as a child). 

In an ideal world, Kirsten would say:

“My insistence on leaving so early is in the end a symptom of fear.  In a world of randomness and surprises, it’s a technique I’ve developed to ward off anxiety and an unholy, unnamable sense of dread.  I want to be on time the same way others lust for power and from a similar drive for security; it makes a little sense, though only a little, in light of the fact that I spent my childhood waiting for a father who never showed up.  It’s my own crazy way of trying to stay sane.”

Had Kirsten communicated the reason behind her seemingly irrational behavior, Rabih might have been more sympathetic.  Instead of be irritated with his wife’s neurotic habit of leaving a whole hour before dinner, he might have felt compassion for the young Kirsten who developed such controlling tendencies as a defense mechanism.  Ultimately, couples must explain the stories behind their particular proclivities if they want to spare themselves silent car rides and tense dinners.

If you and your partner still feeling embittered after an argument, Botton suggests situating your trivial concerns in the grander scheme of existence.  Go for a walk on the beach and contemplate the fact that the deepest part of the ocean is 35,876 feet.  Savor the stirring scale of the Sierra Nevada.  Meditate on the Grand Canyon’s layered bands of magnificent red rock that reveal millions of years of geological history.  Among the many marvels of the physical world, you’ll realize your little spats are stupid and petty. 

After the IKEA incident, Rabih and Kirsten reconcile after strolling through the Lammermuir Hills to the southeast of Edinburgh.  Wandering through the rolling green hills that were formed many millennia ago, the newlyweds come to comprehend the true insignificance of their marital problems:

“They start out silent and cross, but nature gradually releases them from the grip of their mutual indignation, not through its sympathy but through its sublime indifference.  Stretching interminably far into the distance, created through the compression of sedimentary rocks in the Ordovician and Silurian periods (some four hundred fifty million years before Ikea was founded), the hills strongly suggest that the struggle which has lately loomed so large in their minds does not in fact occupy such a significant place in the cosmic order and is as nothing when set against the aeons of time to which the landscape attests.  Clouds drift across the horizon without pausing to take stock of their injured sense of pride.  Nothing and no one seem to care: not the family of common sandpipers circling up ahead nor the curlew, the snipe, the golden plover or the meadow pipit.  Not the honeysuckle, the foxgloves, or the harebells nor the three sheep near Fellcleugh Wood who are grazing on a rare patch of clover with grave intent.”

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Seduced By Surfaces: Donna Tartt’s “A Secret History”

Though The Secret History was published over 3 decades ago, it’s gone viral on TikTok.  In 2022, #thesecrethistory hashtag had more than 229 million views.  Almost every “fall recommendations” list features the mammoth 576 page tome.

Tartt’s 1992 debut is the foundational text of dark academia, a genre that romanticizes higher education and highbrow hobbies like visiting museums and studying leather bound books.  As its name suggests, dark academia novels feature a scholastic setting and often involve gothic elements like moral ambiguity and murder.  Examples of this trending hashtag range from the classic (The Picture of Dorian Gray) to the contemporary (Dead Poet’s Society).

But dark academia isn’t just a genre— it’s a style, a subculture.  The dark academic has a penchant for plaid schoolgirl skirts, bookish blazers, and Doc Marten oxfords.  They read Dostoevsky and dream of attending Oxford.  The aesthetic conjures images of New England autumns and letterman sweaters.  

Part of The Secret History’s enduring popularity lies in these aesthetic qualities (after all, who doesn’t love reading about crimson-covered campuses and tweed-attired trust fund babies?).  But much of TikTok is overly concerned with the style rather than the substance of The Secret History.  Rather than critically discuss the text, many simply romanticize the book’s stylish characters and aesthetically-pleasing surroundings.  One TikTok imagines Tartt’s worldly students indulging in the trappings of intellectual life— chess, cigarettes, red wine— in a popsicle-colored country home worthy of a Wes Anderson movie.

I began to wonder: was The Secret History’s only appeal its aesthetics and atmosphere? 

On a chilly day in October, I decided to pick up a copy and see if I could find an answer. 

The novel centers around Richard Papen who enrolls at Hampden, a small elitist liberal arts college in New England.  Richard romanticizes the East: the crimson foliage, the tranquil lakes.  The East is the antithesis of his unglamorous California upbringing.  Back in his hometown of Plano, desolation is the only distinctive feature of the landscape.  Richard hates his hometown: the ugly tract homes, the endless freeways.   

