Renee Gladman’s TOAF is a book about another one of her books, After That, which never came to fruition, at least not according to the writer’s original vision. In TOAF, Gladman attempts to chart her writing process across various drafts of After That, highlighting both the pleasure and anxiety inherent in the writing process. Initially, seeing herself as a poet but wanting to write more like a novelist, she fails to write with any foresight or structure: “I wrote with obsession, bent over my journal, “coming” and chastising myself for coming.” Like many other writers who dread the question, Gladman fails to identify what After That is really about. Though she means to write about “the problem of bodies in space” and the city (the city of concrete) where she first started writing in the late nineties, she continually encounters problems of time. Unable to create a clear linear timeline of events from memory, she instead looks out in all directions, organizing time by place, and culture, and a series of reflections and imaginings.

*

It was only earlier this year that I realized the book I’ve been working on for three – or four? – years might be about time. I thought this was kind of ridiculous, initially, because looking at things one way, you can make anything about time. I had written a short book of essays/performances/letters/I-don’t-know-whats, and they were all in pretty rough shape. I couldn’t make sense of their disorganization. My refusal to write by sequence, as Gladman would say, meant that the book felt unwieldy. Like Gladman, I identify as a poet, and I wanted to be sure to write like one. But as I got further away from graduate school workshops, this stance fell away more and more. Somewhere along the line, my deepest desire became to write like the myself-self, the writer underneath assignments and labels. From there, my book got even weirder. 

*

Time is a problem of endless avenue. Not only is there the issue of remembering timelines in nonfiction – did Gladman begin writing in 1998 or 1999? She isn’t sure – but there’s also the issue of timeliness. Initial drafts of her novella hinge on one collective stipulation about cell phones, that they’re not only stupid and annoying but, also, intrusive objects. After her neighbor steals the narrator’s waffle iron and leaves behind her cell phone, Gladman’s narrator is forced to carry the phone around all day while it rings and a man on the other end yells. I say “forced,” but anyone looking at this premise from the year 2025 would immediately wonder why she didn’t just turn the ringer off or leave the phone at home. But back in the late 90’s, the narrator is so comically befuddled, if not offended, by the phone itself, by the implication that a phone and a waffle iron could be traded for each other, that all rationality flies out the door. Here, Gladman encounters another problem of time as related to pacing: technology was moving faster than the writing could. 

*

As I let the book I was writing expand, I searched for an organizing principle, which I expected to be visual. I colored in a color wheel, thinking my stories about searching for work and relationships in my twenties might go in a circle. The primary essays – red, blue, and yellow – would hold the three hearts of the book. The other essays would correspond around those primaries, making sure that complementary essays would somehow be in conversation, or work together through contrast. I hoped this might give the book some kind of invisible sense that the reader might feel but never identify. 

But after trying to label the essays with color, everything got convoluted. I gave up on my color-wheel theory, thinking a more organic approach might emerge at some point down the line. The next day, I went to New York to meet two friends, Kayleigh and Neta, each of us “emerging writers.” It was May. Neta and I were turning 37 that week, and we were celebrating by seeing Merrily We Roll Along, a Sondheim musical about the trajectories of three friends, all writers, although I didn’t know anything about this plot beforehand. 

Here’s how it goes for them: One writer scarifies art for big money. One writer sacrifices big money for art. One writer crumbles under the weight of constant rejection, unrequited love, and self-scrutiny, thereby avoiding this decision altogether and becoming an alcoholic. Which one do you think is the woman character? I’ve given you a clue. 

Anyway. We cried.    

*

The way we sometimes chronicle our lives by era, rather than physical time, can make a writing project resist deadlines. “The Era of People,” I recently wrote to describe my 20s: several apartments, which meant many roommates and their friends and partners and one-night stands. Many, many pieced-together, shit jobs. Co-workers; high turn-over rates, meaning new co-workers, new bosses. The bosses I met during interviews for jobs I didn’t get. Old friends and friends of friends, new friends, brand new people, even: my niece was born. And that’s not even counting a decade of online dating.

In this mess of history, my nonfiction book could be quietly careening toward fiction. The possibility is right there. All I’d have to do is say the word. It’s just that in the Era of People, there are too many names to remember, so I have to make them up, which feels like writing a character. But I also seem to be making up plateaus of time. I write essays that cover years of my life and could never plausibly fit into a dot on a timeline. Yet, this body of writing is tethered to a specific set of years, the decade of my twenties and into my early thirties, and the economic circumstances following the 2008 recession.    

