On our recent trip to San Francisco - which is what we finally decided to do for Matt's birthday - we made our requisite stop at the City Lights Bookstore.
Have you ever gone book shopping with Matt? It's sort of ridiculous. Growing up, spending large amounts in a book store was my thing. But he takes it to new levels. He will stand in front of every display, check out every "staff pick," and by the time I wander back to him, he's got a stack of four or five books ready to take home. It's to the point where I rarely ask what's in the pile. And at City Lights, where it was stuffy and I was holding a jacket, a sweatshirt, a scarf, a hat, a purse, and two books of my own, I didn't ask.
We were in the back, by the stairs leading up to the Beat section (a section in which I spent an embarrassing amounts of time when I was in my 20s). Suddenly, I saw a book by Miranda July, one of my favorite directors/writers/modern artists. It was about the trouble she had writing her second movie, "The Future" and how she procrastinated by interviewing people who put ads in the Pennysaver. I added it to my pile. Matt took it out of my hands and returned it to the shelf and then showed me that the book - "It Chooses You" - was already in his pile, a present to me for taking him to San Francisco.
I read it in the plane on the way home. It's about everything. About writing, about wondering if you're good at what you do, about trying to connect with people who have nothing in common with you, even a bit about movie stars (very indie movie stars).
It reminded me a lot of when I wrote these articles called Passages about people going through a major life change - mostly weddings. I did it for one, maybe two years and interviewed hundreds of people about how they fell in love. They were very intimate, personal stories and it often felt strange, like a privilege and also like I was imposing, to hear them.
This book reminded me of those times.
