Friday Write #075
Before Good Ideas came to Substack, I sent prompts out to my writing students via email. Below is a prompt from 2022, with a new intro.
Greetings, writers—
I’m slowly working my way through Kathryn Davis’s The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, a dense, brilliant book with a strange and (I think) unfortunate title. It comes from a Hans Christian Anderson1 fairy tale about a proud, vain girl who steps on a loaf of bread, intended for her parents, to avoid getting her shoes muddy. Then she gets sucked down into the bog, and possibly all the way down into hell, as punishment. (“She was a poor child, but proud and arrogant, and people said she had a bad disposition.”)
“A magical evocation of Hawthorne, Dinesen, and Stephen Millhauser, this imaginary biography of a Danish lesbian composer has all the intrigue of a New England gothic romance,” Kirkus Reviews says about The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, and I’ll go ahead and agree with them, though I admit to having read only one Dinesen, one Millhauser, two Hawthornes, and about 150 pages of the book in question. Anyway, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf is very long, and my available time/attention span varies, so for a break I turned to Davis’s more recently published memoir, Aurelia, Aurélia.2
Aurelia, Aurélia is short but stunning, a meditation on grief and Davis’s husband’s death from cancer. The memoir is episodic and allusive, less concerned with “plot” or “story” than it is with vivid recollection and piercing observation. “It’s like one of those remote places populated by landrace flora and fauna that exist nowhere else on earth,” said the New York Times. I thought it was great.
The Paris Review published an excerpt back in 2022, from which the following lines are borrowed.
Today, pick one of these sentences, and, after editing it however you need to in order for it to work with the voice of your novel, story, or poem, use it in a scene featuring one of your characters—and a new character you have never written about before.
“Springtime, the trees along the parkway leafing out—romance was in the air, along with hints of restlessness and dread.”
“When someone you have lived with for a very long time dies, memory stops working its regular way—it goes crazy.”
“I knew, just as well as I would ever know anything in the course of my long and fiercely cherished life, that nothing would ever be sufficient.”
“The point is, a crush goes nowhere. It’s called a crush because it’s like something landed on top of you, making movement impossible.”
“And, truly, what is the point?”
P.S. Has anyone else out there been trying to read a single book for an entire year, as I have with TGWTOAL? Please tell me I’m not alone.
Davis had pleurisy when she was seven. During the month she spent in bed, her mother read her Hans Christian Andersen stories.
I read a Paris Review excerpt of Aurelia, Aurelia in 2022 and the actual book in 2023. But I’ve had The Girl Who Trod On a Loaf checked out from the library for nearly a year. Embarrassing!