Responding to Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh
I’m not gonna lie, this was meant to be something else. It was meant to be a structured and properly edited review/personal essay - I got it into my head that I could start writing the kinds of things published in the New Yorker, and then get paid to write for somewhere like the New Yorker. Which was really delusional and frankly stupid of me, because I just can’t write like that. I go insane thinking of every single thread of thought or idea that could be expanded upon and I end up with a dissertation-level concept and no patience to execute it. Also, if I leave something unfinished and come back to it the next day to keep working on it, it’s absolutely guaranteed that I’ll read through what I’ve already written and decide it’s shit and then spiral into the kind of self-doubt that has me convinced I should delete all traces of myself from the internet and go work at Lidl again and just shut the fuck up for the rest of my life. But for whatever reason, I just can’t make myself shut the fuck up. So, long story short, I’m just gonna dump my brain onto the page, unfiltered and unedited. Something literally anyone in the world could do.
I’m going to use a writing exercise that I’ve shared in a workshop before. Basically, I’ll take phrases and sentences that I’ve underlined in a book, Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh in this instance, and use it as a bouncing-off point for my own thoughts. It’s a way for me to think through the reasons that I instinctively chose to underline certain things… Why does this matter to me? What does it inspire in me? Could I take it somewhere new, and use it to generate a piece of original writing?
Here we go.
“It was a terrible feeling, the boy’s first experience of nostalgia: the pain of his past.”
I think about the process of ageing and the scariest part about it is that at some point, it’s guaranteed that I’ll have lived through all of my best moments, and only have worse ones to come. I saw a post online a while ago written by someone who’d just realised that there’d been a moment in their life when their parent had carried them for the last time - and neither of them would have realised that this was the case. It’s stuck with me since. There are so many ‘lasts’ that happen without us realising. Time just keeps sweeping on, changing and killing things, and to remember those things, when the things were really nice, can feel so brutal.
“Are you alive or dead?” he asked her.
It can be tempting to ask a person this. Or to stand in a mirror and ask yourself.
The path they’d worn from Agata’s grave through the woods to the pasture was narrow because Jude and Marek never walked side by side.
I’ve written in the margin of my book: DESIREPATHS IN A DESIRELESS WORLD. I wanted to incorporate that line into something but never quite found the right use for it. Maybe it’s because, actually, I don’t think the world is desireless. And maybe I just shouldn’t be so fucking depressing.
I think, realistically: I have experienced extended periods of feeling no real desire. And I’ve observed other people living similarly - trudging along, taking what comes, exercising no will or drive to change anything. Desiring a certain food, or a certain TV show, and nothing else. But also: I’ve pulled myself out of those periods, fed my brain with things I’d know would spark it up again, and found myself inspired and wanting and loving so many things.
So maybe I could write some desirepaths into a desireless world, but have the paths lead somewhere where real desire could stand a chance of being cultivated. To a house filled with sex and vision boards and people wiping the dust from their old Davina McCall exercise DVDs. To a library with an old man sitting at the computer, learning how to use the internet because he misses his long-distance lover’s face and wants to be able to see it easily, every day. A room to cheer up in. A cul-de-sac named desire.
She brought a wet cloth to wipe his face and used her fingernail to scrape the white scum from his teeth, the sleep from the corners of his eyes.”
Moments of intimacy. Accidentally touching legs under a table, and deciding not to pull away. Pretending you didn’t notice when someone spat a little bit whilst speaking because you don’t want them to feel embarrassed. Talking to a big group, but speaking with one specific person’s ears in mind. Walking past a row of terraced houses and catching a glimpse of a stranger sitting alone in their living room, watching 24 hours in A&E…. Maybe the stranger is an old lady whose husband has already died, and who has no kids. Maybe she’s always managed to be brave about the whole dying thing, but suddenly finds herself frightened and almost crying. Maybe there’s a woman her age on the programme, and the nurse has just asked her if there’s anyone they can call to come and be with her, to which the answer is no. Fucking hell that is so depressing. Maybe the old woman in the terraced house could just switch the channel and start watching something funny and then go to bed having spent the night laughing.
“I helped Jacob hunt a lot of those animals,” he said to Agata. She didn’t smile. Nothing Marek said made her smile.
Agata is Marek’s mother. This is such a brutal line.
A little boy, desperate to be the reason his mother smiles, failing to make her do so. A room to cheer up in, except nobody wants to cheer up.
Or!!!
A room to be depressed in, except everyone who enters is hell-bent on cheering everybody else up.
Nobody had the strength to be entertaining.
It’s 2050. It’s really easy to keep up with the kardashians because they’ve stopped doing things. If a baby is born and doesn’t do anything entertaining within the first couple of minutes, it’s thrown in the bin. Everybody’s scared to fall asleep because they don’t wanna be even more boring than they are when they’re awake.
… a fairytale they told each other in bed at night
My boyfriend has a sort of fairytale that he adapts and tells me whenever I’m really sad. In it, there’s a starfish (me), and a prawn (him). The starfish falls to the bottom of the ocean where it’s really dark and scary, but the prawn is always somewhere near, ready to remind it that it’s loved and to help guide it back up to the surface where everything’s nice and light. It’s extremely cute. He’s really good at telling stories that feel like fairytales. I’m not. In case you hadn’t realised.
Right. I’m stopping there. Obviously this was the worst attempt at a review in the world. But the book is actually really, really good. So just buy it. And read it.