The books you need
sometimes, reading the news is just finding the right subplot
Like everybody else, I read both those articles in The Cut this week. For those yet uninitiated, there were two viral pieces in the magazine: one by a woman who was scammed out of $50,000. Another by a woman who was hit by a bipolar episode and considered divorcing her husband.
The divorce essay was the better of the two.1 The set-up goes like this: the author — a writer by trade — has a bipolar episode and ends up hospitalized on a psychiatric hold. When she gets out, she writes: “I attended AA meetings and the DBT meetings required by the hospital outpatient program, and I read.”
She adds: “I read books about insanity … I tried to understand what was happening to me, but nothing seemed to resonate until I began to read books about divorce. I felt I was preparing myself for what was coming.” Throughout the rest of the piece, she keeps bringing up books and putting them into her life. As though the books are puzzle pieces that might fill in the rest of her.
Because this piece went viral on the internet, it’s become — like all viral pieces — about who is the good person and who is the bad person and whether you should hate-tweet at the author or send her chocolates. But that little dichotomy makes me a bit squirrelly and so I don’t spend too much time in it. I was much more interested in the author’s instinct to turn to books.
This is deliberate, obviously. The phrase, I read (past-tense), is separated and repeated and then becomes a refrain in the piece as she lists books. You get the impression that this woman left the hospital and ran straight to the bookstore. That’s a bit funny isn’t it? She was fresh out of the hospital, trying to make sense of her life, and so she went to the bookstore.
Anyway, she read her way through it. Or, more accurately, she read her way into it. She has this fragile existence that she’s trying to make sense of; trying to put into perspective. Eventually, she does and it comes back together. I mean, the piece ends happily.
But that’s the subplot I love. The woman reading her way out of a bad place2. It made me think of that scene in Goodby People3 where the narrator introduces his beautiful, famous actress friend, by saying “she reads, by the way in definite cycles, the way people do when they search literature for answers.” That’s a definite sort of person right there. Slightly different but very similar to the sort of person who might get out of a hospital and rush off to a bookstore.
The Cut divorce essay is a case-study on the potential of just … books. Whatever they do to you. And, of course, it’s about love and forgiveness amidst ambition and illness, but I like the part where it’s about books. And I’ve been thinking about how books can do whatever they do to you — help you out of a bad place or help you appreciate a bright one.
Shameless plug, but I’ve been thinking about it since last week, when I wrote about how I want to begin slipping books to my not-a-reader buddies. But the problem here is how do you play it cool? You can’t just say hey man, here’s this book I really think you should read. It’s too evangelistic. I could say you might like this book. But still, that doesn’t really get the point across.
Because how do you explain to somebody, who doesn’t read, that sometimes, a good book can shift everything in your life. Oftentimes, you can’t even tell them the book. I mean, there are the obvious ones, like Man’s Search for Meaning, or Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
But Dharma Bums was one of those books for me at seventeen. And I wouldn’t recommend that to anybody unless he’s seventeen and bored-out-of-his-mind in a small-town. What I’m saying is that we all need different books at different times, whether you’re coming-of-age or recently out-of-a-psychiatric hold. I just like the subplot where we need books.
Like everything else in The Cut, the whole vibe of the piece is uncannily similar to Fleishman is in Trouble. But the writing in the divorce piece is a lot better than Fleishman, which felt like a Hulu original in the form of a novel.
By the way, the author begins this piece with the line: “in the summer of 2022, I lost my mind.” She sets the stakes out immediately and in a very Didionesque way. It’s very “we are here on this island in lieu of filing for divorce.”
RE: beautiful books, Goodby People is one of those books for me. Like very on-the-surface but so beautiful it hurts. Like Gatsby or Play it As It Lays or Outline.