books

I’ve been waiting for Still Writing for a long time, ever since Dani first mentioned her new project to our class, sitting in her living room, surrounded by books.  Oh, those books!  Those books, alphabetized by author’s name and categorized by type, over which my eyes glided so many times during the hours I was immensely privileged to sit in Dani’s house as a member of her writing class.  I learned more than I can possibly articulate from Dani and from my classmates during the 2 1/2 years I participated.  I left Dani’s workshop this past winter during a time in my life when I felt simultaneously overwhelmed by responsibilities and demands and painfully aware of how short my childrens’ time at home was.  I miss it, but I will never forget what I learned, and I know I’ll be enriched for the rest of my writing days by my time in the class.

All of this preamble is to say: I’m wildly fortunate to be able to call Dani my teacher.  Reading Still Writing felt like listening to Dani talk, and I can tell you first-hand that that’s an immense gift.  Still Writing is full of both specific ideas for and wise observations about the writing life, and it contains the kind of language that makes my eyes fill with tears and the kind of richness that I think about for days, weeks, and months.

At the outset of Still Writing, Dani asserts that “the page is your mirror” and quotes Emerson on how the good writer “seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the universe which runs through himself and all things.”  These two images together remind us that every day a writer deals with the granular reality of him or herself and also with the largest questions of human experience.  Still Writing does the exact same thing.  Dani tells stories from her own life, both to show us how she came to be the writer she is and to demonstrate certain truths about the creative life.  She also makes concrete suggestions which are pragmatic and thought-provoking in equal measure.  Still Writing is studded with quotes from other writers and thinkers; by weaving these words with her own Dani both adds resonance to her narrative and affirms her place in the highest choir of those who write about writing.

The book is structured in three parts: Beginnings, Middles, and Endings.

Beginnings are about facing down our internal censor, about finding a place to sit that is a room of one’s own, and of locating the “shimmer around the edges” that Joan Didion described.  To begin is to find what Dani describes as a toehold – whether that’s character or place or dialogue or plot – and to release our need for permission.  To write is to sit down, over and over again, to stay with something when it gets hard, not to look away.  “The practice is the art,” Dani reminds us.  There is no avoiding doing the work.  At the beginning it is also particularly useful to have a guide, and when Dani describes her first mentor, Grace Paley (to whom Still Writing is dedicated), I found myself nodding vigorously.  As I read Dani say of Paley, “I often found myself on the verge of tears when I was in her presence,” I was myself in tears.  The fact is that’s precisely how I felt about Dani when I first met her, and how I continue to feel.  There are people who touch something deep inside us, in whom we recognize something kindred and also something to which we aspire.  Dani is one of those people for me.

Middles are about courage and quiet tenacity, about muses and finding the right early readers, about identifying the subconscious tics that fill our work and the inheritance and history that colors and shapes our writing, and about that monstrously difficult thing, structure.  In this section Dani shares a line from Aristotle that I have heard her say in person more than once: “Action is not plot, but merely the result of pathos.”  She declares that “if you have people, you will have pathos” and goes on to say that for artists there is “no satisfaction whatever at any time.  There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”  The blessed unrest of which Dani speaks gives me that now-familiar sensation (because I’ve felt it many times when reading her work) of being known from the inside out, of someone reading my mind and putting into words something I’ve felt but been unable to articulate.  Yes.  The pathos that we see, she is saying, is unavoidable, and though it hurts, we must keep seeing it and sharing it.

Middles is my favorite part of Still Writing.  Dani urges us not to give up, to believe that “just at the height of hopelessness, frustration, and despair… we find the most hidden and valuable gifts of the process.”  I am in the middle myself – of writing, of thinking, of life itself – and her words encourage me more than I can articulate.  “It has been said that the blessing is next to the wound,” Dani writes in Middles, and I began to cry.  There’s no question this is true of me: my wound and my wonder are two sides of the same truth, of the frank astonishment at this world that is the lens through which I see every day.  Again Dani describes something so true it sends a shiver up my spine:

I’ve learned that it isn’t so easy to witness what is actually happening.  The eggs, the cows.  But my days are made up of these moments.  If I dismiss the ordinary – waiting fort the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen – I may just miss my life…. It is the job of the writer to say, look at that.  To point. To shine a light. But it isn’t that which is already bright and beckoning that needs our attention. We develop our sensitivity – to use John Berger’s phrase, our “ways of seeing” – in order to bear witness to what is.  Our tender hopes and dreams, our joy, frailty, grief, fear, longing, desire – every human being is a landscape….This human catastrophe, this accumulation of ordinary blessings, of unbearable losses.

