Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life (18 page)

Still Writing

to newspapers; she complained to booksellers; she proposed that the 92nd Street Y allow her to teach a course about the mother and daughter in Jewish literature. During the years of our estrangement, she showed up at my readings and glared at me from the back row. When it came to my writing life, her rage was part of our dialogue. I wrote, she ranted. But then she was dead. Gone. She would never again fight back. I could write whatever I wanted, with no fear of wounding her, and without fear of repercussion.

Right?

Well, no. Not quite. Because I have discovered that having the last word comes with some very heavy baggage. After a person is gone, everything we write about them becomes a eulogy of sorts. It extends and expands their identity and reputation in the world, even if just among a group of readers. Literature is more permanent than the characters who live within its pages. And so the grappling begins. We weigh our responsibilities against our creative impulses. We wonder if simply being aware is enough—its own protection against doing damage. We decide, ultimately, what we, the living, can live with. Because we do have the last word—all of us, whether writers or not. Because we are here, walking this earth, striding over bones, breathing ashes. We remember. That memory is part of our consciousness. And if we are writers, we do what writers do with our consciousness: we set pen to page and see 183

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what emerges. We do not do so with impunity but, rather, with grave misgivings, courage, empathy, discomfort. With unresolveable questions in our hearts. We know that some day we, too, will be gone. That this last word is fleeting. That this last word is not, in fact, the last word. But it is all we have.

As I write these words, I am, of course, alone. It’s the middle of the day and I have barely stepped outside except to pick up a couple of envelopes full of books and manuscripts that FedEx left on the porch. I have spoken to no one since seven o’clock this morning. I’m wearing the ratty T-shirt I slept in last night.

The house is silent. A crow caws outside my office window.

These solitary days are my lifeline. They are the lifeline of every writer I know. We hold on to our solitude, fiercely protect these empty days. But at the same time, we long for community. We have no water cooler. No office gossip. No Friday night drinks after work. No weekend softball game. We’re outcasts and loners, more comfortable being out of step than part of a group. If pressed, you’d find that most of us had not pledged sororities or fraternities in college. We don’t tend to be members of clubs. We approach themed parties, baby showers, 184

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boys nights out, with something like dread. Back when I lived in Brooklyn, our house was in a neighborhood lousy with writers. A quick trip to the corner bodega meant running into writer friends who were out buying a roll of paper towels, sneaking a cigarette. And though from my rural hill, it’s easy to feel sentimental about those encounters, at the time, I recall a certain discomfort on both sides, especially if it was in the midst of a writing day. We liked each other, sure—we might even have a plan to meet later that evening for a drink—but right then we didn’t necessarily want to be reminded of each other’s existence. We were
working
.

This prickly, overly sensitive, socially awkward group of people is my tribe. If you’re a writer, they’re yours as well. This is why I’ve never really understood competition and envy among writers. We are competing with ourselves—not with each other.

And when we do encounter each other, whether at readings, or conferences, or online, hopefully we recognize ourselves and the strange existence we all share. We realize that we are part of the same species and that we need one another to survive. Though we write our books alone, ultimately everything we do involves some collaboration. Every good book you’ll ever read has the thumbprints of other writers all over it. As we finish a manuscript we may find ourselves thinking of who to turn to, who can help us. Who will read us with generosity and intelligence and care. From where I sit, I can see a pile of manuscripts and 185

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galleys across my office floor. They are books by students, former students, teaching colleagues, friends, and strangers—sent to me for blurbs, or with requests to help them find an agent, or whatever. I try to help when I can. When the work is good, I’m eager to be a part of ushering it into the world. Nothing excites me more than wonderful writing. It lifts me up. It shows me what is possible. And it makes me feel connected to this larger community of writers in the world.

A long time ago, I sent a draft—actual manuscript pages—

of an early novel to an idol of mine, the writer Tim O’Brien whose
The Things They Carried
is one of my favorite books. I got his address from a friend, wrote him a note, and stuffed my manuscript into a manila envelope. I knew that many writers of his stature had sworn off blurbing, believing the whole process to be corrupted and ennervating (a view I sometimes share). I had, in fact, recently received a five-page, single-spaced, typewritten letter from a well-known American novelist, explaining to me his policy of not blurbing. Tim O’Brien and I shared no one in common. He was not a cousin of my best friend’s best friend from camp. So I sent off my manuscript with no real hope. A couple of weeks later, I received a thin letter back. I stood in the lobby of my apartment building and ripped open the envelope.

Dear Dani Shapiro,
it began.
It is now three o’clock in the
morning—

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I began to cry.

—and I have just finished your beautiful book.

I can still see the black ink on the plain white sheet of typing paper, the handwritten scrawl.
I’m happy to offer a comment—

Tim O’Brien had stayed up until three in the morning reading my manuscript. He opened the envelope, began to read, kept reading. He had then felt moved to write me back, along with precious words of support. These twenty years later, I still have not met Tim O’Brien but he is part of my community. I will forever be grateful to him, not only because of his act of generosity to a young writer, but also because he taught me a lesson I have come to live by. I don’t forget what it was like. I reach out a hand when I can. I remind myself every day that it’s about the work. I am here in Connecticut. You might be in Missoula, Montana, or Taos, New Mexico, or Portland, Oregon. You’re in a café, or at a writers’ conference, or at your kitchen table. The words have come easily to you today, or you feel like your head is about to explode. You’re a household name, or laboring in obscurity. I am here, and you are there, and we are in this thing together.

