Dear Diana

A letter to my editor

This Substack is for my editor, Diana Miller. I’m supposed to be working on a book project and as she has seen no new work recently I want to explain that I’m on it. At least, I have a book-shelf.

Look at rule #6 among my rules of writing: “Choose one book, or five, but no more than ten, to guide you, not with research necessarily, but with the critical matter of method or style. Another way to think about this is to ask yourself who are the writers, or scholars, or artists that you are in conversation with. I use this question to help arrive at my own subject matter, but it also helps with voice.”

(Also, on the subject of bookshelves, check this out. Shout-outs to Teju Cole and Arundhati Roy for the pictures of their shelves.)

I’m embarking on a trip soon that will keep me away from home for several weeks. I will need to make new choices. But for now, over recent days, the books you see above have allowed me to focus my thoughts. They do this just by standing like sentries on this bookshelf close by my desk.

Why these books? Grace Paley for the sound of humans talking; Renata Adler for a reminder about fragments; Arun Kolatkar for his surrealist eye (I will be traveling); Kapuscinski for his wildness; Naipaul because he is Naipaul; Zadie Smith for her portrait of contemporary globalization by representing a marginal life; the Michael Ondaatje memoir for ordinary magic; John Berger for his lyrical, radical humanism; the more muted humanism of William Maxwell, muted but moving; Geoff Dyer for his wonderful insistence, via Albert Camus, that “the best way of talking about what you love is to speak of it lightly”; and, last but not least, David Shields for bringing to us the Emerson quote: “The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when all the arrows are spent.”

(There is some repetition there with the Naipaul books. I like the omnibus Indian edition because it has this piece as a preface.)

I sent a text yesterday to Diana with a photo of my bookshelf. I was telling her that by placing these sentries in my study I was trying to define the boundaries of my ambition and the shape that my book would take.

Last night I went back to my journals to see if I could find other leads. Was there a newspaper story I wanted to pursue? Some of the events had taken place so long ago. (In 2007, a man named Rizwanur Rahman had been found dead, his face bludgeoned, on the railway tracks in Calcutta. He had made the mistake of marrying, across the religious and class divide, a woman named Priyanka Todi. Where is Priyanka Todi now?) In one of my journals, this one from 2010, I found pasted a line from Salman Rushdie: “Each book has to teach you how to write it.” I accept the wisdom of those words and believe that what I’m also being offered is advice about labor and patience. The struggle between finding the right supports and then striking out on your own!

There are other worries. I’m forever haunted by this old New Yorker cartoon also found among the pages of my old journals:

I wonder whether any of the readers of my Substack have come across an excellent book called Letters to a Writer of Color (2023), edited by Deepa Anappara and Taymour Soomro. I thought of that book just now not only because I have an essay in it on authenticity but because my essay uses various bits I had found in my journals, including this particular bit of gyaan from Colm Tóibín on Henry James that I had cut out and pasted in my journal on my birthday in 2008:

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

Oh, the desire to be free. To write freely. Wish me luck!

Let me end by sharing yet another gem, this one from Saul Bellow, that I found in one of my commonplace books: