Meditative, Lyric, Useful: Two New Books on Writing

by rlhartleysmi | Nov 5, 2021 | Book Reviews

By Marcia Meier

Miller, a longtime writing teacher and essayist, examines the lyric essay and several of its forms—the braided essay, the short-short, and the hermit crab——while giving readers insight into her own writing process. Miller is a creative writing professor at Western Washington University and the author of four essay collections as well as two books on writing and publishing. Most of these essays appeared in literary magazines and appear here as one in the Writers on Writing series through the University of Michigan Press. These are beautiful works that explain various essay forms and demonstrate the best of them.

Early in the book, Miller tells the story of her journey to becoming a writer. She wrote a fan letter to a Los Angeles Times journalist as a young girl, quoting Kahlil Gibran and expressing an interest in going to writing school. The journalist’s response, a cruel exhortation not to bother with writing schools because they train “people to write drivel like Kahlil Gibran’s,” discouraged her for many years. Later, she wrote another fan letter to William Styron saying how much she loved his novel, Sophie’s Choice, and that it had affirmed for her that “a writer’s work is necessary and good; that I could now get on with the business of my own writing, no matter how bumbling it might be, no matter how much I might need to practice.” He wrote back and thanked her for writing him. “He did not critique my writing style or make me feel ashamed of my extravagant emotions,” she notes. “He wished me well in my own writing and signed off.”

For years she kept that postcard—an example of how successful writers can give vulnerable young writers confidence. She says she has since read all of Styron’s books and was especially affected by his memoir on depression, Darkness Visible. “His words had given me more than comfort. As someone who has since struggled with her own depression—and with the negotiation of how much to reveal to an anonymous audience—he showed me it’s okay to be honest, to be vulnerable, to be a human being on the page.”

Miller’s point about honesty and vulnerability is reinforced throughout the essays. Her lyric essays—as opposed to those narrative, descriptive, or persuasive—are built out of poetic language, imagery, metaphor, and reflection.

“The lyric essay is quite an ancient form; it’s nothing new,” she writes. She says Seneca, Bacon, Montaigne, and Sei Sh?nagon, who lived in the tenth century, all wrote what we describe today as lyric. “That is, they did not necessarily follow a linear, narrative line.”

She adds: “The lyric essay doesn’t look too long at itself in the mirror. It is not ‘self-reflective,’ in that it does not really reflect the self who scribbles it down. Rather it is the mirror, the silver film reflecting whatever passes its way.”

In her essay “Durable Goods,” Miller takes something as mundane as a pen and turns it into a meditation on the durability of objects and relationships. She rediscovers a small pen fashioned by her ex-husband and given to her in an act of love, and it becomes the frame of an essay on their marriage and its eventual dissolution. Much like the hermit crab’s shell protects its soft underbelly, the hermit crab essay, a form Miller named and popularized, allows the writer to get at deep, often emotional material by using something outside the self: a to-do list, a menu, a how-to article.

Another example: Miller uses the braiding of a loaf of home-made challah to begin a meditation on the braided essay form. She describes how she learned to braid her boyfriend’s daughters’ hair and discusses the process of musical composition, layering and patterning notes into a moving whole. There is “a sense of weaving about it, of interruption and continuation, like the braiding of bread, or of hair,” she says.

In the book’s last section, Miller contemplates how process and form contribute to the essay as well as to the writer’s understanding of what she is trying to say. She also shows how writing with others or using prompts can open us to discovery and reflection.

While Miller’s book is outward-looking, offering instruction to other writers, Chang’s collection, Dear Memory, is deeply introspective. Chang is the author of five books of poetry, including her most recent, Obit, which was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. She has been awarded the PEN/Voelcker Award for poetry and a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts.

Now director of the MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles, Chang writes imagined letters to her grandparents, her now-deceased mother, her debilitated father, her writing teachers, her daughters, and friends—to whom she speaks of her lifelong sense of not belonging, of grief over not knowing her family history, of feeling a starkly dark silence that’s enfolded her entire life. A child of Chinese immigrants, she grew up in America, but knew little of her family’s history and almost nothing of her own parents’ experiences while escaping China in the mid-1960s.

Toward the end of the book, she writes:

Working on these letters and listening to the interviews made me think that grief and memory are related. That memory, trying to remember, is also an act of grieving. In my mother’s case, sometimes forgetting or silence was a way to grieve lost lands and to survive. In my case, trying to know someone else’s memories, even if it’s through imagination and within silence is also a form of grieving.

