Anxious People, Pretty Things
On catastrophic thinking, creative thievery, fashion inspiration from film, and the lure of beautiful objects.
Last week I woke up in the middle of the night to the familiar sound of my dog scratching at the door of the room where he sleeps. This is something that happens every so often; he’ll want to be let outside, or up into bed. But last week when I stumbled half asleep into the room the dog was frantic—pawing at his face, making horrible noises. It was only once he’d shot down the stairs and out the front door that I realized he was not about to vomit but was in fact choking, and without registering much of anything except that the nearest 24-hour vet clinic is twenty minutes away and that I didn’t want my dog to die, I ran out after him and gave him some version of the Heimlich maneuver and whatever it was that had gotten caught in his windpipe—a piece of a dental chew’s my guess—went flying out into the grass.
Like many things, it was pretty horrible at the time and (because he’s unharmed and snoozing on my feet as I write this) at least a little funny afterwards. I keep imagining my neighbors glancing out their windows at midnight to see me, barefoot in a lemon yellow pajama set from the Vermont Country Store, dashing around the yard stage-whispering “Fauci, are you OK?” to a dog quite obviously not, who I then tackled. It’s also funny in the other sense, as in ironic, because since we brought him home one of my nightly fears has been that something would, at random, stop him from breathing. I have pictured it over and over. This is what my husband or therapist might call catastrophic thinking—my favorite kind! These thoughts run the gamut from traffic might be so bad that I miss this flight, to everyone will hate this thing I wrote, to I might one day forget my currently nonexistent child in the backseat of a hot car.
Somewhere in my brain, and maybe yours too, there must be a sense that to imagine terrible things is to prepare for them, or maybe even that to imagine them will keep them from occurring. But the thing is that sometimes you think of the worst thing and then it happens, and it’s no less bad for having thought of it beforehand. You just either get through it or you don’t, but usually it’s the former. I wonder if this is one reason I’m drawn not just to reading but to writing fiction, that expansive repository of what ifs. When it’s not crippling, anxiety can be interesting. Working visual artists are supposedly more anxious than the so-called general population. Democrats more than Republicans. One can extrapolate all kinds of things from who is anxious about what. But I’ll just close with a little motherly wisdom.
“What if I hadn’t heard him?” I said to my mom over the phone the next day.
And she said, “But you did.”
PERUSE the belongings of Joan Didion (whose sentences the novelist Francine Prose once described as having “a kind of electric anxiety and it's partly what makes you pay such close attention”), which will sell at auction later this month. I have previously documented my interest in obtaining objects that once belonged to beloved writers. Here is a—perhaps the—motherload. Dozens of books. Cookbooks. Portraits. A photograph of Herman Hesse’s typewriter, taken by Patti Smith and inscribed to Didion. A silver tea set. Thirteen blank notebooks. Those Céline sunglasses. “Women have always been known to us through their belongings,” Rachel Tashjian wrote in a lovely piece about the sale. “So have men—the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame is filled with lyrics scribbled on napkins and stage clothes and guitars of spectacular provenance—but they always seem to get less flack for it.” Didion, perhaps more than any other writer, is synonymous with her personal style. Barbara Grizzutti Harrison’s 1980 against-Didion essay begins: “When I am asked why I do not find Joan Didion appealing, I am tempted to answer—not entirely facetiously—that my charity does not naturally extend itself to someone whose lavender love seats match exactly the potted orchids on her mantel, someone who has porcelain elephant end tables…” They’re “glazed earthenware elephant form garden seats,” actually, and if you have the means and lack Harrison’s reservations, they can be yours.
LISTEN to this sublime piece of music, which my dad introduced me to years ago and which always serves as a soothing recalibration. Preferably while doing nothing else. Preferably with eyes closed.
READ a slew of stories about turning life into fiction, and plagiarism accusations, and everything in between:
Start with Rachel Aviv’s piece about the filmmaker Asghar Farhadi, director of the Oscar-winning films A Separation and The Salesman; his former student, Azadeh Masihzadeh; and the legal battle over whether Farhadi plagiarized Masihzadeh’s work. Aviv’s article is multi-faceted and nuanced without doing, as Farhadi describes it, the “good vs. good” thing.
Then there’s the the one about the kidney and, for extra credit, the review of the short story at its center.
And finally, the double header of perhaps the only short story ever to go viral and the essay by the story’s unwitting, real life muse (sort of).
If this has not sated you, several recent novels have poked and prodded at literary ownership, including Andrew Lipstein’s, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s, John Boyne’s, and (soon-ish!) mine.
WATCH Downhill Racer, the 1969 film about a ski racer played by Robert Redford. Come for the portrait of a talented, driven, emotionally stunted young man who behaves consistently terribly to women; stay for the very fun cold weather style. Winter whites, Canadian tuxedos, dishabille breakfasts in bed, a statement beanie…these screenshots don’t do it justice.
AND ALSO this fine piece of cinema. Following my dog’s traumatic night, I replayed it approximately every half hour, all day. I smiled every time.1
You could just enjoy it, or you could enjoy it and use it as a tiny masterclass in narrative. There’s a setup (dancers dancing), a conflict (security guard is in the way), a subversion of expectations (the security guard joins the dance!), straightforward entertainment (dancers + guard dancing), a reconciliation of former foes (that perfect smile from the…coach? on the sidelines), denouement (triumphant security guard).