Jun 6

Jun 6 Memory, identity, & synchronicities: Elisa Gabbert's ANY PERSON IS THE ONLY SELF

Elisa Gabbert is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently Any Person Is the Only Self (out June 11 from FSG), Normal Distance, and The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays. She writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Believer, and elsewhere. She lives in Providence, RI.

Interview by Nirica Srinivasan

Any Person Is the Only Self brings together essays you’ve written over the past few years, some (like “On Jealousy”) as early as 2018. There’s an overarching theme to these essays, but there are also strands—memory, selfhood, Plath!—that tie the essays together. What was the latest essay you wrote for the collection? What was the process like to put it together in book form?

My life changed a lot during the years I was working on this book. The earliest essays predate the pandemic, predate my turning 40. This is dangerous, perhaps, but I’ve started to think of my thirties as a kind of golden age in my own life—I was writing a lot, healthy, surrounded by friends—I was really very happy…

In 2022, I moved across the country. The last piece in the collection (“Same River, Same Man”) is the last one I wrote, and the only one I wrote in full after moving. Five-ish years isn’t so very long, in the span of a life, and yet, during the writing, for various reasons, I felt displaced and destabilized—even in crisis—in ways that now make this book a hard object to grasp. The shape of it sort of eludes me. I also had two books come out during those years—I’m only realizing this, right now, as I write this. No wonder I’m soul-sick of myself. Now that it’s done I have an urge to completely re-invent my life—to write in a genre I’ve never written in before, or abandon writing entirely.

Your work, in The Unreality of Memory, The Word Pretty, Normal Distance, and now this book, has always been interested in the idea of the self. What draws you to this theme? How do you approach exploring it through these different forms—in personal essays, in literary criticism, in poetry?

It’s strange how these career-level themes manifest themselves. I almost never sit down to write with the idea that my primary subject is THE SELF, or MEMORY—it just seems that so many of the subjects I’m interested in lead me back to those ideas. I love writers’ diaries because they’re so intimate—I love how real they make writers feel, with all their shame and vanity on display. But in writing about the journal as a practice, I end up thinking about how writing out the story of your life transforms your memory of your life, as it’s happening, and how writing is a way of constructing a more controlled, tangible self—a self that can outlive the original self, at least for a while. And when I’m writing a poem, I can look around the room, I can look out the window at the weather, what trees or birds are out there against the sky, but I also have to draw on my self and my memory to find enough material to work with. I’m always there, as the poet, casting my shadow on the poem. It feels beyond my control, the way I keep returning to these themes.

I love a phrase you use in “On Recently Returned Books,” about a shelf at libraries—“It was negative hype. It was anti-curation”. Are there other ways you escape the hype? Do you have favorite, non-online ways of discovering new works to read? (I personally love reading sources of the epigraphs of books I read.)

A good used bookstore is one of the best ways to find things you didn’t know you were looking for. I had never heard of Emil Cioran, as far as I recall, before I saw the words The Temptation to Exist on a spine in a used bookstore and had to buy the book for the title alone. His books have some of the greatest titles of all time. I especially like when book shops have quirky, specific categories like “books about books.” And I love to browse the art and architecture sections of used bookstores—those books feel much too expensive and untouchable when they’re new. I also frequently read books because they come up in other books. I read some Hardy almost purely because his name kept coming up in things I was reading—by Yiyun Li, Tillie Olsen, Ted Hughes. I read The Denial of Death after seeing it mentioned in a poem by Louise Glück.

You describe the effect of works like Eliot’s The Waste Land, making you feel “unhooked from time”, as if its references and connections echo both backward and forward in time. You also mention a song that follows you, that you hear playing often. I often learn a word while doing a crossword and then read the same word, which I could swear I’d never heard of before, on the very next page of a book I’m reading. These are probably biases in perception, but I find them such an interesting way to explore art and timelessness and how our brains find and seek patterns!

How do you feel about coincidences and synchronicities in your reading and writing practice? Were there any that emerged in connection to Any Person Is the Only Self? (For me, while reading, there’s a moment where you write, “I missed everyone, everyone I knew and didn’t know,” and that had immediate echoes for me with Catcher in The Rye’s “...you start missing everybody”—and only a few essays later you’re discussing that very book!)

I often have experiences like that! It’s almost as though, while you’re reading a book, you enter the author’s mind and start thinking the way they think, to such a degree that you can psychically predict some of what the author’s going to say next. Books can feel web-like, in that way, or fractal, like you’re reading the whole thing when you’re only reading part of it, like you touch one page and the whole thing quivers, like you can absorb the whole radiating gestalt of the text through the periphery. It’s kind of spooky.

My favorite coincidence I encountered during the writing of the book is captured in the book, on page 100. My husband and I often talk about what we’re reading while we’re eating, and I remember the moment when I told him that Woolf and Sontag both felt, while reading Gide’s journals, that they were reading their own thoughts, and he looked at me wide-eyed and said, “That’s how I’ve always felt!”

