Writer’s block: I’ve had it, for obvious reasons. I’ve been busy - had a baby in late October, found out I was pregnant just when lockdown started, our experience with Porter has been wholly colored by the pandemic and it’s something I’m still trying to figure out, in addition to the general demands of new parenthood. It makes for a fun test: do I have postpartum depression, or is this depression because I’ve had to make personal and physical sacrifices due to a once-in-a-generation global pandemic? Is the answer, maybe, both?
One delightful thing that my baby does right now is that when she sees her reflection in a mirror, she will grin. She is amazed at this beautiful, happy baby in front of her and she smiles like there’s no tomorrow. It’s a truly wonderful sight to see. It reminds me that our default position can be, and should be, looking at ourselves in the mirror and smiling and laughing. It’s not that difficult to do something small and nice for yourself. Maybe it can start with a smile.
She is a full on pandemic baby (I talked about it in this piece here), and it’s interesting to write that because at this time it feels as if those who are pregnant are moving into a new stage: affected by the pandemic, but not dealing with birth completely colored by it. Presumably that end date would be something around when the CDC was like if you’re vaxxed, get back to life, so May 2021 or so, but it means that there’s a whole two years or so of parents and children who are dealing with trauma on top of transition and it’s hard to know how to navigate that, or how it might color the way that I approach parenthood.
But it’s been nice being able to take Porter outside and to have people coo at her and say hi or mutter “that baby is cute” as we walk by. It is a head-turning vibe not akin to walking around with a celebrity or a very beautiful woman, I have to say. (I have done both.) The thing I am figuring out about babies is that they kind of serve the same function as Proust’s madeleine: they take you backwards in your memory, to a place where you knew and cared for a baby and that was the only priority. It’s a romantic journey, and a pleasure to see people go there when they see and say hi to Porter.
These days I have no time or inclination for reading, but I happened upon an ARC of Lauren Oyler’s book Fake Accounts, which got plenty of press over the winter, mostly as there wasn’t much being released and book criticism is so anemic 99% of the time that the fact that Oyler writes pans, pans of books that are often written by people who are popular online, consists of actual news. (And frankly, it is news - I know in my time as a critic I was and am loath to write pans, somewhat due to the fact that a book feels singular at the end of the day, and that it feels petty to do so when a book is basically under one person’s name and generally doesn’t have too much reach - I feel far more comfortable writing a pan of a movie. It’s hard to do when you are a freelancer, nervy on Oyler’s part, but pans also can go viral since they are so rare these days. I actually have more opinions on this topic, tbh.)
There’s a section of Fake Accounts written in an elliptical, collage style, reminiscent of the work of Jenny Offill and other writers. It’s mostly using the style to critique the stye, to claim that you can get so much more meaning when you’re not writing much (and Fake Accounts is, if anything, overwritten), but it seems to be a bit of a teenager’s sneer as well. Now that I have a kid and no time? Garrulousness is in the past! Dickens could go long because someone else was taking care of his kids! I know in some ways short and elliptical is kind of a silly cheat because you, the reader, desperate for meaning, can impose meaning on the spaces but on the other hand I’m really not sure if there’s any other options on how to write when you are a mom with no childcare, who needs money to afford childcare but then isn’t making enough for anything else other than childcare. And I used too many words to describe this - but I just had a feeling it was making fun of something that may be, in some ways, feminine, and feminine out of necessity, and that rankled, somewhat. I did not like Fake Accounts, I slogged through it, I think Oyler is a talented writer that generally needs the right editor, and afterwards, I sped through a Sheila Heti novel called Motherhood that felt off the cuff but made this off the cuff writing look so easy, that it felt, in some ways, closer to art.
PS. I barely write in this space and I’m not sure if I will continue to do so: this tab has been open for two weeks!