My new novel The Miranda features a lead character who wants to walk around the world but doesn’t want to leave his own backyard, so he decides to walk 25,000 miles — the circumference of the earth — by doing laps around his own garden path. However, his sinister professional past proves difficult to walk away from.
I join a very long line of writers who have walked, and walkers who have written. I’m not in competition with my predecessors, either as a writer or as a walker, but here are some works by a few of my favorite literary fellow travelers. Some of these are fiction, some non-fiction—although all the fiction contains autobiographical elements, and there’s considerable invention in all the memoir.
An obvious one to start with: the novel follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus as they spend a day wandering around Dublin, pursuing their separate, then crossed, destinies. There are endless books, guides, maps, organized walking tours to help you follow the characters’ routes in the real world. And the great thing is that any of these walks can easily be turned into a pub crawl. Ulysses also contains what I think is one of the truly great statements about walking: “We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-law. But always meeting ourselves.”
In the winter of 1974, Herzog walked the 500-plus miles from Munich to Paris in the firm belief that this walking pilgrimage would save the life of his friend, the film historian and critic Lotte Eisner, allegedly suffering from a serious illness. The walk was as arduous as you might expect, tramping through snow, sleeping in abandoned buildings, and Herzog is his usual heroically gloomy self. But the surprising thing is (or maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at all) — it worked. Lotte Eisner lived for another decade.
They don’t make ’em like Sebastian Snow anymore, and they never made many. Rejected from the army because of a knee injury incurred playing school sports, he became one of the twentieth century’s most relentless and eccentric world travelers. The Rucksack Man is his account of walking 8,700-miles from Tierra del Fuego to Panama, along the way getting his contact lenses fused to his eye balls, being bitten by a vampire bat, and having the amazing strength of character to refuse the many lifts he was offered.
The title is the name of an isolated farmhouse in the wilds of the Yorkshire Moors, the home of Heathcliff. It’s a long way from anywhere and yet the characters rarely think twice about walking the considerable distances there and back, and even a heavy snowfall only deters them slightly. Admittedly these journeys are sometimes necessary to further the plot, and of course the servants do at least twice as much walking as the property-owning classes.
Julius, a Nigerian student in New York, walks around Manhattan, explores the city, and tries to forget about the girlfriend he’s recently broken up with, observing the present while remembering his past in Nigeria and Belgium. This strikes me as one of the best aspects of walking: it requires you to pay attention to where you are and where you’re going, but because walking is also partly automatic, it leaves the walker’s mind free to set off in other directions.
It would be more or less possible to track the route that Clarissa Dalloway takes — Westminster, St James Park, Piccadilly, Bond Street — as she sets out to buy flowers for a party she’s having in the evening. Like Teju Cole above, she too takes the opportunity to think about her current life and the missed opportunities of her past. For those seeking to replicate Mrs. Dalloway’s ramble, however, the route may be problematic. Critic and contrarian John Sutherland suggests that she couldn’t possibly have done the walk in the time available unless she’d taken a taxi.
Two men habitually go on long walks through the streets of Vienna and have intense philosophical discussions, often about the nature of walking and the nature of thinking. But since Bernhard is one of history’s greatest misanthropes, the conversation inevitably turns to the evils of the Austrian state, madness, suicide, and a hatred for children. It is, of course, a comedy.
Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London: Flâneuse, Lauren Elkin
For all-too-obvious reasons, women walk much more cautiously than men, but there are plenty of serious women walkers, and Elkin’s book could be a sacred text for them. One of my favorite parts is her description of living in Tokyo, where she didn’t have the very best time. “What bothered me most was the certainty I felt that there was a great city out there full of places I wanted to discover, but I didn’t know where to look for them … I didn’t know where to go, where to walk.” A problem all walkers sometimes have.
A rarity, a Los Angeles walking story, and a novella rather than a novel, about Brown Dog, a native American, who walks the 47 miles from Cucamonga to Westwood to reclaim a bearskin taken from him by a “deeply fraudulent Indian activist.” It takes him a “leisurely” thirty-six hours to cover the distance. Google maps clocks it as 51.7 miles, and although the walk looks perfectly doable, I imagine very, very few people have ever done it.
And here’s one for those who want to walk but can’t to go anywhere. In 1790 de Maistre, a French aristocrat and army officer, was sentenced to forty-two days under house arrest for the crime of dueling. For those forty-two days he walked the length and breadth of his own room, treating it like a strange, newly discovered land, seeing it with new eyes, and also creating a parody of travel writing that is still extremely resonant.
Ray had given up answering questions. There seemed to be, he thought, too many of them. Best to just go with the flow. Be that guy; some easy-going dude, in sunglasses and a papaya print shirt. That guy didn’t hit fifty, take up jogging and have an embolism. That guy didn’t split a dick trying to find decent asparagus, ambling around puzzled; all salt and pepper hair at the Sunday farmer’s market. That guy embraced his paunch, the inescapable inevitabilities of age, the unconquerable ravages of existence, replying “whatever you say, doc!” when asked by his GP if he’d considered cutting down on salt, then went straight out for burgers. That guy was alright. That guy was, as you might say, a cool guy.
“Hey, baby,” his wife called from the nursery. They’d always called each other baby, babe, babes; it was their thing, but now they had a living, breathing baby, there was a hesitation in it, something else that needed shifting. She was perched halfway up a ladder, holding the handle, her hair pulled into some vegetal tangle. What was she doing up there? — pawing at the ceiling like a mad thing, feet over the ground, like her body was some unbreakable, undamageable object. He imagined her falling, the slap of her skin and the crack of her bones, and felt jets of adrenaline surge to his heart, a geyser of dread; then recalled his persona, his cool guy schtick. “What do you think?” she asked, fixing some paper birds, some whimsical mobile, over the cot. He held his hands up — I surrender! — shrugging his shoulders, flexing his face. The rehearsed gestures of the recently laidback. She fussed with it some more. The nursery was half-done, in flux. Vinyl wall stickers, scattered stars and half-moons, on the right, on the left, Anita Ekberg, head thrown back, breasts thrust forward, rhapsodic, in the Trevi Fountain. Oh! — it had been quite the guest room.
It would take the weekend to finish the job, the transition near complete, the house almost fully baby-proof. “We’ll soon be set,” he’d said, regretting the phrase, which jarred, summoning images of insects set in amber, jelly tough as varnish. Whatever remained in the mold, doomed to stay there, forever.
He navigated the peripheries of the room, his feet pressing tenderly against the carpet. Since the baby’s arrival, the household had changed. Changed not in the plastic bottles that were everywhere. Changed not in the breast pump that lingered to the side of the bathroom sink like a perplexing adult aid. Changed not in the used nappy containing a single brown blob, which remained on the countertop for hours; the nappy’s frilled edges the split shells of a clam, the blob an offered pearl. No. The changes were more abstract, more semiotic. He increasingly found himself bumbling around in socks and soft clothes, feeling like some senile old fool, some forgetful old pop pops, a lost guest in his own home.
“Things,” his wife said, descending the ladder, with infomercial grace. “We need things.”
Things were her latest demand. An abstract bric-a-brac she willed at random. Like the space around them was significant. Like it needed filling. It was as if she had plopped this squirming animation onto the planet and couldn’t figure out why he too could not create something from nothing. Baby, we need things. Baby, we need stuff. Baby. Baby.
“You can get all this from the supermarket,” she said. “I’ll write you a list.”
She left the room, leaving him with the baby. He looked past him with blissful incomprehension. Babies, with their smug ignorance, their swaggering oblivion. How gladly and giddily they were bewildered. He was propped in the corner, moored to his mobile, with that glazed expression Ray had trained himself not to think too much about. A squidgy, unknowable tumor. A flesh thing. With shining white eyes, roly-poly wrists and the gurgling pomp with which he filled his nappy.
He started to whimper, a soft woolen whimper, as his wife called him from downstairs. Ray froze, unable to decide who to tend to first, mother or baby, apples or oranges. She returned upstairs handing him the list, picking up the baby, who immediately settled. Babies, Ray had concluded, were mostly stupid. But this they did understand. The implicit responsibility of their mothers for them.
Ray scanned the list. It seemed straightforward. “See you later, honey,” he whistled, leaving, and she kissed him on the rough shadow of his cheek. He was trying to introduce honey into their hypocoristic vernacular. Honey was neutral. Honey had no further implications beyond sweetness.
Ray recently found supermarkets stressful. He was used to stress. Of course, he was used to stress. But it was a different kind of stress at the supermarket. Different to the scattered flotsam of swaddling on their living room floor. Other to the lockstitch zigzag of the rush hour drive. The wolfish snapping of the customers, the hummed din of the registers, unique to the shop floor. Life, Ray had decided, was exchanging one type of chaos for another.
