What if you imagine the reader as someone who loves you?

NB—Today’s post is a follow-up to the last one.

In 2019, I traveled for the first time to Ukraine. There, I experienced a series of realizations about the relationship between “great” novels and imperialism—an extension of various earlier realizations about “great” novels and the depoliticization of women (mini-summary here). At the time, I didn’t manage write about the imperialism realizations, because I was too busy with the gender-related ones—some of which made it indirectly into Either/Or, and others of which informed the New Yorker profile I wrote of Céline Sciamma, which came out in late January 2022, shortly before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

At that point, THREE YEARS after this trip during which I had been told repeatedly and in the most insistent way that the rhetoric in “great” novels was linked to a recurrent Russian drive to colonize Ukraine, it felt very urgent and to write about what I had learned—because, even though the imperialism realizations were in some way built into the feminism realizations, the connection wasn’t an easy one to make, even I had had difficulty with it, and I spend all day thinking my thoughts, so how could I expect anyone else to make it. And I really wanted to do this piece for the New Yorker, so it would reach a large audience—particularly, an audience of people who had the same kind of (US, liberal) education as I did, and who had therefore been taught to think of “great” literature as apolitical.

Because of the conventions of magazine writing, the Ukraine story ended up being structured as a (new) series realizations that I supposedly had in Tbilisi in 2023. How this happened is another long story, but, for now, I will say that, although I am HUGELY GRATEFUL to the many people at the magazine who worked really hard with me to make the essay magazine-compatible and to help it find the kind of readership I had hoped for, the project I’m most excited by at the moment is trying to find new forms of writing that can more realistically represent cumulative mental processes.

Remember how in the previous post, I was talking about how I used to think of publication as marking the “end” of a text, but now I think of it as its beginning (“the text starts having its own adventures, and dictating your further fate and movements)? Well, the New Yorker imperialism essay was widely circulated by book people in Ukraine, with the result that I was invited back to Lviv to be on a panel with two of the people whose writing had most informed it, Ewa Thompson and Oksana Zabuzhko. So then I had the incredible experience of getting to go back there and witness the reception of the story in the place that had inspired it—which made me realize the extent to which the jump from “feminist” to “postcolonial” thinking had been modeled for me by Zabuzhko’s 1996 novel, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, which I had been greatly impressed by in 2019, but hadn’t written or even quite thought about at length, because—well, it’s hard to say why. I think, in a way, because it was written from a perspective so different from my own. In the weeks before the festival, I realized I was afraid to actually sit on the panel together—as if Zabuzhko might perceive my whole life-situation as somehow being an insult. This fear disappeared the moment I met her and was able to bask in her warmth and charismatic energy. I think you can see in this picture how relieved and happy I was.

Anyway… the whole time I was in Lviv, I was expanding the Ukraine story in my mind—going further back in time, and further into the future, and feeling more strongly that I had to return to the material at some point “on my own terms”—in a more idiosyncratic and personal form than I could do in a general-interest publication.

That was six weeks ago. Since then, I spent a lot of time trying to find a way into the material. I wrote about 100 different recaps of stuff I’d recapped 100x before, like about Anna Karenina and my relationship to Russian literature—an activity that literally made me want to kill myself, because it made writing feel futile: like something you have to keep doing over and over, and explaining over and over. (In its worst case, this is what book tour can feel like.) And the thing that made it finally not feel that way was when I realized I didn’t have to pretend that I hadn’t written any of the earlier material, and that I was allowed to draw on the New Yorker essay, both the finished version and the many preceding drafts, in order to try to tell a bigger story.

As I was thinking this over during the Thanksgiving break, while listening to podcasts and assembling IKEA furniture, I was deeply impressed by the following quote—a paraphrase from Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing:

“What if we spent more time talking to people who had the context to understand us and less time trying to create things for people who have no context for what we’re saying?” 🤯

I had a LOT of thoughts about this, viewable below by the generous patrons of the Paid Subscribers Memorial RÅSKOG utility cart, which keeps my stapler AND reading glasses AND a giraffe-themed tape measure immediately on hand where I can reach them several times a day. Thanks, everyone!