“Call me Ishmael.”
Why do so many of us know the first sentence of Moby Dick? (1851) It is a simple sentence, brief, tidy and straightforward. Solid.
“I am an invisible man,” Ralph Ellison writes in…Invisible Man. (1952)
Both of those sentences, from wildly different books—written one hundred years apart—make me feel as though I’ve experienced a strong, quick and confident handshake, introducing a first-person narrator, our guide.
Cool.
It’s the initial moment of a job interview or a first-date, a cluster of seconds of sheer vulnerability and good intentions, free of mistakes and entanglements. Hello! they say. I am here, a unique and yet common person! We enter the story from a place of trust.
"By the time they had lived seven years in the little house on Greentree Avenue in Westport, Connecticut, they both detested it."
This first sentence, from The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, by Sloan Wilson, (1955) is a fast glimpse of frustration, anger, rebellion, a marriage, highlighting the couple’s suburban home—strong emotions rise to the surface! Oh, yeah! Drama!
But wait—
“Was it the bourbon or the dye fumes that made the pink walls quiver like vaginal lips?” (1992)
Um, what?—
Oo la la! Ha! I’m in!
I love it.
Darcy Steinke’s first lines of her debut novel, Suicide Blonde, (1992) made so many of us stop, pause then read on to see what daring, strange imagery might come next. The words are confessional and naked. If this is a job interview…what kind of job? Who is our guide? The narrator is destabilized, the very world warbling….
As Maggie Nelson wrote of Steinke’s sentence, “The swirl of bourbon, blonde hair dye, and vaginal lips is audacious, sure, but it’s also funny, and evidences a fairly rare and delightful phenomenon I might call feminist camp. Feminist camp—which can be practiced by persons of any gender (see John Waters, who regularly identifies as a radical feminist)—doesn’t waste time exhibiting its feminist credentials. It simply moves with invention and forcefulness into a new field, one which both belongs to a canon of outlaw writers…” (https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/06/07/suicide-blonde-twenty-five/)
There’s so much going on, in a seemingly quick and unsteady opening.
Honestly, what these words said to me back in 1992 was
“…there’s a voice in the world for you, too, a conversation to be had…” and I laughed out loud in the aisle of Powell’s Books, and spent my minimum wage earnings on a paperback.
Whichever words an author arranges on a page to kick off the party, the meeting, the interview, the court case, the visit, the date—they say, we’re in this together…they say, Come along—and a reader either joins in or puts the work aside. It’s either a conversation via the page or a failed attempt, a stranger rambling on a passing bus.
It’s about forging a human connection.
We might be on either side of the equation—writing or reading.
Those first words, they set the tone.
If you’re writing, and you think about it too long, putting that first sentence on a blank page can become intimidating. It’s easy to want to put a lot of pressure on those words…But you don’t need to put that pressure on yourself, or those words. Not at all. Not at first, and sometimes not for a good long while. (More on that, later!)
Perhaps you’d like to start writing, or start a new project in 2022? Or, never. I would understand either impulse, or both simultaneously. (Seriously, I have both impulses, at the same time…always, to write and to not write...) But today, I’m thinking about first sentences, my own and others.
Some writers challenge the very idea that a “first sentence” exists outside of a construct. “A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair. (1951)
Do you have any favorite first sentences? Or, a book close at hand with a first sentence that interests you? Crack the spine, read those first words without the expectation of reading further in the book, or read an essay, on-line or in print…pause there and consider how the first words you come to are reaching out.
I’d love to hear it.
“I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.”—W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge (1944)
If you’re willing, send me a first sentence, below! And maybe a few ideas about what you think about it…what tone the words set, which direction they seem to be headed.
Cheers, to new beginnings, the new year, a new book, an introduction, a hello.
-Monica
My wife and I have a lot of conversations about this. I am usually a proponent of short and pithy, with a good hook. In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy wrote maybe the best (after Melville)
See the child.
But he also did this one in All The Pretty Horses:
The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door.
My all-time favorite is this one from The Adventures of Augie March:
I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.
I also like this one, which serves as both a reminder that this is a sequel and an advertisment for the first book
You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.
And as good as the first sentence is, it won't help a sagging second act!
“I am boiling inside a kettle with five other people.” Alissa Nutting’s Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls.
“There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them.” Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying.
“Morphine makes me weightless, airborne. Like a spider.” Kelle Groom’s I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl.
“One winter night when she is no longer a child, the girl walks outside, her shoes against snow, her arms cradling a self, her back to a house not her own but some other.” Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children.
“I am haunted by waters. It may be that I’m too dry in myself, too English, or it may be that I’m susceptible to beauty, but I do not feel truly at ease on this earth unless there’s a river nearby.” Olivia Laing’s To the River.