A Confluence Of Karen Green
A Few Book Recommendations; How Come You To The Writers You Read?
The number one question writers seem to get asked where ideas come from, yet I have never seen a reader ask anyone, including themselves, how they come to read what they do.
In a time when we are very aware that we are in our own echo chambers and we must actively seek out those things that differ from the experiences of the people we surround ourselves with, I believe what we pick up comes to us by way of a confluence — just as writers come to their ideas by the same means.
The intersections of our lives are so intricate and patterned, and strange. Reading today is a process of being virtually inundated if you go looking for something to read.
I’m a late bloomer in terms of fostering an active curiosity about what I’m reading. I had never even heard of David Foster Wallace. I knew of Infinite Jest in the same way you kind of know what an actor looks like and what the movie's name is, not what their name is.
First Recommendation
Last year I read In the Land of Men, a memoir by Adrienne Miller, the first woman to be the editor of Esquire magazine. She shaped a lot of fiction in her time, and David Foster Wallace (DFW) became a close friend and antagonist to her process and person in that male-dominated space. It’s a great memoir. I wrote a bit about it, so I will say that I recommend it.
It’s also how I learned of DFW. He appeared fascinating and complex and ironically ended up becoming the embodiment of his own fears regarding fame and notoriety, did not treat women well whatsoever, and most famously, though I didn’t know it at the time, committed suicide.
I quietly moved some of his works on my to-be-read pile down the queue as I examined whether or not I ought to be reading his stuff, given that.
Second Recommendation
Fast forward to me landing on the Goodreads page for Bough Down by Karen Green—the wrong title I was searching for (no idea what it was now). And being intrigued by a strong review of it by Roxane Gay.
Bough Down is a meditation on grief in a manner I’d never read before. It’s poetry and prose and found object art pieces. It’s a bit weird. The structure moves about with the various memories peppered throughout, and the art pieces are open to interpretation.
Often the overriding feeling within the emotional milieu of a particular paragraph is rooted in turns of phrase that will twist you up like a nail being driven home by incredible poetic codas to semi-random thoughts.
It is still one of the most affecting books I’ve read.
Only in retrospect did I learn that the piece was about the death of one David Foster Wallace.
In the synopsis, ad copy, and the matter of the book itself, nowhere does DFW appear. I imagine that when Bough Down initially came out, various reviewers knew, and so some consumers who read them knew? I’ve no idea.
However, people looking for mere gossip found an incredible piece—intersectional and defying categorization, endlessly empathetic and heartbreaking. I would be lying if I said it did not alter the composite I had in my head of DFW after In the Land of Men.
Third Recommendation
Off the coat-tails of consuming such a moving piece of literature (and very much expecting a comedown, as is the way of things for me), I immediately sought out more from Karen Green.
This was a smart thing to do.
Frail Sister, her only other title thus far (so far as I know), takes what works about Bough Down and manages to innovate further.
This is a story about the search for her Aunt Constance, who disappeared, and is only remembered in a few items preserved by her family. Using these and other artifacts, Green constructs a fictional series of life events of her family member. The prose, which are letters written between two sisters, one of whom is the aunt, of course, is placed as typography onto these real-world artifacts.
Or at least, seemingly real, it’s hard to tell sometimes. But that feeds into the unreliable narrator and the overall feeling of the book. You are left to infer some things and must do your own kind of research, just as “Green” does. There are reoccurring patterns and things marked up in specific ways. There’s really nothing like it that I know of.
It takes place in the dustbowl and World War II wartime in Italy. It then draws a thematic connection to the family members during such a time. Many people never learned what became of some of the fallen, and they too might be piecing together a life in a semi-similar manner.
I see it very much as a progression of Bough Down. Though this creates a much more “full” narrative than the previous work. The elements of style and the form. The implementation of poetic turns of phrase. It’s all there.
Tangent Reading
We often bounce from book to book from word of mouth or curated list, and that’s no judgment; I do it all the time — but there is so much connective tissue between titles that move us. Since this happened to me, I have deliberately sought out such connections as much as is possible.
Interesting literary confluences are occurring all the time. Go off on tangents, especially if you are prone to book slumps.