He paced the aisles looking at all the things. The crackling packeted things. The primary-colored cardboard things. So many things. All reaching out, wanting to be chosen. He felt like the world was perennially bulleting questions at him. At every turn there was another question; semi or skimmed, paper or plastic, cash or card; another question that needed an answer. Like the whole world was made up of two lost halves of a whole, searching for each other, eternally.
Beneath the requests for wood glue and mason nails, his wife had written “one cooked chicken,” he noticed, with some relief. There wasn’t nuance in cooked chicken. There weren’t gradations. You just picked the thing; you just picked the one thing. His wife had taken to eating chicken since the birth when she’d been practically vegetarian up until then. Ray assumed it was something primitive, something lunar he didn’t understand; to do with nesting and menstruation. He, the man, sent out to score meat.
He approached the rotisserie, the chickens circling in front of him, roasting to a red gold crisp. He stared at them, entranced; the methodic spin of the rods, the earthy odor, broken, when he noticed the butcher in the background, yanking apart the legs of a pink, plucked chicken, forcing his hand inside, pulling out the giblets. Ray felt suddenly sick. He squatted, with his hands placed over his knees, the world a swirling Lazy Susan, swaying in tandem around him. He tried to forget the scene, as he had tried to forget the scene it reminded him of; his wife lying supine, her legs pulled apart, the baby dragged out of her. How they had treated her like a thing, a meat thing, to be cut up and hollowed out. It had been an awful birth. A day he would forever remember as the worst of his life. He retrieved his phone from his pocket, prodding its glassy surface, dialing home, thinking if he could just hear his wife’s voice, if she could just give him some instructions, some direction, he’d be fine. “Baby?” she said, over the thin crackle of static, the shitty supermarket reception. He had the feeling of trying to suppress a cough, that convulsing heaving panic.
“Baby?”
On the way home Ray called in for a drink. It seemed like a cool guy move; a leisurely interval before they were set; elbows resting on the gravy polish of the pine bar, a single malt whiskey cooling with two cubes of ice.
He sipped his drink, feeling the heat settle in his stomach, wondering why all comforts were thermal. The muted television flickered foreign atrocities, genocides Ray no longer felt pathos for. It was like grieving the seasons, pining the moon; it was so far away, so abstract, it seemed senseless to engage. Even the television didn’t look like a real-life television, like a television within a television, a film within a film, a dream within a dream, the way a life could feel like a life within some other life, some scripted, unknowable life, some non-linear narrative. Well flip the script, buddy! Ray thought. Spoil the ballot! Throw your homework onto the fire! — as he knocked back the last of his drink and considered asking the guy next to him whether we all saw the same colors. He ordered another drink, turning over the cocktail menu, thinking next he’d have a piña colada, easy on the piña, with a side of shrimp and fries.
He rubbed his face. The suggestion of stubble. The threat of it. Resonating a satisfying scratch. Like the ice chiming against his glass, the clack of high heels on a hardwood floor. A bar sound. One of his favorite sounds. He wandered to the jukebox, put on some music; Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Pete Seeger. Some cool guys. Some guys who got it. He returned to his seat and wiggled his glass at the waiter, the way he’d seen in movies, gesturing for another, and then another; stamping his feet in time to the songs. Dance like nobody gives a crap. Drink like you don’t have a family to go home to. Love because what else is the point. By the time last orders arrived, he was a slop; as sloppy as an old sloppy joe, slopping everywhere, slopping his keys onto the carpet, slopping spittle from his jaw. What Ray learned about drunk driving that night is that no one intervenes, no one steps in; like wildlife documentarians, they let nature take its course. And when he came to, his head pressed against the steering wheel, a pool of blood in his lap, flashes of blue from the corner of his eye, he thought, sometimes all you can wish for in life is the physical manifestation of pain.
He woke up in a hospital bed, handcuffed to the rail. It seemed unnecessary. He really wasn’t going anywhere. He lifted up his free arm, bandaged, like lazy fancy dress. His hand had gone, removed; only a white stub remained. A giant q-tip. He told the nurse when he came to he didn’t care; and he still didn’t. What was a hand, anyway? Just another thing. Just another with or without. Everything was just a thing; there was no agency, no ability to affect change. It was the curse of the modern age, options; who needed options, when everything was essentially meaningless?
He thought of his wife during the birth. How he had watched her, her chest heaving up and down, like something equestrian, like something breathing because they meant it. Wondering how so much blood could come from one tiny human person. How he held the baby, but felt like he could be holding anything, any old thing, any old rock or piece of string.
He looked up; his wife hovered over him. It was the first time he had seen her since the accident.
“Baby?” she said. “Are you alright, baby?”
She seemed like she wasn’t really there; superimposed onto the scene, like the Cottingley fairies. She had this ghostly halo of gentleness about her; it was the thing he loved most, like she was from some other planet, lingering inter-dimensionally.
“Listen,” he replied. “Can you stop fucking calling me baby?”
He couldn’t bear to hear the word again.
He couldn’t bear to say the word again.
Mother or Baby, they had asked. A simple question requiring a simple answer. Choose your own adventure. Complete your character arc. They stood facing him, mint green and masked, eyebrows expressing emergency. Like bit parts waiting for their line, waiting for their SAG card. Mother or Baby. Mother or Baby. And he had said Baby. It was instinctive. He didn’t even recognize the voice that said it as his own. Decision made. He had let her go. Let her go like she was a thing. Bon voyage, sweetheart! See you on the other side.
Hospitals, he used to joke, were where you came when your body sprang a leak.
He’d registered some hurt, but it seemed insignificant, infinitesimal; a pinprick of pain among a swarming miasma of emotion.
One thing or the other; how could you choose between one thing or the other.
“Are you okay?” she repeated.
He looked past her, wanting to answer, wanting only to say the right thing.
He stared into the half-light beyond the hospital curtain, the corners gently heaving, in the clear corridor air. The lazily bleeping heart monitors, the silent hurry, the breathless calm, experienced as stop motion, snippets staggered, partially digested. His wife flickering in and out of focus. And a thought, somewhere, papered beneath the cracks, slippery and evasive and impossible to pin down; that everywhere, maybe, is exactly the same.
Novel Gazing is Electric Literature’s personal essay series about the way reading shapes our lives. Submissions for Novel Gazing are open through November 15.
This isn’t the Novel Gazing prompt I was going to write.
We were going to do something a little spooky, in honor of what is usually a time of encroaching darkness and meditations on mortality. But the real scary stories this season haven’t been about witches or hauntings. They’ve been about powerful men who exploit their positions for sexual gain. Forget Freddy and Jason—this year the bogeymen are Harvey, Leon, Lockhart, Mark, Kevin, Bill, and (lest we forget) Donald.
In the last few weeks, we’ve been saturated with horror stories about the physical and psychological burdens influential, compassionless men can visit on the people they think they control. I’m not going to ask you for more of those. Instead, let’s talk about the books that helped you see a better way. What stories made you realize that something was wrong with this culture’s attitude towards gender, or beauty, or sexual entitlement? What stories showed you how to name the injustice, and how to fight?
Maybe you read about an abusive relationship, and reluctantly recognized yourself. Maybe you encountered a male villain so utterly vile that he could only exist in fiction, and then realized that you’d known him all along. Maybe your favorite heroine seemed untouchably strong and that helped you to be strong too. Maybe a book or a show or a mythological monster (little self-plug there) was the puzzle piece that snapped the big picture into focus, that taught you it was okay to be angry or ambitious or sexual or celibate or fat or loud or unfeminine or too feminine or any of the things a masculinity-dominated culture doesn’t want you to be.
These could be explicitly feminist books, but it’s probably more interesting if they aren’t. (And as always, they don’t need to be books at all; film, television, and even games will do, as long as they’re narrative media.) Feel free to write about your first encounter with Judith Butler, if you can do it with wit and heart that will travel beyond the ivory tower—but even more than that, I want to hear about your experiences with Jessica Fletcher or Honoria Glossop or Susie Derkins. If you’d like inspiration, try this beautiful essay Electric Literature recently published about Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch,” or maybe this Tumblr post about Susan Pevensie that reliably makes me ugly-cry.
Essays should not be longer than 4,000 words or shorter than 800, and payment is $60 per piece. Submissions will remain open through November 15. And because I know someone’s going to ask me, of course non-women are welcome to submit their work.
