I was thinking this morning about how much I was going to miss my apartment while I was down in New Orleans. The heat just kicked in and it’s cozy in here, and the icy winter blue of the sky makes the bridge look exceptionally stoic and austere. There’s also this perfect intersection of the lines of the bridge and the lines from my windowpanes that I can see only from my lofted bed, and it appeals so deeply to the tiny aspergery part of me, which is also the part of me that loves Sol Lewitt’s work. If I stare it long enough maybe I can get the rest of my life to fit together just as neatly.
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My hand-edited manuscript of THE MIDDLESTEINS, the one that I did over Thanksgiving at the farmhouse in New Hampshire while my friends were downstairs talking and cooking and I could hear their laughter rising up through the floor and it fueled some sort of temporary greatness wherein I saw every little thing that needed to be fixed (and obviously that moment cannot be recreated), was lost by UPS last week. And I don’t even want to talk about it except to say that I have allowed myself very little time to be angry about this except in curse-filled emails to my agent, and now, to you, too.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
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I haven’t been doing much lately but going to holiday parties (which are mostly fun and some of them have actually been pretty great and might I just say if you happen to know a polka band that plays cover songs of classic 80s hits I highly recommend offering them a case of beer or two to play your party) (also photobooths where I get fun pictures taken of me with my beloved co-workers and also famous British novelists) and then recovering from them. I run lots of errands. (Why are there so many errands to run? Why is there so much mindless shit to accomplish?) Also, when it is not raining, I try to go for long walks in the morning. I read for a few hours a day. My new novel is not entirely dormant, but it is not speeding along either. I would even comment that it is going slowly, although not poorly, which is to say that I like everything I write, when I write it, which is not very often. How about that? Did I just really take a long time to say that I am not writing that much?
I am betting on New Orleans, betting that things will be different there. I’m all in on New Orleans.
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I wrote about Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment for “The Year in Reading” feature over on The Millions. I really recommend you buy it at WORD.
