Lost in Transcription

On unreliable memories and the stories we pass down through the generations

In his book Perennial Seller, Ryan Holiday argues that the originator of any work—be they authors, musicians, artists, or anyone plying their trade in a creative field—should spend as much time selling the work as they do creating it. So, you’re three weeks into what’ll probably be three years of me talking about my book. And I should be pitching it. But, you see, I’ve got a problem.

Because there’s another book taking up real estate in my head, and it isn’t mine. Last month, I read Transcription—Ben Lerner’s latest entry to the genre of autofiction he has helped popularise since his debut novel was released in 2011—for the first time, on the plane between New York and Barcelona. On the recommendation of a friend, I “re-read” the audiobook over the last week: one chunk of it on the train between London and Manchester, nodding off as the train hurtled towards the future; the second as I flew home last night.

The book is structured as a triptych of three paternal portraits as an unnamed narrator—a Lerner staple, although the biblical Adam sometimes stands in as tribute—reminisces about the times when he was “still young enough that months were long,” and navigates the anxieties, internally-faced and externally-caused, in the life of the modern father. The book opens on a train as he heads towards a meeting with his mentor, Thomas, a German intellectual who came of age during Nazi rule. He listens to a talk Thomas gave 49 years earlier. He sits backwards, or as his daughter says, “facing the past,” and our past comes through in flickers: a masked face visible in the reflection, a subtle clue we’re reading a pandemic period piece.

Thomas is fading, seemingly suffering from dementia, confusing the protagonist with his own son, lamenting that he cannot remember the colour of his father’s eyes, feeling his body carrying “the data of his past,” whilst losing “the numbers and the names” that give our memories their flavour. After dropping his phone in the sink, rendering it unusable, the narrator wrestles with the friction that comes in navigating a world without it: his wife and home the only two numbers he can recall from memory, “a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication […] the stones made stonier by being offline,” making sense of his own dependence on his device as his adolescent daughter pushes for one of her own.

The irreversible friction between modern technology and human connection is a recurring motif in Lerner’s work. This book explores our dependence on the world of ones and zeros—the way smartphones influence the relationships in our lives, making personal connections feel both more familiar and more remote, the ambient intimacy afforded by social networks that claim to be built for closeness, but have consistently driven division. Is this a new world, or do digital tools only supplement human behaviours? A son reflects on his father’s distance during his childhood: “Our proximity produced the most intense forms of estrangement.”

Running through the novel’s spine are three generations of a family and their different connections to the digital world: the first who abhors the impact of technology on the world; the next who has become reluctantly dependent upon it; the youngest who has never known life in a world without smartphones, iPads, and the bottomless feast of every video known to man.

It’s a book about the fathers we grow up observing, the mentors we search for in an attempt to fill the vacuum that was missing, and how we reconfigure these inputs into a format that will allow us to navigate the choppy waters of raising children, keeping our heads when all about us are losing theirs. In a passage that had me wiping the tears from my eyes—I’ll blame the altitude, yeah, that’ll do it—a family member says goodbye to another over the phone, social distancing protocols forbidding the delivery of all that needed to be said in person; the goodbye we hope to get the chance to say one day, if not already.

In an interview with AnOther magazine, Lerner talked about how becoming a father to two daughters had influenced his work:

My daughters inform the writing in all kinds of ways, but it’s this mixture of wanting to let them in and keep them out, because you can’t take care of your kids in your work, or you would write really boring shit.¹ I’ve written a lot of poems about this: wanting to protect my children from my voice, and to protect my voice from my children.

I also became more interested in how things are transmitted or transcribed across generations, and the voice as intergenerational technology. When you start talking to your kids, you open your mouth and all this stuff comes out that’s not you. It’s your parents, or your image of what parents should be, or your own voice as a child, travelling into the future.

I’ve often reckoned with the 151.8 gigabytes of memories I have placed in the care of Google Photos—92,738 photos stored in the cloud—its machine learning algorithms categorising my life history—or at least the last two decades of it—by places, faces and things. I have already taken more photos of my son than will ever be taken of my mother. My own failing memory is hoisted up by this more reliable digital twin, scaffolding supporting a failing structure. When I was back in Manchester this week, my dad showed me the four cardboard boxes filled with photos that he wanted me to sort through when I’m back over the summer. No boxes exist in our house; occasional printouts act as physical manifestations of times long gone. When we die, will our digital archives be passed on to our children? Will they even want them?

I’m trying my very best to get into this without spoiling it for you, but the final third of the book takes an incredible turn as the realities of the pandemic come crashing together with the existential anxiety that parents face in their role as protectors and providers. My memory of the first read-through had coloured the second—there were huge story beats that my own memory, even over the course of a few weeks, had forgotten and altered. My recollections are unreliable, whether it’s the chemicals that have passed through my body over the last 25 years, or my body keeping the score of those early years. It is not always something I can depend upon. My mother was the family historian, the chronicler of our collective journey; in the early years of writing this newsletter, I could rely upon her to confirm foggy remnants of the past, to paint in colour where I could only sketch in pencil. The stories we pass down from generation to generation, one unreliable narrator after another mangling the memory even further, a game of telephone told through the ages.

So, yeah. I liked it. You probably will too. It’s a perfect dad summer book—144 pages long, deceptively small, and something that will sit with you long after you close the last page. Ryan Holiday says I should be selling you my book—instead, I’ve spent 1,200 words selling someone else’s. So read mine first. But once you’re done, go show a little love Lerner’s way, too.

Lord knows, he could do with the help.

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Good Dadvice

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1. HOW DARE YOU, MR LERNER