i picked this up in the travel section at the library solely because of the title, and then checked it out after it passed the barebones scrutiny of its dustjacket by having a plug from steve martin and another from someone i have never heard of who said:

What is the proper way to describe Geoff Dyer? Not deeply companionable, not viciously funny, not shockingly original, not effortlessly hip, not naively romantic, not wryly analytic, not endearingly foolish, not engagingly clever, but, perhaps, some as-yet-uninvented phrase which implies all these things at once.

that kind of review kind of makes me snort my nose but it also succeeds at making me curious, and curiosity was enough for it to pass muster for the hodgepodge of working traveler/woman traveler/solo traveler inspirational manifestos that i was accumulating. i will not read them all before i leave town. in fact, there’s a chance that this will be the only one i get through, apart from work your way around the world, which isn’t really a book one reads so much as a book one refers to when needed. it is awesome in a different way, and i will probably buy it to take it with me.

but that’s another story.

this book, as it turns out, is about traveling, drugs, writing, and the search for happiness and a sense of purpose (not necessarily in that order).

it was a good thing for me to read write now [editor’s note: i’m going to leave that typo in, because it is amusing to me].

it has also (in what feels like a somewhat bizarre coincidence, since i had no idea that it would even be mentioned, but i have been thinking about it more and more lately) steeled my intention to make it to burning man in the near future. this year is probably out, since i will still be in europe in september if the work plan takes hold even for a little while, so that means 2007 – black rock city, nevada.

i’ll add it to the DA list.

and just as a note so that you don’t think it was an accident, i filed this as both fiction and non-fiction on purpose. it is one of those kind of short story books, where the stories are real, but not necessarily strictly true, and this was my way of respecting that. if you don’t know what i mean, you should read how to tell a true war story, by tim o’brien, which is in the excellent collection entitled the things they carried, which, if you’re keeping score, is probably one of the books that would make my top 10 list, if i made such things.
and then you should read this.

unless stories of psychedelic drug use make you cringe or sigh or shrug your shoulders.

then you should possibly steer clear.

i hope the three years since it was published have been good to mr. dyer, and if i meet him in the desert of nevada sometime, i hope i get a chance to hear about them, and if i don’t, i hope it’s because i ask him something infinitely more appropriate that happens to occur to me at the time.

i picked this book off the shelf at the library book sale last week because i remembered hearing good things about it a year or two ago, but i didn’t really have any idea what it was about. as it happens, it is the story of a young woman looking to find a new sense of self in the aftermath of a tragic loss for which she feels partly responsible. it is about the ways that she finds to both escape and confront her loss, and the things that she learns about herself as she goes.
it is emotionally gripping, and rather sad overall, despite definite undertones of hopefulness. i came to empathize with the main character in a lot of ways, but i was also always aware of differences between us. in many ways i think this means that the author did a good job of crafting a complete and believable character – i felt like i understood her, and liked her, and definitely wanted the best for her, but i did not feel like i Was her. she is very much her own woman, which strengthens the impact of the story.
one of the main themes of the book has to do with the balance between independence and intimacy, which is something that i’ve been thinking a lot about lately. i should write another entry if i really want to go into more personal details, but suffice it to say that i am currently in a place where i’m doing a lot of thinking about this question of who i am on my own, and how that relates to who i want to be in a relationship. sometimes i feel like being single in my twenties is an amazing gift – i can find out answers to questions that would never come up, or would at least be much more complicated, within a serious relationship. i can see what i am made of, when all i have to answer to is myself. i can see what work i choose, and what play. i can find out how i like to load the dishwasher, and where i really think the baking powder should go. i can sleep all day or stay out all night without having to explain myself to anyone but me, and there’s a certain kind of insight that it seems can only come from those kind of explanations. sometimes it seems to me that a chance to answer these questions is priceless, but sometimes i laugh at the idea. what does it really mean for us to know how we behave in isolation? when are we really in isolation?
this book struggles with these questions. carrie, the protagonist, finds herself suddenly free from a relationship that she has grown up within, a relationship that has always partially defined her. she had begun to be afraid of how inevitable the path of her life was feeling, and then tragedy strikes and she finds herself able to start anew. she runs away from her home, and she falls in love with a man who is fiercely independent. he listens to her, supports her, refuses to meddle in her decisions, and refuses to talk about his own life. they have a passionate relationship, and in many ways she blossoms, but she also finds herself resenting the wall between them.

in the end, it’s unclear to me what the book thinks of the moral of independent living.

this review is unfinished, but here’re the notes i left to myself as prompts:
apart from these deeper things, the book made me miss new york. in the years since i moved away i’ve found that it hits me in waves, but it has never really stopped hitting me. there is something of the city that got into my blood, and the stories of carrie and kilroy walking all over town, playing in the snow in gramercy park, eating in holes in the wall, shopping at the strand, wandering through soho… it hit me. the comparisons between madison and new york, the midwest and the city, were strikingly relevant to my situation. i love bloomington dearly, and

julie?
what’s in this idea we have of getting away?