At some point I accepted that my fate was to fall for guys who liked watching films none of my friends had seen. They didn’t want to watch buzzy or Oscar nominated films; in fact, they mostly refused. Sometimes I watched them solo — It’s NICE to be a part of a larger conversation, I’d say, defensively — but mostly I, a lousy TV-watcher anyway, appreciated the exposure to foreign films and old films and other movies that could reasonably be called “films.” Sam, I should say, is simultaneously diplomatic and non-judgmental about our viewing habits, but that’s as it should be — he’s the one I married.
Despite my love of “seeing what all the fuss is about,” I rarely consume cultural material within its window of group-chat relevance. Blame it on ADHD time-blindness or the fact that my reading list is often filled with blurb/research/event-book commitments, but I often end up reading Sally Rooney books a year after they’re published. I binged Dying for Sex nine months after multiple friends told me it was the best onscreen depiction of female friendship they’ve ever seen, watched Hamnet just the other day on the plane, and Heated Rivalry? I’m into it, I’m watching it, I’m just…too fidgety to sit down and finish it. I’ll get there one day! I promise!
Last month, Sam and I were lucky to spend two weeks on a belated honeymoon in (hot but not deadly hot, argh) southern France, based primarily out of our family friend’s beautiful apartment in Nîmes. For the first time in…years?…I decided to commit to 14 days of zero writing, which made me think all viewing/reading should also be 100% pleasure. While there, we decided to only watch movies filmed at least partially in the region, such as Swimming Pool with Charlotte Rampling (2003), the Kevin Kline-and-Meg-Ryan-rom-com French Kiss (1995), Oceans 12 (lol), and neo-noir action film Ronin (1998…more cars totaled during the production of this movie than any other in history, allegedly).
Before we left town, I had eyed my living room shelf of seductive, not-yet-read books and landed on bringing Veronique Olmi’s Daughters Beyond Command, a 496-page tome translated by Alison Anderson from French and published by Europa editions in 2022. I bought this book on Wolfish book tour on the recommendation of writer Patrick Nathan, at SubText books in St. Paul, Minnesota, after I’d mentioned I was writing about love as it was shaped by our political/global worlds. He recommended this decade-spanning saga of three sisters growing up in Aix-en-Provence during France’s cultural revolution though I don’t even remember if he’d actually read it. For three-and-a-half years it waited patiently on my shelf for, seemingly this: a big chunk of reading time whilst traveling (very near) Aix.
On the plane ride over, I distracted myself with a Harpers stuffed in my bag and eyed Daughters nervously. It felt daunting to dip into a book of this heft that I knew very little about. The blurbs on the back were not even about this book, they were about one of Olmi’s others. I Googled for more info and learned she was a contemporary French playwright, also that reviews of this book seemed to boil down to “pleasurable if slow-moving, good if you like feminism, art, activism.” I kept wishing someone I knew had already read it, or that I would be able to talk about it with someone upon finishing it. A socially anxious streak thought that if I was committing to a giant tome it should be one “everyone” was also reading (Lonesome Dove? Middlemarch?) so that I could “join the conversation” aka have anything at all to say when, in writing group, everyone had read War and Peace.
Was I worse than the old boyfriends? Part of me drawn to canonical and buzzy works and part of me resistant, trying to pretend like this “eclectic” taste distinguished me even as I simultaneously FOMO’d the conversations I, by virtue of positioning myself under this particular cultural rock, would never have?
After about 20 pages of Olmi, I forgot I had been on the fence. I was hooked. When I thought about writing into the feeling, I got a little sweaty. A part of me liked keeping the book secret, even though, as a writer, my career literally depends on readers telling other readers that they love my book. I began to question my love. Was it possible I was mostly drawn to it because I, a youngish woman with activist and artist tendencies in the South of France, had read it— a book about young women with activist and artist tendencies in the South of France?
