Andromeda | A new year for writing and reading about our obsessions

 

    

Running the Kansas tallgrass prairie, alongside steaming Missouri rivers, and under Connecticut fall foliage as part of my latest obsession, running trails on public lands in all fifty states within one year 

It’s a new year, and self-improvement, or at least dedication to new beginnings, is in the air. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a writer, and if you decide to embark upon a project or quest or lifestyle experiment in 2017, you may also be thinking about how you will chronicle the journey, whether you will get it published, whether anyone will read it, or should. The polar caps are melting and we have a reality show star in the White House! Why should anyone pay any attention to your whimsical or tortured desire to learn serious tennis at the age of 60 (Late to the Ball by Gerald Marzorati), become a motorcycle mama (Harley and Me by Bernadette Murphy), apprentice as a butcher (Cleaving by Julie Powell), become a memory master (Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer), learn a foreign language (Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich), run trails in all fifty US states (my latest activity) while navigating through a difficult midlife year, or anything else that doesn’t help save the world from apocalypse?

Why, indeed.

I’ve been obsessed with a genre I’ll call the “learning quest” or “life experiment” genre (if there’s a better name for it, let me know) and looking back over my reading lists this year – guiltily wondering why I have less time for fiction lately – I discovered I’ve inhaled about twenty of these narratives. I can’t stop reading them. I suppose I’m obsessed with people who are obsessed and whatever subjects they are obsessed with, whether or not the subjects are ones I thought I cared about.

This, perhaps, is lesson one I would share with you, while I am simultaneously trying to learn it myself.

Except for those moments when you are wooing an agent or editor, you don’t need to endlessly justify your intense interest, even if you’re planning to write about it for a general audience. Believe me, I fall into that trap, too, writing early drafts that try to inform people why my own latest interests, language learning and running in natural areas, are good for the aging brain and important in our modern age for a whole lotta reasons. But that kind of rhetoric gets boring, or at the very least, it’s secondary. Do any of us need more “shoulds” in our lives? Sell me on your quest as if it’s a universal recipe for betterment and your book becomes a self-help guide, which bores me. Sell me on the fact that you are being challenged and transformed by your logic-defying, individualistic quest in ways that probably go way beyond language, reading, sport or travel and I will follow you anywhere.

Curiosity and joy (authentically intermixed with the occasional frustration) come first, and a tale is only as interesting as the person telling it. Your approach, your backstory, your particular way of capturing ideas and experiences, and all those other intangibles will hook or alienate your reader. Subject—or what appears to the be the obvious subject—may be surprisingly less essential.

Or at least that’s how it goes for me, as reader. This year, although I never intend to study French, I read four nonfiction books about the French language and individuals trying to master it, including one by William Alexander, who at the end of Flirting with French, still didn’t know much French, actually. His year was not extraordinary. He attended some French classes, he went on a short vacation, he failed to study very hard. Alexander’s lack of achievement and commitment bothered me—a bit.

Until, I realized as the book came to a close, it didn’t. (It is called Flirting with French, after all.)

I ended up so charmed by Alexander’s attitude and his light touch that I followed him to another subject and read an earlier book of his about baking bread for a year – 52 Loaves – even though I am not particularly fascinated by baking. I liked the French book; I loved the bread book, which built up to a satisfying and emotional finish, and I’ll probably go on to read another book he wrote about growing the perfect tomato. Alexander’s narratives end up conveying a self-deprecating joie de vivre that go beyond the subjects he writes about.

Attitude and voice are essential. I’m currently in the middle of Ammon Shea’s Reading the OED, a book about a man reading a dictionary until he almost goes blind. Talk about excessive. Does Shea try to convince us that his quixotic quest is important or noble, and that we’d all be better people if we followed his example? Not at all. I was hooked in the book’s first pages when Shea writes, “I have read the OED so you don’t have to.” Shea doesn’t seem worried that his esoteric subject choices could make him a “anonymuncule,” which the OED defines as an “anonymous, small-time writer.” (How could I not highlight that and hope to remember it, even while Shea tells me I need not bother memorizing or using the wonderful words he shares?)

Honesty, or at least the appearance of honesty (we modern readers are less naïve than we used to be), is essential to memoir, including self-improvement memoirs. I like learning quests that admit doubt, boredom, confusion, failure, lack of discipline or simple epiphany.

What are these quests really about, in the end, beyond their obvious surface subjects? The best, for me, are about the learning process itself: about the plasticity of our brains, the stretchiness of our personalities, the changeability of our life trajectories. And they are also, simply, about people. When these memoirs soar, it’s often because the writers let more people into their little projects, and share funny or poignant connections that happened as a byproduct of obsessions with books, balls, bread, or butchery.

When I finish running and writing about the fifty states, I hope to end up with something that appears to be about sport and in the end is about something else is: memory, mortality, rejuvenation, and the importance of landscapes but also mid-life dreams. But who knows? I’m not done living or writing that project yet. For now, I’m only obsessed. And that feels divine.

 

Andromeda Romano-Lax’s most recent novel is Behave. In addition to her fiction, she is currently writing two nonfiction narratives: one about learning Spanish and living in Mexico, another about running public lands in all 50 U.S. states.