For Now

July 15, 2020
Personal digressions and lyrical ruminations from an award-winning writer. In the latest entry in the publisher's Why I Write series, lecturer, poet, novelist, performer, and art journalist Myles offers candid, peripatetic reflections on identity, vocation, and, not least, place. The author recounts a protracted struggle to stay in their tiny, rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan's East Village, home for more than 40 years, after the landlord insisted on a buyout. "The city has taught me almost everything I know about language and existence and being a writer," Myles reveals. Besides paying homage to the grit and textures of Manhattan, the author creates a palpable portrait of Marfa, Texas, where, after a brief visit, they bought a house. "Texas felt great because it was deeply unfamiliar," writes the author. Around 1997, Myles began to sense "something I think of as the archival moment, and before I sold anything I already started to feel the creeping value of the past and the new place the past was playing in the present." A crisis occurred when Myles lost a box destined for the archive; searching for it involved two psychics, a hypnotist, and astrologers until Myles eventually gave up. The archive--without that box--resides at Yale. Of choosing a career as a writer, the author admits that in their 20s, "I discovered that to be real was an interior project" that involves "a kind of aesthetic experience I believe that precedes the work so that you kind of fail into it finding your style and content and opportunity all together at last and that's happened enough times for me to believe that that's my process." As for gender identity, "I'm so obviously a lesbian," Myles writes, "I don't even call myself a lesbian anymore. I say queer, or trans. I say they but none of that matters." A sharply etched, unvarnished self-portrait.

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