I stumbled across this thread on Twitter last night, which led me to a host of wonderful essays and stories. Here’s what I’ve been reading:

• "The Fourth State of Matter" by Jo Ann Beard. I’ll be thinking about this essay for a very long time.

• “Without Inspection” by Edwidge Danticat. This story too. It reminds me of “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff.

• “Local Economies” by Brandon Taylor. Thanks to Sam for recommending this story. And the next one too.

• “Parisian Honeymoon” by Ross Feeler

• “Thanksgiving in Mongolia” by Ariel Levy

• “To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time” by Matthew Salesses

• “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” by Amy Hempel. A Classic. Always guts me.

• “The Love of my Life” by Cheryl Strayed

“When I take out the trash, I find a perfectly good mirror left lying in a heap. It looks new, but my newest new neighbors bought an extra-new mirror and tossed this one out, even though it has nothing wrong with it. It even looks recently windexed. After considering it for myself, I take it from the trash area behind the building and drag it to the sidewalk, where I prop it against the bricks. This is what we do with old, good things we don’t want. We leave them to the street, to the scavengers and collectors. We give back because we have taken. Later, when I go out for groceries, the mirror is gone and I feel gratified. There’s a pleasure in finding one’s offerings have been accepted. It makes you feel like the city is functioning the way it should and you are a small part of keeping that ecosystem alive.”

Open House
Jeremiah Moss

"When you're foreign, you don't have a choice anymore, Tristan says. And he isn't wrong either. Well not wrong exactly, Richard thinks, but wishing assumes that a person still lives in the sort of world in which wishing is permitted. Wishing is a form of homesickness."

Go, Went, Gone
Jenny Erpenbeck

"As I watched Sunshine Woman pull Riv away from me, I felt a stinging in my toes, in my soles, in my legs, up my butt, and through my back, where it burst to fire in my bones, licking all through my ribs, a loose powerful feeling, like a voice freed from a throat, a screaming note all through me, and it was then I knew I was going to run." 

Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jesmyn Ward

"Years ago, I would have settled for an apology from any man who did something wrong. I would’ve given into a meek plea for forgiveness, tucked tail and all. Now, receiving an apology has the adverse effect that it’s supposed to: It just feels like being asked to process someone else’s regret, and embarrassment, and pain, on top of my own anger and frustration. It sounds like dealing with more work."

Saying You're Sorry Isn't Enough Anymore
Saachi Koul

"There is a story they tell, about a girl dared by her peers to venture to a local graveyard after dark. This was her folly: when they told her that standing on someone’s grave at night would cause the inhabitant to reach up and pull her under, she scoffed. Scoffing is the first mistake a woman can make.

I will show you, she said.

Pride is the second mistake.

They gave her a knife to stick into the frosty earth, as a way of proving her presence and her theory.

She went to that graveyard. Some storytellers say that she picked the grave at random. I believe she selected a very old one, her choice tinged by self-doubt and the latent belief that if she were wrong, the intact muscle and flesh of a newly dead corpse would be more dangerous than one centuries gone.

She knelt on the grave and plunged the blade deep. As she stood to run she found she couldn’t escape. Something was clutching at her clothes. She cried out and fell down.

When morning came, her friends arrived at the cemetery. They found her dead on the grave, the blade pinning the sturdy wool of her skirt to the ground. Dead of fright or exposure, would it matter when the parents arrived? She was not wrong, but it didn’t matter any more. Afterwards, everyone believed that she had wished to die, even though she had died proving that she could live.

As it turns out, being right was the third, and worst, mistake."

The Husband Stitch
Carmen Maria Machado

"She drew on her cigarette, blew out. 'Of course, you're a lot prettier than I was–-you'd have won the contest hands down!' She laughed. 'But prettiness is always about pleasing people. When you stop being pretty, you don't have to do that anymore. I don't have to do that anymore. It's my show now.' She said these words as if she were a movie star walking past me while I gaped. 

'I wasn't trying to please anyone, ' I said uncertainly.

'No?' She stubbed out her cigarette in a bright yellow ashtray. 'What were you trying to do?'

Imagine ten pictures of this conversation. In nine of them, she's the fool and I'm the person who has something. But in the tenth, I'm the fool and it's her show now. For just a second, that's the picture I saw."

