Author Archives: Laurie Stone

About Laurie Stone

Laurie Stone is author of the novel Starting with Serge (Doubleday), the memoir collection Close to the Bone (Grove), and Laughing in the Dark (Ecco), a collection of her writing on comic performance. A longtime writer for the Village Voice, she has been theater critic for The Nation, critic-at-large on Fresh Air. She has received grants from The New York Foundation for the Arts, the Kittredge Foundation, Yaddo, MacDowell, Albee Colony, among others. She received the Nona Balakian prize in excellence in criticism from the National Book Critics Circle. Her memoir essays and stories have appeared in such publications as Open City, Anderbo, Joyland, Nanofiction, The Los Angeles Review, New Letters, Ms., TriQuarterly, Threepenny Review, Memorious, Solstice, American Theatre, Creative Nonfiction, St Petersburg Review, and Four Way Review. She has given readings in dozens of venues, including The 92nd Street Y, Dixon Place, The Poetry Project, Barnes & Noble, KGB, The National Arts Club, and The New School. She has served as writer-in-residence at Pratt Institute, Old Dominion University, Thurber House, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Muhlenberg College. She has taught at the Paris Writers Workshop, the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, Chapman Un., Sarah Lawrence, Antioch, Fairleigh Dickinson, Ohio State, Arizona State Un., Fordham, and Stonecoast Writers' Conference. In 2005 she participated in "Novel: An Installation," writing a book and living in a house designed by architects Salazar/Davis in Flux Factory's gallery space. She currently teaches workshops on flash fiction in New York City and in Hudson, New York. She is at work on My Life as an Animal, a Memoir in Stories and The Love of Strangers, A Collage of Flash and Short Fiction by Laurie Stone.

The Lost Daughter

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The Lost Daughter. Some thoughts concerning a film by Maggie Gyllenhaal, not a book by Elena Ferrante.

I think it’s as astonishing first film, Gyllenhaal also wrote the screenplay. What struck me most powerfully is the insistent, close-up work of the camera in the faces of the women. The camera is the way the women feel the press of the outside world, always looking, questioning, suffocating, demanding to be acknowledged. Get the fuck out of my face, the women feel and almost never say, except Leda, played by Olivia Coleman in the present and by Jessie Buckley several decades younger when her two daughters are small. Leda does say it to her children, who, in her memory, never allowed her a moment of separation. When she is separate, the children break down in some way–wander off or hurt themselves–as a way to warn their mother and all mothers of the consequences of thinking about yourself.

The film is a great study of unwelcome motherhood and all the trappings that come with being a female parent, even if you are a woman who wants children. The pressure to conform, the clueless, utterly clueless proximity of the children’s father, in the case of Leda, another academic who thinks his work is work and his wife’s work is something she does in the moments her children are asleep. My favorite scene in the movie is the surprise visit of two hikers, a woman who has run off with a man who has left his children. Leda/Buckley falls in love with the visiting woman, who says this affair is the only thing that has happened in her life she can say has made her feel alive. We see Leda with these people—joyous and sexy—in a way that is not available to her with her children, in her domestic life, in her relationship with her husband, with the moribund male colleagues in her academic world.

Later, when she meets Nina on a Greek island, where both are vacationing, the young woman played by Dakota Johnson who also has a demanding daughter, will ask Leda/Coleman if the depression she feels will ever go away, and Coleman, with her clipped English accent and level gaze says, “No, it doesn’t go away.”

We haven’t seen a film like this, with this subject matter and its resolute commitment to it. That’s all the film is about, and this is also its weakness. It’s a great essay in a sense with a feminist point of view, turning one idea around over and over, but the scenes exist to illustrate the idea not to wander off into places their author/auteur could not have anticipated they would go. I’m not a happy audience for the didactic, no matter how fully I believe in the ideas. I’m not the audience for works about ideas.

