The Questions We Ask

And How We Answer Them

Well, well, well, I’m late for my usual 5am posting time (scheduled in advance and not sent in real time, I promise), but I finished a chapter of my book today (huzzah!) and I still have a cool 40 minutes until school pickup, so I thought I’d type up some thoughts that have been running through my mind like ribbons in the wind.

This week I was able to hear Rachel Khong and Molly Wizenberg in conversation about Rachel Khong’s new novel, Real Americans. (I have about 20 pages left, and it’s wonderful, and you should definitely read it! I also loved her first novel, Goodbye, Vitamin.) Rachel spoke a lot about the questions she was asking in her novel, and they are urgent and deep ones: How do we become who we become? How do our choices shape us, and shape our children? What makes us who we are? How can we approach understanding each other?

It was a wonderful reminder to me of a truth I learned in a seminar on the birth of humanities, and a pertinent answer to anyone who wonders: why study things like art and literature? (I was asked this question by a microbiologist with a completely straight face as I prepared to devote the next seven years of my life to Russian literature. Ha!) The answer is this: We study the particular to get at the general, to understand something about human experience.

I have never written fiction, and I can’t imagine that I ever will. Maybe all those years of studying Tolstoy’s elegant architecture and Dostoevsky’s masterful characterization has intimidated me too much. I just can’t conceive of plotting out a whole novel. And then writing it! Hilariously, as Rachel writes fiction and Molly writes memoir, they expressed a similar awe at each other’s capabilities: I can’t believe you have the courage to write about your own life! I can’t believe you have the courage to make stuff up!

Yet more hilariously, I was there with my novelist friend Bethany, and we have indeed said variations of this to each other multiple times. The whole evening was a joy and a good reminder that all writing, whether fiction or non-fiction, asks questions. Writing is a way of asking, and it’s a way of answering.

It’s been a happy exercise this week to think about the questions my book is asking, and what answers I’m arriving at (sorry for ending a sentence with a preposition! I’m slapping my own wrist.)

Bethany and I faced an age-old problem after the reading—where could we go for a drink that was open past 10 and offered a prayer of finding nearby parking? We landed at an old-school red sauce Italian place, where we indulged in the sexiest of girls’ night fare: a Pepsi, a chamomile tea with lemon and honey (the summer cold strikes again!), and a big plate of spinach artichoke dip. I so rarely go out at night that it felt truly disorienting to drive home in the dark past my bedtime (10:30, if you must know. My little roosters crow very early in the morning).

More questions were asked, and the answers took shape as we talked. It was a delight, and if I were under 40, I could’ve stayed hours longer. I hope you, too, have a spinach artichoke dip partner in your life!

There are so many more questions I am asking and seeking to answer, but the clock is ticking, so I will leave you, as usual, with…

A Few Hopeful Things

-I just want it recorded for all eternity that my son’s kindergarten teacher is a miracle of a human being. For the last 26 days of kindergarten, on top of all the other wonderful things she has planned, she has assigned a letter of the alphabet with fun activities to each day. I got to go in and do a lesson on Watts Towers with the kids on Rainbow Day, and I am still flying high from the joy of it. Those precious kids. I love them.

-We had a freezing cold beach day this weekend, not that this deterred my Seattle-born child, and I could not stop thinking about Dorothy Day delighting in the spider crabs and sea turtles on Staten Island. I love it so much when someone gets under my skin, and who better than Dorothy?

-The bellflowers! AI, I defy you to create a more beautiful tableau than this one, which stopped me in my tracks on the walk home from school last week.

Until next time, asking questions with you,
Cameron