
The Sunday Letter #19
The other day I drove past an older woman who was rollerblading alone and now I can’t stop thinking about her. She was clearly new to the practice, as most of her energy was focused on trying not to fall over as she slowly inched forward, pigeon-toed.
I keep trying to make sense of the idea that I might not get to do all the things I want to do in one life, but then I imagine myself at 60, still trying something new, still writing, still hoping to make sense of things, and I’m so excited. I want it all.
I was in McNally Robinson last week, picking up a copy of Kate Zambreno’s new book, The Light Room, when I passed by two young children and their caretaker. The kids were huddled together, showing each other the books they’d picked out. They were antsy and buzzing with excitement.
The boy said to his sister, “I just wanna get out of here and read.” The girl then turned to run toward her caretaker, who was browsing the shelf behind me. “Can we get bookmarks? My mom says it’s okay!” she pleaded as she held out her cellphone. “Sure,” the woman said, “but you don’t have any at home?”
“Not enough!” the girl replied.
By the way, if you’re in Saskatoon this summer, I highly recommend checking out Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan. I was able to attend the opening night of Romeo + Juliet as my brother worked on the production, and it was delightful!
This week’s recommendations
Celine Song’s new film, Past Lives, starts on the outside, looking in. Disembodied voices are describing the scene in front of us: a luminous Nora (played by Greta Lee) is flanked by two men in a bar as she tries and fails to devote equal attention to both. Who are they to each other, the voices ask. Is the Korean man her brother? Is the white man her coworker? Does she even know him? It turns out it’s all a lot more complicated than it seems.
There are so many soft moments in this film, like when Nora tells her childhood crush, Hae Sung, about a writer’s residency in Montauk, and he, still in Korea, asks, “What is Montauk?” “Like in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” she replies, referring to Charlie Kaufman’s film about the inevitable heartbreak we accept when we enter into relationships, and choosing to commit to something we know is doomed. Later, when Hae Sung visits Nora in New York for the first time, she shows him pictures of her wedding; he tenderly reaches out to place two fingers on her phone, zooming in on her face, past her husband. When he finally meets said husband, Hae Sung admits to Nora that he likes him—in fact, “I didn’t expect liking your husband to hurt this much.” He’s happy for her, knowing that her home country couldn’t contain her magnitudes, but mournful that he couldn’t meet them either.
Past Lives is marketed as a love story, and it is, but only tangentially, in the framing of it. The much more potent love story is between Nora and herself, as she comes to terms with her past selves, the choices she’s made, and trusting that she is where she is meant to be. A stunning film, which utilizes hues, soft fabrics, and gentle music to utmost effect. (See also
’s great review, which delves into the immigration story at the heart of the film.)Also, I finally finished Jane Fonda In Five Acts (yes, I tend to watch films in small chunks, I highly recommend it) and I was blown away by the kind of life she’s led and the kind of self-reflection that is afforded to us later in life. My favourite quote: “None of my marriages were democratic.”
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I finished Yellowface by R. F. Kuang for this month’s book club, and I found it to be an interesting (if at times oddly-paced) satire about who gets to tell which stories, about appropriation, and about writing with a ghost in the room:
“Stopping isn’t an option. I need to create. It is a physical urge, a craving, like breathing, like eating: when it’s going well, it’s better than sex, and when it’s not, I can’t take pleasure in anything else.”
I also finished Haley Jakobson’s lovely debut Old Enough, which was a tender exploration of finding one’s chosen community after moving away from home. It also deftly addresses trauma, the end of a friendship, the clumsiness of new love, and so much more. A very sweet debut.
“I loved nights like this, where one fun thing led into another and it felt like the universe was conspiring to show you a good time, to show you that you were worth having a good time.”
TikTok’s parent company is branching out into book publishing, and users and authors have some concerns.
For Modern Love, Kerry Egan on what heartbreak and grief have to teach us about love:
“I know what the lonely grief of the imaginary feels like. The grief is real because the love was real. For my daughter, the belief was magical, the relationship imaginary. But the love was real.”
From Lux Magazine, “Reading “Playboy” with Barbara Ehrenreich”: “Women, old stories tell us, are the root of all work.”
Jia Tolentino profiles 20-year-old sage Olivia Rodrigo:
“We order coffee, hers with oat milk, and she asks me how I met my husband. Funny enough, I say, I met him when I was 20 years old. “I want to meet my husband now!” she says. I’m grateful, I tell her, that my heart has been treated gently, and that I’m not currently dating 35-year-old adolescents. “Peter Pan boys,” she says sagely. But I wonder if, never having experienced heartbreak, I’ve missed something essential on the spectrum of human experience.
