WRITING
“‘Close to Knowing’ OR Why I Cried Reading Andrew Graff’s Raft of Stars,” The Rumpus, September 2021
I had three good cries in the first couple weeks of January 2020, during my three theater viewings of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, and that set the pace for my crying calendar. I cried when Beth died, of course, and when she got her piano, and several times over the impossibility of Jo and Laurie’s love. I had so many different kinds of cries over the course of the year, in so many different places—in the car, into my pillow, on an airplane, on my parents’ back deck, from anger, from loneliness, from exhaustion, from shame and fear. Sometimes I was crying at circumstance, and sometimes I was crying at what a story had made me believe. For the first time, I began to pay attention to the difference. Keep Reading
“Writing to Heal: The Millions Interviews Elissa Washuta” The Millions, April 2021
I once heard writer and educator Elissa Washuta say that writing essays can get very exhausting when it feels like the essayist is expected to be an insight machine. I took comfort from that acknowledgement, as a young writer who was (and still is) wrestling with the limits of my perception and self-awareness in a genre that often depends heavily on those qualities. And I continue to take comfort and inspiration from her work. She writes well about the difficult and sometimes fruitless struggle to shape narrative out of the mess of experience—from romantic entanglements to searches for the supernatural to our place in the troubling histories of our nations and peoples—and enacts that struggle on the page. The narrator Washuta’s readers encounter is not a sage on a mountaintop doling out wisdom to the worthy, but a friend writing from the middle of confusing and painful experiences, letting you listen while she considers the failures of life to cohere. Keep Reading
“Unreality, Ohio” Essay Daily, January 2021
I’ve begun to wonder if my “good citizen” anxieties stem from a belief that it’s possible for me to act rightly and sufficiently as an individual in the face of the world’s problems, if I just tried a bit harder, taught myself to care a bit more. Gabbert spends many pages wrestling with her limited energies, her limited empathy. Meanwhile, her book complicates any belief in the power of the individual by overwhelming the reader with a full sense of their own helplessness—there are viral pandemics coming that will make this one look like child’s play, she suggests from the research. When Yellowstone’s supervolcano erupts, many of us will be buried in ash before the news arrives. And if these things don’t kill us all, one day we’ll die, anyway. Keep Reading
“Incidental Inventions, short pieces by Elena Ferrante, reviewed by David Grandouiller” Cleaver Magazine January 2020
Who is the Italian novelist we call Elena Ferrante? Since her first novel’s publication in 1992, she—with the help of her publishers—has carefully maintained the real author’s anonymity. Many readers have treated this guarded privacy as a playful challenge, making theories and guesses, particularly in recent years as Ferrante has become increasingly celebrated. The Italian philologist Marco Santagata, after analyzing her oeuvre, suggested she might be the writer Marcella Marmo (Marmo and her publisher denied this). More controversially, the journalist Claudio Gatti dug up financial records to claim that Anita Raja is the author behind Ferrante—others suggest it may be Raja’s husband. One can imagine the confirmation of one of these claims could incite a variety of reactions in Ferrante’s readership, but there’s a more fundamental question behind that of the author’s identity: why do people want to know? Keep Reading
“All the Fierce Tethers, essays by Lia Purpura, reviewed by David Grandouiller” Cleaver Magazine April 2019
It’s hard to find communion with a living thing in winter. Anyone with a burrow crawls in, wraps their tail around their eyes. The other night, when snow had just started falling, I braved the interstate on my way to another city, to share a friend’s burrow. Some black ice spun me around, and I slid off the road, stopped in the median, my tread marks looping back through the new snow like a confused shadow. I’m fine, thanks. I didn’t turn around, kept driving, couldn’t bear missing a chance not to be alone. The car’s fine, too, just brown all over from the dirt I scooped up. I haven’t washed it yet. I like chauffeuring dirt around the city, an unanswered text message from the world of matter: I’m still here. Keep Reading
“How We Speak to One Another: An Essay Daily Reader, edited by Ander Monson and Craig Reinbold, reviewed by David Grandouiller” Cleaver Magazine March 2017
As the conversation here is both broad and deep, there’s something for everyone: muscle cars and fencing, science-fiction and sex and sighing, some prose and some poetry and some playwrighting and some graphic narrative about feeling young and insufficient, about feeling old and insufficient, and of course there are lists upon lists. But maybe that’s missing the point, because what this collection says is that all of it belongs to everyone: “A thing never happens once. A thing happens all the time, is still happening right this instant—to us or to other people,” writes the medical essayist Katherine Standefer. The more of others’ stories I know, the more I begin to realize that all reality coalesces. Keep Reading
“Between Life and Death, a novel by Yoram Kaniuk, reviewed by David Grandouiller” Cleaver Magazine October 2016
In Kaniuk’s world, sons and fathers are dying, mothers and daughters, and “rain pipes” and “secret bays” and “natural pools” are dying, the parking lot of the concert hall (“may-it-rest-in-peace”) on Ibn Gabirol Street is dying, and the restaurant, First Cellar, on Ben Yehudah, died long ago: “A world where everyone swallows everyone else.” But pulsing beneath the persistent irony, puncturing through, is life. Kaniuk shows he has lived: he has stood on Mt. Zion and been shot at and lived, has punched a young man who called Picasso’s “Guernica” beautiful and lived, has attended funerals in Tel Aviv and New York and lived, has frequented jazz clubs in Harlem and studied painting in Paris, “sired two daughters, planted a Jewish agency tree and didn’t build a house, but a rented apartment is also a house.” “My life was a blend,” Kaniuk writes, “of what happened and how I improve, change, build plots. My whole life was an invention of a story which was true but also not, which was legends, always truth, not always right, always a circus of hell and sweet and magic and silly disasters…” Keep Reading
“On the Edge, a novel by Rafael Chirbes, reviewed by David Grandouiller” Cleaver Magazine August 2016
After everything, what remains for Esteban is a landscape of waste, rotting like dead bodies in the local marshlands—the looming rumor of bankruptcy, the incontinent father strapped to an armchair in front of the TV, the nightly game of cards at the Bar Castañer with the high society retirees, and the single, inevitably imminent scene, the one he always refers to in future tense, which begins the novel and ends it: his own death, which flows in the undercurrent (or rather, sits in the stagnant underbelly) of the story, an “intimate little drama, a chamber work, offering to restore what history destroyed.” Keep Reading