Persephone Abbott

Posts tagged “Richard Brautigan

Negotiating

Posted on November 8, 2025

“It seems we lose the game before we start to play.” Those words from Lauryn Hill’s song “Everything is Everything” always resonated with me.  “We never argue.” I told my boss when I was twenty-two. I was aiming to relate how perfect and idyllic my life with my parents was to him. I was living in Paris and not ever planning on moving back to the states.  He stared at me, wordless.  Right then, I knew something was up. I had said something wrong.  And I was wondering how to backtrack. Of course, he didn’t straight up reply that that policy was abuse. He finally said something along the lines of, “I don’t know about that.” Looking back, I recognize that at that time: …

“Do you have any unfinished business with me?”  

Posted on October 12, 2025

A friend of mine related to me that her father had asked her this particular question during a visit to see him. This was about ten years ago. And recently her ninety year old father, a former scientist and teacher at MIT, died. “No,” my friend had replied to his question.  So before her father passed to the great beyond, she spent ten years with him, hanging out, working on a book of his memories, marathon watching educational videos, enjoying a meal together, etc.  Imagine.  I am working on a book with my father, except that he’s been dead these past six years and I have a truck load of unfinished business with him. It’s complicated.  Keith wrote a memoir of his friend, Richard…

Thoughts on Richard Brautigan’s A Confederate General in Big Sur

Posted on October 20, 2024

“There was a ship going someplace. It was a Norwegian ship. Perhaps it was going back to Norway, carrying the hides of 163 cable cars, as part of the world commerce deal. Ah, trade: one country exchanging goods with another country, just like in grade school. They traded a rainy spring day in Oslo for 163 cable car hides from San Francisco.” (Excerpt from A Confederate General in Big Sur by Richard Brautigan, 1965.) I first read A Confederate General in Big Sur when I was a teenager and I just finished reading it for the second time. I would like to think that this novel has made the same impression upon me as forty something odd years ago, however I must say that…