We tell ourselves stories in order to live
I'm currently re-reading Tracy Daugherty's biography of Joan Didion, The Last Love Song. I read it the first time right after it was published, when Didion was still alive and had just published what would be her last original work, Blue Nights.
I can't imagine--although maybe I'll eventually have to--what it's like to outlive everyone you ever loved.
Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant re-arrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
The last time I re-read Where I Was From was last summer, in an Airbnb in DFW, where we'd evacuated from Hurricane Ida. Pure paranoia on my mother's part; Ida went straight for New Orleans and never came within 100 miles of us. I will grant her some paranoia, she's the one who lost the same house in 2 different hurricanes (Rita in 2005; Ike in 2008).
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.
I can't imagine--although maybe I'll eventually have to--what it's like to outlive everyone you ever loved.
Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant re-arrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
The last time I re-read Where I Was From was last summer, in an Airbnb in DFW, where we'd evacuated from Hurricane Ida. Pure paranoia on my mother's part; Ida went straight for New Orleans and never came within 100 miles of us. I will grant her some paranoia, she's the one who lost the same house in 2 different hurricanes (Rita in 2005; Ike in 2008).
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.