Writing Is My Drink (3 page)

all be ful y out of the closet, and I’d have enough out friends to

host a modest-sized pride parade, but this was 1980.

Jean-Paul was always looking for the action, our road to

fame as writers, and on this September day he decided we would

be journalists. In his mind, after a few days working on our com-

munity college newspaper, we’d be Rosalind Russell and Cary

Grant in
His Girl Friday
. So we sat through the first meeting of the year in the cramped
Capilano Courier
office, which smelled of rubber cement and Molson’s-soaked carpeting, and by the

end of the week I was the entertainment editor and Jean-Paul

was gone.

I had no business being the entertainment editor of any-

thing. It wasn’t just that I was aesthetical y an infant with my

Fleetwood Mac albums and my love of Mary Tyler Moore. The

main problem was that on most topics I had no opinion whatso-

ever, and if I did have an opinion, I was so worried what others

might think of that opinion I could barely remember what my

opinion was in the presence of another human. After a Police

concert I was to review, I badgered my friends with the repeated

question “So what did you think?” and then “Okay, why?” until

I had enough material to patch together a review.

For a while I got away with this. The paper came out only every

two weeks. I assigned some of the stories to a few hangers-on, who

general y disappeared after a story or two. And frankly, since most of the time we were down to a steady staff of three—the two co-editors and myself—it was clear that if the editors called attention to how badly suited I was for this position, they’d be stuck writing 1 2

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all the entertainment pieces themselves, on top of the rest of our

riveting community college news
.
One night—probably around two in the morning, four hours before our mocked-up pages were

due at the printers—one of the editors said to me, “Hey, we stil

need an editorial. You write it this week.”

Excuse me?
I tried to play it cool: yes, of course, I
so
did this type of thing when I interned at
Rolling Stone
last summer. I ventured a few questions in as casual a tone as I could muster:

“Can it be on any topic?”

“Yes.”

“How long should it be?”

“Five hundred words.”

“How long do I have?”

“Forty-five minutes?”

Okay, I can write any opinion on any topic and I have forty-

five minutes. Here we go! I tried to pull myself into a quiet cor-

ner where I could do the serious thinking required. There was

no quiet corner. Our office was about four feet wide by twelve

feet long. Springsteen’s
Darkness on the Edge of Town
was perpetual y droning out of a tape player on the windowsil , and all

conversations were shouted across the length of the office. Let’s

face it, though: I could have been floating in the blue hush of

outer space and my mind still would’ve been blank. Our edi-

torials were usual y on torrid topics such as the incremental

increases in student fees, the machinations of our student gov-

ernment, or the occasional edict from our very staid adminis-

tration. None of which, frankly, I had any interest in. This was a

guilty secret, since I was sure that if I were genuinely smart and

interesting and an
adult
, I would be interested in these things. I 1 3

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did, of course, have interests, but it would never occur to me—

no matter how long I sat at that bleak corner table—that rela-

tionships, girl singers, the difficulty of writing an editorial when you possess zero self-confidence, or the local poetry scene could

be worthy, maybe even inspired topics.

I’ll save you the suspense: I choked. The whole thing is still so

embarrassing that three decades later my memory has dropped

a special protective veil over the scene so that I can only make

murky guesses about exactly how the whole thing went down.

I think I stumbled back to the editor about twenty-five minutes

later and sputtered out something like “Can’t.” He stared at me

and said, “What do you mean?” We went back and forth until

he was certain there was no editorial he could wring out of me.

He huffed, sat down at a typewriter, and pounded out a piece

about escalating tuition and Parliament’s weak commitment to

students in approximately 6.5 minutes as waves of shame radi-

ated off me. I tried to earn my spot on the planet by copyediting

a mildewed review of the local symphony’s season. In summa-

tion, I did not die.

I did not die because we never do die in those moments when

we come toe-to-toe with a version of ourselves that’s a fraction

of the person we want to be. We just sniff a little and then quietly do the necessary adjustments to live within the fencing of our

recalibrated limitations. The trouble this time, though, was that

I
knew
this limitation wasn’t truly mine. I knew that deep down I was a writer who wasn’t afraid to say, “This is what
I
think.” But that writer was
real y
deep down.

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The writers I most adored throughout my twenties were the ones

most willing to stake out new territory and not back down. They

were unflinching. If someone bumped into me, I reflexively said

“Sorry,” but Gloria Steinem was willing to call out sexism where

she saw it, even in herself. Erica Jong not only admitted that she

had random sex and liked it, but described her pursuit of the

“zipless fuck” with uncensored detail. Nora Ephron shared every

sadly funny detail of her disintegrating marriage and her own

neurosis in
Heartburn
.

Think about it: The writers we real y admire and adore are the

ones who are willing to take a risk and say what most wouldn’t

dare. When you’re loving a piece of personal narrative, it’s not

just because the writing is lovely; it’s because the writer is offering up something of herself on the page that most people aren’t

willing to give. She’s saying that real y scary stuff—about her

husband, her friends, her jealousies, or her porn habit—that you

need to hear. While it may seem like we get more than enough

information about other people’s private lives in our tabloid cul-

ture, we are still lacking the narrative of the complicated experi-

ence that pulses behind the story’s facts. As memoirist Bernard

Cooper has said, “A good memoir does more than dredge up se-

crets from the writer’s past. A good memoir filters a life through

resonant narrative . . .” And in that resonant narrative, we find

our duplicity, our complexity, our complicity.