Veronica
Mary Gaitskill

"The rudeness of these public figures gives pleasure and relief, it is clear, to their audiences. Perhaps what they experience is not the possibility of actual violence but a sort of intellectual unbuttoning, a freedom from the constraint of language. Perhaps they have lived lives in which they have been continually outplayed in the field of articulation, but of this new skill — rudeness — they find that they are the masters. My mother’s death threats undoubtedly arose from her frustration with my own use of language. What I did not take into account when I spoke to her was the difference in our social positions. She was a housewife with little education and a rapidly retreating beauty, for whom life was a process of discovering that no greatness had been held in store for her. She did such things for me as cook and clean, while I was on my way to university and liberty. Yet to my mind, she had an extraordinary power, the power to blacken my mental outlook and ruin my prospect of life. When I spoke to her, I thought I was addressing a tyrant in whose overthrow my only weapons were words. But words were the very things that roused her to violence, because at her life’s core, she had been separated from them. Her labor, her maternal identity, her status were all outside the language economy. Instead, she formulated a story of herself whose simplifications and lies infuriated me. I aimed to correct her with truth — perhaps I thought that if only I could insult her with sufficient accuracy, we would be reconciled — but she refused to be corrected, to be chastened. In the end, she won by being prepared to sacrifice the moral basis of language. She didn’t care what she said, or rather, she exacted from words the licentious pleasures of misuse; in so doing, she took my weapon and broke it before my eyes. She made fun of me for the words I used, and I couldn’t respond by threatening her with death. I couldn’t say “I could kill you” because it wasn’t true, and in language I had staked everything on telling the truth."

"The Age of Rudeness"
Rachel Cusk

"Well, when that Guardian article came out, I didn’t think it gave people the right impression of me, but now I think it absolutely did. Because it’s true that I don’t care if people hate me or misinterpret my intentions. They’re reading my books, that’s all that matters. I am not important. My personality, whatever, like sure, that might inspire some different feelings in people, but the work is what’s important. You can talk to me all day and I’ll say a million different things depending on my moods.

"But as a rebuttal to the Guardian thing, I’ll just say that I’ve dedicated my life to being a writer and I haven’t done it selfishly. I’m writing for all of you fucking assholes, and I need to figure out a way to do that. And I also think, don’t flatter yourself, I published a book before Eileen. It was called McGlue. I got two thousand dollars for it, almost nobody fucking read it, and it’s so much better than Eileen. But nobody wants to talk about McGlue because it’s too far away from the commercial crap that they’re used to reading. So I knew I needed to write something that was going to be reminiscent of the crap that people are used to, so it wasn’t going to threaten them so much. I needed a way into the mainstream, because, you know what? How do you expect me to make a living?! I’m not going to be making cappuccinos. I’m fucking brilliant! I don’t know what people expect me to do. I needed to be proactive. And Eileen ended up being a very important book for me. It taught me a lot and it allowed me to have a lot of conversations with people about repression, and the repressed world was exactly what I was entering as an author so I can make it better. And now I just want to be like, fuck that. I’m so happy this collection is coming out, because I feel like people can laugh when they read it, men can read it and not feel estranged. I’m incredibly cynical about the public."

Ottessa Moshfegh in Fanzine

"Not only is shame not helpful in treating mental illness or addiction, it also fails to justify its apparent raison d'être in the trainwreck narrative. It doesn't help instill "good values"; instead, it creates a world in which women are afraid of themselves – where every girl lives like the lead in a werewolf movie, constantly monitoring herself for signs that she's turning into a wild animal. Women with serious illnesses are being taught to hate themselves by the ongoing public display of madwomen, but so are women who are merely unhappy, or having a bad day. Female emotion itself is being portrayed as a destructive force that must be tamped down, contained, and (if at all possible) totally denied, because if it ever breaks through and becomes visible, that woman will become dirty, shameful, and disgusting." 

Trainwreck
Sady Doyle

"I got lost following Enzo, who could say proudly: Without her I wouldn't be able to do it. Thus he conveyed to us his love and devotion, and it was clear that he liked to remind himself and others of the extraordinary quality of his woman, whereas my husband never praised me but, rather, reduced me to the mother of his children; even though I had an education he did not want me to be capable of independent thought, he demeaned me by demeaning what I read, what interested me, what I said, and he appeared willing to love me only provided that I continually demonstrate my nothingness." 

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
Elena Ferrante

"The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency."