Are you exhausted from the last few weeks and also the rest of your life? #Metoo. Let’s compile a reading list for getting through this together.
On October 26th 2017, book lovers and literary insiders clad in masks of red and black gathered at Littlefield in Brooklyn for a night of spooky revelry. Burlesque performers Cassandra Rosebeetle, Gin Minsky, and Jezebel Express haunted the masquerade as partygoers sipped on cocktails and danced the night away. At the end of the night, revelers brought home tote bags bursting at the seams with free books. Here are some of our favorite pics from the photo booth and photographer Aslan Chalom.
Burlesque performers Cassandra Rosebeetle and Gin Minsky with Electric Lit executive director Halimah Marcus and her pet crow Bob. (Hey Halimah, his name is Bob now.)
A Littlefield bartender mixing the signature cocktail of the night: the Red Death. (They didn’t even know it was a masquerade event, Littlefield bartenders always dress this way!)
The Red Death stalks us all.
Writer Catherine LaSota and Paul Morris of the Authors Guild getting their groove on.
This dance move is called What’s That On The Ceiling.
Electric Lit social media editor Michael J. Seidlinger and Rosie Clarke of Housing Works smirk for the camera. Their friend didn’t get the no-smiling memo.
Dancers Adrienne Wienert and Peter Bullen dressed in eerie chic.
Smile for the camera and say “BOO”!
Note to all party planners: All you need to pack a house is free masks, free books and free booze.
Check out highlights of the masquerade on Facebook (make sure you follow us too!) and click here for more spine-chilling photos from the photo booth (sponsored by The Authors Guild). See you next year!
Thanks to everyone who bought a ticket, and thanks once again to our generous sponsors.
John Carpenter’s Halloween opens with the post-coital murder of a half-naked adolescent girl at the hands of her younger brother, Michael Myers. He has just witnessed his sister’s seduction of a beautiful young man while spying on them through a window on Halloween night. What follows is a dreamlike first-person sequence that ends with the viewer looking through the eyeholes of a mask. As his sister’s lover bounds down the stairs and out the door, casually pulling on a striped T-shirt over a perfectly toned chest and torso, Michael seemingly takes the young man’s place, retracing his steps up the stairs and into the bedroom where his sister sits topless at a vanity table. He notices that the bed behind her is unmade, the sheets ruffled, evidence of an exchange that Michael doesn’t yet understand but for which he intuitively believes she must be punished.
The revelation of heterosexual desire seems to have triggered the onset of a latent evil inside Michael’s young body. This evil finds its mode of expression in the shiny blade of a kitchen knife, the first iteration of what will become his weapon of choice. After donning a clownish mask that had been discarded on the floor by the departed lover, Michael hacks his screaming sister to shreds before enacting his own post-climax exit down the staircase and out the front door. Outside the house, he encounters his parents emerging from the family car, and his father calls out to him by name as he approaches the street. But rather than relieve his son of the bloodied knife, Michael’s father first removes the mask. The imperative in this scene isn’t immediately to disarm the costumed Michael Myers of a murder weapon — rather, it’s to reveal him, to show his face.
The opening of Halloween is a coming-out story.
I was maybe ten years old when my father took me to the video store during one of the weekends when I was staying with him at the old house where we had all lived before the divorce, and we came home with a VHS copy of Halloween. I remember wandering the aisles alone while my father waited in the car, nursing one of the beers that he brought with him for even the shortest of drives. I inspected every film in the store before finally settling on Halloween, charmed by the haunting simplicity of the cover image of a vicious jack-o’-lantern seemingly gripping the exaggeratedly angled blade of a knife, the fire inside the pumpkin visible only through the carved-out holes of its eyes.
I was reminded of the horror paperbacks that lined the shelves of my mother’s bookcase. Their covers featured eyes glowing in perfect darkness, or headlights in the distance on an otherwise empty street, or a dark house on a hilltop beneath a stormy sky with just the uppermost attic window glowing bright, as if to say that the only person inside was to be kept hidden upstairs, perpetually out of sight. By then I had already read most of those novels, shuttling them in my backpack to and from school and then from one parent’s house to the other, and I already knew that what interested me in the world was also what scared me: the unexplainable, the supernatural, characters suffering random violence at the hands of strangers.
I instantly became obsessed with Halloween. The dread-inducing and methodically paced score quickly became the soundtrack to my own life, and I would hum its provocative notes as I walked or cycled through the streets and sidewalks of a small town that was to me a direct facsimile of Haddonfield, Illinois, where the future victims of Michael Myers sauntered home from school clutching textbooks and discussing their plans for the night. I could see myself in the universe of Halloween, recognizing its contours for the shape my own life had taken. I grew up a few hours south of fictional Haddonfield in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri, but when Laurie Strode — the film’s protagonist and Michael’s primary obsession, his victims almost always being the people closest to her — peered out the window onto sidewalks filled with trick-or-treaters, she might as well have been looking out onto my street, my sidewalk, my house next door.
I recall my first furtive glances at other boys and longing for the safety of something like Michael’s mask.
I was entranced by the way Halloween’s villain moved so slowly and ploddingly, knife in hand and mask firmly attached to his face, and yet always still managed to catch up with the young people who would eventually become his victims. As if the act of being deliberate about his choices was enough for him to get exactly what he wanted. After Michael’s escape from the asylum where he’s presumably been housed for the fifteen long years since his sister’s murder, he’s now returned home to Haddonfield, the scene of the original crime, and the camera in Carpenter’s film adopts not only the pace of Michael’s defining lope but also the nature of his perspective. Many of the exterior shots are framed as if viewed not by an audience, but by a bystander — someone watching unnoticed, just off to the side of its characters’ immediate focus, waiting for the perfect time to strike. The film teaches a voyeuristic way of being in the world, a way of looking without being seen. I recall my first furtive glances at other boys in the locker room after gym class and longing for the safety of something like Michael’s mask, the ability to hide a desire that I knew would be made plain by a quick glance in the direction of my gaze.
I watched Halloween countless times after that first viewing with my father, always in the dark, always aware that I was coming closer and closer to unearthing something locked up within myself. Sometimes I would rewind and start the film over immediately from the beginning after delighting once more in the revelation of Michael’s uncanny escape after having been presumably vanquished. I recognized something in the expression of existential anguish settling onto Laurie’s young face as she realizes that she’s been consigned to a lifetime of looking over her shoulder for the bogeyman.
The reason I was able to watch the film so frequently was because my father never returned it to the video store. The tape and its plastic box remained at the house, the small label on the otherwise blank container revealing only the name of the film, the year of its release, and its genre: horror, a word that would come to imply a kind of comfort for me throughout my childhood and adolescence, an increasingly necessary escape from the real.
I finally stopped watching Halloween on a continuous loop when I stopped going inside my father’s house during the mandatory visits after the divorce. The film remained on the other side of a doorway through which I had come to dread entering. My father was an all-day drinker by then, his eyes always glassy and far away, empty cans littering every surface of the kitchen, the carpet in the hallway perpetually soiled. He would pass out and wake up and start drinking again, cases of beer at a time, like it was some kind of race to get it all down. My mother would drop me off outside his house on Saturday mornings and I would wait for her to drive away before storing the cooler containing my lunch in the backseat of his car, always left unlocked in a neighborhood like the one we lived in, and then I would play with the neighborhood kids until dusk, when my mother would pick me up again. And by then I saw the streets of my old neighborhood through Carpenter’s lens — danger lurking behind every hedgerow, the possibility of the bogeyman stepping out onto the sidewalk in front of me and the knowledge that he would catch me no matter how fast I ran.
No one knew where I was. Anything could have happened.
I was afraid of being a teenager long before I became one. What I knew or at least expected of adolescence was that it would involve performing desire in the form of pursuing girls and trying to lure them into dark corners. The heavy petting I had seen in movies always took place in closets. I didn’t yet have a name for what I was, but I knew that it was derogatory. Schoolyard jeers portrayed queerness as a weakness, an affliction, some kind of monstrosity. I watched with a barely containable resentment as the girls flirted openly with the most alluring of the boys in the hallways of my large public middle school, all of their bodies having sprung suddenly from awkward childhood into something resembling beauty, and I didn’t understand yet that I hated these girls because I wanted to be them, or at least to hold the power that they held over the boys chasing them, pawing at them, trying to claim them. I didn’t understand yet that what I wanted was to be claimed by those boys in exactly that same way.
Schoolyard jeers portrayed queerness as a weakness, an affliction, some kind of monstrosity.
