As the greatest-selling author of all time, in line behind only Shakespeare and the bible, Agatha Christie undoubtedly has a good deal to teach writers of mystery and suspense. But she never would have written a craft book—not about writing, which she considered a job, one at which she worked hard but put away gladly. Once drafts were turned in and contract obligations were met, Christie happily retreated from vocation, withdrawing to her beloved holiday home, Greenway, in an area known as the English Riviera.
Greenway is, in Christie’s words, a perfect house, a dream house. It is situated on more than 30 acres of lush, verdant land criss-crossed by paths down to a boathouse on the River Dart and back up to a hilltop from which one can see, on a clear day, the estuary all the way to Dartmouth and the English Channel. It must have been a glorious place to restore one’s nerves before going once more into the breach of another novel. A perfect retreat, a dream retreat.
Perhaps this sounds like an oxymoron. Science, after all, is about what is observable, quantifiable, testable, predictable, explicable — and dreams are none of these things. They happen inside someone else’s head, quite invisibly to observers, and can be accessed, at best, through blurry and fragmented bits of fast-fading memory. Their bizarre, arbitrary-seeming contents seem to defy all narrative logic (“I was in my grandmother’s dining room, except it looked like my middle school cafeteria, and then suddenly my old orthodontist and this character from a book I’m reading were there”). As Barrett worked her way through a Ph.D. in psychology, she learned that many experts in the field believed that dreams were fundamentally meaningless — that they had no evolutionary purpose of their own and were merely a side effect of random neural firings as the sleeping brain went about more important business. It was silly, the thinking went, to pay too much attention to the results of dozy neurons making odd little stories out of loose bits and pieces rattling about in our brains.
Barrett, however, never lost her conviction that dreams mattered. Her first book was an edited collection that took seriously the dreams of trauma survivors: “Dreams,” she wrote, “can give voice to the unspeakable and begin to restore the savaged.” A subsequent book, “The Committee of Sleep,” examined the role of dreams in creativity, noting that dreams were credited as the direct origin of, to name a few examples, Jasper Johns’s “Flag,” the character Stuart Little and the plot of “Frankenstein,” the Beatles’ song “Yesterday,” the first ironclad battleship, the scientific breakthrough that earned researchers the 1936 Nobel Prize in Medicine and — though this one may be apocryphal — the structure of the periodic table. Stephen King, who struggled with the conclusion of “It” before dreaming the ending exactly as he published it, once explained that he uses dreams as a purposeful part of the creative process, “the way you’d use mirrors to look at something you couldn’t see head-on.” Barrett was also drawn — like researchers who study the dreams that follow hurricanes and fires and wars — to large, collective events, things that lots of different people experienced and then dreamed about. One person’s dreams might seem idiosyncratic and incoherent, but when you looked at many people’s dreams, all affected by the same experience, you could find patterns. Within patterns, you might find meaning.
And yet the biggest source of tension here, I find, incredibly, isn’t race. It’s the tension between “here” and “there.” Most of the people who live here are uprooted beings: uprooted by old age, by their own health, by a nearby dictator’s overreach, by hunger, by climate change, by disaster, by heartbreak. I know all this, and still, I was surprised to realize, just a few months ago, while editing an anthology on Florida’s literature of uprootedness, that I, myself, am not home. Decades after landing here, I am still moved by what I left.
Long form or short, this is a writer who has mastered the art of conveying depths of human feeling in one beautiful sentence after another.
What makes “Sellout” so engrossing is that it profiles both the artists and the suits — the label heads and their A&R reps. Ozzi not only provides a rigorously researched look at how labels targeted bands and fought to sign them; he also amasses an impressive number of firsthand accounts of major-label talent scouts acting like major league sleazeballs.
It may seem like a self-help book, but it resonated with me because it felt like a conversation with a friend or older sibling. It wasn't prescriptive or formulaic — it's without any psychological frameworks or three-step plans — and instead felt vulnerable, accessible and personal.
Being called all manner of things
from the Dictionary of Shame —
not English, not words, not heard,
but worn, borne, carried, never spent —