She notes that heartbreak comes in a lot of different shapes and sizes. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be ‘My boyfriend dumped me and I’m heartbroken.’ ”
That is the classic form, though, I say.
“Well, there’s still time,” she says, dryly.”
Percival Everett in The Yale Review, on trying to convey reality in fiction— “The words are the same, our imagined inflections are the same, but it is different. It is a special language that we have learned as writers of fiction”:
“The reader wants something. Lovers of literature want to enjoy the language, but there is more. They want finally what all readers want, they want to know. Whether this is voyeuristic, I can’t say, but there is a desire to know something about the world that is being offered.”
In Chatelaine, “At Home With Nani, My 85-Year-Old Roommate”:
“Having a housemate who is a senior citizen prepares you for life in unexpected ways. I’m reminded of my mortality when I flick Nani’s white hairs off my freshly laundered pants. (I don’t have the heart to tell her about it.) Or when she leaves the faucet gently running behind her. Nani isn’t easy on herself. If I point out her lapse, she will deny it, embarrassed. Patience, I tell myself, is the softest form of love.”
The most viral Lit Twitter article of the week was, by far, Patricia Lockwood on David Foster Wallace. One writer argued that Lockwood failed to “show reverence for more accomplished writers,” another writer pointed out that that was sexist, and the debate raged on. The real winner: Patricia Lockwood, for having the kind of career where she can hop on Twitter every few months with a new longform LRB piece dissecting a dead famous writer’s oeuvre, start a new discourse, and log back off again. The dream!
“We knew he was not benevolent exactly (well, some of us knew) but there was the sense that he was suffering on the same side as us. Why we believed we were reading him for moral instruction in the first place I have no idea, but it did prefigure the primary way we construct morality now: to be paying attention. To everything. That means you. To read him freshly in a time of failure: his, to be loved; mine, to hold all the facts, to have paid enough attention to sit for the test.”
The irreproachable Parul Sehgal on “The Tyranny of the Tale”:
“This is the red thread I find myself following through literature today—that flash of warning, a sensitivity to story which tips into wariness. Among the skeptics, story’s innocence is never presumed. Story is frisked. Story is marched to the dock.”
I recently received an advanced copy of Claudia Dey’s new novel, Daughter, which I am very excited to read. Here’s Dey, in a 2018 piece for The Paris Review called “Mothers as Makers of Death”:
“My husband could see I had a novel inside me, and it was a commotion, and the only way to settle it was to write it, and the only way to write it was to be alone. I had not been alone in a decade. I had not been alone because I am a mother, and a mother is never alone.”
Here’s what’s been stuck in my head this week: Lucy Dacus singing, “My mother hates her body, we share the same outline. She swears that she loves mine.” Adele singing “We were sad of getting old, it made us restless. Oh, I’m so mad I’m getting old, it makes me reckless.” ANOHNI covering Velvet Underground, singing “Maybe when I’m older, what do you think I’d see, If I could walk away from me?” and David Byrne singing, “We’re only tourists in this life; only tourists, but the view is nice.”
Reading: “I’m currently reading (and loving) Pachinko by Min Jin Lee - I knew I was reading a modern classic right from the very first sentence. It’s a long read, but so so good. I’ve also recently enjoyed Rouge - Mona Awad’s new girly horror coming out in September, and Ruth Reichl’s Save Me The Plums, a memoir about Reichl's career as a restaurant critic and magazine editor in NYC.”
Watching: “I’ve been rewatching One Tree Hill for the nostalgia (my memory is terrible, so it feels like I’m watching it for the first time) and The Great, which quickly became one of my all-time favorite shows. It's absolutely brilliant. I love everything about it - the writing, the cast, the costume design.”
Listening: “Apparently I’m in my Lana Del Rey era! I’ve been going through her entire discography and can’t stop listening to Say Yes to Heaven and Margaret. I’ve also been listening to lots of Cleo Sol and Sade.”
Life, etc: “This year has been all about putting myself out there in every sense of the word: making an effort to meet new people, taking big professional risks and building my self-confidence by showing myself I can do the scary things. It's stressful, but so rewarding.”
P.S. You can find Marta on Instagram and here on Substack @
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