The scenes with Buckley are great. I couldn’t get enough of her in that world. Coleman’s story involves stealing a doll for symbolic import–a kind of displaced anger at her young daughter for purposely destroying a doll Leda’s mother had given her? Don’t care. Hate symbols. Hate dolls. Ed Harris is good. I kept wanting him to throw a bucket of paint against a large canvas. In this film he’s kinda so what. Leda still attracts men? She’s meant to be 48! What the fuck. Harris is 71. There is a class thing, too, between Leda and the world of Nina’s people, a tightly knit, maybe Italian, very traditional extended family. Not sure of its purpose, except a lot of things are set up to distract Leda, even now, from separateness. A woman alone? She must be lonely. A woman in a family with children? She must be fulfilled.

Normal People

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Last night I finished watching “Normal People,” which is set in Ireland, and I am remembering the time I hitchhiked around Ireland on my own. Richard is reading “Time and Free Will” by Henri Bergson, in which the author proposes that when we look at art, we deposit our individual personality on the doormat and give ourselves to the artist’s way of knowing.
 
I was 21 that summer and would that fall be 22 and thought of myself as on the old side for a first trip to Europe and to the abandon I thought necessary for being a certain kind of young I had skipped over by marrying at 19.
 
“Normal People” is one long sequence of falling in love between a boy and a girl, who want each other equally and have the same amount to gain from the relationship. They lose each other only because it is a TV show and the script demands suspense in order to sustain 12 episodes. Their young bodies are beautiful as is their sex inflected with love and a desire to leave themselves on the doormat to enter the other.
 
In Ireland it was always raining either a fine mist or a splashing downpour, and I got used to walking on lonely roads with a towel wrapped around my head and one of those American raincoats cinched tight around my waist. I was wearing the worn jeans of the boy I had met in London and who had sent me on this adventure so I would see more of the world than him. Everything was shaded by the fact I was being unfaithful to the man I was married to and was a liar. The lovers in “Normal People” do not lie much to each other or themselves, and while I watched the show I liked imagining that kind of love.
 
Sometimes when I was afraid on the road alone, I thought there was something soft about me for feeling this way. I didn’t have that much of a bourgeois life to slough off. In temperament, I was closer to the wily peasants and gonifs of my forebears than to the well-appointed girls I’d gone to school with at Woodmere Academy and Barnard. Still, I had something to escape, as does everyone, and that is where you find the fun of life.

I’ll Be Your Jew

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Sacha Baron Cohen–I’ll be your Jew. That’s how I read him. Monied, educated, and English. But still a Jew in that world. The world of Virginia Woolf’s casual, de rigueur antiSemitic quips and Orwell’s spittle. The Jew in England. Shylock and Fagan. The nose, the hands greasy from counting money. Above all vulgar and out of it socially. Big gestures. Hands and voice. Vulgar in the extreme, and they seem to enjoy it, they seem not to understand how repulsive the rest of us find them. Cohen’s response: You want to see the Jew you secretly harbor in your thoughts, the Jew you no longer dare to speak about publicly–I’ll be your Jew, and in being your Jew, I will show you who you are. He’s fearless because of his class and accent, also his tall, handsome manself. Go baby, be their Jew and our reckless vulgarian. There is so much pleasure in what is understood as vulgarity. Another word for this is comedy.

Flux Factory

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Three Poems By Hannah Sullivan
Reviewed by Laurie Stone

Hannah Sullivan thought she might write a novel about being a sharp-elbowed young woman in New York—raising an arm for cabs, kissing a girl, and getting a Brazilian waxing before saying ”I love you” to the wrong bastard she will remember for the rest of her life. She mentions this in a YouTube clip filmed after receiving the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2018, adding she didn’t think she had anything original to bring to the novel form. So instead she turned the material into the verse chunks that comprise her exhilarating debut collection, Three Poems. Sullivan, a Brit, is thirty-nine and has one of those career carving, back-jacket bios—Harvard PhD, teaching jobs at Stanford and Oxford, awards and short lists up the wazoo—you would have to be dead set against her for. You can’t be. With her buzzing mind and technical brilliance, she deserves what she’s racked up, and her book asks us to think about the freedoms different genres afford writers.

