On desperation (and writing)

on readings and writers reading about writing

the writer constance debré

A few days ago, I went to a reading at the college nearby. It was this french writer named Constance Debré, who I’ve been trying to see for a while. She’s in LA a lot (I think she’s dating a model here or something) and I’ve missed her twice. But anyway, I caught her this time.

And I go to a lot of readings, like once a month. I don’t know why. I don’t typically enjoy them. I don’t learn anything — going to a reading and hoping to learn anything about writing is like going to a magic show and hoping to learn something about the afterlife — so maybe I go to remind myself that other people are writers. To remind myself that other writers are still going to see authors give readings.

I hate it, but most authors are boring. They have very deep insights into their own navels — into the world and their own place in it. They are very smart people. But they are also very boring. Well-published authors have somehow perfected a blend of humility and self-assurance, at least in the public forum. They’re better at it than the politicians, to be sure, but they still get exhausting after a while. A few months ago, I went to see Garth Greenwell read and it was like watching print dry. I had to leave halfway through (and I like his writing!).

So I’m always skeptical at readings. And I became even more skeptical when the room filled up with the typical west coast MFA crowd (which is more hopeful and far less promising than the New York MFA crowd). And I became even more skeptical when the professor introducing Constance Debré compared her to Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs.

But anyway, she comes up and she reads a bit from her book Playboy, which is this kind of erotic lesbian book but of course, because Debré is French, the book is only erotic on the surface, if you can read it a few layers down, it’ll cut you to ribbons. So she reads her book in a thick accent — pronouncing ‘tongue' as ‘tong’. And then she takes some questions.

Now this is the part you stick around for, right? The worst part of readings is when the authors read. I can read pretty damn well myself, I don’t need them to do it for me. I go because I want to hear them talk about the text. And most authors are too familiar with their books, they’re bored stiff of them. And when they drone on, beginning all their sentences with “I really wanted to explore the relationship between …” you get bored stiff too.

But Debré is a little different. she comes in wearing a baggy white button-down and she has a shaved head and her grandfather was the first prime minister of the Fifth French Republic and she was a big-wig French lawyer herself before she left her husband and became a rampaging lesbian about town. So she has this sense of anything goes about her.

And some of the people start to ask questions, the typical questions that people ask at readings, mostly just veiled boasts, they ask/talk about some scene in Ulysses because they want everybody in the room to know that they’ve read Ulysses. Or they reference Foucault but it’s the same thing.

Maybe it’s because Debré doesn’t speak English perfectly — she says she enjoys speaking English, but calls it “a blur” — but she has this kind of desperation to her. She answers questions like she’s got a gun to her head. She says that “life comes through the window and grabs you around the throat” and you begin to feel that this is the way she lives, it’s certainly the way she writes. Take this bit from Playboy, it’s the bare-bones sketching that we’re getting a lot out of people like Fosse these days, but it’s also fuck-me real.

I bought a second-hand scooter. I’m renting a one-bedroom apartment in the sixth. I’ve pretty much always lived in this area. In any case, I couldn’t move too far from my son’s school. Every other week, I pick him up on my scooter and drop him off at the gates. He hands me his helmet, bye sweetie bye Mom, I can’t believe he’s so tall, I can’t believe he’s him, I need to buy him new sneakers. Afterward I go to the café with some of the other parents. I listen to them all talking about the apartments they’re buying. They don’t seem happy. The guys are all bored and the women are worried about getting old. They all go to the same places on vacation. They end up in Megève, Biarritz, or Greece every summer. Maybe I’d be doing the same if I had money. Sometimes I feel like telling them they’re all getting worked up over nothing. They’d be better off thinking about something else.

So it’s writing like that. That kind of natural, make it look easy vibe that everybody is doing. But this is also kind of different because it’s a little less controlled than the standard fare.

But back to the questions — most authors are guarded in their responses. Somebody in the audience asked Constance Debré about another famous French writer and Debré answered, “I don’t like her. Her books are boring.” She softened it a bit later, to make it clear that she had no personal animus, but she didn’t pull away from her initial assessment.

And I skipped out on the reception (again, to be honest, I don’t really enjoy the company of writers) but I kept thinking about it. About the reading, and trying to figure out what it was that felt so new about this. The writing was not particularly new; it’s not any more sexual than the writer Michel Houellebecq, who has been famous in France for decades. But it felt new and I think it was this sense of desperation. This sense of “life might come through the window any moment and grab you by the throat.” And it’s not too often that a writer makes you feel that.