Endings are about the “prickly, overly sensitive, socially awkward group of people” that form a writer’s tribe (just that description alone makes me sigh with identification), the themes that “sharpen and raise themselves as if written in Braille,” the necessity of telling our stories, even when it is hard, the fearful uncertainty of the business side of a career in writing, and the dangerous, seductive power of envy.  It is also in Endings that Dani reflects on some of the grand themes of the writing life.  It is in this section that we see most clearly that Still Writing is about more than writing: it is about living in this world, about paying attention, about honoring where we came from while recognizing where we are, about those we love and can trust and those whose intentions are less clear.  It is about remaining open to the world, even – or maybe most especially – when it causes us pain.

Too often, our capacity for awe is buried beneath layers of perfectly reasonable excuses.  We feel we must protect ourselves – from hurt, disappointment, insult, loss, grief – like warriors girding for battle.  A Sabbath prayer that I have carried with me for more than half my life begins like this: “Days pass and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among the miracles.
We cannot afford to walk sightless among miracles.  Nor can we protect ourselves from suffering. We do work that thrusts us into the pulsing heart of this world, whether or not we’re in the mood, whether or not it’s difficult or painful or we’d prefer to avert our eyes. When I think of the wisest people I know, they share one defining trait: curiosity. They turn away from the minutiae of their lives – and focus on the world around them. They are motivated by a desire to explore the unfamiliar.  They are drawn towards what they don’t understand. They enjoy surprise. Some of these people are seventy, eighty, close to ninety years old, but they remind me of my son and his friend on the day I sprung them from camp. Courting astonishment. Seeking breathless wonder.

Still Writing is a book to read carefully and to savor over and over.  I’ve read it twice myself already, and I know it will join books like Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life in the pantheon of those volumes I trust most and revisit most often.  I’m fortunate and grateful to know Dani and feel sure that this volume, which contains so much of her wisdom, her heart, and her soul, will inspire passionate devotion in many, many readers.

I have known Lacy Crawford a long, long time.  We met our freshman year in college and both, I think, recognized a kindred spirit.  We shared long walks on our campus’s tow path, an awareness of how the texture of light changes throughout a day and throughout a year, a deep respect for the solstice, and long red hair.  We also both loved words: poems, essays, novels, lyrics, quotes.  Since 1992 Lacy and I have been trading book suggestions and passages we have read that moved us.  She is without question one of my most valued and cherished friends, a true native speaker, and someone I’m grateful to have in my life every single day.

Reading Lacy’s first novel, Early Decision, was an extraordinarily wonderful experience.  I’ve read many other books by friends but never one by someone I have known so well, so long, or so intimately.  Though Lacy created a rich and textured fictional world, I could also hear her voice in certain sentences, and it felt like she was telling me a story over a bottle of wine in my living room.  Early Decision is published tomorrow, and I can’t possibly say enough about how much I loved this book.

Early Decision is narrated by Anne, a private college admissions counselor, and follows the college application season of five high school seniors.  In the process of working on his or her personal essay, each teenager excavates who they really are and what they truly want.  Lacy makes the point that personal essay, and the deep reflection required to execute it well, can lead us to a more profound understanding of ourselves and our experience.  Isn’t this what great writing really is?  For the writer and, of course for the reader: a gateway to richer knowledge of this life.

Self-discovery and self-determination are central themes of Early Decision.  These are echoed in the dedication (always one of my favorite parts of a book) in which Lacy says to her sons: “May your decisions be your own.”  Anne is very much engaged in both processes at the outset of the novel.  She is a relatable and human character whose own sense of not yet being fully in the world underlines her role as an advisor.  She is observing, and consulting, but she feels she is not yet living. 

