No 2: I’M SORRY JOAN
IMAGE BY LUCIA AUERBACH
BY: REBECCA KOPELMAN
One summer, I was seeing a boy, the heir to some decrepit American empire, who told me that he thought in abstract shapes. He had to translate each of his ideas painstakingly into words, he said, and lost a great deal of his pulsing, animal intelligence once he spoke his thoughts aloud. He assumed I operated that way too, and I felt almost guilty telling him that I thought in full sentences.
“My thoughts are all grammatically correct,” I said. “I see them typed out behind my eyes. I revise them if I need to, but I never have to translate.” He sighed, and I wished then that I were a poet instead of an essayist.
I don’t write because I have any particular story to tell, or even because I am especially creative: I write because I love text. Everything I see and everyone I meet becomes immediately flattened in my mind: I narrate my life’s events as they unfold, hold each shard of moment up to the light and let it calcify before it even has a chance to breathe. I live my life airlessly, and I am frightened by this fact.
This is perhaps why a writer like Joan Didion is both highly appealing and highly dangerous for me. She is relentlessly cerebral, relentlessly stylish in her composition. I learned most of my little tricks–my self-centeredness, my distance, my aversion to narrative–from her. When I first started writing seriously, in high school, I was drawn to literary nonfiction because of its wealth of characters: Gay Talese with his little fedora, Hunter S. Thompson with his guns, Tom Wolfe with his linen suits, and of course Joan, with her pale temples and cocked cigarettes. More than I wanted to experience the human condition in all of its hideous glory, I wanted to be envied for my erudition and strangeness, rendered attractive by my cleverness. I knew myself to be mostly unpretty, and I thought I could write my way into beauty.
The thing with that sort of writing, however, is that it’s difficult to emulate without becoming brittle and substanceless. I am not Tom, or Gay, or Hunter or Joan. I am, unfortunately, Bec. I cannot flatten my own self in the way I can flatten my little stories to fit onto the page.
My dimensionality is frustrating–why can’t I just be a character? Why must I be boring and bored and boorish? I am sincerely afraid that I don’t hold a single interesting (or even firm) opinion. Sometimes, I feel like a liar, manufacturing intrigue in my writing and in conversation. I force myself to fight for ideas I don’t especially care about, playing the part of somebody with a rich internal life.
I write because my mind is a piece of text, but also to escape my own spinelessness. I write towards a spine and a life lived, paradoxically, unrefracted through the page.
