Letting Go of Creative Plans
You don't always write the book you set out to do...that's just fine
I've just finished reading the memoir YOGA (which is as much about writing as it is about yoga), by Emmanuel Carrère. I purchased the book nearly a year ago at Librarie Galignani in Paris. Despite the fact that I started reading it immediately, and despite the fact that I found the book completely absorbing, it has taken me the better part of a year to finish it. I've set it aside not out of boredom, but something else entirely—a certainty that I would finish it, but that I would take my time doing so. I had that sense, every time I sat down with the book, that I did not want it to end.
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Of course, a book ends—one can’t do anything about that—but as a reader, you can choose when it ends for you. You have the power to draw it out indefinitely, for months and even years. (I did this for years with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crackup and with Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights.)
Only now, having turned the last page, do I understand that my slow approach to Yoga had something to do with the fact that Carrere himself didn't truly know the nature of the book he was writing. He set out to write "a little book about yoga," but ended up writing a big book about yoga, depression, love, his time with young immigrants on a Greek island, and writing.
A Divorce and a Reckoning
The book led me down a rabbit hole of articles by and about the author, including this one by Wyatt Mason, in which Carrere states,
"When one writes about oneself, one is obligated to write about other people. And there, as much as one has the right to write absolutely whatever one wants about the self…to write about others is an enormous problem. The sincerity that you can exhibit with yourself, you have no right to inflict on anyone else.”
Yoga was the subject of a lawsuit brought by Carrere’s ex-wife, the journalist Hélène Devynck, before its publication. Devnyck sued because, now that they were divorced, she (quite justifiably) no longer granted Carrere to have blanket permission to write about her. The fact that much has been removed from the book is hinted at a couple of times within its pages. The directive not to include a primary character in the author’s life necessarily changed the nature of the book. One has the sense that things have been left out—because, in this case, they have.
When Your Story Changes
I found the book deeply encouraging precisely because it is not the book the author set out to write. I have been wrangling for years with just such a book, which began in 2018 as essays/memoir about my family's expat years in Paris, and which shifted abruptly in March of 2020 when the world shut down and we found ourselves trapped in France, and which shifted again when we returned to California in the ninth month of the pandemic, and which continued to shift as our lives changed in the following years.
The result is that it is not the book I set out to write. It is more melancholic, for one thing, and it spans a much longer time in our lives than I expected it to. It has more surprises. And within its pages, I write about the act of writing it—how the writing itself is shaped by the twists and turns of my life and the life of my family.