I’ve been trying for over a week to write this post. It didn’t originally have its current title; that’s the desperation title. This wasn’t supposed to be a desperation post. This was supposed to be a lucid piece of writing, explaining what it was exactly about Kate Christensen’s novel, Trouble, that appealed to me so very much.
But right there is part of the problem: this book didn’t just “appeal” to me. I can write THAT post. I can come up with lots of intelligent reasons why this was an interesting/enjoyable/entertaining/thought-provoking/worthy novel. It was all of those things.
But it was more than that too. And it’s the “more” that I want to talk about. And I don’t know how.
I’ve hit this problem blogging before. There have been various pieces of writing, various songs or poems, various pieces of art that have hit these places inside of my psyche – and I don’t know how to express what I feel.
Is it possible to put into words, into language, those things you understand on a level that transcends language?
I think there is; I think there must be. It’s from that root, I think, that some of the most powerful writing comes. It must be. But the fact that I’m still very far from having that facility with language, that artistry, that will allow me to express myself with the kind of purity I want to reach, is painfully clear in moments like this. I simply haven’t reached the necessary level as a writer…not yet.
So that’s been frustrating me this week.
And the issue remains: what to say about Trouble? I almost chucked the whole idea of posting about it – but that’s not fair to the book…or my blog. If something I read had so much meaning for me, I really should say something about it. That’s one huge reason I keep this blog, after all: to log such things.
I finally decided that, even if I can’t speak with the clarity and succinctness and purity that I desire, I can maybe at least express something of my experience with this novel. I can talk a little bit about what I was thinking and feeling as I read it (twice! I inhaled it the first time, and then went back and re-read it more carefully. It was really good both times.)
I’ll add that I have some added incentive to write about this book as it doesn’t have the most positive reviews on Amazon (something I noticed when I went to grab the link to put into this post). I think it’s worthwhile perhaps to write about why I DID like it – a lot – just to balance some of that negativity out a bit.
So:
I think Trouble’s power is in its authenticity.
The story is told through the eyes of Josie, a woman in her early forties who, at the novel’s beginning, realizes that her fifteen-year marriage is dead.
I’m not sure I’ve ever identified with a fictional character as closely and on as many levels as I did with the character of Josie. It partly in her experience of marriage, partly her general outlook, many of her thoughts and feelings and opinions; I just understood her on a very deep level.
Passages like this one, for example, hit home for me very strongly. (This is a snippet of a conversation between Josie and her longtime friend Raquel, regarding Josie’s recent decision to end her marriage):
“Okay,” [Raquel] said. “I didn’t like how you were with him. It seemed to me that you made yourself smaller with him. That wasn’t his fault, but you’re so much more of a person than he is. He’s limited in ways you aren’t. I mean, you’re so much more open and aware, emotionally. He’s closed off, right? Sort of emotionally unimaginative, or one-dimensional, or something. It’s like you had to scale yourself down to fit with him. I always wondered if you liked being diminished like that.”
I thought about this, looking at the tip of my cigarette as if it knew the answer. The question, coming from Raquel…seemed genuinely curious, wholly without judgment.
“I guess I must have,” I said. “Then I stopped liking it…”
(Kate Christensen’s Trouble, Anchor Books Edition 2010, page 228-229)
When your marriage (or any long-term relationship, I suppose) fails, you question everything. One big one, for me, was: How had I chosen so wrongly for myself?
For me, this concept of being “diminished” is part of it.
(I feel a little uncomfortable writing about this – but what’s the point of this blog if I can’t be honest and genuine?)
So – when I met my future husband I was 23. And when I was 23, I didn’t know what I was doing with my life. Not that I sit here in my mid-thirties with all the answers (because that’s certainly not true.) But at least I sort of know who I am now – unlike back then. Back then, I didn’t know much of anything at all.
In hindsight, I had that “Quarterlife Crisis” thing pretty bad. I was so full, just full to bursting, of dreams and desires and ambitions – and I had no clue how to accomplish any of them. I wasn’t mindful and thoughtful enough to grasp that it was looking at things in the macro way I was that was paralyzing me.
So I had all this energy and potential and nowhere to channel it – like somebody who pumps up on really strong coffee and then doesn’t know how to vent the energy, so just sits there and gets more and more jittery. That was me in a nutshell.
