A new short story of mine, “In the Maid’s Room,” is published online today at the Yale Review.
Category: short stories
A new short story, and some remarks
[This post is also available as an issue of my newsletter.]
I’ve been flushed out of my habitual cover by a couple of recent items of personal news. First, last week, at n+1’s annual fundraiser, I was given the Anthony Veasna So Fiction Prize, and was asked to give a very short speech. (A light-hearted report of the evening appeared in The Fine Print [subscription required].) I’ll reproduce my speech just below, for the curious.
Second, though I’ve written nonfiction for The New Yorker since 2005, this week, in its Sept. 26 issue, the magazine is publishing a short story by me for the first time. The story is called “Easter.” Please check it out! It’s my voice on the audio, by the way, if you were wondering what I sound like (I haven’t listened yet).
Remarks for n+1
N+1 has long been generous to me. Its first editors—Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Chad Harbach, Benjamin Kunkel, Allison Lorentzen, and Marco Roth—published my first serious fiction. At Penguin and then Viking, Allison took the further step of publishing two novels by me. Charles Petersen not only posted my film criticism on the website, but I had the honor of going into battle at his side against a plan that would have compromised and probably bankrupted the New York Public Library. (We won.) In the past few years, a new generation, including Sarah Resnick, Mark Krotov, and Dayna Tortorici, have shepherded into print my forays into speculative fiction. And tonight I am grateful for this award in honor of the bold spirit of Anthony Veasna So. Since my relationship with n+1 spans my whole career, I would also like to thank my agents, Sarah Chalfant and Jackie Ko, for their canny, insightful support. And the members of my writing group, Ben Nugent, Andrew Martin, Christine Smallwood, Greg Jackson, and Gemma Sieff, for their honesty and kindness. And I thank my husband, Peter Terzian, my first and my essential reader, to whom I am hopelessly devoted and who makes it possible for me, every day, to take the risks that have led me here.
But enough about gratitude. I’m a writer, after all. Now I want to talk about my mixed feelings.
Is it really necessary to show other people one’s writing? In his last years, Thoreau wrote mostly for his journal. After John Clare was forgotten, the verse he kept writing survived only because the doctor at his asylum collected the scraps of paper. Writing feels most necessary to me when I’m working through something personal—exhuming feelings too hastily buried, turning over a puzzle in my life. Neither motive requires an audience. In fact, an audience, since it implies a marketplace, may be at odds with revelation or understanding. “I am in danger of cheapening myself,” Thoreau worried, after his most austere lecture, “Life without Principle,” became a hit. If, like me and, very likely, Thoreau, a writer is gay and grew up before acceptance became widespread, he will probably always think of what is closest to himself as both a shame he had better keep quiet and a secret he is desperate to reveal. Boys on the hunt for bird eggs imagine that the skylark makes its nest up high, Clare wrote, because that’s what boys would do if they could fly. But the skylark, Clare insists, “nests upon the ground, where anything / May come at to destroy.” Hiding can be as life-giving as flying.
I had a dream recently: I was naked, and as I was heading in through a revolving door, you came toward me, heading out, which made me aware of being two people, one who formed intentions, and had come up with the idea of going naked, and one who registered impressions, and was experiencing, for the sake of remembering it later, what it felt like to be exposed—humiliation, panic. Why do I keep doing this? I asked myself. (I could ask myself the same question right now.) Is the writer the one who decides to go naked or the one who remembers what it’s like? Can I be one but not the other? Is it possible to be honest without being exposed?
For years, I had it both ways: I was ambitious, and it seemed unlikely anyone was going to read my fiction, which left me perfectly free. It wasn’t until 2008, when I was forty, that n+1 published a novella of mine. Without that vote of confidence, I probably wouldn’t have written the two novels that followed. But it took my cloak of invisibility away.
