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Too Much and Not the Mood

9780374714680 fc
Paperback, FSG Originals, 2017
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Durga chew bose

Durga Chew-Bose

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One of Vulture's "25 of the Most Exciting Book Releases for 2017"

One of Nylon's "50 Books We Can't Wait To Read In 2017"

An entirely original portrait of a young writer shutting out the din in order to find her own voice

On April 11, 1931, Virginia Woolf ended her entry in A Writer’s Diary with the words “too much and not the mood.” She was describing how tired she was of correcting her own writing, of the “cramming in and the cutting out” to please other readers, wondering if she had anything at all that was truly worth saying.

The character of that sentiment, the attitude of it, inspired Durga Chew-Bose to write and collect her own work. The result is a lyrical and piercingly insightful collection of essays and her own brand of essay-meets-prose poetry about identity and culture. Inspired by Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Lydia Davis’s short prose, and Vivian Gornick’s exploration of interior life, Chew-Bose captures the inner restlessness that keeps her always on the brink of creative expression.

Too Much and Not the Mood is a beautiful and surprising exploration of what it means to be a first-generation, creative young woman working today.

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An excerpt from Too Much and Not the Mood

3: Miserable


Pronounced miz, as in Ms. magazine. Uh as in an expression of hesitation. And rull, as in rhymes with dull. In my family, when someone is miserable, we say miz-uh-rull. We say it like this because, as a kid, I couldn’t pronounce the word miserable. The B sound eluded me. I couldn’t push beyond that second syllable and form the last two: the ruh. The bull. It was as if I was encumbered by the word’s very meaning; too dejected to complete it. miz-uh-rull, it turns out, was my very own, self-styled onomatopoeia. What ever inextricable despair I was experiencing at the age of three, it outdid me. Some babies, once born, remain unready. Despite our smallness we are in possession of a lair of apprehension, chambered in order to lodge how estranged we feel when someone, say, tosses us a ball. Or expects from us pure jubilation the first time we encounter a Slinky. As a child, a Slinky stalled on a flight of steps caused me acute stress. The way it would cede to its coils—sometimes pause and appear to levitate— and then fail, abandoning all momentum. I couldn’t cope with the suspense. In photographs, my little hands are holding each other tight, or gripped around my wrists like clamps. Concern, far beyond my scope, was compacted into me. 

There’s something about a distraught child that is instantly significant. She gets it: the world is often ten seconds away from tasting like cold french fries. The world can assert itself like a category-3 shitstorm of major letdowns, and minor ones too, which I’ve learned are harder to make peace with because they are somehow inexpressible. Averting one’s attention; reacting unreasonably with no tools to recuperate; seeking sanctuary in the company of friends, who are also unprotected from feeling wrecked; mending on an empty stomach; experiencing life as if you’re watching it from behind a shoulder-high wall—ducking when it’s too much, peering over to discover more, both wise to and oblivious of everything out of view, rashly tossing your effects over the ledge and starting over with nothing. The illusion of nothing, that is. There’s no suitable language for feeling adrift when on paper you seem all right. Arguing with yourself into becoming someone else is next to impossible. And then the world disappoints. And no amount of interpretative power could have prepared you. 

Perhaps I’m still too young to have ideas occur to me. Perhaps I learn and then forget. I’ve Googled many times what poison ivy looks like and I still can’t identify it. Perhaps I’m still unready to conceive of a life entirely my own because I’m preoccupied with the quality of blue in pictures of my parents before I was born. At twenty-nine—that cusp, almost craning, turgid age—I so badly miss hearing, of all things, my father fill the dishwasher, precisely, just as he’s always done. Or how he still yells into the phone when he’s speaking long- distance, to an uncle in India. How expressions of deep love in Bengali somehow boom throughout the house like disagreements might in English. 

And what about life’s near-invisible blips: those private ones like an email from my mother at 9:04 on a Thursday morning. “Just saying hi,” she writes. I know she sent it from her computer, in her study, sitting at her desk of papers where, I imagine, in order to press the enter key, she has to brush aside the corner of a loose page— maybe her class schedule or minutes from a meeting. My mother’s papers are overgrown. A jungle. My mother’s Just saying hi is meant and sent with every atom of her mother brain, body, heart. She misses me. A mother’s lowercase hi is catastrophic. It’s the apple grabbed from the bottom of a pyramid display. I hadn’t meant to be hungover on a Thursday morning, and yet. The culpability that accompanies daughterhood—while it might fade over the years—never fully lets up. I’d estimate even, it reestablishes itself. A whole planet of worry that’s working in collusion with that part of my gut trained to fear the absolute worst when someone leaves a voicemail or when a friend texts “K.” 

