Of course I teach, write, and write about memoir. Of course I write, and write about, young adult literature. Of course I take my stab at poems.
But don't think I'm not also in love with, perhaps most deeply admiring of, novels written for adults. Because I have not found a way to do this work myself. Because I don't know how.
Yesterday I raved about
Swimming Home. This past weekend, in the
Chicago Tribune, Reply to a Letter from Helga. A few weeks ago,
The Colour of Milk, and before that
You Remind Me of Me, The Orchardist,
Boleto,
Book of Clouds, Out Stealing Horses,
The Disappeared, American Music,
The Sense of an Ending, the Alice McDermott novels, the books featured in this yellowing snapshot above (and others). These slender books that devastate with their shimmering, dangerous sentence, structure, form. These books that have left me staggered on the couch.
I don't know what I would do without them, truly. I don't know that I'd have the same faith in humankind if these books were not now in my blood, if they were not (fractionally) mine.
There is still room to do what no one has ever done before. There are still stories untold. I may be getting older, but: there are more stories to be found. Genius abounds.
I spent much of last week in the company of YoungArts writers whose stories and words were so full of the fearless, so unbroken by other people's ideas of what story and language might be, that there was no way in hell I was going to read an ordinary book on the way home. Not that I seek out the ordinary, ever. But sometimes I get stuck with it, and I get rankled through.
So I went to Books & Books while the YoungArtists were listening to people like Joshua Bell and Bill T. Jones and Adrian Grenier and Debbie Allen talk (oh, my), because I knew I could rely on a famous independent to cut the deck of new releases right. And there, on the front table, I found
The Colour of Milk, by Nell Leyshon. I had never heard of it or her, but because I am forever milking my own metaphors, I was intrigued. Read the first two lines. Bought it. Finished it on the flight home. Held it to my chest—this riveting, fierce, enveloping, and I-know-you-want-to know-what-it-is-actually-about book, so let me explain that in a line or two.
The Colour of Milk is the story of a girl in the year 1831 who has learned literacy, but at a terrible price.
Milk is her story, her confession.
Milk will break your heart.
Let me show you how it starts:
this is my book and i am writing it by my own hand.
in this year of lord eighteen hundred and thirty one I am reached the age of fifteen and i am sitting by my window and i can see many things. i can see birds and they fill the sky with their cries. i can see the trees and i can see the leaves.
and each leaf has veins which run down it.
and the bark of each tree has cracks.
i am not very tall and my hair is the colour of milk.
my name is mary and i have learned to spell it. m.a.r.y. that is how you letter it.
Of your list I've only read one: Out Stealing Horses. It was a near perfect novel. I shall have to check out the rest. Perhaps not writing adult literary fiction allows us to enjoy it the more. I can sink into the story without analyzing it to pieces.
And now I have my entire reading list for the month of February ;) Why thank you, lovely Beth.
That's wonderful, Beth. I'm saving these to my list.