Notes from a heatwave

On the challenges of writing from life, books about mother-daughter relationships and defining what it means to be 'cultured'.

Hello,

I watched Bergman Island last night. I loved how seamlessly it moved between two narratives (until they became one!) and the way it captured the evolving spaces between long-term heterosexual couples and the life-long pull of first loves. About halfway through the excellent film, when Persona was mentioned, I realised that this was not the first time yesterday that I came across Bergman. Lauren Oyler’s protagonist in Fake Accounts (clever, flawless book!) mentioned Persona has her favourite film on her dating profile. This worked as an ice breaker on her first date with someone she met online. While I was reading that part of the book I thought about how Bergman clearly carried cultural weight but didn’t mean anything to me. When he turned up again an hour later in my day as a favourite filmmaker to the protagonists in Bergman Island it got me thinking of the gaps in my cultural knowledge.

Until a few years ago this was a huge insecurity for me, not being intimately aware of the works of authors, artists and filmmakers that others declared to be their favourite. I was constantly waiting to be tripped over or made to feel uncultured/ignorant. If I had recently heard of someone, I would pretend that I had known of them for years. Even if it didn’t interest me, I would spend time with their work to figure out what I thought of it, just so I would have something meaningful to add to the conversation that was happening around me. I taught myself the difference between high-brow and low-brow and was appalled to realise that this distinction didn’t come naturally to me. (It was validating to read In the Margins by Elena Ferrante where she talks about how she doesn’t distinguish between high- and low-brow in her writing and thinking. It’s an excellent book for writers, especially those who are writing from the margins or are considered marginalised)

It took me even longer to realise that just because I’m living in this part of the world right now doesn’t mean I’ve to engineer a past that is similar to the ones who’ve always lived here. The lack of cultural value placed on the discourse around excellent Indian cinema from the 1960s didn’t make me uncultured, it just highlighted how limited others ideas of cultured and uncultured were. A couple of months ago, while walking along Thames, my husband and I discussed what the word cultured meant to both of us. We agreed that it’s used to denote class and exclusivity more than anything else and changes as per the values of the speaker. We defined the word for ourselves and concluded that for us cultured meant those who had an intelligent opinion on different subjects and who were kind about and open to ideas that were new to them. Someone who did not use culture as a way to feel superior to others.

When Janet Malcolm passed away in June last year many of my online mutuals wrote heartfelt tributes about how much she influenced their work. I was hearing the name for the first time. I looked up her work in The New Yorker and was blown away by the clarity of her thinking. I read most of her work available in the online archives of The New Yorker but The Silent Woman stayed with me the longest. A couple of months ago I bought the book by the same name and devoured it within days. I loved her insights on biographers and journalists and I felt that she came closest to helping me make sense of why I studied journalism and gave up on it almost immediately.

The Silent Woman explores the lives of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and offers up a counter narrative to the prevailing sensationalised one. It’s a great book on the often uncharted distance between who we are and how we see ourselves. I was also taken by Malcolm’s dissection of Plath’s relationship with her mother and how her mother’s need to be seen in a certain way is what eventually led to Plath’s life and her work becoming so popular. This led to further interrogations into their lives, the one thing Aurelia Plath was hoping to control. A reputation cannot be controlled, however hard one tries.

On the subject of mothers and daughters, it is heartening to see the reception Jennette McCurdy’s memoir is getting online. There was the expected backlash against the title and the stifling and abuse enabling belief that we are not to talk bad about family regardless of how they treat us. This reminds me of two excellent books on mother-daughter relationship I read recently: Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso and Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth. You must read these! The latter is available to pre-order on discount from Verso Books right now. Personally, I’m over books on difficult mother-daughter relationships. In my own life I’ve come a long away and am able to completely see my mother as a woman of her circumstances as opposed to just my mother. There’s no more blame and I’m so grateful for it. But I’m also glad to have made an exception for these books.

I read an excellent interview on Hazlitt with Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch. I confess I clicked on the link because it’s titled ‘Underachieving Can Be an Act of Profound Self-Care’ but stayed for the meditations on motherhood:

My son was three when I wrote this. When he was zero to one, I was so happy every moment of every day. I was basically getting high off my baby, holding him for hours and staring at his face. By the time he was three, I’d been home long enough, doing the stay-at-home mom thing, and we’d formed this intense bond. When kids are that young, and really with just one caregiver for most of the week, it’s a very intense relationship. By the age of three, he was very verbal, very demanding as three-year-olds are, and very bonded to me. That was really hard, because it’s an intensity I’d never experienced before—of not only being responsible for someone else, but him literally telling me what to look at, like, no, Mama! Look here! It was very intense, [my son] trying to take ownership of my entire existence. That felt like the tipping point, and a transition needed to happen. The transition was: mother needs to start writing, and you need to start going to daycare a couple hours a day—which was, y’know, a huge tragedy in his little life.

