Writing Is My Drink (24 page)

earlier when she’d stood in her conservative home state and read

from a book
that speaks boldly of her complicated relationship with her culture. I wanted to hear the hush around my words. I

wanted my words to stir up the molecules in a room.

Was that so bad?

There are certain experiences—like loneliness, grief, and fail-

ure—that seem to permeate our lives but for which we seem as

a culture to have not enough ways to discuss. Almost everyone

I know has been lonely, but no ever seems to admit it. Grief is a

constant in life, and yet no one wants to hear about it for long.

We’re supposed to get over stuff, to move on. Failure—and feel-

ings of failure—permeate even the most successful of lives, and

yet there seem so few ways to make sense of the times we’ve

reached and fallen.

So I was real y excited to hear Joyce Carol Oates talk about

failure as not only a routine part of a writer’s career pattern but even perhaps a desirable one. At a 2011 Seattle Arts & Lectures talk, Oates eloquently argued the point, which she has also made

in her essay “Notes on Failure,” that early commercial success

can actual y
stunt
a writer’s progress just as early “failure” can contribute to a writer’s success. Her theory is that if a writer is very successful commercial y with an early book, he or she will

keep writing that very same type of book, which, in fact, may

not be all that good and may actual y be highly derivative of an

already established author the fledgling author is unconsciously

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or even consciously imitating. But if an author bombs out with

her or his first and second novels, the author may be then be

given the “opportunity” to forget about the marketplace and just

for the hell of it write a second or third book that is truly in his own voice and thus more likely to be of literary value.

Oates cited Faulkner as a perfect example of this: His first

three books, she said, were horrible. One book,
Mosquitoes
, was a complete Hemingway knockoff , and the other two were also

pale imitations of other fashionable writers of the time. And

then, Oates said, his apprenticeship came to an end—just when

a writer of less courage might’ve given up—and he knocked it

out of the park with
The Sound and the Fury
(1929) and then
As
I Lay Dying
(1930) and then
Sanctuary
(1931). The rest is literary history.

But even if early commercial flops and flat-out publishing

rejections might be necessary or even, as Oates argues,
good
for the writer in the long haul, that isn’t how it feels when the world tel s us there is definitely no room at the inn, that in no uncertain terms our essay, story, or whatever we’ve created will not be

appearing in the next issue of
Fabulous
magazine, when we hear the perennial “No, thanks.” Or, in the language of book publishers everywhere: “I was charmed by the author’s voice and found

the writing very engaging. That said, I’m afraid I’ll have to pass

on this. Best of luck finding this manuscript a good home!”

“That said.”

Puh-lease.

Who says that?

Agents and editors. That’s it.

And in the fall of 2003, I hear enough “That saids” to last a

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lifetime. Three weeks after I received Frank’s nice letter, my life began to unravel fast. My husband and I split up the last week

of September, just as my agent was about to send out my man-

uscript depicting a fairly happily married woman’s conversion

to motherhood. Two weeks after the split, I rewrote the end of

Light Sleeper
, quickly bringing the marriage to a halt in the manuscript’s final pages. It took months for all the rejections from

round one to roll in and then it went out for another round. “Yes

comes fast,” someone told me, “and no comes slow or never at

al .” So true.

By Christmas, I’d almost accepted my defeat, but not quite. I

hung on to hope, parsing through the rejection letters to find evi-

dence that the book had enough spark to ignite faith in some edi-

tor somewhere. I wanted the publication for all the right reasons

(recognition of my work, community membership, an audience)

and all the deluded ones (mega money that would solve all my

problems, validation that I was a worthy human being, freedom

from the bondage of the “loser” title I felt was now mine).

But it wasn’t until late spring that I heard that the agent was

definitely no longer interested in sending out the book. It was

over. The three-year
Light Sleeper
dream was ending, and now I was stunningly awake and surveying the debris of my life. No

big advance was on the way. I was a woman with two young kids

and a part-time teaching job in the middle of a divorce. My writ-

ing wasn’t going to save me.

I guess what happened to me next Oates might call a good

thing. I developed a big, liberating Fuck-you attitude. As miser-

able as I was, there was something remarkable and astonishing at

how spectacularly I’d failed in the arenas of both work and home

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with alarming synchronicity, and yet here I was: still breathing,

living, sometimes even laughing, sometimes even laughing de-

monical y. Just a sliver of me felt like a tough chick, like: Yeah, I’m divorced. Yeah, my book crashed. So what? Wanna make

something of it, huh? And then, that faux badass part of me

began to grow. I smoked a couple of pilfered cigs on the back

porch after the kids went to bed and knocked back a cognac.

Nothing to lose now.

Intoxicated by defeat, I opened up the file of notes I’d been

taking on my divorce and started writing them out into smal ,

unpublishable scenes. I refused to craft them into one continu-

ous story that might make them into something publishable,

because I now saw publishing as a closed door. So I would be

an
artiste
. Misunderstood, brooding, creating reckless col ages, that would be me. When my agent—ahem, former agent—had

first seen my
Light Sleeper
, it was a collection of essays. “You can’t sell an essay collection unless you’re Anna Quindlen,” she’d said.

