a contemporary essay that broke me: karly hartzman's essay on her breakup with bandmate mj lenderman

karly hartzman is the lead singer of one of my favorite bands, Wednesday. MJ Lenderman, another big name in current indie rock conversation, was the lead guitarist of Wednesday for years. hartzman and lenderman had been in a steady public longterm relationship when Wednesday started suddenly amassing thousands of fans worldwide. world tours, sold-out shows, and juggling career-making moments with relationship dynamics, hartzman tells the heartbreaking story of what it feels like to break-up with someone whos seen you at your worst...and how it feels to record a melancholy love (?) song for someone you are no longer dating.

read this essay and listen to 'the way love goes'.

when i first listened to this song, the one the essay is more or less about, i was in a happy (for the time being) relationship. i knew the song was good, knocking on the screendoor, even though i could see right through caught in the back of my throat everytime i heard and sung along. but it just wasn't really for me at the time. after we broke up i listened to it on repeat. a few months later i read the essay. and now, a few months from then, i still can't read some of hartzmans prose without choking up, specifically, 'We still can’t get the mold out of the shower; there’s no fan in the bathroom. There’s no hood to suck up the smoke over the stove when I’m frying bacon. The house feels like it was made to hold stagnant air.'

my take: this book is about religion insofar as life itself is a religious experience. i love this book.

i read this book off of a recommendation from a friend who always has the most interesting books on his coffee table, half read and ready to crack open. he tells me the plot summary, and insists i read it, and as one does, i forget to write it down, and it is lost to memory- but this time i reach out and he recalls the recommendation. i've been finding it hard to stay engaged in a book lately. a heavy plot kills me. i hate to know where something is going, i hate dialogue as a device to move the plot along, i hate characters created to bolster some dramatized reenactment of an authors idea. i haven't read any jd salinger before this. i didn't know what to expect, but i now know his novels are very character based- something which i really appreciate. it did not take me long to read this book, despite the fact that i was scrolling through a free pdf version of it online.

a brief summary of the book, may contian spoilers: it begins with Franny a short story about a young collegiate girl who has taken a liking to a certain philosophical/religious book, 'the way of the pilgrim', and follows her to a lunch date with her young man (boyfriend). the reader observes the date, slowly becoming familiar with frannys annoyed and pesemistic and devolving outlook. the second part of the book is a novella titled Zooey, which follows franny's older brother zooey through a chaotic conversation with his mother, and later franny, as the glass family navigates franny's previously described meltdown.

each character in this book feels like a real fleshed out human. chaotic. a bit hypocritical, and desperately searching for meaning in religion and philosophy. they speak to one another like real, though flamboyant, siblings. "it's like being in a lunatic asylum and having another patient all dressed up as a doctor come over to you and start taking your pulse or something.... It's just awful. He talks and talks and talks. And if he isn't talking, he's smoking bis smelly cigars all over the house. I'm so sick of the smell of cigar smoke I could just roll over and die." and this conversation about life, ego, philosophy, and religion takes the reader through many very incredible lines and advice, sandwhiched between quippy and clever descriptions from salinger. his style is effortless.