Looking for Gauraa in “Notes”
Gauraa Shekhar | Notes | word west | May 2023 | 134 Pages
November 1, 2018 1:11 AM
bosco tried to kiss me as i helped him take his halloween makeup off and when i asked him if he had feelings for me he shook his head vehemently and said he just really likes me as a friend and it stung like a tepid slug of vodka
November 1, 2018 11:43 AM
queens always feels bright and open when you’re taking the train back to manhattan
November 1, 2018 12:18 PM
100% sure “wonderwall” is written about my hangover
my hangover is the high-pitched giggle at the beginning of “hungry like the wolf”
despite being often referred to as a one-hit wonder, my hangover landed me on the hot 100 four times in all
If reading this made you need to listen to “Wonderwall,” you’re not alone. There’s something arrestingly intimate about reading the notes somebody else has written on their iPhone: you’re peeking inside the things they never meant to share with somebody else. Learning that “Wonderwall” means something particular to the writer in that moment therefore feels like an invitation to inhabit that private moment alongside the narrator. A playful voyeurism compels the reader to continue snooping.
Gauraa Shekhar’s posthumous debut, Notes is composed entirely of iPhone notes and texts the narrator sends (or doesn’t). These notes are dashed off thoughts (“‘careless hipsters’ by george michael”), reminders (“buy toilet paper”), insights into the mind of a writer who’s making sense of the world for herself. Taking place over the course of an academic year in an MFA program in New York City, the book is an irreverent and sharp künstlerroman—the artist moving through various personal, artistic, and romantic experiences all in the formation of herself as an artist. This journey feels fraught from the start:
October 19, 2018 3:24 PM
my therapist told me i should stop indulging in self-deprecatory behavior like air quoting the word “writer” when i describe myself.
The experience of reading Notes—a book that conveys what it feels like to get to know someone through a screen—is for me an uncanny one; I came to know Gauraa entirely online. During the summer of 2020, I had completed my first year of an MFA program and was displacing my quarantine angst by writing a lot of flash fiction that didn’t go anywhere and over-submitting to various magazines with the logic of one of Pavlov’s mice, hoping for a hit of serotonin with an acceptance. In my hours scrolling Twitter, I came across a slick graphic for a story called “Timothée Chalamet” by Jinwoo Chong. I was a post-Call Me by Your Name Timothée fan, and the graphic was eye-catching. I read the story and then scanned through the magazine where it was published, No Contact.
Founded earlier that year by a group of Columbia MFAs as an online, short-form literary publication, the magazine had a unique and playful sensibility, with beautiful original graphics. I began sending in work, and after an encouraging rejection, was thrilled to have a story accepted about a man who’s obsessed with another man he sees when dropping off his high-maintenance pooch at the dog groomer.
The editorial process with Gauraa and her partner Elliot, the founding editors, felt distinct from the other magazines I’d had the chance of working with at that point. They asked me questions. They shared lines they loved. They imagined a new, clearer ending with me. Where the MFA workshop might cast around ideas together and leave the writer to arrive at a new draft alone, this editorial relationship gave me concrete ways to prepare my story to share with readers.
More importantly, though, No Contact gave me something beyond a new publication on my CV. It wasn’t just external validation: this magazine was forming an online community.
I went on to write a column on horror film for the magazine. What began as a feature for the month of October became a recurring, monthly series. I was brought into the No Contact Slack channel, and every month I looked forward to filing my Cinemacabre essays on Jennifer’s Body, Stranger by the Lake, and Death Proof with Gauraa and Elliot.
For many early career writers, it can be uncommon to be well-edited. A lot of outlets look for work that’s publication-ready, and I knew well the feeling of getting a proof that looked the same as the draft I’d submitted for publication. Sometimes, when I had work accepted elsewhere, I never spoke to an editor, didn’t know if they really liked it, and thought maybe they’d made some mistake and regretted now having to publish it. Given that external validation was providing my primary coping mechanism for how I felt about quarantine and where I was in my writing career, simply publishing work didn’t feel like much of anything. I felt isolated in the writing process and adrift in my career.
