In every beginning writing class that I’ve ever taken, I hear the advice, “Write what you know.”  This sounds good, but it doesn’t always work.  Often, you get so close to your subject, you can’t see the forest from the trees  On the other hand, you can try to distance yourself from your subject – to remain objective – and you lose feeling for what you are writing about.  This week, I just completed Rachel Kushner’s book of essays, The Hard Crowd.  It’s her third book I’ve read this year.  This one is a collection of essays she has written over the course of twenty years; she opens her life for her readers.  Her writing reminds many of the great Joan Didion.  Rachel puts herself right in the middle of the action and reports what she sees.   Her other books I have I read were novels: The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba. In these two,  I was never clear where Rachel was being Rachel, and/or where she was inventing an entirely new universe.  In Telex, Rachel names one of her characters, a stripper and double agent… Rachel K.  In Flamethrowers, her protagonist is a young motorcycle rider who wants to be an artist.   But here, in The Hard Crowd, Rachel speaks to the neighborhoods and people she knew growing up.  I was and never will be part of her “Hard Crowd," but  it’s San Francisco – the Sunset District.   I’ve been down more than a few of those streets in the Sunset.  I have known the types of people she describes.   The writing is more up-close and personal.   In the last chaper, Rachel tells us,  "I'm talking about my own life. Which not only can't matter to you, it might bore you."  Not me!  This was a GOODREAD!

Of course, I loved reading the first chapter of The Hard Crowd. The title is “Girl on a Motorcycle.” Rachel writes about her own participation in the Cabo 1000 motorcycle road race.  I remember fondly a similar chapter from my reading of The Flamethrowers.  When Rachel was 24-years old, her dream was to ride her Kawasaki Ninja 600 the thousand miles from the California border town of San Ysidro (across from Tijuana)  to Cabo San Lucas along the tip of the Baja Peninsula.  In a car, the trip would normally take four to five days through extreme weather and poor driving conditions.  The Mexican pockmarked highways don’t match the standards you would see in California.  Neither do the Mexican drivers.  Motorcycle riders were obligated to slow down as they passed through small towns and villages, but not suprisingly, few did.  It all seems so incredibily dangerous.  To make the run in less than 24 hours, Rachel and her fellow competitors tried to maintain average speeds over 100 m.p.h.  By noon, Rachel hit 142 miles per hour on the longest uninterrupted straightaway along the Transpeninsular Highway.

My favorite part of the chapter may not have come from the race itself, but Rachel’s description of a French movie that gave her inspiration for the title of this chapter: Girl on a Motorcycle, starring Alain Delon and Marianne Faithfull.   I know Alan Delon as the father of Nico’s son. Nico is the Ice Queen from the avant garde sixties group, the Velvet Underground.  Marianne Faithfull is famous for being Mick Jagger’s one-time heroin-addicted girlfriend.  In this movie, Marianne plays a frustrated housewife of a school-teacher husband until Delon gifts her a Harley Davidson.  When  she begins a sorted affair with the womanizer Delon,  she knows she’s going to be abused and manipulated, but she doesn’t seem to care.  It’s the bike that is more important.  It gives her freedom she has never known.  She spends much to the movie cruising the French countryside wearing a tight leather catsuit (apparently with no underear).   The movie descriptions provided in this chapter help us understand Rachel’s excitement for the race.  The risk involved is transformational.  Rachel says the experience of being on a motorcycle makes her feel like she has always wanted to feel:  “kinetic, unfettered, and alone.”

Rachel may be wild and free on the motorcycle, but behind the keyboard, she is is keen and observant.  She is so SMART.  In “Girl on a Motorcycle,” she shares the year-long preparation for her one-day Cabo 1000 road race.  She details the charateristics and performance of her bike.  I mean, it’s on her to anticipate the potential of any and all problems before they happen:  like the selection of  tires, auxillary gas tanks, face shields. She knows in this type of race, no one is going to stop to help her if she becomes stranded along side the road.   Her writing is AUTHENTIC.  She knows her bike like she knows her art.  Later in the book she writes with the same passion and insight for some of her favorite authors: Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Marguerite Duras and Clarice Lispector.  I was pleasantly surprised to see many of her favorite authors are my favorite authors.  It’s just that I don’t have the knowledge and insight to understand their writing on the level she does.  I have also had motorcycles in my life, too, but I never had her grasp or courage for exceeding 100 m.p.h on the highway.