A writer writes alone, and a reader usually reads that way, but the communication between them seems to have to be public. Maybe a writer has to believe he can make a living at it, or at least have the fantasy. Thoreau’s and Clare’s late writings for no audience took place after their understanding of themselves as writers had crystallized. Maybe an audience is only necessary in early stages, as a precipitant. The matter of literary ambition is as strange as its kind. Feelings and perceptions as much as words make up the raw material, but feelings alone would only amount to entertainment, and perceptions, to a sort of flimsy journalism. And no one cares about just words. The ambition has to be to change what fiction is—to make the interaction of its elements richer or simpler, subtler or louder, than other people have realized it could be. So here the writer is, naked in his ambition at last: it’s impossible to change other people’s minds about literary form without other people.
I hate this, frankly. I just want to do my thing—and have all of you read it. (“I am the least difficult of men,” as Frank O’Hara put it. “All I want is boundless love.”) I want to make novels out of a sensibility that’s gay, and maybe a little too vigilantly conscious of its own workings, and in which the felt awareness lags behind perception with a rhythm almost of syncopation. Lately I’ve been trying to accept that I can’t do even this little as peacefully as I’d like to. I have to leave edges ragged, some of the seams unsewn. I have to let my writing more openly have the condition of art, in the sense of being a series of experiments, many of which will fail. If, in the first part of my life, the challenge was to come out, now the challenge is to stay out, in the open, which may be even more unsettling. I may never come to terms with it. But I have to come to terms with not being able to come to terms. “People wish to be settled,” Emerson warned; but “only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”
Ambition
[A story. Also available as an issue of my newsletter, Leaflet]
I was walking through the library, naked as usual, and as always, of two minds, intention and sensibility. Plot and character. Dianoia and noos. But for some reason this time, as I was turning myself through the revolving door, and saw you coming toward me—coming in as I was going out—I wasn’t able to look away and pretend not to see that you saw me, and I knew that you saw me. And I thought, as I struggled to find my underwear, since that’s the piece of clothing to put on first—where had I put it?—I thought, Why do I do this? Why have I done this all my life, knowing, as I do, as a matter of intention and as a matter of sensibility, what I am doing, what will result from my intentions, what the impression on my sensibility will be. Knowing, that is, that I will shame myself, and apprehending, in anticipation, the flush and panic of shame. One is always both the person who decided to walk through the library unclothed (but when did I decide it?—it must have been so long ago) and also the person who is now naked, exposed.
If I find a book of mine in the library, on the open shelves, where the books are for general circulation, and I sign it, without telling anyone, how long will it take before my signature means something, means enough for someone to call it to the attention of a librarian, and enough for the librarian to remove the book from the open shelves to the archive—from general circulation to special collection? And do I want that? Isn’t it better for a book to have no value as a material object, and for my having written something in one copy of it, if I do decide to do that, to be an accident, a secret? A petty vandalism? An almost private defacement? More people might see the book, and the mark that I have made in the book, if I don’t tell, if I’m not caught, if the book isn’t removed. Even a book on the open shelves is so rarely opened by a reader nowadays. A book needs all the chances it can get.
The young people have a new magazine, and not long ago, I went and visited their office, which looks like a schoolroom. One of the young editors there was saying, in a pretending-to-be-annoyed way, that she had started receiving messages from a famous older editor who had been canceled, and I thought about telling her that I had kissed him once and that it hadn’t been so bad. But had I really kissed him, or did I just want to boast that I had? That’s the third kind of mind: pretending. An older writer arrived just then, to address the young editors of the new magazine, among whom I was camouflaging myself, and as we listened to her, I remembered how years ago, when I had been as young as the editors around me and she had been at the height of her powers, she had singled out one or two of my friends to sleep with but not me, and now she was a sage, with an editor at her right hand and a publicist at her left, and I was still in the audience, still hoping to be seen without being seen for what I am.
“Walks” in the Paris Review
The 238th issue of the Paris Review arrived in the mail yesterday, and “Walks,” a new short story of mine, appears in it. Please check it out!
“Massachusetts,” online
“Massachusetts,” my new short story in the Yale Review, is now available online.