I came across this author as she is one of the many quoted in Kerri Ni Dochartaigh’s Cacophony of Bone and it fits with that book, in that it is a kind of journal presented as short essays or fragments on writing, of thoughts that occur while reading other writers’ works.

The chapters have no headings but the book has a contents page that displays from five up to nine words of the first sentence of that fragment/chapter/essay. So the first one begins:

Without planning it, I wrote a diary of sorts…

Through a Window of Words, I See

A number of them begin with referencing the work of an author/artist whose sentences or themes or art provoke her reflections, in particular Elena Ferrante, Annie Ernaux, Marguerite Duras, Rachel Cusk, Marie NDiaye. In contemplating Ernaux’s The Possession, she wonders what it is she loved exactly, alighting on its urgency, the way the narrator is taken over by something – an aspect that is often present in Ferrante’s novels.

In The Lost Daughter, when Leda goes alone…

One she refers to often The Lost Daughter, the story of a woman whose daughters are absent for the summer, she takes a holiday, not thinking of her daughters,

Introspection, Projection, Finding Direction

This leads into Cain’s contemplation of the way humans project on to other things (like the sea) and people and how the act of writing encourages this. She asks why we project at all and delves into that occupation of mind with scalpel-like precision.

She reads the diaries of Virgina Woolf, which cause her to recall 30 years of diaries of an Aunt, one entry telling her that she ‘began to keep a diary because she saw that life had mystical qualities.’

Writing about authenticity gives rise to reflections on Jean Gent’s play, The Maids and Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite and the effect of maintaining roles, when mixed classes live under the same roof.

To have to maintain those class roles always, especially if they are enforced with any kind of degradation, is a violation of the sacredness of one’s life, and a violence all of its own.

The Feline Interruptor

Much of it was written during the pandemic, a period that encouraged introspection and in which humans didn’t always have other humans for company, after reflecting on solitude and the need for human connection and company, other creatures gain notoriety eliciting a chapter that begins:

As I write this my cat Trout whines loudly

It makes me wonder what phrase from this book Kerri Ni Dochartaigh made it into her own; I admit I didn’t have quite the same response on finishing it.

“Astounding…I was distraught when I finished.”

I found it more of an intriguing insight into the varied way writers analyse and respond to each other’s work. I related more to Aysegül Savas‘s blurb.

“Like light from a candle in the evening; intimate, pleasurable, and full of wonder.”

Rather than look at plot, character, dialogue or conflict, these reflections she describes as paying attention to the ‘accessories’, like animals, phrases that create a feeling of relaxation, pondering friendship, or the self. Even plants.

It’s something like finding meaning in other works, that intersects with where the reader/writer is on their own journey, whether that is life or a fictional landscape they are trying to create, looking for lessons that might lie between the lines of others who have gone before, whose words have elicited a response in that reader.

And we, the reader of this book, look through the window of another reader looking through the window of a writer looking at the world.

Author, Amina Cain

Amina Memory Cain is the author of the novel Indelicacy, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and staff pick at the Paris Review, finalist for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Centre for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize.

She is also the author of two collections of short stories. Her writing has appeared in Granta, the Paris Review Daily and other places.

She lives in Los Angeles with her husband.