Category Archives: Blog

The British author Dolly Alderton writes charmingly about the woman’s perspective on love. Good Material is a fun one.  I stayed with the plot the whole way and did much highlighting on its extensive wisdom about men vs. women and its sharp observations on 30-something life. Bolding is my own.

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We shifted from overfamiliarity to inquisitiveness from sentence to sentence; alternating from feeling like old friends to strangers. We gave too much information about ourselves, then we pulled back. We got a kick out of the novelty of each other, heightening ourselves for the other one’s enjoyment…

“Reverse break-up schedules,” he explains. “When men and women break up, men hate everything about their ex-girlfriend for three months, and then they miss her, and then they think they love her, and that’s when they text her. Meanwhile, she has spent three months loving him and then she hates his guts forever,” he says, leaning in for emphasis, his breath hot and tangy with gin. “We were never meant to be with each other. Men and women are not compatible.”

“Hey mate, saw what’s happening online. Hope you’re ok.” I have no idea what he’s talking about, but there is no scenario in which this text is not one of the worst texts you can wake up to other than being informed of a death.

Complaints about people on first dates:

• Talked too much and too smugly about coming from a big family, as if it was her decision to have three siblings.
• Somehow managed to relate the plot of every film we watched back to her own life.
• Was too connected to dogs and spoke to them as if they were people.
• Too nostalgic. Couldn’t live in the present. Will always think that yesterday was better than right now. He genuinely believes the peak of his life was when he was in his early twenties and doesn’t understand that he has the power to make the best moment of his life the moment he’s living in.

Either/Or by Elif Batuman was an excellent read, worthy of its own post of Kindle highlights. All bolding my own.

It was the first time I had heard of an organizing principle or goal you could have for your life, other than making money and having kids. Nobody ever said that that was their organizing principle, but I had often noticed it, when I was growing up: the way adults acted as though trying to go anywhere or achieve anything was a frivolous dream, a luxury, compared to the real work of having kids and making money to pay for the kids.

“Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically.” … One day, early in our friendship, Svetlana had spontaneously told me that she thought I was trying to live an aesthetic life, and that it was a major difference between us, because she was trying to live an ethical life. I wasn’t sure why the two should be opposed, and worried for a moment that she thought that I thought that it was OK to cheat or steal. But she turned out to mean something else: that I took more risks than her and cared more than she did about “style,” while she cared more about history and traditions. Soon, the “ethical and the aesthetic” was the framework we used to talk about the ways we were different. When it came to choosing friends, Svetlana liked to surround herself with dependable boring people who corroborated her in her way of being, while I was more interested in undependable people who generated different experiences or impressions.

he was able, using his “mental gifts,” to make a girl fall in love with him, “without caring to possess her in any stricter sense”: I can imagine him able to bring a girl to the point where he was sure she would sacrifice all, but when matters had come that far he left off without the slightest advance having been made on his part, and without a word having been let fall of love, let alone a declaration, a promise. Yet it would have happened, and the unhappy girl would retain the consciousness of it with double bitterness . . . she would constantly have to contend with the doubt that the whole thing might only have been imagination.

Was an equal relationship possible, or did one person always like the other person more?

Could friendships reach a stable point and stay there, or were they always either growing or shrinking?

Was every smart person funny? I thought humorlessness was the essence of stupidity. Svetlana thought she knew some genuinely smart people who happened not to be interested in whether things were funny. We agreed that Susan Sontag was not funny.

Everyone in the Turkish club seemed to have gone to the same famous high school in Istanbul. All they talked about, other than their high school, was where in Boston you could get some particular kind of cheese. (You could get it at the Armenian store in Watertown.)

I realized, with shock, that I wasn’t good at creative writing. I was good at grammar and arguing, at remembering things people said, and at making stressful situations seem funny. But it turned out these weren’t the skills you needed in order to invent quirky people and give them arcs of desire.

Ishiguro wrote first-person, but the narrator was always “unreliable,” i.e., crazy or ignorant, and different from the author. What discipline—what lack of pride! All I was ever trying to do when I wrote, I realized, was to show how much I saw and understood.

