i do not read Leonard Michaels, who composed some of my favorite paragraphs of narrative, to make myself feel better. Not exactly, anyhow.  i go back to Sylvia, for example, to hear a smart voice make lovely sentences about the difficulty of representing unpredictable connections between desire and productivity: “There was nothing erotic in this picture, and yet we sometimes went from fighting to sex.  No passport was required. There wasn’t even a border. Time was fractured, there was no cause and effect, and one thing didn’t even lead toward another. As in a metaphor, one thing was another. Raging, hating, I wanted to fuck, and she did too.” His passport analogy spatializes the relation, saying: nothing could’ve stopped us and nothing tried. The disabling of causal time confesses an irrational gusto of passions that had no script.  Sylvia admits to the impossibility of knowing precisely what sex is supposed to do, and to the disaster that can ensue when guilt and shame persuade sexual desire to become something of which it is incapable. The eponymous Sylvia of Michaels’s novel kills herself when she is 24 years old. Forty-seven Seconal, a few glasses of bourbon, a hard fall, and she is dead. The novel blends portions from Michaels’s journals with his own fictional retelling of their story. No explanation is offered for why he stuck around for as long as he did. She is, in his telling, intolerable; but Sylvia is not a defense of his inability to save her. It is a compelling, quick read remarkable for its attempt to represent an unliveable series of events. i never get a handle on whether he abandoned her or not. This is, for Michaels, “autobiographical fiction.” i tend to presume that his refusal of the form of straightforward memoir makes his primary concern a good story rather than an airtight defense. She is material, but his use of her seems loving–never the exploitation it very easily could have become. According to his narrative, the night she swallowed the pills he had come to, but never actually got to, ask for a divorce.

Emma Forrest’s new memoir, Your Voice in My Head, obliquely answers a question i recently posed to someone i almost married as i was leaving someone who i had: “Why does leaving also feel good?” He’d fired back: “Connoisseurs of abandonment, trained by our ‘rents.”  i know this is true–his childhood home was even more broken, Southern, and poor than mine was–but i see the tip of a different answer in these snippets from Forrest. Emily Gould, Forrest’s NYT reviewer, assures readers: “She acknowledges that she is privileged to be able to mine her suffering for material.” And, “Writing about an abortion, she admits, ‘I have the luxury to find inspiration in the pain because I am a middle-class girl with a tight-knit family’.” In other words, Forrest’s failures are okay because she has learned a lesson and because she is clever enough to turn this lesson into a book deal.  She also writes against what she describes as a daily battle with the temptation of suicide. Not for nothing is there an endorsement quote from Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, on the cover of Forrest’s book. What, then, is to be made of less repentant narratives of the desire to bust things up?

If a connoisseur is basically someone with a degree of expertise, then i agree with my ex’s reply.  Perhaps those of us who were made to survive abandonment early on also learned how to depathologize “no.” Forrest’s memoir is basically one long thank you note to everyone who keeps her alive, peppered with scandalous and well-rendered anecdotes. Michaels, on the other hand, seems less interested in the saviors and more dedicated to materializing the story.

i like this “connoisseurs of abandonment” phrase, so i dug around to see who else had used it. Here it is, in a book called Abandoned Women and the Poetic Tradition by Lawrence Lipking: “To catch a whiff of future abandonment at the very moment of passion lends an exquisite sadness to love . . . Byron had learned that secret early . . . A connoisseur of abandonment, he shares it with all his lovers.”  And here, from a 2/27/94 article in the  L.A. Times by Barry Bearak, “On most Saturdays, the organizers drive the streets and creep around the brick corpses.  By now, they are connoisseurs of abandonment, picking out the better buildings the way an expert chef might select fish on the dock.”

The first interpretation does not interest me; the second one does.  We do not inhabit the past, or a love, or a place, simply because it sits vacant. Nor do we build in order to destroy. We choose our new stories carefully, with an eye to how they will taste, or feel, or last. Sometimes we are wrong. The peach is pulpy, the apartment is too loud, the heart is not as strong or soft or smart as we’d hoped. My favorite cover by the Detroit Cobras takes this in stride, explaining: “You can’t miss nothing that you never had.” The art of losing isn’t hard to master, as Elizabeth Bishop suggests. The difficulty is in understanding why the graceful loser always wins.