Category: nonfiction

At last, the final volume of Michel Leiris’ The Rules of the Game is available in English—a few (well, more than a few) words about it and a link to my review at Minor Literature[s]

As a reader, I do not tend to be a completest, collecting and diligently making my way through the complete works and associated letters and journals of a particular writer, but if I have made one exception, it is for French poet, novelist, essayist, ethnographer, and critic Michel Leiris. However, as English language Leiris enthusiasts will know, his most important work—the four-volume autobiographical essay to which he devoted thirty-five years of his writing life, The Rules of the Game—was not yet translated in full. That is, until now. This spring, Yale University Press released the final volume, Frail Riffs in Richard Sieburth’s translation.

Sieburth, who translated the book that served as my introduction to Leiris, his 1961 dream diary, Nights as Days, Days as Nights, takes over the Rules of the Game translation enterprise from Lydia Davis, who translated the first three parts of the project, plus Leiris’ novel Manhood. But, if there is any stylistic shift, it is not an issue because Frail Riffs itself marks a sharp shit in approach and style from the dense, labyrinthine prose that characterizes the first volume, Scratches, Scraps and Fibrils toward the fragmented, eclectic form of Leiris’ late work which will be familiar to readers of The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat (which I wrote about at length for The Critical Flame).

Leiris was, throughout his long life which spanned most of the twentieth century, deeply engaged with the political, intellectual and artistic culture of Paris. Yet, his influential autobiographical endeavour was self-focused, scrupulous and often obsessive and critical. It’s not an accounting of his life, per se, but rather of episodes that strike him as important or interesting, against which he can analyze or dissect himself. A love of language and a concern about truthfulness and discretion in the autobiographical exercise are critical. He draws on, among many things, his childhood experiences, travel (as an ethnographer or as part of political or artistic delegations) and, in a particularly vulnerable section of the third volume of Rules, on his suicide attempt, the affair that triggered it and his difficult recovery.

Frail Riffs continues in this vein, but in a more open manner, with short essays and observations, typically grouped thematically, and interspersed with poems, lists, and passages of word play. One of the aspects of Leiris’ character that becomes more apparent in this book and again in Olympia, is his deep despair with the ongoing state of war and violence in the world. He is, as he ages, increasingly confirmed in his anti-colonial and anti-racist convictions. He knows he is too afraid of pain and death to be a true “revolutionary” but as students take to the streets of Paris in 1968, he watches from his well-placed apartment with admiration and offers what refuge he can (the irony of his own bourgeois contradictions never lost on him). I’ve thought about his observations a lot in recent weeks. He would, were he here now, still be in despair.

Anyhow, this long introduction stands as an invitation to follow up with my review of The Rules of the Game Volume 4: Frail Riffs, which has been published at Minor Literature[s]. Thank you to everyone for welcoming my work back to this great literary journal .

The Rules of the Game Volume 4: Frail Riffs is translated from the French by Richard Sieburth and published by Yale University Press.

An extraordinary interrogation: Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

I want to tell how sorrow makes a shape that is familiar. And how that familiar thing can be difficult to both name and to narrate. (Note 83)

For the past week or so I have been sitting in the presence of this singular text. I have been ill, so it has had a little extra time to spin through my fevered brain. And yet, it is not easy to articulate my response.

Ordinary Notes is a text one must come to openhearted and openminded. Over the course of 248 numbered “Notes,” writer and professor Christina Sharpe examines, interrogates and honours the reality of ordinary Black existence. This collection of reflections and observations, some as brief as a single sentence, others extending for several pages, supplemented at times with photographs, documents, and artworks, may appear fragmented yet there is form and direction as Sharpe moves through a series of themes or inquiries, with careful focus and lyrical intensity. The result is a dynamic response to the many horrors and losses faced by Black communities, in the face of white supremacy, historically and recently, but, at the same time, it is a deeply personal work—a memoir, an acknowledgement of the writers and artists who have inspired her, and, above all, a love letter to her mother.

