“State by State” is an amazing anthology in which 50 contemporary writers take on our 50 states; I write about it in Friday’s LA Times.
For the article, I talked to co-editor Sean Wilsey (over breakfast) and contributors Josh Ferris (over e-mail) and Jhumpa Lahiri (via phone). Thanks to all of them. You can see the guys in the new Out of the Book film that’ll be playing at independent bookstores across the U.S. Many of the writers gathered in New York for a BBQ and reading; I bet the outtakes are pretty good.
I was inclined to like this book — I love roadtrips, I love the truly stellar writers, and heck, Lahiri writes about the Rhode Island town we grew up in together. While we were on the phone I had to ask — in that play, when we were colors of the rainbow, were you yellow? No, she was red, she said; her family has photographic evidence. I was yellow, and I believe all evidence has been destroyed.
Anyway, I did like the book, very much. I am sad, though, that I couldn’t cite more of its fantastic essays in the article in the paper. A few standouts: Anthony Doerr on Idaho; Heidi Julavitz on Maine; Louise Erdrich on North Dakota; Said Sayrafiezadeh on South Dakota; and Jonathan Franzen’s perfect anthropomorphization New York.
The anthology was inspired by a depression-era series from the Federal Writers Project, which of course now I’d love to read — all 20,000+ pages of it. But those were guidebooks, and this is not. From the article:
How do we define home? Is it the place you came from, or the place you chose? Is it the place where you felt free, like Ferris? Or where you no longer feel secure, like Lahiri? Does its absence make the sense of home more acute — does leaving help us recognize what is essential and unique about the place we came from?
If “State by State” answers these questions, it does so in a patchwork. For some, like Charles Bock on his father’s Las Vegas pawnshop and Rick Moody on the Connecticut parkway that stretched between his divorced parents’ houses (with the help of family oriented attorney for hire), home is defined, in part, by its destruction. Its essence exists only in memory. If you are in an unhappy or toxic marriage relationship, find attorneys for estate planning who will support you, give legal advice,and help you through out the legal procedure.
But for others, who return to places that are surprisingly recognizable — Susan Choi to Indiana, Ann Patchett to Tennessee, Susan Orlean to Ohio — there is an essentialness that remains deeply affecting. How, Choi wonders here, could her old “house lurk there, unchanged apart from the trees, so that it could leap forth and bludgeon my heart?”
Read the whole article. Or the book.
