La Nausée

Aug 19
Jean-Paul Sartre (left) and Simone De Beauvoir at la Coupole in Paris, 1969, as photographed by French photographer Bruno Barbey.
Jean-Paul Sartre (left) and Simone De Beauvoir at la Coupole in Paris, 1969, as photographed by French photographer Bruno Barbey.

It’s hard to love Nausea but easy to see why it’s a seminal work. Antoine Roquentin, the protagonist (?), is insufferable. He suffers through life, disgusted with his existence and existence around him. He wallows in the mundanity of being alive, and we get to (have to?) do it with him. Next to nothing happens as he moves from library to cafe, painfully detailing the world around him.

Which is the point. What makes it instrumental is that you feel seen. From the first person, a number of times, Sartre’s descriptions, asides, and observations via Roquentin are the same thoughts I’ve had and that, most likely, you’ve had. In a well-examined life, it is inevitable one would arrive at the paradox of being. And having experienced the void of what it means to be alive, the use of “nausea” to detail its procession from nowhere to comprehensive seizure is unerring.

Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that is all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition. From time to time you make a semi-total: you say: I’ve been traveling for three years, I’ve been in Bouville for three years. Neither is there any end: You never leave a woman, a friend, a city in one go. And then everything looks alike: Shanghai, Moscow, Algiers, everything is the same after two weeks. … The time of a flash. After that, the procession starts again, you being to add up hours and days: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. April, May, June. 1924, 1925, 1926.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Starting Out

Jul 19
Jessica Anthony, author of The Most
Jessica Anthony, author of The Most

I hated it when authors would say things like, “I didn’t know what the character was going to do.” It shattered my belief in fully-formed narratives, that genius is complete, self-contained.

Likewise, I hated it when authors would say things like, “I let the character tell me what to write.” This is hand-in-hand with the above. I wanted Gods; I was getting free will.

I have written a book now, so now I understand where my ignorance was coming from. When making a movie, actors get to use their experience and background narratives in bringing life to the characters. But when writing a book, it’s just you. You have to invent the personas and inhabit them when required in the text. I was ignorant of this before I had to do it.

Ignorance firmly displaced, it now gives me great comfort seeing that other writers just… write, which is what inhabiting the characters is actually about. Start somewhere and let them lead you.

Jessica Anthony wrote a book called The Most, a novel where protagonist Kathleen Lovelace “decides to get into the pool in her family’s apartment complex one morning and won’t come out.” A great hook, and:

I only know that when Kathleen got up and decided to go for a swim, she didn’t know what would happen to her that day because I didn’t know.

Jessica Anthony
Interview with Chloe Norman on The Dirt

It turned into a psychological thriller that shifts perspectives between Lovelace and her husband set over the course of eight hours in a day, but the hook was all the seed she needed to begin.

A friend of mine, Michael Kearns, helped me edit the first few chapters of my book. He’s a writer himself. As he was working with me on my book, he told me over lunch he was inspired but that the only thing he had was one line: “Jesus walked into a bar.”

Less than three months later, he sent me a full manuscript based around that one quip. He didn’t know where “Jesus” was going to go, but he went and Kearns wrote.

I get it now. It doesn’t have to come out fully formed. That’s not how babies work.

Instead, you just have to start.