Bachwords and Forwards
Between Fact and Fiction
It begins by falling in love with a name in a history book. Then comes the search for the details behind the name, then the gradual work to rebuild the world around it. Soon the name grows into a Person, someone I know but can never meet.
I chased my latest name (Margaret) to an archive in London. There were her letters—God, her handwriting!—and the first one, dated 1925, was to her friend Caroline and “completely private.”
Saying Yes to Snails
Last weekend, my younger sister and I were sitting up late having a wonderfully sisterly conversation. It was one of those conversations that could have come right out of a Jane Austen novel, if you took away a few hundred years and added several candles.
It was slightly less romantic in other ways too: Iit was past midnight, and neither of us had slept much during the week before. I was lying on the couch, eyes closed, listening to her wrap up her story with a question: “Like, you know those things that are really hard to say, but you just have to say them?”
Scene Change, Regent’s Park
It was sunny, it was warm, and May was lazily giving way to June when I opened my copy of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” in Regent’s Park.
I can’t always remember the places I read books, but I remember this because I was there in the park right along with the characters: calling Peter Walsh and Lucrezia and Septimus Warren Smith into being beside me—albeit with 90 years and a gold-rimmed page between us. And when the summer sun shone over London through Virginia Woolf’s prose, it burned my skin.