Reflected in another's face

One of the great things about being a university professor is that you get to know some extraordinary people on the verge of becoming themselves. In time they bestow gifts on the world, and as their former teacher, you get to rejoice in these gifts. One of the liminal beings it was once my privilege to teach is Tamsen Wolff, who grew up on a sheep farm in Vermont; who is now a professor herself, at Princeton; and who just published her first novel. It’s a wild, hilarious book, a female Catcher in the Rye in which a teenaged girl at a theatre summer camp falls in frantic, obsessive love with another girl. They kiss, they disappear into their own joyous world, and our protagonist sobs and sings, wails in ecstasy, hurls her body on the floor in despair, and finally does what we all do. She moves on. But before moving on, she takes us back to our own crazed, mad, passionate obsessions, and she lets us laugh at ourselves and the drama of it all.

From Juno’s Swans, by Tamsen Wolff.

When Sarah called, I was sitting at the table reading an old New Yorker, wearing her pajamas, and eating fresh bread with plenty of butter, one foot up under my bottom on the chair. Before I could say anything, she spoke, in a tone I had never heard, a measured, tender, regretful, terrible tone.

“Listen,” she said, and all the books fell off the shelves. All the birds fell out of the sky.

“Listen,” she said again while I sat transfixed with everything hurtling violently down around me. There was a powerful smell of sulfur, making it hard to breathe. My heart shrank to the size of a pin. Everything was electrified, dangerous, like before a huge thunderstorm. 

The photograph is a self-portrait in a mosaic portrait by Mary Josephson, made of mirrors and stained glass.