Composing poetry in small bursts and dispensing with the nag of a narrative arc freed Sullivan’s voice of breathless, moment-to-moment consciousness. She could have done the same thing in the form of a novel, which would then have been called “a novel-in-prose-poems,” the way some books are called “a novel in stories.” These days I think we care less and less about the genre attached to a book. We care about narrative momentum and the layering of thought in a scene more than whether a story arrives at an ending somehow imminent in its launch.

Sullivan is right about the ordinariness of her life passages. The first poem, “You, Very Young in New York,” looks back to the time you prove how young you are by notching your belt with forlorn experience you think is adult. The second poem, “Repeat Until Time,” meditates on repetition from the perspective of noticing it for the first time. The third poem, “Sandpit After Rain,” jump cuts between the death of the poet’s father and the birth of her first son. Most stories sound trite when summarized. The power of Sullivan’s writing is in its no-limits subject matter and riotous experiments with language. She freely admits to the autofictive component of her poems, but she’s not engaged with stuff because it happened to her. She’s engaged with what language can generate in the reader, and stuff that happened is what she hangs language on.

She has mentioned Joan Didion’s memoir “Goodbye to All That” and Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City as prompts for “You, Very Young in New York” and her use of the second person pronoun—an inclusive you (really a distanced variant of I)—that can feel cozy one moment and presumptuous the next. When men use you, they are doing what they always do: unconsciously assuming their readers are male. When a female writer uses you, she subversively implicates the male reader in female experience, and it’s thrilling, especially in the hands of a writer like Sullivan, who likes to push the reader’s face into the bodily.

“You, Very Young in New York” speeds like walkers on Broadway, capturing sudden intimacy that is also anonymous, capturing a time of life when you take vitamins without wondering what will happen if you stop. (Answer: nothing.) Whatever else the poem is about—writers sitting in Starbucks “Picking like pigeons at the tail of the mourning croissant”; a vibrator with low batteries that “rotates leisurely in your palm”; shorting the market; and feeling the tongue dry up as Ritalin kicks in—it’s about a doomed affair that sharpens your movie-scene recall.

In preparation for the potential fuck that awaits, Sullivan’s narrator says, you “take two Advil and lie/On a table in Chelsea holding yourself open, ‘stretch it’ she says,/Irritably sometimes, and ‘stretch’ as lavender wax wells/Voluptuously in hidden places, and ‘turn’ as you kneel on all fours/So she can clean you up behind and, still parting you open, her fingers/Spend one moment too long tissuing off the dead wax with almond oil and/’All done she pats ….” Finally, when the bastard shows up on a rooftop, “he says, ‘you’ve lost weight, you look great’ which is true/(He dumped you) you think of elderberry and magnolia, quietly pulling/At the silver-starred skirt, pulling it over the ripple of your thighs./But when he says one more, for old time’s sake, you say why not/And sit rigidly in a cab, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge beside him.”

Almost any experience can stir philosophical and historic associations for Sullivan. It’s what she’s after. In the second poem, contemplating a still photo from the 1961 movie The Black Cat, she notices an older woman “Squeezing her cat like a tantrum,” knowing “that 1960 was the future and JFK is in office” while a blond kid “in a tapestry waistcoat … is waiting for the sixties to start, for the violence to be real./He looks like David Bowie on the cover of Young Americans,/Uranium-bright hair, a softly permed disco halo.” The second poem is set in San Francisco, where Sullivan lived while teaching at Stanford, and the third poem is set in England, her home and where she now lives, but the book feels like one long Alice in Wonderland dream of expansions and contractions.

Sometimes her fever of images is show-offy and doesn’t add anything to the moment contemplated. We don’t need to know, for example, that the look of lights going out in a high-rise across the way reminds the narrator of a Mondrian. Other people don’t seem real to her, even her dying father. Being a good writer does not make you a good person, and hats off to that. In the practice of writing, you don’t care about anything but the effect the writing will produce in the reader, and Sullivan bets she can net you by describing the “gristle” she pokes back into her father ’s neck rather than by measuring the meaning of his departure from her life. Sometimes, though, you have to pretend to be more human than you really are, lest the reader find you too cold, clinical, and fancy with your techniques. You have to stop with the writer-y writing in order to trick the reader into thinking you are an actual human with emotions you don’t have when you are writing.

