About a week before we all started working from home, I developed a mysterious back pain. I was in the middle of reading The Anatomy Lesson, by Philip Roth, and it felt all too perfect. I won’t bore you with a long recap — a joy for the writer to write but for no one to read — but it’s about a writer with chronic, unexplained pain who cannot write. Is the pain psychological? Is it guilt for his parents’ deaths turned inward to attack his own body? Possibly. On March 4, I even tweeted about it: “I’m reading a book about mysterious back pain (The Anatomy Lesson) and now I have acquired mysterious back pain. Better finish the book quick.” Little did I know that Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s protagonist, would have to get a whole lot worse before he got better. Three weeks later, I’d be flat on my back, running a fever of 103.3.
On March 11, I began my quarantine like most people, stuffed to the gills with news and scrambling for insight from writers. It was hard to slow myself down. I was working a lot more than usual (I work in journalism) and, in my spare time, desperately trying to adjust my state of mind to the new conditions. I felt like one of those shrimp injected with goo to augment its size, but instead of goo I was injecting myself with words: notes from a pandemic, blogs from a pandemic, dispatches from a pandemic, and pandemic journals.
Of course, there is longing. The sight of famous destinations, absent crowds and traffic, evoke a Sartre-like ideal — travel, without the hell of other people — that only accentuates their enticement. But alongside this desire, for me at least, there is also melancholy, for it is impossible to witness the serenity of the paused planet without feeling a tinge of regret for what travel has become. In the same way that some of us have found a misanthropic thrill in apocryphal tales of dolphins swimming up a Venice canal, or satellite images of pollution dissipating over China, the coronavirus shutdowns have reinforced an uncomfortable truth: The way we engage with the wider world has needed to change for a long time.
What then to do with Susan Burton’s “Empty”? Burton’s memoir tells the story of her early struggles with anorexia and binge eating. The book, from beginning to end, is a document of anger. There’s quiet fury at its center — a nuclear sun that radiates not out at the world, but back at the author herself. This is decidedly not the work of someone who’s worked through all her issues, as the jargon goes.
And yet: The author’s anger gives the book its considerable power, its substantial grace and even, in the end, its meaning — which goes against every received idea of what good memoir is, and how it ought it to function.
Lisa Woollett grew up on the Isle of Sheppey, at the mouth of the Thames. As a child she became fascinated by what the estuary had swallowed and what it coughed up; she searched the shingle below her parents’ house for fossils and shark’s teeth. In her 40 or more years of beachcombing and mudlarking since, she has been more likely to retrieve and hoard manmade flotsam, clay pipes and bits of pots; cereal-box toys and toothbrushes. She sifts and sorts them, and sometimes fashions them into starbursts of colour, or boxes them in old typesetters’ cases, like exhibits in a museum of curiosities.
In some ways, as this absorbing memoir of shoreline collecting reveals, Woollett was born to this obsession. Her grandfather was a dustman, and back beyond that there were, among the Tolladays on her mother’s side, generations of scavengers, the lowest of the low of London’s raucous street life, scrounging for everything that was not chucked into the Thames, and selling it on.
The day of his visit came
slowly and hot-foot.
I went to buy plums in the market,
all I could see ahead of me,
the night, dressed in music,
and the feast.
The miles-deep Greenland glacier’s lost its grip,
sliding nine miles a year towards the sea
wood veins on ivory sky,
back-lit by moon,
up-lit by snow.