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In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, which is to say the spirit of a pseudo-Catholic holiday co-opted into a $20 billion industry, I wrote an essay-slash-review of the film About Time. In it, I joke-but-not-joke that I would like to go back in time and unsee the film, partly because it is not great (my neighbor disagrees) and partly because it ruined a budding relationship (which arguably was not long for this world).
In addition to watching bad movies, I have been reading a lot about craft in literature: the narrative elements or literary devices utilized within storytelling. It started with Matthew Salesses’s book Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping, and now I’m onto George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.
An aside: On the phone with a surfer, they said someone recently asked them where the stopping point is. At what point are you good enough that you’re satisfied and you can stop? The surfer said that was never on their mind, but couldn’t explain why. To me, a non surfer and lowly land dweller, surfing is not a static sport, in the sense that the conditions under which you play are ever-changing, and so that mythical stopping point doesn’t exist. No two shore breaks are the same, no two tides are identical. And perhaps it’s a stretch to say I view writing in the same way. No two essays or books are the same. Language evolves. Craft deserves serious consideration, not just once; ideally it is eternally called into question. Culture and society shifts, and in some ways it’s a writer’s job to chart the winds of change.
Lauren Oyler charts cultural sea-changes exceptionally well. I was not intimately familiar with her reviews and criticisms before I picked up Fake Accounts, but it’s clear the early praise is well deserved. Oyler feels like a writer’s writer, and I'm often in awe at how she plays into and subverts narrative conventions (which I find myself noticing more and more while reading about craft). I'm only a third of the way through but I don't want to put it down, even though it's also pretty exhausting. The close first-person perspective is intense, and sometimes feels like reading the inside of my own brain, so I've gotten a little taste of what it's like for other people to be around me (and now I can't blame them for not wanting to be around me).
Early on in the book, the narrator breaks the fourth wall, writing: “Knowing what happens next (you’re about to find out), and how he ended up performing as a boyfriend (you know some of this and will learn more), and what happens after that (this would be the conspiracy-theory thing, which you also know), and what happens after that (truly unbelievable, though in some ways not; you do not know this yet, unless you’re one of the people I’ve discussed it with), I would like to deny that I liked him very much by this point. To my credit I can’t identify with the past self who liked him very much by this point.”
An anecdote: In one of my MFA writing workshops, I submitted a packet of very unfinished excerpts of a piece I still have yet to finish (7 years and counting). Even then I wasn’t sure if it was fiction or nonfiction; it was true but it wasn’t the whole truth — things had to be left out in order for the narrative to work. But the only feedback I remember is that the reader (my fellow workshop participants) did not know why the narrator was in love with the person they were in love with. I received similar feedback on another piece, during another workshop, when the readers said they did not know why the narrator had been in love with the person they were once in love with and had since left. Present or past, the sentiment had not translated onto the page.
We are inundated with love stories which require us to suspend disbelief and go along with the protagonist’s sensibilities, if not to adopt those same sensibilities as our own. We the audience fall in love with the love interest on our screens. But how does one express love within a narrative that surpasses sentimentality to land on true tenderness? It’s like all those movies where someone cries, tell me why you love me! and the response is, I don’t know why, I just love you! I'm reminded of Maggie Nelson, who writes in the second paragraph of The Argonauts: “Before we met, I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained — inexpressibly! — in the expressed.”
If it’s hard to express why you love someone when you love them, it’s harder to express why you loved someone when you are no longer in love with them. What I love about the Oyler excerpt above is the way it breaks the fourth wall, like you’re some kind of intimate confidante, while simultaneously escaping the issue of having to manufacture feeling in the aftermath of feeling.
The short version is this: “Knowing what happens next […], I would like to deny that I liked him very much by this point.” Haven’t we all felt like this at one point or another? We walk into love blindly, never knowing what happens next, needing to suspend disbelief, to surrender to the narrative. Sometimes the “what happens next” makes you shudder. (There’s a TikTok trend with a remix of Jefferson Airplane’s song “Somebody to Love,” and the videos that cropped up on my Instagram ‘explore’ page were all some version of women cringing, almost violently so, with a version of the caption: Me remembering the shit I used to put up with.) If only we had known! And if we had known, would we have changed? Or would the outcome remain the same?
We could be like Oyler's narrator: avoid embarrassment and regret altogether, and release ourselves from certain narrative constraints (like performative or manufactured sentiment) by simply ceasing to identify with the past self who liked them very much at one point.
About Time dances around the question of whether you would change the past if you could, and the way changing the past then alters the future, often in ways we can't know or predict. In the essay-slash-review, I avoided outlining why I liked the person who made me watch About Time enough to watch a movie I was sure I wouldn’t like. That in and of itself is a testament to one’s feelings, is it not? To spend your time learning the contours of what someone else likes? Maybe to even endure things you don’t like, whether that’s reality television, a pop song, or a particular restaurant? Having spent so much time alone, reading and watching only what I liked, it was at once refreshing and irritating to be subjected to someone else’s tastes. But because I spent so much time alone reading craft books and dissecting the mechanisms of a narrative, I hadn’t realized it might be perceived as a slight to dislike something someone else liked. Does it matter why I liked him? And if so, does it matter that it was hard to discern whether my feelings were genuine, or simply because I had not seen anyone for months on end? In the end, I deleted the app where we "met," not because I was uninterested in finding love, but because the process of swiping and matching and chatting in isolation felt as contrived as the love story in About Time.
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