on obsession, part 2

Obsession is my favorite literary form. A few weeks ago, I sent out a newsletter about the ways I’m leaning into my own obsessions, and how that process can be a way back to young, unproductive, and earnest parts of ourselves we’ve learned to repress. Obsession also shapes how I read and what I write. My favorite authors are those whose work is so obviously driven by their own fascinations, who return to the same themes again and again with a deep and rigorous wonder.

I’ve never been interested in cultural criticism that’s about embodying authority on the page. In its most banal and insidious forms, criticism is a way of judging cultural production by the value it brings to empire—a conservative genre that privileges assimilation, tokenism, and the known. But criticism, at least the kind that has been modeled to me, can also be an act of love. Of writing ceaselessly and repetitively towards the things that keep you alive. To insist on the circular act of returning in a world that privileges the constant churn of flashy and novel content, is to insist on attention as a form of care. Hanif Abdurraqib writes that “I'm not all that interested in repetition or return as a vehicle for correction, or to make things ‘right’… I get obsessive about my returns because there are places, whole worlds within worlds, where I know for certain that I have left behind a sweetness, and I am interested in seeing how it has grown in my absence, if I'm lucky.”

My people aren’t linear storytellers. They’re people of the return, in for the long haul—the dramatic pauses, the same sentiment repeated ten different ways. The “I won’t keep you” that precedes a forty-five minute long story. The meandering gossip sessions, undertaken for both amusement and survival. The groupchat. The grocery run reportback. Oral practices that revel in the juiciness of a story unfolding, then folding back on itself. Obsession takes up space and time, defying the tyranny of the clean, intelligible narrative. Have you seen the tweets and memes about girls talking, queers talking, Black and immigrant mothers talking? Sitting on the phone, giving updates about relatives you’ve never met, “yes, exactly”-ing each other to death? People enjoy laughing at our excess, and sometimes we do too. From this gift of embellishment, this stubborn and sticky recursiveness, this irritating commitment to memory, I am always learning to write love as deeply and immoderately as I can.

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Some related thoughts:

• Playlists as obsession

• Crushes as obsession

• Fanzines as obsession

• Stanning as obsession

• Knitting as obsession