Here is what was going to happen: Anne was going to wake up one morning in full possession of the authority she needed to go out and start her life.  To acquire the position she really wanted – whatever that was – and succeed.  Like Gregor Samsa in reverse, she’d reach her two feet to the floor and head into the world a whole person. 
She did not know how to explain exactly why it hadn’t happened yet.  She had been careful and diligent.  She’d earned terrific grades….And there she was, at play in the fields of the word, except that the amber reading rooms revealed themselves to be a sort of Neverland, where nothing ever happened, and nothing ever would.

(I have to mention that the offhand Kafka reference is vintage Lacy, and put me back in the mind of a freshman seminar on European Literature in which I read The Metamorphosis for the first time; Lacy wasn’t in the old-fashioned sunlit lecture hall so filled with both ideas and energy with me, but I feel as though she was.)

Many of us, I suspect, can relate to Anne: a character who’s followed the rules her whole life, done well in school, grabbed every brass ring.  She chose to pursue a graduate degree in English and it is there that she discovered the unfortunate truth that “so much passion should come to nothing.”  She leaves school and becomes an independent college admissions counselor, making good money if not the kind of impact that she longs for.

Anne is haunted by this sense that though “her friends read the currents and hopped on in: school-work-love-life,” she instead “teetered there, paralyzed.”  There is both irony and pathos in the way that Anne so ably guides her students to epiphanies and to clearer senses of what they want to do and be while being so utterly stuck herself.  Of course, perhaps the dilemma is one of definition: to me it was clear that Anne has hopped in, and that despite her sense that “she had no contribution to make,” she is already making one.

The five students with whom Anne works are all vividly drawn, from Sadie’s angst about her parents’ role in her college choice and facade of confidence that covers a profound loneliness to Hunter’s boat-sized sneakers and deep but parentally-disapproved passion for the American West.  They serve, ultimately, as foils for Anne, though, and at the end of the day it is her character who has most stayed with me.

Lacy also makes a point about modern parenthood which is uncomfortable in its accuracy.  Most – though not all – of the parents in Early Decision are of the now-familiar helicopter type, hovering over their children, hoping that through sheer effort and good (or so they think) intentions they can protect them from harm and insure their happiness.  This approach backfires, and Anne observes that in many ways all the “supports” that privileged parents can provide their children send one message, brutal in its simple devastation: “whatever you can do, it’s not good enough.”

For both parent and child, the college application process is surely among the most fraught moments in the long-but-short season that is parenting.  How can an experience so wrought with powerful anxiety, galloping hope, and fundamental identification be simple?  Anne stumbles into these weeds more than once, noting for example the “real, tender spot” that is “a mother’s projection onto her only child.”  It’s almost impossible to imagine a choice more weighted with importance in today’s culture than college.

“Alexis, where you go to college is not the same as who you are,” Anne tells one student, who replies, “No, but it shapes me.  It, like, shapes everything.”  And it does.  Lacy wades without hesitation into this whitewater of love and loyalty, of expectations and dreams, of privilege and luck, and Early Decision is full of fascinating reflections on what it is that really makes us who we are.  And of course the answer is neither as simple nor as complicated as those college admission essay questions.

As Anne helps steer her students to a better understanding of themselves and to the best possible college outcome, she grows too.  My only wish is that she was more aware of how important her influence on these teenagers is.  She reflects that maybe “college was best thought of as four years in which adolescents might learn to use the pronoun “I” and mean it,” and I couldn’t help thinking that I’d been watching her do the same throughout the novel.

I loved Early Decision and know you will too.  I’m lucky enough to have read other things Lacy has written, and they are all beautiful.  I know that when Anne says that “quite simply, she loved words most of all,” that’s also Lacy talking.  She does, and so do I.  In Early Decision Lacy has written an entertaining and topical book with deeply-etched characters and some truly vital messages.  There are big risks to the currently-accepted way we parent, there is immense value in thoughtful, engaged reflection, and those who are able to inspire and shape this kind of thinking deserve our real gratitude.

