Strawberry Season

On pleasures & the ephemeral

Good morning. It, somehow, is June!

A few Junes ago, in my mother’s garden

My first job was picking berries on a local farm. We were hauled out to the fields in tractors at six o’clock in the morning to sift through thorns and spiders and wet dew to fill pint boxes with tiny red raspberries and huge, soft blackberries. In later years, they’d drop me off at the pick-your-own strawberry field with a walkie-talkie, cash box, notebook, and golf pencil to weigh and ring-out the pick-your-own strawberries. All of these jobs paid next to nothing¹; I made up for it by stuffing myself with berries and writing ideas for stories on extra pages of the logbook that I would inevitably forget in my jeans pockets and send through the wash.

Each year I look forward to strawberry season with neurotic anticipation: what if I miss it? What if the weather is bad and the strawberries all rot on the vine, or are eaten by bunnies? What if I buy too many, or not enough? To quell this I wake up early on Saturdays and seriously overpay (by Lancaster standards) for two pints of admittedly perfect strawberries, sacrificing a few as cocktail ingredients but mainly to eat plain, or with a little cream, the better to appreciate the peak flavor. All of this really boils down to: what if I waste this opportunity, this season? What if I don’t enjoy strawberry season to the fullest, which is a ridiculous thing to be anxious about, but is of course encapsulating a larger anxiety about life, and time: am I wasting my one wild and precious life, etc?

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

"The Summer Day," by Mary Oliver

In the last week, I’ve finished reading two new novels about desire: R.O. Kwon’s Exhibit and Miranda July’s All Fours. These are extremely different novels in a lot of ways (the prose, for starters, could not be more different: Kwon’s concise couplets vs. July’s chatty confessionals & much more) but they’re weirdly similar in many others, asking similar questions: what do you do with all-consuming desire (lust, mostly, but also other desires), even when getting the thing you desire would ruin your life? In my read, both books come to the same overall conclusion: blow it up. Freedom to name, pursue, and attain (enjoy, even if temporary) the objet petit a is worth the price of the rest of your life: of comfort, of stability, of (for example, in both books) your decent marriage to a good and loving partner.

In both novels desire is compounded by time, a sense of a threat of expiration. Kwon’s book is more career-centric, about two young women with careers in the arts that, by nature of the art (one is a ballerina) cannot last forever. Jin, the narrator, is happily married but longs for kink, particularly from a new woman she’s met. Another layer of conflict is question of whether to have children, something that both has a ticking clock and cannot be compromised (Jin is certain she doesn’t want kids; it’s her husband, beloved and kind, who has changed his mind.) I went down to DC last week to hear Kwon speak at DCPL with Loyalty Books, and she spoke specifically about ambition (as form of desire), and how perilous it can feel to be and to acknowledge oneself as an ambitious woman. She said something similar on NPR’s Weekend Edition:

KWON: One of the ways in which Jin, who is the narrator, is trying to move toward more honesty in her life is being more honest with herself and in how she lives her life about what she wants. And one of the first sparks for this book for me was that I was hell-bent on exploring a question, which is why is it that I feel so strongly pushed by the world, the zeitgeist, to want certain things, and just as strongly pushed to not want other things? And every day of my life, I feel a great deal of pressure to want to be a very good daughter of, a wife of, a mother of, a sister of, a community member of, a friend of - it's all mediated through that, of. The things I feel pressured not to want, to hide my appetite for, includes sex, food, definitely an artistic ambition, any ambition at all. Even a day to myself feels like something that I kind of have to defend. And so in other words, what I feel pressured not to want is anything for myself.²

This ethos is extremely evident throughout the book; the narrator, Jin, follows her desires at great cost but is in the end satisfied, not because all of her conflicts magically fixed themselves but through authenticity, through the power of acknowledging both what she truly wanted and the way things can be important even if they’re not permanent.

In July’s book the narrator is slightly older than in Kwon’s, a 45-year-old mother very well-established in her career (“semi-famous”, semi-autobiographical). After making some interesting, desire-driven (as opposed to logic-driven (extremely opposed)) choices, she learns (to her shock) that she is in perimenopause and that in menopause her libido is expected to drop “off a cliff,” a change that she repeatedly calls death. She is going to die, she yells at her husband, she is dying, and will have to keep living afterward. The flush of desire she’s currently in, the one that propels the novel, suddenly becomes hysterically precious: if this is it, if this is the end, shouldn’t she make the most of it? Convenient, of course, that this urgency aligns with what she wants to do, a gleeful permission she gives herself to act on her desire for a particular dude. She, like Jin, follows her desires, but in a sort of utopian state where all of her friends and husband think as she does and support her choices and transition near-seamlessly into a state that transcends modern marriage and helps her write a new book, with no ill effects on their eight-year-old kid. July’s narrator has no problem naming what she wants the way Jin does; if anything, it’s over-explained, both to herself and then rehashed repeatedly and explicitly with her best friend.