Except no, I decided this love boiled down to two things:
The External: Reading a mega-book I had picked somewhat randomly off the shelf reminded me of how I used to read. Of being a tween with summer reading challenges, walking to the public library and leaving with novels I would consume in a fugue bubble of pleasure and solitude. Back then it seemed obvious that how the story hit your gut was more important than any conversation you would or would not have around it. It never crossed my mind that this type of private reading would fade out…traded for an era of shared end-of-year booklists, Instagram book recs, book groups, constantly reading for “work” or to stay “on top of” literary life as a person in it…etc. I like all those things! And also.
The Internal: What revelatory sentences! I dog-eared a lot of Olmi’s pages. Some drew me in because of the language (that “cruel”!)…
…and others because they articulated what I often felt myself trying to pin down…the psychology of living and loving in a broken world, and the stories we tell ourselves about why we make the choices we do. On raising children in the 1970s, for example, the mother of the daughter-protagonists believes that she…
Daughters Beyond Command felt like it had been written for me, and also like it had reached me at the exact right moment in time. It felt holy, reading this book.
When I got back, a friend asked if I’d read Yesteryear yet. I will? Maybe? In two years? Should I? Well what have you been reading? she asked. I paused. I did not want to be the kind of person who reported that she’d just finished a 496-page-French-book. Why? Was it because I didn’t want to imply that I was better than Yesteryear? Because I’d already spent so much time grumbling about boyfriends who waxed on French cinema? Or just because I wanted my relationship with this seemingly quite-unknown book to stay private, a summer-camp romance I didn’t have to explain to the real world? Then again, I felt like I owed it to Olmi to shout. I pitched the book. My friend nodded, encouragingly. We both knew she would never read it. That felt okay.
As a books person, I get that I’m around a lot of book-talk, so it might be that most other people are always reading in quiet, without wanting or expecting to discuss or share their literary consumption with other people. And yet, in this moment where so many of our cultural consumptive habits are swayed by Big Media Trends and the Algorithm…it’s harder to read outside the discourse. In the notches-on-the-bed-post approach to reading made popular by the “how many books I read this year” December 31 wrap-ups, how many of us subliminally gravitate toward books that are not only shorter in page count, but mean something when shared with others?
Listen, there is little I love as much as talking about books with friends and family, and also with strangers. I love the discourse. I want a literary ecosystem that helps it thrive. We need to support the authors of buzzy and non-buzzy books by buying them and raving online about them and supporting book-review-pubs and attending author events at local bookstores. We need to help people find the books they might not know about, as Patrick Nathan did for me way back in early 2023 (ty!!!!!).
At the same time…I also realize how much I cherish the now-uncomfortable tingle of reading [clears throat] the old way. Of just walking into a spine of pages not knowing anything about what will greet me. Of having the only “discourse” be in my own skull.
What was the last book you read kind of randomly, without knowing much about it or anybody else who had read it? Did it feel like a summer-camp fling? What if your summer reading challenge was to read a book from some other time or place that you were drawn to for an ineffable reason and (maybe) nobody around you had read? Say your relationship with that book is a tree falling in the middle of a forest, with nobody around to hear it.
Would this change what, or how, or why, you read?
My main life update is that I now have a James Beard Award sitting heavily on my messy desk and that, as someone who always wanted to get medals in middle school track and never did, is extremely cool.
I got a chance to talk with Oregon Public Broadcasting about how my winning essay came about and what it’s like to work with the wonderful Orion Magazine team. Speaking of that team…I had the best week teaching at this year’s Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop. Still running on fumes from all the brilliant words volleyed by faculty and participants. If you’re curious about this conference in the future, reach out!
What else?
I was very honored to get to contribute a short essay on how we rehearse for the future (of love AND climate change!) for Ecotone’s 20th Anniversary Issue. There are so, so many amazing writers in these pages. Are you in Portland? Do you want my extra journal copy? LMK…
Meanwhile, I’m currently at a writing residency on the Big Island of Hawaii (yesss), grappling with some tricky health concerns while out of state and simmering with frustration about American healthcare (nooo). But all is well. I am sending greetings from the gecko behind my bedroom mirror, the wild hog in the driveway, the kittens under the deck, the goats in the road, the mongoose in the lava rock.
xxErica
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.