Although a wealth of thinkers, writers and historical figures are referenced in Ordinary Notes, Ida Wright Sharpe is the central inspirational figure in this project. In a number of the earliest notes, Sharpe reflects on the resolve of some of the earliest Black individuals to challenge the colour divide in middle class America: Elizabeth Eckford daring to attend an all-white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, or a Black family moving into an all-white Pennsylvania neighbourhood in the early 1960s. She recognizes an echo of her own experience years later as the only Black student at an all-white Catholic elementary school and then as one of a small number of Black students in a public junior high where it seemed she had made good friends.

Sharpe describes how her mother, recognizing that these friendships her daughter had made were destined to shift with the onset of adolescence, wanted to ensure that she had the necessary knowledge to make her own life choices moving forward—choices she might not have even known she had:

This telling set into motion a series of events that fundamentally changed me.

My mother wanted me to build a life that was nourishing and Black.

My mother wanted me to live in spaces where I would be reflected back to myself without particular distortions.

She spare me tremendous pain.

This Black note changed the course of my life. (from Note 10)

Later Sharpe will explore the lives of her mother and her grandmother, whom she did not know, and the nurturing atmosphere within which she was raised. In a world where Black people are still subjugated in so many areas of ordinary life and society, her mother was determined to ensure that she and her siblings were exposed to literature and arts in which they could see themselves as valued and strong.

As one makes one’s way through this volume, it is perhaps best to take time to stop and process what is being presented, take advantage of the generous footnotes as needed, pay attention to the images. Many of the impressions of anti-Black brutality may be historical, others very recent and widely covered. Slavery, lynching, police violence. Museum visits commemorating historical injustices are described. A multitude of Black voices are welcomed into a conversation with the past and present, the voices of Toni Morrison, Dionne Brand, Audre Lorde, bell hooks and many more. As the Notes accumulate, the observations, reflections, and memories naturally and gradually gather into an examination—a questioning—of the way art, beauty, and literature can form a positive understanding of the meaning of Black experience.

The primary audience Sharpe is addressing and speaking with in Ordinary Notes is a Black one. But a white reader open to listening will find much to both challenge and expand understanding and, as with any intentional engagement with literature, where one comes from and one’s own experiences will inform the reading. Sharpe makes some telling observations about the expectations the often-white reader or reviewer, by virtue of colonialism, brings to a book by a Black writer, fostering a view that “all of that book’s explorations, its meanings, and its ambitions lodge in a place called identity.” They may then praise the writer that “‘bravely’ eschews identity” or does not centre their work strictly in “Black life” as if this is to be commended:

These readers and reviewers are stuck on something they call identity and not something called life or genre or craft or intertextuality or invention or literary tradition.

These readers continually misread the note. They decant all complexity, all invention into that thing they name identity that they imagine is both not complex and not relevant to them.  (from Note 97)

This comment strikes me as applicable to the way much literature is presently reduced to identity, whatever that “identity” is perceived to be, when seen as something distinct from a reader or reviewer’s own experience, disregarding that we are all much more complicated—and ordinary—than any arbitrary designation of identity.

Some things I remember but they no longer live on the surface of my days. (Note 198)

Ordinary Notes has been my companion throughout this Black History Month. It has stimulated much reflection, especially on the legacy of anti-Black racism that is still with us and growing, along with other elements of racism and intolerance, as we don’t have to look too far to see. It challenges me to think more deeply about these issues and explore some of the authors and artists she highlights with whom I should become better acquainted.

Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe is published by Knopf Canada, Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US, and Daunt Books in the UK.

In the footsteps of the man pretending to be me: Under Our Skin – A Journey by Joaquim Arena

The first large group of captured and enslaved Africans arrived in Lagos, a maritime town on the southern coast of Portugal on August 8, 1444. The shipment of 235 men, women, and children marked the establishment of the earliest slave market in Europe, and a segment of that initial African population would end up in Lisbon. A century later, Black Africans would not be an uncommon sight in the city, as colonial Portugal became a major player in the growing trans-Atlantic slave trade. A street scene painted in 1570 depicts a busy plaza in the capital in which half of the people pictured are Black, some socializing, others working, and in the middle of it all, a Black knight passes through on his horse. This image, and the conference where he first sees it, will serve as a catalyst for a journey that will take Cape Verdean-born writer and journalist Joaquim Arena into the Portuguese countryside following the family history of an older woman he befriends who is the descendant of a freed slave. Alongside this narrative, runs the author’s meditation on his own personal history in light of the death of his estranged stepfather.

