Do we really need coffee mugs to tell us they are coffee mugs?
Since when do all notebooks need inspirational sayings on them, anyway?
The pressure, at the Indigo bookstore, is coming from an unexpected place, not from the actual books. And books, the kind you read, can be pressurizing, if you are a person who has put yourself on a three-a-week reading regime to make up for the fact that you are a book writer not yet writing a book. You stand in a big- box book emporium like Indigo and think, “the world really needs another?”
I don’t know what to call this section I am lodged in. The Inspirational Notebook section? The Inadvertent Panic Attack section? There is a whole wall of display space dedicated to these blank notebooks with sloganeering covers, telling me, in gold letters no less, to MAKE IT HAPPEN, or BE AWESOME TODAY, or to DREAM BIGGER DARLING, or BE SO GOOD THEY CAN’T IGNORE YOU, because as we all know WELL BEHAVED WOMEN RARELY MAKE HISTORY, so DON’T HOLD BACK, and LIVE LIFE IN FULL BLOOM because IF YOU DON’T TRY YOU WILL NEVER KNOW.
These notebooks are insane. It’s like Tony Robbins and RuPaul sat down in a Jacuzzi, had a conversation about metallic embossing, and decided to make a line of premium writing paper for women with creative aspirations and poor self-esteem.
I’m actually here to buy Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. I am not doing this because my notebook told me to “Be Fabulous And Buy Nabokov” (my notebook just sits there blankly leering at me). Rather, last week, when I started a personal onemonth read- o- thon, hoping to kick-start a one-year writeo- thon, I canvassed friends for suggestions of memoirs, memoirs t hat t hey considered absolutely necessary, or at least just astonishing to read, and Nabokov’s was the most suggested.
You can learn a lot about people by asking them what their favourite autobiographies are. A slick marketing magnate I know said Motley Cru’s The Dirt changed his life. A Judaic scholar offered up Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson. ( The books mentioned more than twice among 50 suggestions were Gary Shteyngart’s Little Failure, “anything written by Diana Athill,” and the Patti Smith memoir Just Kids, a cool haircut of a book that everyone I know has read but which I look at and think, “oh god, do I have to?”)
More than novels, people want to feel kinship when reading real- l if e stories, whether of a child soldier in Africa or a woman hiking across America. If the story is remote from the reader’s own experience, and the reader still has that emotional connection, the book will feel like hitting a jackpot; some prize having to do with sensing one’s space in the universe more broadly. Last week one of the books I read was Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies, a memoir about the author’s almost-career as a professional swimmer, and it was so enjoyable because it was a book about a life in pools — something I don’t even care to know about! — and yet all the feelings were ones I knew.
For some reason,
t he Nabokov memoir, arguably among the more important and celebrated memoirs of the modern era, is in the fiction section. I wonder if an Indigo stockperson, goaded to “Make History In Your Own Small Way” by a $ 16 notebook, questioned the veracity of Nabokov’s content and made an executive decision. Because it says on the cover: “Speak, Mem- ory: An Autobiography Revisited.” To stock arrangers, that should be meaningful.
Although, to be honest, I see this subtitle and am momentarily offended. To get to the fiction section, I had to walk though yet another section of type- mad Easter gift ideas — bowls that read “Granola Soup Yogurt” and gold-rimmed saucers emblazoned “odds and ends.” I am so tired of things insistently telling me what they are! But then I remember that’s what book covers are supposed to do.
I pay, I leave, I walk home, thinking about the internal and external forces that would make a person want a bit of ceramic that says exactly what to put in it. Is it that they are indecisive? Decisive? Something about too much choice.
I mean, there have always been memo pads that say things like “I don’t have time for a midlife crisis!” and mugs of the “Hands off my coffee” ilk. This is a breed of kitsch that I will always associate with a certain type of mom from back when I was in high school — the mom who might also collect “anything with frogs,” or have a constellation of fridge magnets in the shape of miniature lox bagels and tiny six- packs of Coca- Cola (these were always the houses with the best snack foods in them).
But the spread at Indigo is part of a broader movement of textophilia, trickling out in all directions, from the doors of kids’ rooms that have their names spelled out, to river rocks emblazoned “hope.” In the 1970s, it was ballsy of artist Robert Indiana to spell out “love” and call it a sculpture; it was rebellious of Jenny Holzer to blow up lines like “The most profound things are inexpressible,” and paste them up around Manhattan. But now no Biennale would be complete without a good deal of self-referential art of this sloganeering sort. I remember, a handful of years ago, being in some crazy rich property developer’s house. He had a huge relief sculpture in his living room reading “What would Oprah do?” Likeliest answer: buy this sculpture, and make everyone richer by association.
There is somehow a whiff of personal branding to lots of this. If anyone under the age of 40 walks into a tattoo parlour now, eight times out of 10, they are exiting with something written into their skin, and not even in wrong Chinese, problematic Latin or grammatically incorrect Hebrew. At the same time, the parents of these textily tattooed youth might be swapping the number plates outside their homes for having their address all spelled out, because they’ve been told, by some decorator, that it looks more elegant that way.
Walking home from Indigo, I look at the houses I am passing, nice houses, nearly none of which have numbers as their address anymore. It’s all Sixty- Seven Balmoral Avenue and Three Hundred and Sixty- Eight Lawton Boulevard, either in wedding- invitation script or some Roman font that makes the inscribed house look like a giant tombstone. I hate the idea telegraphed by these fancy addresses, that like some new- build condo complex, every house should have a title, a name; as if every home needs to be a tribute to itself, to its street, to its own concreteness.
When I get to my own house, I am happy to see its plain old numbers, and I am happy to have Nabokov’s words all gathered together in the best possible place: a book.