Colette is very photogenic!
Dear Ones,
Oh! I want to read this to you, sitting very close; I want to be the one to show this thing of beauty, but, but it won't be intimate enough, you or I will feel clumsy, or unsure, and then it will just be another pile of words. You must read it alone; you must be awed by it and face the wonder alone.
My dearest literary love (at this moment, because I reserve the right to change my paramour parameters) is the memoir-ish sound of womens' voices. This one, and this one, and this one, this one, this one, and oh! Claire-Louise Bennett most of all right now. I hadn't near enough of these kind of voices when I was younger- I had a few, to be sure, Ursula LeGuin, Madeleine L'Engle come to mind, Jeannette Winterson: but now, well, now my shelves are overflowing with good guidance and the words of my people.
Don't leave me waxing and gushing, hyperbol-izing, and superlative-ating all over the place; please, if you have ever done a thing (which was hopefully to read Helen DeWitt!) will you now, please, also do this one thing, too??? Pond, Pond, POND!!
PS More wonderful women writers that might lead you to a "moment of psychological integration in time:"
Annie Ernaux
Colette
Jenny Erpenbeck
Sheila Heti
Lauren Groff
bell hooks
Carrie Brownstein
Patti Smith
Tove Jansson
Kelly Link
Annie Dillard
Lydia Yukanvitch
Sandra Sisneros
Amy Sillman
Rumor Godden
PPS Now, maybe, maybe you have finished it, and you want a little more about it, and in that case, but no sooner, you may want to read this. But, do not read it before you read Pond!
PPPS Okay, well, since you asked, I love it because I don't think that I am using my first language, either, but if I were, if I could, it would sound just exactly like Pond. Also:
There was a storm, an old storm, going around and around the mountain, visiting the mountain again perhaps after who knows how long, trying to get somewhere, going nowhere.
Where it would immediately alight upon the dreadful contents therein and deliver the entire catalogue to those parts of the imagination that will gladly make a lurid potion from goose fat and unrefined sea salt.
Not a metaphor, nothing like that- I'd never want the monster to stand for something, that's for sure.
As if making the world smaller because of all the intact explanations that need to occur in order for one thing to become another thing.
It's a devil to know what to take seriously.
And didn't I immediately discover that melancholia brought something out in me that felt more authentic and effortless than anything I'd previously alchemized.
It's been watching me all along, all my life, coming and going- and I don't know what it sees as it stands there, I don't know that it is not in fact becoming a little afraid of me- and I have to be doubly careful I think, not to frighten it away, because between you and me I can't be at all sure where it is I'd be without it.
