Lauren Groff on Work and Love
This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
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I’ve been reading Elisa Gabbert’s essays and poems and criticism for years, but I only met her in person this past February at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Kansas City when I was on a panel with her partner, the writer John Cotter, on the topic of writing about your significant other in your memoir (Elisa shows up occasionally in John’s memoir Losing Music ). It was a topic that felt apropos when I began reading Gabbert’s new essay collection, Any Person is the Only Self , a couple months later. The collection begins in the public library’s “Recently Returned” shelf, where jewels like Rachael Ray’s My Year in Meals reveal themselves, and ends with a surprisingly moving description of rewatching of the movie Point Break , but in-between are many moments of thinking about writers (Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Susan Sontag among them) writing about themselves and others—and, of course, about writing itself. “I love reading writers on writing,” Elisa writes in one of those essays. “I love writers on their bullshit.” A writer deeply interested in meta-cognition—that thinking about thinking that is so well suited to the essay—Elisa is also a seriously funny writer, one who knows herself and her subjects well, and loves a tangent as much as she seems to enjoys figuring out what she thinks about what—or, as she phrases in the book, figuring out the “grammar in the thought” (a variation on Joan Didion’s statement that she writes to find the “grammar in the picture”). We had this conversation in late May, agreeing to write to each other instead of talk because we both think better when we can write our thoughts out. * Sarah Viren: When I reached out a couple days ago to set up this interview, you said you’d just finished recording the audiobook for your new essay collection Any Person is the Only Self —and that it had been, to quote you, “fun.” What was fun about it? Did you learn anything new about the book, or yourself, via that process? I think in […]
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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
The British realist director Mike Leigh loves the term “character actor,” which he uses often and with zeal. To him,
