getting to the bottom of the smelly stuff, with words

In Handling the Truth, I write, in part, about smell—why we need to pay attention to it and what happens when our memories trip up against the stuff.

In the November 18 edition of The New Yorker, Jeffrey Eugenides, in a story called "Find the Bad Guy," does such a terrific rendition of smell that I feel the need to quote it here. Sure this is fiction, but the lesson holds: Look how much history and story and sensibility these aromatic sentences lay at the reader's feet:

I remember going into people's houses as a kid and thinking, Can't they smell how they smell? Some houses were worse than others. The Pruitts next door had a greasy, chuck-wagon odor, tolerable enough. The Willots, who ran that fencing academy in their rec room, smelled like skunk cabbage. You could never mention the smells to your friends, because they were part of it, too. Was it hygiene? Or was it, you know, glandular, and the way each family smelled had to do with bodily functions deep inside their bodies? The whole thing sort of turned your stomach, the more you thought about it.

Now I live in an old house that probably smells funny to outsiders.

I am inclined, reading this, to scissor out space in my day to stop and remember the smells of the houses I once knew.

I wonder what you'd remember, if you scissored out some smell-hunting mind space, too.

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On Writing a Novel for Adults

There are few things more gratifying than successful literary novelists. I myself can't get enough of their stories, their confessions.

It is a lovely thing, therefore, to watch Jeffrey Eugenides in conversation with Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times—to hear what this multi-platinum author of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex has to say about the work that he has done over the years and the city, Detroit, that has fueled his imagination.

I was intrigued, especially, by the way Eugenides has determinedly evolved his own work—moving, as he says, from a "preoccupation with language" (The Virgin Suicides) toward a focus on plotting (Middlesex) toward what he describes as an emphasis on deeper characterization and psychological portraiture—the "deepening realism" that marks his current work. I loved his overt commitment not just to changing form, but to raising the stakes.

At the moment I am deeply engaged in the early research and writing of a novel for adults. It's not as if I have not tried to write novels for adults in the past; I have written many that have failed. I wasn't ready. I needed to take the cross-wise steps that years spent writing memoir, poetry, history, fable, criticism, and young adult novels ultimately yielded. To learn to trust language, in memoir. To learn to break it apart, in poetry. To pursue the almost impossible detail through historical research. To tell a story through YA novels. To bend a story, through fable. To sustain a certain vulnerability through the blog. Having never taken a writing course (as an adult, I attended three summer workshops), I have had to teach myself to write, and the road that I've traveled has often stumped out, looped back, and confused.

But it has also brought me here. It has given me both foundation and framework. Tools with which to work against an idea I can't quite yet contain.

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