Hello,
I’m alone at home, sprawled on the sofa, my back to my work desk. I’m facing the balcony. Within my reach: a stack of books, my journal, a tray with a tea cup and carafe of water and on the coffee table a vase of roses dying their slow death. The balcony door is open, letting in the sounds of light rain, breeze and traffic. I’ve got a playlist of 60s and 70s music playing from my phone. It’s a playlist I created for my solitude, the music is exclusive South Asian and they are the soundtrack of my childhood, it’s the songs my father used to sing and hum to.
All my life I was told solitude was something to fear, something to avoid at all cost, even when the cost was mental wellbeing, dignity, self-belief and freedom of thought all wrapped in one. And now, at 33, to finally have arrived at the solitude I had been warned against, has been truly amazing. This is what you wanted me to fear? This is what you wanted me to abandon my self for? Some lessons can only be learned the hard way. And one of them is definitely understanding that solitude isn’t the enemy at all. In fact, for the the kind of life I plan to live, it’s an essential friend.
These last few months since N moved out have been all about recalibrating my understanding of self. Of revisiting my understanding of all my past selves and pinning my truth wherever it makes itself known. Of forgiving myself for all the times I abandoned my self and let patriarchal fears get the better of me. It’s been a humbling experience, even more so as a life writer. But the reward has been worthwhile too. For the first time I’m able to ask myself what I want without fearing the answer. I can ask myself anything and without the need to create a scaffolding of narratives to keep me upright. I can now freefall into truth knowing that wherever I land, I’ll be okay, insh’Allah.
On the subject of narratives we create to protect ourselves, I read Jill Ciment’s two memoirs back-to-back, published almost three decades apart. The first one is titled Half A Life and covers her harrowing childhood and eventual marriage to her art teacher, a man thirty years her senior. Her experiences with her father stunned me, and it made sense to me how and why she ended up married to a man who was the same age as her father. I didn’t know of Ciment until recently, so I was reading the memoir knowing that a follow up was on its way. And I looked forward to it, especially after this glowing recommendation from Mitch Abidor in the Jewish Currents newsletter who wrote:
These books are a brilliant proof that there is no mystery greater than the internal world of a couple, and a moving testament to the instability of memory and self-knowledge. As Ciment writes in Consent of her earlier book: “I had intended to write the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but I could not find it, or else I found it everywhere.”
Truth is what I’m after too, and while there was a lot of truth in the book, somehow it didn’t do for me what I wanted it to do. And what did I want it to do? Maybe I wanted clear instructions on how to find truth, how to stay true, how to be all truth and nothing else? Just as I began to wonder if maybe my expectations of truth were too high Parul Sehgal weighed in (thankfully). As a likely serial memoirist (I’m currently working on a book about truth and narratives), Sehgal’s joint review of two serial memoirists wasn’t an easy read. But it was oh so necessary.
I believe all memoirists start with good intentions, but the task at hand is too big for most of us, and we aren’t really trained for the unflinching gaze required for the task. It’s a gaze that can only be honed with experience, by making public mistakes, by swallowing shame, by being reminded again and again to unattach ourselves from the false narratives that protected us when we were vulnerable. Don’t get me wrong, I loved both of Ciment’s memoirs and I’m glad to have read them. I would recommend you do too. Sehgal ends her review with the following:
His [Édouard Louis] new life seems to give him little creatively; it dulls him. So he stalks his past—waiting, it seems, for the transformation, that intensity of sensation, to happen again. He wants the blank page back.
Who wouldn’t? A memoir is not merely the record of a transformation but the device for one, and the blank page symbolizes its great hope and wager. Is it the lure of renewal that drives the serial memoirist? The writer’s “I” can be a persona, but it can also be a chrysalis, a placeholder for the self in making, the self to come. Lift your hands from the keys, to reconsider, revise, be reborn. Watch the cursor blink back, patient and cautioning: I, I, I.
I made a note of this in my journal and in the margins I asked myself a question. Is it possible to pursue truth without the use of I? Rachel Cusk seems to be answering this question in her latest novel Parade. Parade is a novel without an I or a narrative, but it’s filled to the brim with truth. It probably won’t fit even the most generous definition of a novel, but I found it to be a rewarding read. I love Cusk, I’m a super fan. And with every new instalment of her work, I’m baffled by the reviews, by the way her words are perceived. But it’s only fair that I also link the most recent review that I didn’t agree with, just in case I’m missing something.
Another rewarding read, almost an extension of Parade in terms of truthspeaking, is Miranda July’s All Fours. What a riot this novel is. I was gutted when July’s Europe tour was cancelled, I was so looking forward to hearing her speak about what it took to write a book like All Fours. The shame of I (and much more) oozes out of every page of this brilliant novel.
I’m writing this letter to you at a time when many people I admire are grappling with the truth about Alice Munro and how she abandoned her daughter in support of her sexual predator of a husband. I’m linking Huma Qureshi’s latest on this, as it comes from a fan and creator of Reading Alice Substack. I hope it acts as a balm to those who need it. The original essay is a painful read, but it was also heartening to see, as Alexander Chee put it, ‘Alice Munro’s children deciding they mattered to each other more than what separated them’. This is the only way to go when we are being forced to choose between truth and facade. This whole episode brings to mind the following from Parade:
We felt both exposed by and imprisoned in what we had built and the story we had created. We wondered, very occasionally, who we were. We looked at our mother and felt, dimly, that we were nothing but a response to her character.