As I began to write, though, my own memories started to return, and I began to trace in language some of my own painful childhood experiences, which I had always kept hidden. I realized I had to tell my stories in order to reflect on theirs because, while I had always thought our stories were separate, they were actually intimately connected.

Throughout the book, Chang asks questions and offers answers that often aren’t answers at all but, rather, piercing insights. In a letter to one of her writing teachers, she says,

Years later, I wrote you an email telling you that I became a writer because of you, because of your class. I wrote that you probably didn’t remember me. You wrote back saying that you did remember me, that you always knew there was something burning beneath. I didn’t even care if you were lying. You were right. Poets live between a fire and a great fire.

In a letter to her ailing father, she writes: “Father, I am ashamed by how much I yearn. Father, I grieve in acres. This land is a façade for the land I really come from. There are lands behind lands.” And: “When I grieve for Mother, I think I am also grieving for my history. I want to fly perfectly above my history like geese. I want to watch the cities pass as I go from one to another. But all the people have no faces. My eyes are deciduous.” In Dear Memory, the poet in Chang becomes a lyric essayist like Miller.

Miller writes that Styron taught her that “it’s okay to be honest, to be vulnerable, to be a human being on the page.” Chang’s book shows us in eloquent and delicious language what that looks like.

Marcia Meier is a book editor, writing coach, and the author of the award-winning Face: A Memoir, published by Saddle Road Press in January 2021.

The Weight of Grief Goes Round and Round

by rlhartleysmi | Oct 1, 2021 | Book Reviews

By Penny Guisinger

Penny Guisinger is the author of Postcards from Here. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Guernica, Solstice Literary Magazine, and others. Pushcart nominated, a Maine Literary Award winner, and a three-time notable in Best American Essays, she is the director of Iota: Conference of Short Prose and a former assistant editor at Brevity. Penny is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Program.

Noticing as Rebellion, as Resistance

by rlhartleysmi | Sep 10, 2021 | Book Reviews

By Emily Dillon

Dara McAnulty, an environmental activist from Northern Ireland, may not yet be an American household name like his peer Greta Thunberg, but he certainly stands among the most accomplished champions of the environmental movement today. In his new book, Diary of a Young Naturalist, McAnulty, who is seventeen and lives with autism, writes autobiographically about environmental conservation and activism. The diary entries, written during his thirteenth year, ultimately build an impressive collection that reads as reminiscent of McAnulty’s age and far beyond his years. He maintains a childlike wonder in his descriptions of nature while offering mature perceptions of other people that challenge even the most ardent stereotypes of autism.

Take, for example, his description of predatory birds while on the island of Rathlin—“A solitary gannet scythes the sky and its cantering cries synchronize with my heartbeat”—or his investigation into creatures swimming at Bloody Bridge in County Down—“I feel the tickle of goby and blenny as beadlet anemones wave their antennae, scarlet with beads of blue around the inner edge.” In the intimacies of his detail, McAnulty showcases his observational closeness to each species and his aptitude for artistic language.

Perhaps most impressive, though, is his simple description of garden birds: “there are fledglings everywhere, alongside the exhausted, bedraggled adults.” Even with no experience of caregiving, he observes how adult birds dote on their young. And he applies this knowledge to his own parents, who he acknowledges throughout the diary for their work in his family: “I can see the drawn expression of tiredness on Mum’s and Dad’s faces. Mum has been sorting out our school, our educational statements, GCSE choices, furniture removals, and all the while she’s still been teaching Bláthnaid at home.”

Living with autism, McAnulty admits that most people find him “obsessive” or “weird” for his hyper-focused noticing, even though he describes this attention as his way “to sit and process the world, to figure things out and watch other species go about their day.” In fact, most of his poetic gifts, including the intensity of his joy, are often misinterpreted through his peers’ fear of autism or his autistic quirks. For example, he jumps for joy and “wiggles” upon seeing a favorite bird, a far cry from the stoic self-consciousness of other pre-teens; this puts his peers off, and he is bullied for it. In this way, Diary of a Young Naturalist is as much an exploration of self-identity in the face of othering, as it is a witness to the needs of nature.