When I search the word miserable in my inbox, most of the results are from friends who’ve had colds. Who were writing to say, “I can’t make it to night.” Miserable, in these cases, connotes the purely physical. A runny nose and fever, a sinus infection. The morning after a bad bout of food poisoning. Miserable meaning a weakened state. 

Then of course there is the quality of being a deplorable person. It comes up in my inbox with regards to men. Miserable men. In one email, I mention to a male friend how a movie I’d recently seen is centered on miserable men. I go on to complain that there aren’t enough movies about miserable women, but I’m careful to distinguish how miserable women are fundamentally different from unlikable women. In the email I sound superior, as if I’m trying to impress this male friend, who I’ve now come to realize is perhaps one of the most miserable men I’ve ever met. I’ve since decided that miserable men, unlike miserable women, are, in fact, unlikable too. 

In 2009, one friend uses miserable while Gchatting with me. It’s a Monday and she’s recapping her Friday night. My friend describes how she spent the night overcome with jealousy, having thought she saw her girlfriend flirting with another woman. My friend tells me how she felt “miserable and then crazy for feeling miserable.” This, I’ve decided, is an excellent use of the word. Feeling miserable is, by nature, a spiraling condition. Almost antigravity despite its Eeyore gloom. It’s a looping state with that touch of screwball. Miserable, I’ve decided, might be the most good-humored way to characterize being in a bad mood.

My father, however, uses the word miserable differently than anyone else. In an email from long ago, he worries, for instance, that my brother is making a “miserable salary.” Or that the bathroom in the apartment I’ve applied to live in is “just miserable.” When he writes, It’s your decision, he means, What are you thinking? 

In 2012, he keeps me informed about my mother’s sister’s cancer treatment. The chemo she’s undergoing leaves her feeling, he says, miserable. When your mother’s big sister feels miserable—the aunt who’s made and custom-decorated all the birthday cakes for all the cousins, dyeing shredded coconut and piping buttercream roses—there’s really nothing to be felt, because your entire body becomes a wound. In the hospital, in bed, not wearing eyeliner or her glasses, she probably looked lost. 

It’s clear to me when my father says miserable, he means it in a way that makes me wonder if I learned it, all those years ago when I was buckled into my OshKosh overalls, from him. If you’ve ever had a sad parent, then you’ve grown up learning how to perceive sadness when it’s being expertly concealed from you. When it occurs merely in how someone needs to conjure spare strength for basic tasks like pushing his arm through his winter coat sleeve or needing to sit at a slight remove from those other parents huddled close on the park’s bleachers during a match. You’ve not so much witnessed sadness but sleuthed it. You’ve absorbed it, and, without understanding what it is, you might even mimic it. You’ve acquired a capacity for providing conciliatory silence. So silent even that one day on the way to work, my father, who every day dropped me off at day care before heading to the office, completely forgot I was sitting in the backseat. When he pulled into his parking spot and turned off the car, I said, “Baba, no day care today?” 

He turned around and gasped. When I consider the context, there is a measure of charm to this piece of my childhood. Miz-uh-rull sounds less like an adjective and more like a collective noun. Like a miz-uh-rull of stalled Slinkys. Of wet basset hounds. Of empty seats, front row. Of stale restaurant rolls. Of introverts at orientation. Like a miz-uh-rull of Knicks fans. Or a miz-uh-rull of tossed Christmas trees on the sidewalk, well into January. A miz-uh-rull of—they can’t help it—tuba players. A miz-uh-rull of tents in the rain. Dogs during fireworks. Delayed passengers at the gate. A miz-uh-rull of self-help books in the “ Free, Please Take” pile. A miz-uh-rull of tangled necklaces. A miz-uh-rull of boarded-up storefronts by the beach. A miz-uh-rull of friends at a party listening to Whitney—she gets us moving, she’s voltaic, a flash storm in D major—only to abruptly and quite mutually all feel the wrench of Wow, she’s really gone. All of a sudden, you’re a miz-uh-rull of friends listening to Whitney Houston. 

