Writing About Writing

 “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova,” collected in Men Without Women (2014), is a story about a story. It opens with an excerpt of the titular piece which the narrator wrote during his college years—the first to be published and compensated. Music, nostalgia, and the dichotomy of dream and reality are central themes but I was most struck by this notion of the writer’s relationship to his own writing. Putting pen to paper brings realities into existence. This manifests as the narrator encounters his fictionalized Charlie Parker LP at a New York City record store. He returns it to the stacks, unable to justify the $35 price, but is later overcome by the urge to return for it “…at the very least as a souvenir of all the twists and turns [his] life had taken” (64). Now his life is “harried and busy,” by implication without room for the imaginative writing he once produced. I think there is a certain naiveté to the writing we do when we’re young. It feels possible and empowering, especially when scaffolded by collegiate writing programs. And when it has an outlet, like the now-folded literary magazine that picked up the narrator’s piece, it’s even better. Maybe I’m writing this with the cynicism of someone who once saw writing as a realistic pursuit for myself. But I think this story is very much about an abandoned love (or like) of writing and how the fruits of our labor are self-contained remnants of past lives.

Charlie Parker appears to the narrator as a ghost of that past life. He emphasizes his early death at age thirty-four and asks the narrator to consider what it would be like to die that early. I wonder what the significance is of the age thirty-four and the record’s thirty-five dollar price tag. The story’s timeline dates the narrator roughly in his mid-to-late thirties. The ghost of Charlie Parker remarks, “Only begun to live my life. But then I looked around me and it was all over” (69). Life is short, he realizes, and his is just starting. After this interaction the narrator is inspired to—literally—put pen to paper again. He writes down all the details and dialogue to the best of his memory. Ending on this image suggests to me that the narrator is picking up where he left off and rediscovering the joy of writing.

- Bella