In contrast, he’s captivated by the charm of New England’s landscape.  Hampden is as picturesque as a postcard, embodying all the cliches of Ivy League universities.  Richard doesn’t choose Hampden for the rigor of its curriculum or its scholastic prestige— he mostly settles on the college because of a glossy advertisement.  He’s instantly enchanted with the ivy-covered campus: the stately, Greek-inspired buildings, the light that reminds him of “long hours in dusty libraries.”  

When he arrives at college, he envies his sophisticated classmates whose childhoods— he imagines— were filled with summers in Switzerland, private schools and English nannies.  Ashamed of his lower-middle class background, Richard— in true Gatsby fashion— reinvents himself entirely.  In this fictive childhood, he’s the heir of a prominent couple in the movie business— not the son of a suburban housewife and gas station attendant.

From the first line of the first chapter, Richard confesses his fatal flaw is a “morbid longing for the picturesque.”  This obsession with aesthetics is what first attracts him to Julian Morrow, a mysterious classics professor, and his equally enigmatic group of Greek students.  Richard is entranced by their erudition and elegance: Morrow’s “students…were imposing enough and different…they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had a strange cold breath of the ancient world,” he says.

Morrow’s cliquish coterie consists of Henry Winter, a brooding intellectual who spends his free time translating Milton into Latin; Camilla and Charles Macauley, prepossessing twins who share a disturbing secret; Francis Abernathy, a gay man with a fondness for “beautiful starchy shirts with French cuffs” and “magnificent neckties”; and Bunny Corcoran, a less-than-intelligent, run-of-the-mill prep school boy.  

After an intoxicating lecture from their charismatic professor, the class becomes obsessed with bacchanals, ancient religious rites dedicated to Bacchus, god of pleasure and wine.   According to Julian, these ecstatic orgies offered a necessary outlet for our primitive impulses.  When his students finally induce Dionysian madness, they accidentally kill someone in the process.  Eventually Bunny finds out and blackmails them, leading Henry and the gang to kill him before he can expose their murderous secret.

Don’t get me wrong: Donna Tartt is a genius.  Her plot is masterfully controlled, her writing is exquisite. However, I didn’t like A Secret History as much as The Goldfinch.

For one, the characters are profoundly unlikable.  Not only are they heartless killers— they’re spoiled and completely insufferable.  Throughout the novel, most of their behavior is preposterous, borderline unbelievable.  None of the characters— not Richard, not Henry, not Frances, not Charles, not Camilla— seem to have any misgivings about brutally murdering their friend in cold bold.  Can five ordinary teenagers really be such cruel, conscience-less monsters? 

Though the gang undergoes a sort of unraveling after Bunny’s murder (Charles begins drinking excessively, Francis nearly kills himself), we rarely hear any of them express genuine remorse for what they’ve done.  After pushing Bunny off a cliff (a horrific way to off someone btw), they attend his funeral and— in chillingly sociopathic fashion— spend an intimate weekend with his family without arousing suspicion or being wracked by guilt.  It’s hard for me to believe that these characters, especially Richard, kids with no criminal record and no history of violence, could so coldly slaughter someone they once considered a friend and get away with it (even if Bunny was a racist/misogynistic/freeloading jackass).

Some might say this is exactly the point of Tartt’s novel: to show we’re all capable of barbarism under the right circumstances.  But I don’t buy it.  The conditions of the book aren’t enough to warrant the characters’ actions.

Consider the boys in Lord of the Flies.  Circumstances explain their behavior: they’re in a terrifying life-or-death situation, stranded on an island unsure of whether they’ll ever be rescued or where they’ll get their next meal.  There are no parents, no punishments, no rules.  No longer constrained by civilization, they surrender to their most savage selves.

But what explains the brutality in The Secret History?  Yes, Richard and friends are on a sort of “island” in Julian’s class, but they’re not completely remote from civilization (or its consequences).  They don’t endure an unendurable situation; they don’t revert to their baser animal instincts because of a traumatic experience.  As a reader, it’s difficult to untangle the chain of cause-and-effect.  How do a few riveting lectures lead to such an appalling act?

Some argue The Secret History is a cautionary tale about the dangers of isolation.  According to this line of reasoning, the characters are so insulated that they lose touch with reality.  Because they only spend time with each other, secluded from other teachers, other students and other ideas, they begin to have a distorted understanding of right and wrong.

However, this argument never made much sense to me either.  How long has Richard been taking classes with Julian?  All of a couple months?  What about Henry and the others?  Maybe a year?  Would it really only take a few months for you to lose your conception of right and wrong?  to feel justified in committing murder?  I can tell you right now: a few months with a mesmerizing professor would not convince me to massacre an innocent person or have an incestuous relationship with my own brother.   

Are these kids the epitome of old money and entitlement?  Yes, but does an endless trust fund and enormous privilege make someone a homicidal psychopath?  If the message is that the wealthy have no moral compass and care little for human life, especially when that life belongs to someone on the lower rungs of the social ladder, why does Richard— a working class character— murder Bunny?  

People like Henry and Frances grew up rich; it makes sense that they might be careless people who are used to smashing up things and letting other people clean up after them.  But Richard didn’t grow up with that privilege: he doesn’t have a powerful father who can afford the best lawyer and bail him out of prison; his family doesn’t have friends in high places; he’s doesn’t always have things handed to him.  Henry is the exact opposite.  He doesn’t think he should go to jail for killing a common farmer; he feels entitled to killing Bunny because he might force him to do the unthinkable: face the consequences of his actions.  It doesn’t seem plausible that Richard would possess the same sense of entitlement.

Speaking of which: why does Richard so eagerly go along with the gang’s plan?  When the idea is first introduced, he seems to have almost no moral qualms.  Callously kill one of my closest friends to conceal a crime I wasn’t even involved in?  Sure, sign me up.  

As a reader, I was left with one question: what in the everloving the fuck?

Richard barely knows these snobbish boarding school students, yet he agrees to murder for them?  There’s no objective correlative, no logical explanation for why Richard behaved the way he did. 

Julian’s behavior is just as inconceivable.  After Henry confesses their dark secret, Julian flees campus and is never seen or heard from there again.  He doesn’t report their gruesome crime to the police, despite the fact that he has a letter from Bunny in which he expresses his fears that Henry is plotting to kill him.  Does Julian just have no conscience?  You’d think he’d feel a moral obligation to report the homicide considering Bunny was one of his students.  Are we to believe that Hampden is exclusively composed of the most terrible people on the planet?

Which brings me to another problem with the book: characterization.  Only two of the characters— Bunny and Henry— had discernible personalities.  All the other characters, even Richard, our protagonist, felt indistinguishable from one another.  How is Richard different from Francis?  What separates Charles from Camilla besides the incident of their sex? 

The majority of the characters have little depth.  While I was reading, I found myself hanging on to the most superficial qualities to tell characters apart (i.e. Francis is the gay one, I had to remind myself, Charles is the belligerent drunk, etc).

Not only are the characters as flat as cardboard cutouts, the book blurb is incredibly misleading.  The back of my 2004 Knopf edition reads: 

“Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries.”

Though the back cover suggests a spellbinding professor will introduce Richard and friends to the mysteries of the ancient world and play a significant role in the novel, Julian is rarely present.  He only shows up a handful of times in 500+ pages.  It’s unclear a) what, exactly, Julian teaches them (save for that single lecture about bacchanals and “beauty is terror” business) and b) how such instruction influences them to commit such an atrocious act of violence. 

We know the group becomes obsessed with Dionysian madness but how, exactly, does Julian stoke the flames of this obsession?  It doesn’t seem like he advocates for drunken riotous revelry or completely losing yourself to irrational passion.  Because we’re almost never in the classroom actually experiencing Julian’s irresistible charisma firsthand, it’s hard to understand how his disturbing philosophies lead the characters down their dark path.

Despite these many problems, readers continue to adore The Secret History, some going even so far as to call it a modern masterpiece.  But as one reviewer cleverly notes, “vibes alone do not a novel make.”  Many are so seduced by the surface of the novel— the cultured characters, the idyllic New England setting— that they don’t question the substance of the story.  Perhaps we, too, possess Richard’s morbid longing. 

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Natalie Goldberg on Why We Should Write & the Importance of Specificity

In her liberating, life-changing Writing Down the Bones, Zen Buddhist and writing teacher Natalie Goldberg argues specificity is the cornerstone of great writing.  In the modern age where most of us are transfixed by the hypnotic blue light of our phones, we float around like disembodied ghosts.  We have lost the sights and sounds, the tastes and textures of the physical realm.  The writer’s job is to restore to the reader some part of his sensual world.

Writing, especially fiction, is meant to transport us somewhere else: a lost submarine in the deep ocean, an imperial English ship searching for treasure along the South American coast.  As writers, we cast a spell, lulling our readers into a trance where they momentarily suspend their disbelief and imagine they’re occupying an alternate world.  The only way to do this is through concrete detail.  We must avoid the vague, the abstract, the general.  When we write with specificity, we cut through confusion and create clarity.  Specificity— to paraphrase one of my writing teachers— takes you from a roughly rendered sketch to a nicely detailed painting.

Take this example:

The woman walked. 

3 words.  A simple noun.  A simple verb.  Though it contains the basic structural units of a sentence, it fails to paint an evocative picture.  Let’s try adding some detail.

The daisy-crowned woman strolled through the meadow.  