In an interview with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett on the
Writ-

ers on Writing
radio show, Mary Karr talks about the heaps of memoirs that are, she believes, all the same—reportage of the

repetition of abuse. “I call them ‘Sound Bite Memoirs,’ Karr says.

“‘I was a teenage sex slave’ . . . They are one-note stories. They

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have one note. They show
one
aspect of
one
person. And they’re usual y kind of repetitive. You find out what the problem is in

the beginning and it’s the same problem kind of reiterated. ‘My

mother hit me on the head with a brick on Monday and then I

was a sophomore in high school and my mother hit me on the

head with a brick and then I was a junior and she hit me on the

head with a brick. Then I got some car keys and I left and I’m

better now.’” But the real story, Karr insists, is the one that most writers still aren’t telling. “The problem isn’t that your mother

hit you on the head with a brick; the problem is that you still
love
her
, that you depend on her.”

I love that line:
The problem is that you still love her.

If you’re writing memoir, you will eventual y be required to

give some part of yourself you don’t want to give. You don’t have

to give it, but if you don’t, your story will suffer. It doesn’t have to be sensational. As Karr said so eloquently, there are stories

that tell every sordid detail but still do not invoke the emotional complexity that makes a story so human: the moment of regret,

the agony of a choice, the fact that you
do
still love your mother.

It’s the place where your guard is completely down and your

complicity vivid. You’ll know when you’re near it because you’ll

want to stop writing or take the story in another direction. It’s

the This Is What
I
Think you haven’t dared to share before.

I had written about family strife for years, or maybe I should

say I’d been writing
around
it before I ever dared to say even a part of what I real y thought. As a college freshman, I wrote a

short story for my creative writing class titled (embarrassingly)

“Keep the Home Fires Burning.” Neither liberated by the mask of

fiction nor galvanized by the boldness of the nonfiction stamp,

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the story hovered in the DMZ between fiction and memoir, pos-

sessing none of the winning attributes of either genre. The story

was a cloaked portrayal of the tension that existed between my

mother and my stepfather as revealed through a conversation

between my stepfather and “the narrator” as they walked the cir-

cuit of a golf course on a dewy morning, my stepfather golfing,

the narrator caddying.

In my defense, the story with its oblique themes was dimly

reflective of the hil s-like-white-elephants aesthetic that was

very chic in the college’s English department that year. But un-

like in Hemingway’s coded story of abortion, it was never com-

pletely clear what this great conflict was that the characters

were woodenly sidestepping. Behind the smoke, there were two

people on their third marriages arguing their way to the bot-

tom of a bottle most nights, but as an eighteen-year-old I wasn’t

ready to see that, let alone name it and bring it to the page. The

class and teacher responded with confusion. What’s real y going

on? What are the characters talking about? “For God’s sake, just

come out and say it,” a kid in the corner final y cried.

Many years later, as an MFA student, I felt similarly defeated

by a lackluster class response to another of my stories about

family: Again the conflicts were muffled and the story aimless.

I ran into a fellow student on my way out of the creative writing

office who, after hearing my troubles, calmly suggested, “Why

don’t you try writing about what scares you the most?” She was

writing a clearly autobiographical story of leaving her husband

for a woman. Was I the only person who was afraid of being

struck down by lightening? What was wrong with me?

That night I sprung out of bed at two a.m. and booted up

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the computer, ready to do what I’d delayed for decades. The re-

sponse to the directive Write About What Scares You the Most

was unfolding frame-by-frame across the screen of my mind.

The opening scene is an early morning in January 1991. The

narrator is driving across the Nevada desert toward the Grand

Canyon, the place where she’d conceived a child six years ear-

lier. As she drives toward the canyon, the impossibly yellow sun

rising in her eyes, the memory of this earlier trip to the Grand

Canyon comes back to her in shards. She tries to blink the mem-

ories away with the sun, but as she drives eastward, she dives

deeper into the memory of the cold January of 1985. It was a

snowy winter weekend at the South Rim, deep wel s of snow at

the base of the Ponderosa Pines, the sky a startling blue. She was

twenty-three and there with a man she never should have been

with, wandering the edge of the frosty white edge of the red can-

yon by day, drinking Scotch in the lodge by night.

There it was: the thing I didn’t want to give. I was reluctant

to release the story of my own abortion to the page, but mostly

I wanted to keep buried the guilt I’d carried for years. But this

time I wrote past the electric fence of reluctance. I’d burned up

all my stalling time. I knew that if I were going to keep writing,

I had to stop hiding. As I typed rapidly in the dark, sweat ran

down my sides. Two hours later, I typed the last words of my

first true This Is What
I
Think.

I lived.

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Try This

1. Think back to,a time when you couldn’t rise to the writing