Book #45: Solitude and Self-Invention

"I heard for the first time his voice, reciting his poems into a lacquered tin funnel as if into the ear of a stranger....  I felt there was something in the articulated voice that suggested a wound, the way one can sometimes recognize a concealed ailment in the slow movement of a king in newsreels."
                                                                                                    -Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero

A few days ago, I finished the final revisions to my memoir and handed the manuscript over to my publisher with a rush of excitement and something else... strangely akin to sadness.  When I ran into a friend of mine at a book launch the following evening, he assured me that this is quite normal - many writers experience "postpartum blues" after finishing a book.  The only cure, he said with an ironic smile, is to throw yourself into another book.

In a little while, I'd like to go back to working on the historical novel I started thinking and dreaming about and writing (in a very preliminary way) last summer.  But I don't feel ready to throw myself into that book just yet.  My mind needs time to recalibrate.  So over the past couple days, I've found myself just reading and reading, immersing myself in my favourite novels with a concentration I haven't had for simply reading in quite a while.  While in the final stages of revising my manuscript, I'd made the mistake of picking up Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero.  This is not the novel to read if you're looking for light diversion, I soon realized.  Ondaatje's experiments with style and genre and the sheer number of unique characters he introduces are too intricate to follow for the distracted mind.  So I'd put the book aside, intent on coming back to it as soon as I'd finished my own writing.

What is it about these characters that I find so alluring?  Children of the California landscape, they come from mysterious backgrounds and their relationships to each other are ambiguous, shifting with the winds.  Coop, Anna and Claire form a peculiar, improvised sibline: orphaned as a young kid after his parents were bludgeoned by the hired man, Coop was adopted by Anna's father, who also adopted Claire after her mother died in childbirth.  But since brother and sister are not truly brother and sister, an illicit desire takes root between Coop and Anna - leading to his violent expulsion from the family in a gruesome scene involving a fragment of glass. 

Without recognizable origins or family pasts, these characters are cut adrift and forced to invent themselves from moment to moment through acts of artistry and deception that yield a deeper truth.  When Anna claims at one point that she comes from Divisadero Street - a street in San Francisco named after the Spanish word for "division" - we know that on a literal level she is lying.  Yet her words do have significance.  For her identity has been severed from her past so violently that she is left in a state of free fall....  Literature becomes her only refuge, like a surrogate family, and what reader can't relate to that?  After becoming a scholar of French literature, Anna devotes her life to studying the enigmatic writer, Lucien Segura, whose voice reminded her of a wound, when she first stumbled across an old recording of him.  His life overtakes her imagination in the sprawling second half of the novel, where the parallels in his own ruptured love life come to light, creating the sense of a strange connection between scholar/reader and writer - both are caught up in some archetypal dance. 

Having just finished exploring and writing about my own relationship to the novelists who have long haunted my imagination, I found this section of Ondaatje's novel particularly intriguing.  I feel as though I could reread it many times and always take away a new insight about how literature shapes life and vice versa.

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Book #44: Looking Back on Thoreau, One Year Later

“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life….”
                                                                                          -Henry David Thoreau, Walden

It’s amazing how much my outlook on life has changed since I started this blog almost a year ago. My aim was simple: I wanted to blog about the books that have uplifted and inspired and occasionally infuriated me – particularly at crisis points in my life. I wanted to explore how reading has pulled me through some really difficult times – my career change, my search for love, my grandmother’s death, which unearthed some dark family secrets – and most importantly, I wanted to share my experiences with a community of avid readers, rather than erudite scholars.

When I moved back to Toronto a few years ago, I was walking away from the only world I’d known for the past twelve years – the Ivory Tower. After two years as an English prof in small town Nova Scotia, I’d had a breakdown and burnt out for a variety of reasons, including a couple of bad love affairs, academic politics, and the humiliation of having some students name me “The Worst Professor Ever” on the worldwide web, to name just a few of my troubles. And worst of all, after my three degrees, I’d somehow lost along the way my love of literature. That was what I wanted back most badly. My childhood love of reading and writing.

