Lately, stories featuring women in their early twenties linger with me long after I’ve finished reading. In hindsight, I see myself at that age as confronting a series of forks in roads. One way led to love and domestic entanglement. The other way, a life of work and solitude. Back then, I didn’t always appreciate what was at stake.
The thing about forks in roads is that they aren’t always obvious.
There is a word for how it feels to look back at my younger self with the knowledge of the major consequences looming behind every minor-seeming choice. It's énouement, that bittersweet emotion of having arrived at a point in the future when you know how the plot turned out but being unable to tell your past self. I felt this way on every page of Practice, British author Rosalind Brown’s debut novel.
In Practice, 21-year-old Annabel, an undergraduate at Oxford, must write an essay, due the following day, about Shakespeare’s sonnets. Most of the book takes place in Annabel’s dorm room, which she finds the perfect place to contemplate Shakespeare’s sonnets: “Compared to the ravenous, jeering crowd of the theatre: the sonnet’s narrow room, where one can hole up and take oneself extremely seriously.” A room is also the perfect container for this 199-page novel, given Annabel’s focus on poetic stanzas (a word that means “room” in Italian) and love of Virginia (“room of one’s own”) Woolf.
The novel begins when Annabel wakes up and ends when she goes to sleep. In the intervening hours, we are present for her every thought, emotion, and bodily sensation. The intimacy of the narration—in the bathroom, for example—may rub some readers the wrong way. I loved every toilet flush; it helps that Brown is an exquisite writer.
Practice brought me back to the years that I spent reading and writing in a quiet room. Like Annabel, I was a bookish, serious college student. I lived by myself in an apartment off campus, working part-time in my college’s writing center to pay the rent. My schedule was the same every day. I woke at 6:00 a.m. to drink coffee, read, and write in my journal before taking the bus to school to study and meet with writing students in the library. In the evenings, I made myself a vegetarian burrito for dinner and read Russian novels in bed until 10:00 p.m. On the weekends and holidays, I walked around my college town speaking broken Russian to myself. I went days without speaking to another person. Once, I went for so long without speaking my native language that English words became strange. I read out loud to my cat in English until my normal accent returned.
After visits to my family in Austin, I flew back to Washington on the Southwest Airlines route that stops in Las Vegas. All I ever wanted was to read until the plane landed in Sea-Tac. The sight of a young woman with her attention focused on a book provoked my fellow passengers, rowdy men enjoying the airline’s cocktail service on their way to the casinos. They were bothered because my attention was on a book, which meant that it was not, by definition, directed at them. “Whatcha reading?” “That must be a good book!” “Hey, why so serious? You look prettier when you smile!”
The “smiling thing” is a recurring motif in Practice. Annabel’s classmates and teachers pick on her serious demeanor, which leads to intense self-consciousness. The very question of whether to smile is fraught: “It is impossible, then. Smile, and you lay yourself open to the world. Don’t smile, and everyone notices you not smiling.”
Reading this passage, my spine and neck muscles stiffened as I recalled those rowdy men on Southwest Airlines. How well I know the look of a man about to command me to smile. (Why is it always so obvious?) Young women know they are being watched; it’s no wonder we watched ourselves so closely.
A few months before my twenty-first birthday, I wrote in my journal:
I don’t feel like I’ll be walking down the aisle anytime soon. But I do feel as if something is closing in on me right now. It’s like I don’t even have to do anything to make it happen or to speed it up; it will happen in its own time.
It felt to me like something else was bending my life in a certain direction. I doubted whether I had control over my destiny, even though, objectively speaking, as a middle-class white American I had more freedom to decide how my life would turn out than any other woman in history. Maybe I invented the idea of “something closing in on me” because the freedom was overwhelming. There is comfort in restriction. (I picture my infant son, unswaddled, the first time I put him down in a crib. He flailed his arms and screamed in outrage because the world was too big; he wanted to be held.)
Annabel’s awareness of her body—the way she regulates her time, energy, and appetites—reminded me of the rules and rituals I created for myself in my twenties: healthy impulses for solitude and rigor that had the potential to veer off into obsessiveness and loneliness. In Practice, a neighbor’s eating disorder poses a “what if” for Annabel, a room she knows is dangerously close to her own highly regulated eating.
Young women know they are being watched; it’s no wonder we watched ourselves so closely.
In Practice, Annabel’s two sides—the one wanting solitude and scholarship, the other wanting sensual experience and love— are represented by the SCHOLAR and the SEDUCER, two imaginary personas that also double as the writer and male object of affection in Shakespeare’s sonnets. (The names are written in all-caps in the text.) At times I questioned whether Annabel’s fantasies were necessary to my enjoyment of the book. I would have been happy reading the inner life of a studious girl in her room, without the “elaborate erotic fantasies” promised by the book jacket. But I do appreciate how this device portrayed Annabel’s conflicting desires. When Annabel imagines herself as the SCHOLAR, she depends “on the pleasurable productivity of a life spent largely alone.” But even her alter ego might bend someday to the emotional pull of the SEDUCER.