Many of the essays in this collection revisit the canon. I loved a line you write, when discussing a Lit Hub list of books to read by living women rather than dead white men: “Since when is it poor form to die?” Later you write: “(I forgive the past a lot; the present is terrible too.)” What has it been like to wrestle with the thorniness of the canon and of the past? Do you find it’s impacted your reading of more contemporary work?

John [Cotter, Gabbert’s husband -ed.] once said something I found very wise—we were talking about that “burn it all down” instinct, during the era of the anti-death reading lists, when people seemed very eager to torch all the classics. He said that there’s usually a point in life when the sheer volume of works that precede you, all the art and books and lives lived, the colossus of culture, strikes you as overwhelming. There’s a justified anxiety in the realization, that you have to confront the past, and you simply don’t have time to do it all. One way to alleviate the anxiety is to come up with some filters or heuristics that help you figure out what to skip. And this can flip your relation to the towering horror of the canon, if you can sort of generalize it away, by assuming it’s all very boring or conservative, etc. I remember making these kinds of assumptions myself, which is part of why classics I read now are almost always surprising, almost always much funnier and weirder and more complex than I imagined. And I think part of being a good reader, and a good person, is trying to understand other people, whether they’re living or dead or don’t yet exist—trying to understand that every person is real to themselves, and is subject to limitations.

Relatedly, do you have a personal canon of works that you think are essential reading?

I don’t really think any books are essential for everyone—but there are certainly books, and particular writers, that feel essential to my own identity, as a reader and writer, which is most of my identity—sometimes books I only read quite recently, but that I seemed somehow destined to read! Many of these come up in the book—poets’ novels like The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and The Bell Jar … the essays and journals of Sontag and Woolf … Prufrock. I sometimes think most of my “personal canon” is fiction, though fiction is the thing I don’t write—Javier Marias, Sebald, Forster. Oddly, some of my most treasured books are the kind of book you don’t need to read cover to cover, reference texts or certain anthologies I’ve had for many years, like The Poet’s Work, a collection of writings on writing, or my Paris Review interviews—I like the idea that these books still contain, and maybe always will contain, something as yet undiscovered.

One of my favorite strands across your writing is the exploration of memory and space. In The Unreality of Memory’s title essay, and here, in “Infinite Abundance on a Narrow Ledge,” memory is spatial—linked to a specific space and time, but also something navigable, almost like a room in a video game (I saw this gif recently that immediately made me recall your essays!). You mention how writing is spatial to you as well, and how essay writing is a bit like architecture. If these essays were physical spaces, what kind of space do you think they would be—how do they feel to you?

Oh, I love this question. (I just finished recording the audiobook earlier this week, and my audio engineer sent me a photo of the booth where I’d been sitting for five days, before he broke down the setup, because, he said, “I know you like rooms so much”!) I think some of these essays have a more legible structure, the way you can see all the bones of a cathedral from the outside (which is similar, I guess, to how you always see Jesus’s bones through his skin in representations of the crucifixion). An essay in three sections, like “Same River, Same Man,” sort of feels like a building with three main rooms—a small museum with three galleries. In “Infinite Abundance on a Narrow Ledge,” I intentionally used no section breaks—I wanted it to feel like a very large museum, the kind where you wander and wander, get turned around and lost, and can’t quite remember your path or which rooms you have been in and haven’t. That’s a little how Tanizaki’s essay “In Praise of Shadows” feels to me, even though he does use section breaks—it’s long enough, with so many parts, it really invites the reader to have a favorite part. I liked the idea of creating the environment for that kind of relation with a text, the way you might have a favorite room in a sprawling museum.

Reading your essays, I thought of a recent online event that caught my eye: a year or so ago, a music critic for Pitchfork revisited a rating she gave a Charli XCX album, and Charli responded on Twitter: “...if the sway of culture and popular opinion is the thing that’s forcing a journalist to reconsider their review with hindsight then what’s the point of even reviewing in the first place?”

I thought this was interesting because it both suggests that public reviews themselves are a wasted effort and implies that revisiting an opinion—for whatever reason—is somehow invalid. Your book is interested in revisiting personal opinions from a distance and not taking things like the classics or public opinion as either a total endorsement or the opposite. I wondered what you think about the value of these practices, especially the value of writing about them.

That’s very interesting. This may be surprising for a critic to say, but I don’t really approve of “reviews.” (I know, I’m reviewing the concept of reviewing.) A rating system (1 to 5 or 1 to 10 or pass/fail, etc.) implies finality in a way that a description of a book or a piece of music, a descriptive impression, does not, and in that sense, it does seem pointless to change a rating. In my case, I often find that over time, my impression changes less than my impression of my impression. A book strikes me in much the same way, but my feelings about the way it strikes me have changed. A style that used to bore me or grate on me doesn’t anymore, or vice versa. This is all about the accident of context, of when you encounter a book, and how you understand it to relate to every other book you’ve read so far and haven’t read yet. There’s no way to write about art without your subjective opinions getting in, of course, but I tend to prefer criticism that shows some awareness of its limits—writing that comes from a mind that knows it might change.

Any Person Is the Only Self is available June 11.

Nirica Srinivasan is a writer and illustrator from India. She likes stories with ambiguous endings and unreliable narrators.