Hi, thanks for being here. This post includes a review of Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation—which you can purchase here or through your local bookseller—but hopefully no spoilers. You can also read an excerpt from the novel before reading this post.
As a reminder I’m offering 25 percent off monthly and yearly subscriptions ($37.50 a year or $3.75 a month) until 12/31. You can treat yourself or give a subscription as a gift to a loved one. :)
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At dinner at a dry pot restaurant in the East Village, I say the wild nights are over for now. I’ve grown tired of the glut of summer. It’s over, as if summer hasn’t been long over for a while now. I confirm this new chapter by ordering jasmine tea. Then I rush to the next thing, a no-wave band whose dissonant yet net unpleasant noises seep through my earplugs. We hurry to the next restaurant for dessert and wine. I remind myself again the wild nights are over. No more excess. I make a claim that excess is probably the worst sin according to the Bible. I spoon the second to last bite of burnt cheesecake. I will take better care of myself, try hard to not neglect myself any longer. The first step is restraint. Then we stay up until two anyways talking.
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A few weeks ago I attended a Forever Magazine issue launch party where Megan Nolan read from her novel Acts of Desperation in honor of an excerpt republished in the magazine. My knee had a new cut on it, which I remembered when I tried to sit on my calves. As soon as she finished reading, I turned to Gaby. We agreed without speaking that we both needed to read the book. The next day I went on a run that ended at the library so I could rent a copy.
I read it slowly over the past few weeks. The novel is visceral, full of scrapes and bruises, rediscovering pleasure as pain and pain as pleasure. In bed as I read many nights, the scab on my left shin itched. It was an identical shaving cut to the one that had just healed on my right leg. When other people saw the cuts, I clarified these were not on purpose even if they looked like they were. What I need is a safety razor.
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s back cover blurb declares that Acts of Desperation is a love story like no other. He’s right. The love story is like no other partially because of its heroine’s high pain tolerance for tainted love. Most people in a dynamic like the one between the narrator and Ciaran would run for the hills. Most relationships never bear witness to the extremities described in the novel. Emotional affairs. Self-harm rooted in rejection. A body that, at times, is offered up as a blank canvas for others’ desire, and then other times, a punching bag or voodoo doll to project pain onto a careless lover. Actual cheating. At moments I wondered how much the narrator could take, because at times I’ve wondered this about myself. And like so many of us in varying situations of punishment, the novel asks for more.
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I feel distinctly punished when it is almost 2 in the morning and my only public transit option predicts a 3 AM arrival home. I close my eyes as I hold the pole grip on the L. The next night, I close my eyes on the dance floor, raise my arms above my head to sway to pulsing techno. I’m surrounded by people who move in strobe, strangers and friends. I’m a long way from home. I know I should just grit my teeth and accept my choices that have led me here. There are always other choices—an air mattress in my friend’s living room, or to keep dancing to the music I can feel in my chest. I’ve done this too often, stayed too long, talked too much. I’ve chosen this. I’ll choose it again.
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The narrator’s pain tolerance rarely wavers. I think of Annie Hamilton’s recent post of her notes app scrawlings. I live hard, hard, hard. Even when Acts of Desperation’s narrator lives softly in a domesticated life with Ciaran, she still craves a hard edge. She misses wild nights, the humiliation rituals of random hookups with men who aren’t afraid to be rough. Often, she chooses punishment as a way to get closer to the kind of love she thinks she wants. However imperfect, however disastrous. Pain tolerance isn’t necessarily a choice, but tolerance does indicate a strength that otherwise might not exist had pain not come first. The way I want the mess. My friend texts me: you’re experimenting, which is the only way to learn.
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On Thanksgiving I watch my friend slice an apple until only the seeds are left, the fruit’s wholeness now only a spine. He arranges them carefully in the bottom of a cake pan for a cake I volunteered to make. I’m too careless, amazed at his precision. It takes a certain amount of care to make something that won’t fall apart instantly. Have I ever done this? I’m shooed away to do messier tasks. At his instruction, I use my finger to scrape out every particle of baking soda from the measuring spoon. Later, I burn my hand when we put the underdone cake back into the oven. Not even an hour after my fingers graze the edge of the fire pit. I’m left with three blisters. I can take it until I can’t. I ask for ice, burn cream, anything to make me careless again.
As I write this, I chew on a pear that is finally ripe enough since I took it out of the fridge. Too afraid to leave it out until I was ready. Afraid I’d let it spoil. I use my teeth to leave nothing behind.