*

Gladman’s writing chips away at the solid cube of fiction. Chipping-away looks like this: if you were to take a mallet and bust open one plane of that cube, some psychic substance might unpredictably spew out, causing the room to fill with thrill, then laughter, and then relief. That’s the type of pre-orgasmic possibility that looms over Gladman’s book, reinforcing the idea that our agreed upon definition of fiction fails to represent the type of sensuality we’re capable of in real life. 

In early drafts of AT, which Gladman eventually changes to AF, although the writer can’t recall why, the plot revolves around an unwanted cell phone. But as the drafts evolve, Gladman incorporates two painters, Carla and Aïda, inspired by the characters in a real film that Gladman has apparently seen, though I have doubts. In the book formally known as After That, Gladman’s narrator intends to see the very same film, but she never makes it there. After a series of strange encounters, and with the cell phone still ringing in her pocket, Gladman’s narrator initially imagines the characters of Carla and Aïda, free from any film plot, while sitting on a bus.  

Gladman includes a journal entry from some point in the writing process: 

“The thing I want with After That is Antonioni, not Fellini.

Space and Void. Not clutter. Not chaos.” 

And the novel continues to morph in that direction. 

*

TOAF is a short book, only eighty pages, full of ellipses that indicate its depth, each time, a little deeper of a dive. Begin with Gladman the first teller, then meet former Gladmans, then Gladman’s narrator, the second teller, and the first cast of characters. Then, that narrator’s daydreams of two painters, where the narrator seems to be playing the part of Carla initially, before suddenly becoming an invisible (maybe third?) narrator, like a film director, who passively records, and when the two painters start fucking, we’re not sure if we should be there except to admire their perfect pacing. 

From there, the film directors seem to multiply: “Between the two painters, there are three to five groups of hosts, who are not capable of knowing each other. We are separated by the camera, which hails and exiles us from our assigned realities.” Gladman continues, “this shortness of field becomes popular reality, or, an even more debated word, fiction.” 

*

When writing “in era,” rather than chronologically, I’ve been wondering lately if you have to emerge from the previous era and be sure of your footing in another in order to finish a book. Eras overlap, I get that. But what about the ones you want a hard stop to? What about the point at which you recklessly say fine. Even if I don’t get what I wanted this whole time, I just want to think about other things now. I want to have new problems. Please let me think about other things now. 

*

The story of three friends in Merrily We Roll Along moves backwards in time, leaving us in the last scene with the first time Mary meets Frank and Charlie. There is an audible gasp in the audience when Frank (the sell-out archetype) feels an immediate connection upon first meeting Mary, and jokes that he wants to marry her. We, the audience, already know that Frank is never going to marry her. And more than that, we know Frank’s place in her life is only going to cause her to suffer. 

The framing and order of this story – the story of youth, the story of hindsight – is what maintains its timelessness. The story of how making or not making art is an organizing principle, which, when coupled with ambition, has the potential to ruin you. The creative process can be difficult, as in when you’re trying to beat your book into submitting to certain deadlines that your book could not give two fucks about. But not nearly as difficult as the unmet desire to be heard, witnessed. For writers, fulfillment of that specific desire requires interaction with an industry, the industry of publishing, which becomes more and more confusing to me the more I learn about it. 

As the writer of a first book which lives on my computer, I’m outside of this industry. My competition is several other “emerging writers,” many of whom, in my opinion, have long since emerged, and if you could all kindly move on to the next category – After-Emerging, Emerged+? Discuss amongst yourselves – thank you and best regards. But the runway is much longer than any of us originally planned for. And I don’t mean runway as in fame and fortune. I simply mean the life that your book has outside of its container, like the room you write in. 

*

A New York Times interview with painter Mary Lovelace O’Neil ends with the following memorable punch-me lines. The interview asks, “Do you have a message for others waiting for their moment of recognition?” She responds, “Yes. Don’t wait.” 

One side of my brain thinks of this quote sometimes for encouragement. The other side wonders what it really means. Being an emerging writer is not so much “hurry up and wait,” as it is “hurry up and split,” i.e. split your creative practice from the pressure of making total and complete sense, which is what makes your art sellable.    