She manages this often and perhaps most brilliantly in the third poem, first dwelling on the limbo plight of a saltwater eel in a suburban restaurant:

It wants to be rid of the tank, the shriek of lobsters,
The monotonous view of leatherette banquettes, The off-duty industry folk, greedily appraising, ‘Let’s do it half sashimi-style, half dry-fried-spicy’, And also not to be rid of the tank, to remain forever Chosen and not yet chosen, neither living nor dead, Eddying between two walls of bubbling glass. Learn something about indifference.

A few pages later, in a jump-cut to the Caesarian birth of her first child—a pregnancy that has forever banished the poet from limbo—she sympathizes with her unborn baby’s reluctance to leave his tank:

Under a tangle of capillaries,
A baby is dreaming of his old home.
The Sunday morning swimming pool
Of far-off children.

Then yellow glows in the curtains And his mouth snapdragons open

. . . .

This is the world:
The street-cleaning machine
The slow lob of rubbish

What can narrative offer if it lacks plot? It prints the shape of a mind looking at the world, and from that a pattern takes shape—which might be another word for personality. In all three poems, Sullivan masterfully follows the best recipe for narrative: start in the middle, fail to arrive, remember to love things, make the reader hot, and make the reader laugh. She knows there are no good endings. All endings are bad. That is why it is difficult to end a story, and you have to stop before the end. The standard ideas about endings, she doesn’t buy. Arrival, no. Death, no. Marriage, no. A baby, no. Love gained, no. Knowledge acquired, no. You have to look for the next tank.

Glass

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When we bought the house, twelve window panes had lost the seal between their two layers of glass and were clouded over. It was like looking through rain on a dirty train window or through the wrong prescription. Four in the kitchen, four in the guest room (ha!), four in Richard’s studio, all on the ground floor. The plan was to wait until summer to pop them out one by one and bring them to the glass store in Hudson. We had to learn how to pop them out and how to pop them back in. It was terrifying until Richard mastered the right way. We were hurting our fingers and shoulders and hating existence. In these moments, I wanted to let it go and live in the cataract limbo. I wanted to jump ship because I knew Richard would get it done with or without me. I didn’t jump ship. The best thing about our relationship is how one of us will care about something with insane intensity the other one couldn’t care less about. 

Today our beloved glass installer told us about the time he cut his thumb nearly off. It was hanging by some skin. He called his wife and calmly said he was spurting blood and asked if she would drive him to the hospital in Great Barrington. He referred to the hospital up the street from the shop, using the word death. It was the Bates Motel of hospitals. People check in but they don’t check out. He said he was stitched up by a team of brilliant surgeons and was back working at the shop in two hours. I wondered if he was in shock or just needed to know he hadn’t chopped off his life.

Living here, in a sense, I have chopped off my life and can’t see it through mist, and I don’t know what to make of this because, in the midst of radical change–I don’t mean me, I mean the whole of society–when you look back or ahead, what can you really see?

Covid

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For 47 years, since he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, Richard has adjusted to living with a chronic, incurable disease. Technologies, developed incrementally, have thus far prolonged his life, including synthetic insulin and smart glucose monitoring pumps. The normal expectation is that he will die, at some point, of one or another complication of diabetes, including stroke, heart attack, and kidney failure. And that before he kicks the bucket he will go blind and lose alimb or two. While diabetics cling to life or like Richard stride around in the back yard, cutting down trees and hauling them across fields, they are supposed to be waiting for a cure. They are supposed to believe in the ineluctable deliverance from their condition via the “progress” of medical innovations.

He has never believed has never believed a cure was coming. He has never believed he was going to end up with a pancreas that produced insulin or had even a few functioning beta cells.

