Veronica…the cover is of a woman’s upturned face, rain pouring down…I got into the car today to do some grocery shopping, feeling the rain on my body, on my cheeks, looking out into the grey sky…feeling sadness envelope me, but thankfully only for a moment, while I was reading the book, I felt like sadness was pressing against my chest, suffocating me, making me nauseous with despair and loneliness…Like I said, it was only for a moment…not a lifetime, like the character feels in the novel, and not like those years in college when I battled depression so much. Like The Bell Jar, and Of Mice and Men, this novel affected me very deeply; wonderful writing, but touching me so deeply that I felt compelled to finish as soon as possible to push it out of my system. Let me say, Mary Gaitskill is an absolutely phenomenal writer. She reminds me a lot of Lynn Crosbie with her use of metaphor, sharp jarring metaphors…I told someone while I was reading the book that her metaphors were like shards of glass made beautiful by the designs dripping blood make upon them. I heard about this book when I dragged Keren to a queer lit talk at Bumbershoot this past year. The two lesbian writers interviewed were asked what book they were reading/read recently that they really liked/found inspiring. Both of them said without a doubt, Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica. I waited for a long time and through the Seattle Public Library system, I found it last week while I was doing my “Wednesday morning wandering” while Keren goes to her supervision in Madrona Park. There’s a super cute and TINY library in Madrona that I browsed through for a while. I picked up a copy of Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain” and Veronica. I haven’t written in this blog in forever, mostly due to sheer lack of time and I do readily admit it, laziness. But, this book compelled me to write again. I have all these private feelings that washed over me in tidal waves when I read this book and the style of the book reminded me so much of how I think myself…Veronica is narrated by a woman named Alison, a former runway model who is now at the minimum in her early to mid-40s, and sick with Hepatitis-C. She remembers her life in flashback form, snippets of memory, while she is moving through her heartbreakingly lonely life. It seems that Veronica, a woman of whom Alison boldly describes all faults: bisexual boyfriend who will eventually give her AIDS, ugly face with a gash of a mouth, bad haircut, terrible clothes, interesting but often not-so-great social skills, is her closest friend. However dysfunctional the bond, and no matter Alison’s level of disgust she is drawn to Veronica, so drawn to her that her memories are framed by this woman and constantly return to her. This unlikely relationship seems to have been so important to both women, Alison being one of the only people who is truly there for Veronica as she dies. Bleakness definitely runs rampant throughout this novel, something that the jacket doesn’t really address, but it isn’t as much sadness as a perpetual feeling that both of the main characters are lost and cannot find their way. They stumble through their lives, blind to error until it slaps them in the face, and ruins them, but makes them stronger as well. It is also peripheral characters in the novel that are “lost”…Sara, one of Alison’s sisters, spends years in a basement self-ostracized from society, watching television and withdrawing inwards…All this seems so superficial in terms of description, though. What got me the most is all the memory that came back to me as I stumbled through especially my early years in college, but also how I cope with what feels like my own perpetual sadness. Not ever having really figured out where it came from, I often felt lost in college, before I became an English major…I remember leaving my last business school classes in the early evening, darkness having already fallen, being assaulted by the harsh cold or the freezing rain or snow…The rain, I felt(and perhaps this is why Seattle fits so well for me), fit my feelings at the time…matching the tears that I had already shed all morning before I gathered myself together and went to class…My eyes were dry at this point, though my throat was hoarse from too much crying…I remember just wanting to disappear, wondering if someone would even notice. I wanted to check myself into a hotel at one point anonymously to just sleep and sleep and sleep…But, like they say in Hotel California, you can check out, but you can never leave. That’s what happens with Alison’s memory too, it never leaves her. Perhaps what makes this book so wonderful for me is that I feel like Gaitskill writes humans really well, her characters are so real. She, for me is like Faulkner and Alice Munro and other authors who I can’t remember right now, though I’m sure I can pull them up from my brain at some point. I think that my sadness, the nauseating sadness of which I spoke earlier, also stems from all my current problems with work, my desire to quit and my self-consciousness regarding the search for a new job. It’s a particularly hard time for me emotionally right now, I’m getting over my rage at my work, and battling all my fears about not getting hired…but, I’m working on all of this, processing and accepting…The other thing about the book that I found really interesting is Alison’s relationship to music, and how she even views others’ relationships to music as well, especially her father’s. He lives in his music, she almost tries to emulate the music, wanting to live like it, or in it, but it is different than her father who is attempting to lose himself in song. Alison, now the age her father was in the majority of her flashbacks, is more lost in thought than music anymore. Perhaps the music fails her, as her modeling career crashes and burns, like a phoenix she rises again, only to be destroyed again. It all reminds me of a Heart lyric: “Love me like music, and I’ll be your song...” Interestingly enough too, both Alison’s friend Veronica and her boyfriend recommend the movie A Star Is Born, one of Judy Garland’s arguably most autobiographical films…it’s a movie that comes up more than once in conversation in the novel, but ironically is a movie that Alison never sees…there are parallels between Judy and Alison, lost innocence at the hands of people who eventually ruin her…All I know is by the end of the book I felt supremely lucky. Lucky that my feelings of perpetual sadness and loneliness I am able to live with, they are accepted friends of mine, I try not to let these demons get the better of me, though unfortunately sometimes it can’t be helped. Alison is like this too, she is living through all of her stuff as well, she has to in order to survive. What I am lucky to have though, is an amazing support system…multiple friends who care about me, a family that no matter how much they piss me off I still know love me very much(and the pissing off factor has been quite high as of late), and a wonderful partner who despite being totally asleep the other night, woke up in the middle of the night to comfort me and my uncontrollable sobbing…Alison’s life is empty of close ties, has been for many years, a former lover is kind to her and she has some other friends, but there is much emptiness…my co-worker commented on that for her life the other day too, which depressed me greatly. I feel very rich and almost guilty for being so rich in my interpersonal relationships, but the feeling is too fulfilling to ever want to lose it of course…Perhaps I’m not that unhappy or lonely, or perhaps I feel like I don’t have a right to be, or perhaps sadness and loneliness are just such natural human characteristics, since they run through all of literature, that I’m not alone, and that unites me with both fictional and real people…