on the first day of the year, i drove down pacific coast highway and merged onto the 5 north. i crossed three lanes while listening to a song i hadn't heard in years. i was barefoot, wearing a bathing suit, and thinking about a burrito.
christmas, a new year, and my birthday follow each other in close succession—a week between each date. every year around this time i feel as though i question myself more. i wonder if i like myself, if i feel accomplished, what a new year might mean depending on the answers to those questions. in recent months i've developed a complex about being alone. wildly vacillating between the unique sadness of not having someone to care for and the freedom that comes with only having to make decisions that affect one person—myself.
over the course of the year, i've caught myself feeling grateful for this loneliness; a solitude that gnaws. it's what has led to aimless drives, spur of the moment trips, elaborate meals for one—an all-around sweet kind of selfishness. it's easy to romanticize sharing a life with someone when you can deftly crop the dirty dishes, arguments, and banal miscalculations out of the image.
on the freeway i caught sight of a 1969 yellow corvette stingray—the car joan didion drove when she lived in malibu and passed onto maria wyeth, the protagonist in her novel play it as it lays. two or three times a year i'll spot one and it always feels like a good omen, so much so that i'll usually trail the car for a few miles.
there's a transcript of an interview between hari kunzru and joan didion that i recently read and it floats in my mind. in their conversation, which happened in 2011 after didion published blue nights, they speak about the corvette and its connection to sixties and seventies los angeles; the contextual role it played in joan's life.
here's an excerpt:
HK: do you still feel connected to that woman? the woman who drove along the coast road to malibu in a yellow corvette sting ray?
JD: no. at some point in the past year i think i twigged to the fact that i was no longer the woman in the yellow corvette. very recently. it wasn’t five years ago.
HK: when you said you ‘twigged to that’, was that a moving on, a sense of loss –
JD: actually, when john died, for the first time i thought – for the first time i realized how old i was, because i’d always thought of myself – when john was alive i saw myself through his eyes and he saw me as how old i was when we got married – and so when he died i kind of looked at myself in a different way. and this has kept on since then. the yellow corvette. when i gave up the yellow corvette, i literally gave up on it, i turned it in on a volvo station wagon [laughs]
HK: [laughing] that’s quite an extreme maneuver.
JD: the dealer was baffled.
i keep thinking about that first line: do you still feel connected to that woman? the woman who drove along the coast road to malibu in the yellow corvette. i've resorted to taking kunzru's question, twisting it, and applying it to my own life. after decades pass, will i still feel connected to the woman who finds meaning in yellow corvettes on the freeway? will i view myself through someone else's eyes? if i don't, what iteration of myself will feel most true?
it feels strange to be embedded in my late twenties. i thought i would know more, thought i would be more sure. of what, though, who's to say? i tip toe around the answers to the questions i posed earlier: yes, i like myself right now, in this moment. i don’t feel accomplished and would like to figure out what i understand a successful life to be—and whether or not happiness is a given in that equation.
joan didion was 36 when julian wasser took a photo of her leaning against her corvette, a cigarette tilted in her right hand. eve babitz was 20 when wasser photographed her, naked, playing chess with marcel duchamp. it took jenny offill seven years to write department of speculation. my grandmother was 25 when she had her first daughter. my aunt was 35 when she killed herself. my mother was 28 when she got married, my childhood friend was 26.
these are the stars against which i measure the constellation of a new year.
tiny morsels
BOOKS: this was my first book of the year and i just moved on to this collection of essays—i read half of it in the span of six hours. up next is some old joan i haven’t read, some new joan i’m anxiously awaiting, and, eventually, this behemoth—does anyone want to tackle it with me ?
MUSIC: been relistening to a lot of the records i loved throughout the year and specifically during early quarantine. this lifted me up, and this is the song i was talking about in the first paragraph of this email.
MOVIES: watched the new miranda july on nye (another great score by emile mosseri !!) and have otherwise been very into art documentaries—a very twee one ft. mike mills (my favorite director and miranda july’s partner). the new 4k restorations of wong kar wai movies are superb also.
INTERNET: on christmas day i binged the hbo docuseries on this sex cult. read, then watch, then tell me your thoughts !