The Thing I Am Most Interested In

Most Great Filmmakers Are Good At Place. Like How People Say, Like, "the City Itself Is A Character In The Movie," You Know? I'm So Interior. I Always Forget There's Such A Thing As An Exterior Wide Shot, Where You Can See Where Someone Is. As Opposed To Just: How Can We Show What This Person Is Thinking, In An Abstract Way That Is Felt?

I Supposed This Was One Reason Why People Got Married, To Make A Fiction That Was Tellable. It Wasn’t Just Movies That Couldn’t Contain The Full Cast Of Characters — It Was Us. We Had To Winnow Life Down So We Knew Where To Put Our Tenderness And Attention; And That Was A Good, Sweet Thing. But Together Or Alone, We Were Still Embedded In A Kaleidoscope, Ruthlessly Varied And Continuous, Until The End Of The End.

After I Had My Son I Looked Everywhere For A Book That Might Serve As Some Kind Of Mirror. I Bought So Many Silly Books. Now I See What The Problem Was: I Wanted A Book About Time-about Mortality. I Can't Think Of A Writer Who Is At Once So Experimentally Daring And So Rigorously Uncompromising As Sarah Manguso. Ongoingness Is An Incredibly Elegant, Wise Book, And I Loved It.

Sometimes I Would Make Left Turns All The Way Around A Block, And When I Returned To The Original Intersection, I Would Feel Disappointed To Find All The Drivers Were New. It Wasn't Like A Square Dance, Where You Miraculously End Up With Your Original Partner, Laughing And Feeling Giddily Relieved To Find Him After Dancing With Everyone Else In The World. Instead, They Swung Around And Kept On Going, Some People Were At Work By Now, Or Halfway To The Airport. In Fact, Driving Might Be The Thing Most Opposite Of Dancing.

I Knew The Beginning And The End – I Just Had To Dream Up A Convincing Middle.