Formally, Diary of a Young Naturalist is prose, but it reads structurally like a poetic sequence. There is no plot per se and certainly no story arc. Instead, the book begins where it ends—with blackbirds in spring—and returns time and again to the same themes, the same questions, embedded into seasonal details. The bullying he faces as an autistic child, for example, emerges with the dandelions in spring and reappears again with the summer solstice; his doubts about the effectiveness of environmental activism surface in summer, re-emerge in autumn, and circle back in winter. Each reiteration feels like an unspooling, a return to themes as they crest through his imagery. The benefit of this structure is that it compels the reader to see his truths as broader than any individual moment, a necessity for a treatise on environmental catastrophe.

For my own part, I gained a lot from McAnulty’s diary. I read it quite slowly over three months, perhaps because of its poetic structure and perhaps because I was getting married. I found that his voice resurfaced even when I hadn’t read the book for a few days: I looked at the cicadas on the sidewalk, noticing their spindly legs and papery husks; I scooped a spider up in my hands from the bathroom to release it outside, noticing how its legs felt on my palm; I looked up at the trees on my walks and wondered about their names. McAnulty’s noticing was infectious, changing the way I encountered through the world.

And so, I think back to a moment of doubt he offered in a summer entry: “But is this enough? Is noticing an act of resistance, a rebellion?” After reading Diary of a Young Naturalist, I offer McAnulty back this answer: yes, noticing is how we learn to care for the natural world.

Emily Dillon is a writer and educator from Maryland whose creative work ranges from nonfiction to poetry and all the lyrical places in-between. An avid reader, she also publishes book reviews and teaching guides and is currently an assistant editor for Brevity. www.emilydillonwriting.com

We Don’t Know Their Names. But We Know Their Character.

by rlhartleysmi | Aug 13, 2021 | Book Reviews

By Katy Major

David Lazar’s latest collection, The Celeste Holm Syndrome: On Character Actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age, is an artfully attuned set of essays that analyzes the delightful nuances of cinema’s Golden Age and the author’s love of its movies. The book’s slim black rectangle is screen-like, and it sits, dark and strangely velvety in one’s hands—a diminutive, dense piece on an expansive topic, rich with possibility, like the moment before an artist’s vision is revealed. A microcosm and a world. From the cover, too, a gleam: Celeste Holm’s level gaze meeting ours, her lit eyes enigmatic and beckoning as Eckleburg’s eyes from the cover of The Great Gatsby.

Lazar’s subject is divided into an introduction, which presents the book’s premise, and eight essays. His aim is to shed light on the person and persona of the character actor who has long intrigued him in classic movies, he and she consigned to the sidelines, captivating in spite of their subordinate status—or, more accurately, because of it. Lazar assigns heroism not to the iconic lead, who is likely defined by his or her virtuous character, but rather those without their winning good looks, stalwart confidence, or even tempers; those who, nonetheless, pique our interest for what Lazar describes as “the way they expand the human franchise of individuality”; and those who might receive that half-admiring, half-bemused expression, “What a character!”

To clarify, Lazar identifies two types: Character actors who bring “an indelible character with them from film to film . . . registering a familiar set of characteristics with the audience simply, after a time, by appearing.” And the second type, character actors whose “essential personality [is] effaced as they [disappear] into each new role.” Though their performances in secondary roles shape common archetypes, the life that character actors bring to them is unique.

Each essay explores a different facet of character actors and their onscreen personalities. One chapter is devoted to men and women actors in the films of Preston Sturges. Much to the chagrin of Paramount executives, Sturges loved to reuse many of the same actors: William Demarest, Esther Hoaward, and Alan Bridge. The chapter “My Two Oscars” lands on Wilde and Levant, the latter a blend of deep melancholia and masterful wit, known also for his role in the pivotal film An American in Paris (1951). “Double Take” explores the unconscious implications of those constantly bewildered, quizzical characters who “stand in for our sense of the world’s cracks and fissures,” like Groucho Marx, Edward Everett Horton, and, notably in this chapter, Jack Carson of Mildred Pierce (1945) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958).

Through these essays and others, Lazar establishes a set of secondary character archetypes such as the parodic “meddling English valet” portrayed by Eric Blore in Top Hat (1935) or the alluring and disapproving mother played by Thelma Ritter in Birdman of Alcatraz (1962). These are shorthand, fascinating representations of people we recognize, rooted in historical reality. Like icons themselves, there’s Jane Darwell’s portrayal of a long-suffering Depression-era mother or Celeste Holm’s of the rejected “mature” romantic interest in a sexist, youth-obsessed culture.