Working with Gauraa and Elliot at No Contact provided the solution I didn’t know I was looking for. The editorial relationship challenged me, and for the better part of two years it helped me grow as a writer. It also rewrote the trap of external validation I was in: collaborating with them—and becoming part of the magazine’s footprint—made me focus on developing ideas instead of rushing to create a published product.
With Gauraa and Elliot, I understood what was interesting with my columns and what ideas needed work. We actually talked about the movies, too, and I could tell they truly read each essay. When I filed my column on the eleventh of every month, I would eagerly check my Slack to learn what they thought about the movie I’d chosen. My use of the phrase “low rent demon” when discussing Fear Street got a laugh. After listening to an interview with literary critic Parul Sehgal, I tried a new approach with my column on Yellowjackets, and when Gauraa shared her feedback, she noted it was one of her favorites I’d written. I found creative harmony as part of this team. A web of meaning was threading together; I’d look at movies with an eye to the column, anticipate feedback, and then use that feedback to reinterpret the film and understand the next in new ways. Writing “Cinemacabre” for well over a year grounded me through the tail-end of the pandemic and provided me with a literary community. Through our editorial relationship and Twitter riffs on Lana Del Rey and horror films, we developed a friendship entirely online. I’d always heard of people having online friends. Through the circumstances of the pandemic and this online magazine, I was discovering the value of that for myself.
Being part of a writing community outside of my MFA program gave me hope for building a life as a writer beyond the structures of school. Gauraa was a year ahead of me, and I looked at her post-MFA life for evidence that there was an other side to all of this. Whenever I had new work published, I could feel the excitement from the team. I too was always eager to read new work from others in the No Contact community. When AWP—an annual writing conference where writers and editors who’ve corresponded virtually oftentimes meet for the first time—returned to in-person programming in the spring of 2022, I regretted that I couldn’t make the trip to Philadelphia. For the first time in a year and a half, I finally had the opportunity to meet my No Contact friends, but my graduate school finances had other ideas. I sent a sigh over Slack, saying I’d have to catch them next year when circumstances were different.
Later that year, I was in Los Angeles for a wedding when I received the news. On a lark, I’d opened Slack while I waited for my friend so we could head out for the day. Gauraa had passed away. I was stunned. I felt a rush of sadness for Gauraa’s family and friends, the people who’d welcomed me into this community and knew her so well. When my friend joined me in the living room, ready to leave for brunch, I shared the news. She offered condolences, yet my feelings confused me. Gauraa and I had never met in person, corresponding solely online. How well did I really know her?
As my friend and I went about our day, I had an unsettling sense of vertigo. In college, there were two times when someone from high school passed away, and I registered the shock with a sense of distance. I felt some proximity to my own life—these were people I’d seen in PE in fifth grade and in the halls outside of anatomy—but also understood I didn’t know them anymore. With this news, I didn’t know what to do. We’d never met in person. I felt self-conscious about confiding what this loss meant to me to my friends and family, worried that they might think I was dramatizing the impact of the loss for attention.
Yet I knew how I felt. When an artist dies, there’s the loss of life and the loss of future art too. I loved reading Gauraa’s work. I felt how much was lost, how much more she could have written. As we’d spent the past two years together in this literary community, I also had the keen sense that there was this personal potential lost too. I’d loved all of the time we’d spent working together. What friendship could have been with more time?
•
The epistolary novel has a long history—for hundreds of years, readers have enjoyed snooping through characters’ letters and diary entries to figure out for themselves what the hell is going on. Dracula was the first novel to illuminate the form’s possibilities for me. Having read Frankenstein in high school, for no good reason aside from Dracula being another famous monster origin story, I’d assumed the novel would unfold through one character’s recollection of this sinister vampire stalking a town. Instead, the novel’s collaging of correspondence and newspaper articles allowed the drama to unfold in a more original way. The epistolary form invites a dynamic readerly experience; instead of following one character’s narrative arc, the reader completes forensic work, holding the various puzzle pieces against each other and intuiting what went wrong through the negative space. The form has so captivated readers for centuries that there’s even a Substack to which readers can subscribe and receive Dracula’s various entries on the calendar date when they would have taken place.
