RaveBrevityYour essays span such a wide range of time, and yet you did the most brilliant thing: rather than smoothing them out to make them all \'contemporary,\' you added notes at the end of each to denote when the essay was written and then when you updated it...You leave the essay as it is, a moment in time, and then enter a correspondence with the essay itself ... What is fascinating to me about your book is exactly that: how you handle the oddness of the experience of time itself, what it hides from us and what it reveals ... I think this is what created the mind-blowing yet subtle effect of this collection: the essays are ordered not by \'when stuff happened\' with the childhood stuff first. They are ordered based on when they were written, so that we are tracking your consciousness as it unfolds through time, as it loops backward and returns to previous themes and changes perspectives. The effect, for me, was of a kind of writing intimacy that one feels in reading letters or diaries: there’s a sense of being in the head of the writer as they have a conversation with what they are writing. It’s like turning over a needlepoint to view the back. But then—whereas a needlepoint’s reverse is often a mess of threads—what you do is you make the back of the essay beautiful. You tuck the ends in and connect them ... The loose ends of the essays all curve and dovetail toward a larger design, making something beautiful, and it wasn’t through forcing them to align. It was through exposing the pattern of their making ... What a brilliant and subtle design.
