First Thoughts on She And I

Recently I read She And I: A Fugue, by Michael R. Brown. I've never spoken to the author, but he's an online friend. I found the book to be quite unusual, and quite gripping. It's a memoir, especially focused on the arc of his love life. Or, as he writes:

Follows apparently disparate lines of experience into a final sounding of nature, time, and the Female Principle.

That sounds rather dry, but the story is juicy and full of emotional events, as he pursues love where it takes him. I take the subtitle, "A Fugue," as referring to the name of the theme-and-variations musical piece. He feels recurring patterns in his story.

I don't want to offer much in the way of story spoilage, but perhaps it is safe to say that it offers explorations of grief, internet relationships, and even polyamory. Some of the key players are what the author calls "the Rand-touched" - people deeply influenced by Rand. It's clear some people have been anonymised, so I kept wondering if I knew any of the people in the story.

He has one stylistic quirk that took some getting used to for me. It looks like this:

No girl’d ever made me feel that.

Thus does a "had" get reduced to an apostrophe and a "d". We do, often, talk like that. But we don't usually transcribe it like that. That took a little getting used to. But perhaps it does make you feel that you are listening to speech, not reading the written word.

The writing is spare, teasing you to imagine the scenes as they glimmer past. To me it felt, at times, like a fairly fast road trip:

We flashed along, by trees - one stand leafless, bare branches swept
against clouds - then copseful of pines - needley, solid, rich-green.

Our hands found one another across divider and clasped.

I kept thinking of Emily Dickinson. I guess it's the love of evocative language, plus the inner yearning for bliss. Like Dickinson, he does not aim to titillate; rather he means to inspire.

There are a couple of previews in the middle of this page, if you want to get a real idea of whether the book speaks to you.

It's often hard to find and hold what will
fulfill.