Trying to Be - by John Haskell (Paperback)

About the Book

In Trying to Be, John Haskell braids essay, fiction, memoir, and cultural history into a haunting meditation on loss, artistic legacy, and the unfinished project of the self. From dance studios to prison cells, from dying friends to dying fathers, Haskell maps the ways we inhabit--and resist--the roles we've been given.

Book Synopsis

With lyrical precision and aching intimacy, Trying to Be moves through history, memory, and the performance of ephemeral identity, as John Haskell assembles a quiet manifesto for how to think, how to live, and how to feel ourselves in our bodies.

Trying to Be is a book about presence, absence, and the intricate art of inhabiting one's own life. John Haskell--known for his genre-defying literary voice--moves through a series of intimate, sharply observed portraits: Francis Bacon and his doomed lover; Danny Kaye and his split personality; Sophia Loren; Diego Velázquez; Ulrike Meinhof; and Yvonne Rainer's radical reinvention of what dance can be.

But this isn't cultural commentary as ornament. These figures mirror Haskell's own attempts to grapple with grief, estrangement, memory, and the failures of language. The result is a book that blurs the line between criticism and confession, art history and personal inventory. Whether recalling a botched friendship, a beloved mentor, or the carefully choreographed movement in a dance workshop, Haskell searches for new ways of becoming--through art, through awareness, through stories that have the quality of song. In prose that's quiet but unflinching, Trying to Be asks: What do we do with our bodies, our memories, and our regrets when even language feels exhausted? And what happens when, against the odds, we keep going?

Review Quotes

"For what I most admire about Trying to Be is that the stories aren't just thinking about visual art, film, and dance; they are coming together with them. It feels as though this book is as close to artmaking as it is to writing, that Haskell's gaze is cast in different directions at the same time, into different planes of existence, that what happened when he wrote these stories is somehow still happening. This is obviously more than story, or it is story to remind us all over again of what is possible in this ever-shifting form."

--Amina Cain, judge, Catherine L. Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize and author of A Horse at Night

"[Trying to Be] is an unconventional and quietly eloquent rumination on what it means to live well."
--Publisher's Weekly

About the Author

John Haskell is author of I Am Not Jackson Pollock, American Purgatorio, Out of My Skin, and The Complete Ballet. He has written on art and dance, is a contributing editor at BOMB and A Public Space, is the recipient of NYFA grants and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and has taught writing and literature in Los Angeles, New York, and Leipzig.