“Do you only write when you’re a little drunk?”
In this edition of the Weekender: reading Proust, the French Open, the volcano that changed the world, and a tribute to Edmund White
This week, we’re reading the classics, going on dates, watching the French Open, and tracing the fallout of a volcanic eruption.
BOOK REVIEW
A great read
Celine Nguyen recounts how reading Proust made her fall in love with capital-L Literature—and makes a persuasive case that the Great Books aren’t just important or impressive, but genuinely fun to read.
No one told me about Proust
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inIn 2022, I decided to spend the year reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. At the time, I knew nothing about Proust:
a bourgeois, assimilated French Jew who spent much of his life at the salons and society events of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, ingratiating himself with aristocrats and artists alike;
a practitioner of anti-work avant la lettre, who—when his father insisted he pursue a profession—chose to volunteer at a public library, never showed up, and extended his sick leave for years;
a neurasthenic who, in the last three years of his life, locked himself up in a cork-lined apartment, ate an unbalanced diet of coffee and 1–2 croissants a day, and became largely nocturnal;
and the writer of a 3,000-page book that is, arguably, the greatest novel of the twentieth century.
I’d left college without taking a single literature class. Instead, I learned how to program and use Photoshop. So no one told me—I’d somehow missed this!—that In Search of Lost Time was a masterpiece of modernist literature. (I didn’t know what modernist literature was, either.) No one told me that it was famously difficult and exhausting to read. All I knew was that Lydia Davis—the queen of the very short story, the grand dame of American flash fiction—had once said:
“You can write three thousand pages (as Proust did in In Search of Lost Time) and still be economical.”
I read Proust because I wanted to understand what Lydia Davis saw in him. And from the very first page—with that deceptively, winsomely ordinary beginning: For a long time, I went to sleep early—I was charmed [. . .]
For the next 291 days, the novel accompanied me everywhere. I brought vol. 1, The Way by Swann’s, on a train from San Francisco to Los Angeles; and when I needed a reprieve from Charles Swann’s obsession with Odette de Crécy (one of the most successful sugar babies in the literary canon), I would rest my eyes by looking out into the arid Californian landscape, which was now layered over with scenes from Madame Verdurin’s salon, where Swann and his lover would meet. I brought vol. 4, Sodom and Gomorrah, on a vacation to Milan—and, lying awake after my friends had gone to sleep, I would indulge in Proust’s descriptions of the night:
“The moon was in the sky now like a quarter of an orange, delicately peeled but with a small bite out of it. Later it would be made of the most resistant gold. Huddled all alone behind it, a poor little star was about to serve as the solitary moon’s one companion. . .”
And during the day, as I observed the unfamiliar faces of strangers on the metro, I could read about the young Marcel’s brief, instantaneous crush on a woman on the train:
“I have never again met nor identified the beautiful girl with the cigarette. We shall see, moreover, why for a long time I had to leave off searching for her. But I have not forgotten her. It often happens that when I am thinking of her I am seized by a wild longing. But these recurrences of desire force us to reflect that, if we wanted to meet these girls again with the same pleasure, we should have also to go back to the year in question. . . We can sometimes find a person again, but not abolish time.”
Everything about In Search of Lost Time was extraordinary—beautiful and funny and remarkable and strange. It was like nothing I had ever read before. I was enthralled. I was also upset. Why had no one told me that Proust would be like this?
FOOD
ROMANCE
Dating diary
In the midst of a crowded week, Julia Harrison uses vivid details to evoke the quiet thrill of a new romance.
Unknown legend
—
inI have one free night that week—Monday. He meets me at The Fly, and afterwards we see Irish music at Hartley’s. I talk about my life as destined to a 5-figure salary and high-APR lifestyle. He seems relaxed. He says I’m always bringing up “my three kids.” When we kiss later, he doesn’t feel like a random person anymore. I walk him to my door late that evening and he turns around twice to kiss me again before leaving. His mouth tastes like how your room smells when it’s sunny in there all afternoon.
Later that week he’s in my bed singing “Turn the Car Around,” and insists I sing the harmony to “Linger” when he plays it. Seventh down in his liked songs on Spotify is Paramore’s “Ain’t It Fun.” I like all his tattoos and I don’t have to lie about that. When he gets dressed I notice he’s not only wearing jorts he made himself but also he’s cut his button-down so little threads hang off the bottom.
In the morning, I woke up early, pressed my face to his arm and fell back asleep like that. When we walk outside, the weather is beautiful. He says so loudly: “GOD. TODAY RULES.” I use it as an anecdote when I’m trying to explain him. I say also that he’s a “chatter,” “so hot,” and that when I mentioned “that artist who lived in a glass box for 100 days or something,” meaning Marina Abramovic, he said: David Blaine??
He has literally no sense of the macabre. We spend Sunday in the park together. I punch him in the arm when he abbreviates nature to “naich.” Every time we pass someone in the park playing Spanish hip hop, he knows all the words. We sit on a tree trunk for an hour. He says to me: you’re always seeing dead birds.