Pushing through the shame is part of the process, like how a butterfly’s struggle out of its chrysalis is what helps it strength its wings to fly.

Both narrators carry a certain sense of shame or guilt though the quantity is far greater with Jin, who is Korean-American and formerly religious, and feels significant shame in her physical desires; we get the impression that it’s taken a very long time for her to say her desires aloud, and to be met with uncertainty from her partner is shattering. July’s narrator, in contrast, doesn’t express much (any?) shame about her sexuality; rather, any explicitly expressed guilt is over her child, who she has left (the primary “trip” of the book being “the longest they’d been apart,”) and who in this new iteration of her marriage she regularly continues to leave. When a friend asks her if she and her husband are going to get divorced late in the book, the narrator reacts with shock; that would defeat the whole point, she explains, which is to have something to escape from.

Both endings are optimistic though Kwon’s more bittersweet, a softer acknowledgement of what was both lost and gained. The split began because of her desire, but the real rift, the point of no return, comes from desire she can’t fulfil: “Philip hoped I’d give him what he desired: I won’t.”³ There’s clearly grief there, but she has reached the honesty she was seeking. As Kwon put it at the reading, “One doesn’t have to be liberated to do liberating things.” Pushing through the shame is part of the process, like how a butterfly’s struggle out of its chrysalis is an important step toward strengthening its wings. In contrast, July’s narrator feels less ambiguously triumphant: she, the smartest mouse, figured out how to get out of the trap, and wants to get her friends out too. “But don’t you see?” she asks a friend, “De Beauvoir was wrong. You can not only want what you want, but have it, too.” Interestingly, her friend replies, “But I really only want to want… That’s the whole point of desire.”⁴

I’ve written about desire a fair amount recently: while it wasn’t my intention to bring it up again (these two books happen to be new releases that came my way in the same week), it’s a topic I keep turning over, like a puzzle box I think will open and reveal its secrets if I press the right spot. One of the things I’ve been puzzling over is why Kwon’s book felt more natural to me in its portrayal of desire, while I had a hard time buying into July’s. I might need to reread them before I try and articulate this further but my first instinct is to say that it’s easier to see myself in the conflict of Kwon’s book, easier to see a rightness in the bittersweetness of the ending. Jin didn’t get everything she wanted, even though she got much; she made sacrifices and they paid off. The difference between jouissance in the Lacanian sense— the pain point, the tension— and jouissance in the Cixousian sense of a pleasure deeply feminine/feminist? Was I merely put off by the terms of July’s desire in a way I wasn’t by Kwon’s? (Is the sour feeling I’m left with after finishing July’s book due to a few moments that are preoccupied with thinness, down to including body weights?) I’m not sure I have an answer, but that’s what’s on my mind lately.

Maybe it’s in the air, the ink; maybe it’s the time of year, Pride and summer and promise. June.

Til next time,

Courtney

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What I’ve Been Reading & Consuming Lately:

• This essay on the history of fudge by Heather Radke for Taste, which has it all: subversive co-eds and Mackinac island and how places get an identity. I would love to read something longer on women’s college clandestine fudge!

• A deeply depressing but well-reported article on Mexican coastal preservation, by Krista Langlois for Hakai Magazine.

• Very relevant to last week’s newsletter: a peek into Alice Munro’s notebooks, via Benjamin Hedin for The Paris Review blog.

• Rift, by Cait West, a really wonderful and moving memoir by a woman who grew up in and escaped a fundamentalist, controlling Christian home. This one brought me to tears. (Funnily enough, Lancaster is mentioned within the first dozen pages— the writer’s family lived in Chester Co for a little while.)

• Two tiered rejections, which I kind of thought were a nice myth writers tell themselves until I got (weirdly in the same week) two of my own from publications I admire, which did actually kind of boost my confidence.

• A look at the scope of housing damage (not in lieu of people, but as it relates to people’s homes) in Gaza, in Architectural Record.

• The weather in Baltimore was stunning last weekend and I spent a lot of it on our back patio with Poe, drinking the first Pimm’s Cups of the summer. (I like it with cucumber, mint, lemon, and strawberry garnish! Carpe diem!)

• NOBODY PREPARES YOU FOR THE FACT THAT GETTING DIAGNOSED WITH ADHD FEELS LIKE FAILING, by Zoe Reay-Ellers, in HAD.

• The Issey Miyake light leak garments (SS24) speak to something possibly (horribly) 2013-era-instagram in me, but I still really like them.

1. Support UFW— the people actually working farms for a living work hard as hell.

2. https://www.npr.org/2024/05/26/nx-s1-131413/r-o-kwon-on-her-novel-exhibit-desire-and-taboos

3. Kwon, R.O. Exhibit. Riverhead, 2024, p 196.

4. July, Miranda. All Fours. Riverhead, 2024, p 283.