How to Be a Writer
Rebecca Solnit

“[Moshfegh’s] sense of alienation is expressed with humour, but is genuine and profound. ‘I felt like I was living in hell for most of my childhood and adolescence and my 20s,’ she says. ‘There was a brief period in my early 30s when I felt life was OK, and now it feels like hell again. The shape the hell took is precisely what my work is about.’”

Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh
The Guardian

I appreciate it when smart women talk straight about their lives and refuse to smooth over the unpalatable parts. Sometimes you feel terrible. Sometimes you feel terrible for a while, and there’s no redemptive arch. I reread “Bettering Myself” after this, which, in her interview, Moshfegh suggests isn’t entirely fictional. I don’t know. I feel pressure to be put together all the time, which I resent and concede to in equal measure. I like reading fiction written by a woman who says when shit sucks and refuses to offer apology for making the reader uncomfortable.

"In the book Art & Fear, authors David Bales and Ted Orland describe a ceramics class in which half of the students were asked to focus only on producing a high quantity of work while the other half was tasked with producing work of high quality. For a grade at the end of the term, the “quantity” group’s pottery would be weighed, and fifty pounds of pots would automatically get an A, whereas the “quality” group only needed to turn in one—albeit perfect—piece. Surprisingly, the works of highest quality came from the group being graded on quantity, because they had continually practiced, churned out tons of work, and learned from their mistakes. The other half of the class spent most of the semester paralyzed by theorizing about perfection, which sounded disconcertingly familiar to me—like all my cases of writer’s block."

LitHub

"I want a female main character with power. And I want her to do harm, because there’s no story without trouble. A woman in charge in a novel needs a problem—a problem that, if it doesn’t ultimately lead to disaster, might lead to disaster. If she’s the captain of a ship, it will almost sink—or it will sink—in part because she makes a mistake. If she’s the owner of a factory, it will almost go under—or go under—after she makes the wrong decision, or takes an exciting but reckless chance, or heroically makes an ethical choice that’s so expensive it puts her out of business."

Tin House

"What’s a girl to do when a bunch of dudes have just told her, in front of an audience, that she’s wrong about what it’s like to be herself? I could talk to them, one by one, and tell them how it felt. I could tell the panel organizers this is why you never have just one of us up there. I could buy myself a superhero costume and devote the rest of my life to vengeance on mansplainers everywhere.

Instead, I round up some girlfriends and we spend hundreds of dollars in a hipster bar, drinking rye Manhattans and eating tapas and talking about the latest crappy, non-gender-blind things that have happened to us in meetings and on business trips and at performance review time. They toast me for taking one for the team. And when we are good and numb we Uber home, thinking Look at all we’ve earned! That bar with the twinkly lights. That miniature food. This chauffeured black car. We are tough enough to put up with being ignored and interrupted and underestimated every day and laugh it off together. We’ve made it. This is the good life. Nothing needs to change."

"Not having any luck disliking a book? Take heart: if your collection is like mine, you may very well find a book on your shelf that is literally breaking. This is spectacular news. The Woman in White, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, What Maisie Knew — all three ended up in my recycling bin. The only catch is that you must read the book — in separate pieces, if necessary — before you recycle it because its binding probably wouldn’t be crumbling if it wasn’t at least half a century old, which means that someone, likely not even you, toted it around for decades, and maybe they even read it, and it would be a shameful waste of their energies, and, frankly, ungrateful of you to unceremoniously chuck it just for the sin of decomposing."

Read it here. 

"'None of you girls should be doing this,' he said.

"He shook his head and I saw how his face moved a little with concern for me, an acknowledgement, I thought of how brave I was. Though I should have known that when men warn you to be careful, often they are warning you of the dark movie playing across their own brains. Some violent daydream prompting their guilty exhortations to 'make it home safe.'"

"I really don’t know how to teach anybody how to make the art they want. I think the desire should dictate the strategy. I believe in talent and self-education. And a writer needs to be in a position of some privilege to write: she needs time. But time is free. Time is not money, as the bullshit paradigm would have you believe. Teaching craft isn’t evil, but I think it’s dumb to accept a craft strategy whole cloth. A writer should do whatever she wants. If she wants to make money, she should do it. If she wants to spend a year in the woods confronting herself and nature, she should do that. Do whatever teaches you the most about yourself and your work. Go where you are least comfortable. You might find new shit to eat there."

Master's Review

"177. Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened. This may have served some purpose for you, but whatever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine. I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day's mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you."