Elisabeth Donnelly

It is this, but also a metaphor

This week I had the pleasure of seeing Joachim Trier’s second film, Oslo, August 31st and reading The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits. They’re both worth seeking out. Oslo, August 31st is purposefully small, a day-in-the-life of a junkie, whereas The Vanishers is a batshit insane novel that’s fun to describe: when a woman gets physically attacked by her psychic mentor, she’s off on a journey to find out secrets about her dead mother. Or something. That’s actually an attempt to be succinct.

But what was funny about both works was that they were dealing with big topics - drugs and addiction, psychics and European spas (it’s a crazy book) - they were both very much fronts for what the artists were interested in. Oslo, August 31st feels very much a film about being in your thirties, as opposed to Reprise, which is one of the very best films about being in your twenties. The Vanishers is wrestling with grief through satire, with Sylvia Plath looming above everything as a benevolent ghost. It is also distressingly on target about the little wars that women wage with each other - sometimes the behavior is that of a psychic attack, but we ignore the wounds.

Oslo, August 31st may be a little bit of a masterpiece - it manages to take a selfish story and make it something about everybody, humanity, the pulse of a city. Anders Danielsen Lie is quite a good actor. There’s stuff happening on his face even when the scene is still. The Vanishers is definitely uneven, but fascinatingly so, and the writing is so good that you need a highlighter for certain sentences. It was a wonderfully maternal world, and I wondered whether Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry - or a female writing/directing team that I haven’t even heard of yet - could make a little bit of weird magic out of its words. It would be a dream, for sure.

Stalking Stieg Larsson

This spring, exiting the Stockholm-Arlanda airport, I found myself in a hall which enthusiastically proclaimed, “Welcome to Sweden!” From its walls, huge portraits of the country’s greatest cultural exports greeted me, head shot after head shot. There were actors and directors (Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, Ingmar Bergman), austere portraits of authors (Astrid Lindgren, August Strindberg), and, in 1970s color, ABBA under disco lights, and Bjorn Borg, whacking a tennis ball. At the end of this procession, as if its grand finale, was a full-body photograph of Stieg Larsson. His head rested on his hand, in a position not unlike that of Rodin’s thinker. It’s a familiar photograph, the same one that appears on the back of each of his books: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire, and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

(I wrote this for The Paris Review. Read more here…)

Books and visceral reactions

When I finished Revolutionary Road, I was in a coffeeshop in the West Village, killing time because I was late for a yoga class and didn’t get in, but it was way too early to get to work. Reading Revolutionary Road, as a woman in a serious relationship, was a very different experience from when I banged through it in high school. The writing was still exquisite, of course, but I understood the characters in a deeper way; their hopes and aspirations of how life in Paris would make them interesting, fascinating people; the way that they boxed themselves into a corner thanks to time and choices. I related to some of that idealism. When I came to the end, I couldn’t put the book back in my purse. It scared me. It was a live thing, a record of life at its rawest and its most emotionally excruciating and the fears that we all have, as people trying to exist and find some proof of worth in that question. I felt like it was a snake, and I didn’t want its physical presence anywhere near me. I ran out of the coffeeshop and walked, briskly, to work.

Regret is a stupid, self-defeating concept, but I do have one that sticks in my mind. Last year, some high school kids were putting on a version of “Revolutionary Road: The Play.” The poster featured a boy and a girl dressed in Mad Men-wear, striking a faux wise and weary look in front of a brick wall. I do regret missing high schoolers taking on Revolutionary Road as theater. It had to have been incredible.



When I finished Desperate Characters, I started laughing. But it was a strange laugh, a sound I hadn’t made before. Deep and long and hearty. I wasn’t quite sure what was in that laughter. It wasn’t funny ha-ha. It was something different.

Needless to say, both of these books are masterpieces.

I wrote about post-collegiate anxiety for This Recording. Hopefully it is a little funny and maybe a little melancholy. I love the Sol Lewitt photos illustrating it - for me, seeing Sol Lewitt at Mass MoCA inspired such a visceral reaction that I could feel in my bones. His work is disorienting.

PSA: The Boston University Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders is a great research institution.

Just Kim

In the wake of Patti Smith and Just Kids, do you think that editors are calling Kim Gordon, every day, to ask her to write her own memoir? I also feel, strongly, that if Kim Gordon did her own version of L.C.D. Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge,” it would be pretty epic.

It was fun to watch Gordon at Tom Tom Magazine’s Women in Media/Women in Music panel - the conversation must’ve felt to Gordon like her “Sacred Trickster” video. I would love to, at some point, go to a “Kim Gordon You Are The Coolest How?” panel, where she could talk about collaboration with Thurston and maintaining a relationship and stuff like that. It would be interesting. But what struck me about Gordon was that you got the idea that music was more of a side thing to her visual art, which makes sense. It’s what she was trained in.

She’s so beautiful, too. Cheekbones of glass. There’s something about her beauty that reminds me of Betty Draper. Maybe it’s the cheekbones and blondeness, the cool. Maybe it’s that she got out, she escaped, with the specter of a perfect wife and mother probably hanging over her head. The opposite of rock. I want to know more. She’s mysterious!

And Gordon did not pick up an instrument until 28. Nor did Patti Smith. And isn’t that fact inspiring?