The fur-donned woman charged along Park Avenue.

The frazzled woman, her dress covered in day-old baby food, struggled to push her two toddlers.

Specificity allows us to see more clearly.  In the first example, words like “woman” and “walked” are too generic to conjure images in a reader’s mind.  They create a bare-bones outline: there’s no color, no dimension, no shadow.  The woman is a mobster’s wife or a traveling circus clown for all we know.

But the latter examples bring to mind a specific character: a romantic woman meandering through the English countryside, a hurried New Yorker who wears Manolo Blahnik’s and shops at Bergdorf’s, an exhausted mother.  Specificity is like a pair of glasses: it brings the fuzziness of the world into sharper focus. 

Much like poet of politics Rebecca Solnit, who urged us to call things by their true names, Goldberg suggests we dedicate the time to finding the exact words for things:

“Be specific.  Don’t say ‘fruit.  Tell what kind of fruit— ‘It is pomegranate.’  Give things the dignity of their names.  Just as with human beings, it is rude to say, ‘Hey, girl, get in line.’  That girl has a name.  (As a matter of fact, if she’s at least twenty years old, she’s a woman, not a ‘girl’ at all.)  Things, too, have names.  It is much better to sat ‘the geranium in the window’ than ‘the flower in the window.’  ‘Geranium’— that one word gives us a much more specific picture.  It penetrates more deeply into the beingness of that flower.  It immediately gives us the scene by the window— red petals, green circular leaves, all straining toward sunlight.”’

Rather than get lost in the airy world of abstractions, writers should focus on what’s directly in front of them.  If you’re writing a poem about love, you wouldn’t fill your verse with intangible concepts like “passion” and “infatuation” and “lust”— you’d want to replace rough approximations with exact images: amorous glances, frenzied cherry-coated kisses, the lingering smell of musk.  Similarly, if want to capture the essence of an August day, avoid indefinite ideas and instead focus on what can be apprehended with your senses: the sultry summer heat, the cloudless sky, the smell of sun tan cream.

So before you write, ask yourself: what can you see with your eyes?  taste on your tongue?  touch with your toes?  William Carlos Williams put it simply, “Write what’s in front of your nose.”  For Goldberg, a devout practitioner of  Zen Buddhism, writing requires we fully immerse ourselves in what’s here and now:

“Study what is ‘in front of your nose.’  By saying ‘geranium’ instead of ‘flower,’ you are penetrating more deeply into the present and being there.  The closer we can get to what’s in front of our nose, the more it can teach us everything.”

In many ways, modern life is antithetical to art.  Much of our day is a whirlwind of speed and distraction, high-speed internet and 30 second TikToks.  We’re almost never completely present.  We hurtle from home to work to school, between the infinite tabs on our laptops and the inescapable ding! ding! ding! of text messages. 

But art demands we examine something with our full attention; it requires we look at one thing longer than we ever have before (As Georgia O’ Keefe once said, “Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small.  We have’t time and to see takes time— like to have a friend takes time.”)  The artist is a monk in a monastery: completely absorbed.  When we create with complete concentration, we enter a blissful state where we both lose ourselves and find ourselves, what taoists called “wu wei” and what positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi termed “flow“:

“You must become one with the details in love or hate; they become one extension of your body.  Nabokov says, ‘Caress the divine details.’  He doesn’t say, ‘Jostle them in place or bang them around.’  Caress them, touch them tenderly.  Care about what is around you.  Let your whole body touch the river you are writing about, so if you call it yellow or stupid or slow, all of you is feeling it.  There should be no separate you when you are deeply engaged.  Katagiri Roshi said: ‘When you do zazen [sitting meditation], you should be gone.  So zazen does zazen.’  This is also how you should be when you write: writing does writing.  You disappear: you are simply recording the thoughts that are streaming through you.”

“When people talk listen completely.  Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say…You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that.  If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling…and always think of other people,” advised Ernest Hemingway.  With similar simplicity, Goldberg recommends would-be writers:

“Learn the names of everything: birds, cheese, tractors, cars, buildings.”

But why bother committing our commonplace experience to paper?  For Goldberg, writing is a revolutionary act of love, a means of planting a flag into the ground and declaring “this matters/I matter/we matter”:

“Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical.  We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles.  We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it.  At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth.  We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded.  This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand.  We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived.  Let it be known, the earth passed before us.  Our details are important.  Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn’t matter.”  

Ultimately, writing is a way of shouting an affirmative “yes” to life.  Much like a Buddhist monk, the writer’s task is simply to observe the truth of the moment without judgement.  As Goldberg writes, 

“Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency.  A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp’s half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter.  It is not a writer’s task to say, ‘It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a cafe when you can eat macrobiotic at home.’  Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist— the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children.  We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.” 

