Delightful Books, Movies, and More
How to stay entertained this summer, plus some notes on being raised by musicians
I wrote an essay about growing up with talented musicians for parents, and being musically untalented myself. It’s up on LitHub and begins:
One of my earliest memories is of being held upside down by my ankles on a fast-moving train. My captor was a clarinetist, a fact that didn’t matter or even register at the time; I was three years old and interested only in the fact he was willing to entertain me during a long day of travel. My parents were there, too. I can picture them sitting across from each other in the dining car, my dad’s bassoon case beside him, my mom’s flute beside her.
But that part of the memory, that image of the two of them, is false, built from photographs and memories of other days, other trips; on orchestra tours, which this was, they never would have carried their own instruments. Those traveled separately, in big black trunks packed after each show. I was already too accustomed to my parents, maybe too attuned to their presence for my hippocampus to lodge real pictures of them from that train ride—the hippocampus being a notorious devotee to the unusual.
You can read the rest here.
“I have no ear for music, a shortcoming I deplore bitterly,” Vladimir Nabokov wrote in his 1964 Playboy interview. “I have a special reason for finding my ignorance and inability so sad, so unjust: There is a wonderful singer in my family—my own son.” Three years earlier that son, Dmitri, debuted at the Teatro Municipale di Reggio Emilia, singing the part of Colline in La Bohème. He and another young man performing that day had won the roles through a prior opera competition—the other man was Luciano Pavarotti.
There’s a father daughter relationship in my novel that began with my interest in Vladimir’s relationship with Dmitri—a heightened example of the differences between my parents and me—and in what would it would be like to have a father who can’t understand or enjoy your primary artistic passion; what it would mean to be that father. The gaps and bridges between parents and children are so interesting. Would we have literature without them? (We certainly wouldn’t have Freud.)
In my earliest memory I am upside down. But I have memories, too, of places I have never been, people I have never met: I have a memory, my father’s, of watching a classmate dump a bucket of water on his counterpoint teacher’s head. My mother’s, of pulling on a red taffeta dress to play chamber music on a cruise ship. They came to me as stories, but they feel so real, almost as though they happened to me. In sifting through my parents’ lives, by the narratives I’m drawn to I can see the story I want to tell about myself: one of love, of resourcefulness, of artistic passion and career success.
When I started writing the LitHub essay I called my parents to ask questions I’d never thought to, to expand my sense of myself through my expanding understanding of them. Through that conversation I gained a new false memory that must now dwell somewhere in the shallow depths of my mind (perhaps in a register also occupied by the adventures of characters like Jo March and Timofey Pnin). It is that great favorite genre, the origin story. Would I exist had this one not played out the way it did? Likely not.
It is the case of many artists that their creative impulse rescues them from a life that is, on some level, unlivable. My dad’s bassoon lifted him out of a fraught home in the Canadian prairie town of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, taking him to summer programs at Banff and eventually to The Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia. My mom’s flute proved a constant through a childhood spent moving between different states and countries—at age seventeen, following her own mother’s sudden death, it whisked her away from Houston, Texas, to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. After studying for two years in San Francisco, my mom auditioned for and was accepted to Curtis, which is where my parents met.
Upon her graduation in 1979, my mom left Philadelphia to play the Festival dei Due Mondi, which took her to Charleston in June and then, in July, to Spoleto, Italy. My dad, despite having two years of his program remaining, despite that they’d only been dating a few months, decided to leave school and join her. They would take auditions, he said, get jobs and live as ex-pats. They were twenty and twenty-two years old; that European orchestras recessed in August was not their concern. He went home to Weyburn to cash in his savings bonds. From there he flew to Munich and traveled on to Ancona where, 168 kilometers from Spoleto, on the final day of the festival, an Italian rail strike awaited. Their relationship was newborn and fragile. She, having received no word from him in weeks—their letters, Shakespearian, got lost in the mail—supposed she’d return to the states with the rest of the orchestra the next day. He, desperate, boarded one of the only trains still running: a local bearing Italian troops on leave. It was getting toward evening when they pulled into the station. He didn’t speak Italian, didn’t know where she was staying. But he heard music floating down from the top of a hill, and he ran toward it.
Watching, Reading, Listening
I saw Celine Song’s Past Lives last week and loved it, which seems to be a fairly universal reaction—though I have read a couple takes that took issue with how pared down it was, how the relationships felt less deeply explored than they could have been. And I get that. I think it depends on what you want from a movie, and to me there was something powerful and real about the series of snapshots that relied so heavily on unspoken expressions from leads Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, and John Magaro, and dreamy, dusky shots that so captured a mood, a nostalgia. It reminded me of certain beautiful, spare novels that pack in a huge amount of emotion and observation: Asa, As I Knew Him by Susanna Kaysen, Winter Love by Han Suyin, The Prime of Ms. Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. (All, incidentally, great books to stick in a beach bag, take on a plane, etc.)
I’ve also been on a movies-about-acting kick. Navel-gazing, when done well, is pretty illuminating (and hilarious and cutting, as the case may be). My favorite recent watches aren’t exactly under-the-radar. The first is John Cassavetes’ Opening Night, in which Gena Rowlands plays a middle-aged actress named Myrtle as she gears up for a Broadway run. At the beginning of the movie a teenage fan gets hit and killed by a car outside the theater, which sends Myrtle into a tailspin. Does anyone play a woman unraveling quite as well as Rowlands? Rowlands and Cassavetes were of course married, and Cassavetes, besides directing, plays Myrtle’s ex-lover and co-star in the play; Rowlands’ character Myrtle is playing a character named Virginia, which is Gena Rowlands’ birth name. Twisty, meta, layered, beautiful, quite torturous.
The other is Wag The Dog, in which Robert DeNiro, as a crisis PR guy, and Anne Heche, a White House aide, enlist the help of Dustin Hoffman, Hollywood producer, to distract the American public from a blooming presidential sex assault scandal. (Forewarned is forearmed, several major punchlines land on sexual violence; it is very much a movie about people behaving very badly.) To do this, they concoct a fictional Albanian war. Kirsten Dunst plays an eager young actress cast as an Albanian refugee. Willie Nelson makes up patriotic theme songs on the fly, Woody Harrelson shows up as a demented faux war hero.
I always love hearing about how other people wrote their books, and I’ve been spending long walks listening to some great podcast chats. Jaylen Lopez talked to Sarah Rose Etter about her gorgeous new novel Ripe (San Francisco tech culture, capitalism, grief, a looming black hole) on Reading the Room. At the very end of the conversation, Etter describes how she wrote the novel while also working full time: by writing an outline, and then breaking down that outline into scenes, and writing each scene on an index card and each day picking a new index card to write. So interesting! Tempted to give it a try as I wade through the murky middle of a new manuscript. For Barnes & Noble’s Poured Over, Miwa Messer talked to Patrick deWitt about The Librarianist, which I loved—I also loved what he said about reading: “There’s no wiser way to spend time, for me, outside of spending time with my loved ones, than reading a book that makes me want to write, that inspires me to continue to write.” His book is one of those! Lit Up’s Angela Ledgerwood talking to Gina Chung about her novel Sea Change (featuring literature’s most endearing octopus) was another recent favorite, as was The Otherppl Podcast’s Brad Listi in conversation with Chelsea Hodson about starting her indie press, Rose Books.
That’s all for now. Tell me what to watch/read/listen to next? Hit the heart if you’ve enjoyed?
Til next time!
Loved this LitHub essay!