What do we think we mean when we say, “a writer’s space”? Is such a space different than, say, any other citizen’s space? Is the space of a writer a physical place—the place where the writing is done, the den, the office, the hotel room, the bar or café, the bedroom, upon a desk or table or any available fat and stable surface?
Or is the “writer’s space” an inner region of the mind? Or is it a psychological place deep within the recesses of the heart, a storehouse of emotions containing a jumble of neurological circuitry? Is it the place, whether physical or spiritual, where the writer tries to make sense of otherwise inchoate lives? In either case, is it a zone of safety that permits the writer to be vulnerable and daring and honest so as to find meaning and order in the service of story?
This is a common scene, whether I’m making dinner for two or six, whether I’m cooking lemony rigatoni with kale or enchiladas or chicken and dumplings. No matter that I’ve cooked for the people I love for 15-plus years. I still worry I haven’t made enough — or, more accurately, the quantity I deem to be enough.
But what sort of host would I be if I didn’t stuff my guests to the gills?
I was stunned to learn that J was older than me, as though it had not occurred to me that one could be an adult but remain cool. J had a husband, an artist with a nerdy affect. His skin was covered with tattoos, many he’d doodled on himself. He’d tattoo me, if I wanted? I was a kid, trying to settle on what kind of person I’d be. Maybe here was part of the answer. Also, I thought him almost unbearably sexy. I wanted to be just like him, and just like her. Weeks later, I stood in the kitchen of their apartment while he sketched out what I’d requested—a skull and crossbones, for reasons forgotten, if I ever had any at all. “It’s perfect because someday all you’ll be is a skull and bones,” he said as he ran the needle across my shoulder blade. “This tattoo will last until then.”
Since bursting on the scene in 2015 with “The Girl on a Train,” Paula Hawkins has established herself as a reliable writer of psychological thrillers set in the U.K. “The Blue Hour” doesn’t plow any new ground on that front, but it’s a tight story with interesting characters that keeps you engaged until the end.
Positively encyclopedic in its outlook, this is a book that takes you back, in a good way, to childhood, every dilemma, decision or future scenario carefully illustrated with a memory-boosting little picture. I agree wholeheartedly with our friends across the Channel. This is vital reading: every maison should have one.
In “Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts,” Oliver Burkeman, a journalist turned self-help writer, argues that we ought to give up a little more often, and more pervasively. Burkeman focusses not on risky alpine adventures but on ordinary life. Many people, he argues, refuse to give up: they are perfectionists who strive ceaselessly to get control of their lives as workers, parents, citizens, and friends. Unfortunately, Burkeman writes, experiencing life “as an endless series of things we must master, learn, or conquer” has the effect of turning it into “a dull, solitary, and often infuriating chore, something to be endured, in order to make it to a supposedly better time, which never quite seems to arrive.” As a counterbalance, Burkeman advocates “imperfectionism.” He invokes the British Zen master Houn Jiyu-Kennett, who, instead of lightening the burden she placed on her students, made it “so heavy that he or she would put it down.” Once her charges saw their situations as “totally irredeemable,” they gave themselves “permission to stop struggling.”