looking back: an art

I’m at my desk, working on a presentation for my forthcoming book. I’ll be introducing it to book reps in February and I’m thinking of the best way to describe it. It’s interesting to take a step back to regard it as objectively as I’m able to. Interesting–and difficult. I realize how complicated its story, how intricate its pattern, so much of which evolved in the writing, almost without me noticing. This is the way it happens sometimes. You open the woven bag of memories, you select a thread tied to, well, every other thread, and you follow them to see where they go.

In the process of writing The Art of Looking Back: A painter, an obsession, and reclaiming the gaze, I spent so much with my younger self. Myself at 23. Old letters, photographs, my journals, but mostly the portrait of myself hanging at the foot of the stairs leading up to my bedroom. That’s a detail of the portrait on the cover of my book. You can see from her eyes that she has something she wants to talk about, something serious. And so I do talk to her, in my book, as well as most days here in my quiet house on the edge of the western world.

During the worst part of the relationship I detail in my book, I simply left. I’d been planning to all along, I had a ticket to fly to London, and then a plan to take the train to Holyhead in Wales, and then the ferry across the Irish Sea. I had a plan to live in a cottage near Foxford in County Mayo although that plan had to be changed and I went instead to an island off the Connemara coast. It was a remarkable time in my life, I know that now, though at the time it felt, well, normal. Inevitable. I made simple meals, read in the evenings by candlelight (there was no electricity on the island), and wrote pages and pages in my journal. I was as close to knowing myself as I’ve ever been.

And all the while the painter sent regular letters, manic, loving, and, well, obsessive. I write about these things in my book.

So now as I try to describe the book in a way that might make it compelling to readers, I am listening to Richard Thompson. Somehow he has the words for how I feel about that young woman, though it wouldn’t be useful to a book rep, I don’t think. Or anyone else.

In the old cold embers of the year
When joy and comfort disappear
I search around to find her
I’m a hundred miles behind her
The open road whispered in her ear

Note: the lines are from Richard Thompson’s song “She Never Could Resist a Winding Road”. I couldn’t then either.