Book Review by a Ghost

in which I mention no title, no author, no ex

I know it goes against everything—ethics, common sense, literary citizenship—to write a book review without mentioning the book but I feel like I have no choice. I am at an arts residency in Virginia, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and this is where my head is at. It’s where I had my first residency in 2009, and the other night I spoke to a fellow at dinner who had taken an online class of mine. I had mentioned on my first day here all I’d done is download this memoir onto my kindle and I had finished it so fast. Maybe it was the Kindle effect? Or maybe it was because I not only knew the author but I knew the subject also? In the course of our conversation, I elaborated on my connection to the author, and then we both agreed me writing an essay about it might make sense. But the how did not occur to me until now.

I don’t think she’d mind if I disclosed but I think it’s information the reader might be distracted by to the point of making us both unreliable narrators. And what is a book review but a sales recommendation in the end? So if you can’t name the author or the book what is the point? Is it perhaps that the book review is also public practice, an exercise in display—the reviewer making transparent their critical thinking, cultural insights, and in the end artistic perceptions all with some ideal literary readership in mind?

Almost exactly 10 years ago, the greatest career high of my life happened: a book review of mine made it to the cover of The New York Times Book Review. It was for Helen Oyeyemi’s masterpiece Boy Snow Bird and I remember feeling so indebted to that book for not just getting me that career laurel, but for also giving me to the space to flex some insights I had on race, fabulism, and the literature of our era. All I wanted back then was to be known for my book reviews, in a way more than my own books.

In any case, this review will go unnoticed by a readership hoping to buy a book as they won’t know what the book is. The question is, shall I send it to the author? The author after all, has read some of my other work—wouldn’t she want to know my thoughts here? Especially given their relevance. Or is the beauty of this post its complete lack of utility. I’ve always loved useless things. I hate how much in capitalist America everything needs a purpose to earn their keep.

Also, there’s the feeling that someone will figure it out. And I hope more than anything they never tell me. We can all go on with our lives with these little bits of knowledge that alter pretty much nothing.

So here it is: the author has written a book largely about the dissolution of a relationship and I too have shared the same dissolution of a relationship with her. Not just the experience of that kind of loss, but specifically: that person. The author and I shared an ex.

For years, I feared reading a complete book of hers in case I ran into this ex on the pages. In real life, I had ran into both him and her at festivals where we had both been invited and I had to pretend I was a ghost; they returned that feeling by also pretty much seeing through my body like I was a ghost. We did not exist to each other. And why should we? The past, the past. Until now. Would I have guessed she would have written this book? Maybe. She tends to write about every aspect of her life and quite well. But I wasn’t thinking about all that. I was so haunted by how shortly after our split he found her and then even more shortly how they married and had a child. I thought many times, a bit bitterly, but even more honestly: good luck with that nightmare.

There was no part of me that wanted what she had and yet I had been on that course, many lives ago. Couldn’t be mereally applied here, except it almost could have. So barely we missed each other that it was not hard to see my life in hers.

We both grew up in the same town. We now lived in the same city. We both wrote fiction and nonfiction. She was a bit younger than me. She was infinitely more successful than me. We’ve written the same number of books. We have overlapping interests and in another life we’d never have needed him for our connection: we would have simply been friends.

We met only once. Seven years ago we were in the same anthology and so prior to it I thought it was best to send her an email (we were cc’ed on the same emails about the event, so I knew how to reach her) to just clear the air or whatever. Emphasis on the whatever.

I wrote, simply, painfully, awkwardly:

> Hi ____, 
> 
> I just wanted to send you a separate email to say hi. We've shared many good friends over the years, and I think you know of my brief history with your husband. I just want you to know that I have nothing but good feelings about you and your work (I always teach you, every semester!) and I'm very happy to meet you finally. I know we've been at a few festivals in recent years where we could have met but admittedly I tried to avoid you--I am always very worried about running into ______! No need to get into all that of course, but I just want you to know it's not you and I feel nothing but joy about our event. 
> 
> (Also, I hope this didn't just make things more awkward--I'm having some Lyme probs again so my wording is wonky!)
> 
> x Porochista

The next day she wrote back:

Hi Porochista,
Thank you for sending this kind note; it's nice to be in touch and dispel awkwardness over email before we meet. I've heard really wonderful things about you over the years from shared friends, especially ___. I'm looking forward to this event--loved your piece in the book--and am glad you reached out. Wishing you good health in the meantime. 
Till soon,
______

Since then we’ve emailed each other once or twice a year. I usually initiate because, as I mentioned, I teach her quite a bit and I love to let authors know about the enthusiastic reactions of students.

In one email in 2021, a longer one, at one point I wrote:

“A very weird experience that haunted me for a long time was when I was so ill and I ran into you at ORD. You may not remember. You came up to me and we chatted--I had waved at you and I was astounded you recognized me in that state. You looked so happy with your beautiful baby and your mom, and you were having this amazing book tour experience. I was in the middle or done with mine but I was flying out to see a doctor--I was in a wheelchair with oxygen, barely alive, on all sorts of painkillers and meds, barely alive. I remember laughing to myself, the sort of very sad dead laugh a person who only has bad luck laughs, and I thought, of course I would run into _____ here and she would be so nice to me and we would look like exact polar opposites in every way--her luminous and with a glittery  life ahead of her, me broken and with my entire life in dead-end chaos!

But try as I could, I could not be upset, jealous, mad, depressed. I felt you were a sister of some sort on some parallel journey.

