His literary reputation has grown. At home in Columbus, life has gotten smaller — and stranger.
COLUMBUS, Ohio — “You will surely forgive me if I begin this brief time we have together talking about our enemies,” reads the opening of Hanif Abdurraqib’s latest book. “” is part sports memoir, part love letter to the city that raised him, and he thought the line might be off-putting. But it’s a sentence that tugs on your hand; it draws you into the inner circle. After all, the passage goes on, “to talk about our enemies is to talk about our beloveds.
“There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension” is deeply rooted in Ohio, and explores the intense sense of affinity and mutual betrayal that can exist between a person and their hometown. The narrative is structured like a basketball game: divided into quarters, numbered headings counting down from 12 minutes, with “timeouts” where the flow of prose is punctuated by verse.
Something definitely changed in the last few years. Abdurraqib has a hard time identifying it. Certainly his national reputation has grown:,” was named a finalist for the National Book Award. Correspondingly, his world in Columbus shrank — or at least became more crowded, more thickly populated by strangers who recognize him by sight.“I guess I don’t really think about how the city thinks of me,” Abdurraqib said, during our earlier, unlucky bite to eat at a nearby food hall.
He didn’t need to tell me about the mural — the one of his face, painted highlighter-bright above a quote from his 2017 essay collection. I’d seen photos of it on the internet. More subtly, the nearby King Arts Complex — where Abdurraqib had gone to summer camp and had his first kiss — put his name on a brick on its walkway.
Turning 40 has made him think a lot about loneliness and how to tend to it carefully, he said: “I want more than anything to not have any of my relationship with loneliness or isolation become anyone else’s problem. I don’t want to become harsh.” He makes sure to go out every two weeks, to buy flowers and a chai, chatting with vendors at the market.
He once thought that leaning into suffering, depressing its accelerator, would yield a romantic result. Now he wonders: “What if I don’t have to? What if my best work is awaiting me through ease, and some level of pleasure?”
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