Dating ran on similarly chaotic lines. I didn’t have particular trouble getting a date when an opportunity presented itself, but I was this ridiculous mix of cocky, unsure, and restless – which makes it rather difficult to form worthwhile connections. I was constantly crushing on unattainable people, or having quick intense flings that quickly bored me. My longest-term relationship (if you can call it that) at this time was with somebody who was pretty much exactly like me. We’d bounce into dating and bounce back out of it with ease. It was totally superficial – as were pretty much all of my social interactions at this time.
What I’m driving at here is that when your life is so directionless, there’s comfort and security (of a certain kind) to be found in binding yourself up with somebody – even if that person does “diminish” you. For me, it was like a siren call. Getting involved with my future husband gave me somebody else to throw all of my pent-up energy at – gave me a channel. It felt good, really good, to do that – in spite of the fact that it did diminish me. I think (in hindsight) that burying my own “light” (diminishing the glow of it, if you will) was actually something of a relief at that time. And that feeling of relief gave the relationship a feeling of rightness than it shouldn’t have had – a feeling that superseded the problems that were there from the beginning.
Stupid, I know. And all I can say for myself is that I certainly in no way made those choices consciously. I would never have consciously chosen to diminish myself. I mistook my feelings and the situation…I glossed over things I shouldn’t have glossed over…I didn’t take my own needs seriously enough. I’m not proud of this, any of this, and it’s certainly caused me my share of grief.
But, okay. I did what I did. You make the choices you make for reasons that seem good at the time. You get married or otherwise bind yourself up with someone who’s not right for you.
But then you slowly gain self-knowledge and come to realize what you’ve done. And then…what?
You try to fix things…for a long time. You try really, really hard. But you finally realize that it’s not possible to fix them. The relationship is unfixable. And you realize that you can’t continue within its inflexible strictures for the rest of your life – not without a part of you, an intrinsic part, dying. So you make the wrenching decision to leave.
Well, this doesn’t go over well with a lot of people – as I’ve learned.
I guess the idea that many people have trouble living their lives “outside of the box” isn’t surprising – but what did surprise me a lot (and I still have trouble understanding) is how very invested many people are in making sure YOU live within that same box. Trouble explores this too.
Here’s part of a conversation between Josie and another longtime friend, Indrani. Josie has just told Indrani that she is ending her marriage:
“You sound so calm about it all,” [Indrani] said.
“I’m scared and sad, but mostly it’s a relief. I realized last night that I’ve felt dead for so long.”
“You know,” she said, “it’s strange; I never had the slightest idea you felt this way. You always said things were going well.”
“I don’t think I could admit it even to myself. I think this had been brewing a long time, underneath, the way things do when you try to avoid them.”
She hesitated, as if she had something to say and was trying to think of the best way to put it.“You and Anthony have been married a very long time.”
“Fifteen years. The first five were good.”
“My grandmother would say to you, ‘Does he beat you? Is he a drunk? Is he in prison? No? Then why are you leaving him?’ That’s what she said to my mother when she left my father.”
“He ignores me,” I said. “I’m so bored by him, I could throw up. He won’t do anything to improve matters. He thinks this is just the way marriage is.”
“He’s a catch,” said Indrani. “Seriously. You’re lucky to have him. He’s brilliant and good- looking, and he makes a good living and comes home every night and is a good father.”
“All true,” I said. “But that’s not enough…”
(Kate Christensen’s Trouble, Anchor Books Edition 2010, page 58)
The conversation deteriorates from there.
And I could have pulled the entire conversation out of my own life.
Following your own self, honoring yourself, appreciating your own potential enough to act to preserve it…these are things for which there’s not often much support infrastructure. In my experience, there’s too often an attitude (sometimes blatant, sometimes underlying) that people who act for themselves are at best immature, at worst selfish. Those casting the judgments either don’t see the full picture or choose not to (I think it’s most often the latter.)
Books like Trouble flesh out that picture. Trouble asks you to explore things like marriage and self-worth and friendship on nuanced levels.
Part of the way it does this is through the really beautiful job it does of exploring the connections we make in life. Looking at Josie’s relationship with Indrani versus her relationship with Raquel was really interesting to me – for itself, and also for its parallels to some relationships in my own life. And Anthony versus Felipe was a lot of very interesting food for thought as well.
I can go on and on with this post!
I really loved this book.
