syllabustering

[syllabustering]

running out of time, margaret peterson haddix

I didn’t like Running Out of Time.

That’s fine, I’m not its target audience. I’m too old for a story about a young girl trusting adults and authority blindly not to feel frustrating, even if she gets there in the end. Also, there is one scene with a press conference in it, and I’m pretty sure that’s not how a single press conference in the history of the world has ever worked.

But again, fine. I’m not its target audience.

I am interested in what it could’ve been, though. I don’t want it to sound like I’m not interested in things made for teen girls, or the interests of teen girls, or teen girls in general, because I am, very much. I am primarily interested in teen girls. I just don’t think that teen girls are very much like Jessie, the protagonist of Running Out of Time, even if she is supposed to be intentionally naive.

I’ve never met a girl who is not a guerrilla warrior. I don’t know if that’s inherent, or if it’s because our options are to become a fighter or be smothered to death. Either way, I’ve only met girls made of iron.

Even if they don’t know it.

I didn’t, when I was a teen girl. I thought I was this malleable thing, shifting to make myself something inoffensive, even as everything in me rejected that. So maybe it is inherent - my bones didn’t want to be made soft, so they screamed. Growing pains, so they say.

I’m still young, but I’m old enough that the word “woman” doesn’t sound foreign anymore. There’s something kind of wonderful about that word. It suggests knowledge, the kind I never thought I would have. I always thought I’d be a stranger to myself. Now I ask her the right questions: What do you want? What do you need? What do you like?

They tell you to learn, but not to be vain, but the best kind of knowledge comes at the intersection of those two things. I’m learning not to be startled when I look in the mirror. The face looking back at me is becoming mine, again.

The part of Running Out of Time I liked the most was when Jessie walked across her entire city with diphtheria, fever scorching her brow. That was the part that made most sense to me. That was the part that sounded most like my girlhood. And then she held that press conference (again, ridiculous) and begged everyone to listen to her. That sounds like who I used to be, even recently. Who I’m trying not to be, anymore. (The ridiculous part, I’ll always be, I’m pretty sure. But I’m trying not to beg anyone to care about it. To care about me.)

I don’t know if any teen girls will ever read this. Again, this whole project is inherently selfish, and I’m not particularly bothered if anyone reads this at all. But if you’re reading this, and you’re a girl, I want you to know that one day you’ll ache less, but that won’t mean you’ll feel less. You’ll feel so many more things, once the pain starts to fade.

I didn’t like this book, and that’s fine. I love teen girls and their power. But I mostly want you to know that I like me. And that I’m learning a lot.

[syllabustering]

you’ll grow out of it, by jessi klein

On my first day of college, my English professor asked us what our lifetime goals were. He encouraged us to dream big. Say anything you want, he said. No wrong answers.

One of my nemeses, who was not yet one of my nemeses, mostly because we had just met and because he hadn’t started hypothesizing about inventive ways to kill me behind my back, said, confidently, “I’m going to change the world.”

I laughed, but only internally, because, again, we were not yet nemeses. (Eventually, when we were nemeses, I would start laughing directly at his face, which may not have helped detangle the nemeses situation.)

I wasn’t laughing internally because I thought his dream was stupid; I was laughing internally because it was absolutely preposterous to me to look a professor straight in the eye and inform him I was going to change the world. You don’t decide you’re going to change the world. You do something, and the world either bends to you, or it doesn’t.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that interaction lately, even if the nemesis in question has been relegated to “former nemesis” and rarely passes my mind. I’ve been thinking a lot about it because he was right. I mean, I don’t know if he changed the world - I think I probably would have heard about it, even in some small way - but he was right to be so boldly and stupidly self-assured.

There isn’t a prize, it turns out, for selling yourself short.

Jessi Klein, the author of You’ll Grow Out of It, feels like a friend, but she also feels like a mirror. Good memoirs do that, I guess. If Jessi has spent most of her life accepting she is never going to be one of those women with grace and aplomb and perfect Gwyneth Paltrow skin, I have spent most of my life trying to beat myself into being one.

Jessi wrote a book, and I’m trying to do that, too. But like her, I have always hesitated to call myself anything definitively - definitions are for other people to decide for you. The world either bends to you, or it doesn’t.

When I was very depressed a year ago, I printed out the quote, “Aut inveniam viam aut faciam” and put it on my bedroom wall. It means, I shall either find a way or make one. I wrote goals underneath it - personal, professional.

I haven’t done any of the things on that sheet.

I did find a way, though. Or maybe I made one.

In my imaginary world in which forty-one year-old comedy writer Jessi Klein is my friend, I would tell her I’m proud of her. We allow ourselves to be defined by the things we aren’t, but Jessi hasn’t. She has created: a career, a memoir, a child, the girl and woman she was, and the woman she is now, and they’re all important. I am proud of all that, and I’m proud of me, too. I’m proud of the girl who laughed in her nemesis’s face (internally or externally), and I’m proud of the person I am creating, day after day, year after year, Gwyneth Paltrow skin, or not.

I haven’t grown out of it. But I’ve grown.

[syllabustering]

a little life, by hanya yanigahara

It took me three months to read A Little Life.

