Jill Talbot Recommends...

“I went to see the film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998) in 2002. Sitting alone in the dark, I heard the opening notes of Philip Glass

while I followed Virginia Woolf to the river, and I wept, not at Woolf’s urgency, but at the score. In the liner notes of the soundtrack Cunningham explains, ‘Glass and Woolf have both broken out of the traditional realm of the story, whether literary or musical, in favor of something more meditative, less neatly delineated, and more true to life.’ He continues, ‘For me, Glass can find in three repeated notes something of the strange rapture of sameness.… We are creatures who repeat ourselves, we humans, and if we refuse to embrace repetition—if we balk at art that seeks to praise its textures and rhythms, its endless subtle variations—we ignore much of what we mean by life itself.’ These qualities—continuation, meditation, and repetition—are all qualities I work toward in my writing and the reason I often write to the soundtrack of The Hours. The compression and articulation of those three notes churning, ever churning, helps me to play such variations in my essays, so much so that I feel I write best when I write inside Glass’s notes.”
—Jill Talbot, author of The Way We Weren’t (Soft Skull Press, 2015)