Every writer I know has memories they return to in their work over and over again. There is rarely much logic to the choices, nor do such memories tend to align with the sorts of significant events that traditionally make up the time line of one’s life. My point of fixation, one that’s appeared a few times in my writing, occurred during a solo cross-country road trip I took at the age of nineteen. I was driving to Seattle, where I knew nobody, and was planning to stop for the night in Billings, Montana. It was already late, and I had been keeping myself awake with a non-stop chain of cigarettes and vending-machine coffee I’d dutifully bought at every rest stop along the way. I had a pile of books on tape on the passenger’s seat. About an hour outside of Billings, I put in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” which, coincidentally, starts out on a road trip to Montana. The first line—“I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning”—had a hypnotic effect on me. I blew through Billings that night, and for the next six hours I listened to Robert M. Pirsig’s barely fictional meditation on fatherhood, Chautauquas, Zen, tools, and the idea that quality—the main conceptual preoccupation of Pirsig’s life—lay in the repetition of right actions.
I am not particularly self-aware, nor do I have much memory for the person I was at the time. So I can’t really explain to you why “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” had such a hold on me. Even back then, I knew that the book was considered a bit gauche—a manual for the type of seekers who plumb out all the parts of Eastern religions that justify their own selfish behavior, who spend their days walking the earth in a fog of patchouli oil and immense self-regard. But I was also captivated by the idea that dharma demanded a sense of conscientious and careful action, whether maintaining a 1966 Honda Super Hawk, shooting free throws, or writing. I was, and I suppose still am, deeply suspicious of the life of the mind, and wanted to believe that enlightenment existed elsewhere.
The Siglio origin story famously begins with founder Lisa Pearson in Prague in the days before with Velvet Revolution being slipped a samizdat copy of exiled novelist Milan Kundera’s incendiary novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Which is to say, in commission of a crime. Because anyone found in possession of the manuscript could be arrested. The novel, a re-typed typewritten translation of a contraband English edition has been mimeographed on cheap paper, so it appears, as Pearson recalls, “as subversive as a thick stack of Communist-era restaurant menus.”
The moment Pearson passed Kundera’s novel-in-disguise to the next person at great risk to her and the next reader, she became a publisher. It’s not surprising that she’d find her calling publishing books whose deeper meaning is revealed in the marriage of the book’s physical form and literary content. Hybrids of art and text that don’t respect boundaries but deal in the frisson created when collage cross-pollinates with fiction, poetry speaks through photographs, graphics accesses emotion the memoir can’t, and paintings remember what history forgets. This unique form of reader engagement is what Siglio books trade in, and it’s what turns readers like me into brazen proselytizers pushing Siglio books into the hands of friends and strangers like a love-drunk publicist.
But when I flipped over my “action” card, I confronted a tableau of despair. My card—the Ten of Swords—depicted a dying man in an arid desert canyon. Swords pierced his side. A muscular black dog growled at his feet. Storm clouds roiled.
“This doesn’t look good,” I said.
“Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean death,” Laura assured me, a little too eagerly. “This card just represents an ending. Like, you’ve tried, you’ve failed. It’s over. Time to give up and move on.” Laura smiled and threw up her hands. “So maybe you’re done with that novel.”
If the growling of my stomach wakes me up at 3 a.m., I go to the 24-hour Japanese diner with my sister, slurping noodles alongside men sobering up after a night of drinking. Or I take a long walk through my bungalow-lined neighborhood with my husband, spotting rabbits in the dew-laden grass. If my strange grief — of leaving home only to come home — starts to feel too big to hold, I sit in the front room of my childhood Chicago home with my father and drink black coffee, watching the sun stretch its fingers through the sycamore trees.
As the birth of our first child approached, my wife asked me to pick a stroller. It took a while: there were so many to choose from, and the decision felt loaded. I wanted our son to be safe. I wanted him to be comfortable. I’d been increasingly preoccupied by the horrors of American car culture, and I wanted to keep walking as much as possible. We lived on the second floor of a walkup, so I wanted something light and easily collapsible—but not fundamentally flimsy. I didn’t want to get duped into spending too much, and I didn’t want to be a stubborn cheapskate. I wanted to identify, from the hundreds of strollers the market was offering us, the right one, proving that, as we became a family, I knew how to identify and satisfy our needs. Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, Babylist: I kept opening new browser tabs, hoping they would add up to one incontrovertible answer.
Over time, I’ve mostly forgotten the details of this search; without looking, I couldn’t tell you the exact model that I picked, even though I use it almost every day. Reading Amanda Parrish Morgan’s “Stroller,” a slim work of memoiristic cultural criticism, sent me back to how stroller shopping felt: my embarrassed sense that I was pinning too much on a damn stroller, and also my inability to stop. For Morgan, strollers aren’t just tools we use, or products we buy; they’re dense symbols, with no single or settled meaning, of our relationships to parenting. They tell us things: about what we want, what we can’t have, what we fear. Some have cup holders, and some of those cup holders work, while some guarantee spillage. You can spend twenty dollars, or three thousand dollars, or anything in between.
Anyone writing a memoir wonders just what they’re up to, pulling together the scattered materials of experience and library work, but few express that struggle with the poetry of Sofia Samatar. She doesn’t merely admit to trouble with structure; she frets that the text is in “magpie condition,” all bits and pieces. Yet “The White Mosque,” out this week, sustains a sturdy and accessible outline. Its present action is a bus tour through Central Asia in 2016, following a pilgrimage most people would consider half-crazy. In the 1880s a wagon train of Dutch-German Mennonites, burning with millenarian fever, set out to meet Jesus on far side of the Caucasus.