that thing
A conversation I have pretty often is that someone asks what my books are about, and I say, "One is about a girl who falls in love with a guy in a band and it changes her life, and the other one is about a girl who falls in love with a guy in a band and it changes her life." I mean, they're about a lot more than that, but it's an easy gloss, and funny, and also, technically, true.
Then the person I'm talking to says, "So music, huh? Are you a really big music fan?"
I tell them the truth, which is that I like music as much as the next person, probably, but it's not like... I don't like music as much as having written two books that center on girls and the bands they love would suggest.
But then it occurred to me recently that they aren't about music, not really, not even in the "not really" way that they're really about like, family and friendships and desire and whatever else. They're not about music , but they are about musicians.
Writers like to talk a big game about how we're very shy, we just want to be left alone, but writing-- writing something you ask anyone else to read-- is, unavoidably, a psychically violent act. Like, other kinds of artists want you to see things, to hear them, but writers want to be the voice in your head; we want the deepest intimacy and the closest control. Joan Didion, of course: "In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. Its an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions, with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating, but theres no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most private space."
But sometimes it's not enough, or it's not enough for me. This is why I like doing readings: instead of relying on you to hear the words correctly, I get to say them, to give them the tone and cadence, the weight that I think they deserve in the air. I get to hold your attention in my fist, and, unlike when you're reading, curled up in a chair somewhere, I get to watch myself do it.
Musicians do that all the time. There's this Lorde lyric: "can you hear the violence? / megaphone to my chest / broadcast the boom, boom, boom, boom, and make 'em all dance to it." They move your whole body to their beats: at a concert, they conduct the mood and rhythm of an entire room. What fucking power. No wonder I was obsessed with them when I was a teenager trying to figure out how to wield myself; no wonder they were the figures I fixated on when I was trying to figure out what it meant to want to write novels, to hold someone's attention for hours at a stretch. Male musicians especially-- what would it be like to be that unapologetic about wanting attention and power and adoration, for your self and for your art? I was obsessed with guys in bands in high school and I'm still obsessed with them now: the way they aren't afraid take all the things I write and slip you like notes, and scream them out loud, for everyone to hear.
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This week's link is an essay I wrote for LitHub about reading a book about the history of the Chateau Marmont, and then nearly not being allowed to get a drink there. Any place that's so difficult about letting you pay $20-- twenty American dollars-- for a martini can extremely go fuck itself as far as I'm concerned; if you read the book, which is very fun, I highly encourage you to do so literally anywhere else.
I also recently recommended Britta Lundin's book SHIP IT as one of my favorite books about fandom, and then saw GRACE AND THE FEVER recommended along with it as a top five book about fandom. Nice, right?
Finally, you can catch me live and in-person at Aminah Mae Safi's launch for her starred-review-getting sophomore book TELL ME HOW YOU REALLY FEEL at The Ripped Bodice on June 15. We're doing a variety show?? Never mind I take it back, I deffo do not want to perform.