We have shared so many students, friends, and this one man who has caused us both some trouble--though mine is very different and maybe you don't know the whole story of what happened with us. I was actually treated like absolute shit, which I hope was not the case for you.”

She wrote back a couple weeks later, a longer email too, but that included:

“I very much remember that day of running into you in the airport--I think it might have been ABQ, en route to ORD? I had stayed with a friend of mine in ABQ whose son had died after 10 hours of life and was feeling very much like a big walking thumb thrust in his wound. I can only imagine the strangeness of seeing me--it was strange for me, too. I don't know everything you were going through just then; I know I felt like a fraud whose life looked so wonderful from the outside but felt--inside--like it was all crumbling and I didn't know how to survive it. I'm in a better place now, which I'm grateful for, and I hope you are too?”

One thing she might not have realized, not then, not ever, is that briefly I had written about her myself in my 2018 memoir, the only other memoir I know where he is mentioned.  I speak about our brief relationship in 2013 and our breakup and my realization of their union in the aftermath:

“When I finally broke up with him, he took the news badly. He faded out my life, and the next time I heard of him it was in the context of his marriage to another much more successful writer. He had often wished we could be seen as a ‘power couple’ and I was relieved he had that with someone else who could support he weight of that dream. I wished them well in my head, from afar, so many lives away I could barely remember his voice.”

Which brings me to her book, a memoir that’s done pretty well already in its first few weeks out. The book examines the dissolution of her marriage coming just on the tails of the birth of her child. Along the way there are all kinds of revelations, from musing on Winograd to Wendy Red Star to Donald Judd, reflections on her past addictions and eating disorders, literary life and professor challenges, and her own family. The book is beautifully written but not one would call impeccable as that implies a preciousness and infallibility our author is not interested in. I wish I could drop the title here, but if you’ve already guess it, then you get it—the book is raw and jagged and at times even rough. I love books like this. As usual the paraphernalia of her city life is well drawn—a world of Cheerios and gummy cherries against chlamydia and impromptu Vegas midnight weddings and diner bacon and sneaker collections and endless rounds of seltzer. There is a feverishness, a longing, a need for wholeness that never fulfills itself completely. This is a book full of brave art.

I wrote her wanting to go to her launch. I’d just given a talk as part of Hunter College’s Distinguished Writer Series and her writing had come up in a class visit. I’d spoken highly of her as usual and afterwards a student mentioned going to the launch. I realized I would want to as well, but the usual thing stopped me: running into him. I thought about braving it anyway but then I thought maybe best for her to make sure this did not happen. So I wrote her and asked and she assured me he would not be there.

She also wrote:

“Anyway--it would be lovely to have you there, but this note is already a lovely thing. And on the other side of all this would be great to finally get coffee, lunch, something. Much to say! Meantime, a hug.”

We will do this one day, this I know. And probably in that context, this post will come up.

After all, it’s a rare thing, the extra-intimate experience of having extra insights into someone else’s work of extreme intimacy. There were jokes I knew from another life, expressions and observations I also shared, a very strange déjà vu feeling at what went wrong as well as what went right. Not many people would know what it feels like to read a book starring someone you know. In a sense it feels like a thriller or a mystery—there’s a restless quality to how your turn the pages, as if their truth is going to somehow sync with yours and that person will exist wholly again. There is some expectation you crave and yet your dread. Neither of us have that person as someone we love most anymore. But in her descriptions I can see him again—his clarity, his loyalty, his humor, his generosity. . .but I also see his anger, his disappointment, his impatience, his competition, his cruelty. There are revelations that she has that I can apply to us. There is a strange voyeurism is seeing her walk a path I refused—her adopting a future I walked away, her taking it all the way to its ultimate conclusion, back where we both started: without him. And there is the inevitable wondering of what got cut, if I lived in the deletes somewhere in those pages, if my name and memory came up like that old unwanted ghost, if us being in touch somehow prevented her from writing me in those pages the way I wrote her in my pages when she was nothing but a distant stranger to me. And what is must feel like to be him, a character in the widely-read memoirs of two women, a portrait of a disappointment, a promise not delivered, a symbol of complexity and ultimately impossibility. Portrait of three hearts broken, in different stages, for different reasons, but same thread that couldn’t mend a thing. All of us, years later, back to where we were over a decade ago: strangers, unaware any fate could tie us.

Interestingly, she and I are the ones not strangers now.

I remember on an airplane, on my way to a festival that I know she’d be at, reading the tweet of someone I did not know enthusing about her new relationship with my recent ex, and knowing I’d be around that. I remember years later in Melbourne, at our dear mutual friend’s house, when he told me he thought about reaching out to me, when she had asked him if she had his blessing to marry him, and all he could think was he had been with another friend of his and how wrongly it had gone. I remember every time I taught a story of hers and how I’d leave out these stories that would interest my students most, I am sure, but how do you get into that, how does reality that real earn its keep in a context like that.

For now, I think like the best secrets we give them their space, without spilling their contents. Here is a space for a book review where I would tell you everything—my take on it all, all the things she didn’t mention about him, about me, about us all of us. There is so much we leave unsaid. I speak to my students about the white on the page, negative space, and how to make the most of that as a writer. Sometimes it is truly blank. And sometimes it looks like this. There’s a thrill I feel recalling all the stories we never tell, like an alternate shimmering bloodstream in me, sparkling and energetic, but contained. Often so terribly contained. Sometimes, beautifully, meaningfully, reverentially so.

Thank you, _____ ______. I loved your latest book so much.