“Different People”
by Clare Sestanovich
from the January 30, 2023 issue of The New Yorker
I first read something by Clare Sestanovich when she was first published in The New Yorker in December 2019. I’ve become a fan, and I’m excited to see her appearing relatively regularly: “Different People” is her fourth story to show up.
Here is how it starts:
When Gilly was young, she lied to her diary. It was not a toy diary. She had dutifully filled several of those already, notebooks in girlish colors, with ostentatious locks and miniature keys. This new diary had a dull-brown cover and no means of protecting itself. It was an object she could imagine becoming an artifact. She wrote in smooth black ink that glittered mysteriously until it dried, and she chose her words carefully, the longer the better. There were some words—squeezed to fit in the narrow space between lines, much narrower than she was used to—that she wasn’t sure how to pronounce. She wrote for an audience. She was twelve years old.
On Twitter Sestanovich said, “’Different People’ is about a diary, a parakeet, and the terrifying power of every child and every writer’s favorite pastime: making stuff up!” I’m in!
Please join in the conversation, and let us know what you thought of the story or of Sestanovich’s work in general.
A very nice story.
First, it has good writing:
“They knew things about her life that she, limited by a small and porous memory, never would — but Gilly had witnessed only a fraction of theirs.”
“The fragile honest core of him retreating into the broad-shouldered frame of solid family man.”
“There was nothing more juvenile than the fear of death.”
“The more you paid attention, the more people you became.”
Also a good graf on anger. And one on opposites.
Also good writing: she tells it all in the voice of one person, a 12-year-old girl, without retreating into an adult perspective, but nonetheless presenting substantive reactions from the girl.
Also nice “plot” — starts with the girl making things up for her diary, then stuff really happens and she has to cope. “She had pretended to be an adult, but pretending was no longer a game or a lie or a choice. She had wanted something to happen and now it had.”
What happens is not just a divorce, but realizing that her parents were two different people. And she became two different people when she was with one or the other of them.
Her maturation task is to integrate the different people she has splintered into. At the end Gilly is trying to become a whole person by reading the book her mother had given her. “She told Gilly it had changed her life.” But it’s tough going: “What had spoken its secret meaning to a stranger [her mother] but would not reveal itself to her.” But she keeps trying.
My only complaint is that the author makes the woman a serious philospher, sophisticated (Italian names of pasta, wine), and a firm disciplinarian while making the man a baby (only drinks water, orders greasy orange pizza), even though he’s a doctor.