Oh yes! We are absolutely running a series on bathroom reading! So long as it's taking place behind the closed (or open, if that's the way you swing) bathroom door, we want to know what it is. It can be a book, the back of the shampoo bottle, the newspaper, or Twitter on your cell phone - whatever helps you pass the time...
Today, Sarah Yaw takes it to the toilet. Sarah Yaw’s novel YOU ARE FREE TO GO (Engine Books,
2014) was selected by Robin Black as the winner of the 2013 Engine Books
Novel Prize; her short work has appeared in Salt Hill. Sarah received
an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College ,
and is an assistant professor at Cayuga Community College Central New York .
Confessions of a Bathroom Reader
 |
| My View |
In the bathroom over the last five and a half years, I have
started and not finished the following: Eat the Document, The Collected Stories
of Amy Hempel, The Pale King, The Burgess Boys, that really brilliant article
in The Atlantic about race in America, Ulysses, Transatlantic, Swann’s Way,
Love Medicine, The Pale King, that other really cool Atlantic article about
kindness, Salvage the Bones, The Presence Process, Absence of Mind, Mountains
of the Moon, The Pale King, myriad New York Times pieces (forget the New Yorker),
and any article you posted on Facebook that I thought, Ooh! I want to read
that.
I have 5 ½-year-old twins. The bathroom is a refuge where
for the length of my twins’ lives I have read the first pages of books or a tease
of each interesting article trending in my social networks, but almost never a
whole anything. I try to finish. I decide, I’ll take my reading to the couch,
flanked by watchers of that curious monkey or that cute tiger or those morons
on Kickin’ It, so that I can finish what I started in the bathroom. It almost
never works. They always ask for juice. It’s all fits and starts. The bathroom
remains my best hope. And yet…
 |
| their view |
Have you ever tried to go to the bathroom with young kids
around? I have used the potty, a word I now reflexively use because I’ve become
an idiot in certain aspects of my life, with not one but two babies on my lap.
Never have I ever gone to the bathroom and not told my kids where I was going.
Never have I ever arrived in the bathroom and not been asked in a yelling voice
from a very far corner of the house, “Mama, where are you?” “Mama, what are you
doing?” “Mama, are you done?” “Mama, mama, mama, mama, mama. I forgot what I
was going to say, but where are you?”
I always spend too long. You posted something wildly
exciting, and I got lost in it or I made it to page two in Swan’s Way, and then
the thundering footsteps, the busting open door and…
I'm semi-informed. I know just enough to know what's going
on, but not enough to feel included in deeper cultural conversations. This has
lead to a general sense of interruption. This has lead to an ongoing lack of
satisfaction. This has resulted in a state of stoppage, which I can tell you is
no way to leave the bathroom.
The best days are poetry days, when one of you reposts a
poem of the day and I have the time to read it, reread it, let it resonate and
lift me up before, well, you know. On those days, my daily constitution is
given a rare sense of completion, and I’m told I have a spring in my step, a
certain glimmer in my eye.
No comments:
Post a Comment