Gigolo

Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


    I first got turned on to this book when I was listening to NPR one day.  I was in my car on my way to work.  I recently snuggled on the couch and watched one of those anthropologic shows where Lisa Ling goes to an encampment that housed sex offenders and I was fascinated.  By the life.  By the people that lived there.  The savagery. The absolute denial and disgust that needed to be incorporated to dehumanize a whole population.  So I was already interested when I heard this novel was a fictional account of a young man that lived in one of those encampments in Florida. Then I heard this passage:

It takes half an hour to fully charge his monitor battery and during that half hour the Kid feels intimately connected to the millions of other convicted sex offenders young and old and in-between, rapists and child abusers and men who exposed their genitals on a bus, public masturbators, voyeurs and escalator gropers, compulsive seducers of teenage boys, coaches who couldn’t keep their hands off their athletes, men who talked dirty in Internet chat rooms to people they thought were teenage girls and then arranged to met them for sex, fathers and uncles who drunkenly reached out for their teenage daughters as they passed by the sofa, porn addicts and fantasists lost in the misty zone between reality and imagery, no longer able to tell the difference- all of whom at this moment have plugged their electronic shackles to outlets and are sitting in the bedrooms, living rooms, and basements of houses and apartments and mobile homes, in garages, homeless shelters, public parks, in airports, and train stations, in waiting rooms, offices, and the back rooms of fast food restaurants and under causeways and overpasses-as if they were all trembling leaves on the branches large and small of a vast electrical tree that casts it shadow across the entire country.

That was one of my favorite paragraphs of 2011.  There is so much conveyed in that paragraph.  I can’t tell you that I’m a big fan of sex offenders.  I’ve been a victim of rape.  I know what it’s like to be afraid to die and then think that you might as well be finished off because there’s nothing worse than what is happening right then.  I know what it’s like to let go of and sometimes even hate parts and smells of your own body.

That’s why I chose to work with sex offenders in my twenties.  They were kids.  I was their resident counselor.  I spent nights counting heads and playing gin rummy and cleaning bathrooms.  I spent mornings waking them up. I was not able to touch them to wake them up.  Some of the counselors kicked their beds and flicked their lights on and off.  It is hard to wake a child up out of a lithium induced haze.  I remember those boys slowly wading the halls, overweight medicated zombies.  The program declared that flicking the light switch on and off and kicking the beds an inhumane way of waking them up.  I agreed. I came up with something more creative. Gigolo.  That’s right I said, “Gigolo.”  I bugged the crap out of them by going into their rooms and singing an elementary school cheer at the top of my lungs:

Gig-o-lo -Jig Jig Alo.  Jig a lo Jig Jig A-lo.


Hey Daniel..


Hey What?


Can you Jig?


Jig What?


A-lo


Aight.  My hands up high my feet down low and this is the way I Jig –A-Lo


Ideally this is when they did their own special little dance.

The only problem with my method was that this cheer is call and response so sometimes I said Hey Darnell and there was no Hey what?  But my technique was pretty genius.  It almost always got them up.  The boys rolled out of bed pleading,  “C’mon... Mama Chula.” 

Mama Chula.  That’s what they called me.  It means cute mama.  Not all the kids were sex offenders only the boys on the third floor. The rest of the boys were in their for other offenses, shop lifting or arson or behavioral issues.  There were two boys on the second floor, Jory and Michael that used to love it when I woke them up like that. Until one morning.

Hey Jory...


Hey what?”


Can you jig?


Jig what?


Alo!


“Aight” He jumped out of bed.  I got excited.  Happy that my way was working.

“My hands up high”- he put his hand up high. Michael jumped out of his bed and started dancing.  I smirked to myself. I did it.  I figured it out. How to wake up a teenager without a bribe.

“My feet down low”-he spread his feet and Michael jumped in front of him

“And this is how I FUCK A HO!” And Michael bent over while Jory bumped and grinded against his butt.

I screamed, “Boundaries!”  and walked away.  That was my job.  To be the boundaries police.  Basically I had a thousand mini heart attacks a day.  The next morning as I walked past their room a sock flew out into the hallway.  It was lined with the cardboard of the toilet paper roll and a latex glove.  It was a Fifi. 

They were just boys but because they were already in a lock down facility that small act earned them the badge of convicted sex offenders.  Landed them on the national registry for sex offenders.  Cleared them of being able to live within proximity of a school or park or playground.  They were to be discarded, unable to secure decent jobs or wives or housing.  Life was gonna give it to them hard.

