—–

1. I kindly request, if you eat canned tuna in spring water, that you switch to oil in 2009.

2. There are 92,000 miles on my car. I intend to drive it another 100,000 and have driven it across the country three times. I enjoy the disparaging looks I receive driving it around Miami, the City of Fast and Furious Drivers.

3. I hope to convert my next vehicle to biodiesel, mostly as an excuse to buy a deep fryer and then use the oil.

4. I have a deep and abiding faith in the Lard.

5. I make a cooking show in my kitchen, by myself, that I post online. I do this more often now because most of the people who have filled my kitchens live far away. Sometimes other people make the recipes later.

6. Moving to Miami was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I miss Charlottesville something fierce.

7. I never thought I would do what the kids call “social media” for a living.

8. When people collect “friends”, “followers”, or whatever other users of an online service are called, I feel sad for them.

9. Most of you don’t know about my real first kiss.

10. There is a high likelihood that I will never own a pet. I might borrow yours.

11. Bikram yoga has changed my hands in the past month or so. I am fascinated by this.

12. I visit California often enough that some people think I live there. I do little to dissuade them.

13. is one of my lucky numbers.

14. When I was nine, I decided to be an FBI agent when I grew up. I taught myself to read backwards, roamed the house with a blindfold on, and started silently walking on the outsides of my arches. This self-imposed training regimen was loosely based on a combination of Agatha Christie novels and Disney movies.

15. One of my favorite films stars Hayley Mills, and no, I’m not telling which one. Don’t hate.

16. I cooked on multiple occasions for someone who could eat seven foods total. And yes, she was older than five.

17. I would much rather you respect me than like me.

18. I am married on Facebook, and I can no longer imagine my life without Stewart Pillow.

19. I’m better at e-mail than phone.

20. I worked as a temp one summer at a Web company before the first bubble burst; there was someone who wore a straitjacket, another who skated the halls, and a third who spent most days in one of the game rooms eating ice cream sandwiches (this eventually impaired his table tennis skills).

21. In many of my dreams, I play a grand piano in a large empty public space. I don’t know what this means (if it’s something horrible, please don’t tell me) and I haven’t played piano regularly since I was twelve.

22. I am a synaesthete. You may be too. I wrote a piece about this in college and tested my hypothesis by feeding my professors’ brainiac kids Cool Whip and asking them what shape it tasted like.

23. I was the Sugar Plum Fairy. And the Dew Drop Fairy. And an amoeba in a pink unitard with a dozen other fourteen-year-olds moving in a cluster around a stage to Pink Floyd. I remain convinced that the choreographer was high. There was an amoebae tug-of-war section.

24. I am missing part of one of my fingers from entering a guacamole contest at my friend Sean’s. I went to the emergency room after the party. It was worth it.

25. I do not go by my first name.

Related posts:

1. A Twenty Hour Tour
2. the secret life of foodpaths (my ars electronica presentation)
3. kthread cooks: conch fritters

Which Brings Me to You: A Novel in Confessions by Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott

My review on Goodreads

rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have always thought the opening sentence of a book is the author’s best pickup line pitched at the reader.

More so, then, in a book where well-constructed paragraphs hold the explicit promise of intimate relations–that, at least, is the premise of this post-postmodern epistolary novel where the two hyperarticulate protagonists agree to reveal the nasty bits of their romantic pasts in letters before meeting up again in real life.

My former colleague Craig Stoltz put it best, I think, when he reviewed the book for the Washington Post:

This book is full of superb writing, and that is precisely its problem…The trouble is Jane’s letters sound an awful lot as if they’ve been written by an award-winning author and writing instructor with an MFA. So, alas, do John’s. To say this spoils the fun is to understate.

To return to the first line of the book, though, it reads: “I know my own kind.” I can only assume that many of the fine Goodreads members who give such lukewarm reviews below are not sympathetic to this kind. Whether the lack of sympathy for this kind is due to character, snark, or textual framing, the book’s prelude section remains a worthy meditation on a smushed boutonniere and contains a line of sexual absolution on page five that I have taken as a personal motto (curious? I thought so).

Moreover, how can you ignore the serious fun of keeping the conceit of a post-postmodern epistolary novel aloft for the length of a novel? I mean, really, our two protagonists always have stamps on hand?

And when one mails a drunken letter irretrievable from the postal carrier once deposited in the mailbox, a “remix” chapter follows with all the apology that comes after drunkdials and drunken texts/emails and none of the clarifying horror of the “sent messages” outbox (tell me the “sent messages” folder isn’t your favorite, and I will denounce you for the terrible liar that you are).

Perhaps I read this in one sitting because each chapter contains character details I covet. To have our hero admit he is a “marginalia junkie”; to be able to refer to a past lover as “the caramelized one”; to articulate an awareness of destructive tendencies and the wherewithal at seventeen to intuit that “boys were dangerous. Each one was shining, lit from within; their souls were torches.” Seemingly trivial and breathy at times, this is true stuff of the sort flawed, complicated, real relationships are built upon.

It’s worth remembering that epistolary works were originally “penned” by female characters (Aphra Behn, of course, used the form; male authors like Richardson would take pains to insist in the introduction that the female narrator’s story was “true”) when the novel was still crystallizing into a genre. Appropriately, the end of the novel careens a bit like its tipsy characters, and structurally, the multiple peaks within the letters throughout are followed by valleys leading to more peaks.

The very end comes together in that elegant way that always brings me to tears–not because it’s an emotional moment (it is), but because each reveals their understanding of the other’s most significant, sustaining source of pain, and those final admissions seal a narrative that the two characters share voicing–imperfectly, and, ultimately, full of hope.

Related posts:

1. kthread reviews: proof
2. kthread reads: middlesex
3. kthread reads: the wonder spot