“But I’m dying,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “You can’t abandon someone who’s dying.” “I hear you,” I replied. “And I accept that you’re dying. I’ve been preparing for months to say good-bye to you. But this might be the moment when we have to say our good-byes because I won’t stick around for what you’ve gotten yourself into. If we need to say our good-byes now, then I will tell you right now that I love you more than I have ever loved anyone, and I always will. You are the love of my life, and of all my lives. I wanted to walk all the way to the river with you, but that might not be possible for us anymore because I can’t survive the way you’re living. It’s too costly for me. It’s too degrading to my soul. And if the real Rayya were here, she would totally agree with me on this. You and I both know that it’s true.” |
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| This incredible snippet of dialog is from Elizabeth “Eat, Pray, Love” Gilbert’s new memoir called “All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation,” as excerpted by The Cut in accordance with U.S. legal and Constitutional requirements. Could any human conversation have actually contained the homily rendered in confident, unequivocal quotation marks above? Who can say. But the excerpt alone contains more events than most entire lifetimes—a Ryan Murphy-esque density of events. I feel like I’m somehow still reading it. How, I wondered, could there be any more events left to tell, let alone a whole-ass memoir’s worth of them? Fortunately Jia Tolentino reviewed the book for The New Yorker and confirmed that there are indeed even yet still more events, at least nine lives worth, as if Gilbert is a cat serving concurrent terms. | Gilbert realizes that she has hit rock bottom, that she is a sex-and-love addict—an addict all around, actually. This becomes the organizing principle and revelation of the book: Gilbert’s journey with Rayya is merely an extreme version of a dynamic that “all of us” can relate to, Gilbert tells her readers, because, like addicts, we have all grasped desperately at “relief from the sting of life.” I’m not sure that’s true. |
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| Lol. Jia’s thesis is something like: Elizabeth Gilbert is preternaturally good at being a mess and writing about it. This reminded me of something David Foster Wallace once wrote about tennis,1 but I couldn’t quite remember what. So I dug up the essay I thought it was from, “Tennis, Trigonometry, and Tornadoes,” which is kind of his version of “Eat, Pray, Love,” if you think about it. But don’t think about it because that’s not the right essay, although B.J. Hollars did write a great reminiscence of his own Division III tennis-playing boyhood in Galesburg, Illinois last year for The Millions, which, near the end, also came close to the thing that was in my head: | As for writing, it’s always felt a bit cowardly to me when writers seem content just where they are. To simply stay in their lane, repeat the trick, and forego any attempt at improvement. I know my lane well; I repeat my trick often. But I also know that I don’t want to be there or do that forever. Like in tennis, if writers aspire to perform at a higher level, then we have to cede the safety of our sweet spots. |
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| This, the idea of leaving your safe space to perform at a higher level, reminded me of another point that Jia made, about the “amnesiac perpetual becoming” of the Gilbertian modern celebrity profile: | “And that’s when I realized that the better part of my life had already begun,” [Gilbert] writes. And there it is again: the new revelation, the better life arriving once more. If you’ve read any celebrity profiles about youngish female stars during the past decade or so, you may have noticed that each woman, no matter what, is always stepping into her truth and power—she will also be stepping into her truth and power three years from now, when she promotes her next thing, and she will certainly be stepping into her truth and power five years after that. Every time, the person you’re seeing will really, finally be her. This, too, may reflect Gilbert’s influence on the culture. But the problem with this amnesiac perpetual becoming is more about the medium than the project. Within our real lives, we do have to always become ourselves. We do have to hope, at periodic intervals, that we’ve actually figured something out. We have to both consider what we’ve learned and also, humiliatingly, continue learning. |
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| “More about the medium than the project” is a wildly compact and breezy way to say that all lives only have one beginning and one ending and they’re both exactly the same for everyone, so where you choose to begin and end a story about part of a life says more about storytelling than it does about living. | Nevertheless this still wasn’t the right Wallace piece, which was definitely about professional tennis, not Wallace himself (to the extent anything he wrote wasn’t about Wallace himself, which is not a great extent). I thought it might be the Roger Federer profile he wrote for The New York Times, but before I even read that one I got distracted by this 2019 Jeremy Gordon post in The Outline. Remember The Outline??? It wasn’t very good, all in all, but it may have been the last time anyone expressed any real optimism for the web as a medium, and the squiggly link underlines still work. Anyway Gordon observed that the miraculous Federer point that Wallace described in his second paragraph demonstrably did not occur the way Wallace described it. It’s a hell of a shot, but it’s also a pretty natural end to a point Federer was in full control of throughout. |  | Roger Federer Moments -- Backwards and Away DTL Forehand |
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| Gordon speculates: | One can imagine a world-class writer subconsciously choosing to half-imagine an event in describing it, empowered by their brute-force talent and the knowledge that nobody was really going to be able to immediately call him out on it… Such journalistic lenience would be difficult if not impossible to pull off today. |
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| Would it be? I tried saying this out loud: “I wanted to walk all the way to the river with you, but that might not be possible for us anymore because I can’t survive the way you’re living. It’s too costly for me. It’s too degrading to my soul.” I mean, I guess people talk all kind of ways. Life’s rich tapestry! You should try it though, see how it feels to you. | The Federer profile wasn’t it either, but one line was similar to the thing I was looking for. “A top athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke,” wrote Wallace, obviously having never encountered Hunter Thompson’s sportswritingwriting in “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl: No Rest for the Wretched:” | “The precision-jack-hammer attack of the Miami Dolphins stomped the balls off the Washington Redskins today by stomping and hammering with one precise jack-thrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint-precision passes into the flat and numerous hammer-jack stomps around both ends…” |
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| If I were writing about a top athlete I would simply describe their beauty directly? But go off, Dave. I promise this is going somewhere2 but first, for no reason other than that I like it, here’s more from Thompson: | They could almost taste it. The smell was stronger than a ton of rotten mangoes. Their nerves burned like open sores on a dog’s neck. White knuckles. Wild eyes. Strange fluid welled up in their throats, with a taste far sharper than bile. |
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| Incredible stuff. RIP to a real one, gone the way of all flesh (blasted out of a cannon into the skies over Aspen, Colorado by Johnny Depp) too soon. | So, where were we? Right. The bit about describing a top athlete’s beauty finally flipped the last switch in my memory and led me to the piece I had been looking for, which was “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” about how disappointed Wallace was by early 80’s teen tennis phenomenon Tracy Austin’s ghostwritten autobiography. This was originally published in The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1992 under the title “Tracy Austin Serves Up a Bubbly Life Story,” in case you thought misleading titles were something they invented for the internet. | The bit I had been trying to remember was this: | Real indisputable genius is so impossible to define, and true techné so rarely visible (much less televisable), that maybe we automatically expect people who are geniuses as athletes to be geniuses also as speakers and writers, to be articulate, perceptive, truthful, profound. If it's just that we naively expect geniuses-in-motion to be also geniuses-in-reflection, then their failure to be that shouldn't really seem any crueler or more disillusioning than Kant's glass jaw or Eliot's inability to hit the curve. |
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| So is Elizabeth Gilbert ultimately a kind of dual genius in both the techné of being messy and the epistêmê of writing about it so well that her very weird and specific mess became what Jia called “something… like a cultural paradigm?” Or is the epistêmê of personal narrative storytelling actually the techné in the first place, and being messy is just more of a hobby? | Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir comes out on September ninth, and will contain more events than you think it possibly could. | 1 Of course it did. 2 Kind of. |
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