I’m reading Michael Byers’ essay on Faking Shapely Fiction.  This is some of what he says about characterization.

Simply put, a character can be considered convincing in equal measure to his or her volume.  Volume is achieved through the accumulation of unaligned attributes-those attributes which do not reinforce one another.

For example, a geometrical rendering of the idea Robert was tall might look like this:

Tall

If we are alert as writers we are aware of these crowding helpers (tall lean lanky awkward), and rather than let Robert stretch to infinite length, as astronauts are said to do as they cross the event horizon of a black hole, we are wise to give him a surprising, unaligned second attribute, for example:

graceful

And if we are especially alert, we will contrive a third attribute which does not align with the first two, possibly:

stupid

Russell Banks perfects this technique in the Lost Memory of Skin:

Due to his obesity, was flattened somewhat, he was nonetheless a conventionally pretty child.-87

Michael Byers also talks about how important it is for the character to be self conscious or self aware to fully ground the character.  This can be done by showing the character in self-reflection.  Like in this excerpt of Lost Memory…

He shuffled shyly up to the pretty blond girl named Ashley Tarbox at the school dance and asked her to come onto the dance floor with him and jitterbug to Artie Shaw’s “I Get a Kick Out of You.” He knew that he would look ridiculous. So he never did any of those things.-88

Here’s a way you can do this using someone else's observations.  Note also how helpful it is to have more active descriptions rather than stagnant.  For example he refers to the girl getting too much sun and her hair being layered and how she colors her hair. Therefore adds more action to this description.

Her face is freckled and blotched from too much sun.  She has a web of fine lines around her green eyes and a vertical cluster of smoker’s lines above her upper lip. Her thick coppery hair is cropped short, chopped rather than layered and streaked with gray, as if the copper red dye needs to be replenished.  She’s her own hairdresser, the Professor observes.  She’s full breasted for such a thin woman and wears a loose, black chenille skirt with a dangling ripped hem and a faded T-shirt with I GOT CRABS AT HALEY’S CRAB SHACK printed across the front.-95

Another great gift of this novel was dialogue I thought that Banks nailed the way in which people talk so much so that I forgot I was reading at times. 

Here’s an example:

I still take you for a cop.
I take you for a vet. ‘Nam. Noncommissioned officer, E-5, Air cav, probably. Or else BRO. Two tours, early 1970s. Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.  I take Trinidad Bob there as a vet too.  A blueleg E-2 who never got to E-3.  One tour, late 1960s, maybe early 1970-s like you.  BRO not in your outfit.  Took some shrapnel in the head. Like they say FUBAR.  Fucked up in the head.

Notice he doesn’t use dialogue tags and never really states who is speaking so he is trusting the reader to be able to decipher this but also has such a distinct voice for each character that we know whose speaking.



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Runaway from me Baby

Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



And I always find, yeah, I always find somethin' wrong
You been puttin' up wit' my shit just way too long
I'm so gifted at findin' what I don't like the most
So I think it's time for us to have a toast
Let's have a toast for the douchebags,
Let's have a toast for the assholes,
Let's have a toast for the scumbags,
Every one of them that I know
Let's have a toast to the jerkoffs
That'll never take work off
Baby, I got a plan
Run away fast as you can

R-r-ru-ru-ru-run away
Run away from me, baby

Those are the lyrics to Kanye West’s Runaway.  If I had to make a soundtrack to Andre Dubus III’s Townie, this song would definitely be in it.  There were things that I really enjoyed about this memoir.

Like it got me out of bed at five am and into my sweats to go running in the morning. I dubbed the month of January ‘Alive at Five.’ I intend on running every morning for an hour and then writing until 8 am when it’s time for me to start getting ready for work.

I was drawn to Townie because I have this thing about New England. I was born in Concord Massachusetts.  Then I lived there as a family with my mom and two brothers for a couple of years.  Until my mom took off with just me like a thief in the night.  It was the last time I remember living like a family. My mom always painted it as a place to be from.   Sometimes, most often in the winter, she would get depressed and crawl into bed with me and ask me if I would want to go back to Massachusetts.  She wove tales of snow days, and how I could come home in the afternoons from school and she would bake cookies for me, and I would be the most popular girl in school.