“Turn it into one consecutive narrative and then I can sell it.” So that’s what I had done. I spent months picking out the stitches of

the essays and reconstructing it into what was supposed to be a

“marketable,” seamless narrative with helpful transitions.

Where had all that got me? Nowhere. In hindsight, the truth

was the revision had taken the charge out of whatever electricity

had once existed in the book. The book might have arguably be-

come more marketable (although that’s hard to argue, seeing as

it never found a buyer) but it didn’t become a better book. And

worse, I’d lost that loving feeling I’d once had for writing, and it wasn’t just the rejection that had killed my buzz. In unstitching

my col age-style essays, I’d lost something. My voice.

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Now that I was destined for a life of failure, what did it mat-

ter what I wrote? I might as wel , I figured, write just for myself. I could still remember my days back in Utah, sitting on the poet’s

trailer floor or in the lodge surrounded by cedars back when

publication was more than unattainable—it was unimaginable. I

still remembered what love felt like. Back in those early days, my

one wish was just to complete something, to finish a story that

felt like it had something of me in it.

Alone in my old, falling-apart house, I turned to my notepad

when my kids were in school and wrote scenes from my divorce

with one goal in mind: I wanted to capture the stunning feeling

of sudden loss and isolation. Articulation felt like the one ticket out of my desperation. If I could create some sort of meaning on

the page, I knew I could rebuild hope.

As I wrote, I decided that those pages were only for me. No

one else. It was a giant message to myself about my own impor-

tance at a time when I felt invisible and of no consequence. Even

if I was the only reader of this writing, I was a reader. I counted.

For that moment in time, I was the only audience I cared about.

Born out of grief, despair, and a sacred place of zero expecta-

tions, the words came rapidly. I filled pages much quicker than

my usual slow, cautious pace. I was writing with abandon, and

I found myself liking what I wrote—liking it, in fact, quite a bit.

Around this time, one of the editors of
Brain, Child
maga-

zine—the mag that had published my very first story—got back

in touch with me. She was doing a story about “momoirs” and

wanted to interview me about my failed attempt to publish mine.

My first instinct was to say no, but then something nudged me

forward. Of course, I’d much rather be interviewed about my

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smashing success, but I’d had very few opportunities lately to

interact with the world beyond the grocery store and my kids’

school and knew I shouldn’t pass one by. Yes, it was humbling,

but humble was where I was at.

Not long after that, I got a letter in the mail with some good

news. I’d been awarded a scholar spot at that summer’s upcom-

ing Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, an honor that I’d always

read as a sign of imminent success since I attended the confer-

ence for the first time as a participant in 2001. I had nothing else to submit for a workshop piece, so I sent a hunk of the divorce

material. I went to the conference and had a great time mak-

ing new friends, and after the conference my workshop leader

sent me an e-mail. A friend of his was starting a column about

relationships for the
New York Times
called “Modern Love.” He thought my divorce piece would be a good match for the column. Was I interested in submitting?

I read the e-mail thinking, Yeah, that’s never going to hap-

pen, but went ahead and contacted the editor. I was risking re-

jection again, this time with the work that I truly considered

my own, work in which there was no compromise. There would

be no escape hatch if rejection came this time. No excuses. But

rejection didn’t come. Within a few days I got the word that, yes,

they wanted to run my essay.

What?

In November 2004, my essay, which was titled by the
Times

“The Chicken’s in the Oven, My Husband’s Out the Door,” ran

in the Sunday Styles section. That Sunday, after my babysitter

arrived, I walked by myself to the corner store and bought four

copies of the paper with a twenty dol ar bil . No change. I went

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to a café and unfolded the Styles section and there it was: a half

a page in the
New York Times.
My byline.
Mine.

The words I’d written in the isolation of failure, the words I’d

written only for myself, had flown away from me. I’d struggled

and pushed to publish
Light Sleeper
and that never came to pass, but these far more honest words had taken off and were now

floating around the world, living a life of their own out of my

reach.

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Try This

1. List times when you felt you’d failed in some aspect of your life.

2. Pick one and write about it. As you’re writing, try to focus on how that failure led to opportunities that would have been

closed to you if you had succeeded the first time around. Were

there ways in which that failure led to a later success or, if

not success, then maybe an insight (compassion for yourself,

maybe) that you could never have gained without that failure?

3. List as many personal, professional, and creative risks you can remember taking.

4. List risks you’ve taken in the last year in any area of the life.

5. If you have long risk lists, pick one risk and write about it. Or write about two risks together.

6. If your risk list is short—especial y your list of recent risks—

make a list of risks that you might consider taking.

7. Pick one risk from that list.

8. Write down the name of that risk on the top of a piece of

paper and then list five things you could do in the next week

to prepare to take that risk For example, call friends for sup-

port, visualize taking the risk, research the risk, maybe even

take the risk itself).

9. Circle one of these preparatory tasks.

10. Do one of those tasks now.

11. Write for ten minutes on this topic: “What Creative Success