Like a Lake

Carol Mavor is a writer who lives in Manchester England. Her most recent books are Aurelia: Art and Literature Through the Mouth of the Fairy Tale; Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour; and Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans Soleil and Hiroshima mon amour.

• Millions of Years Ago 1My Nico 2Unfolding a Flood 4Turning the Key 5The Memory of Lake Tahoe 16My Mother's Eyes 17My Mother 18Coda 21By Chance 25When Bamboo Shoots Poke Their Heads out of the Earth 29Blue Rambler 30Tender Buttons 47Waiting 49Refusing to be Plucked 55We Want Roses 56She Sleeps with Him Every Night 59She-Wolf Made of Rock 61Blue Ticket 65Learning to Swim 66Floating Studio, Floating Zendo 67Fannette Island 76Floating Zendos and Mentorgartens 79I Learned about Snowflakes 82I Learned about the Birds of Lake Tahoe 84Summer Snow Cake 86Love or Affection 88Mary's Dream 89Each Other's Pockets 90Black Cloth 91Brown Kimono 94Something Broke 96The Voice of the Lake 101Moon Writing 102Artichoke 104No Name for Him 107What's in a Name? 108Like Piles of Laundry? 109Frozen Pond 111Coda's Dream 113Like Mother and Son 114Fifteen Good Prints 115Glass Moon 117Tsukimi Udon (Moon Noodles) 118Soaring 121Walking Underwater 123Open My Heart 125Like Rice on Chopsticks 126Like a Sequence of Poems 127Waiting, Still 128Morpheus 129Blue Marble 131Something Like Love 132Afterword (Afterward): Like the Navel of My Dream of Nico 133Acknowledgments 139Illustrations 141Notes 143

"Like a Lake is like a novella teasing an essay, or an erotic ghost haunting a fictional memoir, or a negative searching for its lost prints. It is an unnerving question-machine where desire, memory, loss and invention are staged, folded and held, tasted, re-made and undone. It’s a strange, vivid, troubling and beautiful book." - Max Porter "Like a Lake is a story of where art comes from, the love and grief held in forms - a house, a cup, a photograph, a stone. The experience of reading this novel is lake-like - a beautiful surface opens, and opens, and opens and ripples with grief." - Jennifer Doyle, author of Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art "Like A Lake is... like a lake. A famous one, Lake Tahoe, situated on the California/Nevada border, features plot-wise and thematically in the book, almost flowing it together... an adventurous, even pioneering, book..." - Source Magazine