I began by recording Leo, and ended up recording my parents.
And I've published an essay about doing both while also researching the Uncle I Never Knew for the Boston Globe.
I also managed to quote Jay Allison, the Moth Radio Hour impresario who says something so beautiful it might have been worth building an essay around:
"Sound gets inside of you -- it inhabits you. It can break your heart."
April 12, 2022
Lost diary entry
Last night after a day of working in the garden in Avon and admiring
my father’s books and running on the beach with Caramel, I couldn’t resist any
longer – I began to cry, saying to Mike, “Why does it have to be so hard?” But
really I should have said, Why do we have to only appreciate everything when
it's gone? Most interesting man I ever knew, my father, and yet I often shooed him away like he
was some bothersome child. Like everyone had a father who was an encyclopedia
of musical knowledge (among other things) and a master gardener and a minor comedian.
-30-
I spent yesterday writing a piece about the Joan Didion auction, and immersing myself once again in her seminal 1968 essay collection Slouching Toward Bethlehem, I couldn't help but think over the lines of verse from Yeats that inspired the title:
So I re-read the poem ("The Second Coming") and now it's all my head can conjure.
Every now and again, I file stories for CNN (instead of simply editing other writers' stories), and every now and again I am able to combine my identities as a part-time journalist and a part-time essayist while reporting a story.
This is one of those occasions. I wrote about the auction of personal items that once belonged to seminal writer Joan Didion.
Of course, I've read Didion's work! I aim to chronicle my whole life through essays so I've absorbed many of hers, and was thrilled to quote a few of my favorites in this auction preview story.
A bit chagrined that I am already priced out of said auction -- which includes artwork, furnishings and unused writing notebooks (that last item, hmmm, yes I would happily take those if they weren't selling for $2,500!).
I began reading the Tracy Daugherty biography & revisiting other works -- I'm even thinking it's time to find my copy of Play It As It Lays, though I haven't seen it in years. Maybe decades.
Oh and I'll take recommendations for favorite Didion works I haven't read. Not that I need anything else to put on the TBR pile but...
Here's to pioneering women writers. Here's to women writers who are so successful and iconic that their belongings are coveted.
-30-
From the novel, So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood:
He had written this book only in the hope that she
might get in touch with him. Writing a book, for him, was also a way of beaming
a searchlight or sending out coded signals to certain people with whom he had
lost touch.
The novel is by Patrick Modiano -- the first work I read by the French Nobel Laureate. And the start of an obsession. Coded signals!
Are you, too, obsessed with Modiano? I even stalk one of his translators on Twitter!
In the event you've also fallen under the spell of Patrick Modiano, I've compiled a list of links so I can obsessively immerse myself in his history.
Since that first wonderful novel, I've read the following books by Modiano:
Suspended Sentences
The Black Notebook
Invisible Ink
Missing Person
Pedigree (memoir; you can read an excerpt here https://yalebooks.yale.edu/2015/12/09/patrick-modiano-on-childhood/)
Paris Nocturne
In the Cafe of Lost Youth
The Occupation Trilogy
I find his obsession with maps and addresses and half-remembered episodes from his childhood mesmerizing.
I also love the way he presents childhood as a puzzle we spend the rest of our lives trying to solve.
And his obsession with perennially reconstructing his childhood mirrors my own, though he is careful to point out in Pedigree that he does so without nostalgia. His father was a shadowy figure -- on the run during World War II because of his Jewish heritage and willing to get his hands dirty to stay free -- and along with his mother, who performed in theater, frequently left Modiano in the care of friends.
From France Today:
https://francetoday.com/learn/books/patrick_modiano_literary_giant/
From The New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/patrick-modianos-postwar
AND
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/05/the-unforgotten-books-alexandra-schwartz
From Slate:
From 3:AM Magazine:
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/patrick-modiano-in-and-out-of-silence/
From the Paris Review:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/02/24/lamplight-and-shadow/
From the website of Yale University Press (which has published some of Modiano's English translations):
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/
