Reading About Other People's Lives

I turned 27 last week. Birthdays have always been challenging for me, for entirely self-inflicted reasons. I would amputate my birthday if I could. As I moved into adulthood and friendships became something to be maintained, I started to view my birthday as an annual referendum on my self. If a friend wanted to keep me in their life, they would send me a message. If I didn’t hear from them then maybe my friendship with them had expired. This is a deeply unhelpful and untrue thought. Hypocritical as well, since I’m not above forgetting friends’ birthdays even if I might phone them or send spontaneous presents on other days of the year. Birthdays are the time to wonder if I’ve done enough with my life, if my achievements are commensurate with the number of candles on the cake. (I didn’t actually do candles this year!) 

I get particularly antsy in the week leading up to my birthday. This year, I picked up books I hoped would quell my anxiety.

How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti

The book’s title has been rattling around in my head ever since I came across it in an old issue of n+1. Now that I’ve arrived at a stable (and boring) stage of my life, it’s a question I’ve returned to a lot more. Subtitled “A Novel from Life”, the book is loosely based on the writer and her friends. Protagonist Sheila sets out to answer this question but doesn’t return with any easy answers, which I appreciated. I think, at this stage of my life, it is comforting to read about other people as they stumble around trying to be good. What I relished the most about this novel is its willingness to be ugly and crass. The characters are entirely capable of being superficial and immature (see Sheila when she goes to the pool with her friend Margaux: “I’m so happy with how we were making everyone jealous with how happy we were in the pool!”).

Autofiction can be a polarising genre; I enjoy how it allows authors to take liberties with ideas that might not sit well in memoir. There is more freedom to wallow in ugliness when there is distance between you and your fictionalised self.

I liked this description of writing from The Paris Review’s interview with Heti:

Writing, for me, when I’m writing in the first-person, is like a form of acting. So as I’m writing, the character or self I’m writing about and my whole self—when I began the book—become entwined. It’s soon hard to tell them apart. The voice I’m trying to explore directs my own perceptions and thoughts. But that voice or character comes out of a part of me that exists already. But writing about it emphasizes those parts, while certain other, balancing parts lie dormant—and the ones I’m exploring become bigger, like in caricature. That sounds really orderly but I never realize it’s happening, because who is “the first person” becomes confused.

Building A Life Worth Living by Dr Marsha Linehan

I read the memoir of Dr Marsha Linehan, one of my personal heroes, concurrently. It was interesting reading this at the same time as a work of autofiction; I’m not sure non-writers should write about their lives. You need a certain amount of skepticism about yourself to pull it off and that’s not often found in people who have successful careers and an incentive to self-mythologise. (Dr Linehan’s isn’t the only memoir I’ve read that confirms my belief. I just won’t name the others because it feels unkind to criticise someone’s account of their own life.) I kept chugging through this book because there were anecdotes worth reading buried under chapters and chapters of straightforward recollection. But there’s really no narrative interest when every chapter describes how the author overcame a problem and became better for it. There’s a moment 80% into the book when she recalls how an important scientific paper was rejected from a journal because the editor didn’t think she knew how to write. That felt like a personal attack.

Reading about Reading

This interview with Priyanka Chopra about her new memoir, Unfinished. More support for my theory that memoirs suck. I found this interview refreshing because the writer, Simon Hattenstone, actually holds Chopra (sorry, Chopra Jones) accountable for questionable public statements and actions. Celebrity writing has become more timid in recent years (for reasons that are explained in this newsletter by music editor Eleanor Halls) but there’s a lot to gain from treating public figures’ vanity projects with a healthy amount of skepticism. If nothing else, read this interview for the delicious way that Hattenstone reveals Chopra’s limited vocabulary.

Book Haul (!)

My one big liability to progressive politics is that I love spending money on nice things. I am actively working on my other one (my love of police procedural TV shows). I also already quit fast fashion and mostly buy from local and/or independent and/or small businesses! Leave me alone!

Anyway, I bought myself some books for my birthday.

I went to Kinokuniya first and purchased A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders and Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman. Saunders writes really tight short stories so I’m looking forward to his exploration of great Russian short stories. Ellman’s book gained notoriety when it was published in 2019 because of its format: it’s around 1000 pages long and made up of eight incredibly long sentences. I’m a tenth of the way through and enjoying the form so far. That said, I might take some time to read this because it’s not a very portable book.

The other two books were from Wardah Books, a niche bookstore on Bussorah Street that specialises in titles for Muslim readers. A lot of their books are on Islamic spirituality but they also carry books for non-religious readers. They have a small fiction section and a great selection of regional studies books. I’ve been eyeing Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine for a while. I was also glad to swipe the last copy of Hussein Kesvani’s Follow Me, Akhi on the online worlds of British Muslims. I am really obsessed with the Internet and how people use it. Kesvani really gets the Internet (I follow him on Twitter) so I think this will be good. The bookseller at Wardah complimented me on my book choice soooooo 💁‍♀️ I still got it

A non-book thing

It would be remiss of me to not wish Megan Thee Stallion a happy birthday! My fellow February baby is the person to thank for the recent resurgence of hot girl everything.