Found Texts
on envy and alternate dimensions
My notebooks are filled with ideas for stories, scraps of stories, first sentences, first paragraphs, first pages. I have hundreds of these fragments floating around in various notebooks, buried in drawers, tucked behind books on the shelves all over the house. There are many more hidden in files on old computers I can no longer access. Oh, yes, my fragments of stories go back to the days of floppy disks, and before that to typed pages in manila file folders. Quite a few of these found texts are about found texts.
If I recall, I was influenced twenty years ago by Richard Flanagan’s gorgeous book, Gould’s Book of Fish. (I forgot entirely about Flanagan for many years but recently stumbled upon his newest book, Question 7, at a bookshop in London.) When I taught in MFA programs, I often had students do a found text exercise. I find it gets you outside of whatever story you think you’re supposed to be writing, whatever style you think you’re supposed to be writing in. When your narrator finds a text, you find a different voice. It’s liberating.
Anyway, here’s a fragment I stumbled across while searching my current laptop for something else entirely. The title of the piece is “Envy.”
Thanks to a book I found in a second-hand shop on Boulevard Haussmann, I know there exists a way of traveling to another dimension. The fondness the author exhibited for such travel went back to his youth, when by chance he had found himself in his own town, with his own mother—but with a different man serving the role of father, a different sibling, a different house, and an entirely different family dynamic.
As it happened the mood of the house in that second reality was rosy, nurturing, lighthearted, the polar opposite of the mood in his home of origin. Instead of a brother he had a sister. Instead of a narcissistic mother he had a nurturing one. Instead of a large house in an affluent part of town he had a small house in a noisy, poverty-stricken part of town, and yet that small house was superior in every way, because inside its walls he found peace and fellow feeling.
Intending to return to that unhappy original family only long enough to explain that he was living “elsewhere” now, and would see them on the other side…well, you can imagine.
He returned “home” to say his goodbyes, but never again could find his way back to that happier reality which he had experienced briefly, a reality which made the sadness and bitterness of his original home all the more difficult to bear. For now he knew what could have been—indeed what was, in a place fully real yet inaccessible to him. How he longed for bologna sandwiches and store brand ice cream at a dinner table filled with laughter, rather than the fine steaks and excellent deserts served joylessly, in silence, at the home of origin. How he longed for the stepfather, boisterous and kind in his oil-spattered work clothes, when he looked at his original father, so stern in his well-cut suits, so dismissive of the mother.
The author lived with the knowledge of the happier place and therefore could never quite muster the momentum to vastly improve his relationships and circumstances, forever envious of that other version of himself for which happiness came so easily. Envy, the book I’d found that August afternoon on Blvd. Haussmann, was a tragic memoir of these choices, written in the author’s later years.
That’s it. As I mentioned, it’s a fragment. Nothing more. I lived right around the corner from Boulevard Haussmann, in a Haussmann apartment, on the noble etage. Boulevard Haussmann sounds a little fancy, I guess, but in truth it’s extremely noisy. Living on Boulevard Haussmann drove Proust to despair. Before Blvd. Haussmann, he lived on Rue de Courcelles, directly across from my building. His family’s apartment was also on the noble etage—or the French second floor, which is the third floor by American count—and was named such because it was low enough to be less hot and not to require quite as many stairs, but high enough to be off the street.
All of this only to say how I came to be writing and not finishing a story about a bookshop on Blvd. Haussmann.
If you enjoy this post, you might also enjoy reading London Diary: Michael Fassbender and the National Day of Patti, over at my travel/writing substack, . Paid subscribers to Fiction is My Love Language also receive a complimentary paid subscription to The Wandering Writer.
What an awesome little story to have found. Sometimes we might wish our origins were different and if we only could have gone back to an alternative beginning reality to find our wishes from regret granted even briefly. Clearly this author had the courage to spill the beans on his situation even if later in life. There are all sorts of thoughts that might appear to one but the writer of this gem of a story has just the right tone. Thanks for finding and posting it.