Now, with covid-19, we’ve all become Richard, and one question to consider is: to continue, do you need to believe in deliverance via a cure and or a vaccine that many experts in medical technology think unlikely? How do we go forward without this belief amid the ongoing presence of covid-19? Richard says, “You believe you’re going to die of something. You no longer believe you will die of ‘natural causes’. Our only option is reducing exposure and mitigating the symptoms. It’s the transformation of belief in medicine as a form of deliverance to one of mitigation and only mitigation, and many things that are good and in touch with reality for society flow from that. It places us in a much more collective mental space. We have to make whatever’s possible for mitigation available for everyone. And even though the rich and powerful will ride this out with more padding, they still won’t arrive at a different reality from the rest of us. Just as if it were an alien invasion.”

Unorthodox, Netflix

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I watched with pleasure and interest, a story about a 19-year-old woman, who escapes to Berlin from an arranged marriage within the Satmar Hasidic sect in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It is based on a memoir by Deborah Feldman. As Esty, Israeli actor Shira Haas is brilliantly alert and luminous in all her scenes, coming to consciousness that her life is untenable, while feeling a protective loyalty to the post-holocaust mission of her sect–to keep Jews alive in the world. Almost all the dialogue is in Yiddish, and I loved feeling the language wash over me, the familiarity, I don’t know all the words of course, but this was the language of my mother, especially speaking to my grandmother. My mother was born on the Lower East Side but did not learn English until she went to school at 5. It was still her first language in some ways, the secret language spoken with my father, the language of curses and affection, often interchangeable. All that said, here is the thing I want to underscore: although the thing Esty must escape is an intolerable and cruel form of sexist control, in which every moment of her bodily existence is proscribed and degraded by rituals and laws, and although the series dramatizes this, it does not speak about misogyny directly either in the script or the documentary that follows on the making of the show. That focus is on the complexity of Jews escaping religious confinement in the US and seeking freedom in Germany, the site of their planned extinction in a former age. It’s as if confronting misogyny within Orthodox religious life might be construed as antisemitic, although not naming these practices as human rights violations, wherever they exist, is the way the larger culture licenses and sanctions misogyny. It all has to go, whether inside or outside religions, the control of women’s lives and bodies by males in charge and by their female colonels–the mothers-in-law who gain a modicum of power by tormenting younger women and by the good-girl-wives, who live within a Stockholm Syndrome mindset, in which being a thing to be used and acted upon is an identity. The approach of the show, by focusing on one woman’s plight, makes it seem like a personal story rather than a huge social condition. Esty keeps saying, “I’m strange, not like other women.” She is not strange. She is exactly like every other woman in such a lockdown. Those women, too, hate the lockdown, while hating and fearing something more than their own subjugation.

Letter to prospective reviewers

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I have a new book out, published last month by a small press located in Greensboro, North Carolina. The book is called Everything is Personal, Notes on Now, a chronicle of how we’ve lived since November 2016. I don’t want to send books into the void, and you don’t want more books to offload from your piles. I thought I’d offer some reasons I might want to review this book if I were in your position. If you are disinclined for any reason, please let me know, and I will entirely understand.

 

How the book came to be:

It wasn’t my idea originally. Steve Mitchell, co-owner of Scuppernong Books and co-director of the small publishing company Scuppernong Editions, had been reading my posts on Facebook and thought the writing should reach a larger audience—or at least a book-buying audience. He called. We met at a coffee place in NYC that is also a plant store, and in an hour or two we’d hatched a plan. Two men were reading my posts about #MeToo and felt included, somehow, in feminism, the reboot, rather than worried their heads would be next on the chopping block.

 

Facebook posts as a literary form:

I wrote on Facebook the way I write everywhere—combining memoir, social commentary, fictional narrative, and art criticism—and drawing the reader into what feels like a conversation. My following grew. Readers felt I had invented a new form. Maybe I have. Social media was the incubator for all of the writing in this book, much of which developed into pieces I published elsewhere, primarily in n+1 and Women’s Review of Books.