In one of my last memories of my father, we met in a public park, the old house having been lost to foreclosure, and he tried to talk to me about girls. I was twelve years old and a girl named Sarah had recently pursued me at school, leaving notes in my locker and then in a brave show of vulnerability asking me to a school dance. I accepted because I was afraid of what would happen if I turned her down, failing to play the part I’d been assigned. But the night of the dance came and I pretended to be sick and I avoided her afterwards at school in the most cringingly obvious of ways. She never asked me out again after that, and we eventually became just two young people who would pass each other in the hallway with maybe a smile, maybe a small wave, the confusion and hurt in the wake of what had happened never exhumed or made right.
But I couldn’t tell my father about any of that. Instead, I invented a crush and invented a failed pursuit of this imaginary crush, invented an explanation for why I spent all of my time alone.
Watching Halloween was the first time that I knowingly witnessed a blatant representation of human sexuality — in this case, heterosexual human sexuality, the kind of buzzing horniness most explicit in representations of adolescence on film and television — and what I saw confirmed to me that I was not welcome there. There’s a scene in the second half of Halloween in which Laurie’s friend, Lynda, welcomes who she believes to be her boyfriend, Bob, back into the bedroom in which they’ve just finished having sex. She slowly reveals her naked breasts to him from behind a bed sheet, the camera’s gaze sliding down her body in imitation of Bob’s own, until she is fully revealed, smiling seductively as if she knows that she is giving Bob exactly what he wants. She understands his desire, and she knows how to satisfy it. But she doesn’t know that the man she thinks is her boyfriend is actually Michael Myers in disguise. She doesn’t know that he has just stabbed Bob to death after rushing out at him from a closet, and that what he desires is something different entirely.
I understood that I should want to look, too — that what Lynda expected Bob to gawk at was something that I was also expected to gawk at — but I ended up identifying more with Michael Myers than with these young, doomed characters who would shortly succumb to the actualization of a desire that does not match their own. The experience of adolescence as a closeted queer boy is one of constantly attempting to imitate the expression of a desire that you do not feel. Identification with a bogeyman, then, shouldn’t be so surprising when you imagine the bogeyman as unfit for society, his true nature having been rejected and deemed horrific.
And Michael as Bob is not only wearing the familiar mask now ubiquitously associated with his character in the Halloween franchise. He’s also wearing a white sheet covering his entire body, with Bob’s glasses resting delicately where his own eyes are, and the imitation is deliberate and well-imagined. Michael is pretending to be a straight man — a straight, sexualized man — in order to make possible the expression of his true desire, a pursuit far more deviant than the enactment of a heterosexual coupling. He is wearing a mask over a mask. And he seems so cartoonish in this moment, his desire to conceal himself having reached the level of self-parody. How silly it looks to hide in plain sight.
The second time Michael Myers is unmasked in Halloween — after his father removes his mask in the film’s opening sequence — is by Laurie Strode herself. She has just risen from the hallway floor where she had been recovering from the shock of what she believed to be her final encounter with Michael, having stabbed him with his own knife and believing him to be dead, when he suddenly rises from the floor behind her. He begins to walk toward Laurie just as she steps out onto the landing, and she is alone in the frame for only a moment — believing herself to be safe — before Michael catches her from behind and turns her around to face him, his hands at her throat. He begins to choke her.
My body seized with an urgent, almost unbearable need for him to put the mask back on.
Laurie’s panicked astonishment is palpable as she thrashes about within his grip, and in the commotion, we think she’s grappling for his throat, perhaps trying to weaken his hold on her. But then we see that she’s instead trying to remove his mask, as if she intuitively recognizes the source of his power. To disarm him, she must reveal him. And I remember the horrified expression on his face when it was finally displayed onscreen — ugly and confused, blinking in the sudden light, all of the threat he had previously posed dissolving in his sudden nakedness. He releases Laurie in the effort to conceal himself, fumbling desperately with the cheap plastic, and I remember hating the look of him without the mask. My body seized with an urgent, almost unbearable need for him to put it back on. I didn’t want to see him like that.
Early in the summer in which I would later turn thirteen years old, my mother took me on a weeklong vacation to Florida with the man she had been dating for the past several years. The sprawling seaside resort was magical to me — it was the first time I had seen the ocean, and now we could see it out of almost every window — and I often explored the grounds while my mother and her boyfriend were upstairs in the rented room, sleeping off the effects of morning poolside cocktails. I would get myself lost and then make a game of finding my way back to our building again, one of several identical towers in the complex, mapping the space between them as lizards scurried across the sun scorched path at my feet. One afternoon, I was swimming alone in the shallow end of the pool when a man waded toward me. He said he’d been watching me, that I looked lonely, like I could use some company. His chest hair was thick and his arms looked strong. He had large teeth that revealed themselves when he smiled and suggested that we play a game.
The game we played was that I would swim between his legs, straddled wide at first, with the goal of not touching him at all as I swam through, and then each time he would narrow his stance further, closing the gap, making it more and more difficult for me to pass without our skin touching. I thought I was winning the game because I kept angling my body just so, and I would get through each time without my own legs rubbing against his. But then I went down again and saw that he had pulled himself out of his swimming shorts, his cock now lolling in the water above me.
I knew that he wanted me to touch it, to willfully or even accidentally lose the game. It was clear what he wanted to provide for me, and what I would be expected to provide in exchange. I wondered later, after the fear and confusion and disgust with myself had dulled to a gnawing sense of dread, what I had done to show him that I might have wanted it. Had he seen me watching the older boys in the pool whose bodies were already lined with smooth, curved muscles snaking down their arms and torsos, loose swim shorts hanging just below the stark tan lines on their waists, clinging tightly to their bodies as they pulled themselves up the ladder out of the pool? Had he known how badly I wanted to be with them, to wrestle with them in the water and allow them to hold my head under until my lungs were bursting, but that I was too afraid to approach them, too afraid that they would recognize what I really wanted from them if I got too close?
I swam away and hurried up the ladder, running all the way back to the room without bothering to gather my things. I pounded frantically on the door until my mother let me in, complaining about how much noise I was making. But the man from the pool had followed me. He knocked on the door shortly after I came inside, and when she opened it for him, he asked my mother whether I wanted to come back down and continue the game we had started. I imagined him walking slowly up from the pool while I scrambled toward safety, thinking that he could get what he wanted just by asking — by showing up and telling me exactly what was going to happen next, whether I liked it or not.
I remember shaking my head vigorously, refusing to even look up at him in the doorway from where I’d burrowed into the cushions of the cheap couch, and my mother eventually turned him away, perhaps baffled by the exchange, expecting me to have chosen a different kind of friend. But even after he was gone, I knew he had taken something from me. What I had thought was only a secret desire had actually been visible on my body all along to those who knew how to look. I had never really been wearing a mask at all.
My father died while we were in Florida. We didn’t find out until we got back home because no one had wanted to interrupt our vacation. I was in my mother’s bedroom unpacking when she answered the phone next to the mirror at her vanity table.
The last time I’d used the telephone she was holding was when I’d hung up on my father just before our trip. He was slurring his words and I angrily accused him of being drunk yet again. Our last conversation. When my mom told me that he was gone, I thought at first that he had died from a sudden relapse of the cancer he had suffered through a few years before, during which time we would visit him in the hospital, a dimly lit room full of the various machines to which he had been attached. But the truth was that he had drank himself to death. He had been driving home from a bar. He was often drunk when he drove, beer cans nestled between his legs and at his feet; sometimes he’d pull over to vomit out the open window. He had pulled over to the side of the road this time, too, crawled out and waited for his heart to stop.
My father died while we were in Florida. We didn’t find out until we got back home because no one had wanted to interrupt our vacation.
I became a teenager one month after my father’s funeral. I entered adolescence during a summer in which I didn’t sleep, simply waited up every night in darkness, thinking that if I succumbed to sleep then I’d succumb to death. I watched endless horror movies on the small television above my bed in an effort to keep myself awake, and I became acquainted with other villains aside from Michael Myers, each with his own particular desire and his own particular method of enacting its consummation. I was giving myself an education in what to expect from the world, or in how I expected the world to eventually receive me, and those long nights alone in the dark were spent paralyzed at the threshold of a reckoning I could not yet imagine.
My father had been there, too, and he’d seen his way through to the end. Maybe that final night wasn’t the darkest he had ever known, but it was the last of a series of dark nights, the end of a long pursuit by his own relentless bogeyman. Because in his story, he was the one being chased.