In Russian conversation class, Irina Nikolaevna spoke so quickly, using so many unknown words, that I rarely had any idea what she was saying. But sometimes something shone like a gold ring at the bottom of the stream, and a sentence came to me with perfect clarity. Like this one: “Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you’ll never get—you will get it someday.” I accidentally met her eyes, and it felt like she was talking to me. “Yes, you will get it,” she said, looking right at me, “but by that time, you won’t want it anymore. That’s how it happens.”

What Svetlana felt for Scott, she said, wasn’t a crush, but love. “A crush is about building up the self, and love is about giving from the self. For love, you have to have a self you’re secure with, to give to the other person.” I silently absorbed the implication that what I felt for Ivan was only a crush, because I didn’t have a self I was secure with.

Depositing a paycheck, I noticed, immediately produced some dissociation from whatever work you did: a job was a job.

There was something about crying so much, the way it made my body so limp and hot and shuddering, that made me feel closer to sex. Maybe there was a line where sex and total sadness touched—one of those surprising borders that turned out to exist, like the one between Italy and Slovenia.

But Svetlana had taken a banana, and was holding it up now. “It’s literally the same thing,” she said. I eyed the banana, estimating its girth at about six times that of a tampon. And yet, Svetlana wasn’t the kind of person who used “literally” to mean “figuratively.” As usual, she seemed to know what I was thinking. “It turns out Matt has a really big one,” she said, in a tone of combined exasperation, humor, and pride.

It was a strange thing how people acted as if having a kid was the best thing that could happen to anyone, even though actual parents seemed to experience most of their children’s actual childhoods as an annoyance, which they compensated for by bossing them around.

In the end, I thought the most likely explanation was that most of the people in the world just didn’t know they were allowed not to have kids. Either that, or they were too unimaginative to think of anything else to do, or too beaten-down to do whatever it was they thought of.

Whenever Leonard went to people’s houses, the men would be in the living room, talking about football, or the stock market. Leonard couldn’t survive five minutes in there; he always ended up in the kitchen with the women. They were the ones talking about stuff he actually cared about: gossip, basically, about real or fictional people.

Writers, Leonard said, were not normal people. As a writer, you were never totally present. You were always thinking of how you would put a thing into words.

if I actually listened to other people, instead of worrying so much about what I was going to say, I would notice that everyone was saying all kinds of antisocial, ignorant, or irrelevant things, which were often just a posture they were trying out, as opposed to a reflection of their essential personality, which was probably a thing that didn’t even exist.

In its simplest form, the aesthetic life involved seducing and abandoning young girls and making them go crazy.

Juho told me about how some people in Iceland treated hangovers by eating specially putrefied shark meat that had been buried for a long time in sand. “OK, I never want to talk or think about this ever again, but how long do they bury it?” “Well, a few months, I think.”

The preferred state was for me not to be fascinated. It was for me not to be thinking about the condom factory, wondering why they called it Trojan when the Trojan horse was a story about permeability, about how the Greeks swarmed out and foiled the Trojans, who had believed themselves to be protected

He tried not to show that he was upset when blood got on his skull pillow. There was something exciting about the specificity of his reaction—how precisely it delineated what he was like: considerate enough to try to hide that he was upset, but not considerate enough to try harder, or to not be upset.

On the other hand, wasn’t that what you were supposed to do: give up on the bad boy you liked, and maturely, self-respectingly accept the attentions of a less charismatic guy who had proven his essential goodness by wanting to be with you? Wasn’t that the plot of 40 percent of romantic comedies? Wasn’t it what Alanis Morissette had finally done?

Heavyset, with glasses and pockmarked skin, Sean had a pleasantly conspiratorial, over-caffeinated demeanor, like a newspaper editor in a movie.

Nothing else had ever been like the sleeplessness of Ankara. Sleep evaded and evaded you, and by the time it came it wasn’t a blessing but a curse. Now, the more you slept, the more you were eating into the next day, destroying what was left of it with depressingness, sealing the doom of the next night. When I was little, I couldn’t understand what was happening—why we had to suffer like that. It was explained to me that this was a normal part of travel, called jet lag.

