Eels in the Brain
Jenny Diski, 2002. A white woman with silver hair stares at the camera while reading a book, sitting in a blue armchair. She has a periwinkle sweater and white and blue stripes pants. One foot rests on a stool and one foot rests on the a rug. A large bookshelf towers behind her.
***
Not so long ago, during one of those mind-numbing internet scrolls on the portal, as Patricia Lockwood calls it so sweetly in her novel, I came across a tweet that claimed we don’t talk enough about the link between writing and loneliness. I didn’t realize we weren’t talking about it. I guess that’s what makes the internet profitable. Dredging up truisms we can all rally around.
Writing is a lonely act—until it’s not. I used to write films, hardly a lonely pursuit, until it was. I’ve done The Artist’s Way a few times now, each time hoping for a new core element of myself to be revealed. Maybe I suppressed a gift for the violin. Anything less lonely than being a writer. When I first started out making shorts, I gathered as many people into a room as I could, all of us hungry for something to deliver us from our daily little tasks.
Speaking into the void is a lonely thing to do. Even if there is a response, you’re still on your side of the screen having exposed something of yourself—even if it’s just writing about your favorite coffeeshop on Yelp. One day a potential date will Google you and find out you wrote rudely about a barista. Perhaps that potential date is a barista. Now you don’t have a potential date.
This is why writing on the internet can be so troublesome. It is both tangible and invisible, an eel in the brain, swimming around and zapping neurons off and on. The currents outside of us are even less predictable, the tentacles of Reddit and Discord and Twitter each have their own neurotic aftertaste.
The so-called internet novel boom (which, as Brandon Taylor points out, is a certain kind of internet novel) is really about our collective paranoia. No need for the panopticon anymore, we’re all surveilling each other with gleeful “so true besties.” And it’s fun. It’s how we make our aesthetics. If being seen online is a trap, it’s very seductive. The portal mirrors what we want while walking around in the world of the living. Someone to stop us on the street and tell us we look good.
***
The loneliness of writing is a large part of the job description. The stereotype of the haunted writer lives on in Josephine Decker’s Shirley, her 2020 biopic of Shirley Jackson. Here the writer lives in a large house in the woods sequestered with her husband and his enclave, fenced in by the bed. It’s a portrait of the numbing sameness that can drive a writer to drink. Other writers, like Laurie Colwin turn the domestic into a breeding ground for joy. Colwin’s Home Cooking chronicles an endless array of dinner parties. Colwin never comes across as particularly lonely. She’s too busy searching for the perfect red pepper.
And still the lone writer walking in the city is an evocative image for a reason. Audre Lorde’s Zami paints Coney Island as the saddest place on earth, a misty gray purgatory between love affairs. Vivian Gornick’s staunch one-day-a-week walk with her friend in The Odd Woman and the City reads as a protective spell. Tove Ditlevsen’s recently republished series of memoirs, The Copenhagen Trilogy, is a haunting tale of an author searching for fulfillment through writing, men, and addiction. Her loneliness and pain is palpable as she traverses one affair to the next, only finding temporary fulfillment in Demerol, until this too becomes a curse.
The private life of the writer, their practices, what they do with their solitude, is something many writers and readers track with lurid ferocity. We want “to endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body, to reveal that he likes dry white wine and underdone steak” as Roland Barthes wrote in “The Writer on Holiday.” Barthes wrote about his writing schedule in his autobiography but many writers’ schedules are lost in detritus, only occasionally rescued as important marginalia. Ursula K Le Guin’s writing schedule has circulated on the internet many times, though few note it was her ideal schedule, not her day to day one.
Writing requires patience. Another truism. Patience requires some sort of secondary activity to turn the mind without consciously doing so. This secondary activity is usually another solitary pursuit. For some writers such as Patti Smith, Olivia Laing, and Brené Brown, that secondary activity is the procedural crime show. All of these white women are able to watch the puzzle box turn trauma over and over again. For Brown, it’s SVU marathons. Smith and Laing both love Morse, a British cop who loves opera and the classics. Smith, of course, loves The Killing, even appearing in its final season. The great essayist Jenny Diski loved everything from Midsomer Murders to The Closer, as her husband (now Laing’s husband) notes in his remembrances.
Patti Smith is the one who described it best during a Q&A on Goodreads, “I’m drawn to the way the genre traces the inner mechanism of the detective, the way his mind works, and his ability to get into the skin of his suspect by having an equal comprehension of how his suspect’s mind works as well. A lot like writing. I like watching how an intricate puzzle is unraveled and solved.” In a recent interview, Rebecca Solnit remarked “Scholarship can be a kind of detective work.”
I read about what TV shows these women watch with detective-like flair, always looking for another show Diski liked. When I find one, I consume it quickly, wondering what they liked about it. Often, with cops shows, a certain plot line will force me away for a few weeks, until I return, the spell lost. It reminds me of when I first got into Grey’s Anatomy because my crush recommended it. Then it became more my thing than his—another procedural I tune into weekly even now. In her article “The TV in the cupboard,” Laing describes John Cheever’s giddy excitement over Poldark. I approach Grey’s with similar religious fervor. I pour my red wine, pop my popcorn, and turn my phone off.
I read Jenny Diski’s essay collection, Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? and her final memoir on cancer In Gratitude in quick succession earlier this year. Both are written with steely, unsentimental grit. Diski’s sentences are crisp yet full of style, knocking over arguments and histories with rigid structure:
“Moving day. My ex-Live-in-Lover will come this afternoon to move his things out, eighteen months after moving in. First thing, I wave the daughter off to Ireland with her dad, for an Easter holiday of dosing sheep and castrating lambs on a friend’s farm. Apparently, they use elastic bands. Father and child might be having me on. What do I know, born and raised in the Tottenham Court Road?”
Diski got to the point. Her writing always leads back to the central orbit of personal experience with sharp clarity. She wrote just as well about her childhood with Doris Lessing as she did about living alone, Downton Abbey’s neoliberal fantasy, or the women connected to famous writers. She lived much of her alone or in deep clinical depression, spending time in a psychiatric ward and writing extensively—in fiction and essays—- about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her parents. In the final essay Diski published, her mother and Doris Lessing form mirror images, standing omnipotent nearly up until the end. “I’m not as fond of David Bowie as most people seem to be,” she begins, winding us through her life for the last time. There’s a quiet toughness to her writing. That tender bitterness doesn’t come from having an easy life.
The loneliness some say writing requires is often conflated with solitude. They are different, even if the difference seems to be vanishing. Diski’s daughter has said she doesn’t believe depression drove her mother to be a better writer. Diski didn’t begin writing in earnest until her mid thirties. Certainly loneliness can aid writing, it can encourage us to observe the world with the eyes of a stranger. But loneliness can also fuel depression, leading us further into the abyss of fear and paranoia. I don’t always have an answer to my own loneliness or paranoia. I’m tempted to quote the aphorisms of Anne Lamott, who argues writing gets you where you need to go, but publishing never will. But that doesn’t stop the blue nights either, does it?
***
I hope you’ve been doing well. I know it’s been a while since I wrote here, I spent a lot of time dealing with my health. I’ve also been writing for the Observer for the past few months. You can find all the articles I wrote here. I wrote about the sitcoms of Josh Thomas, Jackie Ess’s debut novel Darryl, Margaret Sanger, the latest Sally Rooney, Amia Srinivasan’s new book, and a new biography on George Orwell.
I also made a twitter. Happy fall!