The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
There are many excellent reviews of The Mars Room, plus its a bestseller, so I don’t see a need to go on too long about it. Except–if you’ve somehow missed this book about the lives of imprisoned women (and one prison educator), you should get a copy and get reading. Despite being an avid reader, I haven’t often experienced the emotional resonance I did with its characters. Now that I’m always in a hurry to consume books, if they are so-so, I don’t even remember the plot, much less the emotionality of the characters. The Mars Room sticks, comes back in quiet moments, enters your thoughts over and over. Finding writing inspiration from The Mar Room is easy.
Writing Inspiration from Good Books
I have been thinking of how, at the sentence level, good books drive me to reflect on incidents in my own life. The sentences that bring back memories or engender ideas for stories are not necessarily the most beautifully crafted sentences in these good books. They also don’t have to have anything to do with the overarching theme, though many times they do. They just manage to take hold because they act as either reminders of deeply-buried events or they stir simmering ideas. I’ve become a big fan of using quotes from my reading as starters for writing sessions. With this in mind, I’m sharing some sentences from the first 50ish pages of The Mars Room. (Well, and one quote from much further in.) Pick a few to use as brainstorm starter. Then go read the book!
Writing Inspiration from The Mars Room
All she did was drive the car.
My life was over and I knew it was over.
You start outward, some prick had said to me once about silverware. It wasn’t a thing I’d ever learned, or been taught. He was paying me for the date with him, and in exchange he felt he didn’t get his money’s worth unless he found small ways to try to humiliate me over the course of the evening.
Sometimes what other people want is wantable, briefly, before dissolving in the face of your own wants.
People say it’s beautiful, but the beauty is only visible to newcomers, and invisible to those who had to grow up there.
If none of that had happened, I would not be on a bus heading for a life in a concrete slot.
O pepper trees, lacy branches and pink peppercorns, without dirty old mattresses leaned up against their puzzle-bark trunks. All good bound to bad, and made bad. All bad.
Some parents raise their children in silence. Silence, irritation, disapproval.
But maybe it was me who pushed him away.
When I was growing up, they all said I had potential.
I don’t consider it an achievement, it was more that I averted a disaster.
For some people, reality is just too thin. For some people the light shines right through, a certain kind of people, a crazy kind of person, a person with mental illness and I know about that.
I could never have a future in that city, only a past.
When I was little I saw a cover of an old magazine that showed the robes and feet of people who had drunk the Kool-Aid Jim Jones handed out in Guyana. My entire childhood I would think of that image and feel bad. I once told Jimmy Darling and he said it wasn’t actually Kool-Aid. It was Hi-C.
What kind of a person would want to clarify such a thing?
That was before we started going to Anton LaVey’s house, where everyone worshipped Satan as a group.
Everything got converted by money and I started to miss these grim places that offered no happy memories, but I wanted them back.
There were days when it seemed like the real meaning of this work he was doing was to destroy his own life by trying to teach people who wanted to burn each other’s face off.
Thoreau’s image of a spiritual molting season, of a new man, the fateful concept of an American Adam an idea Gordon was fond of because of its precipitous arrangance and who doesn’t want to change his life?
It was strange to Gordon how sometimes beauty was magnificent and other times it was nothing and did not move him.
Most people talked to fill the silence and didn’t know the damage they reaped.
The lie of regret and of life gone off the rails. What rails. The life is the rails. It is its own rails and goes where it goes. It cuts its own path. My path took me here.
Other Books to Inspire Your Writing
Some other books I’ve used to as starters include The Friend by Sigrid Nunez and The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro.