DURGA CHEW-BOSE Too Much and Not the Mood. Reviewed by Clare O’Brien
Honesty and self-actualisation are at the core of this debut collection of essays by Durga Chew-Bose.
The 14 pieces in Too Much and Not the Mood, varying in length and form, draw inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, as does the book’s title. The link to Woolf is apparent throughout Chew-Bose’s writing, as she adopts a poetic stream-of-consciousness approach to self-reflection in a voice that is still distinctly her own. The author’s contemplations of childhood, womanhood, relationships and growing up first-generation Canadian come together slowly to form a refreshing perspective on personal writing.
‘Heart Museum’, the first piece, which occupies nearly half the book, reads as a string of Chew-Bose’s unfiltered observations, sensations, experiences and memories, amounting to intermittent epiphanies. The transience of these epiphanies is likened to the workings of the heart deftly pumping blood through the veins – encompassing in the sureness of its movements the dubiousness of human experience. The heart, in this piece, essentially works as the core of the self, which is open to an array of influences, but nevertheless maintains its stability:
… his characterization of ‘Heart Museum’ recuperated in me what I was looking for: a sense of arrival. The words ‘Heart Museum’, like a figurative place; a vault where memories shimmer, fall dark, are cut loose, and unexpectedly flare up when you most need them to.
Chew-Bose acknowledges her inner self as relative to that of others. She considers herself to belong to a category she dubs ‘nook people’, those who are somewhat introverted and ‘seek corners and bays in order to redeploy [their] hearts and not break the mood’. Though she places great emphasis on her tendency to internalise, she draws inspiration from outside herself. In fact, she welcomes her observational nature as both an essential element of her nook-like inclinations and her ability to be shaped by what is happening around her. She writes at length about the significance of her family relationships and friendships, and it becomes apparent that emotional connections are extracted from the outside and locked in the vault of the human heart. Even those further removed from her play an important role in shaping her. In ‘Part of a Greater Pattern’, Chew-Bose observes and unpacks her fixation on ‘older girls’ when growing up, and how this fixation forced a sense of ambiguity about her own identity because of looking or feeling different to those girls she revered as a child.
The idea of separating the self from others is, however, blurred in ‘Since Living Alone’. Here, Chew-Bose focuses on the act of retreating from others as integral to the self as a writer. In spite of the effect others have on her, she dedicates an entire essay to the realisation that solitude equally shapes her core:
Precision of self was a quality I once strived for, but since living alone, clarity, I’ve learned – when it comes – furnishes me with that thing called boldness. Self-imposed solitude has developed in me, as White wrote about Duras, a knack for improving on the facts with every new version of the same event. Living alone, I soon caught on, is a form of self-portraiture, of retracing the same lines over and over – of becoming.
Time and memory serve important functions in this collection. Each piece is either based on, or constructed from, memories. Past connects to present in the same way that minor thoughts lead to brief moments of enlightenment. Chew-Bose acknowledges the unreliability of her own memories in forming a truth that she has now reached, but is nevertheless vulnerable to change. The steady and inconclusive flow from memories to epiphanies is circular, and tends to highlight the impermanence of thought. The existence of change is undisputed, but its nature is ambiguous. The final essay in this collection, ‘At My Least and Most Aware’, poses the age-old question of whether people can really change, and provides an answer that is riddled with deliberate uncertainty:
And change, I’ve come to understand, rises up like nausea: the promise of relief is what makes it bearable. The body’s clever ways for communicating shifts can make a person crazy, but also move a person toward life.
Chew-Bose is never resolute in her convictions; a feature that upholds her honest portrayal of selfhood. This collection is an unassuming study of the self, but also of the writer. Too Much and Not the Mood mirrors Woolf’s ability to write about writing itself, slowly and consciously depicting the act of thinking and forming temporary conclusions. Chew-Bose gives the reader an insight into the workings of her mind, and consequently the mind behind the writer. Unconcerned with the practice of constantly redacting and self-editing, this book gives us an unconventional and authentic collection of personal essays in the form of a perpetually unfinished product.
Durga Chew-Bose Too Much and Not the Mood Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2017 PB 240pp $23.99
Clare O’Brien is an English literature graduate, who still enjoys participating in literary criticism and discourse.
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