I’m grateful to my friend Lacy for writing this book, for the passionate and enduring love of words that she shares with me, and for being the kind of rare friend who has helped shepherd and midwife some of the most important, and painful, moments in my own self-development.

I couldn’t wait to read my friend Lauren Miller’s debut novel, Parallel.  I was already wowed by what I knew of Lauren’s story, that she’d written the first draft of this book during her daughter’s infancy.  Then, I read Parallel and found it an entirely engrossing, tremendously fun experience.

Parallel is a compulsively readable story that combines the tremendous fun of life in one’s late teens with huge, earth-shaking (literally) concepts about time, meaning, and the order (or lack thereof) that exists in the universe.  Parallel tells the story of Abby Barnes, a college senior, who experiences in a unique way the theory that parallel universes exist running alongside ours, populated with parallel versions of ourselves, making different choices, walking different paths.

Parallel‘s central characters are interesting and relatable: Abby’s best friend Caitlin, a brilliant science nerd in a gorgeous blonde fashionista’s body, Tyler, their mutual, handsome, funny best friend, and Dr. Mann, the Nobel-prize winning absent-minded professor whose theories about the entanglement of parallel universes guide the book’s narrative.

More than anything else, I finished Parallel thinking about both the universal human need to plan our lives and the fallacy of that instinct.  For someone whose blog is called A Design So Vast, there was much to ponder, also, about the interplay of order and chaos in our universe.  Abby’s mother is an expert on Seurat, and the metaphor of pointilism, where a field of seemingly random dots up close crystallizes into a clear image from far away, recurs throughout the book.  At one point, looking at a Seurat painting, Abby observes:

“Up close, all you see are the pieces, strewn about, heaped on top of each other.  Total disarray.  But step away, and a picture takes shape.  When you make sense of the chaos, the chaos disappears.  Or maybe, what looked at first like chaos never was.”

Another piece of art that figures prominently in Parallel is Tom Stoppard’s play, Arcadia.  Abby tries out for a play at Yale and is crushed not to be cast.  But then the director surprises her by saying he’d had an ulterior motive in not casting her, becuase he thinks she would be perfect for the part of Thomasina in the next play that’s going up: Arcadia.  Startled, Abby reflects on Thomasina, a character she has always loved but who has taken on new resonance since she has begun experiencing the entanglement of her parallel lives.  Thomasina, “…a  young girl who believed that everything – including the future – could be reduced to an equation.  Maybe this is part of the formula.”

Miller doesn’t entirely let us off the hook: she reminds us also that individual agency has an enormous role in shaping our stories.  In one scene, Abby watches her roommate heartbroken over a breakup for which Abby’s parallel bears some responsibility and thinks, with anguish: “Everything we do matters.”

Ultimately, though Parallel reminds us that our choices help direct our path, it celebrates most of all the mystery behind the way the pointillist dots that make up the story of our lives coalesce into a clear picture.  Towards the end of the book, Abby reflects on something Dr. Mann said early in the book: “You are a uniquely created being with a transcendent soul.  A soul whose yearnings can’t be predicted or effectively explained, whose composition can’t be quantified, whose true nature remains a mystery, as mysterious as it ever was.”

The last scene of Parallel draws together the various strands of narrative in a neat, surprising conclusion.  Abby’s thoughts emphasize the primacy of right now over someday, and remind us of the power of trusting that the universe will take care of us even when things seem chaotic and scary.

“Suddenly, it all makes sense.  The path doesn’t dictate the destination.  There are detours to destiny, and sometimes that detour is a shortcut.  But it’s more than that.  Sitting here, in this seat, Bret on one side, Josh on the other – wedged between my past and my future – is exactly where I’m supposed to be.  It doesn’t matter how I got here or where I’m going when I leave.  The point is, I’m here.  In this place, with these people. Te dots coming together so exquisitely, crystallizing into something greater than the sum of its parts.  All of the past made whole in the present.  The picture of my life is more beautiful than I could ever have imagined.  More beautiful than I ever could’ve planned.”

The design is vast, but oh, how it is beautiful.  I highly recommend Lauren Miller’s debut, which is as thought-provoking as it is un-put-downably fun to read.