This afternoon at the grocery store when the cashier asked for my license (wine), I gave it to her, and she laughed, and when I asked her why, and she said it was because her grandmother was also born in the 1970s.
Still thinking about the ladies next to me, strangers to each other, who talked nonstop on my flight from Atlanta to Seattle. Five hours. Serious therapy vibes. Then at the end, they just said “Great to meet you,” AND LEFT WITHOUT EXCHANGING INFORMATION.
Late last night, I passed my teenager in the dark hallway and he reached out, tenderly touched my eyebrow, and whispered, “Overplucked in the ‘90s.” I’m dead now.
I don't know who needs to hear this today (I do), but the vast majority of the time one spends writing a book isn't spent in writing the book, but rather reading, dreaming, running, walking, experimenting, restarting, writing things that gradually bring you closer to the book.
My boys’ critique of The Lion King was SCATHING because “lionesses, actually, are the hunters, and animals don’t need to accept lion royalty because they can rule themselves,” and, lordy, I have raised feminist anarchists, my work as a mother is pretty much done.
Save me your hot takes about how Florida sucks, and remember that we’ve been gerrymandered so excessively out of actual democratic representation that what the GOP has done here to solidify their power should be considered unconstitutional.
I wrote hundreds of thousands of words this year, threw out nearly all of them, and barely published anything. It’s fine! It happens often. These bleak, dry, fallow years are necessary for the good work to begin to take shape in the periphery.
When I told my little boy to have a good day at school, he said, “Have a good day taking baths and crying and watching Italian movies,” HELP, where’s the aloe vera, I am never getting over that burn.
There are some years when I sit down to write every day and I create almost nothing that’s worthy of being published. It has taken me almost 20 years of a life in art to understand that this is not only fine, it’s necessary.
Mesmerized by the guy in front of me on the plane who spent two hours scrolling through Facebook, slowly and thoroughly enlarging the faces of his friends’ hot wives.
NEW: This summer, we reported on the contents of a controversial database used to train generative AI products from Meta, Bloomberg, and others. Many people requested an ability to search it. Today,
@_alexreisner
delivers.
To avoid being eaten, the eastern hognose snake will writhe in fake agony, throw up, poo itself, and finally lie still, belly up, mouth wide open, tongue out, blood dripping from its mouth.
I see a lot of people wanting a “good billionaire” to resuscitate Bookforum, but maybe the lesson from this is that we need a model of a critical journal that’s owned by a collective of editors/workers, and not by a single whimsical rich person.
Celebrating the US feels off this year for about a million reasons, but I'll never not get a kick out of my 68-year-old mom doing her fire baton routine.
Now that I have a teenager in high school, I would like to issue a formal blanket apology to my parents for the years 1992 through 1996. Sweet baby Jesus.
How can one be a citizen of the US—thus complicit in this absolute horror—without losing one’s mind or faith in humanity. I truly don’t know. I’m struggling.
The major side-effect of the pandemic on me is that I’m astonishingly slow in everything right now. I’m failing to get to every single book to blurb, it’s taking me two days to write 100 words, and even my runs are a minute per mile slower. I’m stuck in invisible mud.
How strange, I looked for the high road today but it turns out there is no high road, only a rollercoaster splashing down into an infinity pool full of champagne.
Someone told me that they were at a literary conference a few months ago and all the editors and agents were saying that new writers absolutely must engage with social media. This is awful advice. Nobody has to be here. This place is a cesspit. Don’t do it if you hate it!
And one more thing. I feel so full of love for Montreal because I was here for both Jazz Fest and the Circus festival and the insistent public commitment to mystery and beauty—to art—feels like a loud vote for humanity. I needed this. We all need this, right now, I think.
My favorite person today is my nephew, who wrote a book called “Stuck in the Butt,” about a boy who is sat upon by a monster and gets stuck in its butt.