 

A critique of feminism, the reboot:

Trump gets in and five minutes later Harvey Weinstein becomes the predator people can nail. At last large numbers of men can identify with the commonplace for women of being held under a boot. It was exciting to see a version of feminism with social power. It has also been something of a mission of mine to examine the category mistakes I see driving #MeToo rectitude and the leveraging of virtue. #MeToo is thrilling when it exposes criminals and acts of violence. It is chilling, however, when the target of a #MeToo campaign—for lack of a better term—has committed no crime or readily identifiable harm and has, rather, caused offense, or rattled some people, or triggered them, or made them feel an emotion they didn’t want to feel. Sometimes the emotion is arousal. I weighed in on whether a call for punishment or decirculation in the name of feminism actually expanded—or crimped—freedom for women. I thought about the benefits of people, ideas, and insitutions remaining in circulation.

 

About the press: Although Scuppernong Editions is a small press, it is distributed nationally through Ingram, offering bookstores the same discount and right to return books as trade and larger presses.

 

Some encouraging comments from Emily Nussbaum and James Lasdun:

Laurie Stone’s “Everything Is Personal” is a galvanic account of our era, a trumpet blare aimed at sleepwalkers. In essays and diary entries that are sharply observant, grieving and generous, Stone seeks links between 1968 and now, meditating with wit and complexity on her own intimate and intellectual history, the question of separating the artist from the art, sexual violence, romantic love, friendship, comedy, television and more. She meditates on the life of Valerie Solanas and the trial of Brett Kavanaugh; she wrestles with her frustration with the “good-girl-ism” embedded in modern feminism and celebrates the messy, unquenchable power of desire. A voice unlike any other, she’s a fearless thinker in an age submerged in fear. –Emily Nussbaum

 

“Laurie Stone’s exhilarating, unclassifiable book brings the stinging wit and ferocious political engagement of the feuilleton tradition of Joseph Roth into the age of the Social Media thread, with its built-in fluidity and openendedness, to brilliant effect. I can’t remember when I last read anything as alive, alert, self-questioning and independent-minded as Everything is Personal, whether in its quick glances at lovers, strangers, houses, movies, skies, or its extended montages on subjects such as Valerie Solanas or the cultural ramifications of #MeToo. It’s a wonderfully generous book too; magnanimous even in its wicked asperity, and above all a celebration of the physical and intellectual pleasures that make life worth living and battles worth fighting.”—James Lasdun, author of The Fall Guy” and It’s Beginning to Hurt.

 

I have also received glowing blurbs from Meg Wolitzer, Michael Tolkin, Mikhail Iossel, Vivian Gornick, Diane Seuss, Steven Dunn, Phillip Lopate, David Shields, and Joseph Keckler.

 

Below is a link to an appreciative essay about the book published in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/navigation-through-longing-on-laurie-stones-everything-is-personal-notes-on-now/

 

Please let me know if you would consider writing a review, and you will have the books as soon as Steve can get to the post office.

 

Best regards,

Laurie

917-696-4059

Lstonehere@aol.com

 

Flux Factory

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From The Women’s Review of Books, January 2020

Three Poems By Hannah Sullivan
Reviewed by Laurie Stone

Hannah Sullivan thought she might write a novel about being a sharp-elbowed young woman in New York—raising an arm for cabs, kissing a girl, and getting a Brazilian waxing before saying ”I love you” to the wrong bastard she will remember for the rest of her life. She mentions this in a YouTube clip filmed after receiving the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2018, adding she didn’t think she had anything original to bring to the novel form. So instead she turned the material into the verse chunks that comprise her exhilarating debut collection, Three Poems. Sullivan, a Brit, is thirty-nine and has one of those career carving, back-jacket bios—Harvard PhD, teaching jobs at Stanford and Oxford, awards and short lists up the wazoo—you would have to be dead set against her for. You can’t be. With her buzzing mind and technical brilliance, she deserves what she’s racked up, and her book asks us to think about the freedoms different genres afford writers.

Composing poetry in small bursts and dispensing with the nag of a narrative arc freed Sullivan’s voice of breathless, moment-to-moment consciousness. She could have done the same thing in the form of a novel, which would then have been called “a novel-in-prose-poems,” the way some books are called “a novel in stories.” These days I think we care less and less about the genre attached to a book. We care about narrative momentum and the layering of thought in a scene more than whether a story arrives at an ending somehow imminent in its launch.

