Reading · From Somewhere with Anna Sale

I love novelist Elizabeth Strout’s writing — its spareness that is never trying too hard. She tells us, the readers, just what we need to know when. Maybe it’s this patient unfurling that makes me totally fall in love with her characters. The first Strout character I fell for was Olive Kittridge, the namesake of the novel that would win the Pulitzer Prize and become a mini-series starring Frances McDormand.

Each character is so specific. Her latest novel The Things We Never Say, which was long-listed for this year’s Booker Prize, tells the story of Artie, a 57-year-old public high school teacher struggling with the state of the world and the rhythms of a lived-in marriage and parenting an adult child. So much so, that he is also struggling with suicidal thoughts. He finds comfort, or at least insight, from the writings of Carl Jung. But, otherwise, he feels very lonely.

In this week’s episode, Elizabeth and I talk about Carl Jung, and what he has to say about loneliness and midlife. We talk about her midlife reset in her early 40s, when the end of her first marriage coincided with publishcation of her first novel. And she describes the horrifying standup class that helped her start writing felt that felt true and less like an impression of somebody else’s.

the routine that I had made up about myself was that I was a white woman from New England, a very uptight white woman from New England, making fun of myself for being an uptight white woman from New England. And honestly, it was not until I did that routine and went through that class that I understood that I was a white woman from New England. That’s the truth.
That’s how New England I was….I’ve been living in New York and there’s so many different cultures and so many different kinds of people. And so I had slowly begun to realize, oh, I am just one other type….And then that is when I understood that I had to go back in my mind to New England. And that the New England, the way the sun fell on the pine needles, you know, the stone walls, everything that I had just absorbed, that’s where I needed to be writing from.

We also talk about Elizabeth’s marriage now to a man whom she met at one of her book events. It reminded me of Isabelle Allende telling me how she connected with her husband after he was captivated by hearing hear on public radio. So here’s the lesson: if you’re a straight man and divorced, widowed, or never married, and you’re a reader of a remarkable unattached straight woman, shoot your shot!

A rockstar becomes #OldManBerkeley. A charming story about Green Day’s traveling guitarist’s routines at home, from my local news in Berkeleyside.
Matthew Snipper writing beautifully about grief in The Cut after the death of his young son. “What do you do after the worst thing you can imagine actually occurs? Literally, what do you do: Where do you drag your burdensome body and freshly maimed mind?” He has a new memoir.
On my family’s long drive back to California, we joined Shackleton and his men as they tried to survive in the Anarctic. HOLY MOLY. This audiobook of Alfred Lansing’s 1959 retelling of their grueling teamwork will make you appreciate having warm toes and dry socks.
As someone currently investing in piano lessons, I appreciated this episode of Switched on Pop featuring pianist Lang Lang where they talk about where you can fit personality into the elegance of classical piano music. I also liked picturing them chatting in the Steinway showroom in New York City, where it was recorded.
The movie You’ve Got Mail got on my kids radar after Aubrey Plaza told Amy Poehler on her podcast it was a favorite comfort movie. We watched it together as a family and it holds up! Tom and Meg are so darn charming, and for me, its happy ending still felt bittersweet because the cute neighborhood children’s bookstore doesn’t survive. Also, do you remember that both Dave Chappelle and Dabney Coleman are in it? I did not. I woke up this morning missing Nora Ephron.

Until next week,

Anna

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