How did I become the library of everyone I love? Nate Lippens asks in Ripcord, his Semiotext(e) debut, which follows his first novel, 2022’s phenomenal My Dead Book, published through Publication Studio’s Fellow Travelers Series and now reissued by Semiotext(e). This question better explains My Dead Book than it does Ripcord; the former is a eulogy of lost lovers and friends, while the latter stands as a broader rumination on life.
There is no plot to Ripcord. Throughout the book, Lippens talks about his love for fragments and collage. He meanders and basks in free-form, immortalizing transient moments—a funny quote from a friend, a subtly cosmic sign on a door—that follow an invisible thread. Some people believe art is whatever you do to be alive. I’m keen on the idea of life being art, but not the life we live and not the life we make. Another life. The shadow one we can’t see, and it grows and shrinks as we move. Lippens, like most writers and artists in general, occupies this space slightly distanced from the commotion of the world. He’s bartending and eavesdropping on intense conversations, he’s reading about a twenty-seven-year-old who sued his parents for creating him without his consent, he’s being ignored by his lover who chose his husband over him. From this outside position, the shadow life becomes palpable and Lippens captures it in disjointed writing. A fragment a day keeps the ghosts away, he quips.
Lippens also makes the claim: I don’t believe there is any such thing as nonfiction. The footage is always edited. This mindset calls to mind other Semiotext(e) genius Constance Debré, who explained that she considers her work fiction despite focusing on real events from her life because of the act of distilling life into words, into a story. “What makes a novel is its form,” she said (she also published the amazing novel Playboy earlier this year). Lippens recalls a metaphorical moment with an ex: He said collage was tired. Cobbled together garbage. Yet here I am pretending to be a whole person. What are we if not amalgamations of what we’ve experienced, grotesque and beautiful?
Ripcord begins with the killer hook, Some people get the glory. Some people get the glory hole. Lines like these make Lippens out to be more of a poet. Examples: 1. It’s hard to take anything personally when you don’t feel like a person. 2. But we’re all in an open relationship with death. 3. He’s told this story for laughs, and he’s told this story for pity. Lippens’ ability to wield every sentence with clever intentionality makes for a pageturner.
A great deal of Ripcord reckons with the harsh reality of being exiled from your family and having to make a life for yourself amongst people who lead their lives with thoughtless privilege. But Lippens doesn’t wallow in self-pity or let the book be weighed down my pessimism. In fact, he sees the necessity of darkness: Let pain be pain. Don’t transform. Don’t rise above. Fry in its heat. And get up the next morning to spite it all. This logic also reveals why Ripcord works so well; it doesn’t romanticize or dramatize, but it also rejects the it is what it is cliché: It’s important to keep a sense of possibility, even if it’s a delusion. Sometimes the necessary delusion is being a writer, of keeping an eye on the shadow of life, of following an invisible thread.
Lippens relays the chaos of dating apps, from a man unironically calling himself enigmatic to Lippens waking up in an empty bed with a bite mark on his wrist. My exhaustion is I have performed these same acts again and again, and I do them because they are all I have. The game of love is draining, but the anecdotes imbue Ripcord with warmth, because even if it’s a coping mechanism, it’s desire, a drive force that takes energy and hope. Despite claiming he doesn’t want anyone to stay, Lippens still longs for more: The sense of myself as not a person. Not the tourist and not the tourist attraction. Rather the place passed through on the way to the destination. But Ripcord itself serves as a haven for people who feel the same way.
