"Nonfiction has crept closer to fiction in our time in ways that are not flattering to fiction, in part because too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like the future, is dark. There's so much we don't know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother's, or a celebrated figure's, an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing. They tell us that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the absence of exact information.

Often enough we don't know such things even when it comes to ourselves, let alone someone who perished in an epoch whose very textures and reflexes were unlike ours. Filling in the blanks replaces the truth that we don't entirely know with the false sense that we do. We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't."

"She got the box open and put her hand into the cooling ashes and tossed or dropped them – with other tiny recalcitrant bits of the body – among those roadside plants. Doing this was like wading and then throwing yourself into the lake for the first icy swim, in June. A sickening shock at first, then amazement that you were still moving, lifted up on a stream of steely devotion – calm above the surface of your life, surviving, though the pain of the cold continued to wash into your body."

"Comfort"
Alice Munro

Still reading Rivecca's collection, which is blowing me away. Yesterday I spent time in a friend's backyard reading "Very Special Victims" (while my dog sniffed around, barked at stray cats, and then, reluctantly, curled up under the steps where I was sitting). After I finished, I put the book down for a long while. 

I read an interview with her while on break this afternoon. Her feelings about the function of short stories reflect how I felt last night when I set her collection on the grated steps next to me and stared out at the broken chain link fencing and spring-green trees surrounding Heewa's yard:

"There’s still a Puritanism in U.S. culture that dictates that art has to be “useful” in some way, instructive or inspiring in a very moralistic, triumph-of-the-human-spirit way. And stories very rarely give that kind of warm & fuzzy inspiration. The inspiration they provide–for me, anyway–is more rigorous and challenging. A good story discomfits you, forces you to question things, to turn the lens on yourself. It leaves you with an unsettled feeling that’s almost indescribable. And in contemporary culture, there’s a reluctance to sit with that kind of unnameable sensation."

It's strange to feel so deeply recognized by a piece of writing, although of course that's why many of us read. But still, when it happens, it feels like standing in front of a mirror while touching your face – that's you there, isn't it? And as Rivecca said, it's unsettling and nearly indescribable. 

I underlined this paragraph from "Very Special Victims": 

"She had never hated him before; she did now. She scrutinized him for a trace of the taut, hunted shiftiness men's faces assumed when they were driven to be with her and didn't know why. It was never sweet. They were never besotted, just stiffly, sullenly advancing as though shoved toward her from behind. Sometimes they looked at her like an animal eyeing an untrustworthy trainer; other times in a gauging, measuring way, like she was an obstruction they needed to lift and move to get what they wanted." 

"It occurs to you that the soul is just another body–only sheerer and with fewer points of entrance or exit–and yours has tiptoed, giddily impish as a truant, away from the flesh puppet. You expected it to hurt more than this, or at least to be accompanied by a ripping sound." 

"It Sounds Like You're Feeling"
Suzanne Rivecca

I'm reading Death is Not an Option, Suzanne Rivecca's 2010 story collection. Rachel and I stopped by Changing Hands on Independent Bookstore Day. It's been a while since I've spent so long in a bookstore or been in one at all, which, how did that happen? I'm annoyed. But, whatever, time is a slippery slug, and sometimes that happens. Sometimes you eat too much takeout and there's a dog at home who needs to pee so you can't go to The Strand after work. 

I didn't realize that Rivecca also wrote "What Men Talk About When They Talk About Mary Gaitskill" which I remember reading on The Rumpus a few years ago. The essay eventually made me pick up Bad Behavior. I hadn't read any Gaitskill at that point, and now she's one of my favorite writers. (Sam is reading Rivecca's essay now, and he just cracked up laughing. "She's so funny!" he said, and then he read me her line about ice dildos. So. Yeah, she's great.) 

It goes without saying, but–it's real nice to be back in Phoenix. 

I love advice columns & I love Ask Polly:

"For me, there's nothing more satisfying than trotting out some complicated, tangled, unwieldy thoughts and emotions and instead of just listening patiently, my husband throws ideas into the mix, offers his own insights, makes stupid jokes, and most of all welcomes the full brunt of what I'm bringing to the table. The difference between being with someone who's engaged and eager to dive into complicated conversations and someone who's not that into hashing things out? To me that's the difference between feeling relaxed and happy and satisfied and feeling like an impatient shrew around the clock. I've settled for less plenty of times, but looking back, I don't know what I was thinking. I was always the happiest with the complex thinkers, and I was always dissatisfied and depressed and lonely in the company of reductive thinkers who didn't really love complex, rambling conversations."

Heather Havrilesky

Oh, how this made me laugh this morning:

"This is man who daily swims through a goddamn quagmire of piss and bullshit and calls it a proud and honorable journey." 

Heather Havrilesky

"I’ve skied steep slopes and hung from a rock face by a short length of rope, but staring into someone’s eyes for four silent minutes was one of the more thrilling and terrifying experiences of my life. I spent the first couple of minutes just trying to breathe properly. There was a lot of nervous smiling until, eventually, we settled in.

