Choose Your Own Obsession

On finding a sense of rightness between writer and subject

Photo by Ben Mathis Seibel / Unsplash

A couple weeks ago, the writer Leslie Jamison announced that she was writing a new book on daydreams—a subject she’d explored earlier in an essay for Astra Magazine.

Ho-ly, I thought, when I read the announcement. What a perfect subject for her. The alignment between Jamison’s preoccupations as a writer and the contours of the topic felt so right, conformed so neatly to the shape of the persona she becomes on the page, it was like somebody had dreamed up (sorry) the idea and then assigned her the task of writing a book about it. Somebody did, of course, and it was presumably Leslie Jamison.

Reading the original essay, “Dreamers in Original Daylight: Ten Conversations,” only deepened my appreciation for the writer–subject correspondence. As she thinks through the various affects and drives that fuel our daydreaming—desire, shame, creation, survival, etc.—Jamison also takes a tour through the hall of ideas that have cropped up across her oeuvre: her affinity for sweetness (“In Defense of Saccharin(e),” from The Empathy Exams); her fascination with suffering and its optics (“Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” also from The Empathy Exams, but really that’s a theme that pops up all over that collection); the complexity of the maternal bond (her forthcoming memoir Splinters, in which daydreams surface fairly often). All of these are classic Jamison territory. Even better, those familiar preoccupations are accumulating, in a way that feels exciting and organic, toward her next big project.

I always love it when a memoirist or nonfiction writer does this: Revisits events and concerns you may have encountered previously in their body of work, but crisscrosses that familiar terrain in all sorts of new and surprising ways, leading you down new trails while referencing familiar landmarks. If you’re coming to it for the first time, you get the thrill of adventure, but if you’re coming to it as someone who’s read them previously, you get the additional pleasure of new dimensions and discoveries layered over the initial event (Melissa Febos is a master of this). I think that kind of layered repetition, too, is a sign of “rightness” between writer and subject—when it’s something you can’t let go of and keep coming back to.

Maybe I’m totally wrong and somebody called up Leslie Jamison and was like “You know what would be on-brand? If you wrote a book about daydreams!” and she was like “Hell yeah!” I do not think this is what happened. But the point still stands: There’s something crackling about the sense of alignment that can arise between the choice of a subject and that writer’s particular way of being in the world. When it lands, it feels practically preordained. More importantly, I think it’s goal-worthy. It’s something I aim for as a writer, and something I encourage other writers to consider as well.

Part of being a writer is identifying and pursuing the ideas that best serve your obsessions. Of hitting on the thing that allows you to bring to bear the full strength and range of your idiosyncratic powers. (This is one of the things I loved most about being a magazine editor: Thinking I want a piece on that and then, in the next breath, landing on the perfect writer to execute the task. Is it a little power-trippy? It’s not not.) I’m reminded of a quote from my friend Maud Newton’s brilliant book, Ancestor Trouble; a line that spoke to me with such clarity when I read it that I wrote it down somewhere I could always find it: “My strongest writing would be the highest and best manifestation of my own perspective and strangeness.” And strangeness is my favorite part of that line. It’s so crucial. The subjects that allow us to showcase our strangeness are, I think, the ones that really sing.

This, in turn, gives rise to one of my core goals as a writer: Find and cultivate the ideas that feel, to you, like such a you project; the one that allows you to confront the fullest and strangest version of yourself. I’m thinking pan-genre, here, not just memoir. Your “self” needn’t be the story of your life—it can be a voice, a set of principles, a beloved tool of craft. That generative impulse creates momentum through the project—it gives you a question you’re in pursuit of, that you’re constantly itching to answer—and it also pays dividends when it comes time to bring that work out into the world and be its spokesperson. Which requires a whole new level of obsession, if that’s even the right word.

Here are some other books that I think do this especially well (I think fiction can absolutely do it, too, but for me to assume that degree of alignment between a writer and their fictional subject seems presumptuous and gross! But I encourage you to still bring that energy to your practice, fiction-writers!):

Brutalities: A Love Story, by Margo Steines (my current read; a book to savor)

How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, by Sabrina Imbler

Thin Skin: Essays, by Jenn Shapland

Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir, by Margo Jefferson

That’s all for now. Now go get weird.