I finally recorded Halloween onto a blank tape from a late-night television broadcast after searching in vain for the old video store copy in the boxes in the basement from my father’s house. I watched it over and over again that summer, renewing my obsession with seeing the world through Michael’s eyes. Watching it again, I was struck for the first time by the final moments of Carpenter’s film. Following the revelation that Michael Myers has indeed escaped into the night largely unscathed, the camera lingers on images of interior domestic spaces now made fraught by Michael’s various intrusions into their presumed realms of safety, as if he’s perhaps still there, lying in wait behind the couch or the curtains, appearing suddenly at the top of a dark staircase. And the final shots of the film are static images of the Haddonfield houses in which the murders and attacks have been committed, as if to show us that what seems innocuous on the outside can in fact contain deadly secrets. The lights are all off, and we can’t see in through the windows, but we know what might be lurking just beyond those seemingly inviting front doors.
By the end of Halloween, earlier representations of the suburban landscape as benign and knowable are rendered short-sighted, and the film asks us to gauge our expectations about these domestic spaces against the knowledge we now have about what they might contain. I would lie awake in bed during the summer of my father’s death and picture what my house looked like from the outside, a small two-story house in a modest row of small houses in a quiet neighborhood where young children often played in the street until dusk. Mine was the only upstairs bedroom window that faced out onto the street, and I often wondered whether it was obvious from the outside that someone like me was living there.
In the early morning hours, long before dawn but after the house had fallen asleep around me, the windows would be dark and the horrors on the television would be muted and I would allow myself the pleasure of my own touch. And just before I came, the man from the pool would always resurface like some kind of secret companion in my mind. I fantasized relentlessly about what might have happened if I hadn’t run away that day, hadn’t come up for air, but instead had done everything I imagined he might have offered. I followed him to an empty room at the resort, photographs of sea shells in cheap frames on the wall, a painting of an endless horizon at sunset hung at a slight tilt above the unmade bed. He turned off the lights, drew the curtains, and stepped toward me in the dark. I was already hard when he grabbed me by the shoulders and threw me over to the bed before scrambling toward me, his body heavy on top of mine as he tugged my wet swim shorts down to my ankles.
I wasn’t twelve years old anymore. He wasn’t doing anything wrong. After all, I had been begging for it. Everyone had seen.
I ’ve been imitating literary characters since long before anyone hired me to do it. As a child, my commitment to craft ran deep: cryptic notes left by a spy signed H; muttered asides to the invisible daemon that floated behind my right shoulder; orange juice in a mug, microwaved until it gave off steam (the nearest thing I could imagine to the hot dandelion wine drunk by the tiny furred creatures of Redwall). There was always a very natural connection between reading and performance. When faced with a book or character that I loved, I would promptly consume, internalize, and project it all outward, like an efficient little machine that ran on imagination and hot orange juice. I was the kind of kid you put in community theater, where my first role was in a stage adaptation of — fittingly — Anne of Green Gables. I played the bit part of a pie-obsessed child (though this may have been invented backstory; that particular character doesn’t appear in the original text).
My house held no shortage of stories in which to seek my models. Some books I can remember acquiring after I’d badgered my parents to make the trip to our local library, while others can’t be traced to a point of origin and feel instead like they’re braided into the fabric of my childhood. For me, and in much of the collective imagination, The Berenstain Bears books give off that kind of eternal glow. I don’t remember a time when the four bears — Mama, Papa, Sister, and Brother — didn’t occupy a solid, perennially expanding chunk of bookshelf. These stories were read to me until I could read them to myself; I read them to myself until I had a steady stream of younger siblings with whom to share them. Or more accurately, on whom to inflict them — when I’d insist on reading books aloud, I liked to do them in funny voices.
I don’t remember a time when the four bears — Mama, Papa, Sister, and Brother — didn’t occupy a solid, perennially expanding chunk of bookshelf.
The very first Berenstain Bears book, The Big Honey Hunt, was published in 1962. Billed to Stanley and Janice Berenstain, before the author-illustrator dream team abbreviated it to the chummier (and much more on-brand) “Stan and Jan,” the book was the product of a harrowing editorial meeting with Theodor Geisel, alias Dr. Seuss. As booklore has it, Seuss sat the couple down and proceeded to dissect the first draft in front of them. His advice included the suggestion to “see the lumbering creatures as real people,” shorten the sentences, harden the rhymes, and keep children’s “eyeballs glued to the page.”
For some children, that kind of magical gluing can only occur in the presence of the sensational or supernatural. I was the type of reader whose literary tastes were fairly Type A, favoring books that mirrored my love for organization and efficiency (a Type A flexible enough, however, to allow for anthropomorphized bears). I put a high premium on dependability, and the Berenstains delivered. The comfort I took in the books came as much from their adherence to formula as from their unchanging presence. Each series installment was slim, floppy, and perfectly square. The family name was inscribed across the top in sophisticated semi-cursive, but the subtitle was always done in a boxier, bolder font that promised drama — but not too much of it — that would untangle itself and provide a key takeaway. Whether she was squabbling with Brother Bear, throwing a tantrum, or exploring Bear Country, Sister Bear’s pink bow remained unflappable, crowning her furry curls at the same jaunty angle.
Combine reliability with quantity and you’ve got a potent recipe for customer loyalty. Stan and Jan set an absurdly high bar for productivity, sometimes publishing more than fifteen books in a year (though to be fair, those are also the years where you’re more likely to find their weirder B-sides, like The Berenstain Bear Scouts and the Sci-Fi Pizza). The result of this prolific output, combined with the series’ overtly moral tone, is that there’s a book for almost every situation imaginable. Are you an incurable asshole? Then try The Berenstain Bears: How to Get Along with Your Fellow Bear. Disillusioned with the democratic process? There’s The Berenstain Bears and the Big Election. Pet catfish got a cough? The Berenstain Bears and the Coughing Catfish. For those who seek more spiritual guidance, there’s even a recent religious spinoff by Stan and Jan’s son Mike, which includes The Berenstain Bears Discover God’s Creation and The Berenstain Bears Follow God’s Word.
Disillusioned with the democratic process? There’s ‘The Berenstain Bears and the Big Election.’ Pet catfish got a cough? ‘The Berenstain Bears and the Coughing Catfish.’
This explicit turn to religion feels like an unsurprising, albeit amusing, progression from books that were already highly moralizing — usually at the younger bears’ expense, a move that I found unfair as a child reader. The public misbehavior of fellow children struck me as horrifying in general, not out of any obsession with propriety but because I always felt strangely implicated by it, as if the heads of the adults in the vicinity would swivel towards me as if to say you’re all little shits and this just proves it.
Which means that when I first met Sister Bear on the page, I thought she was kind of a drip. I recognized myself in a lot of her more quotidian struggles — fear of going to the doctor, the anxiety of making friends — but tended to take a harsher stance when it came to her decision-making. A five-year-old has next to no critical faculties, but even then I knew enough to think: If you eat all that cake and are horrible to your mother and complain about your presents, well then how did you expect your birthday party was going to turn out? (See The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Birthday, 1986). I suppose what that means is that the books, in their didactic mission, were working perfectly.
By age nine, I’d outgrown the Berenstains books, devoured everything to emerge from the pen of Beverly Cleary (even sitting through the substandard spinoffs that centered on Henry Huggins, Beezus Quimby’s much less interesting male friend, because I couldn’t get enough of his dog Ribsy), and was just starting to move into the vitamin C-rich epoch of Brian Jacques.
I’d also outgrown community theater. Crowds full of school peers and camp friends no longer made me sweat (The Berenstain Bears Get Stage Fright, 1986) and I was hungry to start acting out in front of strangers. I begged my parents to help me get an agent, started showing up in tiny rooms to stand in front of a camera or microphone, and landed my first real gig as Sister Bear in the 2003 reboot of The Berenstain Bears (there’d also been a cartoon version in 1985; my fandom extended from the book series to a thick stack of VHS tapes). After getting the call that I’d booked the series, I used my dad’s email address to send a note to Stan and Jan. They were sweet enough to write back.
I hadn’t given much thought to voice acting before I got my start in the entertainment industry. The goal had been to get on a screen or a stage, the bigger the better. But it was in the invisible work of voice acting that I found the most pleasure. Much more than with on-camera projects, I came to see recording sessions as an extension of my literary play-acting, akin to the empathic, immersive pleasures provided by books. In the studio, I could slip into the self I’d comfortably inhabited for most of my life: a reader with an affinity for playing with the text. Going to work every week brought the same joy as sitting down to add a few chapters to my epic of Meg Murray fan fiction.
In the studio, I could slip into the self I’d comfortably inhabited for most of my life: a reader with an affinity for playing with the text.
