May 24th, 2021 - The Party
Dear TNY,
“The Party” is a fucking triumph.
I’m going to get to why it is, but I’d like to apologize for being two days late on this entry. Normally, I heavily prioritize my Monday’s for this stupid FTNY project. But I got my second vax on Saturday which led to an evening in which I went on a fever-driven spirit quest à la Homer Simpson after he ate Wiggum’s chili. This meant taking Sunday to recuperate which pushed my 1200 mile drive to Monday/Tuesday. And I was motherfucking tired, bruv. I turn 40 this year and it feels, simultaneously, like 15 and 65. So, I’m sorry. I’ll try really hard not to let it slip again.
So, “The Party”. I copied and pasted this story into Word, as I normally do, and when I saw the word count I got mad. Another 8k waste of time. And then I read it. And I loved it. What a fucking brilliant piece of forward-motion writing. The present tense. The short choppy sentences followed by meandering, longwinded things that seem to never resolve their own points. The musicality. The intense detail. The seemingly pointless shit that suddenly becomes very fucking relevant. Fuck, man. This thing drives you to read it. It sucks you right the fuck in. And that’s just the scaffolding, you know? Could be about anything. The “craft” (yucky word, I know) behind this is on point. Propelling.
The story was on point too. There were a handful of occasions where I made margin comments that said, “This is a pointless detail.” But you know what? They weren’t. The first detail that I thought was pointless was how loud the young men were making the party out to be. We get it already, you know? But it WAS fucking loud. The second was the fucking dent in the wall. I was thinking, “Why spend so much time on it?” To characterize the dead husband? Yep, but that was not even close to why the dent was important. Holy fuck did this shit bring the crazy. The one that I really thought was pointless was the whole “bored girl” aside. While I could see it was a narrative tool for self reflection as well as the way to get us to understand that it was not a story, it was a life (“it” being, well, EVERYTHING), I was way too into the stream of this fucking crazy wall climb to care about the aside, so in my eyes it took away from the juggernaut force of this. Except, motherfuckers, IT DIDN’T. Because when this batshit lady starts enlarging the hole on the other side of the wall, who’s there to meet her? The motherfucking bored girl. And that aside also came full circle in the last line of the story, that being “This story I have.” She’s got a fucking story, you know? DO YOU UNDERSTAND?! SHE’S GOT A MOTHERFUCKING STORY.
This whole story felt like it was, in the words of a recently late ( and unfairly late, God; get your fucking shit together and start taking out the right people) and brilliant writer, Sherry Simpson, surprisingly inevitable. As in, this story was always supposed to happen, but I was surprised the whole time it was happening because I never saw it coming.
Goddamn, man. The more I think about this story, the more I love it. It’s everything I shouldn’t like in a story. It’s just an older lady in the house with a cat thinking about her dead husband. That’s a typical plot for you, but in most of your stories about that shit nothing fucking happens. Well goddamn it, TNY. SOMETHING MOTHERFUCKING HAPPENED. And the way it was told, man, I was like, “She’s going through that motherfucking wall, isn’t she. Is she? She won’t. She can’t. No way. Wait, she is. Wait, is she stuck? She won’t be stuck. She wouldn’t make that hole bigger, would she?” And on and on and on. Loved it. It was like a Carver story in that there’s a wacky fucking detail that makes the normal seem insane (I’m recalling the peacock and the ugly baby at the dinner party). And after all that, you hit me when I was completely distracted and exposed. You hit me with: We fucking matter, apart and together.
I don’t know what else to say, my man. I know literature is both an artform and taste. For me, this story works. Like, it WORKS. It’s my taste. I didn’t cry at the end, because this isn’t that type of story, per se (edit: I’m on my fourth or fifth draft of this letter and I am crying now because it IS this type of story and the more I think about it, the more I’m seeing that). But when I finished, I felt like standing up and pulling my headphones off in this café and just screaming, then flipping the table and throwing everyone’s breakfast on the walls and heaving the chairs through the front windows and running into the streets and kicking off all the side mirrors on the parallel-parked cars and dumping out the trashcans and slashing all the tires at the bike shop next door and coming from together, right there in the middle of the road, a fine pink mist to behold.
I’m crying right now because you guys did something right. Because you printed something that validates my existence and ALMOST makes me happy that I have wasted three and a half years doing this for less than five stories.
Do more, man. Do more of this.
Fuck my face. What a morning. This is why I read.
See you next week.
Nick
P.S. When I typed the title for this post, my brain told me to write “The Motherfucking Party”. I restrained myself…in the title.
P.P.S. I didn’t even mention how much I loved that you published something with so much cunt in it. You little scamps. Bravo.