As the modes of modern communication have evolved, so too has the epistolary novel. In Calvin Kasulke’s Several People Are Typing, an employee at a New York public relations firm is one day uploaded into the company’s Slack channel. Samantha Allen’s Patricia Wants to Cuddle intersperses the rotating third-person perspective with letters, blog posts, and the equivalent of subreddits to reconstitute the story of a female Sasquatch disrupting filming of The Catch, a Bachelor send-up, on a remote island off the coast of Washington. Where these contemporary novels use IMs and message boards to dramatize characters working together to figure out what is going on in real time, the form of Notes feels both haunted and understated. These notes were never intended for an outsider’s consumption. The reader picks up the narrator’s iPhone and snoops through the thoughts that the narrator is carrying, processing, and using to make sense of the world for herself. As a result, the voice is abundant. Narrating her life to only herself, she shares so much more.
December 23, 2018 10:40 PM
held myself back from texting “i miss you” am i finally guarded now
The text often reads in this free-flowing manner of auto-narration, and the stylization—the time stamps and lowercase letters and flexible punctuation—confer an additional intimacy. This is the unedited version of the character’s musings on her life, and we are so privileged as to view it. In this way, Notes remixes the diaried epistolary with the off-the-cuff style of Slack and Reddit posts. The book becomes an act of construction. For the narrator, the act of writing these notes provides her with a way of processing life in New York within this small writing community. Her sense of the world is condensed.
The novel opens and the narrator meets her friends at the bar. She notices her friend J.J. walk in at 1:23 AM, calling him “guy fieri’s duplicitous evil twin.” By 10:02 the next morning, her assessment of him has evolved unseen to us, and he reappears in a series of texts the narrator drafts but doesn’t send, asking what went down last night. The book makes brilliant use of negative space, capturing the wrinkles of a moment, how a night can change, how our narration of our lives can develop and evolve in unexpected ways.
Novels narrated through IMs or letters can manipulate the space between messages, relying on the reader to intuit the gap between what someone might be feeling and what they might be saying. But the self-recording notes in real time—as opposed to sharing a final account in a diary entry the next day—offers something more: spontaneous insight into how one feels and how their understanding of the event can transform over the course of a night or a conversation. Were the novel composed in diary entries, this spontaneity of thought would likely be dialed down. Recollecting the occurrences of her life post hoc, the narrator might have already processed the events of the evening prior to writing, the minute details that capture her attention might not be worthy of transcribing the following day, and what is written is a more final account—the complete diary entry—as opposed to a note on a cell phone, which can be appended or struck through, as she does throughout the book. It’s process instead of product. We witness the action, its contemplation beforehand, and the interpretation after.
November 18, 2018 9:19 PM
j.j. keeps asking me if i wanna have a cigarette on the fire escape but he also keeps disappearing into different corners of the party
November 18, 2018 9:50 PM
salena shows up to the party with two bottles of grey goose yelling shots! shots! shots! then tells the room how she’s worried about money
November 18, 2018 10:11 PM
sometimes i feel like i confess to truths i don’t believe
November 18, 2018 11:14 PM
sarah keeps leavisg apartment to dowbstairs have cigaettes with natty even thoe everyone’s smoking in the apartment she keeops foretting that th e music is conncted her phone
Notating the play-by-play of parties or her dates with men, the narrator makes legible her inner emotional weather—what feels most important to record in this moment (even when the alcohol at 11:14 PM makes its way into her typing).
The book complements these notes with drafted text messages the narrator does not send to various people in her life. Her crossed-out attempts to say what she means swiftly convey what she wants to say but can’t. (Cue “Wonderwall.”)
For the reader of Notes, its process takes on an additional layer, the act of reading becoming a form of detective work. Through attention to time stamps and the evolution of images, lines of text, art, and music passing through her emotions, the reader learns about both the ongoing story of her writing and romances in the city as well as how she feels in her mind, her thinking, and about her circumstances. Notes both tells the narrator’s story and captures the ephemera that writers collect when taking notes on the world: observations, jokes, story ideas, lines, and turns of phrase. For a künstlerroman, the form matches function; we as readers are privileged to be inside the artist’s process.
