A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Seven-Hundred-And-Seventy-Three

I began reading Lucy Ellmann's novel Ducks, Newburyport and I am finding myself having a lot of difficulty with it.  The book is written using a form of stream of conscious, with a lot of repetition and minimal use of traditional punctuation.  I very much admire the craft and the way admire the form.  It is not an easy way to tell a story, and I am very intrigued by it, and certainly find the book compelling, but I am, as I said at the start, having a great deal of trouble with reading it right now.  This is largely a result of my neurodiversity, or that is what I believe, as the major problem I am having is that I have been having a great deal of trouble navigating the text and just keep getting lost.  To be specific, the portion of the book I am reading is not broken into sentences but is split up with commas, and most of the segments in the sentence begin "the fact that."  Indeed, I think almost everything begins that way, except for small lists and other, often non-sequitur, elements.  I find myself getting visually stuck and not knowing where I should be on the page.  It is very frustrating as I very much appreciate the book itself, but there is something that alienating for me.  I want to find a way to discuss this more, really.  It is a complicated and conflicting issue for me, because I do appreciate and applaud writers experimenting and approaching language and storytelling in non-standard ways, but I also feel like there is a level at which that can create limitations for people with certain kinds of disabilities similar to my own.

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