The hybrid essay is a delicate balance—a common focus must lie at the root of seemingly disparate threads or it feels awkward and forced. With his first nonfiction effort, Under Our Skin: A Journey, originally published in Portuguese in 2017,  Arena manages to weave history, memoir, and travel writing, into an idiosyncratic and entertaining exploration of the early roots of the Black African diaspora in Europe. The thematic mix along with the inclusion of grainy black and white photos will remind some of Sebald (to whom he has been compared), but although both writers blend a personal story with historical and landscape writing, Arena’s story is not fictionalized and his literary style, if at times digressive, is generally more direct.

Under Our Skin opens with Arena’s first encounter with Leopoldina, a retired school teacher, at a conference on Lisbon’s history to which he, much to his surprise, has been invited to represent the ethnic minorities of the city—he, a man of mixed race born in Cape Verde and raised in Lisbon who had until recently been living back in his homeland. While discussing the painting described above, Chafariz d’El Rei, this striking older woman rises to speak,  seemingly with a particular sense of intimacy, of the Blacks, slaves and Moors who would have been living in Portugal in the sixteenth century. Several weeks later, Arena and Leopoldina happen to meet again on a train. They are both returning from an exhibit entitled Blacks at the Heart of the Empire and, as they talk, she confesses that since her retirement, research into the history and social conditions of Africans in Portugal has become a passion of hers. He’s inclined to wonder if this hobby has a personal meaning. Her response: “It’s in the blood.”

Since he is back in Lisbon, at least for the time being, Arena begins to visit Leopoldina on a regular basis, to help her out with occasional tasks and listen to her stories about her family which she can trace back to her great-great-great-grandmother Catarina, a slave in the first Count of Belmonte’s estate. She was apparently treated so badly that she took advantage of an opportunity to escape with a group of slaves who disappeared one morning early in the nineteenth century, making their way south across the Rio Sado valley to settle near the village of São Romão where they found farm work alongside poor white and Black families already in the area. Leopoldina, who would be born there a hundred years later, came to understand her bond to Catarina through the memories and accounts passed down by her female descendants and now she shares this history with her new, younger friend. However, when Leopoldina has a stroke, she asks Arena to go one step further. Unable to speak, she puts her thoughts down on paper, as strength allows, expressing regret that she cannot be buried in her village cemetery because it has been closed for years:

These words make me realize just how much of her life has been spent, that few joys remain for her, and she knows it. I think of her village as a corner of the universe and about time deferred, about permanence and eternity, about all the moments that contribute to a life. I feel an incredible longing for the Sado valley, a nostalgia for heaths, woodland, and rice fields I’ve never seen.

She starts writing again: “Will you go there for me . . .?”

Against Arena’s account of his friendship with Leopoldina, her family’s past and the journey it inspires, is the story of his own family history. Chapters numbered in alphabetical form tell the first story while the latter unfolds in unevenly alternating chapters designated with Roman numerals. Arena’s is a distinctly Cape Verdean story. It is also a search for identity. Born on the island of São Nicolau, to a local woman and a Portuguese temporary worker, Arena grew up with only an imagined picture of his birth father who left when he was two. Four years later he found himself bound for Lisbon, as part of a migration of Cape Verdeans drawn to the city in the early 1970s with the strange man his mother intends to marry. But as a child he initially greeted this new land with a sadness and longing for his island home while his new stepfather, a seaman, essentially remained a stranger who disappeared for months at a time. Now, after years living back in Cape Verde, Arena has returned to Lisbon to help settle his stepfather’s affairs. Can the city’s streets lead the middle-aged man to the boy he once was and, in the process, to himself?