…
But when we offered our children to our mother, we were surprised by the judgements she made of them. She preferred one of them to another; she saw flaws in them, and compared their relative merits. She was not, as we were, transformed by them: in fact she made the suggestion that our management of them was inadequate, that we were ruining them, and with this, her first major tactical error, her power over us was suddenly broken.
…
Our mother, too, disliked the new bonds of love that were growing among us. She tried to disrupt them, but we found that this simple love could resolve the misunderstandings that arose from her interference. We began to talk about the past, and discovered that our accounts of it were all different yet in some sense the same. Slowly, falteringly, a picture emerged. Sensing rebellion, our mother resorted to harsher tactics. Some of us were more susceptible to her control, others less so. On the latter she simply turned her back. For the first time we recognized ourselves as fit to judge her, for now we understood what it would be, to turn your back on your child.
We all deserve to be not abandoned by our elders, especially our parents. And if you aren’t so lucky, do remember that nothing is worse than abandoning yourself. Let that be the bar, and let us always aim to be well above it. This Anna Fusco’s artwork acts as a much needed and constant reminder in moments of despair:
Munro is not the first woman to not live up to her image. Nothing excuses her behavior, and honestly the discourse around this has been deranged, but this thread provides some cultural context to the uninitiated. Again, NOT an excuse. Her actions were inexcusable. Skinner’s essay also brought to mind the excellent and unflinchingly truthful memoir by Angelica Garnett titled Deceived With Kindness (sorry to link to Amazon, it’s the only reliable link for this out-of-print book). It was published in 1995, a year before Half a Life by Jill Ciment, and while both books cover similar themes and experiences, Garnett goes where Ciment didn’t yet have the courage to go.
Around Ciment’s two memoirs I devoured Maggie Nelson’s Like Love, a collection of mostly pre-published essays and reviews that highlight Nelson’s unique ability to write brilliantly about a range of eclectic topics. I had read most of these pieces over the years but it was great to be reminded of them as well as introduced to artists and writers completely new to me. It’s a gem of a book and I feel richer from having read it. Another recent favorite is Go Went Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck. It’s filled with empathy and critique of the western gaze on what has been dubbed as ‘Europe’s refugee crisis’ and is littered with thought provoking questions such as:
How many times, he wonders, must a person relearn everything he knows, rediscovering it over and over, and how many coverings must be torn away before he’s finally able to truly grasp things, to understand them to the bone? Is a human lifetime long enough? His lifetime, or anyone else’s?
and
To understand what a person means or says, it’s basically necessary to already know what that person means or is saying. So is every successful dialogue just an act of recognition? And is understanding not a path, but a condition?
On the topic of questions worth asking ourselves, here are two via Like Love, derived from the curriculum of the Mississippi Freedom School:
“What do we not have that we need?” and “What do we have that we want to keep?” … The first question may contain more urgency, even of the life and death variety, but the second question is more primary, Moten and Harney explain, because it presumes that we are at least at times, already living and loving and thinking and fucking and caring and studying and making in ways worth continuing, enjoying, deepening, and defending.
While I overhaul my life, the second question has kept me in gratitude, which is always a good place to operate from more generally, but especially so when ending a marriage. Which brings me nicely to my current read — The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas. It’s a book about how we spend our days and how this feeds into how we spend our lives.
I really enjoyed Savas’ White on White which had a very Cusk feel to it so I might be biased. Also, until this very second I thought White on White was her debut, but it is her second novel! And one final recommendation (because who can stop me?!) is How I Won the Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto. It’s a sharp, funny book and complements Naomi Kleins’ Doppelganger so well. I’m listening to the latter on my walks and it’s a sobering look at the mirror worlds we could fall into at any given moment.
From around London I enjoyed the photography exhibition at the V&A titled Fragile Beauty. And I found myself revisiting Van Gogh’s self-portrait with bandaged ear a couple of times. The first time I saw it I had to hold back tears, the pain in his eyes, the vulnerability and honesty with which he saw himself. Sigh. Also in The Courtauld is a portrait of Nina Hamnett by Roger Fry which I loved (it’s the single raised eyebrow for me). I revisited Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. It’s always been my safe space, the house I go to when I need a break from the world and it was lovely to be able to share the space with my sister in April and visit again in June with a dear friend.
I hope summer is being kind to you, and most importantly, I hope you are being kind to yourself.
Best,
Zeba
*Books, the other friends are books.
Thank you so much for writing this. It is very brave and gives me so much hope. I am grappling with this need for solitude and intellectual space within my marriage as I try to find my feet in a new country and find the courage to pursue my literary dreams. I love the recommendations and have already noted the ones I want to read as well. And I wish you the very best for your future. Inshallah you will be very happy. ❤️
Good to discover you here, Zeba! An excellent piece of writing, as ever.