I’ve been trying for over a week to write this post. It didn’t originally have its current title; that’s the desperation title. This wasn’t supposed to be a desperation post. This was supposed to be a lucid piece of writing, explaining what it was exactly about Kate Christensen’s novel, Trouble, that appealed to me so very much.
But right there is part of the problem: this book didn’t just “appeal” to me. I can write THAT post. I can come up with lots of intelligent reasons why this was an interesting/enjoyable/entertaining/thought-provoking/worthy novel. It was all of those things.
But it was more than that too. And it’s the “more” that I want to talk about. And I don’t know how.
I’ve hit this problem blogging before. There have been various pieces of writing, various songs or poems, various pieces of art that have hit these places inside of my psyche – and I don’t know how to express what I feel.
Is it possible to put into words, into language, those things you understand on a level that transcends language?
I think there is; I think there must be. It’s from that root, I think, that some of the most powerful writing comes. It must be. But the fact that I’m still very far from having that facility with language, that artistry, that will allow me to express myself with the kind of purity I want to reach, is painfully clear in moments like this. I simply haven’t reached the necessary level as a writer…not yet.
So that’s been frustrating me this week.
And the issue remains: what to say about Trouble? I almost chucked the whole idea of posting about it – but that’s not fair to the book…or my blog. If something I read had so much meaning for me, I really should say something about it. That’s one huge reason I keep this blog, after all: to log such things.
I finally decided that, even if I can’t speak with the clarity and succinctness and purity that I desire, I can maybe at least express something of my experience with this novel. I can talk a little bit about what I was thinking and feeling as I read it (twice! I inhaled it the first time, and then went back and re-read it more carefully. It was really good both times.)
I’ll add that I have some added incentive to write about this book as it doesn’t have the most positive reviews on Amazon (something I noticed when I went to grab the link to put into this post). I think it’s worthwhile perhaps to write about why I DID like it – a lot – just to balance some of that negativity out a bit.
So:
I think Trouble’s power is in its authenticity.
The story is told through the eyes of Josie, a woman in her early forties who, at the novel’s beginning, realizes that her fifteen-year marriage is dead.
I’m not sure I’ve ever identified with a fictional character as closely and on as many levels as I did with the character of Josie. It partly in her experience of marriage, partly her general outlook, many of her thoughts and feelings and opinions; I just understood her on a very deep level.
Passages like this one, for example, hit home for me very strongly. (This is a snippet of a conversation between Josie and her longtime friend Raquel, regarding Josie’s recent decision to end her marriage):
“Okay,” [Raquel] said. “I didn’t like how you were with him. It seemed to me that you made yourself smaller with him. That wasn’t his fault, but you’re so much more of a person than he is. He’s limited in ways you aren’t. I mean, you’re so much more open and aware, emotionally. He’s closed off, right? Sort of emotionally unimaginative, or one-dimensional, or something. It’s like you had to scale yourself down to fit with him. I always wondered if you liked being diminished like that.”
I thought about this, looking at the tip of my cigarette as if it knew the answer. The question, coming from Raquel…seemed genuinely curious, wholly without judgment.
“I guess I must have,” I said. “Then I stopped liking it…”
(Kate Christensen’s Trouble, Anchor Books Edition 2010, page 228-229)
When your marriage (or any long-term relationship, I suppose) fails, you question everything. One big one, for me, was: How had I chosen so wrongly for myself?
For me, this concept of being “diminished” is part of it.
(I feel a little uncomfortable writing about this – but what’s the point of this blog if I can’t be honest and genuine?)
So – when I met my future husband I was 23. And when I was 23, I didn’t know what I was doing with my life. Not that I sit here in my mid-thirties with all the answers (because that’s certainly not true.) But at least I sort of know who I am now – unlike back then. Back then, I didn’t know much of anything at all.
In hindsight, I had that “Quarterlife Crisis” thing pretty bad. I was so full, just full to bursting, of dreams and desires and ambitions – and I had no clue how to accomplish any of them. I wasn’t mindful and thoughtful enough to grasp that it was looking at things in the macro way I was that was paralyzing me.
So I had all this energy and potential and nowhere to channel it – like somebody who pumps up on really strong coffee and then doesn’t know how to vent the energy, so just sits there and gets more and more jittery. That was me in a nutshell.