It took me three days to read the first hundred pages, and then I lost track of it for two and a half months, and then I finished the remaining 700 in five cumulative days. I’d like to tell you what I did in the interim:

I worked, a lot, because that’s what we do. And I spent a lot of nights feeling miserable, and many feeling happy beyond measure. Some nights I think I felt nothing at all, but I don’t remember those. I wish I remembered those. I wish I remembered every second, even those that I spent wishing were over. I wish I could take precise stock of everything I’ve ever done, so I could tell you about it. Whoever you are, I’d like you to know. I am increasingly worried I stop existing when I stop being seen.

It is 8:16 pm, and I am on a train, deeply but vaguely anxious, and I am typing this on my phone.

A lot of bad things have happened lately, haven’t they? I’m not presumptuous enough to think my experience is a barometer for everyone in the world, but I am mystical and sentimental enough to think that there’s an ache we can all feel.

I’m talking around A Little Life because I don’t know if I know what it was about. A group of friends, certainly, and one man’s anguished, beautiful life. But mostly it was about time: the passage of it, running out of it, its tender indifference. Life, the book and the concept, are difficult, sad, beautiful things. And they are both finite. I only have the words on the pages, and that doesn’t seem enough.

Tragedy happens, and it happens and it happens and it happens and it keeps happening. And astonishingly, so do we.

It used to be important to me to qualify the kind of life we have: a good life, a bad life, a hard life, A Little Life. But now I don’t know if that’s important. We have life. And it’s up to us to make that enough. It is nearly nonsense to think that we deserve any particular life - that we are owed happiness, or that we should be punished for our mistakes. But if we have the choice, and we do, it is beautiful to think that our lives are inherently worthy of happiness and beauty. And I would always rather that.  

It is 6:38 pm, and I am in a home away from home, listening to the hum of people I love, and it smells like fir tree everywhere, and I am sad and content. It seems wrong to be both, and it feels right. Mostly, it just feels.

Because a lot of bad things have happened lately. But I am happening too.

[syllabustering]

the folded clock, by heidi julavits

I’ve been thinking about the way I want to write these posts. I’m not going to write reviews because I’ve never been good at the strange, very precise language of reviews. I have a lot of respect for people who write reviews - several of my friends do - but I don’t understand them, on a core level, I guess. All of my reviews sound like “This thing is so amazing and honestly I love it so much????”

So, no to reviews.

I don’t actually want to write that much about the books themselves. I don’t want to rehearse plot or explain the characters or give the context of the book’s publication. Instead, I want to be frank. I started this project as a way to know myself better, and I’ve already read the book in question. So I apologize if that makes it hard to understand what I’m talking about, but this is an inherently selfish project.

That being said, here is what you need to know: The Folded Clock is a diary by a woman named Heidi, who is a writer.

I do not like books by writers about writing because they make me anxious. It’s very self-centered to read all books of this genre as if they are personal taunts - here is what you are not good at - but that’s how I always read them, anyway. This also being said, I very much liked this book. I like a lot of diaries. I like what people want to say to themselves. I like what we say when we don’t really intend on telling anyone else. (For this reason, my own diary became a lot better when I stopped thinking about what would happen if I died and my diaries were published, for whatever self-important reason. I think my best diaries were from when I was a preteen, when I wrote with absolutely no self-consciousness.)

I am interested in what diaries say, but I am more interested in what they don’t say. I am interested in the in-betweens, the spaces where nothing has been written. I have a need for authenticity - I always read diaries and watch documentaries and wonder, but what are they really like? (Comedians who never break from their personas bother me in this way too. Andy Kaufman causes me a significant deal of anxiety.)

It’s absurd to think we deserve to know what a person is really like, to climb into them and make a home there. There’s no great honor in knowing someone so intimately. We think there is, but there isn’t. It’s like cutting something into infinite halves - you’ll never finish, and you’ll end up with crumbs. We’re always startled that ribs don’t make a proper roof.

Heidi is the kind of woman I think I am, the kind of woman I want to be, and the kind of woman I’m afraid of turning into. That is to say - she’s a human being. Heidi writes like she is her own lover. She is frank. She is gentle. I have never known myself that intimately. I think sometimes we’re afraid to search that deeply because it means embracing yourself as something less than exceptional. It means accepting that sometimes you are bad, and sometimes you are good, and sometimes you are nothing. Sometimes when you reach inside, you find there isn’t anything extraordinary after all. Sometimes all you find is flesh. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes that yields something magnificent, anyway.

[syllabustering]

what am i reading?

Read the full syllabus of what my friends recommended here.

For the most part, I included every suggestion offered to me unless a) I’d already read it or b) it was a book by Jodi Picoult. (I don’t need to get into my dislike of Jodi Picoult here, but basically it boils down to deus ex machina is not a sufficient conclusion to a book about the fine points of morality!!!!) 

(n.b. I have placed The Mothman Prophecies under non-fiction because I am whimsical at heart and you’ll pry the existence of cryptids from my cold, dead hands.)

[syllabustering]

yet another literary blog: the origins

There are a lot of Reasons I started this blog, some of which are more interesting than others, so I’ll give you a quick rundown:

I wanted to expand my worldview and get to know my friends better

I like to talk about myself and my feelings

I thought this would be fun and I’m an impulsive person

I want to become a better writer, and reading is the second-best way to do that (right after actually, you know, writing)

The regular NHL season doesn’t start for another two months

Few things have stunned me as much as books have. And I think it’s good to be stunned sometimes.

I’ll be posting exactly which books I’ll be reading in the next couple days, so stay tuned.