whatever this is
I keep thinking of Tinyletters I could maybe write and then not writing them. It's hard not to feel like I've told you every story about myself and my life that matter even a little bit. I get up, I do yoga, I write, I cook, I walk. I volunteer; I sit in friends' backyards and on their porches. I feel like I'm encased in plastic or glass or thick-combed honey. I look at old pictures and cry because it feels like my life, the interesting part of it, anyway, is something that already happened to me. I understand that this is not true, and yet.
Why would I want to remember this? Why would I want to subject you to any part of my experience, when all I have to say about it is, it's hard? I often feel like I write to digest, truly just in order to give my life something to do with itself, but I'm not even done swallowing this year yet.
I had wanted a break from living in public, from performing myself and my career so minutely and constantly. The monkey's paw curled, etc. I've spent the bulk of this year writing books that won't have my name on them. (That's fine with me; they're perfectly good books but they are in no way mine.) I wrote two new drafts of a book on contract and most of a draft of a book that's not. I have helped edit and encourage other peoples' books and that has been an absolute fucking godsend, easily the best thing I've done with my time, because it's basically the only thing I can be sure matters to someone other than myself. (In early March I wrote about wanting to figure out how to be good company for myself; monkey's paw again.)
I don't have anything to say and yet I still feel like I owe you something. What? I couldn't tell you. A thought. A distraction. A story. This life, shaped into a story. It's always weird when people who write about themselves on the internet just... stop. I've never understood it before. But sometimes it happens, I guess: you run out of words for a while. Your life turns into something you can't or won't unpack. And then there's no faking it. There's nothing to do but wait and see if the desire come back.
So. That's what I'm doing: what we're all doing. Waiting, waiting, waiting.
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I did interview Julie Buxbaum about her novel Admission, which is out today.
I didn't publish much this year, but I did write a couple of things I'm proud of: this piece about David Foster Wallace and the art of "profoundly compromised men;" this one, about gaining weight and writing for teenagers, and this one, which is about how contemporary fiction inevitably fails to capture contemporary reality.
Oh, right, and a book called Look.