are what you eat
This Week In Reading:
When You are Engulfed by Flames by David Sedaris
You don’t need me to tell you that David Sedaris funny and charming, he’s written ten books already and been on This American Life too many times to count.
In general, I find self-deprecation to be a deeply unflattering trait. What is the joke? That you have poor self esteem? I don’t get it. David Sedaris always manages to thread the needle between self-awareness and self-deprecation. He is not apologizing for being neurotic and ridiculous and exhausting, but he does apologize for the fact that other people have to deal with how neurotic and ridiculous and exhausting he is. He is a houseguest gracefully acknowledging that he is an inconvenience, and his reader is the host insisting that it was no trouble at all, he is a delight, and in fact, would he like to stay another night?
In one essay, Sedaris admits that he has a hard time making conversation with strangers, and instead falls back onto a safe stock of prepared stories. Often these aren’t even stories from his own life, but bizarre happenings he has stolen from the news. Articles about a quadriplegic stripper whose vagina was eaten by bedsores, a house that was set aflame by a burning mouse.
I feel confident in my ability to converse with anyone about basically anything (TV shows I don’t watch? Tell me more! You have a 3 year old in Montessori? I was once a 3 year old in Montessori! Sports I don’t follow? I can ask so many questions about it!), but at my worst, I fear I am just a collection of anecdotes, a broken parking meter that regurgitates content I have consumed.
It is not a revolutionary idea-- that nothing is original, that we are the sum of the things we are surrounded by, that our own art and writing are simply reflections of all of the things we have seen and read up to that point. Annie Dillard writes: “The writer studies literature, not the world. He lives in the world; he cannot miss it. If he has ever bought a hamburger, or taken a commercial airplane flight, he spares his readers a report of his experience. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.” It is a widely accepted idea, but it is still terrifying. I consume a massive amount of content on a daily basis. I keep up with a dozen podcasts, check in on variety of news websites, online magazines and blogs. Do I have an actual opinion, or am I just rehashing something I read on Vulture? Do I have a personality or do I just listen to a lot of NPR?
I have many positive attributes as a friend, but one of my best is that I am a great resource. I maintain that I’m less interesting than I appear, I just consume slightly higher quality content than the average person. Nothing particularly obscure, but the origin story of the man that kick started the essential oil market is objectively more interesting than whatever listicle is happening on Buzzfeed Community, and I would be thrilled to summarize it for you. Be my friend, and I will send you links to longread articles, recommend podcasts, tell you what current movies are worth seeing. Multiple people have confessed that they have basically let me take over their reading lists. Did you read that thing in the Atlantic last year about how Siberian scientists are trying to clone mammoths in order to solve global warming? Have you heard the Still Processing episode about Ava DuVernay? Did you see that Rebecca Solnit piece called “Things That Are Hillary Clinton’s Fault, Starting with Harvey Weinstein”? Did you know there is serious money in slime?
It’s strange how being someone who reads and passes along interesting content grants you an outsize amount of credibility. I didn’t do any of the fascinating research required to draft an article about child psychopaths, but I somehow come across as interesting and smart, just by passively flipping through a magazine. I suppose it is a kind of curation, which is a skill, but collecting and distributing somehow feels different than having an actual personality.
Are we more than the content we consume? Ideally, we bring perspective, refract the things we consume through our specific lens of selfhood—but what if our perspective is also a reflection of the things we have been exposed to? That was the craziest thing about being a history major. You go through a bunch of scholarly articles and books and read a lot of other historians’ thoughts, and then you have your own thoughts and about what they said and now you can go off write a whole new paper? It feels like spinning straw into gold. Isn’t it wild that we can create something new without providing any new raw material? Sure, historians may collect some oral histories, maybe dig up an undiscussed primary source document or two, but for the most part, new synthesis of old information is treated as new information.
I don’t know if I am more than the sum of my parts, but goodness, there are more than enough parts to get by.
Studio-ing
“In Preparation for an Inevitable Future”, 2017—present
Each year I write my own obituary and get it notarized. I plan on doing this every year until I die, upon which my finally obituary is to be published as my actual obituary.
It is one of those projects that seem so obvious to me, I feel like someone else must have already done it. Sometimes I google ideas I have, or sentences I write, just to make sure I haven’t accidentally stolen then from somebody else.
Last year, I made a book of obituaries of women that had the same name as me. Going into the project, I thought that I would develop a personal connection with all of these other Nicole Anderson’s, discover a kinship with these women that shared my name. Instead, I realized how strange obituaries are. Every life, no matter how specific and unique, ends up summarized in the same way. You are born in your hometown, you go to school, maybe, you love and you are loved, and then you die. The longer the woman’s obituary was, the less I felt I knew about her, her life transformed into a glorified CV.
After that, I decided I needed to write my own obituary. It is partially an art project; I am interested to see the way in which I describe my own life changes as the decades pass, the accomplishments of a 25 year old fading to obscurity by the time I reach middle age. But it also a life project— I am unwilling to cede control of the narrative— I refuse to not have the final word.
Further Reading:
A few other articles I won’t shut up about: the way neoliberalism has created an epidemic of perfectionism, the Elif Batuman piece about Japanese rental families in the New Yorker (and, for that matter, the Elif Batuman interview on Longform), this article in Bitch Magazine about how we devalue ethnic food, this NYTimes piece about raw water.
As far as Sedaris goes, my favorite is still Me Talk Pretty One Day, but you can't really go wrong.