Process Diary #10 📚
Since January, I have read the first half of several books—among them, Leslie Jamison’s Splinters and Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, And Tomorrow—without being able to finish a single one. Last year alone I read thirty-seven books, and in 2022, I read fifty, but this year—probably due to the anxiety surrounding my move home—reading has felt like an excruciatingly tiresome chore. And what’s interesting is that whenever my anxiety or depression flare up, they almost always affect my ability to read; reading, as my hobby but also as my profession, is the invisible metronome within my life—without which I lose all sense of scheduling and almost always feel a little unmoored. Lately, though, I find myself spending more hours online watching videos and reading celebrity gossip—a palliative balm of sorts, perfect for mind-numbing, emotional suppression. While I have always sought out more lyrical writing during times like this—hoping that something refined or polished might restore the fire in me—my current tolerance for longer essays and book-length narratives, no matter how much I try to change it, is small.
Which is why I am surprised that Joyce Carol Oates’ writing—notorious for its never-ending, complex sentences and the 800-page tomes in which these sentences occur—has been the precise antidote to my reading slump. Oates’ narrative style is feral and erratic and a little bizarre. She writes in a way that sometimes defies grammatical structures and language norms, and I realized after reading the first few pages of her book, A Widow’s Story—a memoir about the death of her first husband, Raymond Smith, and the process of disentangling herself from their previously shared life—that what I needed most from my reading life wasn’t so much a beautiful or precious book, but a story that felt split-brained and a little raw. I thought that I needed to find a writer whose overall narrative was compelling and enlightening and a little bit healing—a tenderness, perhaps, or something more delicate. But reading Oates reminded me of the power of line-level writing in enacting a sense of pure and tortuous anxiety. Oates’ sentences, which often veer off into multiple directions and multiple trains of thought, seemed an even match—finally—for the relentless noise of my thoughts.
Take this passage, which appears early on in the book, in which Oates establishes her late husband as a caring and careful person—someone who tended to their houseplants and kept the minutiae of their domestic life up and running:
“The potted soil is probably very poor, there are rapacious insects devouring their leaves, but Ray is determined to nurse the nasturtiums along and through a window I observe him, unseen by him; I feel a sudden faintness, a rush of love for him, and also the futility of such love—as my then-young husband was determined to keep the bedraggled nasturtiums alive, so we are determined to keep alive those whom we love, we yearn to protect them, shield them from harm. To be mortal is to know that you can’t do this, yet you must try.”
In Joyce Carol Oates fashion, this large block of text is actually comprised of only two sentences. And I realized that in Oates’ grief, she made the creative decision to harness her anxiety and use it as a narrative technique—employing semicolons and em-dashes to elongate a thought, or using a combination of sentence lengths to enact a feeling of breathlessness. In another example, from her novel, Blonde, Oates imagines the life of Marilyn Monroe—tapping into the Hollywood frenzy that eventually brings Monroe to madness. I remember reading this passage last year and was moved by how universally true it felt for anyone not yet confident or secure in their life, despite the writing itself being quite simple:
“Maybe all there is is just the next thing maybe all there is is just the next thing maybe all there is is just just the next just the next thing maybe all there is is just the next maybe all there is is is just is just the next thing Roslyn's words stuck in her head & she could not stop repeating them Maybe all there is is just the next thing like a Hindu mantra & she was a yogin murmuring her secret prayer Maybe all there is just the next thing
She thought, That's a comfort!”
Sometimes when I feel anxious, I try to write my way through the feeling, but what often happens is I inadvertently romanticize my experience and come away from it feeling further from myself. What Oates reminded me to do was lean into the anxiety—that it is one thing to write about something, but it is another thing entirely to make that feeling a whole world and allow yourself to enter it. Oates’ writing triggers a particular kind of anxiety, but in reading her again, I have started to feel less alone and a little less ashamed of the myriad feelings and voices and thoughts that have been vying for space in my head. I kept thinking while reading A Widow’s Story about how much I loved the messiness of her narration. Grief isn’t something precious and I don’t need to live preciously—and I don’t have to find books that speak about it all in eloquent terms, either. Like Oates wrote in Blonde: Maybe all there is is just the next thing maybe all there is is just the next thing maybe all there is is just the next thing…
Thanks for reading,
Rachel