Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life (13 page)

Whether an overheard whisper or a gruesome story comes across on the nightly news, we angelic spies live out our childhoods with a knowledge growing inside of us, spreading like moss in a dark place. When we become writers, we are driven by the echoes of those implications—of what we feel and 128

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intuit but cannot know. As we set our stories down on the page, our inner life becomes the only tool we have with which to reenter that dark place. Our eyes adjust. We don’t see everything. Phillips writes that we “live in the dim or glorious shadows of partially apprehended shapes.” We mine the secret life, our responsibility. We make it our business.

I wrote my first novel in that small, borrowed room down the hall from my apartment on the Upper West Side. My second novel was written in a modern high-rise on the Upper East Side when I was parched, lonely, and briefly married to the wrong person. I wrote my third novel in a series of apartments and in a house in Sag Harbor, deeply absorbed in my work, with only my Yorkshire Terrier for company. I met my husband when I was just a few chapters into my first memoir. I remember giving him a piece of it to read one weekend, and lying in bed in a cottage near the beach, listening to the pages rustle in the next room, anxious about what he would think.

By the time I wrote my next novel, I was a mother—a frightened one in the wake of Jacob’s illness. I began that book in our Brooklyn brownstone, and revised it once we’d moved to 129

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rural Connecticut. My books since then have all been composed in that same Connecticut countryside. The meadows.

The stone walls. The dogs. The quiet.

When we first moved to our house in the country—a house that prompts visitors to inquire where we buy food, whether Jacob has any other kids to play with, and what on earth we
do
all day—our friends were taking bets.
Oh, you’ll be back,
they said. We were urban creatures, after all. When we first moved into our house, I didn’t like being alone. It felt strange, isolating, even dangerous. Scenes from Stephen King’s novels and Brian De Palma films played out in my head. I imagined midnight break-ins and bears clawing through cans in the garage. I woke up each morning to stillness. Silence. In New York, the world was a rushing stream. If I wasn’t sure what to do, the city supplied plenty of ideas. I could be carried along by the momentum of that current—decisionless, actionless, but in motion.

In the country, when I opened the front door, the only signs of life were a bluebird, a hawk circling overhead, a white-tailed deer, the occasional fox. I was left with myself, and I hardly knew what to do. The hours would take on no shape unless I shaped them. I had managed to have a routine for all of my writing years prior to moving to the country—I had written four books that way—but I began to see that it had been a series of habits strung together. Not a practice.

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Practice involves discipline but is more closely related to patience. I was nearly forty years old when we left the city, and I had mastered a series of skills that allowed me to be productive. I knew how to find a good café in which to work.

I avoided meeting friends for lunch (or, god forbid, breakfast) because it disrupted my writing day. I knew how to wear ear-phones to tune out the sound of jackhammers on the street below. But in the sudden absence of cafés, noise, or nearby friends, my old habits no longer served me. I had to rethink everything. Surrounded by nothing but space and silence, I saw that up until then, I had been
reacting
to the ready distractions of city life
,
like a spinning top, the slightest bump against anything—a person, a red light, a shop window—and off I might go in another direction. Yes, I got my work done.

But at what cost?

One of the cornerstones of Buddhist philosophy is the notion of dharma—the Sanskrit word that, loosely translated, means teaching, or wisdom, or life’s path. Practice is about engagement with one’s own dharma. The articulation, the expression, day after day after day, of our truest selves. Writing, it seems to me, is dharma practice. If we are patient, if we place ourselves in the path of possibility, we just might find our own rushing current—more powerful than that of any city street.

Lives are made up of days. Days, made up of hours, of minutes, of seconds during which we make choices, and those 131

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choices can become practice. When it comes to the practice of writing, it cannot be distraction that propels us but rather the patience—the openness, the willingness—to meet ourselves on the page. To stop being at the mercy of what we surround ourselves with, but rather, to discover our story.

“Practice,” said the great yogi Pattabhi Jois to the students gathered at his shala in Mysore, India. He was eighty, maybe even ninety years old and I am certain he was speaking as much to himself as to them, as good teachers always do. “Practice and all is coming.”

My father is buried in a massive Brooklyn cemetery where wild dogs roam in the night and the elevated train rumbles overhead.

I get lost each time I visit his grave, and wander among tomb-stones until I find it. He is surrounded by his grandparents, his parents, a brother, a few cousins. His second wife is buried in her own family’s plot, a few hundred steps away. It was startling when I came upon her headstone: the dates bracketing her brief life, just beneath her surname,
Shapiro
. My father’s first wife is buried somewhere in New Jersey. I remember attending the funeral with my half-sister. His third wife—my mother—is also 132

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buried in New Jersey, down by the shore, near the chicken farm where she grew up. She is buried in
her
family’s plot. When she was dying, my mother made it clear that she did not wish to end up in the Brooklyn cemetery; she did not want to spend eternity with
those
people, the ones she had disliked with passion for more than forty years.
I feel sorry for you,
my mother said from her deathbed, eyes gleaming.
You’ll have to visit your parents in
two different cemeteries.

In my basement, on the other side of the wall from Jacob’s playroom (piano, ukelele, bean bag chairs, and half-finished board games scattered across the floor) I have the detritus of my family’s life. It’s all just thrown in there in a jumble.

Most boxes have remained unopened for these nearly ten years since my mother’s death. Some are labelled in her hand:

“Peru,” or “delicate,” or “important papers!” Her wedding dress— ankle-length ice blue tulle with a French lace bodice, the height of fashion for a second wedding in 1957—is not packed in mothballs as it should be but, rather, is tossed across a bench next to our wine cellar as if waiting for the ghost of my young, glamorous mother to come along and dance in it once more. Also in this mess—which my husband keeps suggesting we tackle on some rainy weekend—are my childless aunt’s fifty-year-old golf clubs, my uncle’s framed medical diploma and a basketball signed to him by the NCAA-winning Rutgers basketball players, for whom he was team physician.

