My first Amazon review: M_SS_NG G_RL and the make-believe literary cabal

It takes a lot of chutzpah (or hubris) to undertake a project like the one described in Messas’s book. Messas staged her own disappearance from some unnamed artists’ colony two years ago (simply by not returning when she was expected—no fake ransom notes or overturned chairs), holed herself up in a nearby motel, and chronicled the community’s reactions. Throughout the narrative, Messas positions herself as a victim of a larger cultural response to missing women, rather than embracing her role as mastermind who created authentic distress in a group of well-meaning people.

There are a number of reasons to doubt the veracity of the entire project. How, in this age, does one really cover one’s digital tracks or stay anonymous? Messas has implied elsewhere that a legal gag order is in place that prohibits her from identifying the people or places that appear in the book. (She’s also implied that the news station websites might have employed a web-scrubber to erase their own articles on the disappearance, as though they’d be embarrassed by being suckered in, rather than eager to report a newsworthy hoax.) In the book, she maintains that the “mystery of this story does not lie with those details.” I’m no Reddit user, but I’m a child of the internet, and I’ve got no doubt that sooner or later someone’s going to deal with the issue of truth and credibility here.  

Instead, it’s the literary propositions that I seek to question. In the narrative, Messas refers to “the experience of going missing,” implying that there is a single experience that is shared (metaphorically, at least) by the missing women and girls she identifies in a laundry list of books ranging from Jane Eyre to Lady in the Lake to Night Film (which just came out last year). In Messas’s narrative, I read the insinuation of some shared, insidious intent on the part of the writers who make these women go missing (or die)—as though Italo Calvino, Tom Stoppard, and Haruki Murakami are sitting in a smoke-filled room somewhere, a literary cabal intent on systematically erasing vulnerable women from the world by eliminating them from books and short stories. (Norman Mailer, maybe, but surely not Murakami!) It’s unclear to me what Messas’s alternative would be: a world in which certain subjects are just de facto off-limits for writers? If so, is it Messas—a person who freely manipulated the good intentions of an unsuspecting community—who’s going to draw those ethical lines for the rest of us?

There’s something in Messas’s choice of approach here (the conflation of a physical going-missing with the literary going-missings she purports to be exploring) that implies a causal connection between literary disappearances and real-life dangers to women and girls. It’s a connection that I wish she had amplified and clarified. While I don’t think it would have saved her book from critique, further discussion of this issue might allow the book to have an impact outside her tightly closed circuit of thought. Without reaching a tentacle into the real world, Messas is just another unknown writer criticizing more talented or successful writers rather than making something new herself.

Who will be my muskrat?

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.

Henry David Thoreau

Pretend Tweet-Fight with Rainier Marie Rilke

I don't even have a twitter account really, but I got into a conversation with a friend the other day about imaginary tweet-fights with dead writers. I do have a bone to pick (a tweet to twick?) with this dude in particular, so I thought I'd bring my fantasy to fruition.

@TheRealRilke says:

@ALittleLikeJeannie says: 

"Somethings" that are difficult: lifting one's refrigerator over one's head

@ALittleLikeJeannie says: 

trigonometry

@ALittleLikeJeannie says: 

Candy Crush after the Frest Mint level

@ALittleLikeJeannie says: 

reading Swann's Way or John Banville

@TheRealRilke says:

@ALittleLikeJeannie says:

Why must our growth be solitary? Can it not be in symphony, in communion, or in celebration with? Must we ourselves apart to become ourselves?

@ALittleLikeJeannie says:

In other words: Ain't that more than a little pretense going on, bucko? Not everyone is jealous of you.

 @TheRealRilke says:

@ALittleLikeJeannie says:

Okay. Let's call it a draw.

Out of the Closet

The call comes in the middle of the night, like such calls always do. That’s the story, isn’t it?

A single ring, silence, and then another. I palm at Molly’s shoulder—the phone is on her side of the bed, and it was by her insistence that we continue to pay thirty dollars a month for an outdated landline that only telemarketers and school administrators use. It’s the reminder of this irritation that really wakes me, rather than the ringing itself.

    Molly is dead weight under my prodding, and the damn thing just keeps ringing. I wiggle myself over her, pressing my stomach against her hip bone, and just barely reach the receiver.

“Hello,” I say. I sound annoyed as fuck.

The connection, filtered through the twenty-year-old cordless phone, is staticky and cuts in and out.

“Wh—cl—si—”

“Hello, say it again. Who’s this?” It could be a misdial, aimed for the West Coast where it’s still a party hour, even on a Wednesday. It could be a bunch of kids, friends of Janelle or Elsie, stoned and prank-calling through the school directory. It could be—

More electronic hiccuping, a sound like a theramin, then a quick bark: “We have Elsie.”

*    *    *

For the past four years I’ve been working on my first novel, Redress, a literary thriller about the Testa family whose fifteen-year-old daughter goes missing. There are ghosts, secret lives, betrayals, and a special red dress, poly-cotton blend and handmade by Elsie’s mother, Molly, for her own high school graduation 25 years earlier. It’s a dress that got Molly into heaps of trouble, the undoable kind, and that seems to have led Elsie Testa into something even more sinister.

Until quite recently, I was a secret writer, a closet writer. It’s an embarrassing passion to admit, especially in my family. Keeping it a secret also meant that it was an isolating passion: I’ve been grappling with some big ethical and emotional questions for my characters over the past several years, and have had little support in processing them. I think I’ve done myself, and maybe my characters, an injustice in keeping everything so quiet.

I recently read a piece in the New York Times by Alice Mattison, a Bennington Writing Seminars teacher, about how she feels compelled to keep her novels a secret — she fears her characters might stop talking to her if she exposes them too soon. I’ve been feeling the opposite, though: that my characters feel claustrophobic, that they need breath from outside my head. They need to wander the world a little, encounter new stimuli, do some damage that I’m not tightly controlling.

But that can only happen if I open the doors to my writing closet and let them out. Let myself out.

So that’s what I’m doing. Hello, world. I’m yet another unpublished novelist with big ideas. Welcome.