I’ll read anything Leslie Jamison writes. Her memoir Splinters, about the implosion of her marriage and the love of her daughter, is as just engaging as her other writing. Many wonderful insights and sentences. My highlights from Kindle below. All bolding is my own.

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Those early days with my daughter felt like excess and hallucination. It was all too much, but when I tried to find language for it, it was nothing at all: milk and diapers, milk and diapers, milk and diapers. The astonishing revelations of caring for a baby felt shameful to claim as astonishing, or—honestly—as revelations at all. Attachment bathes every common thing in the glow of false remarkability. My love-drunk gaze made it impossible to see if anything was worth seeing.

Years later, he told me that even though I’d managed to convince the world I was a good person, he knew what lay behind this façade: the selfishness underpinning my ambition, the virtue-signaling others mistook for virtue. Some part of me believed him. Some part of me would always believe him. Where others looked at me and saw kindness, he saw the elaborate puppetry of a woman desperate for everyone to find her kind.

During our four years together, we broke up, got back together, broke up again. We moved, moved again, moved out, moved in, more or less, again. We fought. We made up. We fought. We made up. I drank. I stopped drinking. I started drinking again. I stopped drinking again. We moved back and forth between conflict and reconciliation. Always in transit. Somehow we felt most present to each other in that passage across the threshold.

I was a teenager—and already angry at him in ways I couldn’t quite name, for distances I’d grown so acclimated to I didn’t even realize how badly I didn’t want them. I bristled with indignation and a blind, molten fury that I told myself was on my mother’s behalf. And it was. But it was also on behalf of that little girl who’d been part of the home he left behind, and—though I didn’t know this yet—on behalf of the woman I would become, who recognized some version of his restlessness in herself, and wished he’d given her a different model for how to navigate it.

I didn’t ask why his day had been so bad. I’d asked this question so many times before, I thought I already knew the answers: his frustration with work, or else the unspoken hurt of our distance. Which is maybe how love dies—thinking you already know the answers. I said none of this to him—just, “Our day was great,” and let him read my tone however he wanted.

I came to hold both truths at once: I’d caused him deep and lasting harm, by leaving him. And also, I did not regret choosing a life that would not share a home with his anger. When I say I held both truths, I mean that I lay with them, sleepless, in the dark.

The baby now consented to sleep in her stroller, as long as she was moving. So we never stopped. It made me think of the movie where the bus would explode if it ever slowed down. Or how sharks need to keep swimming to breathe. I was an art shark. I never stopped walking, except to nurse.

Also, I wanted to be taken care of. I told people I wanted to enjoy my singleness, when really what I wanted was a partner. But I was embarrassed not to be enough for myself.

My hometown made me feel at ease in a way no other landscape ever would: the strip malls and cloverleaf freeway exits, the rush of salt wind on the Pacific Coast Highway, the dark silhouettes of palm trees against those startling, smog-brightened sunsets. This was where I’d gotten high with my high school boyfriend, sixteen and not a virgin anymore, driving the dark back roads thinking, not a virgin not a virgin not a virgin. These streets were the first streets I ever drove with my friends, late at night, with the radio cranked up, imagining our futures…. When I drove these streets now, it made me nostalgic for that plural state of being—imagining multiple possible lives. Now I just had this one life—with this baby, this marriage.

His loyalty through crisis, and his unflinching compassion; his awareness that everyone is more than his best or worst moments.

But nothing happened next. Or rather, this happened next: we were friends for twenty years; we were never together; I married someone else. Being an adult meant watching many possible versions of yourself whittle into just one.

The women sitting in that room were a loose net, holding pain but not absorbing it. They’d heard worse. They felt a grace that had nothing to do with getting everything they wanted. It was the grace of surviving things they hadn’t believed they could survive. The grace of one day at a time. The grace of washing stained coffeepots, cracking a bad joke in a dark time, putting one foot in front of another.

Reading a biography of Susan Sontag that winter, I put three exclamation points in the margin next to a quote from her diaries: “I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.”

Some writers hate revision, but I’ve always appreciated its clarifying adrenaline. It’s like plunging into a cold lake, or a basement plunge pool. A challenge. A scouring. Not comfortable, but exhilarating. There’s a visceral buzz that comes from removing an unnecessary sentence from a draft. In its absence, everything else is crisper, starker, more alive. In writing, these removals were a form of rigor. But in life, they felt like cruelty.

