What literature does

8 weeks 3 days

CN: pregnancy loss

This short piece began its life as I was waiting for an operation: the removal of the pregnancy I had only experienced for a short while. The baby had not grown properly, was only a faint white circle inside an even fainter circle. They had been a possibility, but only briefly, before something had stalled. I had had a ‘missed miscarriage’, one where the body keeps going with being pregnant, even as the baby does not. Though I’m sad, I feel strangely calm and at peace: this baby, at this moment, wasn’t meant to be.

In amongst the sadness, I have a desire to reach for literature.

I had been reading Jenn Shapland’s book My Autobiography of Carson McCullers on the recommendation of my friend Andy Perluzzo (whose brilliant research you must check out). I remembered when it came out that the journalist Rachel Cooke wrote a very nasty review of it in The Guardian (as she did with many books that tackled subjects she did not like). Cooke’s point, in among others, seemed to be that Shapland was doing something wrong with the life of McCullers, had made it too personal and too close. But Shapland’s over-identifying, the imagined proximity to people we admire, is crucial to her theme. Cooke’s mean-spirited write-up felt to me to miss a large part of what Shapland was investigating, looking not only at the marked absence of queer lives in biography, but the more general knotty issue of our relationship with literature.

I found myself wondering, in answer, about the literature I’ve surrounded myself with all of my adult life. How have I worked with it, used it, enjoyed it? What have I asked literature to do? And is the literature I reach for mine? In many moments in my professional life, literature has been the source of so much, generating conversation, ideas, writing, teaching. In my personal life too, I have looked to books to do something for me nothing else can do, no longer generating things outwards, but a kind of holding inward. In this moment, the day before, my feeling was that literature needed to take me out of myself, to move beyond my body. And I wanted reading to be a kind of buffer, between myself and time, to help time pass. I needed its activation and its force: I read The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt and marvelled.

Adam Phillips writes in Attention Seeking that ‘the interesting is whatever gives us appetite for the future.’ The early days of pregnancy are strange, marked by the slow ticking off of days. I moved a little more deliberately, with a little more gravitas, considering, as I did in my two other pregnancies (of which only one has been successful), the serious business in which my body was involved. Pregnancy loss has a weird effect on time, months are reordered, events are reimagined.

Writing now, a few weeks after, my feelings dipping up and down, and the distance of days not necessarily working its magic on my heart, the necessity of reading still remains. Finding interest has been the focus of my last few weeks. My reading pile is larger; I take two books on a short holiday of which I only read a few pages - and my toddler is only partly to blame. But I realised, perhaps tritely, that books, in and of themselves attest to a belief in the future, to a reader imagined at another moment, elsewhere. My desire for literature was, perhaps, for a reminder of the transformations of time.

Here’s to more interest; here’s to the future.