This is no straightforward Cinema Studies text. Each piece is enriched by personal reflection and a memoir-like interrogation of the author’s early life. The Celeste Holm Syndrome is a welcome addition to David Lazar’s notable previous collections that feature relationships with his parents, with desire and rejection, and with loss. Two essays in The Celeste Holm Syndrome are devoted to the relationships between Lazar’s parents and the themes of cinema and performance, one of many ways this book echoes Lazar’s first essay collection, The Body of Brooklyn, my personal favorite. That 2003 memoir explores matters of the physical body, Jewish identity, and Lazar’s upbringing in post-World War II New York City.

Both of Lazar’s parents are strongly tied to his fixation on classic cinema; indeed, they first introduce him to movies, which occurs sentimentally, suggestively, in his parents’ bedroom. His mother, Rhoda, was a fervent cinephile, often accompanying him to the movie theater. Leo, Lazar’s father, more intriguingly, occupies the role of the family’s designated “actor” who pretends to be a travel agent in order to procure coveted plane tickets and reservations with his put-on alter ego, “John Waterman.” (Lazar’s self-interrogation is evident in one essay from The Body of Brooklyn, “My Little Heroes,” which reappears here in a revised form as “My Family Romance: Edward Everett Horton and Jessie Royce Landis.”)

What Lazar brings to The Celeste Holm Syndrome are fresh conclusions borne of an intimate marriage between Golden Age cinema, from the 1910s through the 1960s, and his ever-present self-examination. For instance, Lazar speculates on the quality of his mother’s now-forgotten, longed-for voice based on the voice of Thelma Ritter he can still hear:

Ritter speaks with a strong New York accent; it’s crucial to everything she plays because she never loses it. In this she’s a perfect surrogate for me: my mother, too, had a strong New York accent, more specifically Brooklyn, but we could never figure out how she got it. She was born and lived in Lakewood, New Jersey, for her early years, and moved to Brooklyn when she was a teenager, when most accents are already fully formed. Perhaps she was especially susceptible, wanted to fit in with the city girls around her in the early 1940s? Certainly my grandparents’ heavily accented Russian-Ukrainian wasn’t an influence, cast her own accent into a kind of free float. Did she, I  wonder, go to see Miracle on 34^th Street [with Thelma Ritter] when it came out, in 1947?

This passage also exemplifies Lazar’s tone, which modulates in mood from melancholic to rapturous, though it remains conversational, interrogatory, dogged, transparent. This voice I find compelling as it works in separate registers. Lazar thinks nothing of dropping “hermeneutics” into a seemingly casual reflection (such is the way of the essayist—readers have no choice but to strap in, no matter how dizzying the ride). However, the collection never feels inaccessible in the way that Film Studies texts often do. You don’t need any sort of working set of terminology, for Lazar defines it all—with an originality that will intrigue even the seasoned cinephile.

For instance, most of us know what “comedy” is, but we may not consider that “[c]omedy helps us to face taboo, the unspeakable, the repressed, the heartbreakingly irresolvable,” as Lazar writes in “Comedy and Pain: Eric Blore, with a Side of Franklin Pangborn.” The Celeste Holm Syndrome is a reading experience that frequently feels like a phone talk with one’s brightest friend; Lazar is wont to interrupt himself with innocent questions to the reader—revealing Nina Foch’s surprisingly young age playing the mother of an adult in An American in Paris, he stops to query: “Aren’t you surprised? (I was)”—adding reassuringly conversational moments to an intellectually demanding discussion.

Still, Lazar expects not a little from the reader. On the contrary, the essays in The Celeste Holm Syndrome call on us to follow not just encyclopedic references to key players in and works of Golden Age cinema but also casual allusions to Michel de Montaigne and Charles Lamb. These nods to what Lazar must see as essential cultural knowledge texture his writing; due to them, the book’s meticulously close look at specific nuances in film history manages to be multifaceted, ranging. This passage from “Ma: Five Movie Mothers with a Coda on Hitchcock,” a piece dazzling in its scope as it examines gender, history, sexuality, and Jewish identity, interspersed with Lazar revisiting the relationship with his mother. The essay vividly demonstrates the variety packed within this collection’s prose:

In the midst of all of [the fighting between Lazar and his father], my mother would—not unlike Elizabeth Wilson in Little Murders, or my friends’ mothers, like Edith Bunker or the Virgin Mary—try to intercede, calm things down, serve meatloaf and the occasional piety or calming cliché. “So much tension. Rush, rush, rush. My mother taught me to take dainty little steps,” Wilson says in the middle of one stormy episode between father, daughter, and son. Jules Feiffer, at his best in Little Murders, where each scene is like an animated version of his brilliant cartoons that I grew up reading in Village Voice, manages to push the characters further, to somewhere between Pirandello, Chekhov, and I Love Lucy.

“Ma” is a masterpiece of diversity unto itself. The piece moves from Lazar stating his desire to understand his attachment to maternal archetypes, to his identity as a Jewish boy growing up in Brooklyn during the years following the Holocaust, to his mother’s characteristic Jewishness, and to her connection to one of the chapter’s key character actors, Thelma Ritter.

Through his interpretations of performances by Ritter, and four other actresses covered in the essay (Anne Revere, Elizabeth Wilson, Jane Darwell, and Margaret Wycherly), Lazar constructs a contrastive remembrance of his mother. Using Ritter and others, he imagines possibilities for a future mother-son relationship that might have unfolded in Lazar’s adulthood had his mother lived. Their closeness—which, as Lazar writes here and has written elsewhere, was both a welcome source of reassurance and a smothering presence during early adolescence—is projected in some of the more storied, complex onscreen relationships between mother and son. These include Ritter’s portrayal of Robert Stroud’s overwhelmingly omnipotent mother, Elizabeth, in Birdman of Alcatraz, who punishes his interest in another woman by contributing psychologically and abusively to his lifelong imprisonment for murder.

In this line—characteristically allusion-drenched, characteristically dripping with detail—Lazar hits on what excites me most about his latest work: the possibilities it opens for the essayist. The stylistic wealth of each essay weighs heavy in this collection as he expands into rhapsodic long-form prose in some pieces (my favorites among in the collection, “Ma” included) and impressively collapses a world of observation into a few pages in others. My hope—and Lazar’s, I’d wager—is that essayists allow themselves to be inspired by his example, and plumb their favorite works of art, old or new, high- or low-brow, for meaning. Even one conclusion of similar depth to Lazar’s many would make this undertaking worthwhile for any writer.

Katy Major is a writer and writing instructor in northeast Ohio. Her work has appeared in Adelaide, Alyss: A literary zine for dangerous women, and other publications that do not resemble women’s names. In 2017, she earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Ashland University, where she now teaches.

Big Ideas in Bite-Sized Essays

by rlhartleysmi | Jul 2, 2021 | Book Reviews

By Rebekah Hoffer

Jason Schwartzman’s first book, No One You Know, contains sixty-two essays—many of them just a few paragraphs long—in a concise 155 pages. Each tiny essay in this fragmented collection illustrates a brief, memorable interaction with a stranger, creating the effect of a photo collage. Settings and characters pass by rapidly. We are invited to eavesdrop on Schwartzman’s meandering examinations of the world, gleaning small epiphanies as he interacts with strangers. Three consecutive essays, for instance, feature a struggling actress on a long bus ride, a scientist giving a presentation about whales, and a pickup basketball game with nameless men. Most of the people in this book, in fact, are nameless. The author refers to them instead by how he knows them: “the boogeyman of our building,” “someone I bumped into on the street,” or “a Chinese man on the phone.”

Since these interactions and the resulting essays are so short, characters are presented as caricature, their identity distilled into one conversation, one action, one feature—and then, more often than not, we don’t see them again. For most of No One You Know, as the title suggests, anonymity is the norm. There are a few exceptions to this: one recurring character, for example, is Schwartzman’s ex-girlfriend, “L.” In the essay where L. is first introduced, the casual voice and unexpected moments of emotion that pervade this book are clearly displayed.

L. and I are there to learn, but mostly we stand on ladders, stuffing insulation recycled from jeans. Blue dust slips past our surgical masks. It clings to our throats. One day soon, I’m sure, she will remove my picture from her wallet. We are still transitioning out of our intimacy. There is so much dust I can barely see. Not her constellation of freckles, not her ink-colored eyes.

We get to know L. a little better over the course of the book, but she remains more of a silhouette than a detailed portrait, condensed into a few sparse moments. The only character who’s given enough time on the page to develop is the narrator himself. The Jason Schwartzman who emerges in these sundry scenes is a keen reporter, a scrappy not-quite-starving artist trying to make a name for himself, and a gentle, sometimes anxious soul. He is also endearingly awkward—in one scene, he politely turns down cocaine while clutching a bag of four-leaf clovers he just picked; in another, he almost confronts a man who offended his family, but then holds the elevator door for him instead.

