Grief can strip away everything, crumbling the infrastructure of your life. When a loved one dies or leaves, what was once propping up your life is now gone. The ground is gone. Your rhythm is gone. When grief inhabits a story, the same thing can happen to language. A superb writer can create something unique, and, in the case of Lindsay Lerman’s I’m From Nowhere, devastatingly effective.
In the novel, Claire’s young husband dies and Claire becomes unmoored. The personal loss reverberates with Claire’s awareness of the ongoing destruction of the planet. In pared-down, eloquent prose, Lerman uses simple sentences to capture the neural loops of Claire’s grief-stricken brain.
She’s here in this place—this place where he is not—and she is a widow. She has no husband. She has no job. She has no children. She’s useless. She knows it. She lives in this tunnel of wind and sun and never ending vistas—a fly between the screen and the glass.
It’s as if Claire’s brain cannot think beyond the simple sentence, beyond anaphora (the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of sentences, clauses, or phrases). There is an emphasis on negation, with the refrain “no.” The sense of feeling useless is made vivid and specific with the strong image at the end of this passage.
“The truth is these sentences landed on the page without revision,” says Lerman. “I wanted the book to have emotional honesty and urgency. The short sentences and the fragmentary sentences felt like the best way to do that.”
Lerman was also thinking about how we are all voyeurs, and as such, we never get the complete picture. “Fragments felt like a way to do that—I wanted the book to be honest about that voyeuristic impulse of writing and reading.”
Lerman has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Her dissertation focused on the French philosopher Georges Bataille and his concept of nonknowledge. It’s not hard to see the influence. The novel is populated with short sentences that resemble aphorisms, cutting to the truth or the right sentiment. As Claire looks at the pieces of her broken life, the questions proliferate, and what felt certain when John was alive begins to look arbitrary. There’s a smart mind here, accustomed to getting to the heart of the issue as quickly as possible, synthesizing it, boiling it down. Though Claire might not come up with definitive answers, she finds valuable truths and insights, whittled down so the light on the other side of language shows through and makes the sentence luminous.
At her husband’s funeral, Claire wonders: “How does one perform the depth of one’s sadness?”
Claire describes one of her friends at the funeral: “His intensity is a vortex and it functions like an undertow.”
This is what youth is also for, she thinks, at the funeral, as she is swarmed, offered love: being wasted. Youth is all waste. Pure waste. Wasted energy, wasted beauty, wasted love, wasted everything.
To find any love is to be forever in the debt of beauty, she knows now. It cannot help but transform. It requires bleeding. It always aches. Love is not far from fear.
Instead of indenting paragraphs, Lerman separates her paragraphs by white space.
“I wanted silence on the page,” she says. “When I was writing this novel, I was also working on my dissertation in philosophy and a lot of my textual world was not the standard fiction prose world but the theoretical, which has a lot of different formatting.” Mood and tone create the forward motion in the book, propelling the reader to turn the page. The passages of Claire not understanding are juxtaposed with the moments of clear understanding. A chapter that focuses on the marriage and Claire’s existing relationships is followed by a chapter that swings away from individual lives and to the earth itself. Tension is created by not knowing where the story will go next.
In one section, for instance, the story turns to the collapse of the planet.
Disaster. The long, slow disaster of life now, life here, life then, life there.
The news of the disaster unfolded so slowly, so methodically, over the course of Claire’s entire life, that she and everyone else never knew it was coming. It was never coming, in fact—it was always already there, just growing.
It is hard for organic bodies—no matter how large—to see their own growth.
The section opens with a one-word fragment, “disaster,” which draws sharp focus to this word. The next sentence is mimetic of its content, slowing down the disaster with the addition of the adjectives, “long, slow.” Lerman invokes anaphora, repeating the word, “life,” which is pressed up against the former repeated word, “disaster.” After the white space, she uses a complex sentence that is full of music, “so slowly, so methodically.” After the second white space, Lerman adds the cutting, insightful aphorisms that might come from Claire or from an omniscient third narrator.
I asked Lerman to choose some favorite sentences. Her first selection is from a point in the novel when Claire is having sex with a friend of hers.
Outside this room, the abandoned landscape is littered with abandoned buildings.
Can you slice me out of me? I don’t want this body anymore.
“I like these sentences because it drives home the impossibility of Claire’s situation,” says Lerman. “She’s in a room with Andrew—these are two people trying to find intimacy and escape at the end of the world. The landscape is abandoned, the buildings are abandoned. There’s a starkness to the moment. And really there’s no escape. You can’t be sliced out of yourself.”
Her next selection is from a memory of an argument Claire had with John about placing a TV in the bedroom. She relented.
None of the old categories worked anymore, they were living on borrowed time like everything else, but if they paid close enough attention to the facts of the disaster, they didn’t need to think about it.
“When I reread the book recently, I found this sentence descriptive of our current moment,” says Lerman. “We consume news of unfolding disasters—we’re addicted to it. If we pay close attention to the facts, we don’t have to think. It’s like overeating.”
I liked this sentence, too, which uses a comma splice, connecting two independent clauses together with a comma. The result is speed, which is what the consumption of gobs of information does to the mind—it speeds it up, giving it no time to think.
The last selection is toward the end of the book.
Don’t come back to yourself. Don’t come back to yourself. Don’t come back to yourself.
“This is s a turning point in the book,” says Lerman. “Claire realizes she has to break free or she won’t make it. There’s a lot of loose threads in the novel and strange jumps in perspective, which I considered smoothing out or eliminating, but I also wanted the book to have a mysterious unity.” Holding up one sentence after another doesn’t do this novel justice. The sentences accrue; they pull the reader forward in anticipation of the next one. At once tender, sharp, insightful, and true to the interior reality of grief, I’m From Nowhere is a book I’ll pick up again and again for inspiration, for discovery.