How Should I Read?

November 2 of 8: The Long Run - Stacey D'Erasmo - Graywolf 2024

This is a book about the longevity of a creative life. D’Erasmo went around interviewing eight artists, all in different mediums — two visual artists, a composer, a landscape architect, a writer, an actor, a dancer, a singer-songwriter — all of them old people (the average age is 78). D’Erasmo herself is in her 60s, a few years younger than my parents. The central question of the book is how these people sustained their practice over a lifetime, and it’s organized as a collection of essays, each one examining a different sustaining force that made a difference in some of these artists’ careers: freedom, desire, exile, descent, among other themes.

Let me admit to you that the way I’ve been reading in these first weeks of my new habit is very self-centered, and I struggled with what I should say about this book because [wincing] I approached the book in the same way I might approach a self-help book. What I mean is that as I read, I was most drawn to passages I felt I could relate to or insights I thought might help me. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, inherently, but it’s only one of many ways to read. I’m embarrassed not just because I noticed myself reading this way but also because I know that if this is the way I read, this is also going to be the way I write about the books I’m reading — the consequence being that when you read this, you’ll learn more about me than you will about the books. But even more tragically, I will spend my time thinking more about me than I do about the books, which isn’t the point of this exercise.

I’ve been fixated on this aspect of my reading for a couple weeks, since reading this brutal but enlightening essay on the autobiographical trend in contemporary American essay writing. “When we do like an essay,” Jackson Arn writes in this piece, “it’s not because we agree with the writer’s politics or feel her pain; it’s because of the way she interprets her subject (which may be politics or pain or both).

“Interest, not sympathy or solidarity, is the thing. And maybe I can squeeze a second rule out of this: all good essays are personal, but not for the obvious reason. Not, that is, because they feature lots of Is and autobiography (though sometimes they do), but because they’re a frottage of the writer’s brain, a record of her innermost quality: the way she thinks.

“Good essays are personal, then, but in a way that transcends differences between essay-writer and essay-reader. In too much of TCAE, the personal stays personal. ‘Everything is autobiography now,’ the critic and novelist Gary Indiana said in an interview with Benjamin Moser in 2019, ‘and it’s not helpful to people. It’s only helpful to the people writing the autobiographies.’ The very idea of helping readers — pleasing them, teaching them something worth knowing, making them laugh — is made to seem faintly impolite in these pages; too many of these essays end with an implicit go fetch!, as though the reader were the essayist’s therapist, puzzling over stacks of notes to figure out where it all went wrong.

I have a tendency to reach quickly for self-disclosure and anecdote as my main source of subject matter, and Jackson Arn’s disdainful review made me look hard at that tendency, and — more productively — it made me try to imagine what else is possible. What are the most substantive ways to engage with what I’m reading?

I will likely be chewing on this question for a very long time, and I hope this newsletter will continue to be a useful place to chew on it. A first answer that came to me in the meantime is that I can be more hesitant to identify with statements that have little to do with me. When I read some lines from D’Erasmo’s book like these,

“We were […] sort of a mess […] People with that much appetite, facing that much barbed wire, can develop very sharp teeth […] I was scared of some unnameable inner current, something that often grabbed me by the throat from within, without warning, making my heart pound, shaking my veins” (19),

my first reaction is to be like, ugh me too. I too have so much appetite I hardly know what to do with it. I also am exhausted by whatever it is that’s burning me from the inside. I am not, however, facing very much barbed wire, let’s be honest. I am not a young lesbian poet in 1970s Manhattan. And I don’t even mean that in a kind of overly self-conscious woke way — I don’t mean it’s not about me, a cis white dude. That may also be true, but the point I’m trying to make is a much simpler and more obvious one: this is literally not about me insofar as I am not Stacey D’Erasmo.

It’s fine, I think, for me to relate to the way D’Erasmo expresses her memories of that time, and fine to let that lead me to consider my own life. But what I’m realizing is that if I jump too quickly into that kind of response, I can short circuit other thoughts and questions that are worthwhile, like, “What does this paragraph tell me about the history of NYC or the US, or about a lineage of Queer resistance to a hostile culture? What does it say about ambition? About libido? About community? About the ways conflict and community can be so intertwined?”

Despite all that, back to me. I felt immensly encouraged by D’Erasmo’s book, and I found it to be an especially good companion for closing the first chapter of my adult life. D’Erasmo spends a lot of time reveling in how much these different artists dared, reveling in the determination and abandon with which they lived and made art. Watching her be inspired by the fullness of these eight lives, I was inspired. She seems to get permission from them to keep going, much in the same way she got permission, as a younger writer, from her friend and professor Michael Cunningham:

“The fact that he was more famous than I was, then and now, felt in large part like permission: I could run as fast, hit as hard, and demand as much of the world as I wanted without ever being in danger of losing him by going too far, because he had always gone farther. There was nothing I could write, and very little I could do, that would shock or dismay him. For a woman in this world, or at least for this one, that’s life giving” (53).

The book also made me feel challenged, motivated, which was a good supplement to the encouragement and permission. It’s a book that makes you want to grow up without making that sound easy or simple:

“‘For some writers exile means leaving the family home; for others, leaving the childhood town or city; for others, more radically, growing up.’ That he sees adulthood as a more radical exile than, say, going into political exile, as he did when he left Chile in 1973, raises the bar considerably for what ‘growing up’ might mean, and perhaps what it might cost” (89).

It also helps that The Long Run, with its focus on artists in the final quarter of their lives, showed me how the process of growing up, and growing into the work you want to do, extends much further than I might have thought. It isn’t something I’m supposed have already done but something I’m supposed to keep coming back to. And it showed me how slow a creative life can be, how much time there is to find my way toward writing what I want to write. The key, I gather, is not to wait. The key is to keep writing, keep making, keep living in the meantime.

I picked this book up at what felt like exactly the right time. Whereas I’ve been scared that time is running out for me, D’Erasmo unfurls a longer view and with it an implied responsibility to keep growing. Pace yourself, she seems to say. Things will take the time they will take, and you can’t know how you will get there, who will come into your life to make it possible. But you can keep going. You can throw yourself at the day, and toward the people in your life and toward the art you want to make, with energy and with faith that all this engagement will amount to something. If that practice itself doesn’t come to feel worthwhile, then probably nothing that comes of it will ever feel worthwhile. You have to learn to believe in the practice.

That emphasis on practice is becoming important to me. It’s an insight that keeps coming up in everything I read, or maybe I’m just starting to notice it. Now I’m watching for it.

Click here to read November 3 of 8: The Unbearable Lightness of Being