I think it's important to commit fully to the work (daily, if possible), but that commitment can mean staring at a wall for an hour or listening to music or flipping through Pantone colors that bring you close to the feel of what you're trying to do.
Bowing in awe to anyone who can work for more than an hour right now or read more than a page before sense wriggles away. Solidarity to anyone who can’t. Fight or flight is real and we are tethered to these blunt animal bodies, dammit.
I spent all day chasing down this poem I half-remembered from 10 years ago. Turns out it was by Hafiz, translated by Matthew Rohrer, in
@Harpers
, and it slayed me anew.
For my birthday, I’d be delighted if you replied with a photo of your dog or baby or favorite flower, a poem you love or a book you recommend, and if all the above fail, and your cat is objectively a good one, I’d be glad to admire your cat (today only).
My husband just told me it was OK that members of our family had been struck flat with a stomach virus because, “It’s like a cleanse!” I have to deal with this relentless optimism on a daily basis, please pray for me in this difficult time.
Life is hard and humans are sweet, easily damaged little sacks of pudding, try to be as good and kind and generous as you can be. See you all shining in the new year.
The doorman at a random building handed me, for free, a set of eight COVID self-tests, courtesy of the NHS. I can’t even find them in pharmacies for 25 bucks apiece in a US pharmacy. Goddamn, actual healthcare! It’s a travesty Americans are servants of capitalist health systems.
Just had a full-body flashback to the first day of college, when, after moving me into my dorm, my dad said, “Hey, I heard about this great new film on NPR!”—and that’s how I spent my first night in college, flanked by my puritanical parents, watching Boogie Nights, slain dead.
It absolutely drives me bananas the way they teach writing in middle schools. Formulas and taking off points for imaginary errors. Way to murder young people’s imaginations and love of language, damn.
Someone needs to write a novel in the form of a neighborhood listserv. This shit has everything: drama, fury, casual racism, white men rushing to save white women who feel attacked for their racism, the realtor who once called my husband, drunk, at 3 in the morning, it’s gold.
Recently, at every single class visit, some new writer asks me why short stories are so depressing and I usually just fumble an answer about how stories need conflict and tend to be written in a minor key (as opposed to the novel’s span of keys). But honestly, I don’t know.
@johnVcorbett
@amayeda
I have five books in thirty languages, two more slated for 2021 and 2021, and have written every day for the last 22 years, including the day I had an emergency C-section. But, sure, go off, condescending little man.
This place has EVERYTHING. Circuses! French! Cardamom ice cream! Mysterious shade gardens! Boat-spas where beavers rush you whilst you’re reclining in a chaise longue!
It’s fine if you’re friends with a writer and don’t like some of their work! Totally normal. Some things reverberate with you more than others. It’s fine. It’s fine! Fine fine fine fine fine. Fine. Don’t worry about it. They’re not crying. It’s totally fine.
Who are these monsters who have their shit so together they have already sent out holiday cards of their perfect happy families? (I have three photos of me this year and in all of them I’m either crying or eating, or crying AND eating.)
If you’re anxious and sad and feeling like a lowly amoeba on God’s playground in this political environment, I heartily recommend reading this book to reaffirm the truth that most people are inherently good and want to help.
It seems people hate the winter, potholes, and imposition of French. Valid points! But, like, in the US a tiny minority of religious zealots just took away fundamental human rights from over half of us, plus I’m afraid every day my kids are going to get shot at school, so 🤷♀️
In other news, someone told me that I look like Meryl Streep’s daughters yesterday and so I’ve been walking around all day as if Meryl Streep birthed me, and let me tell you, it’s a whole swagger.
I am thrilled to finally announce an initiative that I’ve been working on with
@greenpeaceusa
: ringing in the new year by asking geniuses to write and make art about climate change—on the Greenpeace social media over the next month.
#ClimateVisionaries
I am beyond happy that the New Yorker is publishing this novella of mine online today. It took years to write, and one of my struggles was trying to force it to be a short story before I capitulated to its full (very long!) form.