  Not too long ago, I discovered a Lispector short story collection in the UABC bookstore here in Mexicali.  I can't tell you why I bought her book att he time, but here is my thinking now: About the same time my grandparents were fleeing Jewish persecution in 1920’s Eastern Russia, future author Clarice Lispector was doing the same.  Her parents had desperately tried to contact relatives in both the United States and Brazil, but only those from the latter country responded.  At age two, Clarice emigrated to Brazil with her mother and father.   On one hand, it’s fun to think what would have happened if she became an American writer. On the other, the story is not very pretty. Before the escape, her mother was raped by Cossacks  and rendered paralyzed for the rest of her life. Clarice was born with the name Chaya – this means “life” in Hebrew.  Clarice grew up healthy and strong, but her mother passed away when she was only nine. What a sad start in life.  Upon landing in Recife, the family changed all their names to hide their Jewish roots.  Pinkhas, the father, became Pedro.  Mania, her mother, became Maria.  And Chaya became Clarice.  Later Clarice would write, "I lost myself so many years ago that I hesitate to try to find myself again… They gave me a name and alienated me from myself.“

Rachel writes about Clarice Lispector in a chapter titled "Lipstick Traces."  Clearly Rachel's writing takes inspiration from Clarice's.  According to Rachel, Clarice had a "diamond-hard" intelligence, a visonary instinct and a sense of humor that veered from naif wonder to wicked comedy."  Rachel readily admits she felt Clarice was talking to her. I believe Rachel may have adapted much of Clarice's style into her own narrative.  This woman, Clarice, is disassociating.  She has lost everything that matters to her.  She’s stripped of her identity.    Maybe through the experience of watching her mother suffer and die at a young age, Clarice developed a writing style that pushed her characters up against what they didn’t understand and never would.  She has said her goal was to avoid generating meaning where there was none. Clarice’s stories are as cruel as they are complicated, but as a descendant of East Russian immigrants,  these are stories I deeply care about.

I bring this up, for I just read Calrice Lispector’s novella La Hora de la Estrella, the sad story of a factory worker name Macabéa fro Alagoas, Brazil.  This is the state where Clarice’s family first lived when they arrived from Eastern Russia.  Macabéa is nineteen, and has  nothing to her name.  No money.  No family.  No understaning of the way the word works.  To begin with, Macabéa has never learned the concept of love.  She was raised and abused as an orphan by a curel aunt.  She is all on her own in the slums of Rio de Janeiro – all vunerability, no charm.  Probably the saddest commentary on her life may be her dependence on Radio Reloj.  It seems everything she knows comes from commercials in between songs.  It speaks to the disconnect with the people around her.  The meaning she gets from her radio only makes her feel lonelier.  She is completely lost and doesn’t even know it.

This book is a hard read.  I wish I could explain the secret to Clarice’s style of writing but I can’t.  Here I suppose she uses an alter-ego as narrator to tell us the story; Rodrigo SM I shis name, and he is writing his own book based on Macabéa.  Every other page or so, he interrupts the flow of the narrative to interject his own sadness, frustation, and/or confusion.  His troubles in writing become our troubles in reading.  Because Ricardo is rich, highly-educated and male, he has no idea where he is going or what Macabéa is about.  We have to reach back to Clarice to know what is in Macabéa’s heart.  Clearly, having grown up on the same streets, Clarice feels that she could easily have ended up with the tragic, doomed life of her protagonist.  Macabéa is anonymous.  If she fell of the face of the earth, no one would notice.

Why am I devoting so much time to Clarice?  In reading Clarice, I see the writer that Rachel aspires to be.  Clarice Lispector was a beautiful woman who wrote about people we don't normally see or want to see.   According to Rachel, Clarice was a writer that looked outward.  As far as I know, Clarice wrote little about her family's dangerous and ardous journey to escape Russia. She would not have received much of a grade from a writing professor who taught her to  "write what she knows."  Instead, her writing reflects about cultures, and subcultures, and worlds that don't necessarily have anything to do with her life.  Instead, Clarice followed her own curiosity.  She took the dangerous path of writing about what she didn't know.  She joined the Hard Crowd.  In her collection of essays, many of the friends that Rachel most deeply admired suffered violent and/or tragic consequences.  Bikers she rode with. Bartenders she worked with.  Classmates she went to school with.  Like Clarice, Rachel writes about the people we turn our backs on: drug addicts, prison convicts, people who die.   On her pages, she reveals a world we fear to enter on our own.