“People change, but there really are limits. One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life. We are children for a very long time.” —Adam Phillips
What’s in our Spring issue? Interviews with Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips; a visit with Evan S. Connell; fiction by Zadie Smith, Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, and Bill Cotter; poetry by Dorothea Lasky, Carol Muske-Dukes, John Ashbery, and Frederick Seidel; and a portfolio of previously unpublished photographs by Francesca Woodman. And we haven’t even put the issue to bed yet!
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Adam Phillips, 2004.
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Adam Phillips, The Art of Nonfiction No. 7
Interviewed by Paul Holdengräber
I had no idea how to write a book. I had never had any desire to be a writer. I wanted to be a reader. So, I thought, what you do is, you do all the research, which I did, and then you take a month off and you write the book. So I took a month off work, and for literally three and a half weeks, I did nothing. I sat around drinking coffee, reading the paper. I just couldn’t do it. It was really terrible. And it was exactly like the way writers talk about writing. Which is a feeling that I really wanted to do something and had a lot to say and I was a blank. It was as though there was nothing inside me, so I could no more write a sentence than I could stand on my head. It was absolutely impossible. No amount of willpower, no amount of resolution, determination, conversation with my friends made it happen. But it was as though, at a certain point, something literally got me to the typewriter, and I started typing. It just never stopped. It had a grip on me.
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The Sad Thing
John Ashbery
He has a lazy father in Minnesota.
I hope you never have to do this in life, with its crazy little darkened
rooms. People are standing, an accurate jumble. Famille rose happy campers.
And if the water tastes funny, she must be pretty young. That came from a tree.
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To the Lake
Luke Mogelson
There was zero legroom in the rear of the Jeep, and with my hands cuffed behind my back it was most comfortable to sit sideways, leaning against the door. As we eased down the mountain, the deputy would not shut up. He hadn’t wanted to arrest me, he’d explained after administering the Breathalyzer, and now it was like he was trying to make amends. At one point, maneuvering a tight bend, he said, “Year ago, gal got decapitated here. Rolled her Benz with the sunroof open. I was the one found the head—believe that?” He glanced up to observe my reaction in the rearview mirror. “Guess you’ve seen worse. Me? That was definitely a first. Head sittin’ there in the bush.” Several minutes later, the deputy looked in the mirror again. “I had to carry it back to the bus,” he said—and then, misinterpreting my silence, the deputy clarified, “That poor lady’s head.”