I was so optimistic this time last year. I had such ambition. I made an easy goal for myself (more charcuterie boards!) which I managed to keep, but I also made a lot of very ambitious and very small goals. I made so many goals. And most of them I failed on. This wasn’t a year for success or for trying very hard: in life or in reading. I didn’t get to Proust. I didn’t read more narrative non-fiction. I didn’t read as many books as I read last year. I didn’t spend a whole weekend reading. Not once. I spent dozens of weekends watching TikToks on my phone and trying not to panic. But when I was reading, I was reading Laurie Colwin.
In February, when I was still optimistic, I wrote about how one of my goals was to read an author’s entire oeuvre. You can find that post here, but to recap, I wrote:
When we read an entire oeuvre, we learn to read an author how they want to be read. This is particularly important, in my opinion, for writers who are women or people of color. It is often true that when a man writes a book that receives high-acclaim, it is automatically assumed that every book he has ever or will ever write is also worthy of the public’s time and energy. This is not true for other writers. Women and people of color may have a single book be critically acclaimed and the rest of their works remain out of print, or unloved, or ignored entirely. This is not only a disservice to the public, it’s a disservice to the book that we claim to love.
I ended up picking Laurie Colwin and wrote about why I picked her as my oeuvre for the year too. Libby Nelson recommended her to me, and then we rescheduled our drinks to talk about her one too many times and now I haven’t seen anyone in almost a year. I regret that because reading Colwin has been one of the bright spots in my year, and I wish I could talk about her at a restaurant, drinking a martini like all of her characters.
All of Colwin’s fiction was a relief from the terror of this year: a transport back to 1970s New York, and eating at restaurants, and the biggest stressor in life being who you love. I loved the books on cooking too, but there was too much cooking this year.
Just this week, I was moping about how I’ve been unable to focus on any of the good books in my stacks when I remembered: I had one Colwin left. I started Passion and Affect, a collection of short stories, on Saturday and am almost finished with it. It’s the last of her 11 books I have left to read, and I’m going to be sad when I’m finished. Colwin’s prose is gorgeous. Her plots are like goddamn rockets. Her characters are smart and funny. I would write that there isn’t any fat on these books, but there is. The fat is inside the sentences, beautiful little tidbits to savor and enjoy. Plot wise, though, they’re lean. Each book is short. There are no extra scenes.
Just as a little treat, here is a page from maybe my favorite Colwin, Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object:
This page ends with a sentence trio that is so good it makes me want to quit writing:
“But to Sam, I was only a sure thing. I was the wedge he stuck between himself and everything else. I was his lead line to an emotional world where he took no chances at all.”
This is what makes Laurie Colwin so great, and it is the thing that stuck out to me over and over again in reading her fiction: her ability to pin down a character (any character, but especially a smaller, side character) with a few sentences that allow us, the reader, to create an entire backstory in our minds without her wasting space on the page. What a skill! What a thrill! Reading can be so good if you can get yourself to do it these days.
You’ll notice from my stack of some of her books in the photo above that all of these books are old. I bought them from the bookstore near my house and from abebooks.com. I found editions from the 70s for three dollars. Their pages are old and yellowing. The glue in the 70s and 80s was made out of some kind of cookie and it crumbles all over the pages if you so much as look at it wrong, much less try to read the book like a normal person and i don’t know open it all the way. This was frustrating because I loved these books, and I like my books to remain intact.
Colwin’s books were out of print. You could find them, but it’s always frustrating to want to recommend a book and know that your friend is going to have to order Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object from a used book store and just pray the idiot who owned it before them wasn’t a person like me who marks in her books with pen. I say they were out of print because I received a very exciting email last week.
Next year, in 2021, Vintage & Anchor Books (part of Knopf) and HarperCollins will reissue their back-catalogues of Colwin’s work! This is great news because it will make her work easier to find. This is also great news because I am SURE the reissues will be beautiful and give us all an excuse to post their covers on social media and maybe revive an author whose novels have the emotional cadence and plot structure of a Nora Ephron movie.
Colwin wasn’t the most erudite choice for an oeuvre to read in a year, but it was one I immensely enjoyed and highly recommend. Reading all of one author’s work also made it easier to refrain from choice paralysis in a year where everything felt hard. I’m already making plans for which author I’ll spend 2021 with. Hopefully, if things go well for us, I’ll be able to blab about that author in person, where my friends are trapped with me and have to listen.
I know some of you aimed to read an oeuvre this year too! If you did, please respond to this and let me know how it went, or maybe we could have a little open comment thread. Let me know what you think.
This year has been wild and terrible and so stressful. I am depressed which is fine but also exhausting. This newsletter isn’t dead, but I am sorry that it has been inconsistent. I’m going to send another year-end letter next week and the first letter in January will be a State of the Union.
Please let me know if you have thoughts or ideas or feelings. I hope you are all safe and at home and cozy.
xo