I get a Pilsner and he gets a Michelada. I mispronounce Michelada. The bar has printed out the Sunday crossword and for one of the clues he says: okay, I know it’s misdemeanor but I don’t know how to spell that. I ask if the US has its own soccer teams and he says: that’s an insane question. I tell him he has a surplus of joie de vivre and he says so do I, which I think is such a nice thing to say because I kind of think that but expect other people not to think that. When he speaks Spanish I try to guess what he’s saying and when I get it wrong he laughs and kisses me.
You’re finally experiencing a dynamic of: black cat to golden retriever, Maureen says, and not: Mom to whatever fucked-up cigarette you’re dating.
PAINTING
SPORTS
Tennis
Hailey Grohman considers what makes the French Open so fun to watch—from the chalky drama of clay courts to the Cinderella run of French underdog Lois Boisson.
French Open
—
inTennis is summer, tennis is pathos, tennis is hubris and folly and the whole emotional spectrum filtered through two (sometimes hot, sometimes children of billionaires) athletes. Tennis is Serena Williams overcoming prejudice to become the forever GOAT, and it is also Nick Kyrgios telling a line judge that he is “a snitch who has no fans.”
Of the majors, Roland Garros has emerged as my favorite to watch. Australian, though it kicks off the tennis year and inspires feelings of warmer weather, is basically impossible to watch due to the time difference. Wimbledon, despite its satisfyingly crisp lawn lines, has kind of an off-putting colonize-y vibe to me. Why does everything have to be white? Why do we have to eat cream when it’s hot out?
The US Open has historically been my favorite given its proximity, but the last few years it’s felt more like a playground for aspiring Rolex bros and their West Village girlfriends. As soon as I learn how to make a Honey Deuce at home, it’s over for my relationship with that tournament.
But the French! Clay, with its chalky texture that shows every point and leaves its residue on the players, feels like the most poignant surface. It’s a unique challenge for players, especially Americans, and can sometimes feel like a third competitor on the court, throwing everyone off their game. Additionally, the remonstrations of the umpire seem more soothing in French. Merci, madames and monsieurs, silence s’il vous plait. . . (as my dad would say: those French have a different word for everything).
All this, combined with the lack of Hawk-Eye, make Roland Garros feel more organic and genuine somehow. It’s like how I imagine Disneyland Paris is much more tasteful and refined, with Ratatouille giving out cigarettes.
It may be that I’m just riding high off the past two days of incredible upsets by French underdog Lois Boisson, who beat #3 Pegula and #6 Andreeva back-to-back to reach the semifinals despite being ranked #361 and having ACL surgery just a year ago. As a member of the ACL community, I am finding this extremely inspiring. I will be channeling her while I do my PT after surgery next month.
Boisson (us French minors just call her Beverage) has shown incredible poise, power, and reach in this tournament. Without much of a backhand due to a shoulder injury, she is constantly racing across a wide-open court to return shots, sliding in ways that give me phantom knee pain but seem to be effortless for her. Her frightening Michelle Obama biceps are generating an insanely fast serve that looks like a baseball slider (I am new at sportswriting!).
She has clearly invigorated the French crowd, normally kind of reserved [with] ennui, into such a frenzy that they were basically openly bullying 18-year-old Mirra Andreeva. I don’t condone it, but it makes for an electric match. It even outstripped the energy that the crowd had literally any time Monfils hit the ball a few days ago. The French have taken some Ls lately (Le Slap) and it’s nice to see them succeed.
Boisson likely can’t extend her Cinderella story past her semifinal with Coco today, but this brief underdog supremacy is obviously what is so exciting about the major tournaments. Nothing is more fun than devoting your life to a buff child that you had never heard of a week ago, then forgetting them again. Sort of like the Olympics!
SOUND EFFECTS
IN MEMORIAM
Remembering Edmund White
Garth Greenwell recalls his first meeting with Edmund White and reflects on the literary and personal legacy of one of the most influential gay writers of our time.
On Edmund White (1940–2025)
—
inI had been dreaming of him for a long time. There’s no gay writer whose career Edmund hasn’t influenced, even if they don’t know it: he made all of us possible. I read his work for the first time when I was sixteen, newly arrived at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan; I found it in the old-fashioned way, by searching the card catalog. That was one of the first things I did when I got to Interlochen, a rite of passage that hadn’t been possible in my public high school in Kentucky: flipping through the cards until the subject headings began “Gay--Fiction” and then reading through the books one by one. Like most people, I started with A Boy’s Own Story, Edmund’s great novel from 1982. I read it avidly, not least because much of it takes place in Cincinnati, not far at all geographically from where I grew up. (Culturally it was a different world: Cincinnati is incontestably (to us, anyway) Midwest; Louisville is the South.) Kentuckians fill some of the novel’s stickiest, funniest, saddest pages: farm boys who cross the river to make a little money in exchange for sex, including money from the novel’s adolescent protagonist.