These intertwined journeys, one through the landscapes, villages, and historical sites in an area south of Lisbon reaching, ultimately, all the way to the site of that fateful landing in 1444  and the other exploring the author’s own heritage, as a mixed race Cape Verdean, both include fascinating detours to include eccentric relatives and Black historical figures who started life as slaves, only to find themselves rising to positions of influence in European and Russian society—even if such transformations had their limitations. Arena’s journalistic skills are evident in his ability to transition between historical details and present day encounters. Although they do not explicitly play off one another, the two strands of his journey are necessarily connected, or rather, it seems as if he needs to trace Black African history in Portugal to complete a piece of himself that is missing, a piece that connects him back to a distant African homeland that generations of Cape Verdeans have sought to deny. Cape Verde was discovered and settled by the Portuguese to serve as a base for cross-Atlantic slave trade and, as a result, most of the local population are mixed race and were, historically, afforded a better education than other colonized populations in mainland Africa. This enabled them to play a more active role in the structures designed to exploit African peoples. Such a legacy can foster a complicated relationship—or rejection of a connection—with others of African origin.

Of course, following the stories of others, tracing their lives, and visiting the places they lived is one piece of a much larger puzzle. To understand himself, Arena will also have to come to terms with his own experiences growing up in Portugal and attempt to understand those closest to him, even the one man he feels most estranged from. The journey he will take extends far beyond the Lisbon city limits and reaches far back in time, and it’s conclusion is as rewarding and as nebulous as any historical/existential exploration can be. But it does make for a very rich reading experience.

Under Our Skin: A Journey by Joaquim Arena is translated from the Portuguese by Jethro Soutar, and published by Unnamed Press. It is Arena’s first work to appear in English.

Pride Month reading 2023—None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary by Travis Alabanza

I have long been ambivalent about Pride, but the rising waves of anti-LGBTQ, and especially anti-trans, sentiment seen over the past few years has made me very concerned. As a transgender individual who is white and fits visibly into the accepted gender binary, I have been able to stand in the shadows for a long time. For more than two decades. In fact, when I was a single parent supporting two children in a world without any legal protections on the grounds of gender identity, keeping my gendered history hidden was essential. On the occasions that I dared to out myself to a co-worker, job loss invariably followed. But, for the most part, especially outside of the LGBTQ world, I have encountered very few problems because I am older and exceptionally ordinary in my presentation. I pass so well that often I am not heard or believed when I try to tell someone that I am transgender.

For British writer and performer Travis Alabanza, on the other hand, none of the above applies. So when I heard about their Jhalak Prize-winning book None of the Above: Reflections on a Life Beyond the Binary, I knew I’d found my perfect read for this year’s Pride Month. And, even though our ages, lives and experiences differ greatly, I related more closely to many of the ideas they explore in this thoughtful and articulate examination of what it means to exist as an openly gender non-conforming person of colour in a world that is bound to the binary, than in most of the more “conventional” trans-themed books I’ve read. This is a bold and honest work that rides on a shifting current of hurt, uncertainty and self-affirmation against an unspoken pressure for trans identified people to be determined, self-assured, and often stubbornly binary in a world that increasingly strives to deny our validity. There is little room for doubt, less for admitting how exhausting it can be.

In our journey to ‘own our gender’, is it ever really our own? Or does it rely on us conditioning those around us to act and be a certain way too?

None of the Above is neither a typical memoir, nor an explicit defense/explanation of non-binary identity. It is, rather, something in between—a personal account structured around seven statements that have had a particular impact on Alabanza, as a youth and as a public figure, exploring their identity, sexuality and gendered expression. As they dissect these statements, there is a persistent question of how long an obviously gender-defiant presentation can be maintained before it simply becomes easier to move toward a more “acceptable” or “proper” presentation of transness. Of course, given the ongoing escalation of hostility directed at trans women, it’s not clear that such a progression toward hormones and surgery would be easier.

