I write less here on this blog than I used to. The conversation I am having is mostly with myself. When my son calls and asks how I am—when friends ask—I have no news, no funny anecdotes, I am mostly absent. Perched on the edge.
I am reading, I am writing, I am reading more. I am reading memoirs or novels that might have been memoirs or books on the meaning of story. Eileen Myles (
Chelsea Girls). Alison Bechdel (
Are You My Mother?). Maggie Nelson (
The Argonauts and
Bluets). Decca Aitkenhead (
All At Sea). Sarah Manguso (
Ongoingness). Heidi Julavits (
The Folded Clock). Ta-Nehesi Coates (again). Claudia Rankine (again). Joan Silber (
The Art of Time in Fiction).
Every time I slip inside these books I am living, for a spell, as other. Walking, as they say, in others' shoes.
The news is crisis. It is a madness that requires us to absent ourselves from ourselves so that we might occupy the heart and mind of others. White. Blue. Black. Whatever color it is: take your own off, put another on, and see. Feel. Think.
Two weeks ago I taught memoir to a group of six who, in their glorious differences, were gorgeously one. Tonight we will have dinner with friends who know and love us. In between I am seeking, in the books I read, a path toward greater empathy and knowing. So that when I return to me I'll be bigger than I was. More capable of making some kind of earthly difference.
The Center for Fiction has named Ben Fountain as the winner of the 2012 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. He won the $10,000 prize for Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.
The judging panel included American writers Francisco Goldman, Lev Grossman, Heidi Julavits, Paul La Farge and Bonnie Nadzam. Prior to establishing his career as a writer, Fountain worked as an attorney.
Here’s more from the release: “Fountain has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, a Whiting Writers Award, an O.Henry Prize, and two Pushcart Prizes, among other honors and awards. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk was shortlisted for the National Book Award this year”
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I’ve wanted to give Heidi Julavits a try for sometime so when the publisher offered me a review copy of her newest, The Vanishers, I wasn’t able to resist. I had no idea what to expect and what I found was weird and smart and sometimes funny.
The book opens at The Workshop, a college for psychics in New Hampshire. I was immediately disoriented. Was I supposed to take this seriously? Was this a satire? It wasn’t long before I understood that I was to take the whole psychic thing at face value, accept that it was real and not a source of irony or farce.
The story is told by Julia Severn, marked as gifted and taken under the wing of The Workshop’s Queen Bee, Madame Ackerman. Julia is given the job of being Madame Ackerman’s secretary, to record all the things she says during her daily psychic regressions. Except, to Julia’s distress, Madame Ackerman doesn’t regress at all but falls asleep. When Madame Ackerman wakes up she wants to know from Julia what she said during her regression so, at a loss and trying to protect Madame Ackerman, she starts making stuff up. But when Madame Ackerman is asked to locate a lost film shot by pornographer/feminist performance artist Dominique Varga, Julia is the one who has the regression and locates the film while Madame Ackerman sleeps. But Julia passes it off as Madame Ackerman who eventually figures out what has been happening and launches a psychic attack against Julia.
Suddenly ill with all kinds of symptoms and no doctor diagnosable physical cause, Julia takes a leave from the Workshop and lands drugged and defeated in New York working as a showroom model for a flooring company where she sits at a desk in the window and pretends she is speaking in Arabic on the phone to upscale foreign clients.
Strange enough for you yet? From here it gets even stranger with Julia being hired by Colophon, an academic searching for Varga. She is sent to Vienna to the Goergen, a spa for those recovering from psychic attacks and women getting plastic surgery. And what a tangled web gets woven.
About the title. There is lots of vanishing going on in this book, from deaths real and faked to people who choose to vanish in order to start new lives as someone else. And there is Julia whose identity seems to have vanished because she is always open to psychic intrusions by other people. The vanishing that takes center stage is the suicide of Julia’s mother who killed herself when Julia was only a month old. Julia doesn’t think the absence of her mother has made a difference in her life, but really, it has shaped her so completely she can’t even see that her psychic abilities are one of its results. Along with the search for Dominque Varga, the book also becomes a search for Julia’s mother and a kind of coming-of-age story for Julia.
Everything is more or less resolved at the end of the book, the main plot points at any rate. We are still left with questions: Was Madame Ackerman really psychically attacking Julia or the other way around? Was Julia’s dead mother attacking her psychically? Though we don’t know for certain what is clear is that these psychic attacks serve both a real and metaphorical function in the book especially when it comes to mother-daughter and mother-daughter-like relationships; the damage women do to themselves and each other and the lengths we go to to try and pick up the pieces and make sense of it all.
As odd as The Vanishers is I still very much enjoyed it. It is a smart book that expects the reader to be smart too. Now that I have had a taste of Julavits, I will gladly read her other books as well. When I will get to them I don’t know, but I do know they will be a treat.
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The authors of "The Lifespan of a Fact" discussed the controversial book at McNally Jackson Books on Wednesday night.
The Tumblr social network has helped countless writers connect with readers over the last few years. We finally decided to open a GalleyCat Tumblr page, a warehouse for all the opinions, videos, photos and other items that didn’t quite fit on our publishing blog.
We caught up with Tumblr literary outreach Rachel Fershleiser for some advice about using the network. She shared five useful tips for writers who want to explore the social network. You can read her link-filled advice below…
If you have a Tumblr post you think we should see, just add the ‘galleycat’ tag to your Tumblr post. We will use the tag as a source for our own posts. The Millions created a handy Tumblr directory for readers and writers as well.
continued…
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
More than 80 Harper’s Magazine writers and friends signed an open letter to publisher John “Rick” MacArthur supporting the unionization of the magazine’s staff and urging publisher not to cut two editors. The publisher has since defended his actions in another letter.
The 84 signatures on the original letter included: Tom Bissell, Heidi Julavits, Naomi Klein, Jonathan Lethem, and Zadie Smith. The letter asked MacArthur seek alternative ways to reshape the magazine’s financial budget, suggesting the publisher to study the models of other not-for-profit magazines.
Here’s a quote from the original letter: “Editorial costs can only be cut so far without damaging the quality of the publication … At a time when there is much chatter about the death of print, publishing a magazine as brave and creative as Harper’s Magazine verges on a sacred trust.” (Via New York Magazine & Sarah Weinman)
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
