I’m reading her book right now, No Time To Spare, and am filled with this familiar feeling of how it feels when you’re reading someone and just feel…seen. Understood, yes, but more than that, like your own way of understanding itself is being reflected back to you.
Or, in other words, she’s just smart and I like how her brain moves ideas around, how it thinks and how she shares that thinking with the world.
So many do this, take us on their trains of thought. Sometimes I can hop on and often I can’t, but rarely does a writer make me realize that I’ve always been on that train, somehow, but just didn’t know it. AND - and this is key - I’ve felt bad for not being able to jump on so many other trains for so long, but finally, here, for a moment, I feel good. I feel okay. Whole.
The feeling fades, and it’s a good thing it does - how else could we return to it?
I’m really loving the essay TGAN Again about The Great American Novel in which she says:
“Greatness, in the sense of outstanding or unique accomplishment, is a cryptogendered word. In ordinary usage and common understanding, “a great American” means a great American man, “a great writer” means a great male writer. To regender the word, it must modify a feminine noun (“a great American woman,” “a great woman writer”). To degender it, it must be used in a locution such as “great Americans/writers, both men and women . . .” Greatness in the abstract, in general, is still thought of as the province of men.
Who wants “The” Great American Novel, anyhow? PR people. People who believe that bestsellers are better than other books because they sell better than other books and that the prizewinning book is the best book because it won the prize. Tired teachers, timid teachers, lazy students who’d like one text to read instead of the many, many great and greatly complex books that make up literature.
Art is not a horse race. Literature is not the Olympics. The hell with The Great American Novel. We have all the great novels we need right now—and right now some man or woman is writing a new one we won’t know we needed till we read it.