*

TOAF is not really about publication, but it does hint at the tension between product and creation. Gladman notes her lover’s advice to be “…more linear here. It’s not a poem,” and general feedback not to refer to concrete trees as if everyone reading knows what she means. “Confusion is a gift, I have always thought,” Gladman writes, speaking more on the experience of the writer to understand their own work, than on the readability of a book to its audience. “…what I’ve written is beyond me. Eventually one comes to know what belongs in a book one is writing and what does not. And eventually one changes one’s mind on all of this.” 

Just as Gladman struggles to place After That on its prior trajectory, I struggle to place my book on the timeline of completion. It seems to need a lot of work, I’ve thought many times. It doesn’t seem to be doing what I want yet. It needs another essay. I have a new idea. Other times, I plan out its complete revision in three weeks and get as far as I can. I make some mistakes. I send it to a few agents who ultimately aren’t interested, to test the waters, right before having to have my gallbladder removed earlier than I thought I would, thereby messing up these deadlines. Post-operation, I sit in bed asking of my former self – what were you doing? Why the rush?  

*

TOAF isn’t really about art history either, but I kept wanting to make the connection. This is probably because Gladman is such a visual writer; she uses the reader’s mind as a sort of additional projection space. I think about the concept of transparency and our traditionally taught Western art historical timeline. The artist is always looking for a new challenge, at least the ones considered to be on the cutting edge. When photography became widely accessible, painting became like a blurry dream. Then it became like a snapshot of a subject from various angles, laid on top one another. Then, art came from a place of questioning reality. For a time after, art became stoic, linear, philosophical, then it was vast, a silhouette, an entire landscape. After all that, what else could be done except to become transparent about the artist’s process?  

This is the dominant story we tell about art history, but there are many other stories. Contemporary artists still borrow from trajectories that are popularly considered to have gone cold. Our one-track timelines are largely inaccurate not just in exclusivity but also in the field of time. 

This is also the challenge of writing memoir, of organizing a past I’m still processing, which juts out in so many different directions while my body moves forward in time. It’s the lie of memoir too: the idea that anybody could encapsulate with words the process of locating themselves in the past when something more immersive, more visual might do the chaos of this process more justice. We are writing now from tumultuous economic and political times, which gives us even less grounding, though I don’t think the word “tumultuous” is really enough to describe ourselves, our grief in this present moment.  

*

But mostly, when I think of “the problem of bodies in space,” I think of Kazuo Shiraga, the Japanese painter who painted with his feet, and the velocity of his body, hanging onto a rope hung from the ceiling, slipping across the surface of his work. I only recently saw one of his paintings in person. It made me think of waves. I felt like falling back, that way you can when standing in the ocean.  

*

Carla and Aïda want to finish their paintings: “The paradox of finishing a painting is that the final stroke or touch, as soon as it is completed, is immediately absorbed into the entirety of the work.”  But when they do finish, and after the initial joy, a kind of murkiness descends in over their lives: “Carla and Aïda are moving toward the end of an epoch in postures awaiting the cessation of time, unaware that time has already recounted its steps and begun again.” 

*

Sometimes I have this dream where I think about all the people walking around with books inside of them, stories I mean. It's kind of a sad dream, to be honest, because the books either never become realized, or they live in the form of a forgotten manuscript locked away in some drawer. I understand this to be due to obstacles like having a day job or lacking the type of access you need to publish a book. But what I like about this dream is that, though separated by an immeasurable amount of space, I can feel close to anybody, draw them close through the shared vulnerability of having a book at all, regardless of that book’s relationship to completion. 

*

When TOAF ends, we’re back with Gladman Gladman, who recalls that at some point, she had to admit that After That was never going to be a finished book. In a flash of inspiration, she decides to offer readers “the story of its failure,” drafting the new opening of the book, after which she bursts from her home to meet the air. “I was outside, the relief was tremendous,” she writes. Like smoking a cigarette after sex. 

But we, the readers, especially the writers, know how this cycle goes. Soon anxiety will creep in. Soon, emptiness. Next, summon, perspire, wait, work, re-work, pull out hair, a small pearl of insight that could carry us through one more year, or several. In other words, this: rest assured. The creative process never really ends. Are we living with it or are we living for it? Yes, we are.