A Year in Reading: Elvia Wilk

1.

Back in April, I told a friend that I was too depressed to focus on reading and asked for a book recommendation. She suggested I try Emmanuele Carrère’s Yoga. It’s a memoir about depression, she explained, but it’s also a fast read, and there’s a lot of literary drama surrounding its publication, because it’s full of lies, which gives a salacious element to the reading experience. In the book’s final scene, she told me, the narrator is brought out of a long period of hopeless despair by the sight of a woman’s bare ass when she does a yoga handstand.

, I thought. I bought the book right away, but I didn’t open it until June, when I was on vacation and feeling better. I hadn’t exactly spelled it out to my friend, but for much of the spring I had been in one of those situations so severe that while walking to her apartment that day I had been doing the same thing that I had been doing for weeks with,,, while I walked. Which is to say it didn’t matter how fast, sexy, or appropriate a book was. I was constitutionally incapable of reading at that point.