I don’t have a photographic memory in general, but I do have one for the placement of quotations in books. I can recall words I’ve read, and find them again on the right page almost immediately. They make an indentation on my brain, like the mark a head leaves on a pillow; the words have a distinct shape, a curvature.
So it’s not surprising that when I look back over a period of my reading life (a year, for instance, to use an artificial time constraint), it’s those page memories that are first to mind. Sometimes, I can trace a particular concern when I lay them all out in a row: maybe I was unusually anxious (I am always unusually anxious) about my daughters’ safety in our horrifying world, so I gravitated towards expressions of maternal concern, or I’m stuck on the theory that I’m wasting my life living inside books, so I judiciously highlight any similar reflections.
I’ll let you judge me for this collection and decide what is swirling around most in my addled little brain. (I am a mother, and therefore I am always a mother, even and especially when I am trying my hardest not to think about my motherhood-ness, i.e. when I am reading.) But this is a collection of the lines I underlined or transcribed and then saw again in my mind’s eye, the ones that had some big meaning for me outside of my work (though some were also a part of my work). They are from novels and nonfiction, a few articles and essays.
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“The change [meaning menopause] is not trivial, and I wonder how many women are brave enough to carry it out wholeheartedly. They give up their reproductive capacity with more or less of a struggle, and when it’s gone they think that’s all there is to it. Well, at least I don’t get the Curse anymore, they say, and the only reason I felt so depressed sometimes was my hormones. Now I’m myself again. But this is to evade the real challenge, and to lose, not only the capacity to ovulate, but the opportunity to become a Crone.”
Space Crone by Ursula K. LeGuin
I saw Space Crone in the hands of another writer (I don’t remember who) on Instagram, and immediately ordered a copy for the title alone. LeGuin is best known for her gender-bending science fiction, but her essays are frequently cited by people I admire and pop up in endnotes. The title essay is alternately hilarious and insightful, a short take on the delights of post-menopausal life. It made me long, more than ever, for my Crone Era to begin.
“She sits there, thinking about the fact that a part of her is now lying in the ground and beginning to rot, then she looks at her skin, which is still surrounded by air, alive.”
The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck
I’d never read any Erpenbeck until I picked this up at the urging of my editor Gal Beckerman, who calls himself “a proselytizer” for the German novelist. In The End of Days, a girl’s life in twentieth-century Eastern Europe and Russia is relived half a dozen times; in the first iteration of that life, she dies in infancy, and her mother, who is described in the quote above, sits on a footstool for a week, mourning the daughter who never had a life. Right now, when so many babies are publicly dying gruesome and preventable deaths-by-bomb-and-slaughter, this quote, about the firm physical distinction between the living and the dead, really smacked me.
“Relations with the parents of your kids friends can be like those of rival dukes and duchesses, forced into civility solely because you belong to the same ruling house.”
Day by Michael Cunningham
I reviewed Day for The Los Angeles Times, and although I’d never thought of Michael Cunningham as a great chronicler of the parental experience, this line, about the strange bedfellows of child-rearing, made me giggle.
“The world, the girl knew, was worse than savage, the world was unmoved. It did not care, it could not care, what happened to her, not one bit. She was a mote, a speck, a floating windborne fleck of dust.”
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
Lauren Groff never misses. I’m a completist, and this new angle in her career — her last two books, Matrix and The Vaster Wilds, are both historical novels that revolve around allegedly powerless (haha! they are secretly powerful) women, one an abbess in the 12th century and the other a runaway from the Jamestown encampment in 1609 — has amped up her aptitude for considering the place of any individual in the wider world. The Vaster Wilds tosses its young protagonist out into the dense forests of pre-colonial America and then watches as she comes to see herself as a fragment of that natural world.
“Even the cold was a matter of pride. Warmth did not rate as a necessity, since it was held to be the opposite of fresh air and therefore unhealthy, so everyone was crippled by chilblains from November to February. ‘My sponge is often frozen solid in the morning,’ I remember saying to some less hardy, less fortunate child.”
Instead of a Letter by Diane Athill
Diane Athill, the legendary British editor (Roth, Updike, Rhys), wrote seven memoirs, a number that seems a bit presumptuous of her until you read them and realize that perhaps nobody has ever done the genre better. Start with Instead of a Letter and then go anywhere from there — she wrote about childhood and old age with equal hilarious wit — but pay special attention to the way she conceives of the English upper classes, from which her family humbly fell as she grew up. She writes memorably about the addiction to niche varieties of suffering that comes along with the stuff upper lip.
“Why am I trapped in the belief that writing about motherhood is shameful when I know that creating life where there once was none, creating flesh where there once was no flesh, is one of the most radical and outrageous things a person can do?”
