Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Bookmarked. Брайан К. Эвенсон

as long as I agreed not to publish. I chose to leave and take a one-year position at Oklahoma State University—not an easy decision, since at the time I had two young daughters and a wife to support. A few years later, still being subtly pressured by church leaders about my fiction, I made the decision to leave Mormonism and asked to be formally excommunicated. My then-wife, Connie, remained Mormon. We drifted further and further apart, and eventually divorced. As I was waiting for my official letter from the church telling me that, as they arcanely phrased it, my name had been “blotted from the records of the church,” I found myself worrying obsessively that I would go to hell. But as soon as the official letter arrived stripping me of salvation, I felt nothing but immense relief and freedom.

      When my girlfriend and I broke up after my near-death in the hospital, I felt an immense despair. For weeks, I kept the same CD in the car stereo and listened to it over and over again, feeling, I suppose, that it was the only stable thing in my life. We have these moments where we feel like we’ve been torn out of life in some manner, and it’s difficult, almost impossible even, to imagine how we will ever be brought back in. Even if we’ve been there before, have had our suffering eventually mitigated before, each dislocation is painful and new. What Didion talks about in the faces of people who have recently lost someone, that look of “extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness” manifests in a lesser way, I think, for those smaller losses—divorce or breaking up, illness, loss of religion or job.

      And yet most of us do manage to move on. We manage to piece ourselves back together, make a new life for ourselves, eventually begin to feel like we are resident in the world again. And, if we’re lucky, whatever the losses of the past, however unimaginable the future, we learn to live more fully in the present world than with the ghosts and regrets of the past.

      Now, six years after my hospital stay, I’m married to the writer Kristen Tracy, a woman I deeply love, and we have a four-year-old child. That previous relationship had become more of a holding pattern than a relationship: I was fairly comfortably (or at least not unbearably) stuck, but stuck nonetheless. It wasn’t until illness cut the ground out from under me that I was able to shake my way free of that relationship and find the life and partner I both needed and wanted. If I look back on that other life, it’s with melancholy, but also with a sense of it being fully over, being past, almost as if it happened to someone else. And yet, if I hadn’t had that illness, inertia would have probably kept me in the eddies of that other relationship, and I would have been satisfied with good enough rather than good.

      There’s really only one story in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that strikes me as being narrated fully from that vantage, with someone looking back on their past from a point of melancholic stability: “Everything Stuck to Him.” ⁷ It is also the only story in the volume set outside of the United States (it takes place in Italy)—indeed, one of only a few stories in the volume set outside of the Pacific Northwest. About a fight followed by a moment of love and closeness, it’s my least favorite story in the volume. But having it there among the other stories of blunt difficulty and drunken struggle does give the sense that yes, these things can be lived through, these things can, no matter how bad they seem at the time, be survived.

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      Back when I was still Mormon, still married to a Mormon and living in Seattle, I was a counselor in a bishopric, one of three people directing a congregation of several hundred people. I’ve talked elsewhere ⁸ about one of my jobs sometimes being to go out and meet people who had ended up in Seattle without resources, people in distress, often late at night: people at the end of their rope financially, people who had no place to stay, people who couldn’t afford shelter or food. I’d talk with them, sometimes use church funds to buy them a meal or groceries, help them find a job, try to make things possible for them. Most of them were stuck, though also a little baffled about what had happened to them. Most of them didn’t get unstuck because of our help. Or they might get free of their difficulties momentarily and then slip back again.

      Most of the characters in What We Talk About . . . are like that: numb, wounded, and unable to break free of the trap that they’ve had a hand in creating. But they keep struggling, keep trying. Or try at least to sort through the past again, set up the chess pieces again and see if the game plays out any differently, try—and fail—to understand where exactly they went wrong. Or even if they do understand, be incapable of making things different.

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      There are the complex paths that fork in life, but for writers there are paths that fork with books. Sometimes a simple, almost random choice opens a field of possibilities. For instance, on a whim I pick up a book called Berg in a used bookstore on Tottenham Court Road, largely because I like the cover. It’s by an author I’ve never heard of, Ann Quin, and begins, “A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father . . .” The book does something with overlapping different levels of discourse that I’ve never seen before, and leads me as a writer to figure out how to do things that I’ve never done before. A year later I’ve read everything by Quin, and then I co-write an article about her, and then I’m asked to write the introduction to the reissue of one of her books, and then, when I take a job at Brown University, I’m hired at the same time as poet Robert Creeley, and we strike up a friendship over the fact that he was a close friend of Quin’s.

      In the BYU bookstore back in 1985, I know I’m going to buy another Raymond Carver book, and I’m holding both What We Talk About and Cathedral.