I was newly twenty-two when I came across Mary Robison’s novel Why Did I Ever. It was 2004, the book a few years old. Earlier that year I’d started a job at an independent bookstore in Olympia, Washington and was frantically trying to read every book in existence. I’d never had much guidance through my reading. My family members weren’t avid readers of literature, I never had a cool English teacher in high school, I dropped out of college. Though I’d been blowing through books in my late teens and early twenties, I still felt behind.
Every day a coworker or a customer, often both, would recommend a book, and the store’s fifty-percent employee discount made it so that, five days a week, I came home with a new used book in hand. The stacks beside my bed swiftly multiplied. And although they were filled with books I was supposed to read—The Corrections, The Plot Against America, books I’d been assured were important—a part of me felt like these important books already had enough readers. So instead I mostly read oddball books that I’d come across while reorganizing a section, or ones that passed over the buying table, books no one had recommended.
One day, in a pile of remainders, I found a book with something that resembled a gallery wall on its cover: slight color gradations, a frame around a rough-edged red square, a school-intercom speaker in the top corner. Inside, the book had 536 numbered sections, some a few paragraphs long, some just a sentence or two. I bought it immediately, read a handful pages on my lunch break, and quickly fell in love with its narrator, Money Breton, an ADHD-addled Hollywood script doctor in her mid-40s with a pharmaceutical drug habit, an adult daughter with a methadone addiction, an adult son recovering from being held captive by a sexual predator, three ex-husbands, a lost cat, the I.R.S. on her porch, a boyfriend she thinks is stupid, and a best friend she can barely stand. She’s an insomniac who spends her nights driving around the American South, yelling at semis, buying things at all-night stores, getting lost.
Those early pages were a whirlwind, a beautiful exercise in bewilderment. Through Money’s point of view, the simplest actions became skewed, the world new again. “Now he and I are watching some men with a ball,” she tells us. “No matter the shape or size of the ball, what team or for what country the men fight. The TV is showing men with a ball so we’re watching.” (8)
She was like an odd, jaded child, simultaneously seeing everything for the first time and the thousandth time. “I get lost driving back and do the same exits and merges for hours and hours. I wonder if an aerial view of me might be fun to watch.” (10)
Early on I learned that, with Money, the line between truth and reality is flexible. Part of the fun of reading the book is imagining where that line lies. “That ex I heard was arrested for stealing food. Maybe I only dreamed it. It’s what I tell people anyway.” (6)
I tried to share my excitement with my roommates at the time—graffiti artists who smoked weed every few hours and DJed experimental electronic music—but they didn’t understand what was interesting about a book of apparent non sequiturs narrated by a middle-aged woman. We spent many of our nights at the Rib Eye Steakhouse, a small 24-hour diner on Olympia’s ugliest thoroughfare, just a short walk from our house. I read most of Why Did I Ever there. Staying long after my friends had headed home, I savored the book, unsure why I was so captivated by this strange, fragmented work.
For years, I held the book dear, often referencing it in my mind. A decade later, I read that Why Did I Ever was written on notecards, and I said to myself Of course it was written on notecards! It made so much sense; it should have been obvious. I read it again, thinking it might be less impressive now that I knew its “trick.” But instead, I felt it was even better with this knowledge—all of this, I said to myself, this big world, just from notecards. A year or two later I read it again to help me reimagine an off-kilter young adult novel I was working on. And while I didn’t rewrite the book on scraps of paper or make my narrator less reliable, the simple act of reading it put my mind into a different mode of viewing the world and the page, allowing me to get past some of the genre conventions I’d been working within. Each time I reread Why Did I Ever it was like the first time—I was newly excited, surprised by lines I’d surely read before but had no memory of. Why Did I Ever was something of a dream state, I decided—the act of reading it transcending the text itself.
*
Counterpoint Books is reissuing Robison’s complete catalog—four novels and four short story collections—and I’m reading it all. Some I’m rereading, some I’m reading for the first time. Like any completist venture, the why of this project is hazy and unclear. Maybe it’s because, even amongst my writer friends, it’s rare that Robison’s name rings even a distant bell. But largely, I think it’s simply because she’s a particular type of hit-and-miss writer that leaves me wondering, baffled by why their work works.
While Robison was lumped with authors like Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Frederick Barthelme, and Ann Beattie—fellow so-called minimalist writers of the late ’70s and early ’80s, known for their defamiliarized tales of modern domestic life and frequent appearances in the pages of the New Yorker— my mind has always placed her next to writers whose work helped me, as a young adult, see what was possible on the page while also making me question what it means for a writer and a book to be “good.”
My mind puts Robison next to Gertrude Stein, Richard Brautigan, and Grace Paley—writers who don’t share a lot of obvious traits. But they all immerse their reader in an uncommon way of viewing the world. And all have, in every one of their books, a rather large number of moments where I have to ask myself what makes this work special. To me, these writers are hit and miss not from book to book, but from line to line. While most of them are known for their fastidious, almost obsessive editing practices, all of their works contains moments, lines, and scenes I can’t believe made it past the author, or any editor, let alone a team of editors. But all have prose unlike anyone else’s prose and create an experience unlike anyone else, and I know I’ll be rewarded if I forge through what I see as the lesser moments. And I hold these writers in higher regard because of their flaws. The blemishes make both the writers and the work more real, slightly closer to earth, something I can reach out and touch.
