STORIES

Sometimes you read a book and wonder how the author survived the telling.

How did this person stare this thing in the face and grapple with it and pin it down? How did she take an amorphous mass of dark, swirling emotion and turn it into the hard, gemlike flame of a book?

It's a miracle to me: that there are people among us who devote their lives to telling stories, to observing facts big and small — how sunlight plays on a brick wall, how grief plays on memory — collecting and polishing the raw data of humanity and giving it back to us in a portable form.

Why do they do it?

The easier thing, by far, would be to not grapple, to not write, to let the butterflies — or predatory birds — of experience flutter by unexamined. Why this need to capture, categorize, contain?

I was thinking of this today while reading a beautiful book I can't imagine writing. Reading it was harrowing enough.

I told a friend it depressed the hell out of me, and she said, "This is two in a row for you! Let me pick out your next book, dear."

Her observation, referring to my last post, made me smile. I hadn't thought of it that way. I hadn't thought that it was something about the books, some gloomy common denominator. I had assumed it was something about the way I received them, something about my own state of mind.

I previously have had two notable experiences of being horribly depressed by books: one was Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" and the other was a book of Diane Arbus photographs. In both cases I didn't even want the books in my house, I found their content so bleak and sour. But I couldn't banish them from my soul, and, in both cases, I was able to re-examine them and where I remembered despair and the desire to avert my gaze I now found a surprising beauty and gentleness, even a delight in life. I can't explain the transformation. I would like to think I became braver.

Writing is about so much more than a gift of expression. It's about an extreme sort of courage. It's about a willingness to handle the mess, to give it shape, to endure the terrible loneliness of the task so someone else can pick up the book and feel a sense of recognition, even if horrible at times, and, in the process, feel less alone.

So here's to Alice McDermott, the author who made me feel terrible today. A great writer. If she has the courage to write it, I have the courage to read it.