A more fun way to be
Hello, friends!
I have happily been gorging on books. Don't you just love when that happens? Everything you read is interesting, and before you know it, you're done with one and halfway through the next?
Last week I read Hannah Pittard's newest book, We Are Too Many. The cover describes it as "a memoir, kind of". It's a series of remembered and sometimes imagined conversations between Pittard and other people in her life, all of it revolving around her husband's affair with her best friend.
There was one passage I saved for later. In it, Pittard says that her husband complained once that she was very rarely fully present when with him.
The other half of me, he said, was thinking of a story or a novel I was working on, or replaying an anecdote from earlier in the day, or eavesdropping on a group of strangers in the restaurant booth behind us. I never objected to this observation because it was almost always true.
She writes that her husband only once told her that this bothered him.
He said, "I wish you'd tell me more. I wish you'd tell me all the secrets you tell yourself all day long."
And she said:
"I can't, though. You must understand that. If I said everything out loud, there would be nothing left to muddle my way through, I'd have no ambition to write, I'd have zero material, my instinct to tell stories would evaporate. I have to be like this," by which I meant insular, guarded, aloof. I paused. "I've always been like this. I enjoy being like this."
I read this passage, and beyond the subject matter and subtext, I found myself thinking about that last observation: That Pittard holds her thoughts close to the vest as a way of maintaining some sort of inner world that fuels her work.
I saved the passage because I realize I don't do this, and I wonder if that's why writing feels so hard these last few years. Because it's been hard. I don't know how much I've admitted this before; maybe I have, and I've forgotten. Writing is hard. It's hard to put my butt in the chair. It's hard to stay focused. It's hard to get lost in a scene, or even a sentence. In recent years I've lost my certainty that things I write are good; I don't usually know anymore if other people will find value in the words. I've had some disappointing publishing experiences: Books and ideas rejected. Long periods of utter quiet. I've finished drafts of things and felt little reason to celebrate. I've wondered what the point of it all is.
Part of me has wanted to blame the pandemic, and the myriad ways it has affected every single aspect of our daily lives. It's changed everything. It's changed things we haven't even yet realized have been changed.
But I also don't think that's entirely it. Maybe that's why Pittard's passage resonated. Maybe I'm too exposed in my day-to-day life, and that leaves nothing private for me to sift and mine for the work.
Maybe I talk too much.
That's rich, I know, coming from someone who once blogged multiple times a day, but now blogs maybe twice a month, from someone who left social media five years ago, from someone who is more disconnected now than connected.
But it could still be true.
I blogged recently about finding myself in a sort of season of change. I'm not sure how it came about, or even why. I can probably put a bit of this on Squish, who came to me two months ago and said, "The sun's coming up early again," which was her way of saying I miss our morning walks, Daddy. So we started walking again, and then I found myself returning to the trail one or two more times later in the same day, and then I began watching what I ate a little more carefully, and then, most revelatory to me, I suddenly wasn't afraid of food anymore. This is a tangent, I know that, but let's run with it for a second. I wasn't an adventurous eater as a child, and I carried all of my food suspicions into adulthood. Far into adulthood, as it happens, which made life a little harder for me, and a little annoying for people who ate with me, or lived with me. Everyone adapted to my limitations, and I clung to them. It was a burger that did me in. I'd been accustomed to ordering my burgers plain—my whole life, robbing myself of flavors—and then, on a date with Felicia, I just felt...tired of myself. And I ordered a burger the way it was meant to be made, and it was fucking delicious.
Take that, Jason.
Since then I haven't said no to anything, even things that definitely weirded me out before. Felicia and I just spent a weekend celebrating our anniversary, and the happiest part of it, for me, was sharing food with her. It was like I'd unlocked a part of me, and in doing so, unlocked a part of our relationship that I'd somehow been content to leave closed-off before. Felicia loves food. Loves it! And somehow has managed to live thirteen years married to the plain burger guy.
🤦♂️
None of this, I know, would qualify as adventurous to most people. Probably not to you. But it's all new territory for me. And in the way that positive change can do, I've found it spilling over into other parts of my life. I once griped, in this very newsletter, about the way the band The National wrote songs. This week I've heard a few songs by them that I can't get out of my head, like "Weird Goodbyes" and "Tropic Morning News". So in the spirit of iteration and revision, I'm giving them another try, ignoring the grouchy old voice in my head and finding lots to love.
Felicia has been watching all of this transpire, and as I've exclaimed things like, What the hell is happening to me or Suddenly I just want to try all the things, she's just nodded the wise, patient nod of someone who figured this out decades ago. "It's definitely a more fun way to live, isn't it?" she asked me.
I'm waiting, now, for the spillover to find my creative work. I think it will. It's finding its way to every other part of my life. I'm beginning to understand that I've lived, in so many ways, in the dark for a very long time...but that I'm the one who unscrewed the bulb.
The call was coming from inside the Jason.
All right, let's swing this back around to reading: I highly recommend Pittard's book. It's quite good, often funny. Hell, I recommend all of her novels; she's one of my favorite writers of the last several years.
I also highly recommend Jesse Q. Sutanto's Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, which I devoured in about two days. It's a murder mystery, but not really; it's a book about glorious food disguised as a murder mystery. Great characters, lots of joy.
Blair Braverman's first novel, Small Game, is very good. Darker than Vera Wong, but as good as Braverman's earlier memoir, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube, which was one of my favorite reads of 2021.
Janice Hallett's The Appeal is a gift from the gods: A murder mystery, but an epistolary one. This book was made just for me, I think. It's the story of a small town community theater group, and how someone turns up dead, and the entire story is told by two law clerks sifting through thousands of emails, transcripts, playbills, posters, etc. A nearly perfect book.
I intend to spend today trying something new. Well, heck, no, that's not right. I already have: Felicia made a pour-over coffee for herself, then let me try it in stages: First black, then with a bit of sugar, then a bit of milk. (Some details from Felicia: The coffee was Starbucks' Casi Cielo, from Guatemala, ground using a Camano Coffee Mill that she scored from a thrift store for five bucks, but which apparently sells for quite a lot more? She used her Hario V60 ceramic coffee dripper, with a stainless steel mesh filter. She brewed it into a lovely East Fork Pottery mug, in the color Pollen. I have to note that as she gave me all of these details I couldn't help but recall the wonderful scenes in My Cousin Vinny where Marisa Tomei delivers perfect catalog-quality recitations of car engine specs. Life with Felicia is just this cool, constantly.)
Anyway, the outcome: I've resisted coffee all my life. I don't love it yet, but I see it as a possible color to add to my broadening palette. And that's weirdly exciting.
I wonder what other new thing I'll try today...?
Maybe I'll try writing.
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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