Dear Readers,
A friend told me that sometimes, Sunday Dinner feels old-fashioned. It reads like I am an ex-pat in Paris in the early 1900s writing to my benefactors. Except instead of being in Paris, I am sometimes in Philadelphia (often known as the Paris of the Mid-Atlantic.1
I have been on a Sally Rooney kick. Which I know as a 28-year-old is very cliche of me. I am well aware her books are criticized for being romance novels written for Millennials. But I like them because they remind me of Hemingway and Raymond Carver. They write about doing nearly nothing using as few words as possible. That moves me for some reason. If you have ever read “The Garden of Eden”, it is about a guy living in a hotel, going swimming, and being mad at his wife. And that’s it. But I think about that book at least once a week.
The Atlantic describes Rooney more eloquently than me, saying “With a writer so chary of detail, the reader rushes to fill in”.
I have always had a difficult relationship with details.
In my youth, I was always lying. And a good lie has the right amount of detail, everyone knows that. I mostly lied because I was a bad student– chronically late, allergic to homework, and had the propensity to avoid math class. I needed plausible excuses for my behavior.
But I included too many details. Like, I wouldn’t just say I was sick, I had to have pink eye that I picked up from my second cousin at a BBQ in Minnesota last week. I was never just late., I was late because my house flooded during the night because I turned off the heat and a pipe burst so I stayed home until a plumber came because my mom is a doctor which is more important than the geometry class.
This issue with details extends into my more creative pursuits. I include too many details or too few. Michael, my roommate/f·ancé/head editor, spends half his Sunday trying to get me to be more descriptive and vulnerable in my writing, but without throwing in a bunch of adjectives.2
And in my creative writing, the opposite happens. I get so bogged down with the details, describing every movement of every character like– “She lifted her left hand to the silver door knob, purchased from Lowe’s in the early 2000s. She turned it slowly, thoughtfully…” – that nothing ever happens. My characters are forever stuck moving from one place to the next.
In my “unsuccessful” paintings I get obsessed with articulating all the images and end up leaving nothing to my viewer's imagination, or my own.3
Last week, I went to see the Cecily Brown show at the MET with a few friends. And Cecily is a master of imagination in her paintings. They are packed full of images while being completely abstract, which makes them act like Rorschach tests or eye spy games but a million times more beautiful. They are so amazing because they are the same as Sally Rooney’s writing, leaving all this space for the viewer to fill in.
So, dear comrades and benefactors, I have been obsessing about details. How do you know how many details to include? Is it a God-given talent? Is it something you are born with?
I suspect it has something to do with confidence. When I am afraid that someone thinks I am lying, my anxiety makes me overshare. I start providing every detail possible to assure them that I am honest.
And in painting, when I am afraid someone thinks I am a bad painter, I become determined to paint whatever object perfectly. Every blade of grass is articulated and every line on a fence is exact.4 So the whole world knows I can do it. I can paint5. Even though it ends up killing the painting.
I got into an argument with a professor last semester because he said saying that a painting is dead is antiquated and it is 2023 and we don’t kill paintings in 2023. We had been in the middle of a lengthy discussion about details in my paintings when this came up. He wanted more details but I told him I was too afraid. What if I kill the painting?
Michael thinks that I added more details to this week's newsletter. He said it makes it feel more modern.
As always,
Thank you for reading
What’s For Dinner?
Uber Eats keeps offering me these crazy 2-for-1 deals. We had to take advantage of this. We got take out Rigatoni because we could get two, for the price of one! Even though ordering pasta via Uber felt silly.
a joke
I am always adding too many adjectives. And saying always too much.
But not in a cool way, like how photo-realists paint every strand of hair in a drawing.
I am describing a hypothetical painting here. Like providing an example so you can picture it with more detail.
Abstract painters are the bravest of us all. Like to be Rothko and just paint two colors and drop a paintbrush and walk away… that is confidence.
This was a very funny one
wow