Away from Her

tatters. (These details are only relevant to one another in the context of my own reading of the story. As the details of someone else’s life are only relevant to their reading of it. That’s one of the strangest things about the adaptation of fiction into film. You can never claim that it’s faithful to anything but the story that you read, at that moment, in those particular circumstances. The person next to me, who may also have been reading that week’s
New Yorker
on the plane from Reykjavik to London, could have easily read another story entirely.) The film that I made,
Away from Her,
may seem blasphemously untrue to what another reader may see in it, though I painstakingly honored the story that I loved.
    I’ve always admired Alice Munro’s writing, but this story punctured something. I read it, stunned,and let it sit there. It seemed to enter like a bullet. So concise and unsentimental, nothing to cushion the blow of its impact. When I was finished, I couldn’t stop weeping.
    I returned to it many times in the following months, trying to make sense of the hold it had over me. First, there was Julie Christie. I had met her on the set of Hal Hartley’s film
No Such Thing
. It had been a magical time, being exposed to someone so essentially curious and alive, and as Alice Munro writes about Fiona, “not quite concealing a private amusement.” It was compounded by meeting her in such a stunning and strange place. And it was a wonder to discover it with her. It was immediately impossible to not imagine Julie’s face when Fiona was described in the story. (And the coincidence of Fiona’s Icelandic background was odd, to say the least.)
    Meeting Julie was a kind of salvation for me and distracted me from the exhilarating mess I had been making of my life. In retrospect, I wonder if it isn’t part of the job description of being in your early twenties to make a mess of things. If it is, then I was excelling at my work. I had one unstable, destructive relationship after another, and I didn’t want it any other way. I was a love glutton, addicted to melodrama, and convinced that happiness was the stuff boredom was made of. In the middle of thisheartwrenching, hugely stimulating time, I met a film editor named David.
    He was a respected editor in Canada, and he agreed to guide me through making my first short film. I immediately liked him, his dry humor, his achingly empathetic eyes, his introspection, the compassionate way he listened when others told stories, his lack of need to take over a room. I loved sitting next to him in the dark in front of the Avid editing system as we talked about images, sound, and the emotional narrative of two other, fictional people. After the film was complete, I stalked him until he dated me, and when, after three weeks, he hadn’t fallen in love with me, I was hurt, and possibly furious. I confronted him. Looking back, I am in awe of the gall it takes to “confront” someone over not falling in love with you.
    He was patient with me. He explained that he didn’t believe that love was the name for the butterflies he had in his stomach after three weeks. The butterflies were there, but he didn’t think they were … important. I believed that initial obsession was the main signal, the chief aim of coming into contact with someone you were in love with, and didn’t understand his apparent disregard for irrational passion. If he felt these things as he was claiming to, why wouldn’t he call it love?
    He talked about his parents, how they had been together for forty-five years, and how sometimes, as his mother washed the dishes, her husband would approach her as she worked, slip his arms around her waist and lightly kiss the back of her neck. He thought that this
endurance
was the definition of love, not that initial insanity. If something remained, some inexplicable, intangible thread managed to stay unbroken, after the betrayals, the hurt, and the disappointment that any marriage must surely endure, then that was what he was willing to concede must be love.
    Finding this the most boring, unromantic, staid portrait of the thing, I bid him adieu and ran into the arms of the next nightmare I could find. We stayed friends, but the friendship was fraught with hurt and abandonment, more obviously for him, but for me too.
    And so, much of my time in Iceland was spent negotiating an impossible and uncompassionate relationship with someone else, someone with whom I could see