May 5, 2022 Diaries Diary, 2010 By Adam Levin In our Spring issue, we published selections from Annie Ernaux’s 1988 diaries, which chronicle the affair that served as the basis for her memoir Simple Passion. To mark the occasion, the Review has begun asking writers and artists for pages from their diaries, along with brief postscripts. Dear Levin, No one wants to hear about your parrot. Even your dreams are more interesting. Even the word you stammer in search of to get across the precise nature of the pain in your stomach. No one wants to hear about your novel-in-progress, either, not unless you can tell them you finished it, you sold it, or how much you sold it for. And yet they ask. About your novel-in-progreess. About your parrot. Why do they ask? You know not to speak of the novel-in-progress. You know not to speak of the bird. You know both equally. So why, Levin, capable as you are, successful as you are at not talking about your novel-in-progress—why can’t you just shut the fuck up about your parrot? Levin Read More
May 3, 2022 Diaries Other People’s Diaries By Sophie Haigney While reading Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion, I often caught myself mistaking it for a diary. The memoir details an illicit affair in prose that feels startlingly immediate, full of particulars that seem to surface in real time: a skirt in a Benetton shop; a list of fortune-tellers in the telephone book; the faded lettering of a plaque that reads PASSAGE CARDINET, near where the author sought a clandestine abortion years before. Yet I was continually made aware that time had passed, and this was last year’s love seen through this year’s eyes: “From September last year,” Ernaux writes, near the beginning, “I did nothing else but wait for a man: for him to call me and come around to my place.” The details of this “most violent and unaccountable reality” have been refracted and altered, distilled into a remarkable book. Read More
May 2, 2022 Diaries Diary, 2018 By Elisa Gonzalez Photograph by Caryl González. In our Spring issue, we published selections from Annie Ernaux’s 1988 diaries, which chronicle the affair that served as the basis for her memoir Simple Passion. To mark the occasion, the Review has begun asking writers and artists for pages from their diaries, along with brief postscripts. July 13, 2018 I was up all night and it’s afternoon now. Maybe writing this will let me go to sleep. Sometimes it feels as if I’ve been awake for six months. Longer? In Cyprus I felt like I never slept. Even when I did my body felt impatient, braced, alert, waiting for the knock of the cat’s paws on the bedroom door at 5 A.M. I would be out of bed before she could start mewing for food. “Acutely, terribly awake,” I wrote in a poem I’m still trying to finish. She knew I was an easy mark, looking for an escape into the day. I saw nearly every sunrise from my window onto the garden. The bougainvillea. “I want to make love to everyone who’s ever lived,” I wrote in the same unfinished poem. An unwise wish, and a lie, of course, if taken literally—but the feeling. What was I trying to ask for? Pleasure. Recompense from the world. Surprise. The end of desire. Something. Read More