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“Where does the pain go?” asks Donna Masini in her poem “Eye of the Skull.” The poet has come from the dentist, where she’s just had a cavity filled. She walks down the street, her mouth numb, when she notices a crazy woman behind her. “An older woman / dressed as a young girl. She had gone to a good school / liked good things. Had had them too. You could tell. / She is screaming into herself, into the air. Vulgar things, shouting them to no one in particular

/ that I can see.”

I remember reading this poem with a shock of recognition.

It was shortly after a spate of losses: my father, grandmother, and two uncles, all within a year. My mother was living in a rehabilitation center. My remaining relatives had stopped speaking to each other. Bad blood boiled to the surface. My relationship had ended. I read Masini’s poem and identified with both the numb poet and the crazy woman. I knew the pain went somewhere—I was quaking from it—and also afraid of it. I was afraid that if I let myself fully feel the accumulation of those losses, the enormity of them, I would become the crazy woman. I would go to a place from which I’d never be able to recover, to return. “What is trapped in the bones, the gearlike teeth / that join the two fused cramped parts / of the skull? What clenches and curls in the marrow? / Did the pain surface, just then? Did all that / numbed pain come in one great rush?”

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I needn’t have worried. To write is to have an ongoing dialogue with your own pain. To scream to it, with it, from it. To know it—to know it cold. Whether you’re writing a biography of Abraham Lincoln, a philosophical treatise, or a work of fiction, you are facing your demons
because they are there
. To be alone in a room with yourself and the contents of your mind is, in effect, to go to that place, whether you intend to or not.

I recently met a writer who is also a psychoanalyst. She laugh-ingly recounted a conversation at a dinner party, in which she told the man seated next to her that she was doing post-doctoral training in trauma. “You
want
to do that?” he asked her, baffled that anyone would choose to do such a thing.

Just as I know that a holy mess waits for me on the other side of the wall from Jacob’s playroom, I also know that it’s only a representation (all that stuff!) of the holy mess inside of me. The ghost of my mother who died confused and angry.

The ghost of my father who I still talk to every day. The golf clubs and medical diplomas of aunts and uncles left in the hands of the last person for whom it will have any meaning.

What clenches and curls in the marrow.

The mess
is
holy. What we inherit—and how we come to understand what we inherit—is all we have to work with.

There is beauty in
what is
. Every day, when I sit down to work, I travel to that place. Not because I’m a masochist. Not because I live in the past. But because my words are my pickax, 135

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and with them I chip away at the rough surface of whatever it is I still need to know.

The Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield once said that all of life can be summed up in these three words:
not always so
. We plan on our day going in a certain direction? Not always so.

We expect a friend or relative to behave the way they always have? Not always so. There is the pattern, and then there is the dropped stitch that disrupts the pattern, making it all the more complex and interesting.

Stories are about the dropped stitch. About what happens when the pattern breaks. Though there is a certain poetry in the rhythm of the everyday, it is most often a shift, a moment of not-always-so, that ends up being the story. Why is this moment different? What has changed? And why now? We would do well to ask ourselves these questions when we’re at work. This shift can be a massive one (here I am thinking of the dystopian novel in which the very rhythms of the universe are called into question: the sun no longer predictably rises in the east or sets in the west; a meteor is hurling toward earth; the oceans are rising), or it can be as subtle and internal as the 136

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Steven Millhauser story, “Getting Closer,” in which a nine-year-old boy on vacation with his family feels, for the first time, a searing, wordless awareness of time’s passage.

Why are we writing about this moment, and no other? And what can we do—stylistically, structurally, linguistically—to get inside it? How can we reveal the innards, the pulsing truth of this character who is—let’s face it—at some sort of junc-ture, because if he isn’t, why would the story be worth telling?

The Millhauser story takes place within the span of just a few minutes. It unpacks, layer after layer, the dawning consciousness of its nine-year-old protagonist. The action of the story, so to speak, involves the boy dipping his toe into the water for the first time that summer. That—in terms of external action, in terms of plot—is it. Nothing else happens. Can you imagine Millhauser having to answer the question,
What are you
working on?
while he was writing that story?

But what goes on internally in “Getting Closer” is gripping to the point of leaving the reader breathless. We are guided deep into the inner world of that boy, tracing thought after thought until we
are
him, we become him, and this is literature doing its job, which is to penetrate the surface, to dis-mantle the ordinary, to find the dropped stitch, to show us that we are—all of us—built of these not-always-so moments, that they mark the turning points of our lives.

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I am on the chaise longue, cross-legged, my computer nestled into a cushion on my lap. It’s my best time to be writing–-first thing in the morning, before I’m distracted by those “fleas of life.” The house is empty. There is nothing stopping me from getting to work. Except that I can feel it: a restlessness, an unease. I’m about to get in my own way. The Internet beckons.

The book review due next week feels suddenly pressing. The galleys and manuscripts piled across my office are calling my name. The previous night’s dreams hover just at the edges of my consciousness, throwing me off-balance.

It’s so easy to forget what matters. When I begin the day centered, with equanimity, I find that I am quite unshakable.

But if I start off in that slippery, discomfiting way, I am easily thrown off course—and once off course, there I stay. And so I know that my job is to cultivate a mind that catches itself.

A mind that watches its own desire to scamper off into the bramble, but instead, guides itself gently back to what needs to be done. This kind of equanimity may not be my nature, but I can at least attempt to make it my habit. I was a young writer when I first read Donald Hall’s memoir,
Life Work,
but 138