Author and Oulipo member Anne Garréta is no stranger to sex, desire, and love. In Not One Day, originally published in 2002 in French, Garréta permits us to inhabit her body through memory, embracing the messiness of desire, not cisheteronormativity.
Garréta stages Not One Day as a response to a writing prompt that can be summed up as “not one day without a woman.” As an exercise to break Garréta’s writing habits, she challenged herself to write five hours every day for a month about one woman who she has either desired or has been desired by. She set other constraints: write about each woman in the order they come to mind, only one woman per night, list them alphabetically by their initials, write without her usual tools, do not draft, and to “tell them as they appear to you in the precise moment you recall them.” How many of us could be so structured in baring our intimate memories?
These loves vary wildly: flirtations at symposiums, desires both frustrating and unwanted that catch her off guard, friendships-turned-lovers that burn out to ashes, and far more. Garréta presents as more masculine, which has its significance in some of her stories. In one, she’s mistaken for a man by one lover in “the most banal of bourgeois affairs.” In another, Garréta meets the young stepdaughter of a writer at a colloquium when she helps the girl climb down steep slope and thus is likened to being her beloved Prince Charming, who she will dearly miss when she leaves.
One of these nights focuses on herself. Self-love and self-desire are not often held equal with with lovers, crushes, and flirtations. The author initially treats it like cheating, like procrastination, but it does in fact fit the theme. Not in a way that comes across as narcissism, but is treated with a similar nostalgia and reverence the other experiences carry. By the end, Garréta reveals she broke most of the rules she set for herself in writing Not One Day. Which is fitting, as she admits of the nature of desire: “It won’t be contained or restrained.”
Twelve Tales of Desire in “Not One Day,” by Anne Garréta was originally published in Anomaly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.