TOMORROW — join me in San Francisco at City Arts and Lectures for an on-stage interview with artist, filmmaker, and writer Miranda July about her new novel All Fours. Get your ticket here.)
On June 11 — I’ll be at the Tribeca Festival in New York, hosting a live show with Kara Swisher. Let’s have a big night in New York City together! Get tickets here.
Our new episode this week is about a sudden spinal cord injury, enduring the long labor of physical rehabilitation, and psychedelics. I talk with Jim Harris about the accident that left him partially paralyzed ten years ago, and eight months into his rehab, about taking psychedelics at a music festival and feeling part of his hamstring muscles fire for the first time post-accident. We also talk about the couples therapy sessions that ended a long relationship in his 20s and the men’s group that gives him comfort and community now.
It was a great conversation, so much so, that as we were wrapping up our recording, Jim paused to ask me some questions about what had just happened. We ended up having a meta-conversation about how I ask questions and how that helps us put together stories that are (hopefully) very specific and accessible to many different listeners. He and I also talked about books that have been helpful for each of us to find space and calm when our thoughts get anxious and spinning.
We will drop that part of our conversation in the Slate Plus feed on Friday as an exclusive extra for Slate Plus members, so if you haven’t already signed up, get to it. (How? Sign up for Slate Plus here, or if you listen in Apple Podcasts, click “Try Free” at the top of our show page.)
Speaking of books…
I was invited to join a new book club and we had our first gathering last weekend and discussed the reading over little sandwiches, cheese and crackers, and a bowl of cherries. It was such a good time! Next time I go too long between gatherings of 6 to 8 people to talk about a book, remind me how wonderful it is! I was in the best mood afterward.
We read To Name the Bigger Lie by Sarah Viren. It’s a weird book that is made for a book club discussion — part coming of age in the 1990s memoir, part thriller about lies and deceit in the contemporary academic job market, part inquiry into Plato and the nature of truth. I was into it, especially the last section that captures the trippy fever dream of trying to finish a book and the nerves of fact-checking memory with combative sources.
I also finished Carvell Wallace’s new book, Another Word for Love, and I’ve been turning over particular lines from it since. Its language is breathtaking in spots, so much so that when we recorded our interview together last week, I asked him to read passages to me out loud. He left me thinking deeply about love and hurt and love after you’ve hurt and been hurt — and appreciating the ways exquisitely precise language can help us learn how.
I’m still finishing All Fours, Miranda July’s new novel, ahead of our on-stage talk together in San Francisco tomorrow. It’s another book that has me reaching for a pen and folding down corners to mark specific passages. Like this description of what it’s like for a mother of a young child to wake up alone in a hotel room all to herself:
The sudden absence of responsibility was a floaty, frothy, almost hallucinogenic weightlessness. No one to make breakfast or, no need to pack a five-part bento box lunch, no need to yell Put on your shoes! Brush your teeth! (Kindly but firmly, again and again, not nagging but not indulging and always keeping in mind the future adult who was being shaped right now.) Why are your shoes on? Where are they? Here they are. That’s the wrong foot.
Does Miranda July have a secret camera in my house?!? Or, the bigger question….if I’m so predictably rendered at this stage of life, how do I feel about that?
Finally, of all the Alice Munro appreciations from the last week, I liked the one by Madeline Leung Coleman in Vulture the best, especially this line:
“Munro, a writer in total control of her instrument, spent seven decades building stories in which the most consequential moments of a life could be decided by a look that lasts just a second too long.”
You can read that beautiful remembrance here, called, “No One Wrote About Sex Like Alice Munro.”
Until next week,
Anna
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Anna Sale. Long time. I'll email you one of these days.