What is a writer?  Susan Sontag defined a writer as “someone who pays attention to the world— a writer is a professional observer.”  Goldberg would add that writers are chroniclers of our collective history and stewards of all of life’s lovely little details:  

“This is what it is to be a writer: to be the carrier of details that make up history, to care about orange booths in the coffee shop in Ottawa.”

“On paper our greatest challenges become A Real Thing, in a world in which so much seems ephemeral and transitory,” Anna Quindlen observes in Write for Your Life, her passionate plea for ordinary people to start writing.  Naming things— the smell of garlic and oregano in our favorite Italian restaurant, the black-and-white checkered floor of our first apartment building— grounds us in the present; it brings a sense of solidness to the ever-shifting fluidity of our experience.  Life rushes like a river.  Ultimately, putting our experiences into words keeps us from getting swept under:

“When we know the name of something, it brings us closer to the ground.  It takes the blur out of the mind; it connects us to the earth.”

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Our Wives Under the Sea: Loss, Grief & the Turbulent Tides of Change

The ocean is in my blood.  As a Bay Area native, my childhood consisted of building sand castles and eating funnel cakes at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.  Both my parents lived within minutes of the beach: my mother grew up swimming with sea turtles in Mililani, Hawaii; my father spent the majority of his childhood across the shimmering lights of the San Francisco Bay in Marin County.  Using only their wits, my Pacific Islander ancestors navigated the endless sea. 

Yet in the ocean, I’ve always felt ill at ease.  As a child, I viewed the sea as a mighty force that surged and seethed.  It was defined by violence: it raged, it ravaged, it crashed relentlessly against the beach.  I was never the best swimmer so I always worried the powerful tides would pull me under or even further out to sea.  

More terrifying than the waves are what lies beneath.  When you go in the ocean, you’re entering another realm, a watery world where you’re no longer at the top of the food chain.  Out of your element, you’re at a distinct disadvantage.  No matter how clear the water, it’s impossible to see more than a few feet.  Even when I swim close to shore, I feel acutely vulnerable, as if at any moment I’ll be ambushed by a tiger shark or gripped by a mysterious tentacle.  Whenever I go to Hawaii, I hate snorkeling in the coral reefs.  Most people love swimming in the tranquil waters among sea turtles and butterfly fish; I’m always terrified that some monstrous creature is going to emerge from the deep.  I recoil when the slimy fish touch me.

“Never turn your back on a wave,” my uncle would tell me.  For more than 30 years, he worked as a lifeguard at legendary Waimea Bay where ocean swells reaching shore sometimes crest and break at heights of 30 feet.  “Ever since Blue Crush, everyone thinks they can surf,” I remember his fellow lifeguard saying as we baked in the sweltering Hawaiian heat.  That summer, hundreds of wannabe surfers took their longboards into the surf with no conception of the danger.  Some died, underestimating the sea’s strength.  As a lifeguard, my uncle saw this sort of hubris everyday.  Better, he thought, to have a healthy fear of the sea.

our wives under the sea

No book has made me more fearful of the ocean than Julia Armfield’s debut novel Our Wives Under the Sea.  The story alternates between the perspectives of two wives, Leah and Miri.  After Leah, a marine biologist, goes on a submarine mission and is lost at the bottom of the ocean, Miri must cope with the crushing weight of her absence.  When the two are eventually reunited six months later, Leah isn’t quite the same: she takes unimaginably long baths, has developed a thirst for salt water, and runs the water at all times of day.  So traumatized is she from her experiences that she appears disassociated from her surroundings and rarely speaks to Miri.

Our Wives Under the Sea is at once horrifying and heartbreaking.  Armfield expertly combines the haunted houses of the gothic genre with the disturbing physical transformations of body horror.  The ocean serves as the perfect (though oft overlooked) setting for a horror novel.  Though our planet is covered by water, scientists estimate that more than 80% of the ocean remains unexplored.  The sea is vast, mysterious, unknowable.  Tens of thousands of feet below the surface lies an entire underwater realm.  At a depth of a thousand meters, the ocean is plunged into impenetrable darkness.  Is it any wonder the sea has always been a source of fascination and fear, the submerged site of magical creatures like mermaids and otherworldly monsters?

Leah’s plight on a lost submarine plays on our primal fears: of the unknown, of the dark, of lack of air.  Her chapters suffuse the narrative with moments of page-turning suspense and nail-biting terror.  What— we wonder— is lurking beneath the waves?  As film critic Zander Allport writes, “The experience of reading Armfield’s novel feels like a descent into deep water, a study in adapting to conditions of intensifying darkness and pressure.”

