My current song obsession is Harry Styles’ new single, “As It Was.” There’s a riff in it that’s clearly a descendent of perennial gen-x earworm “Take On Me” by Ah-Ha, and it shares DNA with other synth-pop favorites that are always playing in my 80’s-kid lizard brain.
The song is simultaneously tapping into my nostalgia for that time and offering lyrics that serve as a warning about nostalgia traps. The hooky refrain (currently all over TikTok) is, “You know it’s not the same as it was. … You know it’s not the same.” The video has Harry knocking at closed doors, walking backwards, having his attempts to hold hands with his beloved constantly thwarted by sliding panels, other people, an ever-moving turntable that won’t let him catch up. At the same time, the music is joyful and the video ends with a smile.
We tend to think of nostalgia as something that belongs to grownups. Kids feel it too, though. When I was four or five or six, I lost my favorite doll while I was out and about with my dad in San Francisco. The doll’s name was Kathy. We didn’t have a car, so we were on buses and foot, and at some point along the way when we were close to returning home, I realized…hey wait a minute, I don’t have my doll! I cried and told my dad.
We tried to retrace our steps. We walked back to the bus stop and thought about all the places we’d gone. I know that my dad made some calls, and I know he talked to a bus driver and got the bus driver to radio other drivers about Kathy, and gave out our phone number in case anyone found it.
It’s emotional just thinking about this, for a lot of reasons, including that it was one of the times that my dad really tried. The idea of this lost doll was painful for both of us; we both longed for the time before I lost it. Him for different reasons than me, I’m sure. That day or a day soon after, we walked over to Geary and Clement streets where the stores were, and tried to find a replacement.
Of course, there was no replacing Kathy. Even if we’d found the exact kind of doll, we’d always know that the true Kathy was gone.
Nostalgia is typically associated with missing happier times, and losing your favorite doll or toy is not exactly a fond memory. But I longed for the doll, and maybe for the version of my dad who would go to those lengths to recover her, that little window of time in my childhood when he and I were buddies.
And I got from early on that something about that longing was pleasurable. I was a kid who liked to go there and feel it. I would drop the needle on my Annie record and play “Maybe” over and over again while I gazed out the window. I gravitated to sad books that would fill me with a delicious ache. I liked the minor keys, rainy days, and the episodes of Little House in which Pa cried (which was a lot of them, let’s be honest).
C.S. Lewis basically defined this feeling as joy, that joy is “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” For joy to meet his standards, it “must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.”
It’s a bit perplexing and yes, in fact, there is a German word for it. Sehnsucht. And it’s complicated enough to get its own wikipedia entry. One of the six characteristics of this feeling (as outlined in the entry) grabbed me: “conjoint time focus on the past, present, and future.” It made me think about what I wrote for this very newsletter about time, back in December.
My own experiences with nostalgia while still in childhood informed Lu’s inner life in A Song Called Home. She’s a girl filled with longing, who loves sad books, misses her old apartment and the life before her mom remarried, and has nostalgic attachments to objects from that life: her old bunk bed, the kitchen table. The life before wasn’t easy or always happy, but leaving it is still a loss.
I remember this feeling from my own experiences that the book was based on. The adults around me could only see my mother’s remarriage as a good thing—a kind of rescue for our little family. Why would I feel nostalgic for something that had been so hard?
The caption I wrote for this post:
When I was a kid and we moved to the suburbs to my stepdad's house, I missed the apartment I grew up in sooo much. I dreamed about it regularly, and still do. You don't have to be a grownup to experience nostalgia. That's something I thought about a lot while writing A SONG CALLED HOME. Lu, 11, is going through her first experience of nostalgia, and it hurts! We all live with all our losses - they become part of us. But they're never easy.
Thinking about the “conjoint time” aspects of sehnsucht, maybe my painful/pleasurable childhood longing for the old apartment had to do with the possible past version of my family that never could quite exist, alongside the idea of a future home and family that could feel whole and comfortable for everyone, a world now where I could be at the old kitchen table and in the old bunkbed with “Maybe” playing on the stereo…to not have to lose those moments or the person I was inside of them.
In that regard, we’re all continually experiencing loss. Not just old friends, old homes, old beliefs, old versions of a country, old versions of relationships—but also “old” moments that could have been as recent as yesterday or this morning, and what we felt and what we knew and what we realized and who we were. Moment by moment, we know it’s not the same as it was. But there’s a joyful steel-drum riff in there, too, an earworm or a dance, or something like Harry’s smile at the end of that video.
News/Watching/Reading
My book came out!
I watched all the conpeople shows, and I really like what Alissa Wilkinson wrote about them here. I think The Dropout was the most successful version of this type of show.
I read Around the Writer’s Block: Using Brain Science to Solve Writer’s Resistance by Rosanne Bane. A writer friend recommended it, and I found a lot of useful stuff that I probably knew but always need reminders about.
I read (on audio) and enjoyed You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession by Piper Weiss. It was on some booktokker’s “books I hate” list, and when I heard everything she hated about it, I thought, “I bet I’d like that.” I was right! Maybe it’s true that no publicity is bad publicity.
I also got a good start on The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang, and am loving it and excited to spend this afternoon reading more with a cat on my lap.
Diversions from my reading progress included wrapping up the This Creative Life companion book, which is now off to the copyeditor. Finally letting go without anyone but me to tell me it was done was an exercise in terror!
Speaking of This Creative Life, I recorded what will probably be the penultimate episode of the Launch Box series I’ve been doing with Andrew DeYoung. It was fun to reflect on the arc of a book release, and get exisistential about what’s next for each of us. We’ll be back for sure for a post-mortem on the TCL book and what I learned in the self-publishing process.
I guess I shouldn’t end this newsletter without going ahead and embedding some Styles.