But it took me some time to see any existing relationship between my life as a reader and my newfound responsibilities as a cartoon voice actor. That first day in studio was pure terror. My voice squeaked out of a body that seemed to have forgotten how to operate properly. Not that feeling comfortable enough to flail my arms around would have made much of a difference. As the creative team watched me from behind the control room’s glass, I faced up to the full weight of a seemingly impossible undertaking: fashioning a character entirely out of the inflections of my voice.
Eventually, I came to recognize that I wasn’t alone in this task. Being a childhood fan of the books meant that I had years of material and backstory to play with. I was armed with a low-grade distrust of Sister Bear’s numerous poor decisions (The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Junk Food/Forget Their Manners/Get the Gimmies). I had a history of identifying with the social pressures she’d faced as a young girl (The Berenstain Bears and No Girls Allowed/The In-Crowd). I had the power to shape my performance to reflect, or even limit, those tendencies. It wasn’t a fantasy of revision, but an act of collaborative storytelling. Not only was I working with a character that had a past — it was a character whose past I knew and in many ways felt like I’d lived. As an actor, especially a novice one, this was a tremendous gift.
There’s another important element of collaboration to this, too — the fact that I would record the show with the rest of the cast. I was rarely in the booth alone. Usually, I worked in an ensemble that included the two actors cast as Mama and Papa Bear — theater veterans both — and the boy who played Brother, a thirteen-year-old who had his sights set on moving to L.A. to become a comedian. His name was Michael Cera.
Your job as a voice actor is to bring to life the words on a page, which is certainly possible to do in isolation. But there’s a particular kind of vitality that can only be attained by pursuing the goal as a group. My awareness of this vitality has transcended the work of cartoons. Reading scripts aloud every week, observing the journey that language takes off of the page and into the world, I learned the varied shapes and cadences of conversation; the distinctiveness of speech patterns; the full spectrum of tone. The Berenstain Bears, and much of my voice work since, was also a crucial step in my education as a writer.
A few years ago, I was startled by a flurry of Twitter notifications from a bunch of cartoon fans demanding to know “if it was really true.” If the surname of their favorite bear family, one of the sturdiest fixtures of their childhoods, was indeed spelled “Berenstain” rather than “Berenstein,” as much of the world seemed to mistakenly remember it. More importantly, they wanted to know if I could confirm or deny the existence of a parallel universe, the working hypothesis to explain away this fracture in their childhood foundations. As the voice of Sister Bear, I was regarded as a definitive source on the conspiracy. I joked about mysterious NDAs, but I had little to say to substantiate the theory (if you’ve seen the name written at the top of sixty scripts — moreover, if you’re any kind of close reader — you’re going to remember how to spell it correctly). It was both the most dramatic and anticlimactic resurfacing that the show has made in my life since we wrapped more than fifteen years ago. But it also speaks to the reach of Stan and Jan’s world — a mere allegation against the reliability of their beloved bears can stir the internet into a mass frenzy, even if that frenzy is tongue-in-cheek. I was surprised, and a little flattered, to see the depth of people’s commitment to the performance.
A couple of months ago, my partner and I were in New Zealand. We’d chosen to pass on the bigger, more obvious cities — high-drama landscapes were our priority, with bonus points if they’d appeared on Top of the Lake — and were staying just outside of a tiny, historic gold mining town with a population of 2,000 and restaurants that would start to close just as we were getting hungry. Nowhere, in other words, where you’d expect to find any evidence of yourself or your life on the opposite side of the International Date Line. While pawing through our Airbnb’s movie selection I found, tucked in next to the complete Lord of the Rings (our hosts knew their audience), a DVD of The Berenstain Bears. The first episode on the disc was The Berenstain Bears and Too Much TV, one of the storylines lifted directly from the books. I decided, for the first time in over a decade, to take a trip to Bear Country. Once again, albeit for different reasons, Sister Bear was the focus of my judgment. Yes, she still had a startling lack of self-awareness, but with the aid of time and distance — and maybe, a little bit, the performance — I was able to read it as innocence rather than idiocy. I admired the perfect pertness of her little pink bow. I was touched by how easily and often she laughed.
Each month “Unfinished Business” will examine an unfinished work left behind by one of our greatest authors. What might have been genius, and what might have been better left locked in the drawer? How and why do we read these final words from our favorite writers — and what would they have to say about it? We’ll piece together the rumors and fragments and notes to find the real story.
The world nearly lost Clarice Lispector in 1966. After taking a sleeping pill on a September evening, she got into bed to smoke a cigarette and soon woke to find her apartment engulfed in fire. “In a panicked attempt to save her papers,” Benjamin Moser writes in his biography Why This World, “she attempted to put out the fire with her own hands.”
Lispector’s son eventually walked her over to a neighbor’s, but not before she had been badly burned from head to toe, her clothes melted onto her skin. Footprints of blood marked the carpet where she had stepped.
Had she died that night, Clarice Lispector would still have been remembered as one of Brazil’s most famous writers. At 46, she was the author of eight books, including Near to the Wild Heart and The Passion According to G.H. Her masterful, mystical stories and novels were like nobody else’s, and beyond this she was a fashionable and public figure, mesmerizing both on the page and in real life. One critic wrote that her work had “shifted the center of gravity around which the Brazilian novel had been revolving for about twenty years.”
Thankfully, Clarice Lispector did not die, not then. She was, however, hospitalized for three months with third-degree burns, experiencing immense and lasting pain. Her right hand, which she had used to write, was blackened and horribly bent. She kept family, friends, and neighbors nearby, and in time she pulled through — albeit to a life irrevocably altered.
She was hospitalized for three months with third-degree burns. Her right hand, which she had used to write, was blackened and horribly bent.
Lispector faced a grueling physical recovery, but the damage to her work was perhaps even greater. All her unfinished writing had been lost in the fire. She had been struggling for some time to follow the success of The Passion According to G.H. Now, after this trauma, Lispector began to despair, feeling increasingly isolated from society. “As time goes by, especially in the last few years,” she wrote, “I’ve lost the knack of being a person. I no longer know how one is supposed to be.”
Despite the setback, during this time she published two novels for children and wrote, in 1968, a novel called An Apprenticeship, which critics enjoyed, though she expressed dissatisfaction. Soon after, she announced that she would not write another book. When asked why in an interview she replied, “What a question! Because it hurts too much.”
But Lispector did keep fighting — not to get back to her old self, but forward into something else, which would eventually amount to a kind of second life of letters. She reinvented everything: her style, her methods, and even the very questions at the heart of her writing. In the years following, she would write dozens of new stories and several beautiful novels, including the masterpiece Água Viva and The Hour of the Star, which would carry her reputation beyond Brazil and into the waiting world.
To face these huge new challenges, Lispector got some help. She began to see a psychiatrist, Jacob Azulay, five days a week, an hour a day — for the next six years. Sometimes, he recalled, she would write sentences and fragments in his office.
“I am nothing,” she wrote, once, according to Azulay. “I feel like those insects who shed their skin. Now I lost the skin. The name of that skin is Clarice Lispector.”
She also hired an assistant named Olga Borelli, who, according to Moser, “would become a key figure in the last years of Clarice’s life and whose tireless dedication and intellectual affinity facilitated the creation of Clarice’s great final works.” Borelli, a former nun, had been an ardent fan of Lispector’s writing, and after seeing her on a television program one night, decided to call her under the auspices of fundraising for a charity. They spoke on the phone and two weeks later, the women met.
Lispector gave her a typed letter declaring their friendship:
I have found a new friend. Which is too bad for you. I am an insecure, indecisive, directionless, rudderless person: the truth is I don’t know what to do with myself. I am a very fearful person. […] Do you still want to be my friend despite all that?
She did. Borelli henceforth dedicated her life to the remainder of Lispector’s. She became a part of Lispector’s day-to-day world. She cared for her, talked with her, comforted her, and played a singular hand in the construction of her late works, editing and arranging them from disparate fragments, including until her very last — A Breath of Life, published in 1978, just a year after Lispector’s death from cancer.
A Breath of Life (Un Soplo de Vida), which was translated for New Directions in 2012 by Johnny Lorentz, is primarily a conversation between two characters: an unnamed male Author, and Angela, the character that the Author is creating. “The title,” according to Moser, “refers to the creation, mystical or ‘Frankensteinian,’ of one being by another.”
Over the book’s 160 pages, Angela and her Author discuss the connections between Creator and Created and what this breathing of life entails — the creation of a character, the process of filling its days and years with pain and joy. There is a strong preoccupation with knowing that creation means, inevitably, death. Some critics have noticed that the voices of the two characters often switch and merge together. The Author has a tendency to override Angela’s voice, who in turn sometimes influences her creator’s mannerisms in spooky ways.
