Life of a Star by Jane Unrue
This was our playroom now, shared bedroom too. Those walls that had been mine were ours now, papered in a faded floral, seams and corners peeling, bubbled in some places, cracked. On every wall a stitchery picture: scenes from storyland were also faded. Soiled. No glass. Frames: chipped-off painted wood. Threads pulled in places, evidence of little fingers that can’t keep from touching, pulling—as if doing so could take a body out of this and into that: round wooden door to mouse’s tree-trunk house; white wicket gate set in the background of a garden overgrown with purple blooms; enchanted cottage all but hidden in a forest thicket; green-and-ruby turret window that, despite the ravages of time and all those dirty little fingers, still appeared to be enough to make a castle glow. And in that decorated room that had been mine but now belonged to us, the place in which unpleasantness seemed not just possible but downright inescapable, I told her stories with more stories stacked on top, all set in carefully described locations peopled with the characters I represented and the objects I pretended (on behalf of characters) to see, pick up, and operate.
(Read more of this excerpt from Jane Unrue’s recently released novella, Life of a Star, on Ben Marcus’s blog. The book can be purchased from the publisher, Burning Deck.)
Tags: Jane Unrue, Life of a Star
i read this book earlier today. it’s quite unusual and powerful
i read this book earlier today. it’s quite unusual and powerful
Thanks for this, Evelyn, and esp. for We Were Eternal and Gigantic, which is those things, and quite those things as well. (Blake, have you read The House? I thought of it reading Ever.)
Thanks for the kind words, Nat.
I also thought of The House while reading Ever, especially how, in The House, the narrator’s body seems to become part of the house, like in these sentences from page 26: “I remember breasts like tiles. My pubic hair a tile, my lounge chair floated by a wall of glass bricks, apparently just switched on behind a staircase, although the staircase, unlike the wall of glass bricks, which was always in the same place in the lake, was not itself ever in the lake.”
Thanks for this, Evelyn, and esp. for We Were Eternal and Gigantic, which is those things, and quite those things as well. (Blake, have you read The House? I thought of it reading Ever.)
Thanks for the kind words, Nat.
I also thought of The House while reading Ever, especially how, in The House, the narrator’s body seems to become part of the house, like in these sentences from page 26: “I remember breasts like tiles. My pubic hair a tile, my lounge chair floated by a wall of glass bricks, apparently just switched on behind a staircase, although the staircase, unlike the wall of glass bricks, which was always in the same place in the lake, was not itself ever in the lake.”