A HORSE AT NIGHT

How one writer reads.

Making her nonfiction debut, novelist Cain offers a spare, graceful meditation on her rich, idiosyncratic reading and her practice of writing. Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver, Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, Adam Gopnik’s Winter, and Annie Ernaux’s The Possession are among dozens of works (a bibliography is appended) that have inspired Cain’s thoughts about identity and authenticity, language and landscape, solitude and friendship—not least, the trust and vulnerability that complicate human-animal relationships, such as hers with her three cats. It was Marguerite Duras’ The Ravishing of Lol Stein that inspired her to write fiction when she found herself unable to stop thinking about Duras’ central character. Regarding her craft, “of all the forms language can take, the sentence is the one I’m most drawn to,” she writes. “I want to leave a chain of images that remain in the reader’s mind. I want to write what heightened experience feels like.” Cain is excited by the idea that she might “haunt” her sentences so that “the reader might be taken over subtly.” Her sensibilities, though, have changed as she has gotten older: “I have more fears than I had when I was younger; I am more rigid; and there has been a loss too of the freedom I once felt, when the world seemed entirely open, and utterly beautiful.” How, she wonders, will these changes—and changes in the world, too, including climate change and the pandemic—affect the novel she is working on now? “I want to be able to write about loneliness, humiliation, and shame, things I never would have written about before, that would have embarrassed me,” she notes. “For a long time I didn’t want to write ‘emotionally’…there has been something valuable for me in exploring the emotionless.” Cain ties her development as a writer to her engagement in zazen meditation; in stillness, she was able to listen for her voice.

An intimate recounting of a literary life.