Indebtedness, The Green Dress, and How We Come to Books We Love

"In defiance of everything, Miranda bought a green dress." This is the first sentence in a story called "The Green Dress," which is in a collection by Kristjana Gunnars titled, The Guest House and Other Stories. I was rearranging books on a shelf, and this one fell into my hands, literally. The red door on the cover made me look at it again more closely - I had been thinking, daydreaming really, about red, about doors, portals, passages, about the way books will appear, openings, opening, out of the blue. I was thinking about how I open books - usually nearer to the ending than the beginning. This book was published in 1992, and I must have read it shortly after it came out but I don't remember it making a huge impression on me. Not in the way that Gunnars' books, The Prowler and The Rose Garden did, and later her book on writing, Stranger at the Door. I was fortunate to have Gunnars as a professor in my undergrad, for both a creative writing class and for an honors English tutorial. I appreciated her demeanour, the calm and careful distance she kept. In spite of the distance, or maybe because of it, I felt a connection to her and her writing has since been a source of inspiration for me.

I reread "The Green Dress," amazed really, that I hadn't been more taken with the story then, as I am now. The book with the red door on the cover, opened immediately to the story of the green dress. Maybe I can see why it didn't enter into my bloodstream when I first encountered it. It's simply written, understated, sharp. Miranda shops at the West Edmonton Mall, which is also where I shop, where I did shop. I would have likely thought then that the mall was not worthy of being in a short story. Probably the character, Miranda, who is "six thousand dollars in debt" and who is pondering a dress that "cost seven hundred and eighty-two dollars" but decides in the end that "one thousand more or less did not seem to her to matter," frightened me. I saw myself in her.

Maybe when I read the story of the green dress now, I'm able to read it knowing that I escaped being Miranda, knowing that I carry a Miranda inside me. But I'm also coming to the story, to Miranda, having read The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector several times. It was through reading books by Gunnars that quoted Lispector that drew me to this particular small book. In the dedication to the book (how I love Lispector's dedications), she says: "It is an unfinished book because it offers no answer. An answer I hope someone somewhere in the world may be able to provide. You perhaps? It is a story in technicolour to add a touch of luxury, for heaven knows, I need that too. Amen for all of us." And then the book begins, the first sentence: "Everything in the world began with a yes." The 'girl' in The Hour of the Star is named Macabea, and she "found consolation in being sad." She is a typist who lives in poverty. She likes coca-cola, has a "passion for horror films and musicals," and she has taken up with a boyfriend who is a rat. They have things in common, Macabea and Miranda. Miranda drinks coffee from "Cookies by George" and would like to go to La Boheme, but opera is out of the question given her budget. I don't find it a coincidence that both of their names begin with an M.

I passed over the story of the green dress many years ago, hardly thinking about it. And now I can't get it out of my head. I keep coming back to it. The image of the dress itself, floats around in my mind. I think knowing that this sort of thing happens (it's happened to me before often enough) is what makes me reluctant to review books. The cadences of a book, of a writer, may not be accessible to one at certain times. We are not where the book needs us to be.

And then, all of this has got me thinking about how we find those books we love anyway. Sometimes it's through a review, but for me, it's more often that I find a book through another book. Or word of mouth, a recommendation by a friend, or on a blog. Those books we need tend to appear by rather more mysterious methods I've found. I know several people who have talked about meaningful books that have literally fallen off a shelf into their hands or onto their path. Of course, I've most often worked in libraries or bookstores, so this will increase the odds of such things happening.

If I hadn't read The Rose Garden and other books by Gunnars I don't think I'd be writing the sort of thing I'm writing currently. It's not that it's really like The Rose Garden in any way, but that Gunnars' writing illuminated certain possible paths for me. And then, this book also affirmed things that I'd been thinking about how to read (and isn't reading the most important part of writing?). Gunnars says, "It occurred to me in this summer of reading, that the whole idea of "reading" is suspect. We think that to read is to sit down with a book, scan its pages word for word, finish it, and put it away. That is a consumer model of reading, and that is the one we have." Up until I read this, I think I felt twinges of guilt about the way I often read books - not always front to back, but dipping in and out, returning to them again and again. Maybe this mode of reading has to do with how we read as writers.

All this really to say, that I'm indebted to Kristjana Gunnars, to her books. In an essay in Stranger at the Door, called "Theory and Fiction," she writes, "If a text is an apprenticeship to other texts, it would be natural for it to reflect its influences, to make them transparent and to show a certain self-consciousness about its own genesis and process. In doing so, the writer can acknowledge a debt that is owing." She also talks about an 'honest' writing and this is exactly the sort of writing one finds in "The Green Dress."