Kate Colby, PARADOXX

 

To lie by omission is to leave out the truth. To tell truth by omission is to leave out the lies, but the lie of my continuity constitutes my continuity, without which there’s nothing to tell. And if truth by omission is also to leave out misapprehensions, then I am not equal to the work.

I am absolutely struck by the thoughtful and interconnected ongoingness of Providence, Rhode Island writer Kate Colby’s PARADOXX (Essay Press, 2025) [a book I took with me to read in Ireland, as you well know], a first-person non-fiction portioned across a wide stretch of exploratory, present prose. Each of her sections begins with a moment, thought or quote that expands exponentially out, as she reacts and explores, furthering to see how far it might go. “Neither my experiences nor my memories are exceptional,” she offers, as part of the fifteenth section of her opening monologue, “HOW IT ENDS,” “but the relationship between them interests me now that I have children making memories of their own. I do my best to ensure that they will have positive memories of their childhoods, but the question of which will prove most important to them preoccupies me. When they are away from me at school and other activities, they are making memories we’ll never share, which makes me feel that my kids are being ripped from me slowly like the wrong way to take off a Band-Aid.” Colby writes through the coordinates and considerations of women writers, artists and thinkers, swirling around her own writing and thinking through her own parenting, and her own writing, and of those distances that might seem impossible but also seem impossibly interconnected.

The poet Muriel Rukeyser famously wrote, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” Did she mean every little truth or one overarching one? Would all of the former add up to the latter? Either way, Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journal feels like what spills from the gash, evincing exhaustion and interruption—a mishmash of memories, sex, scatology, and mundane notes-to-self punctuated by shouty all-capped imperatives from the inside of her forehead. But unconventional as it is, Clairvoyant Journal is thoroughly of its moment—the real-time transcription of the mind was a project common to many of Weiner’s peers, including Bernadette Mayer and Lyn Hejinian. Where is the line between her diagnosed schizophrenia and a literary movement?

Through one hundred numbered sections, Colby writes her thinking and experience through and across an array of forebears, including Gerard Manley Hopkins, C.D. Wright, Kurt Vonnegut, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost and Lyn Hejinian. One hundred sections, across one hundred days, reminiscent of the one hundred days I composed my own one hundred pages across the onset of the Covid-era. She offers the footnote: “One hundred days ago (on paper) I was spontaneously induced to begin this writing by Jean Rhys’s unfinished autobiography. I’ve since spent years replacing nearly every word and sentence, letting the whole thing gather and shed like a thousand skins of its snake. I wish my life in the world was the same—that I could freeze it and work with what’s already here till I knew it was fruitless and/or finished.” Her exploratory, accumulative self-contained sections almost give the sense of writing from the foundation of Hejinian’s classic My Life (1980), utilizing biographical moments as the building blocks of structure, but through a more exploratory prose style, as a book-length essay, attempting to navigate, as she suggests on one point, her life on paper. Referencing Hejinian’s Writing Is an Aid to Memory (The Figures, 1978), she writes of memory and how it impacts being: “Writing Is an Aid to Memory is an experiment in omissionless self-depiction, where the sum of a life is an endless journey toward a shifting image of what it already is. Great, but I’d rather see my memory in a display case. (It would have to include the display case.)” She writes of collectivity and individuality; she writes of establishment and anti-establishment, negative capability and global culture, folk songs and the Spice Girls. “Reflecting and reacting to the narrative conventions of social media,” she writes, “the current literary approach to reality is self-reportage that represents representation within the exigencies of late capitalism. I want to take a hard look at my role, but can I see it from inside the eddy?” She writes of forebears, as this moment near the end offers: “I have a lot of obvious predecessors—Stein, Rhys, Wright, Hejinian. I don’t begrudge their sexiness. I do resent my first wives, though, and all of them are men.” Her writing, her thinking, is remarkable, and this is a book worth sitting within for as long as possible. Or, as she writes near the end:

Mallarmé said, “Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.” What baloney, but I’ll own it. I process the world by considering how I’d render it on paper, and then my conclusions are the product of having been written. At times I hide from news media, but am still beset by ambient information—birds and weather and a glimpse of a headline about a journalist’s beheading.

There should be a word for a word that should be its own opposite. Why does “behead” not mean to gain a head, in the manner of “bejewel,” “betroth” and “befriend”>

There’s a certain episode I can’t write about because I would lie. 

Willie wants to know why all my writing rhymes.