currently reading: Loving Day by Mat Johnson
books bought:
Tonight I'm Someone Else by Chelsea Hodson
Loving Day by Mat Johnson
books received:
Number One Chinese Restaurant by Lillian Li
Vanishing Twins: A Marriage by Leah Dieterich
Women Talking by Miriam Toews (e-galley)
books finished:
The Age of Earthquakes by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland, and Hans Ulrich Obrist (reread)
Women in Clothes by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton
Sweet & Low by Nick White
Vanishing Twins by Leah Dieterich
Hey you,
One of the people I'm in love with – or was in love with, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference – is also the person I worry about most as a reader. He reads a lot of pop psychology, the kind of books that implicitly accept capitalism as a cool, chill thing and that unquestioningly reference evolutionary psychology. (Sometimes I give him books that aren't like this – once I even gave him a book of poetry – but he doesn't read these books or if he does he doesn't tell me.) I worry because the stories in those books are so seductive – because the books do have narratives and storylines that make sense when real life does no such thing. I am always very wary of books that make the world make sense. Maybe what I'm saying is that I think of the universe as a lot like the narrator in Mary Robison's Why Did I Ever: "I just regret everything and using my turn signal is too much trouble. Fuck you. Why should you get to know where I'm going, I don't."
He isn't an idiot, by the way, this guy I am/was in love with. But he is so logical! Of course he sees the patterns, wants everything to make sense. It's the logic that makes me worry about him.
Sometimes I'll end up with a copy of a book – always nonfiction – that I think he will like and I don't gift it to him because I worry he'll find the ideas too convincing, the story too persuasive, and what if they're the wrong ideas and the wrong stories?
Some of the people I'm in love with, or have been in love with, don't really read at all. One reads a book or two a year and it's never anything interesting. One hasn't read a book cover-to-cover in probably six years, although when I fell in love with him six years ago it was in part because we both happened to be reading the same book at the same time. As far as I know, it was the last one he's finished. One of the people I am/was in love with told me how much she loved Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night, so I read it the night before our first date as a way of both a) impressing her and b) assuring we would have something to talk about. Another's favorite is Infinite Jest (Infinite Jest!!!!!!!!). One of them once sat on a couch and read a book with me all the way through and it was one of the most intimate experiences of my life, a holy feeling.
I've been thinking about all these people since I finished Vanishing Twins (which comes out in September). I hate summarizing so I'll steal the description right from Soft Skull:
For as long as she can remember, Leah has had the mysterious feeling that she's been searching for a twin – that she should be part of an intimate pair. It begins with dance partners as she studies ballet growing up; continues with her attractions to girlfriends in college; and leads her, finally, to Eric, to whom she moves a cross the country for and marries. But her steadfast, monogamous relationship leaves her with questions about her sexuality and her identity, so she and her husband decide to try an open marriage.
It's written in short passages, arguably prose poems, although I would not be the one to make that argument. I liked the book a lot, more than I thought I would – I tore through it in an evening plus change – but I felt like Eric was kept at arm's length. I didn't feel like I knew him, and so I didn't really know why Leah loved him. And I think there's a strong case to make that this was intentional – the book details their distance, literal and figurative, so it makes sense that readers would end up feeling a little distant from him, blah blah blah etc.
But – I don't know. Part of me felt like, Look, I get it. I can't write about my twin either.
(For those of you who don't know: I have a twin sister. A real one!)
It's not that writing about her feels like a violation of trust, though I'm sure it would, at some point. I'm trying to put my finger on what it is exactly. We've been referred to our whole lives as "the twins," we sometimes answer to the other's name, we've always been compared to each other. It makes me very conscious of when someone else is speaking for me, and I resent it, and so I try to let my sister speak for herself as much as possible...
That's bullshit, but it sounded nice. Really I don't write about my twin sister because it would be such an enormous undertaking, because I am so painfully zoomed in: it would be like taking a telescope and looking right at the sun. It would be like trying to describe the air I breathe. Where would I start? People ask us all the time what it's like to have a twin and we always have the same answer: I don't know, what's it like not having a twin? How do you describe that?
So I get it, Leah's trouble describing Eric, I do. Or: I get the trouble I am projecting onto her. Still, there were times throughout the book I wanted to shake her and say, That's not how twins work!!!!! Twins don't typically marry each other!!!!!! I know this is an inane thought but that won't stop me from having it or from sharing it with you. I also resented the implication that all twins are identical unless otherwise specified. This is in part because I feel like it's a too-obvious way to make your metaphors work better – it's an easy out, is what I'm saying – but mostly because I'm a fraternal twin.
There were no twins in anything else I've read this week. There were also no people I fell in love with, although I did fall in love with a name: Forney Culpepper, from Sweet & Low.
I'll leave you with something to think about, or at least something I've been thinking about this week. It's an excerpt of sorts from The Age of Earthquakes, which is a strange and charming little book, really well designed and way too self-assured:
You know the future’s really happening when you start feeling scared. | The future loves you but it doesn’t need you.
Here’s what I have been thinking, specifically: What if the future doesn’t love me?
your friend,
Smalls