The role of muse is a fairly dangerous one, in my experience, fraught with insanity and blood loss. Yet it is so necessary to any creative transaction. As a muse, you’re really just the plot device in someone else’s drama.
The Magic Merge / Tracy Rose Keaton / Frequencies, Volume 1
“The Hare with Amber Eyes” describes the rise and fall of one family in Europe. Having written about them, the author was faced with the unintended consequences of his discoveries: that just as every national history belongs in a different way to every nation, so every family story belongs to each relation, and every narrative contains elements claimed in equal measure by the teller and the told.
Edmund de Waal’s Unfinished Business / More Intelligent Life
Perhaps writing opens up a parallel universe into which, one by one, we’ll move all our dearest memories and rearrange them as we please.
Perhaps this is why all memoirists lie. We alter the truth on paper so as to alter it in fact: we lie about our past and invent surrogate memories the better to make sense of our lives and live the life we know was truly ours. We write about our life, not to see it as it was but to see it as we wish others might see it, so we may borrow their gaze and begin to see our life through their eyes, not ours.
” André Aciman / Alibis
This is my favorite book about Afghanistan ever. If you’re tired of war, this is a nice break from the current affairs books out today.
Forever Top 10: An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan by Jason Elliot
Long before I began working at Picador I fell in love with Jason Elliot’s travelogue An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan. I was working at Borders at the time and my manager recommended it. Her parents had met in Afghanistan in the ‘70s while volunteering for a humanitarian organization. Both considered it required reading.
There are many passages underlined in my well-worn copy and the margins are full of stars, exclamation points, and smiley faces. While many books on Afghanistan written today focus on the war presently taking place, Elliot’s book, published in 1999, stands outside of the current conflict and instead focuses on the people, landscape, and travel experience.
There are moments of meditative insight into being far from home:
And there it was again, that feeling that the journey was becoming more than the sum of its parts, more like a clandestine sculpting at work within me, which in the visible world I was merely acting out, to reveal—what? The shape of a character I knew only dimly from a life whose roots were growing more tenuous by the minute. How precious and remote the world of home now seemed! In ordinary life you know yourself from your surroundings, which become the measure and the mirror of your thoughts and actions. Remove the familiar and you are left with a stranger, the disembodied voice of one’s own self which, robbed of its usual habits, seems barely recognizable. It is all the stronger in an alien culture, and more so when the destination is uncertain.
At first this process brings with it a kind of exhilaration, a feeling of liberty at having broken from the enclosures of everyday constraints and conventions; this is the obvious, if unconscious lure of travel. But once it has run its early course a deeper feeling more like anguish begins to surface, until the foreignness of your surroundings becomes too much to bear. I had never felt so strongly before, and wondered: when does it start, this divorce from oneself, and what is its remedy?
As well as humorous interactions with locals, often equally profound:
I studied my map to try to find a lake I had seen in the distance, but it was not marked. I asked Ali Khan what its name was. ‘Lake nothing,’ he said, ‘just lake.’After all these years, An Unexpected Light stays with me—both on my bookshelf as well as in my memories. It’s one of those books where you lose your surroundings and forget to breathe. Regardless of how many books I’ll read in my lifetime, Elliot’s book will remain forever in my top 10.
New in Paperback for June
These forthcoming paperbacks, a mixture of originals and reprints, are sure to keep your June a busy one.
[Follow the link for more info about the books and interviews with the authors]
Awesomeness in the bookroom at Picador
my eye is twitching
as i sit
in my kitchen
Bought at MoCCA Fest yesterday
Underwire collects the wise and witty autobiographical comics of an eloquent new voice on the comics scene: Jennifer Hayden, politically incorrect mother of two. These everyday observations about marriage, motherhood, and modern life are so perfectly captured, you”ll start to feel like a member of the family yourself! Here”s the wisdom that comes with wearing an underwire - and you don”t have to own a bra to enjoy it! These stories are about the little things that give us the big picture. Jennifer Hayden started writing and drawing Underwire as a webcomic. Since then, it has gained critical attention as a fresh indie comic about womanhood, parenthood, and being-in-the-middle-of-life-hood. Here are twenty-two of the original stories, plus seventeen new pages of comix and art created exclusively for this collection.
Alison Bechdel’s new graphic memoir, ‘Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama,’ is out on May 1st. There’s bound to be a ton of coverage. Here’s the early stuff.
From the best-selling author of Fun Home, Time magazine’s No. 1 Book of the Year, a brilliantly told graphic memoir of Alison Bechdel becoming the artist her mother wanted to be.
Maud Newton interviews Alison Bechdel for the Barnes & Noble book blog
One of my earliest, most powerful memories of my mother is playing this game where I would be a crippled child like the kids I would see at the orthopedic wing of the hospital when I would go to get my fallen arches checked up on. I was just fascinated with these children, with their external signs of disability, their crutches and braces and big shoes. There was something about that that I needed to reenact, and my mother entered into that imaginary space so willingly with me and in such an encouraging way. Even though I knew there was something weird about having this fantasy about disabled children, she didn’t sensor it. She encouraged me to go with it, and I feel like she probably did that with me in lots of imaginary games as a kid but for some reason this is the one that I remember the most vividly. And I speculate in the book that it’s because it was a fantasy that she shared to a certain extent as well.
Katie Roiphe reviews ‘Are You My Mother?’ for The New York Times
“Are You My Mother?” is among many other things a nuanced, sophisticated investigation of the impulse to write or create, the desire, shame, guilt, excitement and shadiness of the process. Bechdel, unremitting in her exploration of her motives, pins down and examines the moral ambiguity of the venture, the detachment and ruthlessness and terror inherent in exposing those close to you, along with the mysterious compulsion to do so.
Buy ‘Are You My Mother?’ at IndieBound or find it at an indie bookstore near you
The Kitchen Counter Cooking School / Kathleen Flinn
Normally, I do not stalk people in grocery stores.
I confess to the occasional practice of supermarket voyeurism. But who doesn’t sometimes notice the curious collections of fellow shoppers, then contemplate what they may reveal about them?
What goes on in the home of a hunched, graying woman with nineteen cans of cat food, iceberg lettuce, a family pack of steaks, and a copy of In Style magazine? Or a young woman in full stage makeup oblivious to the world outside her headphones, a pack of tofu hot dogs among the contents of a hand basket nestled in the crook of her tattoo-littered arm? Or an elegant man with a perfect manicure who lingers over the imported cheese counter, his cart filled with organic greens, expensive olives, and four bottles of champagne? Every grocery cart tells a story.
The Kitchen Counter Cooking School / Kathleen Flinn
