She was an individual, not an icon, with interests and fascinations and aspirations she could not always fulfill. She wrote, as all writers do, for the art and for the money, using the materials at her disposal as best she could. Sometimes I think of those ghost books — on LSD and Linda Kasabian and Patty Hearst — and wish I could read them, but in fact we already have the necessary parts. What else did she need to say about the 1960s that isn’t in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album”? How do we improve on the magnificence of those books? Indeed, it is their elusive fragmentation that gives them their weight, their gravity, by evoking the author’s wary interaction with her times.
Late at night, creating something recognizable out of a shapeless mound of Play-Doh gave me the greatest sense of satisfaction I’d felt in years. This was how I had imagined my artisan life. And, unlike my academic pursuits, clay was something that didn’t need to be perfect, given how little was at stake. Unlike an experiment, or even another, more permanent art form, Play-Doh required no advance planning or skill or discipline. If the skull I molded wasn’t quite right, I could roll it back into a ball and start over, and then again until I was happy with what I’d made — an approach I was too afraid to apply to the rest of my life. With Play-Doh, I started to practice courage, building myself up to eventually leave what I perceived as the security of academia and begin anew.
Andreades’s writing has economy and freshness. “Brown Girls” reads as much like poetry as it does like a novel, which is another way of saying: Don’t arrive here expecting a good deal of plot.
Beside the fountain’s troupe of sun-bleached rubber ducks,
in the gardens, under a shade sail,
my father is crying about Winston Churchill.