With chapter titles such as “So, When Did You Know?”, “But I Mean, Proper Trans”  and “This Ain’t A Thing We Do Around Here, Son,” Alabanza talks about growing up poor in a council project, their first joyful expressions of femininity, and their development of a successful career as a performer and theatre maker. The questions and comments they encounter come from curious, well-meaning friends, neighbours, fellow performers and critical journalists. Yet, in exploring their reactions and possible responses to these statements that weigh so heavily, there is a willingness to open up their experiences to concerns that intersect with those of others who may be white and/or cisgender. After all, the rigid strictures associated with the gender binary impact people who are not trans in many ways even if they also drive transphobic attitudes. The same gender binary can force trans people to consider medicalization as the measure of “true” transness and look at the openly queer and non-binary as troublesome distractions. For trans people of colour all of these contradictory forces are heightened.

Often what is projected onto those who are visibly gender non-conforming and non-binary, is that our existing, and claiming transness, will ruin it for those wanting (and deserving) a quieter life. Gender non-conformity and being outside of the gender binary cannot be seen as quiet: it is seen as purposefully choosing to cause trouble. To those so wanting a life of peace, others’ disruption can feel like a threat to that fought-for sanctuary.

This is a book that strives to come to terms with the feeling of being at odds with the gender one is assigned at birth, but not feeling comfortable identifying as a man or woman. It’s not a new phenomenon—I have friends who have identified as “gender neutral” for decades. What has changed, for better and for worse, is a wider public forum for people to see and be seen defying or transcending gender. I am grateful I transitioned before the advent of social media, but without the internet I would have had no community. Likewise, without the fabulous gender-bending musicians of the 1970s, I would not have survived my teens. As it was, I was thirty-eight before I finally had an understanding of the differentness I’d always known. But, even though my ultimate path was quieter and more conventional (to a point), my strongest connections have always been with those who stand at the intersection of masculine and feminine. So, for me, there was much food for thought in None of the Above that is beyond the scope of this brief reflection/review. Perhaps it will emerge elsewhere. Meanwhile, I will say that, for readers inside and outside the trans community, this is a very valuable and entertaining read (though one that might anger some on both sides).

None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary by Travis Alabanza is published by Canongate in the UK and will be published by The Feminist Press in the US in October.

Taken, not taken: The Nail in the Tree – Essays on Art, Violence, and Childhood by Carol Ann Davis

I accepted this book as a review copy when it first came out, just over three years ago now. I put on the shelf with all the best intentions, and then forgot it. When I rediscovered it there, lost among assorted volumes of nonfiction, I felt ashamed by my negligence. Surely I could have read it earlier, if not when I first received it, at the very least during the trial of Alex Jones for the outrageous conspiracy theories that hurt so many people and ushered in a whole new form of denial, or a few months later when the tenth anniversary of the Sandy Hook school shooting was marked last December. But The US seems an endless supplier of senseless and tragic school shootings so it’s no surprise that, when I finally did take the time to read The Nail in the Tree: Essays on Art, Violence, and Childhood, I happened to finish it on the one year anniversary of Uvalde.

Poet and essayist Carol Ann Davis was newly relocated to Newtown, Connecticut, with her husband and two young sons when the Sandy Hook shooting occurred. They lived close to the site but, due to zoning, the boys attended another school. Willem was in fourth grade at the time, Luke in kindergarten. They were safe, but not untouched. “And this is what it is not to suffer that day,” she tells herself when recalling the shooting, “This is the not-suffering, happy ending story.” But, of course, it’s not that simple. The trauma sends lasting ripples throughout the community in way that leaves no one unaffected:

Sacerdos, from the French and earlier from Latin, literally meaning “offerer of sacrifices.” The children who live here, perhaps it’s strange to say, now glow. They do, they glow. No one can approach unmoved, and the children, understanding their role, shoulder, take on, burden themselves with us. Their skin nearly translucent, they walk around like that, glowing. They offer themselves like bits of mirror, and we accept.

The adults, by virtue of wider perspective, suddenly become acutely aware of the fragility of childhood. For those who still have to send their children back to school, trust them to the school bus each morning, there is the conflicted desire to both protect and prepare. Older siblings want to look out for their younger brothers and sisters. No one wants to trigger memories that may or may not even exist.

It is within the altered dynamic of the six years that follow the tragedy, that Davis endeavours to articulate and make sense of what it means to raise children in the aftermath of violence. In a series of essays that make their way slowly but not strictly chronologically away from the pivotal event, she turns to poetry and art to understand how artistic practice might be a productive way of integrating trauma into life moving forward—for herself and for her sons.