Just heard someone say the word “grody” for the first time since 1989, and now I am just whispering “grody grody grody grody grody” to myself in absolute fucking delight.
I love airports. If you nurse a glass of wine long enough at any bar, a Jimmy Buffett Dad will eventually sit down beside you and talk so much that he will end up dissolving into tears. It it A+ storytelling entertainment.
I saw a friend for breakfast whom I’d first loved when we were seven years old. We’re older now than our mothers were then. In all the photos we took this morning, we look exactly the way we looked when we were seven; we also, somehow, look exactly like our mothers.
The days between Christmas and the new year are for standing in your pajamas at the open refrigerator, spraying leftover whipped cream directly into your mouth while avoiding the censorious eyes of your dog and pondering the howling bleak void at the heart of existence, etc.
Legit, at this restaurant (five course price fixe meal, tonight) I ate the best food I’ve had since before the pandemic. Spectacular, delicate, revelatory.
A gentle note to say that it is possible to take life, art, and the state of world seriously and to also make dumb jokes on this website. Humor may be the only way to survive. So if your response to a joke is fury, the problem is likely you. Take a walk around the block, buddy.
Can’t wait for this pandemic is over so that I accept every invitation as soon as it arrives, show up uncomfortably early, wait until the host is engaged in conversation with someone else, pour my drink into a ficus, and run home early to hide under the covers, hyperventilating.
To not have to hear that oleaginous voice again. To not have to see that sphincter mouth. To not have our days poisoned by the sheer toxic hatred and lies. To see the whole grifter family flee to Siberia, where during a blizzard one night they’re stalked and eaten by wolves.
I had drinks tonight at an outdoor bar with fully vaccinated friends for the first time in 14 months, and I think I’ve forgotten how to speak to anyone who doesn’t HAVE to speak to me out of love or work.
Strangely broken up about Cormac McCarthy’s death. The man wrote exactly one believable (living) woman in his whole oeuvre but turned this incapacity into genius—his work is an acerbic damnation of the hyper-masculine mythology of the west. (That’s how I read him, at least 🤷♀️).
Why is editing in Word with Track Changes so unbearably painful, and why, for the love of god and all things technological, is it still the most advanced tool we have?
I’ve read many great books this year, but if there is any 2019 book that will be a classic in 40 years (if humanity lasts that long), I feel sure it’ll be Miriam Toews’s WOMEN TALKING.
I ran into Rebecca Solnit at breakfast and she revealed that, too, she is a secret medievalist. The best thing about having published a novel set in the 12th century is discovering how many of my favorite thinkers were molded by a serious engagement with the Middle Ages.
A guy thanked my husband for a favor that I did. When my husband pointed out that I was, in fact, the one who did the favor, guy wrote back—but not to thank me, to thank my husband for having supported me in the favor I did him. Misogyny is a hell of a drug, gentlemen.
Anybody else wake up in a panic in the middle of the night, dead sure that the fucker’s announcement that he wasn’t going to the Inauguration wasn’t him just being a petty narcissist, but rather it was a clear semaphore to his followers to bring all their firepower to DC?
Proud to be included in the 2024
#TIME100
list; weepy at the write-up by my beloved Ann Patchett. Thanks,
@TIME
and Ann and the whole family at The Lynx. We will work hard to make Gainesville and Florida proud. See the full list here:
I’ve listened to Florence and The Machine’s new album Dance Fever so many times at this point that one of my kids just sarcastically called it “Mama’s new religion.”
The surreal thing about giving a long talk on zoom is that you have no clue if your jokes are landing or if your audience is snoozing, doing calisthenics, petting their cat/themselves, whistling, etc; you’re just staring at your own dumb pasty face mouthing back at you in horror.
My parents and my husband’s parents crossed paths at the same facility to get the first shot of the vaccine today. I’m so relieved, I’m actually shaking.