A couple of weekends ago I had a friend over for lunch and we were discussing our childhoods, with the intention of trying to figure out why we have such strong, common feelings about certain things in our lives. She said that her mother was too emotionally connected to her needs as a child, that because she cried every time her mother left for work her mother decided to stop working and stay home with her. She said this stopped her from figuring out how to self-soothe. We both concluded that nothing a mother does is right, she is destined to fail. It reminded me of the thesis of Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers, another great read! (Unrelated but it brought me joy to see Jacqueline Rose described by Janet Malcolm in The Silent Woman. The latter wanted to interview Rose on her experience on writing her own biography on Plath. The descriptions revealed her to be exactly as I would have imagined her at that age.)

Bergman Island’s exploration of teenage romance made me think of this review of CJ Hauser’s The Crane Wife by Rachel Connolly. Like many of us I read (and loved!) Hauser’s essay in The Paris Review in 2019. In the review Connolly uses the expanded book by the same name to discuss generalisations in writing, romance (especially first loves) and the power of specifics in life writing. This sits well with my book research as I’m also fascinated by the different ways in which we interpret a story/incident depending on our experiences, privileges, self-narratives and tendencies towards self-pity and victimhood.

I love Akhil Sharma’s work and it was a highlight of my summer to learn that he had a new (sort of) book out. I don’t remember much of the plot of his first book An Obedient Father but I remember the uneasy feeling I had when I got to the end of it. I’m thrilled to see that he has rewritten in and it was helpful to read his meditations on novel writing, creating characters and doing right by them:

“Because I published the book when there were problems in it,” Sharma told me, “I had always felt that I had betrayed my characters. And because I had betrayed them, I had committed a moral injury to myself. I did the best I could back then, but my best wasn’t good enough. I was like an inexperienced surgeon who botched an operation. What made the sadness of the botch greater was that the characters couldn’t complain, they had no one to say on their behalf that they had not been given the opportunity they deserved to be themselves.”

“Just so I don’t sound crazy,” he explained, “let me declare that my characters are, of course, imaginary beings. They do not exist in the real world, and they have never existed. They are stand-ins, however, for real human experiences. They are also stand-ins for temperaments, histories, hopes. Even though the characters are imaginary, after enough years spent with them, I begin to feel that I have to represent them the way a journalist would have to represent subjects. My responsibility feels even greater than a journalist’s because I have to do more than represent. I have to give my characters the opportunity to be their full selves — this feels like what a parent wants for their children.”

I’m sorry to turn yet another one of my letters to you into an Akhil Sharma fan letter but this New Yorker piece on his experience of writing A Family Life is a must-read. He captures so beautifully and truthfully the challenges of writing from life:

All of this, more or less, happened to my family, and to go back and relive the events was awful. I would often meditate on the horrible possibility that my brother might have been aware and not unconscious during the minutes underwater—poor boy, lying on the bottom of the pool and looking up at the people swimming back and forth above him like they were stroking their way across the sky. Along with the simple misery of examining things that I would rather not have considered, my artistic instincts were thrown off. I didn’t feel as confident as I usually do about how to describe a room or a street, because the room and the street were based on real life and I kept comparing fictional reality with factual reality and finding the former wan.

I struggled especially with three technical challenges. The novel is told from the point of view of the younger child. The danger of taking on a child’s P.O.V. is that children mostly don’t understand things. They understand bits and pieces of what’s happening, but they can’t process what it all means. This gives the narration a flattened quality. Reading novels told from the P.O.V. of a child, you often feel like you are on the surface of events.

This reminds me of a conversation a friend and I had while walking around Francis Bacon’s RA exhibition in April. We were in front of an artwork of his that my friend felt wasn’t as brilliant (in terms of craft) when compared to his other work in that room. The subject of this one piece felt more personal than others. I said that this is probably the reason why it doesn’t look artistically as brilliant as some of his other work. Her comment touched on something I have been thinking about a lot this year. When we feel something greatly, especially when that feeling is of hurt, then it’s difficult to maintain our artistic eye while exploring/painting/writing about or around the painful incident because our feelings are on the surface clouding our artistic judgement. It’s something I’m contending with in my own writing.

I’m thrilled to be invited to Gladstone’s Library for this year’s Gladfest. I’ll be speaking about My Past is a Foreign Country, memoir writing, the power of our voice, navigating the patriarchy and my next nonfiction project! You can buy in-person tickets via this link and online tickets by clicking here.

I hope you are keeping cool, I hope you are doing well.

Best,

Zeba