Another aspect of the narrator’s personality is his strong desire to be less anxious and awkward. “My preferred self-image,” he writes, “comes from the stapled and long-faded pages of my old summer camp sports newspaper, where someone once characterized me as ‘a fiery guard with a mean streak.’” Perhaps this is why we see so many scenes involving basketball. Schwartzman writes with pride about continuing to play after an injury in one essay; in another, he makes a snappy remark to a player who was whining. Glimpses of that preferred self-image.

Fieriness aside, pickup basketball is a source of interesting strangers, such as the title character in “Magical Dave,” and brief connections, such as Schwartzman describes here:

We are playing three on one and he is by far the best. It seems like he never misses. He raises the ball up slowly into his stance, shoots, swish every time. He is a beautiful machine, a magic trebuchet of basketball. . . . Guy never says a word, but we win every game. It’s something I like about pickup—the instant chemistry you sometimes develop with strangers—learning each other through playing.

These little nuggets of insight are the hallmark of this book. In some essays, it’s fun to puzzle out what the message is. In others, the message is plainly stated, which I find exasperating, especially when the last sentence reveals the moral of the story. Schwartzman toes the line between profound and cheesy and sometimes ends up on the wrong side. One essay, for example, ends like this: “’I feel like I lost the last part of my mom today,’ she tells him. ‘No,’ the repairman says. ‘You’re the last part of your mom.’” Such sentences feel too obvious in their supposed wisdom, bordering on triteness.

As I got further into the book, I began to struggle with finding a through line. Such fragmented  and ever-shifting essays make it hard to find a clear sequence of cause and effect between scenes. The overarching themes of identity and perception are easy enough to see, but what about plot? The narrator goes on dates with different people, works different jobs, and lives in different cities, but doesn’t seem to be striving toward any goal. If pressed, I might say that this is the story of the narrator and his ex-girlfriend growing apart. However, she appears so infrequently that I wouldn’t argue that with certainty. The thing that develops most consistently is the reader’s acquaintance with the narrator—a pleasant enough progression, growing familiar with his voice and personality—but not exactly a compelling narrative.

There are inherent limitations to the format Schwartzman’s working with. The vast majority of stranger interactions are brief, boring, and not worth writing about; the ones that are truly essay-worthy are far and few between. Most of my favorite essays ended up being the longer ones: in “The Man on the Street,” Schwartzman walks and talks with a homeless man for an afternoon, learning about his day-to-day life, and, in the book’s longest essay, “The Man Who Has Everything,” we realize along with Schwartzman just how often a casino-loving DJ tells lies. Schwartzman has managed to come up with enough really unusual moments like these to use as the foundation of No One You Know, but the sum total feels like he’s forced himself to stretch in places. The essay about his little brother’s childhood nicknames comes to mind.

My biggest complaint is the lack of chronology. Scrutinizing the table of contents feels a bit like searching for a pattern in an abstract painting. The book is divided into ten sections; odd-numbered sections contain only one essay, while even-numbered sections contain between six and fifteen essays, the first of which is a short, transcribed conversation with no original words added by Schwartzman. I tried to parse out the connections between the title of each section and the essays it contained or to deduce a system of organization, but I had to squint to find any.

Collage-like, Schwartzman bounces around between childhood and adulthood and between different places, rarely providing temporal clues or a pattern of progression. I mentioned earlier that I appreciated being allowed to find my own meaning in individual essays, but on a macro scale, I would have appreciated more guidance.

This book may have been improved by greater coherence and a more obvious climax, but despite the weak organization, No One You Know is sweet and thought-provoking, and, as others have noted, it’s a good book to pick up during a lonely time of your life. I enjoyed how closely Schwartzman paid attention, how he found significance in insignificant moments. The bite-sized essays in this collection are individually intriguing, if largely random. All told, I think the book achieves what it set out to do: I imagined myself in a lot of strangers’ shoes, I was struck by conversations that didn’t go as I expected, and I came away with new ideas about how and why we interact with people we don’t know.

Rebekah Hoffer lives in Indianapolis, Indiana with three of her dearest friends and the world’s most perfect cat, which, as far as anyone can tell, has a single stale piece of candy corn rattling around in its head where a brain should be. Rebekah’s work has been published in The Broken Plate, Dive In Magazine, Ball Bearings Magazine, and elsewhere. She earned her Bachelor’s in English from Ball State University in 2021.