Very First Words

It often feels as if I live multiple days within the framework of one. I was writing about global health care for hours in the early part of yesterday, before I scrambled to my former middle school for the exhilarating Operation TBD, then went out with video camera and my Sony in hand to collect footage for book trailers now in progress. An hour of email, then to the high school down the road, where I was teaching a mini-course called "Very First Words." At nine-thirty I was sitting in our favorite neighborhood restaurant, chatting with one my favorite waitresses about a law school choice that she is making, her preparing to leave one life to create another.

Beginnings, then, were very much on my mind—each scene from the day let loose and catalyzed. In the class itself we asked ourselves what beginnings do and decided that, among other things, they extend an invitation, issue a caution, or lay down a bridge; they set the tone, establish a voice, and signal rhythms; they provide clues as to what is at stake; they either announce or suggest a world view. Beginnings can be bombastic or brave, ideological or explicit, dashed into place by an opening salvo of dialogue, or hushed unto themselves.

We read the prologue of Frank Conroy's Stop-Time—that streak through the dark world. We read the jiving Mum says of Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. We stole within the sensory till of Marie Arana's American Chica and the hushed deep night of Patricia Hampl's The Florist's Daughter, which is not the same, at all, as reading the clinical reportage of Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking or the truly (and I do mean truly) non-cinematic opening lines of Steve Lopez's The Soloist.

Then we talked about how a writer gives a piece momentum, and while fiction wasn't on the agenda last night, I had Patrick Somerville's The Cradle with me, and so I read. For look at what Somerville does here—twining disclosure and unexpired exasperation, pairing a short sentence and a long one to rush the reader in, so that there is no choice but next:

Marissa could not be comforted, and wouldn't have it any other way. The cradle for the coming baby had to be the cradle she'd been rocked in as a child; not only the cradle she'd been rocked in but the cradle that was upstairs in her bedroom when she was fifteen and her mother came home one night from the grocery store, slammed her keys down on the countertop, slammed the brown crinkled bag onto the table, looked down at the floor, looked at Marissa, took the keys, and walked out the door, this time permanently.