by
Kate Folk
inspo/characterisation
Lucia Berlin,
Helen Garner,
Shirley Hazzard,
Michael Ondaatje,
Rachel Kushner,
Francesco Pacifico,
David Foster Wallace,
Vladimir Nabokov,
Elizabeth Hardwick
nice character descriptions (fiction, memoir, journalism)
“Sure, sure,” Genevieve said. “I mean, no judgment.” She said this without apparent irony; Genevieve was the most judgmental person Meg had ever known. Without her usual eyeliner, Genevieve looked like a child, her round face puffy, lips swollen from sleep. She was not conventionally beautiful, but Genevieve harbored a self-assuredness that drew people to her, broken people who longed to be told how to live, and with whom Genevieve amused herself temporarily before gently breaking their hearts. She possessed the unyielding self-esteem of a person with rich parents who loved her unconditionally, who called her every Sunday evening, hoping she’d soon tire of her West Coast experiment and move back to Connecticut. Genevieve would have been capable of using Roger for sex, laughing in his face when he told her he loved her, but Meg had known too much of life to treat people so casually.
My neighbour laughed, and said that I was probably right. My parents fought all their lives, he said, and no one ever won. But no one ran away either. It is the children who have run away. My brother has been married five times, he said, and on Christmas Day he sits alone in his apartment in Zurich, counting his money and eating a cheese sandwich. [...]
wow
She was adored. As an adult, I am still sometimes stopped on the street by people in their seventies or eighties who tell me how much they loved my mother, how much she made them laugh, how much she helped them and believed in them. One of her former colleagues told one of my siblings that they remembered her rushing into a meeting late one day, which was odd, as she was usually so organized and responsible at work. He noticed that her face was greasy-looking and sweating. He said, “Diane—were you just sunbathing?” She yelped. “Yes! I’m so sorry! It was just such a beautiful day!” She managed to pack these shards of joy into a life that was constantly overstuffed.
<3
Today Clémentine is wearing blue eyeliner today she’s wearing pink lipstick today her nails are painted today they’re not today she’s wearing lace tomorrow leather and then a massive hooded sweatshirt. I can’t pin her down, she is simply, and thoroughly, herself. I see her pretty much every day now. She knows what time I get tired of being alone, and turns up. Sometimes she’s on her way out to meet a friend, and just wants to check in. Clémentine goes places. The theatre, the cinema. Out for drinks. Once: bowling. I just run in my circles around the Buttes-Chaumont. She’s taken the place of all the friends I don’t see any more. The ones with kids (can’t bear it). The ones who are pregnant (fuck them). The ones who are trying to get pregnant (don’t want to hear about it). I figure she’s too young to know what she wants kid-wise so it’s perfect. One night we take a selfie with her Polaroid, she kisses my cheek, my smile makes my eyes squish shut.
cute
Henry is hosting his office poker game tonight, and they seem more than usually loud and swaggering, smoking around the table like something out of a movie. I hear Henry telling them about me as I walk out, hear him say consciousness, hear him say raising. How will I tell Henry my news, Henry who knows I have someone, and who is taking it exactly as I knew he would, like a little boy who has to be at the centre of everything, all the time, who wants to benefit from the liberations of the past few years without actually sacrificing anything for them, who likes to talk to his friends about his wife’s feminism, feminism, what a dirty word, like a disease I caught, to laugh about it with them, I hear them as I’m at the piano and he thinks I’m too involved in the music to hear what they’re saying, they’re joking about my feminism, he doesn’t understand it can liberate him, too.
<3<3
Oil is one of the last avenues of blue-collar opportunity in this country, one of the few sectors open to working-class men—outside of sport—that still pay well. The oil workers I knew were always trying to redress this imbalance by spending their wages as soon as they got them. They bought powerful cars on finance, expensive clothes, good shoes, strong cocaine. They went to the gym, bench-pressed weights, and covered themselves in tattoos (it seemed a cultural practice somehow related to the job, as miners in South Wales used to gather in chapel to sing). They stayed single longer than most men in the provinces, and even their marriages had a provisional feel, as if they might be dissolved at any moment. They were interesting. The sort of people you’d want at a house party, provided the house wasn’t yours.
lol
I turned to look at the man who’d spoken. He looked back at me. His look said he knew all my secrets, and found them unedifying.
“Who’s this then, lad? Your eldest?”
The others laughed.
“Didn’t like that, did she?” said another.
We went around the corner, out of sight. I could feel the malevolent force of the men at my back. I wished I’d let him come alone.
“They were rude.”
He glanced over my shoulder.
“I told you. The rules are different offshore.”
Kentucky: that is certainly part of it. My mother lived as a girl in so many North Carolina towns they are confused in my memory. Raleigh and Charlotte. She hardly knew her own parents; they died quickly as people did then, of whatever was in the air—pneumonia, diphtheria, tuberculosis. I never knew a person so indifferent to the past. It was as if she did not know who she was. She had brothers and sisters and was raised by them, passing their names down to us.
Her face, my mother’s, is not clear to me. A boneless, soft prettiness, with small brown eyes and the scarcest of eyebrows, darkened with a lead pencil.
There was a man who brought me my first pair of reading glasses, which I did not need. He was a romantic figure, mostly because he had studied French and adored the difficult r’s of that language. He was tall and good-looking and not very truthful. He was corrupted by an uncertain nature and no one understood his fits of self-expansion or his disappearances into torpor and melancholy. And yet a vanity and rather pleasant carelessness seemed to survive in all his moods.
Mason at least knew one pure, perfect joy. That was to go to the polling station near the courthouse and to write in the names of Communist Party candidates on election day.
lmao