I know the eyes are the windows to the soul or whatever, but the real crux of the moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me. Once I embraced the terror of this realization and gave it time to subside, I arrived somewhere unexpected.

I felt brave, and in a state of wonder. Part of that wonder was at my own vulnerability and part was the weird kind of wonder you get from saying a word over and over until it loses its meaning and becomes what it actually is: an assemblage of sounds."

And:

"I wondered what would come of our interaction. If nothing else, I thought it would make a good story. But I see now that the story isn’t about us; it’s about what it means to bother to know someone, which is really a story about what it means to be known."

To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This
Mandy Len Catron

"Sometimes, things simply happen too late. Sometimes, beautiful things are simply not what we want, no matter how badly we want to want them."

A Life in Men
Gina Frangello

"But it's love that does us in. Over and over / again"

February
Margaret Atwood

"I smiled warmly and winked and quickly settled my tab and hurried out before someone blew my cover. And I remember thinking, Well, that’s the point of being alone—it’s not anything to do with you. It’s about being something in someone else’s life, and no one ever knows the difference, or the truth. That’s why people like bad movies and bad fiction, and it’s worth it, it’s worth it, it’s worth it."

"A Dance to the Music of Time"
Sadie Stein

"Yet for a long time when I did think of her, I never questioned what I believed had been shown to me. Long, long afterwards, when I was not at all interested in any unnatural display, I still had it in my mind that such a thing had happened. I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn't believe it anymore."

The Eye 
Alice Munro

"Your ideas about how people "should" be are honorable and well-intentioned enough, but they're also very immature. It's immature not to listen closely and work hard to grasp WHY people who are different from you do the things they do. It's immature not to recognize how hard people struggle just to come up with a system for dealing with their disappointments and frustrations. It's immature not to recognize that most people DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT LOVE IS. Most people don't feel loved enough. Most people feel abandoned and lost. Most people are trying, with every word out of their mouths, to get more love — MORE MORE MORE — from the people around them. Most people chase money, real estate, stuff, fame, attention, sexual intrigue, gossip, just for a little taste of love, just for a momentary glow of acceptance and happiness from the world."

Ask Polly: Why Do Other People Always Mess Up?
Heather Havrilesky

Uh oh, 2015 Reading List from The Millions. Can't wait for: 

• Find Me by Laura van den Berg
• Get in Trouble by Kelly Link (Is it February 3rd yet?)
• The Strange Case of Rachel K by Rachel Kushner
• Ember Days by Nick Ripatrazone
• God Help the Child by Toni Morrison
• The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard
• Saint Mazie by Jami Attenberg

"That image, of the self, does not belong equally to everyone. As a woman, I must keep myself under constant surveillance: how do I look as I rise from the bed, and while I walk through the store buying groceries, and while I run with the dog in the park? From childhood, I was taught to survey and police and maintain my image continually, and in this role--as both surveyor and the image that is surveyed--I learned to see myself as others see me: as an object to be viewed and evaluated, a sight."

The Other Side
Lacy M. Johnson

"And let's be clear: Nine times out of ten, when someone says, "Yeah, I'm an asshole, I'm a loser, I'm a dick," what that person really means is, "I can't stand for anyone else to draw conclusions about me, so I have to do it for them.""

- Ask Polly: How Do I Stop Being Such a Dick? 
Heather Havrilesky

"At some point in the night, I sit at my desk, and do what Dubus suggested. I write vertically. I have never been a writer with a lot of time to write. I am thankful for that. I am not sure what would happen if I had hours to work. Not being able to write makes me want to write very badly. It makes me not want to squander the moments when I sit with a story."

– Gestation of Ideas: On Vertical Writing and Living 
Nick Ripatrazone

"She looked out – not at me. She said the worst thing of all. Remembering it, I see the unwashed window pane. She said, 'Don't you girls ever know when you're well off? Now you've got no one to lie to you, to belittle you, to make a fool of you, to stab you in the back.' But we were different – different ages, different women, two lines of a graph that could never cross.

Mostly when people say 'I know exactly how I felt' it can't be true, but here I am sure – sure of Mrs. Ireland and the window and of what she said. The recollection has something to do with the blackest kind of terror, as stunning as the bolts of happiness that strike for no reason. This blackness, this darkening, was not wholly Mrs. Ireland, no; I think it had to do with the men, with squares and walls and limits and numbers. How do you stand if you stand upon Zero? What will the passage be like between Zero and One? And what will happen at One? Yes, what will happen?"

– "Between Zero and One"
Mavis Gallant

"I do have personal boundaries and I'm actually a very private person, but there's no point in pretending I'm always cheerful," she says. "I'm not. That's just not me, and I don't feel the need to create a persona. And I don't feel the need to play the games that sometimes people play, like projecting a perfect life or a happy life or very well crafted insecurities. No, I kind of have them all."

– Profile of Roxane Gay on NPR.
(Just what I needed to read today.)

To continue to the self-promotion train that is this week, my story The Panda Barn is up at Hobart. ! I'm excited.