Amina Cain

A virtuosic meditation on literature and life in the tradition of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and William H. Gass’s On Being Blue. “Without planning it, I wrote a diary of sorts. Lightly. A diary of fiction. Or is that not what this is?” A series of essayistic inquiries come together to form a sustained meditation on writers and their works, on the spaces of reading and writing fiction, and how these spaces take shape inside a life. Driven by primary questions of authenticity and freedom in the shadow of ecological and social collapse, A Horse at Night: On Writing moves associatively through a personal canon of authors—including Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante, Renee Gladman, and Virginia Woolf—and topics as timely and various as female friendships, zazen meditation, neighborhood coyotes, landscape painting, book titles, and the politics of excess. Amina Cain’s first nonfiction book is an individual reckoning with the contemporary moment and a quietly brilliant contribution to the lineage of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own or William H. Gass’s On Being Blue, books that are virtuosic arguments for—and beautiful demonstrations of—the essential unity of writing and life.

On Writing

A Horse at Night

maia

Imagine surrounding your own soup. Imagine surrounding it with anguish. At night I am surrounded by my books, not the one I am writing.

We project onto people; we attach one person to another. We haven't been able to let go of the first person, and try to connect them to a second. We're either aware we're doing this, or we're not. We project our own self, what we want and what we want another person to be. We project what we fear, or what we dislike. Sometimes it's reversed: we take on someone's intonation, without even trying. We dress like them, or copy something we saw them do. We try to bring a projection of them onto our own selves.

A Horse at Night quotes

Join the club