The other day I was FaceTiming with my father and stepmother. I can’t be sure what we were talking about, but it was evening and I was sensing, more so than usual, the current of daughterhood. It sneaks up on me when I can spot in the background, perimetered by my screen, their umbrella tree, for instance, and how it reinvents them, outside of me. Living their routines, watering their plants, going about their days. The phone will ring at theirs and it’s Ray. Who is Ray? 

After we did some catching up, I could tell my parents were about to turn on the television and watch the news, so I said—though it wasn’t true—that I was meeting a friend. I pushed my face closer to the screen and waved like a maniac to suppress those tears that aren’t tears, exactly, but a warming of my face, because my body reacts disobligingly, and confounds goodbye with just bye. Though I’d hoped to say, in jest, in some wimpy grown-daughter way, how this evening I was feeling vaguely miz-uh-rull, the call was already over. They’d pressed end, and the rude slight of my face was reflected back to me. How is it that coming upon one’s likeness, my own face, can feel like an unsolicited affront? Vulgar. A harsh blow, not just to my vanity but also to my personhood. My screen-lit contours—somehow soupy—and the blunt quiet in my apartment were, momentarily, impassable. Those seconds that followed the call were a miz-uh-rull of seconds. A reminder of how damning too late can feel.

  • "[Chew-Bose] traverses the mazes of [mental] pathways like a brain archeologist, returning with shining fragments of memory . . . which she places next to, on top of, and inside of critical observations and feelings. In Too Much and Not the Mood, she is also a skilled analyst, articulating precisely concepts of daughterhood, friendship, and solitude . . . But Chew-Bose also allows herself to meander—to explore, as we all do in our most private moments, how her mind associates the immediate and the corporeal with the otherworldly."

    Vrinda Jagota, LitHub
  • "A collection of delightfully insightful essays . . . Whether Chew-Bose is riffing about her own difficult-to-pronounce name or dead squirrels, the bounty of the book lies below the surface, in the subterranean underworld of each essay. . . Chew-Bose seems to pay close attention while everyone else races ahead to the next thing, and she's generous with her findings. "

    Amanda Stern, Interview
  • “Our generation has no one else like Durga Chew-Bose: a cultural critic who isn't afraid to get personal, a romantic nostalgic with a lemony twist who applies her brilliance to life as it is currently lived. It's a profound and glorious relief to encounter this book.”

    Lena Dunham
  • “Durga Chew-Bose is our artist of beautifully distracted attention. Her sentences are like a procession of stills from the films she loves so much: each is a field of vivid color; a fraction as worthy of scrutiny as the whole; a delivery system for poetry as well as plot. To read Chew-Bose on Allen Iverson's annoyance, or on a premonitory twinge in the gut, or on the joys of living alone, is to be convinced—and, in the end, grateful—that good writing is a kind of sight. Chew-Bose sees unfailingly well. Too Much And Not the Mood is a stunning debut and, to me, the perfect paperback—it is the work of a mature and individual mind, insistent on the personal as well as the coolly philosophical, crafted to be carried around in pockets for years to come.”

    Vinson Cunningham
  • "This sharp and astute debut essay collection reveals a young author who is wise beyond her years and whose keen eye moves beyond tired tropes about identity struggles . . . brilliantly eloquent . . . [Chew-Bose] is an expert assessor—of moods, of situations, of her own writing, and her relationships . . . Her ample talent and keenly observed essays will surely win her followers, especially at a time and place when authenticity is a rare and much-valued currency."

    Poornima Apte, Booklist (starred review)
  • "I admire the fine and detailed quality of Durga Chew-Bose's prose, and her modesty of ego, which lingers in the mind. These essays are a refreshing contrast to those loud and showy voices, which are so common. One wants to lean closer to hear her."

    Sheila Heti
  • Too Much and Not the Mood is a tremendous comfort and a transporting experience. Durga Chew-Bose’s stunning prose elevates the subtleties of existence to a sphere that is both otherworldly and painfully recognizable, offering a panoramic view of her whole heart and mind. She is sure to leave her readers stunned.”

