If you grew up whispering to trees, creating narratives for every creak that was “just the house settling,” and telling yourself stories where you got to exist in other bodies to help you fall  asleep —

If you find both sorrow and sacredness in your solitude —

Then you might really get into Nell Stevens’ Briefly, a Delicious Life.

For three centuries, Blanca has been haunting the Royal Charterhouse of Valldemossa in Mallorca. Blanca is alone. She floats, painfully aware of her solitude, in the dark wondering why. Besides her past of hurling bibles and twisting candlesticks to terrify the predatory brothers who occupied the charterhouse at the time of her premature death, Blanca has been completely deprived of stimuli in the afterlife (not dissimilar to her existence in life, a pursuit of pleasure where pleasure was scarce). There is no evidence that other ghosts exist — she isn’t joined by a single one of her relatives as they slip out of existence, one after another. Her sole descendent is, after many years, an elderly woman in town. After this woman’s death, Blanca is forced to grapple with an unfathomable reality: she has no one left.

The charterhouse, long abandoned, is filled with memories — every crack, nook, cranny, and corner hold some recollection for Blanca. The house’s vast emptiness haunts her, and for a long time, these memories are all she has. Until, of course, one day.

One day, Blanca is surprised to hear voices, laughter, and some bustling in the charterhouse — evidence of aliveness that she hasn’t encountered in ages. What she sees: two men embracing each other, kissing in the overgrown garden amongst rotten pomegranates, air thick with the stench of hot fermentation. Having watched monks be secretly affectionate with each other for centuries, it isn’t the first time Blanca has seen men kissing. It is the first time, however, that Blanca has seen men kissing without a visible skittishness, without a palpable fear of being discovered. But when Blanca catches a glimpse of the lovers’ faces, she learns that the couple is not man and man, but man and woman, and not just man and woman, but iconic Romantic composer Frédéric Chopin and renowned writer, known crossdresser, and performer of all things masc., George Sand. Blanca is immediately enamored by the couple, especially with George.

For the first time, Blanca observes queer love and affection that puts its finger on something she has struggled to locate in her own body and to find language for throughout her existence. Even through hundreds of years of using her ghost form to shift into and out of living peoples’ memories, and after realizing that she’d chalked up women to symbols of safety and motherhood in life, Blanca was never able to articulate that her existence could be like George’s — fluid, joy- and pleasure-seeking, and irreducible to a binary.

As Nell Stevens did, the George in the novel leaves her husband, and then runs off to Mallorca with Chopin and her children, Solange and Maurice, in hopes that the warmer weather will heal Chopin of his tuberculosis. When they arrive, however, the townspeople are disgusted by them, especially George, who wears trousers and smokes cigars as she struts through the village, indulging in a relationship with a man who didn’t father her children. Even Blanca is shocked and disturbed when the family’s first Sunday in Mallorca rolls around and no one goes to church.

But it would be wrong to mock up Briefly, a Delicious Life as a piece of historical fiction. This novel locates itself in the cracks between categories. It’s a text that assumes the form of Blanca’s world and her being; it embodies an unfathomable aloneness, an empty, edgeless existence that teems with the fruits of life: those sappy emotions that accompany love and questions of identity that feel too pathetic to write.

“Really literature is pathetic,” says Eileen Myles in the introduction to their Pathetic Literature. They follow up:

Every act had this extra dose of froth. Like the stories were bobbing in a vast and 

inexplicable solution, like the squeaking sounds I just heard coming out of the pasta I was 

cooking tonight. I got closer with my phone to record it but then the sounds stopped. What the hell was that. It wasn’t just pasta, or literature, but something tiny, mysterious, unjustly alive.

Put most simply, pathetic literature can also be understood as a reversion back to the original meaning of pathetic: “capable of feeling.” In practice, though, it can’t be defined in any singular way — it’s an edgeless, irregular body that contains the undefinable. Like Blanca’s. 

For me, pathetic literature presents an opportunity to write in a way that feels first and creates meaning later. It’s a paradox: a genre that rejects genre while inviting me to bear myself in ways that feel private in the making, but still extends a hand to someone on the other side of the page in the end. Like bubbles settling in the grout between tiles, like the foamy suds you scoop out of your sink and blow into just to watch the flecks float and bob in the air, pathetic literature is formless.

