Sepideh Saremi

I’ve got a project going right now, where I’m re-reading a bunch of old books. “Old” as in I’ve read them before, not as in 15th century.

I re-read most of Raymond Carver’s short story collection, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” late last week. His writing is famous for being very minimal, and I remember reading that book my freshman year of college and wondering if it was maybe too minimal. From the notes I made in the margin, I can tell I spent a lot of time flailing around desperately, trying to find meaning in the stories - and failing to do so. Some of my notes: “love=pain” and “marriage as metaphor for destruction.” Huh? Yeah, that can only be explained by saying that I was seventeen years old when I made those notes.

Now, in the infinite wisdom I’ve amassed through these years (hah), after my re-reading I realize Carver is all about that quiet desperation of trying to find meaning, etc., etc., you know what I mean. This is, of course, really depressing, but in kind of a good way. It was nice to read him again, with a little more perspective.

So I thought Carver was all nice and resolved for me, and now this story in the NYT makes me feel duped. Apparently a lot of that spare, emotional sublimation stuff came from his editor, who went ahead and made a bunch of changes to that short story collection and didn’t change it back when Carver begged him to. And now his widow is fighting to publish the original collection. So now I’m lost about Carver again. And wondering about editors, and the line between writers and editors.