Sullivan is right about the ordinariness of her life passages. The first poem, “You, Very Young in New York,” looks back to the time you prove how young you are by notching your belt with forlorn experience you think is adult. The second poem, “Repeat Until Time,” meditates on repetition from the perspective of noticing it for the first time. The third poem, “Sandpit After Rain,” jump cuts between the death of the poet’s father and the birth of her first son. Most stories sound trite when summarized. The power of Sullivan’s writing is in its no-limits subject matter and riotous experiments with language. She freely admits to the autofictive component of her poems, but she’s not engaged with stuff because it happened to her. She’s engaged with what language can generate in the reader, and stuff that happened is what she hangs language on.

She has mentioned Joan Didion’s memoir “Goodbye to All That” and Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City as prompts for “You, Very Young in New York” and her use of the second person pronoun—an inclusive you (really a distanced variant of I)—that can feel cozy one moment and presumptuous the next. When men use you, they are doing what they always do: unconsciously assuming their readers are male. When a female writer uses you, she subversively implicates the male reader in female experience, and it’s thrilling, especially in the hands of a writer like Sullivan, who likes to push the reader’s face into the bodily.

“You, Very Young in New York” speeds like walkers on Broadway, capturing sudden intimacy that is also anonymous, capturing a time of life when you take vitamins without wondering what will happen if you stop. (Answer: nothing.) Whatever else the poem is about—writers sitting in Starbucks “Picking like pigeons at the tail of the mourning croissant”; a vibrator with low batteries that “rotates leisurely in your palm”; shorting the market; and feeling the tongue dry up as Ritalin kicks in—it’s about a doomed affair that sharpens your movie-scene recall.

In preparation for the potential fuck that awaits, Sullivan’s narrator says, you “take two Advil and lie/On a table in Chelsea holding yourself open, ‘stretch it’ she says,/Irritably sometimes, and ‘stretch’ as lavender wax wells/Voluptuously in hidden places, and ‘turn’ as you kneel on all fours/So she can clean you up behind and, still parting you open, her fingers/Spend one moment too long tissuing off the dead wax with almond oil and/’All done she pats ….” Finally, when the bastard shows up on a rooftop, “he says, ‘you’ve lost weight, you look great’ which is true/(He dumped you) you think of elderberry and magnolia, quietly pulling/At the silver-starred skirt, pulling it over the ripple of your thighs./But when he says one more, for old time’s sake, you say why not/And sit rigidly in a cab, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge beside him.”

Almost any experience can stir philosophical and historic associations for Sullivan. It’s what she’s after. In the second poem, contemplating a still photo from the 1961 movie The Black Cat, she notices an older woman “Squeezing her cat like a tantrum,” knowing “that 1960 was the future and JFK is in office” while a blond kid “in a tapestry waistcoat … is waiting for the sixties to start, for the violence to be real./He looks like David Bowie on the cover of Young Americans,/Uranium-bright hair, a softly permed disco halo.” The second poem is set in San Francisco, where Sullivan lived while teaching at Stanford, and the third poem is set in England, her home and where she now lives, but the book feels like one long Alice in Wonderland dream of expansions and contractions.

Sometimes her fever of images is show-offy and doesn’t add anything to the moment contemplated. We don’t need to know, for example, that the look of lights going out in a high-rise across the way reminds the narrator of a Mondrian. Other people don’t seem real to her, even her dying father. Being a good writer does not make you a good person, and hats off to that. In the practice of writing, you don’t care about anything but the effect the writing will produce in the reader, and Sullivan bets she can net you by describing the “gristle” she pokes back into her father ’s neck rather than by measuring the meaning of his departure from her life. Sometimes, though, you have to pretend to be more human than you really are, lest the reader find you too cold, clinical, and fancy with your techniques. You have to stop with the writer-y writing in order to trick the reader into thinking you are an actual human with emotions you don’t have when you are writing.