The SCHOLAR and the SEDUCER are always dancing around each other, never fully together. “There must always an until,” she writes, “it will last, until it doesn’t,” which may also be the case with Annabel and Rich, an older man with whom she has become emotionally and sexually involved. While she is attempting to focus on Shakespeare’s sonnets, she is distracted by fantasies about the SCHOLAR and the SEDUCER and by the prospect of Rich visiting her at Oxford the following weekend. She likes being with Rich, but she doesn’t want to commit to seeing him because he will rob her of the time and solitude she craves. She tries to bargain:
“Perhaps she and Rich will get married and live quietly and he can build his medical career and she can do a DPhil on Shakespeare or Woolf. Somewhere in the middle they will meet and give physick to each other. That unspeaking delight sometimes between them, when they look into each other’s faces: serious, and delighted. Also true that nothing in even the best of the Sonnets can convincingly replicate the sensation of being fucked by him. What if she kept her words over here, and her body and smiles for Rich? Seems as good an arrangement as could be found for her.”
Oh, Annabel, if only it were that simple!
I met my husband one month before I turned 25. Three years later, halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge, he stopped, got down on one knee, and asked me to marry him. Fear welled up inside me. We’d bought furniture together and shared two apartments. I’d moved from Texas to New York for him, and he’d reciprocated by moving to California for me to go to law school. I wanted to spend my life with him. And yet I was scared to say yes to marriage. I must have known that I would be giving something up—some precious kernel of solitude that I might never be able to recapture, at least not without extraordinary effort. I said yes anyway: yes to love, yes to having an emergency contact, someone to kill the bugs and plunge the toilets, someone in whose eyes I see my silent laughter reflected when one of our kids says something hilariously inappropriate. We’ve been married for two decades and I don’t regret a day of it.
But, boy, do I love reading a novel about a girl alone in her room with a book. When Annabel turns off her phone so she can focus on the sonnets, something in me cheers. And when she turns to Rich for support in a vulnerable moment, a part of me wants to shout, “Don’t do it! Don’t go down that path!”
Let’s talk about that title. The word “practice” has several definitions: to follow or work at as a profession (as in, “I practiced law for 16 years”); to perform an act or exercise a skill regularly or frequently so as to win greater command (as in, “Annabel practices yoga and meditation”); a customary action or code of behavior (as in, “a practice of rising before dawn”).
I have practiced law, yoga, Judaism. In my life now, the practice that is most important to me is my writing practice: waking up to write three pages by hand every morning, no matter what else is going on. My practice is not the pure morning pages ritual prescribed by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. I don’t fall out of bed and write straight from the subconscious. On most days, I feed the dog and cat, make one and 1/2 lunches, brew my coffee, and unload the dishwasher before I open my notebook. Often, in the middle of a writing session, I must interrupt my flow with emphatic exhortations and gestures intended to encourage my children to get themselves up and dressed. Still, it’s a practice I do every day, and in that way I feel like I’m holding onto some part of my rigorous younger self.
In Practice, I recognized the habits of a young woman who reminded me of myself. So even though I worry about Annabel, I know she’ll be okay in the end. She has practiced being alone in a room. This will serve her well, no matter what happens with Rich.
Other interesting things
Speaking of novels that take place in one location, Here, one of the most interesting graphic novels I’ve ever read, is being turned into a movie by the same team that gave us Forrest Gump. I’m not sure how to feel.
I finally read (what I’d heard described as) Parul Sehgal’s “grouchy” review in the New Yorker of Liars by Sarah Manguso. I haven’t read Liars, so I can’t speak to all of Sehgal’s criticisms. I’m mostly interested in the question of free will. Manguso’s memoir of infidelity and divorce alleges that women are “impelled” to make the “bad choice” of heterosexual marriage— “The entire civilization is screaming it at us. . . .from the cradle.” To which Sehgal responds:
A little proportion, please. As the product of generations of arranged marriages, a number of them coerced, I find that such claims feel strange, if not obscene. It’s not merely that bandying around these neon words—abuse, coercion—dilutes their power; it’s that these words are being deployed to foreclose thought and impose silences of their own. . . .Later, when considering her own decisions, her orientation toward freedom or constraint, she admits to herself, “I was a logical person, and I chose restriction, over and over, because it felt good.”
This newsletter by Mandy Brown about work and social media feels in conversation with Practice. I read it as a meditation on the importance of knowing when to turn off your phone and get to work.
I cannot dip into the stream, even briefly, and also maintain the awareness and focus needed to do my own work, the work that is uniquely mine. I cannot wade through the water and still protect this fragile thing in my hands. And perhaps I owe to my continued senescence the knowledge that I do not have time for this anymore. Perhaps it’s age that grants the wisdom to know where my attention belongs and the discipline to be able to direct it. The great power of a middle-aged woman is that she knows where to give her fucks.
Hello Sarah,
Thanks for your insightful reviews. I have been thinking a great deal about young women in their 20s, as my daughter is 23, and has recently gone to Israel to teach English for a year. During her senior year in college, she was driven by the desire to choose a financially rewarding career. But when she actually graduated this past December, she was restless about getting sucked into starting a long term career. So she went to Israel to do 2 weeks of volunteering. She loved it. She travelled some more. Then her heart turned back to something she thought she would love to do, teach, (except for the poor pay). So she eagerly accepted an invitation to teach English to elementary school kids in a diverse public school in Israel. And I am Empty Nester Esther. Something that occupies my daily thoughts is remembering back half a century to my early twenties. Gemma has told me to write “our story” which I have begun to do. But we both realize that I have to begin by telling my story, ands who I was before she came into my life, with pure u relenting joy. I hope to get enough on paper, or rather the computer, so that I can put you to work as my guiding editor. Happy New Year.