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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My five-year-old and I were reading Charlotte’s Web at bedtime recently when we reached what constituted her—and, presumably, many children’s—first literary fainting episode. It occurs after Wilbur the pig, getting loaded into a truck to head to the fair, hears what is doubtless the most terrifying sentence ever uttered within porcine earshot: “You’ll get some extra good ham and bacon, Homer, when it comes time to kill that pig.” Wilbur immediately flags his imminent faint to a nearby sheep, the sheep urges him to kneel down so the blood will rush to his head, people start to scream and the geese cheer, the truck begins to roll away, people dash this way and that, and then, amidst the chaos, Wilbur lists over onto his side and faints away. The hysteria of the non-fainters, Wilbur’s acceptance that he can’t fight, but must surrender to, his fate, the fear of both parties—it’s all spot on. And I should know. I’m a life-long fainter. My parents used to call me Victorian, ever since I went to get my ears pierced at the local jewelry store. After hearing the jeweler say, “Oh, crap” after ear number one and picturing the worst—a pierced brain? unclear—I fainted, woke up soaked in sweat on the floor, then walked around like a punk for a week until we completed the job at the pediatrician’s office, with waxed paper cups of orange juice standing by in the event of a needed sugar rush. In the years since, I’ve fainted in the shower, when giving blood, on a tennis court, flying across the Atlantic, and surrounded by children on their first day of school. Since I long ago confirmed that I simply have low blood pressure and the episodes are nothing to be concerned with medically, I have found the moments of fainting and regaining consciousness to be some of the most ethereal and otherworldly I’ve ever experienced, next only to giving birth, and the hormone-flooded moments of holding my children for the first time. Which is why it strikes me as odd that I so rarely come across […]
Click here to view original page at The Lights Don’t Just Go Out: A Lifelong Fainter on How Fiction Gets Fainting All Wrong
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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,