Publisher’s Weekly called it a “schizoid duet” (in a nice way) when the book was translated into English — the Author and Angela being two sides of Clarice Lispector, struggling both with the challenge of creation and with her own imminent death. Throughout the book, the Author, and Clarice, struggle with having to come to an end, meaning that Angela will come to an end. “Do I kill her? Does she kill herself?” he asks. Angela remarks later, “At the hour of my death — what do I do? Teach me how to die. I don’t know.”
But in some sense, the novel as we read it is actually a “schizoid trio,” for between the arguments of Angela and the Author, who together may make up Clarice, there is also Olga Borelli — the woman who transcribed, edited, typed, retyped, and reedited hundreds of fragments during Lispector’s lifetime, and, after her death from ovarian cancer, ultimately organized those fragments into their final form.
Olga Borelli transcribed, edited, typed, retyped, and reedited hundreds of fragments during Lispector’s lifetime, and, after her death from ovarian cancer, ultimately organized those fragments into their final form.
According to Benjamin Moser, before meeting Borelli, Lispector had never permitted her literary work to be edited by anyone. Olga Borelli would be more than just an editor, however; she was a silent collaborator. Possessing “a sensitive, well-educated reader with a refined sense of language,” she would later write her own memoir of her time with Lispector. Organizing and editing was exhausting for Lispector at this stage, and she was prepared to fully abandon a several-hundred-page mess she was calling Loud Object. Instead, with Olga’s help, they shed its skin and exposed a 96-page masterpiece, Água Viva.
Borelli’s contribution to A Breath of Life was even more crucial, since the book was still in fragments upon Lispector’s death. In a half-page introduction to the book, Borelli briefly notes her role in finishing Lispector’s unfinished “definitive book,” which was, “in the words of Clarice, ‘written in agony,’ for it was born from a painful impulse she was unable to contain.” Reflecting on her eight years of working closely with Lispector, Borelli remarked, “I wrote down her thoughts, typed her manuscripts and most of all shared in her moments of inspiration.”
Borelli described her method as “breathing together” and likened the experience to building a puzzle, in this case out of sometimes scavenged fragments of writing: “on the back of a check, a piece of paper, a napkin […] some even smell of her lipstick. She would wipe her lips and then stick it in her purse.” The fragmentary nature of Lispector’s writing and Olga’s editing is part of the book’s atmosphere. In her introduction, Lispector wrote, “This I suppose will be a book made apparently out of shards of a book. […] My life is made of fragments and that’s how it is for Angela.”
Moser notes that A Breath of Life was “not only published but also, to some extent, written after Clarice’s death” by Borelli, “breathing together” with the memory of Clarice. Thus the book, Moser argues, achieves its perfection “precisely by its incompletion and imperfection.”
After this final book’s publication, Olga Borelli confessed to having left out one crucial line of the Author’s: “I asked God to give Angela a cancer that she can’t get rid of.” This was, she said, out of sensitivity to Lispector’s family. Lispector had told several people throughout her life, including Azulay, her psychiatrist, that she knew she would someday die of “a nasty cancer.” When Lispector was hospitalized in 1977, just a few days after publishing The Hour of the Star (which Olga also edited), doctors soon diagnosed her with terminal ovarian cancer—although she was never told that this was what she was dying of.
Lispector again spent three months in the hospital, but this time she did not leave. Olga Borelli passed the time with her, taking dictation right up to the day of the hemorrhage that would end Clarice’s life.
In the letter that Lispector wrote to Borelli at their first meeting, she asked if, despite all her fears and problems, Olga would want to be her friend. Just following that, she wrote:
If you do, don’t say I didn’t warn you. I don’t have qualities, only fragilities. But sometimes… sometimes I have hope. The passage from life to death frightens me: it’s like passing from hate which has an objective and is limited, to love which is limitless. When I die (as a matter of speaking) I hope you will be near. You seemed to me to be a person of enormous sensitivity, but strong.
Clarice Lispector died, again, almost eleven years after the fire that had changed her life, and her art, forever. Olga Borelli was there, holding her hands as it happened.
For much of the past five decades, Joan Didion has been both subject and curator of her own work. Whether mining her own insecurities to talk about self-respect or plumbing her own loss to ponder the meaning of grief, Didion’s books have nurtured a particular idea of “Joan Didion.” But now, in her 80s, she’s begun to see others take the reins to tell her story. On the heels of The Last Love Song, Tracy Daugherty’s 2015 biography of the California native, comes the Netflix documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold.
Featuring interviews with writers David Hare, Hilton Als, editor Shelley Wanger, as well as candid one-on-ones with Didion herself at her New York City apartment, the new documentary offers a personal look at the onetime Vogue copywriter. This may be the only film where you get to see Didion prepare herself a sandwich, talk at length about why her forays into fiction never quite worked the way her nonfiction seemed to, and later engage in a touching conversation with Vanessa Redgrave (who played Didion in the theatrical adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking) about their gone-too-soon daughters. Like Didion’s best work, the documentary manages to paint a portrait of an artist who constantly felt the need to turn to the blank page to make sense of what was happening, both inside and outside herself.
I got to talk to Annabelle Dunne, who produced the documentary alongside her cousin Griffin Dunne (Didion’s nephew — it truly is a family affair!). In our conversation, Dunne talks about the many obstacles she and Griffin faced in first getting the project off the ground, shares the most surprising thing she learned while working with Joan for so long (it involves a freezer), and why she thinks Didion remains such an iconic American presence, both timeless and timely.
Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold is available on Netflix starting October 27, 2017.
Manuel Betancourt: Let’s start at the beginning. I wanted to hear about how it all began, how you guys ended up going the Kickstarter route, and how that lead to its release this month.
Annabelle Dunne: It began almost six years ago. We’ve sort of lost track exactly when. Right after Blue Nights came out. Knopf, Joan’s publisher, had approached Joan and Griffin, her nephew, about doing a short film that would accompany the release of the book. It was something that they would play when she went on book tour because it would ease the necessity for long-drawn out production on her book tour. So we did a one day shoot in New York. It was really really fun. Griffin approached her after that and said, would you be open to doing a documentary? She agreed and we then spent a considerable amount of time trying to find a home for that documentary. We knew we definitely wanted to do it, and it’d be a great opportunity — she’d never said yes to anyone before and we felt she wouldn’t, so we needed to seize that opportunity. But we had a hard time finding full financing. We had interest here and there but we had a hard time finding the amount of money we needed. I had some friends who had done Kickstarter campaigns. So we decided to do a campaign. It was a really incredible experience. To be honest, it didn’t actually fully finance the film. It was probably one tenth of our budget but what it enabled us to do was a kind of marketing campaign. It got the word out that this was something we wanted to do. Based on the incredible reaction to the Kickstarter we met our goal in 24 hours. Then we went on to get a lot of money over the course of the campaign and a lot of support and press. It was clear that there was an audience for a movie about Joan. With that in tow we then were able to get Netflix to come on board and fully support us. It was a long road and there were a lot of different people who were involved at one point or another but we ended up with Netflix which has just been great.
MB: Especially because it’s going to reach so many people.
AD: For sure. That was really wonderful about working with them and knowing that it would be global and that all these people would see it. It was important that it be something that would resonate with people who were familiar with Joan and her work, but that it would also hopefully attract a new group of readers, a new generation of people who didn’t know her yet or who are older but who may have known her later work but didn’t know her earlier stuff.
MB: That was my experience. I’ve read The White Album, The Year of Magical Thinking,and some pieces here and there but if there’s something you really get a sense of in the film is just the sheer amount of work Joan has written over the years — which is also all over the place in terms of genres and themes. Was it hard to winnow her canon down and choose what we eventually see in the documentary?
We knew we weren’t going to be able to look at all of her work. We knew that, from a family perspective, it was always going to be a personal movie.
AD: Yeah! It was. We knew we weren’t going to be able to look at all of her work. We knew that, from a family perspective, it was always going to be a personal movie. So we knew that we were gonna have to be very judicious about what we covered. And we really tried to pick a variety of pieces. Also, things that had a through-line. Central Park Five [Didion’s “New York: Sentimental Journeys”] feels as relevant now — if not more! — than it did back when she wrote it for different reasons. So we really tried to find things that had been true then and were true now. Things that spoke to the spirit of her as a person. But it was tough. Griffin tried to take them as needle drops on an album. That was the thinking. But it was definitely hard and daunting. Because there’s a lot of people out there who know a lot about her work — certainly more than Griffin and I do! So we were intimidated by some of the more scholarly aspects of dealing with this person’s canon.