I thought reading Why Did I Ever in 2019 would be different than reading it in 2004. Or different than when I reread it a couple years ago. In recent years, book-length fragmented narratives have become so common and uneventful that their accumulation has begun to feel a little taxing. I still love and appreciate them, but I’m rarely surprised or stunned by them in the way I once was.
I was wrong. Why Did I Ever is a unique dream state, an island of its own that doesn’t read like any other fragmented narrative. Sure, it’s as rough around the edges as its narrator, and it has a few brief cringe-inducing moments, but on this read I saw how each short section—even the ones that hadn’t landed on previous reads—were building up the character that is Money. She doesn’t feel like just a clever voice Robison is playing with; she feels real and alive, her many traits adding up to one of the best unreliable narrators in all of literature. This read also highlighted that—especially for a book written on notecards by a writer who famously cares little for plot—Why Did I Ever is a well-plotted book. On first glance it might seem genre-less, or genre-bending, but it’s a novel, through and through. A good one.
I realize some will read Why Did I Ever, see a book that contains all-caps lines like, “CAT WITH ITS HEAD TRAPPED IN THE BASKET HANDLE!” and question this fawning. And I get that—not everyone will find something special within. But during this, my fourth time through, I came to see lines like “CAT WITH ITS HEAD TRAPPED IN THE BASKET HANDLE!” not just as Robison being goofy, but a line representative of Money’s daily dramas: something funny when told, but just another stressor in the moment, piling onto an already impassable mountain of stress. I hear the blood pressure rising in that line, the sheer exhaustion. I think all that is there if you want it. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s just silliness for silliness’s sake, but to me it’s a way into her mental health, a moment that says, I’m trying, but there’s just so much.
*
Why Did I Ever came after a decade-long silence from the author. Not only did Robison not publish anything but, as she told Nathan Ihara in 2002 for an L.A. Weekly profile, “I didn’t have anything. I had nothing, and I really didn’t know if I ever would again.”
Saying the book was written on notecards is only partially true. It was the product of what Robison called, in that same profile, “the great tradition of writing in cars,” the result of her “driving around and screaming into the tape recorder.” Ihara writes, “Robison worked on Why Did I Ever in her now-deceased Honda, recording thousands of microtapes, transcribing them [onto notecards] with an electric typewriter plugged into her cigarette lighter; for illumination she positioned her ‘moon-roof’ under street lights. She had all she needed: a/c, music, ashtray, zero interference.”
In that profile, Robison talked about the anguish of the years leading up to the book. “When I was young and heard about writer’s block, I thought, ‘Oh, they’re just doing other things, and they’re busy, busy, busy.’ All that is true, but then there’s the real thing: You’re balling it up 26 times, and just weeping. It’s about pride, really; feeling the words on the page can never represent you. It’s the worst thing you can learn about yourself. You could go mad. It’s a paralysis that I pray on my knees never visits me again.”
I feel this is palpable in the prose: Money’s desperation mirroring Robison’s. I read the section that says, “So I give up. Yes, I am stupid. I just start saying anything—weather/ballgame/read your horoscope/cowlneck/car mileage things about no one, for no one. Lint, really, from my mouth and into the air” and I hear, not just a momentary lack of conversational skills, but a personal and professional definition of self slipping away. Maybe Why Did I Ever works because—on both the character level and prose level—it feels just shy of giving up, of no longer caring what anyone else thinks.
*
While I was drinking two a.m. coffee at a bad diner in 2004, being transported by Robison for the first time, the world around me was beginning to crumble. One roommate moved out and ran off with my ex-girlfriend, another walked away from the nonprofit publishing company we’d been running together, another told me he was in love with me, and our dynamic was forever altered when I said I wasn’t in love with him. During this time of emotional trudging, the book felt right, the perfect companion. Money Breton’s life was nothing like mine, but hers was the voice I needed to hear right then. She reminded me of my mom’s friends—rural women with gravel voices, loud personalities, and cutting humor. Money was an auntie telling me to buck the fuck up. Telling me that there was no way things would work out, but it was okay because nothing works out.
My favorite moment on that first read was when Money tries to check herself into a psychiatric hospital, facing a doctor who won’t admit her. “I want to explain a few things before I finish here. ‘This,’ I say, pointing at the area in front of me, ‘is not my real life. My real life is still coming up. It’s just a matter of my digging in. I won’t have this hair, for one. I’ll put better magazines out. Drink juice. Take stuff to Goodwill. Get the car tuned. That, there, will be my real life.” (60)
These words gave me some sense of perspective—made my problems seem smaller, easier, funnier. And all these years later, they still do. When I need it, I point at the ground a couple paces ahead, and claim it as my future, the life I will lead. I’ll have some extra money, I say. I’ll move out of the basement, I’ll get control of my chronic illnesses, I’ll be in a relationship, things will be okay. It’s kind of a joke and kind of not.