I wanted to write; I couldn’t write. I wanted to write, I couldn’t write, I didn’t want to write, I didn’t write. I didn’t write. Now I am beginning to write again.
Two kinds of depression: the one you realize you are sliding into and the one you realize you are sliding out of. Both contribute to the writing of elliptical novels. In the middle, a thick, colorless morass. This third kind is maybe the realest. No writing gets done during this time. But it’s still real.
How do I think of my mood? I think of it, most often, as a leaf balanced on water. Something swiveling and breakable, movable by currents and winds. Mornings are key—I’m Virginia Woolf as written by Cunningham, a woman in a robe standing at the top of the stairs. If I can manage a morning without scuttling it, there is hope for the rest of the day. Here’s a fragment from the novel I am working on. “She rose and dressed. Her mood was good. She held it carefully, like an egg.” In this novel, I am not the protagonist. But she’s based on my grandmother. So I think I am allowed to give her a mood like an egg, in the way that my mood is like a leaf balanced on water but also like an egg.
But there is also the other color to it, the one that’s harder to write about because it recedes and becomes unreal the moment I am able to sit up and write. This color is darker, gluey reds and browns and deep, unguent purples. There is something of the bramble to it. And it feels brambled, prickly, the same way it makes me prickly. I’m the burr in my own throat, convinced I am impossible to love; convinced everything good in my life is abandoning me. My mind races, creating visions of a world without me in it. Maybe, I think darkly, everyone is better off without me—that that’s what they’re all doing, behind my back, making preparations for a life where they will gently let me down and tell me that it wasn’t working. Then a small part of me rises to the surface and says, It’s not true, this is all in my head. Then the cycle starts again, and I grow frantic.
Explaining this to you, I say that I feel like an animal caught in a trap. The more I struggle, the more it hurts. The only way out seems to be to chew off my own leg. I fantasize about being the bird that bashes into the plate glass window—looking at my letters, I realize I wrote something similar, around this time last year.
How many things can a woman be? She can be a leaf, an egg, and a fox in a trap.
And she can also long to be a bird. I’m fine, as I write this. I can tell you that because I’m writing. I’m in the part that comes after the brain-numbing fog and the spiraling self-hatred, and interestingly but unsurprisingly, this is often where my best writing happens—when I’m close enough to the recent pulp of my life to make something from it. I’ve been interested in feelings lately; to say more, really, how things feel. Or how it feels. I wrote an essay recently about criticism that attempted to get at one side of this (3), the resistance to vulnerability and stakes that so much contemporary writing seems to be showing. People seemed to appreciate it; what resonated with most, actually, was a single line: “I have never craved knowing how something feels—materially, I mean, like within a life, within a body, within a person—more than I do now.”
I was writing within the frame of politics; of longing to see how other people attempt to live, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I also meant it in a bodily sense. I want to know how it feels. What the air smells like in, I don’t know, Colorado. The crystallization of sweat, the feel of a body thudding onto a gymnasium mat. I want to know what it feels like inside, the churning personhood, the contradictions. I’m so distant from my own body that I only feel real when you touch me. So I’m looking, looking for something to bring me back—if not to my own self, then to the reality of someone somewhere else.
So I’ve been reading Ferrante. I finished her most recent novel, The Lying Life of Adults, and I’m still thinking about it. I mentioned this on Twitter a while ago, but her writing has truly been the antidote to feeling unfixed. When I first picked up My Brilliant Friend, I had trouble with Ferrante’s imagistic prose—how could a child put so many disparate images together? And then I realized, no, that was exactly like a child. And exactly like a person, a person trying to make the interior exterior and legible. The things that happen inside us are real. The difficulty is making them visible. I’ve been told that too often I resort to metaphor, but I don’t know how else to do it. What else is language, anyway, but us parading around with our dark vessels? Maybe it matters less what symbols I’m using, if you can understand what I’m trying to say.
Writing made this made me feel better. I hope it touched you in some way, too.
Until—well, until sometime,
LP
1: Capitalism sucks but I would be remiss to not inform you that my essay collection, Pop Song, is now available for pre-order here. In it, I write about a lot of the same things I mention in this letter, and also a lot of other things.
2: I recently read The Book of Salt, in preparation for a new book I’m working on, and it is an enchanting, beautifully told novel.
3: And if you’d like to read the piece of criticism I mention, it’s here.
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Hi, you’re reading intimacies, a relaunch of the original, occasional diary letter I sent out from 2016-2018. You’re getting this email because you were previously subscribed to its first iteration, and you got those emails because you were probably subscribed to Cum Shots, my previous letter at Nerve. If you liked this letter, please click the heart. Thank you for reading. I really appreciate you
ahhh this was so beautiful and all too real (like all your writing). i'm hesitant to even comment because of how deeply this hits, and how much i can relate. especially the part about how writing is both a salve and a sign, in times of depression. i was just thinking about this recently too, the act of writing helps you realize you're starting to get better, but also makes the dark places less real, and maybe even harder to explore, regardless of how numbingly painful they might have been to sit in. i especially connected to this line: "I’m the burr in my own throat, convinced I am impossible to love; convinced everything good in my life is abandoning me. " thank you for your writing larissa, i always look forward to your newsletters and am super excited to read your new novel. will pick up ferrante--"antidote to being unfixed" sold me on it <3