    Tavi Gevinson
  • "This sharp and astute debut essay collection reveals a young author who is wise beyond her years and whose keen eye moves beyond tired tropes about identity struggles . . . brilliantly eloquent . . . [Chew-Bose] is an expert assessor—of moods, of situations, of her own writing, and her relationships . . . Her ample talent and keenly observed essays will surely win her followers, especially at a time and place when authenticity is a rare and much-valued currency."

    Poornima Apte, Booklist (starred review)
  • "A warmly considered meld of criticism and memoir, a self-portrait of the writer as intrepid mental wanderer. [Chew-Bose's] enthusiasms for art, literature, movies, friendship, and family life are as broad as they are deeply felt. This is a book to slip into your pocket for company during a day of solitary walking." Alexandra Schwartz, New Yorker "If you admire Maggie Nelson’s ability to combine the personal and the academic into a thrilling new art form, Durga Chew-Bose will be your next favorite writer. Her remarkable debut essay collection touches on art and literature and pop culture, but also feels intensely intimate, filled with stunning insights both large in scale, and small." Maris Kreizman, Vulture"Too Much makes looking seem extravagant, and in Chew-Bose's hands looking is a tool for cultivating intimacy with the world . . . This is a form that turns the vulnerability inherent in being a woman of color into strength and constructs connections between things that we rarely think of as connected . . . The dissonance Chew-Bose brings to the table has never felt more necessary." Ismail Muhammad, Slate "When the world seems to be on fire, intuitive essays that focus on miniature aspects of the ordinary-everyday can serve as a balm. Chew-Bose turns all her associative musings into a melancholy self-portrait of the highest order . . . Her sentences show tremendous promise, coming as close as language can to how it feels to be alive as a young woman, at a time in your life when every detail matters." Anita Felicelli, San Francisco Chronicle"[Too Much and Not the Mood] is a skilled and evocative contribution to a genre that has long frustrated definition by critics and practitioners alike . . . Chew-Bose’s collection bristles with slow and tender inquisitiveness, carefully wrought anecdotes and character studies, devotion to detail, and nuanced structure in which form engages with content." Emily LaBarge, Los Angeles Review of Books"Chew-Bose is one of our most gifted, insightful essayists and critics, and her first collection of essays is bound to contain a wealth of her singularly lyrical and profound prose, as she meditates on topics like identity and art, as well as culture and belonging. [Too Much and Not the Mood is] a must-read" Kristin Iversen, Nylon"This slim collection of essays ushers in the start of what will hopefully be a long run of books by essayist and critic Durga Chew-Bose. Picking apart art and literature and blending it with observations from everyday life, Chew-Bose could make even the grayest day seem beautiful and fascinating." —Rolling Stone"[Chew-Bose's] first book is already earning her comparisons to the likes of Zadie Smith and Lena Dunham . . . In this lyrical collection of personal musings, she delves into the connections between identity and culture from the perspective of a self-reflective, first-generation Indian-Canadian living in Brooklyn and writing for a living. This book's worth of poignant pieces from someone so talented and self-assured is well worth your weekend." Carolyn L. Todd, Refinery29"A collection of delightfully insightful essays . . . Whether Chew-Bose is riffing about her own difficult-to-pronounce name or dead squirrels, the bounty of the book lies below the surface, in the subterranean underworld of each essay. . . Chew-Bose seems to pay close attention while everyone else races ahead to the next thing, and she's generous with her findings. "

    Amanda Stern, Interview"Too Much and Not The Mood comes as a welcome reprieve at a moment when personal essays are often cloyingly concrete. . . Chew-Bose’s writing complicates and unravels takeaways . . . The writing, while concise, is beautiful. [She] approaches the word essay less as a noun and more as a verb. . . Chew-Bose is a writer who will last, because she has the interior reserve, the collected goods, she has spent the time and filled the well, a well that she can draw from, for as long as she feels so the mood." Anisse Gross, The Rumpus"[Chew-Bose] traverses the mazes of [mental] pathways like a brain archeologist, returning with shining fragments of memory . . . which she places next to, on top of, and inside of critical observations and feelings. In Too Much and Not the Mood, she is also a skilled analyst, articulating precisely concepts of daughterhood, friendship, and solitude . . . But Chew-Bose also allows herself to meander—to explore, as we all do in our most private moments, how her mind associates the immediate and the corporeal with the otherworldly."