It would leave me with a feeling of longing every winter. It begins slowly like a San Francisco Cable car creeping in on Thanksgiving and then is fully enflamed by the end of Christmas. Finally leaving me plump with drunkenness New Years Eve so I could somehow fuck away the dull clots in my spirit. In California I sit exposed, my arms hoarding a box of buttered popcorn, watching snow covered scenes of East Coast sidewalks, false ice frosted windows of storefronts selling books, plush toys, and sophisticated outfits.  I paint my nails a deep warm red and don black leather boots, sometimes a scarf to celebrate like those people in the movie were celebrating. I watch commercials that feature fluffy puppies jumping out of shiny boxes donning Santa hats. I drink hot apple cider, and eat all things Yuletide packing on an extra winter layer. I do this wholly, as if I had sliced open my own wrists, ripped out my veins, only to create more room for nutmeg and cardamom. It’s completely masochistic as I’m sure you know that one cannot replace their veins with winter spices!

Townie definitely satiated my winter craving for New England.  Andre Dubus III captured the register of the Townies perfectly.

I actually laughed out loud when I read this passage and then repeated it ad nauseam to my partner, “I’m always hawny in the mawnin’”

This is a memoir so I can’t delve too far into critiquing it’s content but it is a story if Andre Dubus III’s upbringing his proclivity toward fighting. Which is something I could definitely relate to with my own upbringing.

“This warm wet evidence of a street rage I’d either forgotten to bring along, or was too drunk to bring along.”

He also spoke honestly about his struggle with writing this novel.  Which as a writer I appreciated.

“Or maybe the women were doing the wielding and the cutting.  I didn’t know. What I did know is that this novel was dead and I had killed it.  I’d been trying too hard to say something- about poverty, about overwhelmed single mothers, about absent fathers and tough neighborhoods and all the trouble that could be found there, but most of all I’d been trying to make the reader feel sorry for the children, especially the teenage boy I’d based solely on me.”

That made up for the fact that he didn’t even pick up writing until he was a young adult submitted one story to five different places and his first acceptance was to Playboy, which paid him a nice lump of money for his first published unagented story.  Oye! 

To be honest there was something overly sentimental to me about this memoir.  I appreciate that in nonfiction one has to dig deep but I don’t want to see the digging I just want to feel the burn and scrape of the cuts. There was a lot of over-explaining of his thoughts and feelings for my taste.  I’m more grateful for what this novel has inspired me to do off the page (run run run) as opposed to on the page.




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Something dark

The Outlaw Album: Stories by Daniel Woodrell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars




I love Daniel Woodrell’s creepy dark prose. 

“Such questions popping up keep the hurt fresh.”

“They tell me Dad committed suicide for reasons he dreamed up.  His mind was too active.  He had a round mind and it roamed.  He could imagine any king of hurt.  He could imagine the many miseries of this world flying over from everywhere to roost between his ears, but he couldn't imagine how to get away.”

“Summer had its fangs out sharp and long that year, sucking the joy from every sunny hour.”

“He was stronger’n Limburger cheese.”

“Coleman Younger was reddish in skin and hair with the temperament that is wed to the hue and girth and grit enough to back it up.”

“For Coleman Younger to speak of me so set a glow in me that whiskey could not match nor doubt extinguish.”

“She’s put her finger right on the button about him, which is embarrassing.  It’s so general, his problem, so everywhere among men, that he wants to add a wrinkle to it, some invented misery that makes it seem like he at least had a special sort of problem with love that was all his own. “

“Her look makes her seem like a lady he should’ve met in some other life, one when there was more horn music.”

This collection of stories was all woods and musk and meth and fight and fog. I was especially bitch slapped by the story Uncle about a girl whose uncle was now her baby dependent upon her because after he molested her she beat him into a handicapped existence.

This uncle became a drooling needy baby and she still watched his nasty molester brain watch girls so she decided to end his life by pushing him off the bridge.  This whole concept intrigued me.  I always thought I had some form of Stockholm syndrome but this was extreme.

“I had a friend who was molested by her step dad that was in a wheelchair.” Is what my girlfriend said after I sighed and put the book down and explained the story to her.

Whoa. That’s gnarly I thought. 

“Yeah it was fucked up.  She took care of him and he molested her.”
Whoa.  The point is these stories showed me dark things I could not normally dream up.  It made me feel tender toward people.




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This Made Me Better

Blueprints for Building Better Girls: Stories by Elissa Schappell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I hadn’t read any of Elissa Schappell’s writing before this collection although I did see her deft mom skills at the Tin House summer writer’s workshop when she lured a teenager that was tripping his balls off away from the podium were Steve Almond was in the middle of a reading.  She was so stealth so composed. Maybe it doesn’t have much to do with craft but acts like that, that require a certain amount of empathy and prowess also inform me that someone is a good writer.

