I like to admire the reflections in the disingenuous slick surfaces of the diary written for public airing. True, it’s a form that works best with the delectation of knowns— if the writer is known and they are interesting, say, or their location is known and it is timely, or some crucial variable or name or event is known. Yet here I transact in vaguenesses and implications, “oblique points of stage direction,” the anon’s coy boustrophedon. I wonder if a diary of [redacted] reveals something new by defeating the point or if it just defeats the point.
I’m in the office, in a meeting filled with mostly directors, in the manner of a map mostly of water. I once made a character in a short story a director, and the workshop forced to read it was very confused. “Like, film?” No, like, directorship, like, leading, supervising, “looking after.” People decidedly in charge of [redacted]. They are women. One is married to a senior investment banker; another is married to a partner at [redacted]; another comes from generational wealth; another is married to a [redacted]. I am thinking again about one of my book ideas, the one on a history of the advantageous marriage and what it can do for a woman. This book would do for women boosted through spousal association what Parallel Lives did for wives of the saints. Someone asks me a question, and the answer I give sounds like someone else is speaking.
Later, I’m complaining about several popular female authors with a colleague who also dislikes them. She says doesn’t like that one, either; I wonder if she’s just saying this to ingratiate herself. Whenever a preference is too well matched I can’t break the habit of suspicion. She goes on to say she hates A Little Life and calls it “torture porn.” We agree they are all “books for people who do not read.” We also agree the best genre of clothes is “stolen from boyfriend’s mother.”
The sky is grey and blue and low and easy to look at but the light is greasy and sticks to the eyeball. I stare at a far-off and gloomy skyline. Later, the sun goes down in great fluoro gouges. I think of a line from one of the better things I’ve ready lately: “worldly sensation is here for the taking.” I think, worldly sensation is here, right in front of us.