Liftoff: On Writing and Flight
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The first scene of my novel, Discipline, takes place in an airport: the narrator, Christine, is running late, and forced to check her bag at the gate. When she touches down in Chicago and goes to retrieve her suitcase at the baggage claim, she learns that a stranger has mistakenly taken her bag. Taking matters into her own hands, Christine decides to meet the stranger at an art museum downtown. Much of the pleasure of writing the opening pages of Discipline stemmed from following Christine in this moment: what decisions would she make? Where would she go?
‘I was late because I love being in airports – that floating, anonymous feeling,’ Christine observes. Like my protagonist, I have always loved walking alone through an airport. I love the scale, the unfamiliar architecture, the long distances travelled on foot. I even love the lack of natural light, how within an airport it can feel like all times of day at once – noon, sunrise, midnight. The rules of normal living seem to melt away: in an airport, it’s always the right hour for an espresso. The airport is the epitome of a liminal space. Nearly everyone there is merely passing through.
When constructing Discipline’s opening scene, I wanted Christine to begin in precisely this kind of liminal zone. I wanted Christine to be already in transit, to embark on a journey that she couldn’t turn back from, and I wanted to sweep any chance of returning home out from under her feet. Once the book begins, Christine’s only path is forward. It felt especially important for Christine to start the novel by taking a decisive action. Here, I wanted to say, is a character who’s willing to take her fate into her own hands.
This choice to start a novel in an airport isn’t new: two books in Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy begin with a conversation on a plane; Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth opens with two men meeting at an airport. What is it about being midair – or preparing for it – that seems to set the stage for a novel? Could it be that the act of reading and flying ask for the same leap of faith?
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In Cusk’s Outline, we meet her narrator, Faye, as she prepares to travel to Greece to teach a writing workshop. ‘On the tarmac at Heathrow the planeful of people waited silently to be taken into the air,’ Cusk writes. Later, as the plane begins to take off, ‘detach[ing] itself from the earth,’ Faye observes: ‘There was a moment in which it seemed impossible that this could happen. But then it did.’
There’s a certain kind of force that’s required to set off a novel, a tension that’s been built before the start of the book – call it backstory, call it the setup, call it the inciting event: it’s what needs to be in place for the story to begin. This tension is not unlike the power required for a plane to take off, a pressure that makes you feel as though you’ve been forced back in your seat. This tension is necessary because reading fiction requires that we suspend our disbelief: we know what we’re reading is untrue – in that it’s not factual – and yet we agree to follow the author into the clouds. Without enough compelling tension, the story never rises from the ground.
In Outline, the opening of the novel also serves to set the tone and expectations for the text. Cusk includes a capsule version of a one-sided conversation with an unnamed billionaire before Faye sets foot on the plane; it’s a way of signalling to the reader that the novel will be formatted similarly. When Faye’s neighbour turns to her – immediately after the plane takes flight – Cusk takes the reader through a longer conversation, one that spans dozens of pages. By the time we reach Kudos, the third book in the trilogy, we’re familiar with Cusk’s style, and the book begins even more simply: ‘The man next to me on the plane was so tall he couldn’t fit into his seat.’ We start in midair: in transit, suspended, ready for the story to begin.
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In my twenties, I saw airports as sites of possibility and freedom. I always seemed to be travelling, hurling myself into the sky on a shoestring budget, buying the cheapest flights with the most inconvenient transfers. I flew fearlessly, enjoying the anonymity, safe in the knowledge that no one – or so I believed – was waiting at home to make sure I safely touched down.
When the Covid-19 pandemic arrived in 2020, I was twenty-seven years old. All movement seemed to come to a standstill. No more flights; no more international travel. I’ve kept a log of my reading for the last decade or so, and during those years my reading list ballooned: seventy books in 2020; fifty-five in 2021. Aside from the road bike I fixed up to ride through Brooklyn, books – specifically fiction, specifically novels – became my favourite mode of transportation.
So perhaps it makes sense that the airport – the airport lounge, specifically – becomes a site of both fantasy and fabulation in Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth, published in 2022. In the novel’s opening pages, Wilson’s unnamed narrator encounters an old classmate, Jeff Cook, who has reinvented himself as a successful art dealer. When Jeff extends an invitation to join him in the first class lounge, the narrator follows. ‘I wondered if he was having second thoughts about inviting me into the land of the fancy people,’ Wilson’s narrator observes. ‘I hoped I hadn’t seemed too desperate when accepting his offer.’ Later, Wilson’s narrator thinks: ‘Perhaps if I’d been paying closer attention, or if I’d known what was to come, I’d have detected a glimmer of desperation in his eyes. I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t there, not yet.’
Wilson’s novel builds slowly, Jeff’s voice slowly taking over the narrative, as he describes his rise to fame and the entanglement that got him there. The cloistered, luxurious setting of the lounge – ‘the airport’s privileged inner sanctum’ – becomes a container for the book. Placeless, free-flowing with wealth and privilege, it’s an ideal setting for Wilson’s novel. Yet there’s a tension already present, one that Wilson’s narrator foreshadows. Trapped in the lounge together, he has no choice but to be absorbed into Jeff’s narrative.
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What is it that we do when we write fiction? Early on in Discipline, Christine is questioned by a student about her method. ‘Do you see writing as an act of faith?’ the student asks. Christine isn’t sure how to answer, but later, during another conversation, she considers her process: ‘While Zoë talked, I imagined building a glass staircase. This was how I often thought of writing fiction: with a step that started already in midair. It was that first, crucial step, the one that lifted you above the earth and held you there, that required a leap of faith.’
I’ve made a habit of looking closely at novel openings because, like Christine, I’m interested in that first step. What lifts a novel off the earth, and invites the reader to stay there? What tremendous power must exist – known only to the author, invisible as yet to the reader – to get a story started? Sometimes that power, that tension, lies coiled in an emotional question, close to the heart of the author. Sometimes it comes from a place of love and care, a desire to represent a cast of characters compassionately and fully. Sometimes it comes from an earnest attempt to grapple with morality and politics, how to live a good life in the era of late capitalism. Often it’s a combination of all three, and more. I look for where the author takes that first step, when she lifts us off the ground.
As I grow older, I’ve stopped taking flying for granted. Or maybe it’s truer to say that my flights have become more serious, less full of freedom and fizz. Lately, the reasons I cross the country have involved sickness, and loss, and grieving. The airport has swelled to accommodate this: its liminal space has become a holding space for strange, uncategorizable feelings. No one minds if you cry in an airport. No one minds, either, a tearful reunion. And yet all of this has only made me more grateful for flight: for the power that air travel has to connect us, to bring us where we need to be, with each other. It doesn’t escape me that fiction holds exactly this same power: to bring us into other minds, other subjectivities, and remind us that none of us is truly alone.
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Larissa Pham is an artist and writer in Brooklyn. She has written essays and criticism for The Paris Review Daily, The Nation, Art in America, the Poetry Foundation and elsewhere. She was an inaugural Yi Dae Up Fellowship recipient from the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. Her debut novel, Discipline (Serpent’s Tail), is out now.
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