The Lint Between My Ears (Not My Toes)

Before Julia Cameron, for me, there was Natalie Goldberg, and right now, I'm rereading Writing Down the Bones, one of Natalie's most famous books, and relishing quotes like:

"So perhaps not all obsessions are bad. An obsession for peace is good. But then be peaceful. Don't just think about it. An obsession for writing is good. But then write. Don't let it get twisted into drinking. An obsession for chocolate is not good. I know. It's unhealthy and doesn't help the world the way peace and writing do."

Or:

"It is very painful to become frozen with your poems, to gain too much recognition for a certain set of poems. The real life is in writing, not in reading the same ones over and over again for years. We constantly need new insights, visions. We don't exist in any solid form. There is no permanent truth you can corner in a poem that will satisfy you forever."
_____

Last night, I finally finished Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. It was brilliant, I thought. At first, it seemed matter-of-fact, analytical; after a while, however, the chapters shed skin and became pulpy, oozing layers of raw material, urgent emotion. Didion communicated a frantic desire to fix problems before they became unfixable. To rewrite. To remember precisely. And finally, to navigate without one's other half. It wasn't the kind of book I would cry over; it's the kind where I felt the proverbial lump in my throat expand and swell until I felt like I couldn't breathe. I couldn't talk to Lou about it when I was finished because my throat ached (that feeling that if you start blathering about it, you're going to wake up in the morning in your bed with an entire box's worth of balled up tissues surrounding you, sort of like those styrofoam pellets that UPS uses for packaging).

Next in the queue is a true crime, about a millionaire from Texas who is murdered by his trashy, young wife.

What's next in your queue?