Reading 1001 discussion

***

In summary, the unnamed female narrator of this novel is trying to write a novel about her memories from an affair she has had with a young man who was probably 10 years younger than her; it is not entirely clear when and how the relationship ended, as he ghosted her on several occasions and she kept trying to keep track of him. At the beginning, the novel was quite (deliberately) confusing, as the author tried to put some order in her memories. It almost felt like one of the Nouveau Roman novels. However, the story gets gradually clearer as she writes longer passages about it. The writing of the novel is meant to be the end of that story, so this is a novel about grief to some extent. I nearly gave up a third of the way through, but it improves as it goes on.

In reading this modern novel that is both about the end of an affair and also about writing a novel capturing the end of that affair, I went through a number of waves. At first one is only convinced that our narrator is very unreliable and as the novel progresses I began to admire some of the discipline necessary to write about an affair with no sentimental emotions getting in the way. We don't learn much about him, he is much younger, still going to school, works at a gas station and is capable of loving women for who they are regardless of age. He is sometimes angry and sometimes loving. Sometimes silent, sometimes talkative. However, that really is about it. We learn more about our narrator simply because in writing about the affair we see her cruelty, her egocentric fixations, her obsessions and her pain although she does not express this pain, only notes that it is there. We learn about the mechanics of the affair rather than the motivations. She notes how many parties they went to, how long the phone calls were, when exactly he said this, or she said that. The narrator comes to the point that she realizes her love of this man was more about loving that part of him that was loving her and missing him is missing a part of herself and the dry husk of who she thought he was. The narrator wants the novel to be "correct" but she is unable to understand exactly what that means. She purposefully leaves out emotions, intimate details and feelings, which means she leaves out that correctness and yet the novel is nothing but the pain of loss.
The novel is a bit like a modern painting, building up layers of brush strokes, scrapping off those layers, building, covering and occasionally revealing.
In the end I liked "the novel" although not the characters.

I thought I would like this based on the description and reviews. A lot of people find it quite funny. I found it tedious for the most part. You know how a friend going through a breakup will not talk about anything but the breakup and you’re sick of hearing about it? That’s this book.

⭐⭐
---

“I often chose to do the wrong thing and feel bad about it rather than to do the right thing, if the wrong thing was what I wanted.”

Reason read: both August 2025. This book was written by American author Lydia Davis and was published 1995 and is about the end of a love affair. But it is more about writing about the end of a love affair. Because memory is unreliable as is the narrator of a novel often unreliable. Obsession is a huge part of the narrators problem and she is most annoying with her behaviors. She does not paint a pretty picture about this woman and this love affair. She is obsessed and self centered. It is about the unreliability of memory and truth. Throughout the book the author tells the reader about “her” process of writing. I did not find the book hard to read but yet I found myself rereading paragraphs when my mind would drift. I am thankful that it was relatively short.

Some quotes:
"The Last time I saw him, though I did not know it would be the last."

"...as thought the road itself, running like a river through this place of private properties, carried on its back the life of the outside world..."

"The breath of the eucalyptus would be heavy on the air it coated my open lips."

"my memories are quite often false, confused, abbreviated, or collapsed into one another."

"... highway with yellow lights moving down and red lights up..." "I could see far up the train tracks a train coming south". "...no matter how clearly I saw what I was doing; I would go on."

"I'm shifting the truth. There are things I like to remember and others I do not like to remember."

The book is all about how to "end the story". (which I do think is a struggle for many authors as well as people in relationships).

Is this book worth reading? What do you think?

Lost love and self-pitying, obsessive jerks about love are common enough, but the structure here is so interesting. We have a novel about writing a novel - its not even clear that the parts which we are reading that directly detail the relationship are going to make it into the finished "novel" or just represent fragments that she is collecting in her various boxes as perhaps ready to be used. This very beautifully captures the shifting and insubstantial nature of memory and how we craft narrative for ourselves. This ties in with the title, with starting with the closing scene, that all narrative is ultimately self-serving in that it creates linearity and cadence and meaning out of events that may not have them. And also I like Patrick's observation that the writing of the novel itself is a way of ending the story for herself even though that isn't working.

It also lets us in on how much of an unreliable narrator she is because we can see how much more of a self-centered jerk she is when thinking about writing about the relationship than when actually purporting to give us sections of the story. My unease in having to be in her company through most of this had to do with how much of a stalker she is, and then the growing understanding of how much of a jerk she was to him as it was going along.

I was also a bit disconcerted at the beginning because she is deliberately not giving us the names of location and yet is so specific with the details that I knew it was the City Lights Bookstore in SF. And she sticks so closely with things a reader would know about her own details, like translating that it is hard not to feel like you are reading memoir. But I think that is a feint, since the partners name is different for example, just another choice to blur the lines of memory and story telling.

There were things I loved about this book and things I didn't exactly hate but found tedious, which is just as bad in a reading experience.

I found the repetition tedious, and the self-absorption and behaviour of the main character.

Things I loved included how insightful it is, especially about not valuing a person/relationship until they are gone, on the lines of Big Yellow Taxi. In fact the whole book had a 1960s Joni Mitchell vibe for me, despite being written in the 1990s. I'm not surprised to see the author was born in 1947.