So let me first say, yes, the day of my birth is an utter and unmitigated delight, and not only for the very sweet notes I sometimes get that day—already five by 8:15 a.m., from Taiwan, the Basque Country, Palo Alto, Bloomington, and Frenchtown, New Jersey—but also for the actual miracle of a birth, not just the beautifully zany and alien and wet and odorous procedure that is called procreation, but for the many thousand—million!—accidents—no, impossibilities!—leading to our births. For god’s sake, my white mother had never even met a black guy!
“My Birthday, Kinda,” from The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
The title of Gay’s essay collection is embodied in this long sentence, which pulses with delight. Whether it’s rage or joy or unhappiness or longing, the long sentence is the perfect form because it simulates heightened emotion. Emotion overspills, sweeping up and along, and word after word lines up, cascading down the page.
Gay opens with a colloquial tone, verging on a phatic utterance: “So let me first say, yes.” (Like last week’s sentence ):
It’s a friendly door opening to the sentence's subject, “day,” and the linking verb, “is.” He uses balance (the pairing of two), two adjectives to describe the feeling of the day: “utter and unmitigated delight,” weaving in the echo of the sound “u.”
Gay grows his sentence primarily through two correlative conjunctions, which work in pairs, and two parentheticals. For his correlative conjunctions, Gay uses “not only/but also” and “not/but”
1. not only for the very sweet notes…
2. but also for the actual miracle of a birth
1. not just the beautifully zany and alien…
2. but for the many thousand
Let me add a small comment about the adverb “very.” I know from teaching that most students are taught to cut this word during revision (in fact, cut all adverbs (no! don’t do it)), but I want to argue for its value here. “Very” captures the narrator’s big emotions as he thinks about his birthday. He needs to reach for superlatives to move the sentence out of the ordinary and into the extraordinary to amplify that earlier word “delight.” “Very” means “to a high degree, exceedingly.” The word “actual,” an adjective, works similarly, as does “beautifully.”
In the second correlative conjunction, Gay uses polysyndeton, the repeated use of conjunctions. Because the list includes four or more, he creates more emotion: “not just the beautifully zany and alien and wet and odorous procedure that is called procreation.” Says Winston Weathers in his essay, “The Rhetoric of the Series,” the four-or-more series suggests the human, emotional, diffuse, and inexplicable. But you know that already; you can feel it.
Two parentheticals interrupt the linear flow, adding even more emotion. It’s as if Gay can’t make a straight linear sentence because his delight keeps erupting. In the first parenthetical, he has another four-or-more list, and he varies the rhythm by using two-, three- or four-syllable words, with the last one five syllables (Frenchtown, New Jersey). The ear likes this variety. In the second parenthetical, exclamation points capture Gay’s delight.
already five by 8:15 a.m., from Taiwan, the Basque Country, Palo Alto, Bloomington, and Frenchtown, New Jersey
million!—accidents—no, impossibilities!—
The different registers of language are also pleasing to the ear. (They also help with characterization, showing the protagonist’s range of language and education.) Gay uses high register words—polysyllabic, Latinate in this line: “odorous procedure that is called procreation.” This contrasts with the opening colloquial tone, a tone repeated in the second parenthetical and the second short sentence.
I included the second sentence to show how Gay uses sentence length variety to change the rhythm: from a long sentence to a short one: “For god’s sake, my white mother had never even met a black guy!”
Your Turn
Open your sentence with colloquial language or a phatic utterance. Now add your subject and the linking verb, “is.” Use two adjectives and a noun to describe your subject. Can you use assonance?
Add the conjunction “and” and use a correlative conjunction, not only/but also. Interrupt the first part of this pairing with a parenthetical that is a list. To heighten emotion, use four or more items in your list.
Use a second correlative conjunction, not just/but. In the first part of this pairing, use four or more adjectives and polysyndeton.
In the second part of this pairing, interrupt it with a second parenthetical. Can you use exclamation points?
After you finish that long sentence, write a second short sentence to create a variety of lengths.
How did it go?
What else do you see?
About The Book of Delights: One of today’s most original literary voices offers up a genre-defying volume of lyric essays written over one tumultuous year. The first nonfiction book from award-winning poet Ross Gay is a record of the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives. Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane, the silent nod of acknowledgment between the only two black people in a room. But Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man or the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture or the loss of those he loves. More than anything else, though, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world–his garden, the flowers peeking out of the sidewalk, the hypnotic movements of a praying mantis.
About Me:
I’ve taught “Style in Fiction,” “Word for Word” and “Cultivating Your Prose” at the University of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies since 2007.
Please visit my website to find all my books: ninaschuyler.com, including my novel Afterword, How to Write Stunning Sentences, and Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal.
Please consider preordering my award-winning short story collection:
I’m so happy that my short story collection, In This Ravishing World, will be published in July 2024. The collection won the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections and The Prism Prize for Climate Literature.
I’m honored and thrilled to receive this blurb from the fabulous writer Karen Joy Fowler:
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I gotta try:
I could tell you it was all for the best, yes, not only was I a capable, sharp, inciteful seventeen-year-old, certain she was too deep-thinking for high school, but free!--free of my father’s insistence that school was vital--free as a teenage girl could be with a widowed mother who would not stand up to her children--free to try and free to fail!--and as I burst out of that imposing, granite edifice—strands of waist-long beads swinging around my neck, fringes on my knee-high moccasins fluttering and my skirt showing too much thigh for the rules of a small-town high school of the 1960s—my resolve felt at the same time, rock steady and giddy. And, it actually did turn out all for the best because why would anyone waste another moment in a place where they'd known only misery?
What a sentence! I love the combination of adjectives 'zany, alien, wet and odorous'. Not much romance in that image of 'procreation' :) These long sentences are mind-stretching, and I suppose that's the point. Thanks for this one.
Mine is even longer than the model (sorry) but here it is:
Well I can tell you, starting out at that all-girls’ high school with its reputation for testing the fortitude of every fledgling teacher was not fun, and not only due to the nausea that arose as I approached the school carpark—it sometimes took me twenty minutes to settle my stomach enough to venture from the shelter of my safe, friendly, familiar, battered and dented VW—but also because of the welcome I knew awaited me inside, not just the sullen looks and whispered taunts and insults and jeers that accompanied my progress through the halls, but also the practised contempt and sneering disapproval and amused curiosity and sheer cussedness of the old, seasoned staff members, those who had survived—thrived!—in this purgatory—no, this hell!—survived, but only as spiritless, soured, joyless echoes of the human beings they must once have been. My career was just beginning.