Michele Filgate

Hi! You always seem to have amazing book suggestions and I'm at a loss of what to read next...I just finished Beautiful Ruins and absolutely loved it! I was thinking of reading Fates and Furies next? But, I would love any suggestions from you :)

We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love—a connection between things. This arcane bit of knowledge is respoken every day into the ears of readers of great books, and also appears to perpetually slip under a carpet, utterly forgotten. In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again, to watch the great personal psyche spar with it, to suffer affliction and weakness and injury, to die and watch those you love die, until the very dizziness of it all becomes a source of compassion for ourselves, and our language, which we alone created, and without which the letter that slipped under the door could never have been written, or, once in a thousand lives—is that too much to ask?—retrieved, and read. Did I mention supreme joy? That is why I read: I want everything to be okay. That’s why I read when I was a lonely kid and that’s why I read now that I’m a scared adult. It’s a sincere desire, but a sincere desire always complicates things—the universe has a peculiar reaction to our sincere desires. Still, I believe the planet on the table, even when wounded and imperfect, fragmented and deprived, is worthy of being called whole. Our minds and the universe—what else is there? Margaret Mead described intellectuals as those who are bored when they don’t have the chance to talk interestingly enough. Now a book will talk interestingly to you. George Steiner describes the intellectual as one who can’t read without a pencil in her hand. One who wants to talk back to the book, not take notes but make them: one who might write “The giraffe speaks!” in the margin. In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?

The writer has to see everything – you have to see not just the highway but what’s beyond the headlights; what’s standing out in the trees; you have to know what earth looks like from the point of view of the stars; you have to know what lily pads look like from underneath, from the perspective of a fish on the bottom of a pond. And if you can’t know that, and if you can’t imagine that as a writer, then what’s the point in writing creative nonfiction? What’s the point in writing if you’re not going to try to project yourself into those points of view? I’m sure other people have their own reasons for writing. But that’s my reason for writing.

Unless you're a doubter and a worrier, a nail biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That's the quality I've found most consistently in those lifestory writers I've met. Truth is not their enemy. It's the bannister they grab for when feeling around on the dark cellar stairs. It's the solution

Dressing Myself for the First Time

Busyness is an excuse, a way to sidestep others, even those we actually care about. A bit of joy is had in turning on whichever device, that portal that siphons the mind away from the here and now, that doesn't ask us explicitly for anything except to behold it. This makes immediacy less and less easy to handle. What is in front of us is unbearably real, with its insistent materiality from which it is uncomfortable to shy away. There is no possibility of delaying our response to it. The real just waits. Increasingly, human interaction without a filter verges on the painful because the skills in dealing with others face-to-face have been abandoned for the refinement of digital social skills. All communicative occasions today are ideally set up to avoid that horror of the modern soul: awkwardness.

Where do any of us come from? Is it a country? A mother? Or is it perhaps an image, a song, a story inside which we feel...named?

The Fertile Fact

The Places We Read