As I go back and reread my first post on Thoreau from a year ago (you can read it here), I’m struck by how much happier I am now. That post was based on musings in a notebook I’d kept while at the depths of my misery as a professor, so my amazement in looking back is doubly refracted through my remembrance of the “me” I was a year ago and the “me” I was three years ago, as I stared out my university office window at a beautiful, bucolic landscape and could see nothing but my own entrapment in the wilds of nowhere…. At the time, I’d been reading and teaching a lot of Thoreau, and it incensed me that his grand vision of Nature did not, through my depressed eyes, live up to expectation. And his snobbish view that the “works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them” rankled me – it was precisely this view of reading-as-the-art-form-of-the-elite-few that I so desperately wanted to get away from.

Funny how my impression of a text always has so much to do with my mood.

Over the past week, I’ve been rereading Walden, as I put the finishing touches on my own memoir, The Reading List: Literature, Love and Back Again, being published this fall (something else that's making me happy these days....  Not that I'm not still prone to bouts of bluesiness and depression). This time around, I met a different Thoreau, one whose bedraggled beard and constant, poignant searching for some deeper meaning to life filled me with sympathy. What reader isn’t hoping to find some marvelous, inspiring insight springing from the world of literature, lifting her above the drudgery of everyday life? This way of reading isn’t only for the elite few, I see now – it’s for readers as diverse as me and Thoreau.

Photo from: here

Book #43: Reading Yourself Into a New Life

"She knew she was going to have trouble believing in herself, in the room of her house, and when she glanced over at this new book on her nightstand, stacked atop the one she finished last night, she reached for it automatically, as if reading were the singular and obvious first task of the day, the only viable way to negotiate the transit from sleep to obligation."
                                                                                -Michael Cunningham, The Hours
 
What a week.  I have been run off my feet at my day job.  And at night, I have been stressed - exhilaratingly stressed - finishing off the edits to my book in time for my agent to take it to the London Book Fair.  Now that my book is finished (or finished at least until my friend, Diane, another writer, finishes giving it her final read through, for tweaking), I don't know what to do with myself.  Last night, I indulged in my first cigarette in months and also began reading The Hours, which I've been meaning to read ever since I saw the movie years ago. 

While watching the film, I recall identifying most closely with Clarissa (Meryl Streep), but upon reading the novel, it's a different character, Laura Brown, who pulls at my sympathies most urgently.  The avid reader, the repressed housewife.  She's the one whose story beckons to my imagination and lets me see shades of my own former miserable self and uplifts me in surprising ways.  Laura Brown literally reads her way into another life - gradually, at first, as the simple tasks of caring for her son and baking a cake for her husband's birthday compete with the illicit pleasure of reading Mrs. Dalloway, a novel that she strangely, exquisitely, identifies with, even as it illuminates her own stifled condition.  Although it first seems she's simply reading for escape, just the opposite ends up being true.  Reading Mrs. Dalloway pushes Laura to change her life in frightening, unthinkable ways.  And as I'm reading, I find myself remembering the moment in my own life when reading so transformed me.

It was six years ago, the year I'd moved to Berlin.  I was in the second to last year of my Ph.D., and I was supposed to be immersed in my dissertation, writing five to ten pages at Staatsbibliothek every day.  But the temptation of being a flaneuse in Berlin's graffiti-filled streets - touring the makeshift galleries and experimental music venues and clandestine bookstores - was simply too great.  The grand theoretical intervention that my dissertation was supposed to be making melted away, and I remember the illicit rush of thinking, Screw it, I'm just reading for fun today.  The first book I picked up was Accidents in the House by Tessa Hadley.  I remember its black cover very clearly.  It's a collection of linked short stories about a group of people, primarily women, and by the end of the book their fates have reversed in ironic, inspiring ways.  The story stayed with me and my desire to read for pure pleasure, too.  A dangerous drug.

Although I did eventually plough through my dissertation, I could never truly envision myself as a professor after I'd read that book, after I'd allowed myself that momentary freedom.  And a few years later, I walked away from my life in a small university town, heading for some unforeseeable future. 

Photo from: here

Book #42: In the Waiting Room

"I can't imagine anyone becoming a writer who wasn't a voracious reader as an adolescent.  A true reader understands that books are a world unto themselves - and that that world is richer and more interesting than any one we've traveled in before."
                                                          -Paul Auster, The Paris Review Interviews, Volume IV

Revising my book has been a curious activity.  It's a bit like looking in the mirror and trying to remember how I looked a year and a half ago (when I first began writing my memoir) or better still, three years ago (when I was still trapped in the dreary life of an English professor and having a meltdown in tandem with my father's - our twin breakdowns forming the subject matter of my three hundred pages).  But now, as I look back on that time in my life, I feel weirdly distant from the neurotic, panic-stricken woman I was back then (well, still a little neurotic, I guess).  Such is the editing process.

