Talking To Deborah Levy: As If
Autobiographic writing & Where it leads | The Muse Letter No. 101
Marcelle Sauvageot’s Laissez-moi: Commentaire
It’s Spring without you. It’s the green leaves emerging and the air tasting like fresh cut cucumbers: moist, cold, pure. I want to put them in a gin and tonic to drown.
I walk by a bookshop and find a used version of Marcelle Sauvageot’s Laissez-moi: Commentaire. I pay 4€ and read it the whole afternoon at Schillerpark. The lilacs are slouching forward filling the air with their rich sweet scent, I break off a few branches to bring home.
Sauvageot wrote letters to her ex-lover, her ex-fiancé while impatiently trying to heal from tuberculosis and a broken heart at a Sanatorium. She never sends them. Instead, she publishes them. Writing about real people is always cruel. They don’t have a chance to answer.
So I guess this is revenge.
3 years later. Another Spring. Another you. Another broken heart. I remember Sauvageot. And I write it all down. All those you’s. All of it. The whole Heartbreak Hotel. I decorate the rooms. I turn them into one. I call it “This Feeling Of Emptiness Like Shopping For Groceries And Forgetting To Bring The Pfandflaschen”.
I merge her words and mine, I put them into the mouth of an actress. She walks on stage, dripping wet, explaining our grief.
I never talk to you again. I publish it instead.
Deborah Levy - Living Memoir Trilogy
I’m in Edinburgh and the light is getting weaker. It’s November and I’m coming to terms with the fact that living alone: sucks. And I cannot afford it.
This is where she finds me: “That spring when life was very hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn’t see where there was to get to, I seemed to cry most on escalators at train station. Going down them was fine but there was something about standing still and being carried upwards that did it. From apparently nowhere tears poured out of me and by the time I got to the top and felt the wind rushing in, it took all my effort to stop myself from sobbing. It was as if the momentum of the escalator carrying me forwards and upwards was a physical expression of a conversation I was having with myself. ”
On my own mental staircase. Lifting me up.
It feels like talking to Deborah Levy: as if.
A year later I will write my answer.
Amy Liptrot - The Outrun
I remember being at my parents’ home watching a tv program and the landscape of Orkney, Scotland flickering over the screen along with a tall blond woman watching birds and that longing slowly awakening again to leave Berlin and my old life behind. To find something else, something different. Something like that.
I don’t remember exactly how and when I read The Outrun but it must have been around the same time I was decluttering my memory chest, an old wooden family heirloom, the dowry chest of a great-great-aunt from 1892 because I had made the plan to move to Edinburgh and it felt quite fitting to read a memoir by a Scottish author more or less my age.
I remember sitting on the floor with conflicting feelings about my teens and early twenties, contemplating how I actually wanted to live my life and justifying a move, while reading about the struggles of another, guiding me:
“Rain on me. Strike me with fire. I feel like lightning in slow motion. I am one fathom deep and contain the unknown. I am vibrating at a frequency invisible to man and I'm ready to be brave.”
Kate Bolick - Spinster
New York in early fall and a shitty Airbnb in Bushwick. It’s my first time in the city having overcome my inherent and ongoing fear of flying. I walk a lot and subsequently am tired a lot, I find out that a poet is renting the bunkbed next to me. It’s a four-bed dorm and at 3 AM the guy underneath me doesn’t realise his headphones aren’t plugged in properly and we can all hear the soothing voice of Ira Glass hosting another podcast episode of This American Life till someone musters up the courage to let him know.
The poet and I exchange Instagram handles, the next day we watch the presidential debates and everybody is still hoping that Hillary will win.
Months later I see a book popping up on the poet’s Instagram page: Spinster by Kate Bolick. Newly heartbroken and single, I trust her advice and order my own copy the same day.
“Being single is like being an artist, not because creating a functional single life is an art form, but because it requires the same close attention to one's singular needs, as well as the will and focus to fulfill them. Just as the artist arranges her life around her creativity, sacrificing conventional comforts and even social acceptance, sleeping and eating according to her own rhythms, so that her talent thrives above all else, nurtured the way a child might be, so a single person has to think hard to decipher what makes her happiest and most fulfilled.”
Bolick writes about her personal path as a spinster, while also describing other women’s fates. Specifically, other women who wrote namely: columnist Neith Boyce, essayist Maeve Brennan, social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and novelist Edith Wharton.
Watching her, watching other women, trying to find connections, weaving ourselves into the narration. I read about Wharton and end up on Les Iles d'Or - Porquerolles a french island 2 years later, one that she visited while residing in the hotel, where I would also book a room. Autobiography is exactly that. It leads you places. It connects you to the world, it is an agenda if you let it.
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IN CASE YOU MISSED LAST WEEK’S MUSE LETTER
May is the month of new beginnings. Not just because it marks the anniversary of this newsletter – TWO YEARS! – can you believe it? 100 Muse Letters!
Intuitively I have chosen May for many other new beginnings in the past, too. 3 years ago I moved to Edinburgh, in Mid-May, 5 years ago I published my first graphic novel at the beginning of May. I got my dog Filou 4 years ago also in May. It is the month when I like to have things happen.
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