Writing intimacy

What does that even mean?

In the last few weeks, I’ve offered a few thoughts on moving and the intimacy of memory, music and intimacy, intimacy within a symphony orchestra, and intimacy, spiritual yearning, and music.

What does intimacy mean? One answer that’s legit: I know it when I experience it. Another answer includes a constellation of things we need as humans —friendship, romance, love, understanding, closeness—physical and psychological—and family, chosen or biological or both. It includes necessities such as homemade cooking and eating together, and dancing and art and music and poetry and books. You will definitely have other ideas. Please let me know!

How to write intimacy? I want my fictional characters to experience intimacy, but unfortunately for them, they often suffer and struggle to get there. (More on that in a subsequent post.)

Two books that capture intimacy with unearthly skill are Shirley Hazzard’s THE GREAT FIRE, and Vikram Seth’s AN EQUAL MUSIC. I think every writer has books she wished she’d written, and these two are mine.

I heard Shirley Hazzard interviewed when THE GREAT FIRE came out, and wrote a piece about that. The novel is an epic, unlikely, love story set mostly in Japan and Australia in the embers of WWII. Hazzard was inspired by a love affair she’d had as a late teenager when she worked as a Chinese translator for British intelligence in Hong Kong.

My words—

The leading man in this taut, beautiful novel is Aldred Leith—measured, strong, true—crisscrossing continents out of duty, curiosity, and ultimately love. Co-starring are Helen and Benedict Driscoll, seventeen and twenty respectively; together, a single force of nature.

Hazzard’s words—

That evening, he wrote on the end of a letter to Helen: “Yes, I do tell my friends about you. Sometimes I also tell those who are not my friends—flourishing you like a safeguard, a talisman.”

I wrote about AN EQUAL MUSIC for a Tin House blog here—

The novel unfurls the achingly gorgeous romance between violinist Michael Holme and pianist Julia McNicholl… This book is a moving investigation of loss and love; the relationship between father and son; and the meaning of commitment to marriage, children, and above all music. In spare, elegant language Seth describes Julia’s playing as “a beauty beyond imagining – clear, lovely, inexorable, phrase across phrase, phrase echoing phrase…. It is an equal music.”

I wish I could unpack how these writers do it. Just read these books and enjoy.

Here is my new review on NPR of Georgi Gospodinov’s novel, THE PHYSICS OF SORROW [translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel]. Gospodinov is a prize-winning Bulgarian writer of great brilliance, whose book “is a winding labyrinth through Bulgarian communism, art, literature, history, the personal past, love, sorrow, and so much more.”

And here’s my new review at Lilith Magazine of Maya Arad’s three novella collection THE HEBREW TEACHER [translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen]. Arad writes about family and women and decracination with a light touch and a deep impact.

Hope your week brings you good reads and joy.

Love, Martha

P.S. ICYMI, here is last week’s newsletter: On Yearning: Intimacy, spiritual yearning, and music