I had already read Giovanni’s Room by that point, but here was gay life happening not in glamorous Paris but dowdy Cincy; a radical thought. Still, another book of Edmund’s was even more important for me—a new book in 1994, which I think I found in a bookstore in Traverse City: The Burning Library, a collection of Edmund’s reporting and cultural criticism, a brilliant overview of the gay cultural scene. Impossible to say the impression that book made, with its profiles and reviews of Hervé Guibert, Marguerite Yourcenar, Darryl Pinckney, Michel Foucault; it gave me a kind of map to gay intellectuality, a field guide to the territory I would spend the next decades exploring. With the possible exception of Colm Tóibín’s Love in a Dark Time, which came out several years later, I’m not sure any book had a more profound or lasting impact on me as someone who would, though I didn’t know it yet, eventually make my way as a writer.
So imagine what I felt as we crossed the street to introduce ourselves, as he stopped and acted like he had all the time in the world, like nothing could be so delightful as talking with us. I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone so charming; and part of his charm was making you feel he was always happy to see you. I never saw Edmund be anything other than kind, to anybody; though it’s also true that he could be withering, devastating, in the things he said when somebody wasn’t around. The things he said behind their back, I guess you could say, though that sounds petty in a way Edmund never seemed, maybe more than anything else because of his style: gossip is a gay art, and Edmund was its master. (If his letters or diaries are ever published, I’m pretty sure we’ll all be toast.) In any event, he seemed perfectly happy to be accosted by two youngish gays in the street, and honestly probably he was—if only because my friend was glamorously beautiful, and Edmund had a weakness for beauty. But he was lovely to me too, and quickly he had us laughing to tears. I loved your novel, he said to me, in that voice that was fruity, expressive, still midwestern but tinged by Europe, steeped in another generation’s gayness. How do you write so lyrically, he asked; and then, with perfect earnestness, he really wanted to know: Do you only write when you’re a little drunk?
Praise with an undertow; I fell in love.
PAINTING
HISTORY
Creative fallout
The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora triggered a global climate catastrophe, unleashing death, disease, and widespread suffering. But as Stephanie shows, the fallout also sparked unexpected innovations—in agriculture, medicine, meteorology, public health, painting, and the birth of Gothic literature.
The Year Without Summer
—
inDuring that tragic year of 1816, those not immediately concerned with the business of death and survival found themselves inspired by the apocalyptic weather conditions gripping the world. Paintings from the time depict skies of vibrant red and golden yellow, consistent with what we know about the appearance of atmospheric ash. Today, landscape paintings from the Tambora years (1816-1819) serve as our best understanding of what the world looked like during that harrowing time.
On the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816, a renowned circle of English writers bemoaned the loss of their vacation to constant, intense storm activity. Shuttered inside their summer home, Percy and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and other friends gathered by the light of candles in the absence of the midday sun.
To pass the time, the group read from a collection of German horror stories until it was suggested that they each pen their own in a sort of horror story contest. Inspired by blinding flashes of lightning over the lake, Mary Shelley developed the story that would later become Frankenstein.
The Shelleys’ literary circle would publish a breadth of work in the years of Tambora’s fallout. During that summer, on the balcony of his Lake Geneva home, Lord Byron penned “Darkness,” a poem detailing apocalyptic horrors witnessed at the end of the world. Much of “Darkness” reflects the world that Byron saw beyond his balcony in 1816: the disaster, the famine, the calamity, and of course, the darkness. The poem begins:
“I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation; and all hearts Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light. . .”Though Tambora’s sulfuric clouds would dissipate around 1819, the horrors of their three-year stratospheric presence would completely change the course of history, bringing about great leaps in the fields of agriculture, meteorology, and public health.
In 1820, the very first weather charts would be created in response to the lack of widespread weather reporting during the Tambora years. By 1835, when the electric telegraph was invented, weather reporting became more regular and more widely disseminated. Ten years later, German chemist Justus von Liebig would develop mineral fertilizers in order to prevent a famine like the one he had lived through as a child.
PHOTOGRAPHY
What we’re watching this week
Tuesday, June 10, at 6 p.m. ET
Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and Peabody Award-winning “Gen Z historian”
breaks down today’s headlines by interviewing experts, uncovering hidden histories, and connecting the past to the present to explain how we got here. This week, Kahlil will go live with a Cold War professor from Yale to discuss the attacks on academic institutions and the history of anti-intellectualism.Wednesday, June 11, at 12 p.m. ET
of will be going live with of to discuss why your future depends on getting curious.Substackers featured in this edition
Art & Photography:
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The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.
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Well, haha no, but it's great for creativity and I find it best (for me) to table it for the next day to re-edit my writing, sober. I had noticed it, I had made alot of mistakes.
Being a little drunk is funny but soberity is heroic.
Cheers, to knowledge!
Writing and drinking is one of life’s great pleasures