Ann Patchett, Square Corners and Me
Just finished Truth and Beauty, by Ann Patchett. Wonderful. Patchett’s prose are quite simple and so is the parallel she draws in this book about her relationship with a close friend: She is the ant, her friend Lucy, the grasshopper, a’la the familiar fable.
As I sit here tonight, at home on a Friday, trying to add 25 more pages to my MFA manuscript for Pitt, I think of this, of Ann Patchett, the successful writer who is also the ant. I imagine her seated before her Remington: line after line, page (ding!) after page, day after day, neat piles. (How did people do this when they had only typewriters??) I am not her; nor am I Lucy, the brilliant, tragic genius who only knew for absolute certainty that she was ugly but whose writing (according to Ann) was all poetry. I fall somewhere between. I am not crazybrilliant; I don’t know if I can be constant, either. I am not suicidal, though occasionally depressed.
What I do know is that I am always doing this. Comparing. Putting it that baldly makes it look base or hopelessly insecure, but that’s not how I mean it; that’s not how I experience it. I mean simply, that that’s what all of my perception, and thus, my writing, is: Oh, your experience is different from mine because of this and that fact; really? How is that? Tell me the whys and hows. And let me tell you mine.
I think: I am not like those ladies I worked for at those dreary two months at the Events Production firm. Not at all. And I’ll make that feel good by writing Fish so far, far Out of Water tales. Because, I think, even if no one sees what I write or scrawl, I’m still somehow talking to a someone who exists, (why? Because he or she must. Because I write to him, to her, they must. An implied audience is still an audience) who is also not like them, but like me. The uncomfortable feelings of dissimilarity are transformed into charming little tales.
Or, another type of story: In this way, I am not like one sister or the other, though I am like this one in that way. And look, she’s like me, look at what she does/says. I am like my father in These ways; this, I have always known. I am like my mother in these other ways, I am just learning. I rejoice to find I am like this friend in this way, or that I am not like that friend that way, because we can learn from one another. I am not like this ex-boyfriend in this crucial way; I am not like this current whatever-he-is in this crucial way. And I find a thousand metaphors to describe these likenesses and differences. And sometimes I experience times when I feel a panic that no one is like me at all, in all the key respects. That I have only myself to live with here, in my head. But we must live in some sort of hope, right? And for me, this hope is acted out by writing, by trying to express how this and this and this is for me; maybe it’s like this for you, too? Maybe you, whoever you are, whether you’re no one at all or my sister or just my own comfort at seeing these words on the page, maybe together, in this way, we can find something sort of like closeness. I long for closeness. I tire of the feel of square corners bumping against smooth surfaces.
Just finished Truth and Beauty, by Ann Patchett. Wonderful. Patchett’s prose are quite simple and so is the parallel she draws in this book about her relationship with a close friend: She is the ant, her friend Lucy, the grasshopper, a’la the familiar fable.
As I sit here tonight, at home on a Friday, trying to add 25 more pages to my MFA manuscript for Pitt, I think of this, of Ann Patchett, the successful writer who is also the ant. I imagine her seated before her Remington: line after line, page (ding!) after page, day after day, neat piles. (How did people do this when they had only typewriters??) I am not her; nor am I Lucy, the brilliant, tragic genius who only knew for absolute certainty that she was ugly but whose writing (according to Ann) was all poetry. I fall somewhere between. I am not crazybrilliant; I don’t know if I can be constant, either. I am not suicidal, though occasionally depressed.
What I do know is that I am always doing this. Comparing. Putting it that baldly makes it look base or hopelessly insecure, but that’s not how I mean it; that’s not how I experience it. I mean simply, that that’s what all of my perception, and thus, my writing, is: Oh, your experience is different from mine because of this and that fact; really? How is that? Tell me the whys and hows. And let me tell you mine.
I think: I am not like those ladies I worked for at those dreary two months at the Events Production firm. Not at all. And I’ll make that feel good by writing Fish so far, far Out of Water tales. Because, I think, even if no one sees what I write or scrawl, I’m still somehow talking to a someone who exists, (why? Because he or she must. Because I write to him, to her, they must. An implied audience is still an audience) who is also not like them, but like me. The uncomfortable feelings of dissimilarity are transformed into charming little tales.
Or, another type of story: In this way, I am not like one sister or the other, though I am like this one in that way. And look, she’s like me, look at what she does/says. I am like my father in These ways; this, I have always known. I am like my mother in these other ways, I am just learning. I rejoice to find I am like this friend in this way, or that I am not like that friend that way, because we can learn from one another. I am not like this ex-boyfriend in this crucial way; I am not like this current whatever-he-is in this crucial way. And I find a thousand metaphors to describe these likenesses and differences. And sometimes I experience times when I feel a panic that no one is like me at all, in all the key respects. That I have only myself to live with here, in my head. But we must live in some sort of hope, right? And for me, this hope is acted out by writing, by trying to express how this and this and this is for me; maybe it’s like this for you, too? Maybe you, whoever you are, whether you’re no one at all or my sister or just my own comfort at seeing these words on the page, maybe together, in this way, we can find something sort of like closeness. I long for closeness. I tire of the feel of square corners bumping against smooth surfaces.
Labels: writing
posted by Alice at 9:42 PM
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