Don’t let life just happen to you

VIENNA | The Muse Letter No. 186

The green velvet worn out, wallpaper scraps barely holding onto the wall, the ceiling darkened from decades of cigarette smoke: there are places that allow you to step into a younger version of yourself, as if time was a construct of the outside world, a folly to entertain elsewhere. In Vienna I am carrying a younger skin.

It’s been 8 years since I last walked into Cafe Jelinek and yet as I sit by the window at a table that is designed for one, it is not that I remember it all, it is as if the plush sofa, the marbled table, the high ceiling and the Schlagobers remember me, that by the simple act of sitting down: I am her again.

“Why do you write about the personal, the mundane?”, Jaqueline Scheiber asked me last night during our conversation on essays and writing our future selves at o*books. The reason I am in Vienna to celebrate the release of the final book of my poetic memoir trilogy.

And I thought of something that Sarah Manguso said in a podcast I listened to a while ago, that i…