    I am embarrassed to admit that I spent a lot of my life as a misogynist.  I grew up hating anything remotely associated with femininity.  I hated pink. I wanted to change my name to an androgynous name.  I thought the woman’s suffragist movement was born out of racism.  I called myself a Womanist rather than a feminist in the same way Chicanos protest the term ‘Hispanic.’

    My early impressions of women were that they were weak that they forsake themselves and their children for men.  My birthmother battled with mental illness and raised me up into my teens as a single mother. This dynamic was complicated and slippery. We shared clothes, she sometimes introduced me as her sister, I answered our phone playing the role of a receptionist, “Chadburn residence may I help you?”  She said it was for our own protection. We were two women living alone. At times we were competing.  Attention was the reward.

    These are all the reasons why it would have been least likely that I picked up a collection called ‘Blueprints for Building Better Girls.’ But later I received my biggest gift.  I had dozens of women rescue me.  All different types of women.  I was adopted and taken in by a Dutch Indonesian woman, she was a powerful Ad Exec.  She wore big clunky jewelry. She had long hair and long skirts and could dance and laugh and cook and she would goof off and stand on a skateboard and we ate dinners at the table. Real dinners, salad main dish water wine coffee.  She let me call her mom. 

    Then I went for a short while to another woman she was Jewish from Texas a social worker at the county hospital.  She had two daughters.  One of them battling Anorexia the other a fiercely talented artist. We worked out at the gym together me and this mom.  We took walks together. I never had a mom like that.  That was willing to sweat with me.  When I first met her I’d snuck into their backhouse with boys and booze in the middle of the night.  Her husband came out in his underwear annoyed. He got dressed and drove each of us home.  I never knew a parent that would do that.  Be mad but still drive everyone home. This mom wasn’t much of a cook it was always shriveled up chicken breasts but she supported our academic pursuits like no other.  There was reading of papers and an office with a computer and me up all night studying drinking coffee was okay.  I never knew I could do that before.  Stay up all night studying.  It was a luxury.

    I had another mom that could never officially adopt me because she grew pot in the backyard but she was still the one that taught me how to drive a car and over shared about her sex life and if I ever ran out of places to go there was this place on the hill that I knew there was love.  She never made me feel not enough.

    There are more, many more, teachers, social workers, friend’s moms that all acted as surrogate mothers to me.  There’s a million things I can thank these women for but one in particular is the empathy they built in me the capacity to see and connect with so many different types of women.  I think that having these experiences has made me a better writer. 

    Elissa Schappell does all this in just one collection of stories.  As I read the collection I could see myself spotting what I might have judged to be a certain type of woman somewhere and speculating what her guts were like what her motivations were.  Blueprints answers all these questions.  I love books that make me want to be a better person.  Not like there is a good and bad person but there are times when I loose patience with people. There are times when I’m overly critical.  That is all just a fancy way to say, there are times when I’m very afraid and insecure.  I don’t like the person I become at these times. 

    Like the other night there were these two teenage girls in a meeting and they were laying on each other stroking each others hair slowly gliding their fingertips back and forth up each others arms.  It annoyed me.  Then I read Blueprints and I remembered that that’s what a lot of teenage girls do.  They’re affectionate and that’s sweet.  It’s also what I like to think of as my ultimate job.  To be loving.





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I LOVE THIS BOOK

We the Animals: A novel by Justin Torres

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


    I chose Justin Torres’ We The Animals mainly because like the novel I’m working on he stated that his narrative had no linear through-line.  That it wasn’t plot driven as much as conflict driven, meaning that you turn the pages because of the constant presence of two opposing desires.  He’s said that there is no plot.
    I am dealing with similar delights and challenges.  This story is told in first person from the point of view of one of three brothers.  The novel begins fast and choppy.  The novel itself is really expository not a lot of dialogue but still it is compelling enough. I think his description of having conflict present is true.  I’ve had editors tell me in the past that they wanted to chase after the ends of sentences.  Torres had me chasing. 

For example:     “Manny threw the rock, and then we were running, at the full speed of terror, along the edge of the woods, running, running, running, falling down and catching our breath, with the sound of the shattering glass playing over and over in our minds, the sound permanence, the delightful, shocking sound of damage done.”-89

I’ve also heard that whenever you know where you’re going turn left.  Torres turns left.