December 24, 2018 3:02 PM
before i got on the plane to tampa bosco wished me a safe flight and asked me to text him when i land
is this like the episode of my so called life where jordan catalano realizes he loves angela chase
December 24, 2018 3:06 PM
not sure if i’m jordan catalano or angela chase in this equation
The reader learns at once about how the narrator feels about herself and her circumstances from the way she interacts with external texts and cultural artifacts, such as My So Called Life or the music video to Gwen Stefani’s song, “Cool,” and what her particular style looks and feels like from the kinds of media that are magnetized into her field of reference.
For me, the form had a reduplicative effect: I was reading the debut of a friend I knew exclusively over text, written in notes on a phone. I couldn’t help but read into everything.
When I read the book, I feel as though I’m reaching for connections to the person I knew. I feel this, in particular, through the narrator’s relationship to the art and media she consumes, divining connections between the pop culture references the narrator and the writer loved. She finds a kinship with Lana Del Rey—Lana’s recycling of Emily Dickinson’s sadness, her own recycling of Lana’s sadness—and Jenny Lewis. We learn about the kinds of things that she is surrounding herself with and what’s speaking to her.
December 25, 2018 3:27 PM
fiona’s dad pulled up a new york post article about a woman who had sex with twenty ghosts and is now engaged to a spirit and i don’t know i really felt that
Getting inside of the narrator’s relationship to art and music and how that supports her understanding of self and what she creates is remarkably intimate. I’m always absorbing interests—music, books, fashion, even skincare products—from other people in my life, and I sometimes share the soundtrack of my lonelier days with a Spotify link and a text to a friend that simply says, “Mood.” I often think in references, too, reinterpreting the goings-on of my life in terms of lines from movies, books, The Leftovers. Seeing what populates someone else’s field of reference creates points of vulnerability and connection, offering windows into the ways one person sits inside their mind. This mode of connecting with someone over a passing thought or affinity for certain media also replicates how I felt getting to know somebody over Twitter: who do we both like, what interests do we share, you like what I like too.
This development of intimacy through media—using texts to connect with others—even arises within the events of the book.
February 13, 2019 6:30 PM
i was looking up a song on bosco’s phone and rilo kiley appeared in his recent searches and i looked at him and he said what! i didn’t wanna make a big deal out of listening to the music you like! it was nice
The book invites a porous read—seeing the narrator interact with her own life through its potential for artistic creation, we also feel the potential to ask about the relationship between the writer and the text. Where does the self end and the created self begin?
January 10, 2019 9:14 AM
i woke up with clenched fists today and instead of analyzing what that meant i was just like what if a character woke up with clenched fists what could that mean
January 10, 2019 9:16 AM
favorite new dissociative technique is treating my own problems as character details
Reading the narrator’s account of relating her life to her writing and back again, I recognize how I do this in my own life as a writer. Everything is material; how can we mine our private lives for the purpose of creating our own artistic texts? Yet reading a moment like this one, I also feel its double meaning. For me, it’s not just about the relationship between a writer and their narrator and the collapse of space between them; I’m looking for records, more to go off of to understand the person I knew.
•
In November of 2023, No Contact announced that the magazine would be concluding operations following the release of its final issue. Since Gauraa’s passing, I’ve joined the magazine as a prose editor and will be working with the team to usher issue 31, Closing Time, into the world.
February 16, 2019 7:49pm
you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here
you don’t have to stay here but you can go home
you don’t have to go home and you can stay here
you don’t have to go home and you can like totally stay here
Soon, I’ll be saying goodbye to this community that has come to mean so much to me. In the meantime, I’m thinking about what final message to leave in my last column, what record will carry forward from what this all meant.
Slack deletes messages older than ninety days. There’s no archive of our editorial conversations, our moments of connection over books and film. Until Twitter disappears for good I can still look back at our tweets to each other, but otherwise the record is gone.
Over the past year, I’ve asked myself about these kinds of relationships we form with others—both online and within the literary world. Comparing these connections with the kinds of relationships I have in my physical community—with friends and family—left me confused over what I could feel about this loss—of community, of the writer, and of the editor and friend.
Holding Notes against this particular kind of friendship is like looking through a photonegative at the picture. I’m looking for the person I knew in digital spaces through her narrator, who’s using digital spaces for purposes of her own design.