our readerly ghostship

Dear Lori,

Deliberate study of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling provides a different experience than other reading approaches. While our journey through the novel is not a particularly systematic undertaking, we consider images and themes, sentences and phrases at some length. What I meant to say is: I wonder how my reading experience would differ were we not corresponding about the book. In a video call earlier this week, we discussed our curiosity about the experiences of others who are reading or have read the novel.

To some extent, in its repetitions, catalogs, philosophical musings, and surrealist metaphors, I think the novel’s form might incite a lot of the type of thinking we’ve put to the page even in those readers who never share any thoughts about the book with anybody. Along with it’s ocean imagery, however, it seems possible that those long sentences might wash over a person.

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We’ve quoted liberally from pages throughout Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, but we’ve directed the majority of our attention so far to the first, second, and third chapters. We encounter the bus driver, the two lovers, the fog, and memories of Miss MacIntosh in the first chapter; Vera’s mother and Mr. Spitzer in the second; and Miss MacIntosh in the third. Such a summary hardly does those pages justice, however. It’s a map that doesn’t provide any guide through the many literary allusions, strange ghosts, or competing, overlapping realities. What have our fellow travelers experienced in the early pages of this ghostship in the form of a bus in the form of a novel?

Curiously,
Anthony

Dear Anthony,

How apt that in your letter you referred to the novel as a “ghostship” and shared our mutual curiosity about how other readers might be experiencing it. 

Like being aboard a ghostship, I feel, though I cannot see, the presence of fellow readers, past and present, each time I sit with the text, in awe of its contradictory ephemerality and solidity--how Young illustrates time again that memory is like a spider web, delicate, replete with holes, and yet also substantial in that specific themes and images forever reemerge, refusing to be relinquished.

Each reader comes to Miss MacIntosh, My Darling with their own personal memory palace where, like the sea-blackened house, many ghosts reside. The novel has changed the way that I think about my own memories, no longer so ready to discount or discredit those that seem implausible or unlikely to have occurred “in real life” because the images and ghosts that inhabit them arise in my mind, and that makes them worthy of acknowledgement.

Perhaps other readers have experienced the first three chapters of the novel in other, altogether different ways. In any case we would love for you to share your thoughts in our comments section, even if to tell us that you consider praise of book unmerited. While our readerly ghostship may feel at times like an apparition, we need only hold the novel’s bulky 1,321 pages in our hands to appreciate its insistent physicality.

From the sea’s mist-laden graveyard,

Lori