My Work by Olga Ravn, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
You may have read Olga Ravn’s The Employees, her perfect 2018 novella (translated into English in 2020) about a half human/half humanoid crew on a twenty-second-century space exploration who begin to question the purpose of their work. If so, you might be confused about how she shifted so ably to My Work, an autobiographical novel about the creative losses and inertia of motherhood. But consider that Ravn is coming at the same idea from two equally intriguing angles: how do we define who we are when we are primarily seen as workers, as people who must chop ourselves in half in order to live in this world? I profiled Ravn for the magazine Mother Tongue, so I spent weeks reading and rereading her work, and returned to these lines again and again.
“Art, in the twentieth century, tried to escape from story, which doesn’t stop us telling stories about this very escape, perhaps to fill the blanks left behind by abstraction, by minimalism. But the unspokenness of visual art puts it beyond the power of rhetoric; its texture, even when made of sound, even — possibly? – when made of words, works on some other part of our beings; it has a power that ‘story’ doesn’t. Art is potentially unbounded.”
Art Monsters by Lauren Elkin
“I’m habitually intrigued by internecine strife among feminists: the way certain conflicts can make the broad church of feminism feel like a single pew in which we’re all jostling for a seat. Feminism is less a cohesive movement than a series of concerns that sometimes overlap, yet just as frequently fail to catch us all, and fragment just as we need them to hold us together.”
Art Monsters by Lauren Elkin
Art Monsters is a chronicle of the ways in which female artists have used their bodies as the site of their politics, like Hannah Wilke photographing herself with little vulvas made out of chewing game glued all over her body, or Carolee Schneemann pulling a scroll from her vagina and then reading it aloud to a gallery crowd. But Elkin also goes very broad — she covers dozens of different artists of varying mediums, and offers free-ranging commentary on the general state of female work. Her observations, like those above, sometimes make grand pronouncements that hit just the right note of reflective and unexpected.
“The luxurious sensation as I arranged myself next to her in the cool sheets at night, taking care not to wake her, the quiet joy almost inexpressible. I was a professional gambler on a lucky streak. I loved the simple rubbing-along with another person, friendliness, a calm and busy rhythm, lustre and life cheer.”
Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt
I’d never read Susie Boyt until this year, although she’s published more than a half dozens novels in her native England. In Loved and Missed, secondary school teacher Ruth takes in her granddaughter Lily and raises her as her own after the girl’s mother, a drug addict, hands her over. It’s a novel that is (surprisingly, for its subject matter) brimming with pleasure and contentment (I wrote more about that here). This snippet brought me, as a mother, untold happiness. Finally, a writer who can capture the surge of joy that coats my insides when I’m with my children.
“What bothers me about writing is that I’m here and the page is there.”
Biography of X by Catherine Lacey; borrowed from I Never Liked Art by Vito Acconci
First, to be clear (although clarity isn’t always as helpful as it seems), this line originates from Acconci, and
refashioned it for her brilliant novel Biography of X, in which a widow tries to understand the origin story of X, her infamous artist wife. (I profiled Lacey for The Atlantic.) X, as a person and an artist, is an amalgamation of a variety of celebrities and characters — Marina Abramovic, Andrea Fraser, Sophie Calle — and so Lacey’s use of so-called stolen quotes works beautifully in tandem with her plot. I feel a kinship with this line, with the knowledge that I am never anywhere close to saying the thing I want to say: the gap between the hazy mass of ideas in my mind and my published words is basically the size of our growing universe. What I find so funny and clever about it is is that its own finished form — as a line in a published novel — undermines the quote itself. The page, you see, is no longer there, it’s now here, and yet the idea still stands.“All language was disgusting, said Marta. But people seemed to adore it. It was like how everyone loved reading these novels in letters. As if everything existed in order to end up in words! Whereas most feelings, or at least the most interesting, avoided language entirely.”
The Future Future by Adam Thirlwell
Surely you can see the connections between the Lacey/Acconci quote and this one. The Future Future is ostensibly about Celine, a 19-year-old Parisian who transcends the strictures of time firstly by living for hundreds of years and secondly by never actually living in her own time — the anachronisms are frequent and hilarious. But really it’s a novel about how unsettling the Information Age, by which Thirlwell means the eighteenth century and onwards, really has been, and how readily language attacks its own users. (The novel received an overly harsh review in the New York Times, one that didn’t seem to want to understand his experiment at all, but I highly recommend it.) Writers want to solve problems with words, and what I appreciate about The Future Future, and this line in particular, is that it admits its own failings and complicity. “A writer,” Thirlwell says a few pages later, “is an animal who is often pure but somehow wants fame, all the time, however lethal it may be, because they are also infected with this illness of timelessness.” Aren’t we all?