It’s what Nell Stevens has created. A book is inherently finite, and yet Briefly, a Delicious Life manages to extend itself beyond edges I wasn’t aware of, sometimes pressing itself against the tangible — sex, Mallorca, Blanca’s menstruating body in the Mediterranean Sea — and sometimes against foamy ghostliness, queerness, love.

As Blanca watches and latches onto the first people to occupy the charterhouse in centuries, she falls pathetically in love with George. At night, when Chopin is either brooding over the unkempt, out-of-tune piano he has instead of his own beloved instrument, which he can’t afford to ship from Paris, Blanca watches George write by candlelight. The charterhouse is quiet except for the moaning of occasional notes from Chopin and the scratching of George’s pen on paper. In the chapter “I Gave Myself a Body,” Blanca “curls up in George’s dirty clothes like a mouse” and watches George from the rafters, grasping one of her shirts —

I love you, I said, nuzzling a cuff.

Below me, George’s concentration broke… She put the pen down, stretched her arms above her head, laced her fingers together, and flipped her palms faceup. Her knuckles cracked.

I love you, I said.

She stood up. The chair legs scraped the floor.

I love you, I said, and what I saw through the ceiling cracks then was a sliver of eyeball. George was looking up.

My heart — where my heart had been — quickened. Eyes — where eyes had been — prickled with instant near-tears. Skin — where skin had been — suddenly very hot. George was looking up at the place where I was and she was therefore — it was not too much of a stretch to say, surely? — looking at me.

Suddenly, Blanca is in something like a body, which she can only access through memory and her new love for George. With something tangible to cling to, she discovers a possible reality in which she’s not alone. Blanca’s desperate yearning to be noticed by George assumes a pathetic form that transcends her sorrow, becoming even blissful at times. Like the novel’s form, Blanca’s ability to desire George despite not having a body is “formless, gutless, all-consuming because unconfined” and without edges. What you won’t get in this novel is any sense of linearity. But the movement in and out of Blanca’s physical life, afterlife, and her family members’ memories; Chopin’s pain bearing itself through his compositions; and George’s exploration of herself in her writing is all so much more delicious.

Like Blanca, my identity is something I’ve always struggled to find definitive language for, oftentimes avoiding conversations about gender because it’s a question I don’t always know how to answer. The beauty of Briefly, a Delicious Life is that it reminds me that some things are so in flux that they cannot be defined with resolution-seeking terms, and that it’s okay for labels to feel totally arbitrary.

Like my gender, my marriage has been difficult to find language for — sometimes questioned by similarly counterculture-loving friends and traditional family members. I’ve questioned it, too — perhaps more than anyone else. In direct opposition to my raging-leftist-feminist ideals, I married my partner (in a somewhat unconventional ceremony). Admittedly, I was naive of the microaggressions to come: cards that address me by my husband’s name or that exclude my name entirely and opt for “Mr. and Mrs. Man’s Name,” and the occasional sanctimonious comment from friends who want me to know that it “could never be them.” While I’ve always felt secure in my decision, I haven’t always felt secure in what my decision meant for my identity, how it would change the way people interact with me, how I’m perceived.

After saying that she thinks George is a person who easily falls in love, Blanca peers into George’s memory of being eighteen and about to be married. George attempts to grapple with this impending reality —– her name change, her seriousness, her significance. “It is as though, already, her wifeness has become the most important thing about her,” Blanca notes. “For some reason, [George] pictures wifeness as a kind of toad, bulky, warty, its throat undulating over its breath.” Blanca considers George’s visibility — George: a mysterious woman who moves from her traditional (but very real) girlhood desires toward a complex existence that, just like Blanca’s, seems to straddle states of being.

And wow, I’ve never felt more seen by a passage in a book. Despite my decision to marry, I’m so resistant to the idea of “wifeness,” resistant to the idea that I should consider “wife” to be a defining piece of my identity. After all, “wifeness” doesn’t even have anything to do with the love I share with my partner, with who I am, or with who we are together. Perhaps paradoxically, it’s a word I’ve always felt completely alienated from. It has always been something that has nothing to do with me.

After having been trapped in the confines of herself for three-hundred years, Blanca at last finds that she has more to experience and more to desire of George — to be seen, to be loved by her. George is so much like Blanca, and like the version of herself she couldn’t be in life. Finally, Blanca finds that she is no longer alone.