I read Our Wives Under the Sea in less than 3 days.  With each chapter, the mystery of what happened to Leah deepened: what did she encounter in the unfathomable, pitch-black depths of the sea?  did she see a giant squid, a prehistoric shark or some other equally terrifying ocean fiend?  who, exactly, is the Centre for Marine Enquiry?  why were Leah and her crew sent on this mission in the first place?  was the sinking of their submarine purely an accident or are they a part of some sort of sick experiment?  does the Centre have ulterior (perhaps sinister) motives?

Sadly, I didn’t find answers to most of these questions.  The one thing I hated about this book was it’s complete and total lack of resolution.  Can novels contain ambiguity?  Of course; in fact, many of the greatest books maintain a bit of mystery.  But as a reader who sacrificed much needed sleep expecting to unravel the mystery of what happened to Leah, I was bitterly disappointed.  I turned page after page hoping to finally pull the curtain on the Centre, the narrative’s main antagonist.  I wanted the book to culminate in a climactic scene where we finally saw the creature Leah encountered at the lightless depths of the ocean.  But instead, what happened in that submarine only lingers at the edges of the narrative.

But perhaps this was Armfield’s intention: much like the deep blue abyss of the ocean, the ones we love exist outside the bounds of our knowledge.  In the same way that Miri can never grasp her wife’s ghastly transformation, we can never fully understand the people in our lives: their hearts are as inaccessible as the Mariana Trench.  Our loved ones are like water: flowing, fluid, incapable of being confined to the rigid roles we create for them.  They might not mutate into marine monsters, but they will change.  Sometimes we drift apart like ships lost at sea.  When our relationship falls apart—  like Leah and Miri’s— we often can’t explain the change.    

Despite its flaws, Our Wives Under the Sea manages to be a moving meditation on grief.  Though Leah does return from her harrowing descent under the waves, she emerges as another person entirely and Miri must cope with an even more complicated form of grief.  Leah and Miri may be physically together, but they’re emotionally faraway, as distant as two islands separated by a seemingly impassable sea.  “It isn’t that her being back is difficult.  It’s that I’m not convinced she’s really back at all,” confesses Miri.

Deterioration and loss take many forms in the novel: Leah becomes a shell of her former self, Miri loses her mother to a degenerative disease.  No matter how much we love something, Armfield seems to suggest, it will inevitably slip away as surely as the shore disintegrates into the sea.  

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Susan Sontag on the Bliss of Having Written & the Inextricable Connection Between Reading & Writing

What’s the secret to being a good writer?  Aspiring wordsmiths often think the answer is shrouded in mystery.  New Yorker staff writers and Pulitzer-prize winning novelists— they think— might possess this arcane knowledge but they keep it locked away like a buried treasure in a cave.  To access it, you have to know the magic words open sesame.  

But being a good writer is actually quite simple: you have to read.  

“Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river,” Virginia Woolf wrote as she contemplated the inseparable connection between reading and writing.  Ray Bradbury urged aspiring artists to devour as much material as possible: “If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful.  I have never had a dry spell in my life mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting” (Mr. Bradbury must be on to something…he wrote more than 30 books and nearly 600 short stories).  Stephen King put it more simply, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”

Towering intellect and titan of criticism Susan Sontag would have to agree.  In her distinctively discerning essay “Directions: Write, Read, Rewrite, Repeat Steps 2 and 3 as Needed,” one of many thought-provoking pieces in the New York Times Writers on Writing, Sontag makes the convincing argument that you can’t write unless you read.  We usually think of the writing process as a series of predictable steps we learned in 3rd grade: brainstorm, outline, draft, revise, edit.  However, this formula neglects a fundamental stage: reading.  Reading is integral to revising: we must first become master readers before we can assess what’s working and what’s not working in our own writing.  As Sontag writes with characteristic acuity: 

“…to write is to practice, with particular intensity and attentiveness, the art of reading.  You write in order to read what you’ve written and see if it’s OK and, since of course it never is, to rewrite it— once, twice, as many times as it takes to get it to be something you can bear to reread…Hard to imagine writing without rereading.”  

Every week in my writing workshop class, we have to critique our classmates.  At first, I resented the exercise: helping others revise their work kept me from my own writing (after all, I only have so many hours in a day).  But now I realize that assessing others sharpens my critical faculties.  If I can comprehend why another person’s story isn’t working (their central message is unclear, their characters are cardboard cutouts instead of three-dimensional people, their writing is clunky), I can apply those lessons to my own writing.  In the same way, when one of my classmate’s stories is working, it inspires me.  Nothing rekindles my creative fire quite like encountering an evocative bit of imagery or a sharp turn-of-phrase.  

Ultimately, reading ignites writing.  Reading a good book can electrify us with an ecstatic lightening bolt of inspiration and send our fingers flying.  But if we read too much, we might compare our not-yet-developed first drafts to the masterpieces of literary giants and find ourselves wanting.  No writer is safe from the torture chamber of comparison.  Though Virginia Woolf was certainly a genius in her own right, she found herself overcome by crippling writer’s block any time she read Marcel Proust.  “Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out a sentence,” she wrote in 1922.

In an incisive passage, Sontag captures this complex relationship between reading and writing:

“Reading usually precedes writing.  And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading.  Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.  And long after you’ve become a writer, reading books others write— and rereading the beloved books of the past— constitutes an irresistible distraction from writing.  Distraction.  Consolation.  Torment.  And, yes, inspiration.”

“I hate writing, I love having written,” lady of wisecracks Dorothy Parker famously quipped.  You’d be hard pressed to find a writer who didn’t agree with this sentiment.  The act of writing is often agony and anguish.  There’s nothing more formidable than facing the blank page’s daunting nothingness.

But if writing is torment, revision is bliss.  The first stages of writing are like the first stages of gardening.  There’s a lot of difficult decisions, not to mention drudgery: you have to choose the proper plot of land and the kinds of flowers you want to grow, you have to till the soil.  But once your seeds are planted and begin to bloom, most of your work is maintenance: you water, you pull weeds, you prune.

Once you have a first draft, you’ve arranged your thoughts into some sort of logical order.  You’ve accomplished the most difficult task: assembling your ideas into a coherent form so they can be transported into someone else’s consciousness.

“Having written” is the less laborious, more fun part of the writing process.  Once you’ve overcome the paralysis of beginning and gotten something, anything, down on the page, you can commit yourself to the more pleasurable work of revising.  Revising is weeding out unnecessary repetition and awkward phrasing, cutting away overgrown bushes of syntax so your reader can more readily understand your thinking.  Revising is replacing recycled ideas and commonplace cliches with fresh turns-of-phrase.  It’s replacing close-but-not-quite-right-words with more precise words that exactly convey your meaning.  Refining your work is endlessly satisfying.  As Sontag writes, 

“…though this, the rewriting— and the rereading— sound like effort, they are actually the most pleasurable parts of writing.  Sometimes the only pleasurable parts.  Setting out to write, if you have the idea of ‘literature’ in your head, is formidable, intimidating.  A plunge in an icy lake.  Then comes the warm part: when you already have something to work with, upgrade.

[…]

Let’s say, it’s a mess.  But you have a chance to fix it.  You try to be clearer.  Or deeper.  Or more eloquent.  Or more eccentric.  You try to be true to the world.  You want the book to be more spacious, more authoritative…As the statue is entombed in the block of marble, the novel is inside your head.  You try to liberate it.  You try to get this wretched stuff on the page closer to what you think your book should be— what you know, in your spasms of elation, it can be.”

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 1 Comment

Gish Jen on the False Dichotomy Between Life & Work

“Want to get a coffee?” my sister asked after I had just settled in at my desk.  It’s inevitable: the moment I finally get into the flow of writing, something interrupts.  An offer to get a coffee, a phone call, an invitation out.  

“Should I go?” I wondered to myself.  I wanted to focus on my work.  After 45 torturous minutes of writing and rewriting sentences, I had finally found a rhythm.  But did I really want to pass up an opportunity to get a cold brew with my sister?

If you’re a writer, you understand this unbearable tug-of-war between life and work.  On one hand, you want to RSVP a resounding “no” to every invitation out.  You’d much rather work on your novel than go to a pool party or out for brunch.  In many ways, you resent life itself: the million and one daily occurrences that intrude upon your work.  You despise the demanding ring of the telephone, the incessant irritating ding-ding-ding sound of mail in your inbox.  You harbor borderline irrational resentment for any errand that forces you out of your house.  For the writer, Dante’s nine circles of hell is taking your car to the mechanic or waiting on hold to talk to a representative at AT&T about your phone bill.

On mornings like this one, I entertain fantasies of abandoning my real life and retreating to a secluded cabin in Big Sur.  Among the quiet hush of redwoods, far from the commotion of city life, from the distractions of technology, from the infuriating interruptions of other people, I could finally get down to work.

But other times, I resent having to choose between life and work.  Every minute I spend in my fictional world is a minute I’m not spending in the real one.  If I choose to spend my afternoon rearranging words on a page, I’m not exchanging intimacies with my husband or seeing my brother for his birthday.

