hey there nervous wrecks! happy pride to one and all!
thanks for your patience while i recalibrate these last few weeks. i’m glad to be back on my weekly publication schedule!
The night I finally started Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson, I’d made tortellini with peas and spinach for dinner. An easy meal, one that didn’t require much brain space. I used some of the liquid gold pasta water to make a sauce with butter and parm. A lush little weeknight indulgence.
fI’d been putting off reading Jefferson for a year and I felt guilty about it. Margo Jefferson is a Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times critic and writer, perhaps best known for her cultural criticism surrounding the trials of Michael Jackson as well as her memoir Negroland. I just adore her writing. She was also a beloved nonfiction professor in my MFA program, one whose seminars and workshops were tough to get into due to her popularity. I was lucky to have taken a seminar with her, and she had the kind of luminosity and wisdom that made it clear just why she was so popular. She was an astute and generous reader, unafraid to challenge us as writers and thinkers while always open to hearing what they had to say. In other words: I greatly admire her, am biased, and I am thankful to have worked with her however briefly.
So you’d think I’d be rushing to pick up her latest book. Despite knowing all of this, I put off starting the book, feeding myself a plethora of reasons: I’m having trouble focusing; I’ve been more compelled by fiction lately; I want to separate myself from some of my MFA influences to better recognize my own voice; yada yada. But none of these things were the actual real reason.
See, the thing is, I have a nasty habit of putting off reading books that I know I will love and perhaps even envy. I buy them or borrow them from the library, thrilled to get the chance to read them, then leave them to spoil in my TBR pile. I get anxious when I pick up that book. Will this book say what I have to say, only better? Will this make me want to give up on writing? And perhaps lost pressingly: will I ever be able to articulate something this beautifully and meaningfully?
I get so fucking tired of my own writerly bullshit—the excuses I make for writing this but not that; for not applying to That Residency or That Prize I’ll never win; for not writing at all; for putting my all into a piece only for it to come up short (for example: spelling and grammatical errors in this newsletter that elude me as I rush to edit my work, sorry about it!!).
Reading the work of those I know I will admire is sometimes like looking at myself in a mirror after being beaten to a pulp. Look how much stronger, more agile, more luminous you could be, if only you were this person, or if only written this book.
Creative/literary readers here are likely screaming right now: YEAH SARAH, THAT’S AN UNHEALTHY MINDSET TO HAVE. And they aren’t wrong! It’s insecurity, pure and simple, which keeps me from picking up the works that could, and likely would, speak most to me. It’s not as simple as “well just push through and read if you want to be a writer.” It’s something echoing, more soul-crushing. It can’t simply be fixed by finishing a book.
And Jefferson’s book is no exception. It is a lush blend of memoir and cultural criticism and writing craft and the words of others (sometimes purposefully misquoted) all about anxiety and defining oneself against a world that is not centered around you. In other words: it’s a version of what I do, what I’ve been working on for years, and it is both the answer I have been dreaded and desired all at once.
Jefferson plays with the words and works of others, metabolizing and analyzing them on the page while simultaneously quoting, misquoting, visiting, and revisiting them. She focuses particularly, but not solely, on black women she has been drawn to over the years—from Ella Fitzgerald to Condoleezza Rice. This was a part of her own formation of an identity, particularly as a black woman from a privileged family, which required her moving through the world with intense precarity and precision. The ways that others move through the world, and make art out of their experience, is a place for her to start to articulate her own ever-morphing identity. In other words: she’s a work in progress, ricocheting off the work of those who influenced her most.
If you will, let me bring you back to that tortellini dish I had at the beginning of this mini-essay. That pasta water sauce technique was one I heard for years before I actually tried it. I was certain the sauces I made or augmented from a jar were adequate. But then again, I was never a big pasta person. And I was so sure what I knew already was enough. So when I finally caved and tried adding a bit of pasta water, I was simultaneously shocked at how effective it was and kicking myself for putting off trying it. I could see gold, but was convincing myself I didn’t need it as a means of insecure detachment.
Writing, like cooking, is so solitary and lonesome. It is especially so when I, someone who overly prides myself on independence, refuse to take in the outside works of others out of envy. It is easy to take rejection and self-loathing and use it as a magnet to repel the words of others who only wish to share. But I know always wiser to read what I envy.
As I tell my students: we don’t write or create in a vacuum. But I haven’t been following that advice as I should have. We, like Jefferson, use the work and words of others are a jumping off point for the new and unknown. By putting off reading the works of others, or completely hiding behind their words, I pervert my understanding of my place in a larger conversation. I artificially inflate myself while diminishing the beauty of the works of others.
And let’s be honest, this is a far healthier and more generative way through that negative self-talk. Jefferson puts her entanglements with other writers and artists she admires into what she calls “temperamental autobiography[,] which is the self experiencing pieces of the world as a kind of aesthetic nervous system.”
And that’s something I want to take with me as I leave avoidance behind. Jefferson reminds me that the works and words of others are that liquid gold pasta water just waiting to make what I’m already creating all the richer for its presence.