What stories do you return to?
Travels with Charley, August 2024
Hi readers,
Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send these dispatches every month or two, writing on four different fronts: where I’m living, what I’m reading (lines I’m adding to my commonplace book), what I’m wondering, and what I’m writing. If you feel moved to write back, the questions are genuine! I’d love to hear from you.
Where I’m living
I haven’t sent a newsletter in a couple months. That’s in part because I didn’t have published work to share and in part because I was spending the time away from my computer, swimming and reading and people-watching and, you know, generally smelling the summer roses, in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere.
I’ve also been traveling, mostly to see and celebrate friends: by dancing under the redwoods at a friend’s wedding in Oakland, with a birthday ocean dip in coastal New England, on my way to a reporting trip in the blinding sun and verdant plum fields outside of Fresno, through the intoxication of sweaty July nights in Brooklyn. It’s been a really good summer.
I just got home from my traditional two muggy weeks in central New Jersey, teaching earnest high school students through the Princeton Summer Journalism Program. They’re 8am to 10pm days, filled with big revelations—about what a college dining hall is like, about the scary exhilaration of interviewing a stranger, about all the different people you can grow up into. It’s a privilege to watch these bright teenagers realize how big their lives can be. (And sobering to realize how very old I am: If the dorm-issue twin-extra-long induced back pain doesn’t do it, try looking around a lecture about live coverage on 9/11 and realizing no one else in the room, neither the high school students nor their college-age counselors, were alive for 9/11.)
What I’m reading
Mating, by Norman Rush, is such a sharp delight. I know I’m late to it (both the 1991 publication and its resurgence of a couple of years ago), but that won’t stop me from foisting it upon all my reading friends (aka you):
It became the kind of scene that makes you want to be a writer so you can capture a transient unique form of social agony being undergone by people who have it made in every way, the observer excepted… Everything was adding to the mad hatter tenor of events. In every collation of at least two hundred Brits there will be several people with hysterical surnames. I think this is the result of coming from a culture which has yet to wake up to the fact that it’s a thinkable thing to do to go down to the name-changing bureau and rid you and your offspring of these embarrassments. Or possibly they don’t do it just because Americans do, when they notice that people start falling about laughing when they introduce themselves. Anyway, they were all there: Mr. Hailstones, Mr. Swinerod, I. Denzil Quorme, Mr. Leatherhead, and a plump couple, the Tittings. Anyway, there we were with all the Brits with ludic names in one enclosure. The feeling of being under guard was enhanced by the presence of lots of actual guards, Waygards in specially cleaned maroon uniforms, spaced like caryatids around the edges of the incipient riot we were becoming. I had to get myself under control. I kept thinking, This is the world created for us by grown men, n’est-ce pas? This was the human comedy.
Demon Copperhead felt so wonderfully American. I think something about the unapologetic vast scope and regionality of the voice. Makes me want to read other Barbara Kingsolver:
“Hang on tight,” I said, and flopped on the ground beside him, panting like a dog. He was quiet, holding that string and kite with everything he had. The way he looked. Eyes raised up, body tethered by one long thread to the big stormy sky, the whole of him up there with his words, talking to whoever was listening. I’ve not seen a sight to match it.
A lovely movement through anxiety, from “Loom” by Bradley Trumpfheller (“breeze-fretted!”):
My mother says when she is anxious she finds a seam,
finds stitches on her clothes, on furniture she’s near, always
a verge has that feel, birch joints, wrinkles. It’s a relief
to think with the hands. Not with what years do,
not with rings or someone else’s sadness. With the repair
in a sheet her sister tore, breeze-fretted in the yard.
I’m already a fan of Becca Rothfeld’s book reviews for The Washington Post, which read like your smartest friend spouting off about a movie as you walk out of the theater together. Her collection of essays, All Things Are Too Small, is a paean to excess in its many forms, and it has so many ideas I want to work through aloud. (If you’ve read it and want to talk about it, text me.) Here’s one of many good lines:
compliance is the preserve of the inanimate: pique and resistance are the best proofs of life
Also worth noting the list of words I’ve written in the endpapers of Mating and All Things Are Too Small, which I may work up the courage to pepper into conversation: beguine, carking, vitiate, effulgence, salable, sanguinity, salvific, lustration, bete noire, labile, ersatz, empyrean
If you’re interested in more of what I’m reading, or a book recommendation, check out my storefront on Bookshop. (Buying through there sends me 10 percent of the sale, which I’ll add to my donations to help kids in Gaza get medical care.)
What I’m wondering
What stories do you come back to? Movies you re-watch, books you re-read, albums you listen to again and again?
What should I be writing about, in this newsletter and elsewhere? What kinds of stories do you want to read? What questions do you think should be reported out?
What I’m writing
Some professional news: I’m now officially a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. I’m thrilled about it.
For Vox, I wrote about how being an only child is, contrary to popular belief, totally fine. If you’re also an only child who gets accosted by worried parents-of-one at weddings, please feel free to deploy this article and its statistics at will.
What’s it like to step away from work later in life, when your career has thoroughly defined who you are? I talked to some lovely octogenarians (not Joe Biden) about their experiences for The Atlantic.
I wrote about how we should think about what we do afterschool (and after work), for both kids and adults, in Vox.
I’ve also been interviewed about my stories in the past few months: for The New York Times, The Sunday Long Read, The Brian Lehrer Show, KQED’s Forum, and WFAE’s Charlotte Talks. I will never voluntarily listen to a recording of my voice, but my parents say the interviews sound great.
yours,
Charley