“What we gotta do is, we gotta figure out a way to reverse gravity, so that we all fall upward, through the clouds and sky, all the way to heaven”-85

     It’s fun.  His writing is very sparse.  I get the sense that he is used to writing in short form.  And in fact I first learned of him this year with the story that he had in the New Yorker then later a story of his appeared in Harpers.  I am wondering if initially this novel started as a collection of shorts. Each chapter reads like it could be a standalone short story. 
    When he said he didn’t have a linear through-line I sighed with relief because of how acclaimed this particular novel has been lately but when I read it I realized it is totally chronologically in order. So while each chapter can read as a standalone short there is a chronology here that is not currently in my manuscript.
    This is more of a novella than a novel, that consists of nineteen chapters.  The book is small 125 pages and he says that a lot of people ask for more, that they want it longer but he replies that they don’t that it’s really complete. I think I got the impression that he is used to writing in the short form because every word on every page is working, doing some sort of job. In terms of process he says that he doesn’t write tons and tons of pages and narrow it down later that he is economical with his language and revises as he writes. That’s definitely reflected in the tone of his work. He uses the exact right words.  For example:

    “ribs softly stepping down from her breasts,”-45

    Torres has a magical grasp on language he can slip in and out of slang and his narrators voice is incredibly unique:

    “We aimed to smile like that.”-4
    “what he was doing was this: making us a salad.”-36

    I think that he does a good job of crediting the reader with intelligence. He doesn’t over-explain. In fact I think he leaves a lot of holes intentionally so the reader can partake in the story.
    There was a new development towards the end of the book but I’m not sure I would call it a surprise.  It was just the way the story evolved.
I’m really moved by Justin Torres’ authentic voice.  A desperation for honesty.

    “God’s scattered all the clean among the dirty.  You and me and Joel, we’re nothing more than a fistful of seed that God tossed into the mud and horseshit.  We’re on our own.”-84

    The book made me like him.  His voice was witty and charming but more than that I felt his hard work.  I get scared a lot that I’m not doing things right and after I read this novel I felt like I got permission to “do me.”




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POWER BABY

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



I used to be a phone hostess.  Muscle chat.  Guys would call me to simulate wrestling over the phone.  There’s a fetish for that.  It’s really about the oldest aphrodisiac... power.

Every door closer every window opener every exploiter every opportunity maker is about power and Lipsyte has been coined a “gifted critic of power.” Which really just makes me like him as a person.  The irony here is that in real life I work in development for a man that developed something called the power analysis.  It’s a way to measure power in the political landscape.

I say irony, because The Ask is a satirical novel about a man, Milo Burke who is a development officer at a third tier art school who will be unemployed if he does not secure a major amount of funding from an old college friend turned Tech Mogul.

This novel was too good in so many ways but what stood out for me the most was the humor. Well the humor coupled with traditional storytelling.  As a commie and a writer I heard what I would consider the highest compliment bestowed upon Lipsyte, “literary vanguard”  Aahhh music!  Something to strive for. The revolution will be written about and it will be funny and entertaining and full of foul language! 

What I really enjoyed about this novel is that I, as the reader, felt like I was in on an inside joke with the writer.  The jokes were being told through the protagonist but still I felt like I was a part of it.  Like he was winking at me.  In fact this entire novel was like getting an unexpected yet warranted facebook poke (only political and brilliant) it was just fun is what I’m saying.  Here are some examples:

It was an odd moment, as though the narrative had somehow forked and we were witnessing two possible outcomes, the intruders subdued at one end of the room, our friend strangled at the other.  The story had to decide.-144

And when I read this I nodded my head.  I winked back.  I felt like we were in on something together.  I laughed and it didn’t break the dream.  I just thought Yeah let’s go. Take me there. I’ll go to jail for you.  I won’t tell anyone.

Then there was this witty piece of dialogue:
“No, I mean, if I were the protagonist of a book or a movie, it would be hard to like me, to identify with me, right?”
“I would never read a book like that , Milo.  I can’t think of anyone who would.  There’s no reason for it.”-229

Love it!  Get it he IS the protagonist of a book!  I am reading it!  We are a team now Milo and me because I hate this guy that says no one would read it.  I think of the little seal on the cover of my book that says New York TImes Book Review Notable Book of the Year and then I think this jack ass doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  But I still have some empathy because maybe that was put on paper when it was being written and it was written from Lipsyte’s most critical mind. Maybe he was afraid when he wrote it and that is the voice of his fear. 

