~*~*~*~*~*what delia read recently~*~*~*~*~

Television, a memoir by Karen Brennan

When I was visiting Philadelphia at the start of the summer, I went to a bookstore called “Giovanni’s Room” and bought this book. My friends were outside waiting for me for so long, I had to hurry up. I was taking forever, browsing and thinking. I imagine my friends on the sidewalk, smoking cigarettes. The day was overcast. I thought it said $4.99 on the back of the book but it said $14.99 when I got to the cash register. I bought it anyway, mainly because I liked the drawing on the cover. I thought it was an old book from this design, like from the early 2000s or late 90s, but it’s from last year. I skimmed the pages and liked that it was broken up into segments, each with its own title spanning one or two pages, like prose poems. I opened it up once we were back at my friend’s apartment. Sitting on the skinny vintage couch with a tiny pillow on my lap separating me from the book, I read the first mini essay about Karen Brennan’s life. She started with the moment, during the polio era, when the first of her neighbors got a television, and everyone stood around to watch it turn on: “To everyone else it had been a shock (I recall my mother shrieking) like seeing a chair fly across the room or a dish of apples suddenly begin to cough.”

Her pose hit me in the face with imagery, rhythm, and humor. The emotions she feels attached to the fragments exit out of them with stark clarity. Each piece is a memory, a television screen that switches to the next one, flipping channels through years. Since each “chapter” is so brief, the words feel powerfully intentional. The honesty is real: discussing growing up with rich, firm parents and grandparents, and then becoming a working class mother, then visiting her daughter permanently disabled from a motorcycle wreck. She tells all of this in chronological order. The childhood sections were the most surreal: remembering torturing another girl with a stick with poop on it, or the mundane diaries from a cruise trip in her teens. Everyday experience and embarrassing thoughts are acknowledged as heavy branches in a life just as much as monumental events. Childhood, with watching her mother, disabled by polio, putting on makeup, and later in life having workshop students over at her house, Brennan stuffing herself with Oreos.

“Television” could’ve been marketed as a book about womanhood, or a book about aging, but it’s not. It is simply a life written.  Brennan asks, who will remember this? And then declares: “I will, since I’m writing it down.” Brennan adds: “The past, which we distill down to its essential events, always seems simpler, truer and more well-meaning than the present.”   

Usually the books I read are ones that I’ve heard of or ones that have been recommended to me, but “Television” was neither, and so I went in blindly and its intimacy and pieced-together prose surprised me. There are not a lot of surprises in life and this was a good one.

I Wished by Dennis Cooper

In my preconceptions, Dennis Cooper is a cult-classic who writes about sex, desire, and punk shit. There’s an excerpt from his book “Safe” in “Writers Who Love Too Much” the New Narrative anthology that I’ve read, and I’ve also checked out his blog, which reviews books and films prolifically. I felt like I needed to read something more substantial, and a lot of people were talking about his new book, and it turns out it was the only book of his available at my public library, as an ebook. I think this is because this is his only book that has gotten “mainstream” attention, and rightfully so.

“I Wished” could be a novella, it’s so short. Sometimes I only like to read short books, to gobble them up. This book was not easily gobbled. It’s an exploration about his obsession with a childhood friend and muse George Miles, who died of suicide, and who he has written many books about. “I Wished” demonstrates Cooper’s stark questioning of why he wants to keep writing about his friend who he was in love with, wondering if his friend loved him back, and why no one else loved George the same way. So the writing becomes the only proof that George exists/existed. There are experimental fiction sections where the conversation turns to the mouths of Santa Claus or the crater from the eroded earth art piece by James Turrell. The writing creates a hole where George’s soul can hang out, disappear again. It’s a book burning for reciprocal love.

My favorite part was the explanation of a lifelong secret wish for death: “-my wish had been completely understanding because it knew me, unlike my friends. / I felt like when I’d wish to die, I was being who I really was.” This wish relates to writing, allowing the writing to “selectively” tell this secret-self: “What the writing did was draw a stylized map to the general location where my wishes were impregnating.” Writing is a place where we can access our darkness, the end, more so than our outward selves. This part of the book really fucked me up and I’m still thinking about it.

Intimations by Zadie Smith

This audiobook was read by Zadie Smith herself, which was fun during the final list essay where she starts singing a Tracy Chapman song. It’s weird for me to read essays written so early on in the pandemic. I read this book with my knowledge of the future, and it sometimes felt dramatic, but those were dramatic times: consumed by the daily life of lockdown, Trump, change of busy routine, and not being able to interact with people. But these essays are not irrelevant or time-sensitive. Smith often discusses non-pandemic topics that I loved to hear her take on, such as femininity and her relationship to her body over time. Smith has a great knack for capturing characters, giving eccentric neighbors and people on the street so much humanity and wit. Zadie Smith writes about the times of the George Floyd protests in the US, and wonders how American racism relates to a virus that we will never receive herd immunity from, no matter how much we wish for it. I thought this metaphor was spot on.

Heaven by Emerson Whitney

I read a chunk of “Heaven” while at the county jail, where I have been tutoring writing every Friday for the past month. In between tutoring the residents, I was reading this. “Heaven” is an interesting memoir to read while inside a jail. Something felt related, maybe the idea of feeling trapped inside somewhere where you cannot be yourself.

Emerson Whitney, who was seemingly mentored by Maggie Nelson and namedrops that he’s hung out with Eileen Myles, combines hyper-descriptive scene writing about his childhood with his current research about gender theory and psychoanalysis about mother-child relationships. Whitney plays around with timeline, but mainly the book describes his life from the beginning, with his mom as a complicated caretaker. Whitney shows her as this blonde otherworldly person wanting to give her kids a life of play, and also an alcoholic who often ran off with boyfriends, leaving Whitney behind. Eventually, Whitney switches homes to his beloved grandmother’s, and also back over to his stepdads. Every scene is so visceral; this writing sticks to my mind with acidic feelings of abandonment, performances of gender and school that children are supposed to uphold, and deeply wanting to be close to his mother and his grandmother.

I don’t know how Emerson Whitney does this: remembering crisp details of their childhood, or at least knowing how to recreate the image of it, even the color of people’s clothes, the smells hanging in the air. Emerson Whitney began as a poet, which shows itself in the lyrical nature of the language. Because of Whitney’s gift, this book is insanely engaging, like a movie, or a movie that also wanders into essay. A mind-blowing Judith Butler quote pops in, or Whitney opens up his mind to us: what if being trans originates from this childhood, this relationship with a mother who is also not a mother? These are intense anxieties to reveal, and Whitney blares their uncertainty alongside the stories we are told about gender, the phallus, and the “lack” of it. He discusses Freud, and the repulsion of our mothers, that “lack.”

In a unique way, the reading process was not all leading up to some big realization about how Emerson became the person who he is today. My anticipation guiding me towards the final pages was for what ended up happening with his mom. “Heaven” provided this longing for me. Whitney explains: “This book isn’t about individuation or even coming of age, the achievement of selfhood despite everything, it’s about ways to find a response, to respond to her.”