My publisher's main criticism was that in certain sections, she wanted "more Leslie."  In a few areas, she feels the prose is still a bit too intellectual (the very mousy self I'd come to loathe!)  So that's what I've been working on for the past two weeks - injecting more of my authentic, unfiltered voice.  And the experience has been therapeutic, to say the least.

There's also been a certain amount of traipsing around the city involved in the final stretch of writing my book.  One of the scenes I was reworking is set in the hospital waiting room where I sat for so many hours as a young teenager, chewing my fingernails and awaiting the next round of medieval treatments in store for my scoliosis.  Reading over the scene, I was suddenly overwhelmed by this fear that I'd described the waiting room all wrong - that wasn't at all how I remembered the plastic benches and hyper sanitized surfaces and lame murals of dragons and rainbows.  The feeling lingered, sharp and disorienting, and later that day I couldn't resist my desire to return to that very place, that very waiting room.  I wanted to examine the tiles and breathe the vaguely sweet, antiseptic air and search - once again - for vestiges of my old self.  But it was the end of the day, and the waiting room was completely empty.   

Still, it was oddly moving to be back there and I found myself wandering around the ortho ward for some time.  I paused outside an exam room where I caught a glimpse of a surly, stringy haired girl slouching down in her chair, her arms crossed like her stomach hurt, while a white-haired doctor prattled on.  Ah, yes.  I had her number.  I stood in the shadows of the door, mesmerized. 

It must have been around that time in my life that I turned to the solitary, inward compensations of reading.

Photo from: here

Book #41: Disaster, Diaspora, Dispersion

"Six months now since she'd been sent away to London.  Every morning before she opened her eyes she thought, if I were the wishing type I know what I would wish."
                                                                                                      -Monica Ali, Brick Lane

Staring at images of the earthquake in Japan has been leaving me nauseous.  To watch fields being swallowed by waters like lava and lonely survivor buildings peaking over the mounds of rubble fills me with a very strange, sad feeling, to say the least.  I'm wondering if we have family there, caught in the chaos.  I emailed my mom to ask, but of course she didn't know - it was my grandfather who faithfully wrote letters to our relatives in Japan, and he's dead now.  Neither my parents nor I even speak Japanese.  So with my grandpa's death, the cord of communication was cut, and I'm left with nothing more than hazy memories of some distant cousins coming to stay with my grandparents when I was a kid.  A couple of teenage boys, dressed all in white.  They seemed to embody the mystery and otherworldliness I'd always associated with my ancestral homeland.

As a fourth-generation Japanese-Canadian, perhaps it isn't surprising that I felt like a tourist when I visited Japan for the first and only time.  Still, it greatly upsets me to see the photos of rubble and ruined land, as if something of my past is again being swallowed up, and simply clicking a button to give a few dollars doesn't do enough to appease my conscience.

How eerie that when all this struck, I was reading Brick Lane, Monica Ali's brilliant debut novel about diaspora and dispersion.  As I read, I was thinking about the parallels between her tale and my own family history.  This novel about two Bangladeshi sisters - one of whom resigns herself to an arranged marriage in London, the other of whom runs off to pursue a "love marriage" to a man who beats and abandons her - reminds me in certain ways of the fates of my grandmother and great grandmother. 

My great grandmother was a picture bride, a woman sent from Japan to marry a stranger in America, strictly based on her photograph.  Well, that's not true exactly.  According to my grandmother, she was actually the matchmaker's secretary.  When my great grandfather proved himself a particularly picky client and turned down all the ladies selected for him, the matchmaker, on a whim, presented his secretary.  "I'll take her," my great grandfather said immediately.  Thus my great grandmother boarded a ship for Oregon, but did not find the life of luxury she'd been promised - her husband, it turned out, was merely a drycleaner.  Putting on a stoic face, she swallowed her desires, until her desires resurfaced through her daughter (my grandmother).  My grandmother, a Japanese-American beauty queen, prided herself on being American, and when the family tried to send her back to Japan through an arranged marriage to a wealthy Japanese businessman, she rebelled.  By this point, she was already in love with my grandfather; he was one of the guys who came to play basketball in the part of Portland, Oregon, where she grew up.  So she got on a ship and came back to America bringing with her only a beautiful Japanese doll as a memento, and married my grandfather.  But her love marriage soon soured.  My grandfather turned out to be a violent, angry man blinded by alcoholism and his own thwarted artistic ambitions. 