About two years ago I started noticing books that spoke directly to the reader. Then there were all those fun footnotes that started coming around.  I tried to use those things in my own work.  A teacher said that it was too gimmicky.  That I shouldn’t play like that until after I got the whole Strunk and White down.  Well Lipsyte addressed me as a reader and I think I actually spoke out loud.  It takes a lot to do that.  I mean it’s one thing for me to go lending out fifteen hours of brain space to a writer so we can take a trip somewhere but to actually feed into the dialogue in physical space? That is not something that happens.

And maybe it was me and some of you who took a nap before dinner, lay back on the sofa with a book, the assigned reading, another novel with the old fashioned folk, their stiff speeches and chafed hearts.  Maybe some of you, like me, shut your eyes with the book open on your chest, tumbled into another world, near and impossible, homeroom skin beneath the rain damp denim.
-281

Lastly there were a couple of lines here that were just plain funny.  He creates new words in a great way and his dialogue is impeccable but it’s the funny that I’m into. 

“The few girls you’ve brought home, they seem like nice girls.  But you’ve got to learn how to reach the dirty glory in them.”-50 (father/son talk)

“Was it the one where you’re inside the girl and you are pumping her and pumping her and you are so happy but then it turns out it’s not a girl, it’s really one of those super poisonous box jellyfish, and it stings you and you are screaming and screaming and screaming and the sky rains the diarrhea of babies?”-273 (in reference to a dream)

I’ve been thinking a lot about funny lately.  I noticed in a workshop recently peppering all the saddest things with jokes and the saddest jokes made me laugh the hardest.  For example one student submitted a story in which a woman had a miscarriage and after the writer used some sultry adjective to describe a conversation between her and her boyfriend.  The workshop teacher pointed it out and I cracked, “Hey what’s better than break-up sex?”  and made a thumbs up.  It was so funny because it was so horrible and awful and sad.  I think this reviewer puts it best:

It takes fiction, with its subtlety and interiority and sentence rhythms and essential made-upness, to marry the individually uproarious to the systemically tragic in a way that can be laughed at without, finally, also being laughed off.-Lydia Millet New York Time Sunday Book Review  March 4, 2010.




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I am a wrecker and maker of wordhouses. Me and my twin have each other’s backs. And we’re coming for your women and children.-Lidia Yuknavitch

The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I had a miscarriage once.  I didn’t know I was pregnant.  I was sixteen and sitting in my brother’s room while he and his friends sat around playing video games.  I had cramps.  Cramps like I had to shit something real bad.  I walked down the long hall of the house into a bathroom off of the kitchen.  There was no shower in this bathroom.  Just a toilet.  And pretty soon a toilet with lots of blood.  When I got there I already had blood soaked jeans.  I sat quietly breathing little hoo hoo hoo owl sounds to myself, clenching and pushing and breathing.  I hid in that bathroom all night. Until people were tucked away in their beds. I  snuck into the other bathroom.  On the other side of the house.  The very far away bathroom. That had a shower.  I went there and bathed. There was so much pain in that day. The pain of the miscarriage and the pain of nobody noticing my absence.  All night alone with me and my pain.  It’s what I had always suspected but still feared.

    Lidia Yuknavitch has a way of talking about all these secret shame pains and making it okay.  You can be a world of contradictions you can have red combat boots, and have all kinds of crazy sex, and get wasted, and swim like an athlete or a kickass mermaid, and have a PhD, and teach literature, and know all sorts of shit like pedagogy and still speak and write in the most accessible language.  She wrote Chronology of Water in such a way that it made me open it and fall into a world I once was in or wished I could be in or sort of tinkered around on the periphery of  or once was really the ringleader of and then I would close the book and everything was silent and boring and I never wanted another day to go by without her words. So so grateful for all those words.  Here’s some of them:

The victories were small.  About the size of a child-36

Even angry girls can be moved to tears.-59

I didn’t know yet how wanting to die could be a bloodsong in your body that lives with you your whole life. -72

“Remember you are Israel Boone!  You can do anything! When we get home I’ll make you a buckskin shirt!”

It was a lie.  A beautiful, stunningly creative, lifesaving lie.-88

Bennett passing out like a reverse miracle.-117

Me waiting in the dead air like a little lost comma.-137

I am a wrecker and maker of wordhouses.  Me and my twin have each other’s backs. And we’re coming for your women and children.-194

You see it is important to understand how damaged people don’t always know how to say yes, or to choose the big thing, even when it is right in front of them.  It’s a shame we carry.  The shame of wanting something good.  The shame of feeling something good.  The same of not believing we deserve to stand in the same room in the same way as all those we admire.  Big red As on our chests.-199

Thankyouthankyouthankyouthank





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