In her essay “Inventing Life Steals Time, Living Life Begs It Back,” one of many insightful pieces in Writers on Writing, Gish Jen explores this seemingly irreconcilable conflict between life and work.  Despite her success as a writer, Jen almost quits.  “Is writing worth it?” she wonders. Is it worth it to live on the page but not in real life?  Mired in existential crisis, she writes, 

“Last year I almost quit writing.  I almost quit even though I was working well, even though I remained fascinated by the process of writing— the endless surprise of the sentences, and the satisfaction of thoughts taking form.  I had a new book I wanted to write, the book I am now writing, which I knew to be a good project.  I knew, what’s more, that I was not written out, something for which I have perhaps morbidly always watched: I have long vowed not to keep on past the point where I ought best to stop.  

I was not there yet.  Still, I almost quit because I felt the writing life was not life, because I felt I was writing instead of living.”

Ultimately, writers are caught between worlds: the real one they inhabit and the imaginary one they construct.  As Jen observes,

“There is never enough time for writing; it is a parallel universe where the days, inconveniently, are also twenty-four hours long.  Every moment spent in one’s real life is a moment missed in one’s writing life, and vice versa.”

For the writer, writing and not writing are equally excruciating forms of torture.  When you’re writing, you’re wondering whether it’s any good, you’re comparing yourself to other writers.  Your day consists of trying to wrangle your wild, untamed thoughts into a comprehensible order.  You might labor over a single sentence for more than an hour.

But not writing is just as much torture.  Not writing is wishing you could be writing, it’s being physically present but mentally elsewhere.  You might be at a dinner date with your boyfriend, but you’re actually in your short story, wondering how to propel the plot further.

Jen intimately understands the agony of the writer’s life.  In a passage of emphatic anaphora, she writes,  

“To write is to understand why Keats writes of living ‘under an everlasting restraint, never relieved except when I am composing.’  It is to recognize Kafka’s longing to be locked in the innermost room of a basement, with food anonymously left for him.  It is to know why Alice Munro describes the face of the artist as unfriendly; and it is to envy Philip Roth, who, rumor has it, has sequestered himself in a cabin in the Berkshires.  He is writing, writing, people say, writing without distractions, only writing.  To which the news part of us asks: Is that a life?  Can you really call that a life?”

To write is to enter a Faustian bargain of sorts.  We might not sell our souls to be writers, but we exchange invaluable moments with our loved ones for more time at our keyboards:

“Writing competes with…life and shortens its run.  I struggle not to hurry my time with my children; I endeavor to lose myself with them even as I squeeze every last minute out of the rest of the day.  I calculate; I weigh; I optimize.  That I may lose myself again in my work, I map out the day, the route, the menu.  I duck, I duck.  I hoard the hours and despair in traffic jams.  Worse, I keep an eye on my involvements.  I give myself freely to others, but only so freely.  I wonder if writing is worth this last price in particular.”

Is writing worth the sacrifice?  For Jen, the answer is “no.”  Writing— she feels— has become a jealous, too possessive lover.  Determined to live again, Jen puts down her pen and spends her newfound freedom gardening and making up for lost time with loved ones.  

But after awhile, Jen misses her old paramour.  Writing had been a way of ordering the shattered fragments of her life into a coherent whole. Without writing, life didn’t feel worth living anymore:

“Yet I found life without work strangely lifeless.  I wish I could claim that I went back to work because I had an exceptional contribution to make to the world, or because I found the words to dress down Old Man Death; but in fact I went back because life without prose was prosaic.  It seemed as though someone had disinvented music— such silence.  I felt as though I had lost one of my senses.”

Jen had been living in a false dichotomy of either/or: either she lived or she wrote. But, she soon realized, she could live and write. Encountering an island of ice on a walk, she discovers an apt metaphor for the relationship between her work and her life:

“I walked past a reservoir in the spring and saw an ice island.  This was gray-black and submerged enough that it could have been the reflection of a cloud, except that it was covered with birds.  The birds were ankle deep in the cold water; pointing in all directions, they seemed, despite their concerted stares, to be scattered.  The island was something I’d seen and admired every year, but when I looked at it this time, I saw that it was transitory yet permanent, that its islandness depended on the water, which would destroy it and create it again.

The water and ice were antagonistic, but not only antagonistic.  The water was of the ice, after all, and the ice of the water; the water gave rise to the ice.  Their relationship was what James Alan McPherson might have called one of antagonistic cooperation.”

Ultimately, life and art aren’t armies in constant battle. They aren’t enemies— in fact, they can be great allies to each other: the mundane matter of life offers material for our art; making art makes life, at least, makes it worthwhile.

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 1 Comment

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.

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.