Other people’s words about … intimacy

He exhales. In the spring he would sometimes wake up at night beside Marianne, and if she was awake they would move into each other’s arms until he could feel himself inside her. He didn’t have to say anything, except to ask her if it was alright, and she always said it was. Nothing else in his life compared to what he felt then. Often he wished he could fall asleep inside her body. It was something he could never have with anyone else, and he would never want to. Afterwards they’d just go back to sleep in each other’s arms, without speaking.

from ‘Normal People‘
by Sally Rooney

I don’t know anyone who writes about intimacy better than Sally Rooney, especially in her first two novels, Conversations with Friends and Normal People. What I love about Rooney’s writing is that she understands how our emotions convey themselves to us by manifesting themselves physically. Connor’s longing for Marianne in the passage above, his longing to be inside her, is both physical and emotional. It’s all-encompassing, unspeakable, the kind of intimacy that he doesn’t have words for — that most of us don’t have words for. Only Sally Rooney, as I said, can write this way.

Port Elliot, June 2024.

I’ve been thinking over the last few months about why I write and what I want to write about next, now that my novella Ravenous Girls is out in the world. And I’ve been writing, too, or trying to. Earlier this year, in fact, I submitted part of a new manuscript, the manuscript I’ve been thinking about over the last few months, to the Deep Creek Residency — and this week I found out to my excitement that, based on the strength of the material I’d submitted, I have been named the winner for 2024 of the residency. Which is deeply exciting.

It’s funny how writing works, though — by the time I got the news about winning the residency, I’d pretty much convinced myself that this manuscript, or the version of it that I’d worked on and submitted to the residency, was unfeasible. Clunky. Strained. Embarrassing, even.

So maybe I was wrong about that; maybe I somehow got myself lost inside my own echo chamber. This happens to me over and over again whenever I’m writing, and yet each time it happens to me, it astonishes me anew. It’s not a place I recommend staying in very long, this echo chamber. It’s a desolate, lonely place.

Aldinga Beach, June 2024.

Partly what I’m writing about in my new manuscript is Cairo. Partly what I’m writing about is the two sisters that I wrote about in Ravenous Girls, Frankie and Justine, at a later stage in their lives. And partly what I’m writing about is intimacy, not in the way that Sally Rooney writes about intimacy, but intimacy nonetheless.

Intimacy, which is its own terrifying echo chamber.

Lately I’ve been reading …

• • And still you write. It takes stamina and dedication and perhaps a bit of insanity to work on the same story, year after year, and do it without praise, without support, without even the knowledge that it will come together in the end: On the subject off writing, here’s Peyton Marshall, on the value of writing slowly. Long-time readers of this blog will know that there were ten years between my second book, a novel for young adults, and my third, a novella. Talk about getting lost inside an echo chamber! I find much to relish in Marshall’s words here.
  
  
  • To be honest, I’m a little frightened of how humbled I am. Which is why I must share my news several times a day, and with all 12.9K of you — to show that, even in the wake of success, one can achieve an improbable amount of humility: Still on the subject of writing, in this piece Jeff Bender lampoons the social media posts that writers publish in the wake of publication. Ouch! This made me laugh at first, and then cry. In the end, it’s not the writers who come off badly here — it’s the industry.
  
  
  • Clouds rend the air: This poem, ‘My Atmosphere’ by Alan Felsenthal, took me by surprise. Read it to the end and you’ll see why. Reading it again now, I’m still left breathless.

   

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