This is not a typical grief memoir, nor does it delve into the specifics of the shooting or the political fallout. The event itself rests as a horror too large to think about directly—it sits, unspoken, in all aspects of community life, especially at the bus stop, in the schools and on the playing field. Yet Davis seeks answers at her desk, beneath the hummingbird feeder, at art galleries and museums and, ultimately swimming in the open ocean, the one desperately longed-for release her newly adopted, landlocked hometown denies her. Along the way, among others, she turns to the work of Hélène Cixous and poet Miklós Radnóti and, for an extended period, she follows the lead of (and argues with) Rumi. She engages with the art of Eva Hesse to better understand the poetic process, and when, four years after the fact she has to fully explain to Luke, now that he is old enough to know, the extent of what happened at Sandy Hook, she draws on Paul Celan and Armenian born artist Arshile Gorky to help her untangle the enormity of her own grief.

Davis’s writing is poetic, pulling images, quotes and refrains through her essays, like threads to link or unravel her thoughts as needed. And she is an astute observer of art who is able to find in a number of artists, their techniques and philosophies about their practice, clues to appreciating how she is growing and, more importantly, how the boys are not only coping, but finding their own ways to thrive. More than once the boys are dragged through exhibitions, like one of Picasso’s sculptures in New York, or shown a show catalogue, like that of American abstract painter Agnes Martin. Davis hopes that Luke, who is a budding draftsman will find some connection in Martin’s geometrically precise but somewhat dissonant canvases (he does not). The message in the artist’s work and her method, however, is less for the child than his mother:

I’m suddenly afraid: I am not ready to admit to myself, as Martin has, that the purpose of art may be to unlock an inner happiness in the viewer. I am doubtful such a happiness is inherent, and unsure whether it is larger than forces with which I’ve engaged in my own work (such as grief and difficulty). I am uncertain I can place the function of art, art-making, its practice, in the category of making-happy, given all I’ve seen and felt in the last five years, all my children have endured in the service of gaining a working understanding of the world into which they’ve been thrown. Of course, any difficulty can be a subset of happiness, Martin’s work virtually shouts at me. Don’t be so narrow-minded.

Throughout these original, thoughtful essays, it becomes clear that the search for meaningful expression—even happiness—after trauma is Davis’s personal journey, one within which her children are her motivation and measure of progress, but not her exactly creative companions. One cannot grieve for anyone else as much a parent might wish shield their child from their own inevitable process. With luck and their parents’ support, Willem and Luke will hopefully have the resources to come, in time, to their own mature understandings of the event that they escaped only by chance. Sadly, with school shootings such a regular occurrence in the US, shadows of the horror that erupted at Sandy Hook on December 14, 2012 may be hard for any of the Newtown residents to fully move beyond.

The Nail in the Tree: Essays on Art, Violence, and Childhood by Carol Ann Davis is published by Tupelo Press.

Searching for the ever elusive “I”: The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills

Lately, when I imagine, I remember. Then I shift into a peaceful kind of forgetfulness. And I start to imagine again, remembering. Like a circle that’s no longer vicious because it erases its own trail, little by little, always resketching its outline for the first time.

How much of identity is memory? It would seem that the experience of being in the world is dependent on memory because each moment, as it passes, becomes part of an ever accumulating past—a past that gives coherency to the existential “I.” Yet, can what we think we know about ourselves help us live with our choices, idiosyncrasies, strengths and faults? In her inventive and intelligent collection of personal essays, The Book of Explanations, Mexican poet and writer Tedi López Mills begins with a look at a most basic question of identity, her “improper” (read: “unconventional”) name, followed by playfully distinctive explorations and dissections of the nature of memory. These opening pieces set the groundwork for a journey that will carry us through many of the experiences, influences, values and ideals that make her who she is and, by extension, any one of us who we are—or might be—because, after all, what can anyone ever really know for certain?

I don’t know the history of the fourteen essays—cleverly numbered from 0 through 13— that comprise The Book of Explanations. That is, I cannot tell if the original 2012 collection was assembled from previously published pieces or intended as a cohesive work from the outset, but it definitely succeeds as a whole. López Mills’ style is eclectic and fresh; her essays open up in unexpected directions, adopting different forms and approaches from piece to piece. She is always very much present, drawing on memories and personal experience, but even her more memoirish essays swing toward broader social, psychological and philosophical questions.

After her early forays into the nature of remembering, López Mills turns her attention to that strange period of often dark introspection otherwise known as adolescence and to reflections on the peculiarities of family dynamics. As a teenager, the author, or  her possible alter ego/alternate “I,” falls into to some classically heavy reading—Hesse, Nietzsche—in search of formulative role models. On her family’s frequently uprooted home front, her father, an eccentric, frustrated architect of dreams and schemes, is an unpredictable but memorable character while her mother is the stabilizing presence. She explores the lasting impact of her childhood in the essay “Father, Mother, Children,” where she posits: “Maybe there are no happy families, just happy days. I remember them because they’re always flanked by unhappy ones.” Her father, she says, was “erratic, original every day,” her mother “homogenous, predictable.” She is tempted to imagine who her mother might have been without children, although that necessarily imagines the imaginer out of existence. This leads into a fascinating observation about childlessness—her own situation which she insists is neither right or wrong—and its implications:

You belong to yourself, and in the end you may realize that your persona dims if you don’t put it at risk; you start melting away into a nervous, perfectionist mind. The influence of childlessness may even be more shocking, a deprivation so intense that it triggers hallucinations of a crowd as you rummage around, hearing no one’s noise. A fictitious identity, if forced and constant. While there’s no room for regret—you can’t undo what was never done—there’s an extravagant kind of nostalgia. You miss the future, not the past.

Either option, parenting or childlessness, simply puts you on one side of anguish or the other. And as a parent, I would add that you can experience an extravagant kind of nostalgia as well. In fact, I suspect that we all have some aspects of our lives in which it is the future we miss, not the past.

From one essay to the next, López Mills, examines those notions that intrigue or trouble her, or both. Her affection for cats, the pervasive and evasive nature of guilt (a regular evening visitor), what makes some people prone to jealousy (something she does not experience) and what makes others “good” (something she would like to be). She defends pessimism in what is essentially an essay about Cioran, makes some astute observations of the way we show or fail to show compassion for those in need and, finally, engages in a spirited Wittgensteinian-like investigation of wisdom by way of by Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and the Bhagavad Gita with plenty of introspective musing unfolding over 54 short reflections.

Not only is López Mills an engaging companion with a philosopher’s tendency to question and a poet’s sensitive attention to language, she puts herself—as the typically uncertain “I”—into all of the subjects she explores in a way that is always thoughtful and recognizable. This is a book filled with so many intriguing thoughts and ideas, but it is never intimidating or alienating. At a time when “genre-bending” essays have become quite popular, I sensed something here that I have not found in other similarly described collections. I suspect it may have to do with age. Although I grew up in a different environment and my soul searching may have had some differing triggers along the way, I had a sense from early in this collection that the author had to be close to my own age. There were no particular pop culture references to cling to but rather a shared atmosphere of being a teenager in the seventies, and a certain accumulated, well, wisdom. I finally looked her bio up online and discovered that she was born in 1959 and is just one year older than I am. Even though this book, first published in Spanish in 2012, was probably compiled when she was in her early fifties, I felt I was reading a contemporary.

It’s so easy to believe we know it all when young, but the older you get the more you realize how naïve your younger self was and the more you appreciate how little you ever really understand about who you are. At fifty or sixty, you may care less what others think in explicit terms, but that doesn’t mean you stop trying to figure out what it all means at the end of the day. As with one of my heroes, Michel Leris, who differs greatly from López Mills in style but not in intent, there is this unending desire to catch oneself in the act of being and examine a subject—the elusive “I”—which can really only be observed in passing. Both writers know we can look back at what we remember, but in the moment we are fluid beings and what we remember is always being reimagined. There will always be more questions than answers.

And that’s okay.

The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills is translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers and published by Deep Vellum.