The moment I finished reading Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be I started searching for Margaux Williamson’s paintings online. The book, which calls itself “A Novel From Life,” tracks Heti’s adventures among the young bohemians of Toronto. It’s self-conscious literary tone and explicit descriptions of her love life have earned the young writer some notoriety, and also comparisons to Lena Dunham. I actually think Heti describes artistic ambition and physical love quite powerfully. But the real subject of the book is female friendship, and how a strong one can sustain one emotionally and intellectually. At the heart of the book is Heti’s relationship with her best friend Margaux Williamson, which is challenged as their identities swerve too close to one another during a trip to Miami, and then recovered when they’re both back home and able to identify the very particular ways each supports and inspires the other.

Heti’s language is light and she describes things by brushing over them. The memoir, though it covers one year chronologically, has a porous quality, as if it’s a mass of memories captured at just that moment before they settle into a proper novel (from life). Williamson’s paintings are, necessarily, concrete. But there’s a similar hovering quality in her hand. There’s also a wonderful dissonance in the way she locates figures wthin space. The people she paints are often at odds, both spatially and dramatically, with their surroundings, as if they’re trapped inside the wrong world. Do Williamson’s paintings illustrate Heti’s book? No, but they give voice to the same kind of searching, unsettled spirit. Expressed so precisely by these two artists, this condition might be a sign of the times.

The Weeds by Margaux Williamson

October 11, 2012 by Nalina Moses

There’s been a fuss about the contents of Karl Knausgård’s memoir, particularly the account of his father’s descent into alcoholism and death. That description centers on the house in small-town Norway where the senior Knaussgård passed his final days, which is, when the writer and his brother arrive, layered in filth, and presided over by his still-happily-imbibing grandmother. The pages describing the storm of soiled laundry, food scraps, and bottles inside are terrifically vivid. The house has already been proclaimed one of the Top 10 Homes in Literature by one newspaper. (While the American paperback features an irrelevant splatter painting, the UK version features a white wood frame house.)

What I found most remarkable about the memoir weren’t the familial revelations (grandmother peeing in her seat) or brutal emotional honesty (apathy towards an about-to-give-birth wife), but the vividness of the physical descriptions. Even in translation (and the imaginative leap from Norwegian into English must be a big one) those passages that simply describe a thing (any thing, really) shine through. Each object is alive, a character that acts importantly on the author’s internal life. When just he, his brother and grandmother are inside the house “the rooms seemed to close around what had happened, as though we were too weak to open them." And after it’s is cleaned out and the windows are thrown open, "the movement of the air inside plus the sunlight falling over the floors and the overpowering smell of detergent on at least the second floor, allowed the house to open up, in a sense, and become a place the world flooded through…" It’s a wonderful way to write about buildings.

August 07, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Rosamond Bernier went to Paris the same way that Isak Dinesen went to Africa, with crazy dreams in her head. Both of these privileged, high-spirited ladies got up and moved far away from home, throwing off conventions that might have held them in check had they just stayed put. And both of them, in between their adventures, wrote. Traveling to Paris after the war to serve as a European cultural editor for Vogue, Bernier fell right in with Picasso, Matisse, Miro and other art stars, started the magazine L’Oiel, and then returned stateside triumphantly, writing art history books and lecturing at the Met.

Today, at ninetey-five, Bernier retains an aura of glamor. She wears couture separates, grooms herself regally, and walks with the assistance of a handsome young escort. She spoke in New York recently to promote her latest book, Some of My Lives: A Scrapbook Memoir. As slides flashed on the screen she offered up gossip about her brilliant friends. Before meeting Picasso, she remembered, her publisher advised, “Whatever you do, don’t wear a hat and don’t ask any questions.” Those words served her well. The great painter made her a confidante and granted her exclusive access to some of his work. Bernier lives life big. When she married her third husband, art critic John Russell, at the Glass House in Darien, Aaron Copland was the best man, Leonard Bernstein was a witness, Richard Avedon was the photographer, and Philip Johnson was in attendance. Looking back at it all and summing it up, she said, “I made terrible mistakes and had a marvelous time.” There has got to be some wisdom in that.

April 06, 2012 by Nalina Moses