The solace and the grief

Not sure how I missed this one when it came out, but saw something about it in advance of the publication of Yiyun Li's new novel in coming weeks and thought I'd better read this small collection of essays to catch up. It is a haunting book, it resonates strongly with me: it has the amazing title Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life. Four bits I especially liked (it is a bleak book about a year of suicidal ideation and multiple hospitalizations):

To articulate it demands honesty that I am almost unwilling to offer. Though evasion rarely leads to joy; there is, one must admit, a sense of joy if one can dissect something, oneself included, with precision. (In college and as a young scientist the tasks I had most enjoyed were the peripheral activities: to peel everything away and leave only the neural system intact in an insect; to harvest the bone marrow from a mouse’s femur until the bone became nearly transparent; to carefully flush out a mouse’s lungs. Perhaps my deficiency as a scientist, a lack of ultimate purpose, is why I love writing. Precision gives me more pleasure than the end result.) (117)

In an ideal world I would prefer to have my mind reserved for thinking, and thinking alone. I dread the moment when a thought trails off and a feeling starts, when one faces the eternal challenge of eluding the void for which one does not have words. To speak when one cannot is to blunder. I have spoken by having written—this book or any book; for myself and against myself. The solace is with the language I chose. The grief, to have spoken at all. (152)

Only by fully preparing oneself for people’s absence can one be at ease with their presence. A recluse, I have begun to understand, is not a person for whom a connection with another person is unattainable or meaningless, but one who feels she must abstain from people because a connection is an affliction, or worse, an addiction. (183)

Many drafts were written when things began to feel unbearable. Composing a sentence is better than composing none; an hour taken away from treacherous rumination is an hour gained; following the thread of a thought to the end is better than having many thoughts entangled. In a sense, writing becomes the effort of detecting a warning sign before it appears. There are moments when it must sound as though I am arguing against hope and happiness, against others and myself, but any attachment, even to the most fallacious idea, is an anchor when solidness cannot be felt. (200)

Closing tabs

Busy week, somehow. And excessively cold! My lungs are ready for spring.

I enjoyed many of the pieces in MFA vs. NYC, but Alexander Chee's essay was by far my favorite. Leslie Jamison's account of the book is good (via Chloe S.) - I have a review of Jamison's forthcoming essay collection in the next Bookforum, the book's a must-read if you are interested in the contemporary essay or the question of pain, female or otherwise.

Other light reading around the edges: two absolutely delightful young-adult fantasy novels by Sarah Rees Brennan, Unspoken and Untold. These books are perfectly to my taste (they would make a very good television series also) - only I have to wait until September for the next installment!

Stage Kiss at Playwrights Horizons is one of the funniest plays I have seen for a long time - especially in the first half, I was actually laughing uncontrollably out loud. (It was a matinee, so no outright feasting afterwards, but we did have a piece of pie at the diner next door - cherry for me, apple for G.) Between that and Antony and Cleopatra, it was a good weekend for theatergoing. Seeing No Exit tonight at the Pearl; 7pm curtain + short play = more realistic than serious mid-evening theatergoing for a school night.

Closing tabs:

Andrew Solomon on having the demons of depression exorcised - literally.

The inimitable Cintra Wilson watches the Oscars.

Excited about blurbs accumulating for my style book - official publication date is June, but I should have some copies by the end of May.

Last but not least, trilobite! (Time to reread Richard Fortey's book, I think.)

A kind of static

Via Bookforum, a very good piece in the Yale alumni magazine by Andrew Solomon on his college friend Terry Kirk's suicide:

Depression is a disease of loneliness, and the privacy of a depressed person is not a dignity; it is a prison. Therapists can be perilously naïve about this. Marcello and all of us who loved Terry were locked out by the same privacy that kept him locked in. Privacy is a fashionable value in the twenty-first century, an overrated and often destructive one; it was Terry’s gravest misfortune. The unknowable in him, which I thought was just a kind of static, was actually his heart.

Ribs of laughter

Jennifer Michael Hecht on teaching.

Survival strategies

At the Guardian, Margaret Drabble on depression:

I learned my strategies. The walking cure, the talking cure, the Samaritans in emergencies, the bouts of inept gardening, the bottle of whisky, the long hours of lonely work, the bold decision to throw a party - and, of late, the comforting jigsaw puzzle, which has been my friend through the last few years.