Recovery Go-Bag: Jason Brown

“There’s no hope — that’s the hope.”

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I kicked around an idea for “Desert Island Discs” for recovery for a couple of years. However, instead of your top-five favorite music albums you’d take with you to a desert island, it’d be the recovery books or comfort items you’d bring.

I had this experience when, out of an abundance of precaution, we left our home and neighborhood semi-urgently during the recent LA fires. What did I throw in my bag? Well, two physical copies of my marked-up version of “When Things Fall Apart” by Pema Chödrön and “How to Do Nothing” by Jenny Odell. I took those two because I feel like I’ve studied them and used them enough during various crises, both existential and familial, that I know how beneficial they are and how essential they’d be had we been away from our home for an extended period or, God forbid, lost everything. We were fine. And I was fine, and I knew if I stuck to my books, I would be fine even if something terrible did happen.

It gave me the idea to ask other writers, artists, and musicians about what they’d bring with them if shit went down and they were forced to only bring a few items with them to help keep their recovery intact, well — what would those items be?

Today, our guest is writer Jason Brown. After you’ve read Jason’s Go-Bag, read an excerpt from his new memoir, “Character Witness” right here.

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1. Book. WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, that poem of sorrow, mourning, complaint. I feel pretty sure that whatever was wrong with that guy is also wrong with me. His elegiac portraits and landscapes are all portraits of his shattered, melancholic self. That book is a friend who knows that every time a girlfriend dumped me in high school I got drunk and listened to The Smiths until I passed out.

2. Book. Tao Te Ching — to bring me out of the adolescent doom state induced by spending too much (or maybe just the right amount of) time with the Rings of Saturn. The Tao is a pool of clear cold water. Bracing, cleansing. If only one could read it once and be done. The person who wants to be done forever done — rereads The Rings of Saturn and has to reread the Tao Te Ching. Repeat. Could be worse. Sometimes slowly. There’s no hope — that’s the hope.

3. Stuffed animal. On permanent loan from daughter, Bella: Pale, fluffy goat with pink flower on head named Tulip. No explanation immediately forthcoming (longing for the false comforts of middle-class tropes . . .).

4. Book. Being in Time by Martin Heidegger. (Just kidding: I would not take this book with me anywhere, under any circumstances.). Dasein.

5. Book. Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. Only a writer could imagine Sisyphus happy, but . . . in any case, amor fati only takes you so far. Another kind of love is necessary — I’m still figuring this out.

6. Book. Of my three favorite works of American fiction — Moby Dick, Blood Meridian, Love Medicine — I would take only the latter. In a pinch, I’ll stick with Love, and Love Medicine still has much to teach me.

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Jason Brown is a fiction and nonfiction writer who teaches at the University of Oregon, where he is a professor and the Director of the MFA Program. His memoir Character Witness is his most recent book.

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Previously:

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