1/4/2024 0 Comments The journey back book![]() Two years earlier, I’d sat in the kitchen of my newly-rented apartment in Lancaster, PA, three hours southeast of my still-farmhouse and still-husband. Since leaving my marriage, I felt like I’d been driving backwards. Good for you also means: You are moving in the right direction, or Keep going, or You’re on the right track! I couldn’t exactly feel authentic in that sentiment, but I tried it on sitting in that dimly lit auditorium and found that I liked it. She’d said it as if we were talking about a raise, or a decision to quit smoking. ![]() Good for me, I repeated to myself later, sitting in the audience and listening to her talk about mansplaining and Trump and protest. Then we walked next door, joined in the tepid buffet line, filling our plates with salmon and rice pilaf, and moved with the rest of the professors and deans to the auditorium. ![]() We finished the last 15 minutes of the interview sitting with our knees almost touching, talking about boys and their possibility, the struggle of raising good ones. The experience was uncannily similar to the way I often felt at the same godawful table at my lawyer’s firm, the bloodless copies of court papers in front of me. I ruffled through my notes, suddenly hating all of the questions I’d so painstakingly prepared. I’d wanted so desperately to impress her, to feel some camaraderie, but at that giant table I felt like an imposter. She is insanely prolific, and though I called myself a writer, the truth was I hadn’t filled a page in a very long time. Her casual brilliance is intimidating, as much for her meteoric intelligence as for her all-in-a-day’s-work air. Solnit is passionate in thought but not diction her answers, as transcribed later, came out in full, potent sentences, forming perfect unhurried paragraphs. She recounted some esoteric historical fact about Holland, because she is Rebecca Solnit, and we sat down at the glossy lacquered table, the kind I’d recently grown accustomed to in my divorce lawyer’s offices, the same impenetrable glaze atop the same piss-yellow wood. We’d spent an hour together, first examining the old black-and-white photographs on the walls in the austere conference room, laughing conspiratorially about the ratio of men to women in the images. She’d come as a guest speaker to my university as part of our MFA reading series and we met before her event so I could interview her for our literary magazine. The first time I confessed aloud to being a single mother, I was talking to Rebecca Solnit.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |