Victoria Redel’s “Soul to Take”
Come under my covers
This is First Breath—one paragraph, up close, every Friday.
I’m KKP and I’m very new here! Please consider subscribing if you’re a writer or reader interested in sentence-level craft. Share if you know someone else who might be into it.
The Book
Blurbs don’t always move me, but there’s one on Where the Road Bottoms Out from Grace Paley that seemed put there personally for me by god: “Only a poet could have written this prose.” I immediately read the collection, obedient for once in my life, then spent the next few years trying to figure out how the hell Victoria Redel was doing what she was doing.
Then I got lucky. When I was a first-year MFA student, I worked at the Columbia Journal and asked if she'd agree to be interviewed. She said yes. I wasn’t nervous so much as inconveniently thrilled. (I had perhaps looked at her effortlessly cool author photo more than once. Sentences that good and also... that jacket?!) But she was warm and open from the moment we sat down on the steps outside Dodge Hall, and at some point she mentioned a Post-it note she kept above her desk. It said, “You have permission.” Permission to be whoever she needed to be on the page. I didn't know how much I needed to hear that. I was already writing dark, lusty stories, I just hadn't figured out yet that I didn't also need to feel bad about them. I walked away from that conversation feeling like a writer, maybe for the first time. She’d given herself the note so she wouldn’t forget, and somehow, without meaning to, she gave it to me too.
I took her seminar the next semester, we became friends and stayed in touch. (More on how she became one of my beloved mentors here.) Years later—after the birth of my second son, when I was breastfeeding around the clock and hadn’t slept well in actual years, when our bed was basically a warm pile of bodies and I’d stopped being able to tell where I ended and the babies began—I ran into her at a book launch at KGB Bar. I moaned about not writing. She listened patiently, and then she put her hand on my arm and said, very firmly: “Look, get back to work. Or don’t.”
Like, that’s it. Those are the two choices! Pick one.
I could have cried. Not because it was harsh—it was, though not only—but because sometimes (most of the time?) what you need is a brilliant, beautiful person to cut through all your bullshit and just tell you what to do. That brutal ultimatum set me free. I got back to work.
Where the Road Bottoms Out was Redel’s debut collection, published in 1995 by Knopf and edited by Gordon Lish (because of course it was). Publishers Weekly called it “sometimes too high in decibel level”—which, whatever—before arriving at the verdict that Redel has “an intriguing, yeasty voice.” Yeasty! It seems to me what they mean is that Redel has Paley’s formal precision and her willingness to locate an entire world in a small domestic moment, but the prose is lush and more bodily, more interested in sensation than sense.
"Soul to Take" is the story I teach when I want to talk about young narrators and time—specifically, how experience doesn't pass so much as accumulate. A child narrator, her parents’ bedroom—the particular intimacy and strangeness of early childhood lived from the inside. It's about the cost of becoming a self, specifically the moment when the warm animal blur of family suddenly has a border and you realize you're on the wrong side of it.
Here’s how it starts:
