This is not a solid state object.
on life & literature in the middle distance (and also: Paris)
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Lately I’ve been reading
, whose books are beautifully impossible to classify. I’m currently reading Break.up, described on the back cover as a “novel in essays.” It’s a book about traveling alone through Europe by train after the breakup of a relationship that was always elusive, not quite solid. Exchanging texts with the man at the center of the breakup, Walsh ruminates on the nature of love, relationships, writing, and travel. Ultimately, it is a book about living in a world defined by digital spaces (which is stated on the cover) and about living as the object of someone else’s observation or lack thereof (which is not stated on the cover).In Chapter one, Walsh tries to decide what kind of book she is writing. She wonders if it will be a self-help book but then decides that it will not—“as though the self could be helped only by writing…”
I’ve done it online, tweaking my profiles, refining sentences, but a book is a solid state object: there it is, all at once, not a word can be altered, and nothing tells you the time quicker than a yellowed paperback.
Every writer who sends a book out into the world must come to terms with the solid state of that book, its basic inalterability. Maybe that is what makes writing online so easy, and what makes finishing a book so hard.
Once your publisher has sent the book to print, you cannot do a thing to change it. Ostensibly you can fix typos between editions, but you cannot fix the thing itself, the book as a whole, its nature and its substance. By then you have gone over every sentence dozens of times, you have done multiple full-scale revisions, you have done your best. And yet you are aware even as you approve the final page proofs that the book does not really have your approval and it never will. You have not written the book you meant to write. You have not done everything you intended. You are not signing off on the book’s actual readiness to be read, you are only signing off on the fact of its inalterability. You are saying, “This is about as good as it’s going to get in this moment in time.”
Of course, this moment in time is all you’ve got. Once it goes to print, there are no more moments to futz with the book. The book you have written is the book that will be read (or not read), no matter what you dream of doing differently.
We writers have grown so accustomed to the ability to tweak and refine that the solid state object-ness of the book is a tough beast to wrestle. I remember those first days of blogging, the liberating joy of the form. I wrote for Salon blogs during their first year, back when they were pretty much the only kid on the block. I later wrote a blog for SFGate’s City Brights. This was twenty-something years ago. The revelation in those early days was that you could hit publish and still go back and fix a sentence any time you wanted. If you wrote something that embarrassed you, you could delete it. If you wrote something that, upon reflection, felt meaningless, you could erase it (sort of—in those days we did not understand the wayback machine).
But I digress. I picked up Break.up because, when I was flipping through it in the bookstore, I saw that there was a chapter titled “Paris/Passing.” These days I am always picking up nonfiction books that include some version of Paris. I am curious about Paris as experienced by other writers, as I attempt to recall a certain version of Paris experienced by me. I am trying to remember that place. That moment in time. The life we spun there, the life that at times felt as though it was spinning out.
It was such a short time, relatively speaking, those two-plus years in Paris. And yet it is outsized in memory. Now, when I see television shows or movies set in Paris, I feel a pang. I recognize the streets, the neighborhoods, the light. I wonder, “Why did I not do Paris better?”