Clare Carlisle, a British philosopher and an award-winning biographer, is fascinated by books that relate the inner lives and sensibilities of others. “This sort of writing is often in the first person,” she said. “The ‘I’ is strongly identified with the writer, but the story is neither straightforwardly autobiographical nor fictional.” Carlisle recently joined us to discuss four works that sit ambiguously in the space between fact and fiction. “They’re all attempts to make life into art,” she said, so the differences between the genres matter less, precisely because the writers see themselves as artists. Her comments have been edited and condensed.
Checkout 19
by Claire-Louise Bennett
The drama in this novel lies in the unnamed narrator’s relationship to books, in her life as it’s lived with them: “I read Henry Miller for the first time in France, one evening while my friend was out with her boyfriend, and I hated it, I found its bombastically vulgar language unbearable, which made me feel disappointed in myself.” Bennett’s unique voice drives the story, and the way it establishes intimacy with the reader is extraordinary.
This sense of familiarity is, perhaps, tied to the narrator’s attentiveness to her ordinary daily experience, which she recounts in a curated stream of consciousness. She talks about things that many writers might consider too trivial to put into a book, like drinking cups of tea and taking long baths. But there’s also a remarkable elasticity to Bennett’s prose: the narrator’s thoughts stretch from the very inconsequential to the most profound. Indeed, she sometimes finds her way to big observations through smaller ones. “Checkout 19” transfigures a woman’s thoughts into an intense, exhilarating reading experience.
Slow Days, Fast Company
by Eve Babitz
Babitz was from Los Angeles, a city she loved, and this book is about her experiences there during the late sixties and early seventies. It’s a collection of stories, each one organized around a person she spends time with or a trip she goes on. She describes cocktails, restaurants, drugs, the beach; she details the clothes she and her female friends wear, their hair styles and makeup. Though it’s frothy and frivolous and languid, the writing is driven by a ruthless commitment to beauty, to chasing and uncovering it.
The last story, “The Garden of Allah,” is my favorite. It centers on a graceful young woman, Mary, whom other women, including Babitz, adore: “through some invisible chemistry of Mary’s, new friendships would be formed between unlikely combinations.” But, after Mary gets married, she disappears—both in that people no longer see much of her and because she has lost her quiet charisma. In the hands of Babitz, a radical aesthete, this feels like a tragedy. Babitz refuses conventional bourgeois ideals; people’s aesthetic qualities are what she finds sacred. They are heartbreakingly ephemeral, but she manages to re-create them in her writing.
Festival Days
by Jo Ann Beard
“My first love was poetry, my second love was fiction, and my third and lasting love was the essay,” Beard writes in her introductory note to this collection. But, after drawing a distinction between these genres, she concedes that there’s a story-like quality to the essays in her book. This translates into a really interesting way of writing; there’s typically a main through line around which Beard loops and layers her prose.
The title story is about a holiday that Beard and two friends take to India. One of them, Kathy, is dying of cancer, and it’s the last trip she’ll ever go on. That’s the arc, but Beard folds in other stories and memories from different times in her life, like how her former partner left her for another woman. The layering creates a mixture of emotions and intensity that’s not unlike the trip to India itself—one that’s both sweet and very sad, inspiring and bitterly painful. In this way, Beard brilliantly evokes the experience of being human.
Motherhood
by Sheila Heti
The narrator of this book is a youngish woman who’s in a relationship with a man whom she loves, and she is contemplating whether to have children. The story is ostensibly about that choice, but Heti, a philosophical writer, is more interested in choice itself. It’s a Kierkegaardian problem, and by situating the question of choice in a contemporary and feminine context Heti picks up where Kierkegaard left off. Her narrator is drawn to the idea of not having children, as well as to understanding where that desire comes from.
Heti is artful and cerebral, yet at the same time earthy and funny. She doesn’t take herself too seriously—which makes for an elasticity similar to that of “Checkout 19”—and she embraces female embodiment unashamedly. The narrator describes having her period, and the way her thoughts and emotions fluctuate through her cycle. People might think that the life of the mind is distinct from the life of the body, but Heti’s intellectual curiosity is rooted in physical experience. Freedom is also central to the book. The narrator values hers, and Heti’s prose allows readers to exercise theirs. I love the way her writing—as with the other three authors—leaves space for readers to explore their own thoughts and feelings.
