For the Birds: "I'm sick of the blues"
Reading journal #1: Sarah Manguso / mushrooms / hopeful misery / & a life-affirming reading list.
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Reading Journal
Summer 2024
“I think my sensibilities are changing,” I said out loud to my partner, M, two Saturdays ago.
I said this sentence 988 days after quitting my traditional 9-to-5 job; 172 days after being diagnosed, at 36, with Autism; and eight days after experiencing, under the guidance of a licensed facilitator, a therapeutic psilocybin journey.
It makes sense that I am changing.
When I said the sentence out loud to my partner, I’d been reading Sarah Manguso’s new novel, Liars.
Manguso has been one of my favorite writers since I devoured Ongoingness nearly a decade ago. My little red hardback copy is full of margin notes in multiple colors, a sign of many distinct devourings. I loved her memoir, The Two Kinds of Decay. 300 Arguments is a gem.
Manguso feels like a writer’s writer to me; what I’m responding to when I read her work is unconditional and bone-deep.
Said differently: She’s just one of those writers whom I trust. I never won’t trust her, I am sure of it.
So I felt weird and sad when, upon asking me what I thought of the book so far, I noticed a rift, a veering away of my preferences from this skillful thing a beloved author had produced.
Don’t get me wrong: The writing is brilliant. Manguso’s signature collage style is at its best in Liars, her short, discrete paragraphs flowing one into the other with a crystalline fluidity that only *seems* random—I picture a Boggle board full of literary paragraphs, shaken and settled per nobody’s authority—and belies a precise ordering. The book also makes the idea of numbered chapters feel like a laughable, antiquated practice.
But I thought Liars was going to be something that it wasn’t—a complex look at the gray areas between marriage & personal calling, or the imperfect boundary between familial self-sacrifice and artistic devotion. “A searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars of us all,” the jacket copy reads.
My librarian boyfriend is always reminding me not to trust the jacket copy. (His Autistic girlfriend doesn’t understand why people say things that aren’t true.)
What I’m timidly trying to get at is that I did not enjoy reading this book, which is, at its core, a blunt story about an exaggeratedly abusive man who is unfaithful to his wife and eventually leaves her.
He leaves her. There are no liars. There is one liar.
I found myself frustrated by the implication that the wife’s learned helplessness equates with dishonesty. Equally frustrating—more timidity gurgling up inside me now—were the pages and pages and pages of the same transaction happening over and over again: He does something terrible, unforgivable, and then, in a fleeting moment of something-other-than-terrible-ness, she remembers she loves him.1
It did not register with me as complex, gray love. It did not register with me as love at all.
Willful ignorance makes me awfully tired these days, it occurs to me in this moment of writing.
I’m not trying to say bad things or mean things about another person’s hard creative work, let alone a beloved author.
I’m trying to say that, until very recently, I’d never understood what people meant when they talked about taking ownership of one’s own happiness.
I know Liars is telling a kind of story that still needs to be told. Bless the resilient women, fictive or otherwise, who survive their bad circumstances and go on to tell a ferocious tale with a clear, singular thesis. Marriage is bad. Men are bad. Etc.
But I’m tired of these stories—or rather, I’ve reached my own personal quota of them.2
Talking to my partner, I knew there was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, something I wanted to summarize about this feeling I had as I reached the end of Manguso’s novel, this feeling of being let down by the book’s summaries, and what I thought was missing. Reaching around inside my brain and body for the right phrase, I couldn’t find it.
Later that day, I did:
Life-affirming.
Too often, I think we think our choices look like this: pie-in-the-sky peacefulness, or fist-in-the-air cancellation.
What about the squishy gray complicated middle space between them? To be sure, it’s not as photogenic as the other two. It’s the space where you look at hard things and bad choices alongside the people who create or make them, and you grapple with what to do about such common human contradictions.
(And no, I don’t mean separating the art from the artist. What I’m talking about here involves a bothness, not faux compartmentalization.)
I’m not sure cancel culture is life-affirming, I finally say to M, and it feels like a lightbulb moment, a brand new kind of thought, one that both startles and excites me. It comes on the heels of decades of wanting to send everything that’s ever harmed me straight to the gallows.3
I suppose I have the mushrooms to thank for this increased spaciousness, in which it occurs to me that love and goodness are actually quite complex.
If you think love is good because it’s simple and clear and contains no trace of anything else, I’m not sure we’re talking about the same genre.
I want to read the book that digs deep into the hard, dark aspects of good things and comes out holding truth in one hand and something bright in the other.
I want to read the book about good men and good women who do bad things on difficult occasions, and the wrestling-tumbling that comes afterward, not a sign of banishment, but of continued life.
I want to read the book that’s critical of marriage without deciding it needs to be cancelled whole cloth.
I want to read the book that excavates the soil in which good things and non-good things simultaneously grow, because holy cow, something happens right in the center of my stomach, higher than where I feel hungry, when I consider this truth.4
I want my misery to always include a Fiona Apple spunk, a sense that there’s pleasure and frivolity to be had even when we must sing about life’s harshest abandonments.
I guess I’m tired of thinking you have to be happy in order to sing.
Writers & books who go deep / dark / heavy while maintaining (in my estimation) a life-affirming stance:
Sigrid Nunez (especially her unofficial trilogy: The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and The Vulnerables)
Nnedi Okorafor
Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar
M’s entry: Hanya Yanagihara
What goes on your list?
Love should not be a thing you must primarily experience through memory, I think to myself, not that anyone is asking me for advice.
It’s the same thing I feel when confronted with animal rights advertisements, à la PETA, that show any amount of direct suffering. I STOPPED EATING MEAT WHEN I WAS 13, YA’LL. I have seen all the factory farm videos I need to see in this lifetime.
Another new thought: That curiosity might be more healing than forgiveness. Do what you wish with the idea.
Another post-mushroom reality for me: Using the word, “bad,” feels increasingly inadequate. What makes more sense to me, on a cosmic scale that includes but is not limited to this present iteration of human reality, is that there are good things, and then there is whatever exists in addition to good things that, for one reason or another, aren’t captured by the word. It’s a fundamentally neutral stance, in that way that neutrality can also feel quite kind.
I agree with M :) A little life checked all of those boxes for me!
Write on, Sarah!
Here's to partial sun, to in-betweens, to nuance and maybes.