I have carried Olivia Laing's
The Lonely City from place to place this past month. Laing is a thrilling writer. A form breaker. A true, adult, expansive thinker. In
Lonely she weaves together her personal story with the lives of Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, and others.
I'm going to be writing about this book in the next issue of Juncture Notes, so no need to say much more about it here. For today, I simply want to quote from the end. Here Laing is speaking about the healing power of art. She holds in her hands the works that others have made. She finds, in them, necessary connection. We live at a time of jarring national discourse, social media degradations, easy, anonymous strikes.
But art speaks of and for the honestly questing self. It speaks not just for the artist but to those seeking proof that their own yearning is neither aberrative nor, somehow, wrong. Loneliness is human. It binds us to each other.
When I came to New York I was in pieces, and though it sounds perverse, the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.
Starting tomorrow, at a farm in Central Pennsylvania, it will begin. The inaugural
Juncture Workshops memoir program.
The cows and the pigs and the chicks and the peacocks and the horse are ready for us, we're told. The sky and the hills. The fresh air and the peace. Those writers.
We will spend one day focused on uncertainty and time, as all memoir writers must. Recently I read Olivia Laing's gorgeous
To the River and found, nested within, this paragraph. It will be shared with the writers, but also, I'm thinking, why not share it here, with you. For this is how it feels to be alive. To have hoped for something. To have almost had something. To have lost something. To allow that lostness to linger.
This is life, and this is memoir, with thanks to Olivia Laing:
It felt as if my blood had turned to mercury. I lay on the bed almost weeping, suddenly overwhelmed by the past few months. I hadn't thought I was running away, but now all I wanted was to turn tail and fly, back into the woods, the dense, enchanged Andredesleage where no one could find me or knew my name. Why does the past do this? Why does it linger instead of receding? Why does it return with such a force sometimes that the real place in which one stands or sits or lies, the place in which one's corporeal body most undeniably exists, dissolves as it were nothing more than a mirage? The past cannot be grasped; it is not possible to return in time, to regather what was lost or carelessly shrugged off, so why these sudden ambushes, these flourishes of memory?
The Devon Horse Show grounds are empty, but the gates are open. No, not empty, we discover; there is a single contractor working within. With his permission we walk, in and out of the stables, the new buildings, the old ones. I find a ladder and Bill climbs it into a secret place. I think an abandoned sink is lovely. Also a discarded, woven hat. Also emptiness as countered by the milk of contained light.
In the sun it is hot. In the shade it is perfect.
What are we searching for on this Labor Day?
I have been reading Olivia Laing. I have been reading (I seem to endlessly circle her) about Virginia Woolf. Her ecstasy. Her mourning. Her river and her pocketful of stones. I have been reading, too, about artists, jealousies, rivalries. Bacon and Freud. Manet and Degas. I have been thinking of the panel I was on, just yesterday afternoon, at the exquisite AJC Decatur Book Festival, and all the things I didn't say, and the friends who came to see me, and the ease of our stupendously fine moderator, Terra Elan McVoy, who brilliantly coined perfumes for us and wove a silk thread between stories for us and wondered about our books as films and decided
This Is the Story of You isn't really a film, not yet a film, though perhaps it is an Indie. Yes. Always. I am, will be, the Indie. Slightly out of step and over to the side and stewing inside the next act of making something, my preference, always, for the thing that is not yet made, as opposed to the thing that is.
Do we read our books after they are published (beyond when authorial responsibility calls us to), we were asked. No, I said. No, emphatic. For there is no fixing the book then, no new chance, and I always wish that my books were better than they were, and I am always trying, until they are printed (ask any editor of mine) to make them better than they are, than they will be, but yesterday, when I was feeling, I'm not entirely sure why, sad, there was a girl in the line after the panel who asked me to sign her books. "You are my favorite author," she said, and I was stunned by it, set back, this gesture of hers, this kindness extended. Words that pinned me to the present time, for that present time, in that moment. With me on one side of the table and this beautiful girl on the other, for just that moment or two, I was me, with the books I have made, in the present, in the moment. I was not looking past them.
Not yet, anyway.
Why are people so interested in drunk writers? Recently I was sent a very interesting nonfiction book, The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, by Olivia Laing, for a review. I couldn't review it. It's an anecdotal study of several American writers, including John Berryman, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver (all [...]
