A Book of Fixation: On Sally Lawton’s On Second Thought
- Em Nan
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Re:Viewed by Hannah Bonner
Illustration by Em Gray
RE:VIEW
With the cool precision of Joan Didion and the smoky lyricism of Renata Adler, Sally Lawton’s On Second Thought (Diagram Press, 2023) is a scintillating collection of production diaries, script marginalia, and short auto-fictions that probe motherhood, filmmaking, and ways of seeing with ardent acumen. What does it mean, On Second Thought asks, to understand a narrative? To figure out the innate connection between two seemingly disparate ideas or things?
Despite depicting major life events, including pregnancy and marriage, Lawton remains interested in the peripheries of story, frames, and characters. “I wanted to align with the less obvious thing,” she writes in “Garden Variety: Notes on Filmmaking.” Though Lawton adds that she’s “felt [her] searching desire for the obscure was shameful,” the delight in her prose is how a “large martini glass” makes the narrator look “foolish” or how a friend’s husband’s thinness underscores “a long resignation from drugs as opposed to a bloat of having recently given them up.” “No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams once wrote. In Lawton’s book, things illuminate the interiority of characters. Like the best filmmakers (John Cassavetes and Jane Campion immediately leap to mind), the props and costumes in Lawton’s prose tell us just as much, if not more so, as the dialogue or plot.
Lawton possesses a filmmaker’s eye in her attention to detail. Describing a friend, Lawson writes,
Madeline looked extremely beautiful. But her beauty was not a response to fertility, or any life. She had a still beauty—a beauty of fixation. Like Bresson films. She was timeless—or maybe stopping time with her body’s ability to keep still, her skin’s ability to be stone, her hair’s even oil. A body without wind—similar to the one now inside her.
Lawton’s fixity of attention creates, what Roland Barthes calls, a bloom-space of possibility within the frame—or scene. Like a careful camera, Lawton inches closer and closer to the visage of her friend until that wonderful, unexpected detail of “her hair’s even oil.” When Lawton writes, “a body without wind,” the affective properties of that image stir something within me that I’m still trying to name. The best kind of writing, as Lawton herself writes, “needs to be read over and over to be understood. It comes to you not in the first thought but in the second and third and hundredth.” Perhaps on the hundredth reading I can give language to what “a body without wind” means, but existing within the liminal, between feeling and words, is a space that Lawton welcomes us into again and again.
Thinking of her unborn son watching her films one day, Lawton writes, “I want him to see the film and the garden and know my attempts at clarity were real.” “In Search of the Centaur,” Philip Lopate states that “an essay is a continual asking of questions—not necessarily finding ‘solutions,’ but enacting the struggle for truth in full view.” The attempt or the struggle are all synonyms of the essay, which is a genre marked by searches and wanderings. On Second Thought is a ruminative exploration of the wanderings that make up a life.
In an oneiric epilogue to “April & Justine,” Lawton, two friends, and her mother,
Dagger out the disease from Justine’s mouth and chin and throat. Then we dagger out April’s memory of being brutalized and called a cunt. Then they dagger out my fear of losing my mother and we sit down. Blood flows out of us, side to side, left to right, and then circles the edge of the table. Then the alphabet flows into the stream, then oxygen and myrrh. And we become an eternal fountain, no longer in need of protection. And we know exactly. We close a circle.
This scene, as witchy and mesmerizing as Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), showcases Lawton’s writing at its strongest. There is a mysticism and poetry in the flow of “oxygen and myrrh,” a miasma of whirling senses and sensations. The indefinite article “a” keeps the story squarely within the realm of the unknown. Closing a circle suggests there are multiples or variations on this shared experience among the women. Refusing to name that experience or specify what the circle signifies infuses Lawton’s writing with affective pull and potential. The “less obvious thing” is not a shameful pursuit but a poetic one. Lawson’s words and images cast a spell that lingers long after the characters or scenes have left.
SALLY LAWTON (b. 1991, Detroit) is an artist and educator with a practice based primarily in film, photography and writing. Her work combines documentary practices and experimental techniques. She received a BA in Digital Cinema from DePaul University (2013), and a MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2022). Her films have been exhibited at festivals, museums and galleries, including Media City Film Festival, Echo Park Film Center, Onion City Film Festival, among others. Her writing has been featured in Brink Literary Journal and her first writing collection On Second Thought was published by Diagram Press in 2023. She has curated programs for The Nightingale Cinema, Constellation, Cinema Borealis, and Mothlight Microcinema. She has taught at The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and is currently a student in Northwestern University's Masters in Counseling Psychology program.
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