Trying to Be
A Collection
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
With lyrical precision and aching intimacy, Trying to Be moves through history, memory, and the performance of ephemeral identity, as John Haskell assembles a quiet manifesto for how to think, how to live, and how to feel ourselves in our bodies.
Trying to Be is a book about presence, absence, and the intricate art of inhabiting one’s own life. John Haskell—known for his genre-defying literary voice—moves through a series of intimate, sharply observed portraits: Francis Bacon and his doomed lover; Danny Kaye and his split personality; Sophia Loren; Diego Velázquez; Ulrike Meinhof; and Yvonne Rainer’s radical reinvention of what dance can be.
But this isn’t cultural commentary as ornament. These figures mirror Haskell’s own attempts to grapple with grief, estrangement, memory, and the failures of language. The result is a book that blurs the line between criticism and confession, art history and personal inventory. Whether recalling a botched friendship, a beloved mentor, or the carefully choreographed movement in a dance workshop, Haskell searches for new ways of becoming—through art, through awareness, through stories that have the quality of song. In prose that’s quiet but unflinching, Trying to Be asks: What do we do with our bodies, our memories, and our regrets when even language feels exhausted? And what happens when, against the odds, we keep going?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Haskell (Out of My Skin) ventures into nonfiction with this slim but potent volume. He begins by reflecting on the work of painters Francis Bacon and Diego Velazquez, both substantive subjects he handles with gravity, but through a series of turns ends up describing a class he took to learn to perform Trio A, a modernist one-person dance by choreographer Yvonne Rainer. It's an intriguing portrait of someone (in this case, Haskell) skilled in one medium trying their hand at something very different, and from there Haskell unveils the book's true aim: reckoning with how to live a creative life. As he writes, "I understand the necessity of constraint, that wanting is one thing and not getting what you want is a fact of life, but still. I want my life to expand into moments that aren't just reiterations of what I already know." Haskell offers further observations on the works of filmmaker Mikio Naruse, actor Sophia Loren, and playwright Bertolt Brecht, which begin to converge with Haskell's own life in a deeply moving segment about his late aunt, who wrote a biography of Keats during her retirement. His aunt, he shows, possessed the courage to change course, and he recalls their many conversations centered on "the process of becoming a person." The result is an unconventional and quietly eloquent rumination on what it means to live well.
