Reviewed by Steph Jurusz

As a form, the essay's main objective is to mine for understanding through the vehicle of language; it is an exploration of ideas and of the self on the page. The essay is a place where meaning is hypothesized, challenged, made and unmade—where truth mingles with myth and curiosity.

"Doesn't all writing begin with the artist making up a myth about herself?" asks the poet protagonist of Rebecca van Laer's How to Adjust to the Dark. This is one of the many questions raised by the lately silent writer, Charlotte, via a series of memoiristic fictional essays that center poetry and analysis. After a hiatus from writing, she delves into her own archives of poetry, using prose to untangle how she came to be in the present moment of reflection. The novel is framed as the musings of a writer looking at her past through the lens of her writing, all the way from early college when she desired to be a writer into her graduate education when she questions how/if she is a writer at all despite the desire that initially drove her.

The irony of a writer who has stopped writing exploring herself through her writing via writing is so apt for a narrator who so unflinchingly embraces her faults within her reflection. She is full of contradiction as well as consistency, and she attempts to identify formative moments—moments as in narrative scene as well as the moments within her poetry—of her identity as a woman and writer and the complicated relationship between those identities feeding one another like an ouroboros.

The protagonist identifies with the title of poet most strongly, but she is also a masterful essayist who can interweave intellectual rumination with moments of scene and narrative. She can switch gears from the tangible to intangible and inquisitive in a single line. The poems aren't an excuse for the prose or vice versa—they create a symbiosis that builds a startlingly intimate portrait of a woman and artist who is in a state of flux, recounting moments of doubt and confusion with confidently assured prose.

The question Charlotte ultimately attempts to answer is "why do you write?"—askedexplicitly in the final lines of the book but obliquely explored throughout the text. The reasons for writing vary throughout Charlotte's narrative, from spite to love to desire to connection. It is within the 11 essay-chapters that Charlotte grapples with these questions while trying to (re)create who she is/was in those moments being recounted and within the recounting itself.

The opening chapter offers a heavy nod toward literary theory (which, to the delight of lit nerds everywhere, continues throughout) as Charlotte reflects on Foucault's technologies of the self:

Self-care is the maintenance of a healthy ego, while the care of the self may be painful. As Foucault defines them, technologies of the self involve entering into an intimate relationship with one's past and present, often through writing. The goal of such self-analysis is not just to know oneself, but to "form oneself, to surpass oneself, to master the appetites that threaten to overwhelm one."

Without this framing, the narrative itself would certainly be well-written but less compelling, with a fainter heartbeat because it is within these ideas of creation and transformation, exploring the self and the portrayal of the self, that the most intangible narrative action occurs, with Charlotte's poems serving as a scaffolding. After all, she's asking questions that all writers have probably asked at one point or another: What does it mean to be a writer, to live a writing life? Not to be confused with living a life for writing, which Charlotte does, at least at some points in the beginning of her evolution.

As a writer emerging from my own hiatus, this book was gripping, painful, and oddly comforting. Charlotte is simultaneously trepidatious and brazen as she mines her memory of herself and her work. She recounts how she once lived for her writing and sought to cultivate experiences that would feed her art—attempts that ultimately broke her heart. She reckons with self-betrayal and desire in a manner that is remarkably coherent for so much intertextual genre mixing. The ontological extra-narrative meaning is what compelled me to finish the book in almost one sitting. It is a love letter to art, poetry, reflection, and an unstable, imperfect self.