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A few weeks ago we were in Missouri and talking about maybe going to see The Mounds. "I read an essay about the Mounds once," I said. "By John Jeremiah Sullivan. Or John McPhee? One of the journalist Johns. I don't remember. I read it in college."
"You were obsessed with John McPhee in college," M said, which is true. (It was Sullivan, for the record.) I was obsessed with John McPhee and Joseph Mitchell and JJS. All of these plainspoken, old-fashioned men.
"God," I said. "No wonder I thought I would never write a book."
I love the way those men write: going out into the world and investigating it minutely. Their prose is thoughtful, tender, unironic; they are not exactly romantic, but their work makes good on the promise of the maxim that paying sustained attention to a thing can be a deep form of loving it. They know the names of all the types of trees they encounter, and snakes, and birds. They seem to live in a world that is more human and much less stupid than mine.
I love their work, but it is not my work. That's what I had to learn in college and after: that I love a lot of writing, but most of it is writing I cannot do. I love the journalistic essay, and brick-heavy high fantasy novels, and I can't write them. I can't write any of the things that I understood as literature when I was first starting to understand what literature meant.
I guess I used to imagine it would be more like mimicry, a writing life: seeing the thing you loved in the world and trying to make more of it. A choice. Intellectual.
Instead it feels physical: the same way I can do a hundred thousand chatturangas and still not have "yoga arms," I can read literary men named John, and I can love doing it, but when I write, when it's more than a page or two where you can borrow voice and style without too much strain-- it won't come out that way. It will be fiction, narrative, propulsive, intimate. Unmistakably female. Neon in a dark night; teenage girls in big houses in big cities with big questions. What it feels like to be such a hungry fucking animal.
Those are the books I write whether I like it or not. I sold a couple more of them, we announced this week. It will be a while before you guys get to read them, but still, I am very excited to share the news.
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I do write some non-fiction, so in the mean time: here's one for the LA Times about chef Adam Perry Lang and how he's incorporating hard-of-hearing chefs into his new restaurant, APL, plus a piece for WeWork about why so many female entrepreneurs are choosing to make their homes in Los Angeles.