MB: She has been around long enough that many people have pored over what she’s thought and written. Which brings me to something I also wanted to ask you about. How did you decide who would be the talking heads in this film? We see David Hare, Shelley Wanger, even Vanessa Redgrave at one point.
AD: It just ended up being a group of people that are or had at one point in their lives been incredibly close to Joan. We talked to a lot of other people that didn’t end up in the movie. People who had known her personally and who hadn’t known her personally. We talked to people about her style. About her impact on New Wave Journalism. People from a fashion perspective: we talked to photographers and designers. We talked to people who were young up and coming writers on the impact she’d had on them, almost like a Greek chorus. Ultimately, those things didn’t make it into the film because it became much more personal. We felt like it served it better in the end have it be a very small core of people who clearly had had a meaningful past with her personally. That seemed to work. But that was hard — it’s hard to cut a lot of people out! Certainly we were very grateful for their time and their energy.
MB: It’s okay, I won’t ask you to name names.
AD: (Laughter) Well, that’s when you just have to look at the Thank Yous in the credits, you know?
MB: But the set of people you landed on does make it all feel like a rather intimate affair. What did you and Griffin hope they (and the documentary itself) could tell us about Joan that we wouldn’t perhaps get from her writing?
She’s seen as cold or remote. Or private. Those may all be true in a sense. But she’s incredibly warm.
AD: How warm she is! I think she gets a very severe reputation. She’s seen as cold or remote. Or private. Those may all be true in a sense. But she’s incredibly warm. She has a great sense of humor. She’s incredibly loyal to her family and her friends. We knew that that would come through. Clearly in any of the interviews she does with Griffin you can see that. That was something that was important to us. I was surprised at the how harsh she is on herself with regards to everything that happened with Quintana, which comes through in the film a bit. She’s clearly feeling guilt. That surprised me, that that came up.
MB: There is a way the film turns into a rather melancholy portrait of Joan-as-mother, especially in her discussion of Blue Nights. Was there anything else that surprised you as you were working on the film?
AD: What else was surprising? The fact that she put her manuscript in the freezer was truly surprising. I loved hearing that — that was kind of funny. There were a lot of things, and we worked with her for such a long period of time. I was surprised at how supportive she was, even when it went on and on. I’m sure she wondered privately if we were ever going to finish it. But she let us keep going which was really cool and nice.
MB: And has she seen the film?
AD: She saw an early cut, when it was really long and rough (about 3 hours long!) So she saw that and then she saw later cuts. She’s seen various versions.
MB: What does she think? I can’t even imagine looking at something like this about my own life and work.
AD: I think it’s really weird to see your life in front of you, while you’re alive. Most people don’t have that in their lifetime. I think that was really intense for her. But she’s been incredibly supportive and encouraging. She really took both Griffin and me in. I think she likes the film, it’s safe to say. Or, it passes muster!
MB: The one film it reminded me of, and which I only later realized you’d also executive produced, was the Nora Ephron documentary directed by her son Jacob Epstein, Everything is Copy. In my mind they’re almost like twinned films about these wildly talented women being captured by those closest to them.
She’s always been herself. And herself is just this very unwavering, tough, spare, elegant being.
AD: Yeah, there’s a lot of similarities. You know, both Jacob and Griffin were first-time directors — this is Griffin’s first documentary and it was Jacob’s first feature, period. I know that they both were very very clear that they didn’t want — well, Jacob always said, “I don’t want to do a hagiography.” We felt the same way. We wanted this to be a personal look at this person’s life but we also wanted to keep it fair. Both Griffin and Jacob had incredible relationships with their editors who really helped them, because they were a degree removed and weren’t related and hadn’t known the subject the entire lives. They were instrumental in helping to tell that story from a perspective that felt real but fair. Obviously, with this movie we had the advantage of still having Joan. We didn’t have Nora anymore when we started Everything is Copy. And that was hard — it’s hard for a number of reasons. The interviews are tainted. It’s very hard for people to speak candidly about someone that’s gone if they don’t have the best things to say. I think Jacob did a really good job of painting an accurate portrait of his mom despite all that. And we did have all of her books on tape, which was helpful. Because you hear her voice in the same way that we do with Joan. I do wish — I mean, there are so many questions I wish we could’ve asked her!
MB: Oh, especially about, well, the end of it all. It’s funny, I’d never quite thought of Didion and Ephron as contemporaries but it did strike me that these two films end up being portraits of women who blazed trails by being quite candid about their own lives.
AD: Yeah. I think they were both fiercely ambitious, even if they may have revealed that to different degrees, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being ambitious. They both clearly valued the work. Both seemed to find salvation through work. They worked through things that were hard in life and found answers in working it out and writing it out. That’s what I think they both share: they clearly both worked from a very very young age to, well, I mean, Joan is still working! It’s something they both valued a lot. Like they have to think through writing.
MB: You truly get a sense of that in the film. You get a peek at the Joan behind the page. In that sense, what do you think it is about Joan that so captivates readers to this day?
AD: She’s herself. She’s always been herself. And herself is just this very unwavering, tough, spare, elegant being. She looks the way you think she’s gonna look and you want her to look. She photographs the way she — it’s all very much in keeping with the work on the page. If you track her work, it’s always been like that. And we try to show that with “On Self-Respect.” I mean, that’s her voice! Her voice evolves and matures but that’s really her voice on the page, from the very first thing that she writes. I think that’s what keeps people coming back. She’s always been that and will continue to be that way for people.
Librarians from Invercargill, New Zealand had a “totally impromptu, definitely not planned” photo shoot spoofing The Hollywood Reporter’s The Kardashian Decade cover, and everyone is losing their minds. But did you know that librarians have always been lowkey the most fun people on the planet? Here are seven times that librarians have debunked the stereotype that they are uptight scolds ready to shush those who dare to have fun in their sacred institution.
Caution: These musical tributes to libraries and the amazing people who run them will have you wanting to break out in song and dance at your nearest library. And then you really might get shushed.
What happens when librarians at the University of Washington go Gaga? They sing “Ca-ca-catalog.” Perez Hilton called this video “positively awkward,” a designation the librarians would probably accept with glee.
The Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library has a message for you: #CheckItOut #CheckItOut. These dollar bill throwing librarians adapted Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” into a public serving announcement reminding everyone that the library is a place to “play play play play play” and borrow “high-def Blu-ray ray ray ray.” Fun fact: The book and movie titles featured in the video double as Swift’s song titles.
Ever wondered what librarians do on a Saturday night after the library has closed? They dress up in literary costumes and have a dance party, of course! This remix of Bruno Mars’ Uptown Funk by Pogona Creative and the Orange Public Library in association with Chapman University is rife with slick book references (“Got cancer and a cool boyfriend, any guesses?”) and killer dance moves by a very snazzy Neil Patrick Harris lookalike.
Faced with the prospect of making yet another snooze-worthy powerpoint for their end of the year report, the Shoalhaven librarians decided instead to highlight their accomplishments by rocking out in boa feathers and hamming it up on air guitars to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” singing: “Is this nonfiction? Is this just fantasy? Working the library, escaping from reality.”
This Ohio librarian is not having any my-dog-ate-the-book excuses. Drowning in stacks of overdue notices, Mary Evelyn Smith set out to warn the students of Liberty Elementary School to return their books by getting her grove on, transforming “All About That Bass” to “All About Them Books” with the help of an ensemble of cute book-swinging kids. Not a bad way to publicly shame those book-stealing kiddos.
A campaign promoting studying in the library of a Mormon university is the last thing you would expect to go viral. Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library’s shot-by-shot riff of the popular Old Spice ads has than 3.5 millions views thanks to snarky lines like “Did you know that 8 out of 5 dentists say that studying in the library is six bajillion times more effective than studying in your shower?”
Move over, Carly Rae Jepsen! The New York State Reading Association’s ode to libraries will have you singing “got a library card, it kind of caught me off guard and now I’m on my way. Then this one book seemed to shout come on and come check me out!” We guarantee an ear-worm for days.
Bonus Video: So this one’s not technically a parody by a librarian, but we couldn’t help but include this hilariously subversive SNL skit. Margot Robbie plays a sexy librarian acting out the raunchy fantasy of some college bros, or so you think… She lets her hair down, takes off her glasses and just as it looks like she’s about to make the wet dreams of every straight male come true, she rips the hair off her head (ouch), reveals her then-and-now Joel Haley Osment tattoos (ewww) and then gleefully murders everyone in sight with her demonic powers (so badass). Watch out fanboys, Margot Robbie is coming to get you!
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