I often wondered, as I discovered pieces of her life through conversations with my father, whether she ever regretted her decision to come back to America.  It's haunting to think about the other set of descendents she would have had, had she decided to marry the Japanese businessman, and I sometimes dream about the woman I would have been.  My ghostly alter ego......

Photo from: here

Lovely Blog Award

This morning, to take my mind off awaiting my editor's comments, I've been indulging in quite a bit of social networking.  Diaspora Dialogues asked me to do a guest blog about my participation as an Emerging Writer in their mentorship programme, which really helped me gain confidence as a writer.  They've already posted my blog entry, which can be read here.

And thanks so much to Anglers Rest for awarding me One Lovely Blog Award!  It was such a nice surprise, as I'm still quite new to the world of blogging.  I had no idea that in starting my blog about my favourite novels and the book I'm writing I would meet such a warm and embracing community of other bloggers, readers and writers.  What a pleasure to be drawn into this world.

Here are the rules for accepting the award:

Accept the award, post it on your blog together with the name of the person who has granted the award and their blog link.

Pass the award on to 15 other blogs that you've newly discovered.

Remember to contact the bloggers to let them know they have been chosen for this award.

This is a great way to be introduced to lots of new blogs and their authors. 

Book #40: The Risk of Writing Honestly

Diana Athill: A sort of shudder of guilt still goes through me about being so - not indiscreet - but about myself.  I shouldn't be doing it.  But if you're trying to write about something because you're trying to get to the bottom of it, whether it's your own life or something else, there is no point in doing it unless you try as hard as you can to do it honestly, and to say how it really was.

Alice Munro: Well, I got things right, but it didn't always please the people I got it right about.  I can remember really hurting people.

                                    -A Conversation between Diana Athill and Alice Munro, Finding the Words

A couple weeks ago, I went with some friends to the book launch for Finding the Words, an anthology of personal writings by various writers who support PEN Canada.  Although I went to the event not knowing much about this non-profit literary organization, by the end of the evening I'd learned a bit about its work defending freedom of expression in Canada and abroad, and I was sufficiently intrigued to buy the book (from which all profits go to supporting the organization).

Last night, when I couldn't sleep, I began reading a transcribed conversation between Diana Athill and Alice Munro - two great writers interviewing each other.  I don't know why I began reading in the middle of the book, but their conversation instantly grabbed me.  Their frank discussion about the risks of writing honestly - the emotional risks of hurting others, the writer's own paralyzing sense of self-exposure - struck a chord indeed. 

I suppose it must have something to do with the fact that yesterday I finished editing the final chapters of my own book and sent the manuscript off to my agent and publisher for their feedback.  So later that day, I was left lying on the sofa, feeling bored and antsy, and my mind started wandering to the fateful prospect of how my writing would be received.  I'm not talking about the requests for revisions that Sandra and Sam are bound to throw at me, I'm talking about the more terrifying question of how the people depicted in my memoir will respond.  My parents, my surgeon (now deceased, it turns out, according to Google), a smattering of ex-boyfriends some of whom I'm still friends with (and all of whose names have been changed, don't worry), a cast of dead relatives who come alive in my imagination, et cetera.  How will these people and ancestral ghosts respond to their afterlives on the pages of my notebook?

It came as something of a relief to discover via Athill and Munro that I'm not the only one to feel awkward and embarrassed about having undertaken this unabashed exercise in narcissism in writing a book at all.  While I was immersed in writing it, I was simply luxuriating in the freedom to write and I felt it was important to allow myself to write in a way that felt authentic and uncensored, as I journeyed back through my defection from the Ivory Tower, my breakdown, my sense of failure, the toll that my career blues took on my love life and all the rest of the emotional turbulence stirred up during that miserable period.... 

Paradoxically, while writing, I wasn't thinking about the eventuality that others would read my words.  But I'm thinking about it now.

Fortunately, just as I was prepared for a night of insomnia, I discovered another essay, "The First Time," by Stacey May Fowles, who reflects at length on the beehive of neuroses presented by publishing her first book.  Plenty of alcohol and cognitive behavioural therapy, she recommends. 

Photo from: here