Jhumpa Lahiri, Beth Kephart, and More Attention Given to the Sentence

I was happy to find Jhumpa Lahiri in The New York Times Sunday Review this weekend.  I wait, impatiently, for her books, her words.  When they come, I devour them quickly, then I come up for air, look around, wild-eyed, wish for more.  


The article (here) is about sentences.  And while I do believe my friend Beth Kephart was writing about sentences well before this article was published, I am pleased to see these thoughts extend from one of my favorite writers to another.  Because, as Lahiri says:

...it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.

The article is the first in a series called Draft which according to The Times will feature 'essays by grammarians, historians, linguists, journalists, novelists and others on the art of writing — from the comma to the tweet to the novel — and why a well-crafted sentence matters more than ever in the digital age.'

And now that I've read the article, I have learned why I must wait for Lahiri's words.  She waits for them too.  She takes care with them.  She does not rush.

"Listen To Me"

Today, I want to link to Jhumpa Lahiri's recent piece in The New Yorker, Trading Stories: Notes From a Literary Apprenticeship.

I'll just pull one quote from the article, which is about her life-long relationship to books and writing, and the 'creative stasis' she experienced before writing her first short story as an adult.

It was not in my nature to be an assertive person. I was used to looking to others for guidance, for influence, sometimes for the most basic cues of life. And yet writing stories is one of the most assertive things a person can do. Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconceive, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, “Listen to me.”

This was where I faltered. I preferred to listen rather than speak, to see instead of be seen. I was afraid of listening to myself, and of looking at my life.

These words took my breath away. As with most things I think and feel, Jhumpa Lahiri can say it better than I can.