Dating ran on similarly chaotic lines. I didn’t have particular trouble getting a date when an opportunity presented itself, but I was this ridiculous mix of cocky, unsure, and restless – which makes it rather difficult to form worthwhile connections. I was constantly crushing on unattainable people, or having quick intense flings that quickly bored me. My longest-term relationship (if you can call it that) at this time was with somebody who was pretty much exactly like me. We’d bounce into dating and bounce back out of it with ease. It was totally superficial – as were pretty much all of my social interactions at this time.
What I’m driving at here is that when your life is so directionless, there’s comfort and security (of a certain kind) to be found in binding yourself up with somebody – even if that person does “diminish” you. For me, it was like a siren call. Getting involved with my future husband gave me somebody else to throw all of my pent-up energy at – gave me a channel. It felt good, really good, to do that – in spite of the fact that it did diminish me. I think (in hindsight) that burying my own “light” (diminishing the glow of it, if you will) was actually something of a relief at that time. And that feeling of relief gave the relationship a feeling of rightness than it shouldn’t have had – a feeling that superseded the problems that were there from the beginning.
Stupid, I know. And all I can say for myself is that I certainly in no way made those choices consciously. I would never have consciously chosen to diminish myself. I mistook my feelings and the situation…I glossed over things I shouldn’t have glossed over…I didn’t take my own needs seriously enough. I’m not proud of this, any of this, and it’s certainly caused me my share of grief.
But, okay. I did what I did. You make the choices you make for reasons that seem good at the time. You get married or otherwise bind yourself up with someone who’s not right for you.
But then you slowly gain self-knowledge and come to realize what you’ve done. And then…what?
You try to fix things…for a long time. You try really, really hard. But you finally realize that it’s not possible to fix them. The relationship is unfixable. And you realize that you can’t continue within its inflexible strictures for the rest of your life – not without a part of you, an intrinsic part, dying. So you make the wrenching decision to leave.
Well, this doesn’t go over well with a lot of people – as I’ve learned.
I guess the idea that many people have trouble living their lives “outside of the box” isn’t surprising – but what did surprise me a lot (and I still have trouble understanding) is how very invested many people are in making sure YOU live within that same box. Trouble explores this too.
Here’s part of a conversation between Josie and another longtime friend, Indrani. Josie has just told Indrani that she is ending her marriage:
“You sound so calm about it all,” [Indrani] said.
“I’m scared and sad, but mostly it’s a relief. I realized last night that I’ve felt dead for so long.”
“You know,” she said, “it’s strange; I never had the slightest idea you felt this way. You always said things were going well.”
“I don’t think I could admit it even to myself. I think this had been brewing a long time, underneath, the way things do when you try to avoid them.”
She hesitated, as if she had something to say and was trying to think of the best way to put it.“You and Anthony have been married a very long time.”
“Fifteen years. The first five were good.”
“My grandmother would say to you, ‘Does he beat you? Is he a drunk? Is he in prison? No? Then why are you leaving him?’ That’s what she said to my mother when she left my father.”
“He ignores me,” I said. “I’m so bored by him, I could throw up. He won’t do anything to improve matters. He thinks this is just the way marriage is.”
“He’s a catch,” said Indrani. “Seriously. You’re lucky to have him. He’s brilliant and good- looking, and he makes a good living and comes home every night and is a good father.”
“All true,” I said. “But that’s not enough…”
(Kate Christensen’s Trouble, Anchor Books Edition 2010, page 58)
The conversation deteriorates from there.
And I could have pulled the entire conversation out of my own life.
Following your own self, honoring yourself, appreciating your own potential enough to act to preserve it…these are things for which there’s not often much support infrastructure. In my experience, there’s too often an attitude (sometimes blatant, sometimes underlying) that people who act for themselves are at best immature, at worst selfish. Those casting the judgments either don’t see the full picture or choose not to (I think it’s most often the latter.)
Books like Trouble flesh out that picture. Trouble asks you to explore things like marriage and self-worth and friendship on nuanced levels.
Part of the way it does this is through the really beautiful job it does of exploring the connections we make in life. Looking at Josie’s relationship with Indrani versus her relationship with Raquel was really interesting to me – for itself, and also for its parallels to some relationships in my own life. And Anthony versus Felipe was a lot of very interesting food for thought as well.
I can go on and on with this post!
I really loved this book.
