Leave the World Behind

The last two weeks, my younger son has been particularly difficult to get to sleep. We moved him out of our room, out of his crib. It has been disruptive. I have taken to lying in between the two twin beds in my kids’ room sort of checking Twitter and sort of just feeling the bones in my hips slide into the carpet. The pandemic has been tiring, and a newly sleepless toddler makes it even more tiring still. He tosses and turns, leans over the side of the bed, asks me for “Mommy’s hand,” and by the time he finally drifts off to sleep, it’s about ten thirty, and I race downstairs to finish up the dregs of my cleaning. My husband has done the dishes, I have to do the last load of laundry, and then I can pour myself a tiny bowl of cheerios and a big glass of water and get ready for bed. The “free time” I was cultivating for writing, tv-watching, or whatever has been reduced from two or three hours to about forty minutes. This will pass.

The last two nights, I have crawled into bed around midnight and opened my book, thinking I’ll just read a little bit and then go to sleep. But the book I started on Wednesday is Rumaan Alam’s new novel, Leave the World Behind, and I am gripped beyond reason. I’m about forty pages from the end after two big bursts of late night reading and I am shocked by how terrified this book has made me. I mean, we are living through an actual pandemic and, perhaps, through the actual end of democracy — or whatever approaches it — in the US. Alam’s book pulls together the kinds of details I associate with domestic fiction — what kinds of food a character is buying, how much it costs, what kinds of closures her pants have — and the dystopian frame of speculative fiction. To my eye, the details are part of the structure of terror: we can’t leave off the habits of our lives when living through a catastrophe, in part because the habits have become the scaffold that unifies our conscious lives. We check our phones. We pour a drink. We watch something dumb on tv. In Alam’s book, one of the key signals that something is wrong comes when the phones and television stop working: without the comforting glow of the NYT home page, what can we really know about the world? I haven’t finished the book yet, but it’s gripping and awful. Alam is a tight, precise prose stylist, which makes the terror of the pacing more extreme. I kept reading a few more pages in the hopes that my anxiety would abate a bit (will the husband come back? will the children be ok? why are the deer doing that?) and, no, the book just never lets up. Wish me luck tonight from midnight to one, when I try to finish this novel and not scare myself into oblivion!

Brandon Taylor's Real Life

I reviewed Brandon Taylor’s debut Real Life for Bookforum.

I cut an observation from this review that I’ve been thinking about since I filed it. Taylor’s protagonist, Wallace, is nauseated. He throws up, and feels like throwing up, repeatedly in the novel. There is a psychological element to this characterization — the character has very disordered eating, due to his painful and impoverished childhood, but it serves as a metaphorical connection to a whole swath of Black expatriate novels from the 1950s and 60s. In Wright and Baldwin, characters often vomit, especially after tense exchanges. I had always connected that impulse to those writers’ investments in and reading of existentialist philosophy, but when reading Taylor’s novel, I thought of it in relation to expatriation more broadly. Wallace, though he is in an American university and was raised in an American state and town, experiences the world he finds himself in as a foreign country: the problem of the novel is what to do when you feel like an immigrant in a country you ostensibly belong to? It’s a remarkable debut, and I’m excited to read his next book(s).

Hiiiiiiiiiiiii (hi).

Well, well, well, what a world, huh? I’m still sheltering in place. I know all of you are, too. It is hard to know when anything like my normal life will return, but I’m trying to make a new normal out of the scraps of my old life. Between taking care of the children full time and driving myself to distraction with COVID resources that — in theory! — will help me make decisions, but are in actual fact making me dizzy with confusion, I am trying to get some writing done. I have also embarked on significant culinary adventures; I am now the protector of a delicate young sourdough starter.

I’m trying to focus more attention now on the Oxford project, but I’ve been delving into a new project, about women and psychoanalysis, from which one of these essays is drawn. So, here are two short new pieces, one a part of a cluster at Post45 collated by the great Gloria Fisk and edited by Dan Sinykin, and the other a short essay on Melanie Klein and, well, having babies. This was edited by B. D. McClay!

There are some more pieces coming down the pipe, but for now, thank you for reading!

New Work

Honestly, I keep trying to have a good handle on updating this, but it never works! I should use naptime to my advantage, but I very easily succumb to warm snuggling children. Here are some new things I’ve done.

A review of the new Gillian Gill Woolf bio. A review of the latest Rachel Cusk essay collection. Some more stuff coming soon!

Before the global catastrophe, I had finally gotten into a good rhythm with reviewing. I figured out how much time I needed to research and read, and because my childcare situation had slightly improved, I was able to find that time more readily. Oh well, that’s out the window now! But, as my children get a bit older, I am finding the times when I can plop them down and get them absorbed with legos or toy food or some harried craft project are becoming more and more frequent. I have my computer in the downstairs closet and I haul it out if I have a few minutes. It’s helping. Not much, but a little!

I am better at updating twitter (read: posting ponderous bread pictures).

Slow burn

Impossible to keep up with my brain these days! I’m going to be writing more here now. But, some recent work:

I wrote about Sally Rooney’s novel form for Slate. I wrote about Lucasta Miller’s Letitia Landon Biography for the New York Times. I’m working on some other small things, so check back soon!

Babies

Around 11 pm every night I have a brilliant idea, almost always, it’s one that would help me figure out whatever writing or thinking problem I’ve had during the little snippets of time I carve out during the day. And every time I tell myself, half asleep, nursing a baby, that I’ll remember the idea tomorrow. But I never do. I can sometimes remember the shape of the idea. This morning, I knew my idea from last night was 1) comparative 2) involved Jane Austen 3) involved some amusing adjectival hijinks… but what was it? How can I get it back? Oh, well!

Recently, my toddler started saying “Oh, well,” in a tiny, downbeat slur. Whenever we missed a bus, or had to cross a road, or didn’t have any more crackers, he’d pipe up: “Oh, wellllll.” That’s my doing.

“Oh, well.”

I’m going to use this space to circulate my writing, when I do it. And I’ll try to periodically post something about what’s happening with me. Thank you for reading!

Hello

Hello. I am a writer and scholar living in San Francisco. I have written one book, Exquisite Masochism, and am working on a new project about women writers and middlebrow genre fiction. I write about literature, feminism, motherhood, and culture. My writing has appeared in The New York Times, Public Books, n+1, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Here is a conversation I convened for Post45’s Contemporaries blog about writing in public while female.