creating | time.

on time, Liars, and female creatives.

Writing News:

• Foundations got a lovely review at Sundress Blog, you can read it here. I am forever grateful for people reading my writing and I love receiving reviews where it feels like the reader really connected with and understood my characters.

• I will be reading at The Secret Nook series, hosted by Clio’s Bookstore (it’s a bookshop AND a cocktail bar!) in Oakland, CA on September 18^th at 7pm. I will be reading from my new novel, Select Screen, for the first time and copies of Foundations and The Drowned Woman will be for sale. If you’re local, come check it out!

I am in a transitional space this week as I quit my job and am taking some time off to rest and recuperate before starting a new job. Almost immediately after resigning, I felt the energy in my body shift from focusing on corporate negativity to having the space for my interests again—I immediately read two books and spent a lot of time online reading about perfumes, a latent hobby of mine.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time—how we spend our time, who we give our time to, and what the value of time is in a life punctuated by capitalist obligations.

In The Atlantic’s article, “The Friendship Paradox,” Olga Khazan writes:

“Americans now spend less than three hours a week with friends, compared with more than six hours a decade ago. Instead, we’re spending ever more time alone. … This difficulty arises, in part, from a shortage of free time. In 2021, older Millennials—those ages 35 to 44, a demographic that’s likely to have young kids—had 16 fewer minutes of leisure time each day than similarly aged adults did in 2003, according to Bloomberg’s Justin Fox. They’ve reallocated those minutes to sleep, work, and child care.”

As someone who is childfree, I had previously allocated most of my free time to work, upskilling, sleep, or commuting (when I was still commuting 2-3 hours per day), but I am starting to actively reclaim my time—working from home gave me back several hours that I reallocated to the gym and cooking for us three times a day, things I enjoy but hadn’t had the time for. I have actively made space for my hobbies again and taken up some new ones, most recently lap swimming and learning Magic the Gathering. Time has increasingly become the most important commodity in my life.

Still, there is a plethora of apps intended for the sole purpose of logging our time, proving to ourselves (and perhaps others) we’ve spent it in a productive way. We are out here gamifying chores, tracking our running, and posting how many books we’ve read. For me, keeping my journal is a private way of savoring and memorializing time. I catch the overflow of my emotions with my pen, When I look up after half an hour of uninterrupted scribbling, I feel like I’ve done something transformative by creating an artifact of myself.

Sarah Manguso stated in Ongoingness, “I write the diary instead of taking exercise, performing remunerative work, or volunteering my time to the unlucky. It’s a vice.”

My diaries were my vice for a long time, but only because I lied in them. They were filled with falsities that belied my own experiences and would have told the story of my life in a way that made everything seem perfect, or at least how I imagined my perfect life to be. In 2016, I decided to no longer lie in my journals. During the pandemic, I threw away all the journals of my twenties and swore to only tell the truth to myself.

In Liars by Sarah Manguso, the renowned diarist tells the truth of a marriage that may or may not be her own. While Liars is billed as autofiction, Manguso notes that she used her own “rage” at her divorce to propel the story—a fact certainly felt in the prose.

Jane, a writer, meets John, the man who will become her husband, and is bowled over by his creativity, his expansive knowledge that seems to dwarf her own. She dreams of a blended life between two creatives and gives herself over to the dream, the imaginary vision of their future.

“Agreeing to be someone’s wife should be done only if you can’t help yourself, I thought, but of course no one can help herself.”

The seemingly like-minded couple sets their sight on achieving shared goals and successes. Almost immediately, Jane is chosen for an artist’s residency in Greece and, instead of being happy, she feels guilty about telling John, who also applied, but wasn’t chosen. He still accompanies her and insinuates himself among the artists with an unearned sense of belonging, speaking about the idea of the art he is not creating.

The primary theme of Liars is truth and one’s own version of it. As Manguso, weaves the story of an obviously unhappy couple, the reader may be wondering why on earth Jane is staying with this man. The reader must subsequently wrestle with the fact that staying in a bad relationship is not an inherently rational act. Instead, truth is actively avoided, you begin writing a different narrative in your diary, telling your friends it’s a work in progress (or avoiding them and their questions entirely), but leaving is not on the table. Not yet. You just need to put in the work. You just need to stay for the child.

Jane’s lies are for her own self-preservation while John’s lies are for his self-mythologizing. As his priorities shift from art, to writing, to entrepreneurship, they move several times across the country with their young child to support his goals, no longer shared between them.

“So, at his worst, my husband was an arrogant, insecure, workaholic, narcissistic bully with middlebrow taste, who maintained power over me by making major decisions without my input or consent. It could still be worse, I thought.”

Ultimately, Jane and John divorce due to his infidelity. It feels like such an unfitting, if accurate, end to the affair as the reader is rooting for Jane to realize her worth and leave John’s morally deficient self behind. Instead, she is the one who is still making the effort, wanting therapy sessions, initiating sex, while he is living a double life. She is the one who ends up being left behind.

Liars is incredibly evocative—I really felt it. The push and pull of being a female creative and taking on the primary domestic role while trying to simply exist under the patriarchy is on full display and underscores some of the themes I wrote about in my own novel, The Drowned Woman (the comparison to Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment was also incredibly on point). Manguso tells Jane’s stories in a fractured vignette-like narrative which physically illustrates that push and pull, the lack of time to sit with your own thoughts for any extended period of time.

“A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I'd always known that. But I'd never suspected how easily I'd fall into one anyway.”

In a 2019 conversation with Kate Zambreno in The Paris Review, Manguso states, “the books I’ve written since my son was born have been written one pebble at a time.” She underscores the relationship between art and time and capitalism, the choices one must make to be a writer, to pursue art at the expense of other things.

“I think failure and creative blocks are interesting, especially as they intersect with the double threats that occur after becoming a mother, of needing to make money and needing to remain a writer (or remain sane, or a self, or alive)—needing to remain a writer in the marketplace, but also privately, where one’s identity also becomes distorted.”

The dichotomy of woman and writer / artist will always hold appeal for me and I will read every book and diary and continue to peer into the blank space where we must all write our own stories.