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There are bare realities of Ciaran and the narrator’s relationship:
that you can let go of anyone long enough for them to come back to you
that someone can harm you, and it’s possible to not register this pain for a long time
that it’s possible to wait until circumstances change for better or for worse
3a. that it’s at times impossible to tell if things are actually better or worse
that you can love someone deeply and hate them to a different, but equal depth
“I don’t want to hurt any more, or to hurt anyone else. But I want to try,” Ciaran tells the narrator when they first fall in love. Those two sentences hold all of these realities through the omission of what exactly Ciaran wants to try. There is no distinction in subject of the infinitive “to hurt.” Who will be hurt—ourselves or the other person? And how can you begin to distinguish the difference?
phoebe bridgers kinda wrote the songbook on self-inflicted punishment
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How do you form relationships, a stranger asks us on the back patio of a jazz club in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. The gravel shifts under my feet as I adjust in the wrought iron lawn chair. It’s a question that probably exists in everyone’s heads, but rarely asked out loud. There are sirens in the distance. Smoke pours out of our mouths from the night’s dropping temperature or cigarettes.
The unanswered question hangs between us and the stranger. I’m reminded of a passage from Acts of Desperation: “Sometimes this distance between everyone comforted and pleased me. I would die knowing things about myself that nobody else on earth did [...] And sometimes, like now, the distance seemed too sad to live with.” The distance between us and this stranger, someone reaching for connection, a shut door to the car we called to take us back to our neighborhoods far enough away to lessen his question’s weight.
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Sometimes I’m afraid I will only ever be attracted to careless people. What I want to try: clarity, consistency, a sense of certainty. But what I pursue is the opposite. I often follow what is painful and precarious because for some reason I believe those qualities indicate something precious. Then, I cry over the pain caused by this carelessness. Like the narrator in Acts of Desperation, I wallow in the glamor of sadness from the pain I choose. An on/off again partner snaps at her for this kind of indulgence: “You can’t complain about feeling bad, about being depressed, if you aren’t trying to sleep, trying to eat, trying to care about yourself.” Maybe the carelessness of the people I am most drawn to comes from this–that I am just as careless as them.
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Later that week after the conversation with the stranger, I ask a friend what it means to have a relationship—romantic or platonic—with someone. I clarify that I don’t need a theory, what I want is something simple. Just being around each other, he answers. There’s no need for a definition beyond this.
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The stranger’s use of the verb form struck me as odd. I remember Megan’s introduction of the excerpt at the Forever reading. She said, “This is a section of the novel after the narrator has bullied this man into loving her.” I loved that. I loved this idea even more because Popular Opinion declares it’s impossible to make someone love you. I’ve never actually believed it was impossible. Neither does the novel. Whether the love lasts is another issue entirely. And the novel isn’t careless enough to depict a version of reality where this construction of intimacy is fail proof.
She writes, When you fall in love with someone and your life is remade, you know instinctively that you must take great care of this delicate new world the two of you are building. There is infrastructure to be dealt with [...] The high stakes precarity of what you are doing will frequently bring tears to your eyes, both from fright and from exquisite pleasure. One wrong move and the whole thing could collapse before you have even finished construction. Couples will often disappear together in their beginning stages, which is not just about lust but also building.
To form a relationship is different than from simply having a relationship. Form indicates a construction, an active making. Having an effortless, mutual possession and state of being. The stakes are high either way. Having and forming can both lead to a failed structure, from negligence or too much overworking. The difference comes in the act of making.
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I sit next to Marissa in a Nolita gallery space. We’ve not seen each other in ten years, but no time seems to have passed, because we’ve kept in touch through sharing our lives on the internet. She’s working a cozy pop-up selling beautiful pottery and spices. A customer gives me a ginger sesame cookie from the bakery she works at. I’m still in the clothes I put on the day before at 4 PM. When I put on the outfit I accepted it was very possible I would be in the outfit for at least twelve hours. In an hour or so, I will have been more or less in these same clothes for twenty four hours.
All afternoon I’ve felt dumbstruck in my luck. I get to go from a lazy morning with one friend right to the pride of sitting next to another who has made a beautiful life for herself. Here with her, I forget to be uncomfortable. Not my hunger, my unwashed hair, my day old clothes, or list of things to do can remove me from the warmth of sitting with someone who makes me laugh without even trying. The narrator describes living with her former roommate as a pleasing self-containment. Whatever the container, I know we’ve made it together.
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The secret is this: the most beautifully designed things are impossible to tell they have been designed at all.