She manages this often and perhaps most brilliantly in the third poem, first dwelling on the limbo plight of a saltwater eel in a suburban restaurant:

It wants to be rid of the tank, the shriek of lobsters,
The monotonous view of leatherette banquettes, The off-duty industry folk, greedily appraising, ‘Let’s do it half sashimi-style, half dry-fried-spicy’, And also not to be rid of the tank, to remain forever Chosen and not yet chosen, neither living nor dead, Eddying between two walls of bubbling glass. Learn something about indifference.

A few pages later, in a jump-cut to the Caesarian birth of her first child—a pregnancy that has forever banished the poet from limbo—she sympathizes with her unborn baby’s reluctance to leave his tank:

Under a tangle of capillaries,
A baby is dreaming of his old home.
The Sunday morning swimming pool
Of far-off children.

Then yellow glows in the curtains And his mouth snapdragons open

. . . .

This is the world:
The street-cleaning machine
The slow lob of rubbish

What can narrative offer if it lacks plot? It prints the shape of a mind looking at the world, and from that a pattern takes shape—which might be another word for personality. In all three poems, Sullivan masterfully follows the best recipe for narrative: start in the middle, fail to arrive, remember to love things, make the reader hot, and make the reader laugh. She knows there are no good endings. All endings are bad. That is why it is difficult to end a story, and you have to stop before the end. The standard ideas about endings, she doesn’t buy. Arrival, no. Death, no. Marriage, no. A baby, no. Love gained, no. Knowledge acquired, no. You have to look for the next tank.

Marriage Story

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I was prompted to see the movie after reading a long thread of mostly negative reactions on Facebook. Many of the comments faulted Noah Baumbach for writing about his own experience because it was the experience of a straight white male raised with financial and cultural advantages. The gist of the remarks was: We’re tired of your world, we’ve heard enough from your side of things, stop looking at yourself, use your imagination and do something else but whatever you do don’t write about experience that isn’t yours, either. Don’t be a narcissist on one hand. Don’t be an appropriator on the other. Just, shut up and go away.

I don’t believe these are fair or useful ways to speak to artists about their work. These are not the right categories to go after people with.

I didn’t enjoy the film, and I don’t think it’s good. It felt false from beginning to end and like a piece of self-congratulation on the part of the director/writer for giving the female character her due. He doesn’t. Her position is witless and makes no sense within the terms of the breakup and as a result makes everything she says about feeling pushed around and used sound like a sudden tantrum, a spurt of #MeToo juice directed at her husband, who hasn’t really done anything. Baumbach allows that the husband has had a small, meaningless affair with a member of his company, but in a screaming fight justifies this by saying the male character and his wife didn’t have sex for a year.

There is a giant, missing elephant in the picture: in reality Baumbach started a relationship with Greta Gerwig while he was still married to Jennifer Jason Leigh. To the degree that the wife character, played by Scarlett Johansson, represents Leigh’s plight, she would have had reason to leave New York and return to LA because her husband was no longer with her. Without this provocation, the husband character, played by Adam Driver, looks like a man who woke up one day to find his wife and son missing. We’re supposed to feel sympathy for him throughout: poor guy has an irrational wife who suddenly dissents about everything he thought she liked; poor guy has to negotiate a divorce with shark lawyers in California; poor guy has to jeopardize his great chance at a Broadway production (Broadway??? is good??? to an avant-garde director??? with a Macarthur????) in order to visit his son across the country. Poor guy has to hear the rhetoric of the dominated woman who has not been coerced into anything, and we are supposed to understand why he is rolling his eyes. The movie is saying: What do women want? What do women want? They’re so mysterious and confusing. I thought you liked that. You mean all those years you were faking it? Poor guy.

The story is the husband’s and what kind of story is it? It’s a victim story. He is the one who is done to. Victim stories don’t work unless the person begins to wonder how they came to be so easily beguiled, what was in it for them to believe situation A was really situation B? The Driver character asks none of these questions. Even if he did, they aren’t relevant to why the marriage came apart. It came apart because the man fell in love with someone else. These things happen. It’s not a crime. The question is: In what ways has anything happened to you you can channel into your art so it is rich with complexity and has a chance of moving people because complexity is what moves us, complexity and contradictions that can’t be resolved.