Process Diary #3 📚

On writing a near-perfect sentence, Leslie Jamison, and the power of words.

Good morning! Welcome to Wednesday. The weather in Tokyo has finally become warm enough to pack away my kotatsu (a Japanese low table with a heater underneath), which means that after living in Japan for almost three years, I have officially experienced my final winter as a resident of my old and drafty, but otherwise wholly excellent apartment.

This week’s reading recommendation is an essay by Leslie Jamison, who, in an exploration that is equal parts critical and inquisitive, unpacks the cultural phenomenon behind the popularity of gaslighting—both the using and the doing of the term. From a craft standpoint, the essay reminded me of Cheryl Merrill’s “13 Ways of Looking at an Elephant”, which, very obviously, examines “elephant”—the term, its context, its historiography—from thirteen different lens. Jamison, too, does something similar in this essay, which is why I wanted to share it with you. Through interviews with patients, clinicians, herself, and with friends, she offers up a very detailed exposé of something that has taken deep root in today’s culture. You can read excerpts of both below, followed by this week’s Process Diary for paying subscribers: a discussion on sentence structure and why I obsess over it.

From Leslie Jamison’s “So You Think You’ve Been Gaslit”:

“Gila Ashtor, a psychoanalyst and a professor at Columbia University, told me she often sees patients experience a profound sense of relief when it occurs to them that they may have been gaslit. As she put it, ‘It’s like light at the end of the tunnel.’ But Ashtor worries that such relief may be deceptive, in that it risks effacing the particular (often unconscious) reasons they may have been drawn to the dynamic. Ashtor defines gaslighting as ‘the voluntary relinquishing of one’s narrative to another person,’ and the word ‘voluntary’ is crucial—that’s what makes it a dynamic rather than just a unilateral act of violence. For Ashtor, it’s not a question of blaming the victim but of examining their susceptibility: what makes someone ready to accept another person’s narrative of their own experience? What might they have been seeking?”

From Cheryl Merrill’s “13 Ways of Looking at an Elephant”

“An elephant's vision is front facing, binocular, but an elephant also has a large blind spot caused by its nose. Place both hands between your eyes in the manner of prayer and you will see what I mean. The rods in an elephant's eye register mostly greens and blues, helpful to a creature who needs huge amounts of water and browse. It is said that elephants will stare at a full moon; do they also see the stars?

What would it be like to think without words and recognize shapes without names?”

---

Process Diary #3: On Aspiring to Write a Near-Perfect Sentence

This week I have been focusing a lot on sentence structure and sentence variability—aspects of writing that, when done well, can determine whether your audience remains interested in what you have to say or not. I myself will often put a book or magazine down as soon as I discover that I don’t like the writing style—even if the story or the author or the research are worthy of praise. While a lot of this comes down to personal taste, I do believe that a writer’s ability to keep readers’ attention lies not in any grandiose sweepings of the pen, but in the barely-there and hardly perceptible mechanics of their sentences. Like any relationship, that which exists between a writer and a reader ought to be built upon mutual curiosity of, and investment in, one another—where small and intentional building blocks can create a whole world of trust.