During my first weeks getting sober, when I was spending many evenings each week in church basements, I fell in love with these words from G. K. Chesterton: “How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it. You would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.” In that dark gallery, I found myself.

She made solitude look liberating, while others made it look like a grind. I knew the truth everyone knows, which is that it’s both.

The road is pure loneliness, he wrote. Or rather, dying of loneliness & dying to be alone. It’s perfect for a sober alcoholic because you only feel bliss or terror. He was a self-dramatizer who was aware of his own drama. I recognized myself in his preemptive self-awareness.

That summer I was ravenous for the world—for stoop chats on hot nights, and endless seltzer at my kitchen table, next to the open window, listening to the anonymous soap operas of strangers on the sidewalks below. I’d never felt more seduced by the city, more grateful to it. I was determined to treat the divorce not as life paused, but as life happening. Every feeling was a fucking miracle. I wanted to believe that maternal love could be bolstered by everything else you longed for—friends, work, sex, the world—rather than measured by your willingness to leave these longings unanswered.

Holding his disabled calico cat in a tight embrace against his tattooed chest. Lol, he said. But he loved it. He was so committed to his own mythology—living in the well-worn jeans of a certain sense of self—that I had trouble believing it.

Talking to him felt cozy and illuminated, like settling into the passenger seat for a long road trip, the car packed with gas-station snacks, rolling prairies beyond the windows, the buzz of everything ahead.

When I talked about the tumbleweed with friends, I’d say, Oh, I know we’re doomed, but only because I imagined us in a movie where the main character says, I know we’re doomed, and that means they aren’t doomed, after all.

This version of me spent whole days not checking his Instagram—not checking it, not checking it, not checking it—like starving myself in college, that self-denial as proof that there was some force inside me larger than my hunger. Perhaps I could call it dignity.

This wasn’t wanting. This was just wondering, What would it be like, after all these years, to feel that flush of relief again?

Kyle had given me this holiday without my daughter as an experience of presence rather than just absence. All this time, our friendship had been teaching me about ongoingness—how intimacy holds friction alongside sustenance, how pain and proximity emerge from the same honesty.

We aren’t loved in the ways we choose. We are loved in the ways we are loved.

On the page where the conductor says, “To the North Pole, of course!” I always raised my finger to point at the ceiling, and did my silliest voice for the conductor. My daughter always raised her arm at the same time, her tiny finger also pointed, giggling madly, looking up at me to see if I’d seen. I knew there would never be a word for how this felt.

Getting my heart broken by the tumbleweed was a useful pain. It told me I could still want something so much I was willing to be broken by it.

Just because a relationship didn’t last forever didn’t mean it had failed. I wanted to feel this way about the tumbleweed. I wanted to feel this way about my marriage too. Roland Barthes once asked, “Why is it better to last than to burn?” A sober heroin addict once told me, “I like being hungry. It’s my body telling me it wants to be alive.”

The chill was stark, but the sky was blue and wide open like a doorway. Both things were true, the bitter wind and the brightness of the sky. Neither one dissolved the other.

But it made me nervous to think about sharing the actuality of parenting with him: the constancy and repetition, the ways it was neither new nor revelatory in most moments, just more of itself.

When he’d first told me the story of his marriage and divorce, now seven years behind him, I could hear genuine pain in his voice, but also the well-worn grooves of an oft-told tale. I asked if he felt like he was still learning.

He would often preface things he told me about his job, his home, his exes, by saying, “The thing I always say about this is…” Letting me know I was getting a secondhand sentiment. A polished stone of selfhood.

His shower was a graveyard of expensive conditioners left by other women he’d dated. When I asked if it stirred up old feelings to see things that belonged to his exes, he said no. I nodded, receiving the news about this different way of being alive.

Table, the ex-philosopher told me that there was something about our conversations that felt unsatisfying to him. His comment was like a heat-seeking missile the universe had sent to destroy me. He actually said it this way: “It feels like our conversations are about 85 percent as good as they could be.”