currently reading: Mitz by Sigrid Nunez
books bought
Empty Words by Mario Levrero, trans. Annie McDermott
The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth by Josh Levin
The Summer of Dead Birds by Ali Liebegott
books received
Banshee by Rachel DeWoskin (e-galley)
Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime and Punishment by Rachel Monroe (e-galley, out 8/20)
Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury by Sigrid Nunez
Oval by Elvia Wilk
Aug 9—Fog by Kathryn Scanlan
books finished
Empty Words by Mario Levrero, trans. Annie McDermott
Aug 9—Fog by Kathryn Scanlan
The Queen by Josh Levin
The Summer of Dead Birds by Ali Liebegott
Hey you,
First, the obvious: I’ve moved from tinyletter to substack. This is because of formatting issues.* I will never, ever, ever charge for this dumb, stupid newsletter. I promise. Anyway!
Welcome one, welcome all, to dead dad month. It’s June, baby! We’ve got his birthday, we’ve got my parents’ anniversary, we’ve got Father’s Day, we’ve got the deathiversary. (We’ve also got my mom’s birthday somewhere in there, in case you can think of anything I should get her?)
It was dementia—I would be wondering too. Lewy body dementia. When the news came out Robin Williams had undiagnosed Lewy body dementia when he died, I thought, Oh good, I can just say “what Robin Williams had.”
A few weeks ago at the Harvard Book Store I saw Max Porter read from his new book, Lanny. (It was actually a very enjoyable reading! I’m sorry for any authors in the room that I said “actually”!) Afterwards I stayed for the signing. I was last in line. When it was my turn we talked about our dead dads and his book Grief is the Thing with Feathers, about a dead wife and a dead mom. We talked about this passage from the book:
Where are the fire engines? Where is the
noise and clamor of an event like this?
Where are the strangers going out of their
way to help, screaming, flinging bits of
emergency glow-in-the-dark equipment
at us to try and settle us and save us?
There should be men in helmets speaking
a new and dramatic language of crisis.
There should be horrible levels of noise,
completely foreign and inappropriate for
our cosy London flat.
We talked about feeling that way in real life—how bewildering it is, as a child, that the world outside continues on exactly the same as it did Before. What a betrayal it feels like. This was one of the passages, he said, that was just directly from his real life.
He asked me how old I was when my dad died and I said eight and he said, The book must’ve just about killed you. When I write that now it sounds maybe self-aggrandizing but was actually very empathetic. It helps, I think, that what he said was true.
I kept it together while I was talking with him but afterwards I sat by the anthologies and cried and cried until I startled an unsuspecting bookseller. Then I got on the T and cried the whole way home. It had just been so long like anyone talked to me like my dad was something I might want to talk about. I was sad about my dad and I was made more sad that it felt like no one wanted to talk about him; I felt in the moment like not talking about him was a way of making him more dead. Or I can talk about him, but no one talks back, no one says anything that really means anything. In her book/essay Time Lived, Without its Flow, about her dead son, Denise Riley writes:
The same phrases recur. For instance, many kindly onlookers will make use of this formula: “I can’t imagine what you are feeling.” There’s a paradox in this remark, for it’s an expression of sympathy, yet in the same breath a disavowal of the possibility of empathy. Undoubtedly it’s very well meant, if understandably fear-filled. People’s intentions are good; a respect for the severity of what they suppose you’re enduring, and so a wish not to pretend to grasp it. Still, I’d like them to try to imagine; it’s not so difficult.
Later this month it will be sixteen years and still sometimes when I’m upset and people ask me what’s wrong I want to snap at them, My dad is dead! In her memoir about her dead dad, The Glass Eye, Jeannie Vanasco writes of a psychiatrist who is trying to diagnose her, “I wanted him to say: You don’t have your dad. That’s your illness.”
Of course his death is the central fact of my life, the defining fact. Of course no one, him included, would want this to be so.
When I was 19, I found out he wasn’t my biological father. My parents used a sperm donor. It didn’t make as much of a difference as you might think: my dad is still my dad is still dead.
After I first met my biological father I had a terrible realization, made worse by the fact of its obviousness. There’s a passage from How to Behave in a Crowd by Camille Bordas where the narrator reflects on the dreams he’s been having about his dead dad. It reads:
I’d started dreading them. See, the more time passed in real life, the more it did in dream life as well, and even in dreams, I’d gotten used to the idea that the father was dead, and the thought of his being resurrected had become discouraging, because if he wasn’t dead, I thought, it meant he had yet to die, and and I had to go through all the steps of grieving him, and I didn’t know if I could do it again.
Another way to say it: before the first time I went to visit my biological father where he lived I cried on my friend Jesse’s couch. I had just realized that I liked this man, and that he was going to die too, someday.
I mean, it does kind of make a difference. Enough time passes and you learn to read people’s reactions to grief. (Bough Down by Karen Green: “The doctor says people back away instinctively. They don’t want to get any on them. I pay him not to cover his eyes and plug his ears with comic book hands.”) Mostly there is the pityface, strange in its uniformity. But now sometimes I say, My dad is dead, and it’s like I can hear them thinking, Not really.
At his funeral, my mom asked if I wanted to see the body. No, of course I didn’t. From Julian Barnes’s memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of, about dying:
When my mother died, the undertaker from a nearby village asked if I wanted to see the body. I said yes; my brother no. Actually, his reply—when I telephoned through the question—was, “Good God, no. I agree with Plato on that one.” I didn’t have the text he was referring to immediately in mind. “What did Plato say?” I asked. “That he didn’t believe in seeing dead bodies.”
In her book Bough Down, about her husband who killed himself, Karen Green writes:
What to do, what to do.
Unwrap him like the worst Christmas present ever. Wash hands. Hey, I have a spider bite on my fuck-you finger. Is he really with god?
None of this breaks his heart anymore; he no longer cares that he doesn't care. Oh the dead do fight dirty and for a while I am sick with fear but then I get bored. The doctor says this is non-linear, inelegant progress.
On his birthday I flipped through my dad's copy of the Bluejacket's Manual, which is the guide that people in the Navy and, formerly, the Coast Guard, get. It's signed like a yearbook. One of the messages says:
Which, if you can’t read it, says: To a small guy but full of the devil. Best of luck in the Regulars and think of me in the Army.
O, to be seen so clearly!
Your friend,
Smalls
*Not that this is interesting but it like, changes the font color and size and italicization between when I type a newsletter and when I send it. Sometimes I’ll send a preview email to myself and catch it but then it’s like, cool, I guess I’ll go into the HTML and try to fix it? But I don’t know anything about HTML and the changes I make there never stick. (I told you it wasn’t interesting!) I don’t think the folks at Mailchimp are updating tinyletter anymore!