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I think of her still. She was one of my most gifted students, and she was endearing, vulnerable—the kind of young woman who compels you to take her under your wing. Which I did.

I took her in, crossed all sorts of boundaries. I read and edited her work outside the confines of class, met her for coffee, for drinks, had her to my home for Thanksgiving. She was a quivering creature—everything about her shook: her hands, her legs, her voice. Her fingers—what I most remember are her fingers—bloody and raw, bitten to the quick. Her prose was a wild, galloping horse. Untamed and gorgeous. She ricocheted from the sacred to the ordinary and back again, jammed erudite references into brief asides, created worlds within worlds within worlds.

When she asked me—halfway through her first novel—

what I thought about her getting an agent, I told her to wait.

I urged her to finish it first. To spend more time writing in the dark. I counseled patience. She nodded, shook. Bit the skin around her fingernails. She was in a graduate writing workshop filled with good writers. They were all driven, all anxious about being young but not
that
young. How many years did 188

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they have before they would no longer be considered preco-cious? How many years to make the lists—you know, “Thirty-five under Thirty-five,” “Twenty under Forty.”

When she came back to class after winter break and told me that she had an agent, I wasn’t surprised. And when the agent sold her unfinished first novel as well as an unwritten second novel in a two-book deal so substantial that it was covered in
New York Magazine,
I was also unsurprised. She was rare, an original. But I still felt she should have held off. The book wasn’t ready, and now she had a deadline. She had an editor, a publisher, the pressure of a hefty book advance.

In my workshop full of panicked MFA students, I probably don’t have to tell you how this news was greeted. Students wept in my office. They were sure this spelled the end for them—as if writing were a race. As if the success of one young writer somehow robs another. They were sure that she had grabbed the brass ring. That there
was
a brass ring. The delicate balance between creativity and ambition, patience and impatience, private and public had been upended.

I loved this young woman—her old soul, her stubborn streak, her huge heart—and so I wish I could tell you that her story turned out well. That, as her classmates believed, her early book deal presaged a lifetime of literary achievement and even personal contentment. Instead, she pushed to finish the novel, and it was published to little fanfare. Reviews 189

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were mixed. Critics were respectful of her talent but found the novel to be frustrating, undisciplined, uneven. Within a couple of years, it was out of print. She disappeared, ostensibly hard at work on her second novel. I lost touch with her but kept my eye out for her new book. It never came.

She taught, here and there. To my knowledge, she never published anything ever again. Not a story, not an essay, not a book review. Once, I ran into her in a Brooklyn restaurant and she was still that same, trembling creature, but now she had a brittleness to her, a distractibility that hadn’t been there before.

A number of years later, I received an e-mail with her name in the subject line and I knew she was dead. She had died of a heart attack in an East Village bodega at the age of forty.

Look, it’s easy to sit here—my eyes brimming at the memory of her, at the loss of her—and speculate how it might have been different. If you change one thing in a narrative, everything else changes, too. What would have happened if she had waited, if she had taken the time to shape the book, to deepen it, to allow it to become its best possible self? If she had spent longer, writing in the dark?

A number of her classmates went on to have writing lives.

They are novelists, short story writers, editors, professors. For some, it took five, ten, twelve years after graduation for their careers to take hold. A story here, a story there. Drawers full of rejection slips. Novels abandoned, buried in closets. Plenty of 190

Still Writing

days, no doubt, filled with hopelessness, regret. Those writers who once wept in my office now know what it takes to build a creative life. To wake up each day and start anew. To shrug off humiliation, rejection, uncertainty. To avoid the impulse—

like reaching for a drug—to skip steps, succumb impatiently, send out work before its ready. They have learned that there is no brass ring. That we can never know how it’s going to turn out. That the race is not to the swiftest. I wonder if they think of her.

I am a Jewish girl from New Jersey. Have I ever wished I came from somewhere else? That the soil that grew me wasn’t New Jersey—which, while the birthplace of Philip Roth, is not a state known for its great literary landscape the way, say, Mississippi is (Faulkner! Welty!) or New England (Bishop! Dickinson! Thoreau!) or Nebraska (Cather!). But “geography is destiny,” said Heraclitus. So is childhood. The atmosphere I breathed in as a child remains with me still. It is the basis of my material—my clay, my marble, my palette. It’s what I’ve got.

Only child, older parents, their contentious marriage, observant Jew, religiously conflicted, suburban upbringing, 191

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child model, rebellious teen, tragic accident—are, on their own, just a list, but when woven together, begin to form nubs and knots, the texture of a fabric. Every writer has a fabric.

The most intense moments of our lives seem to sharpen and raise themselves as if written in Braille—this is where our themes begin to take hold. Explore deeply enough and you will find strange and startling questions to grapple with on the page.

We do not choose this fabric as if browsing the aisles at Bloomingdale’s. We don’t get to say,
Hey, I really prefer that
writer’s life circumstances. I think I’ll take the Southern Gothic
childhood, the crazy alcoholic mother, the gunshot in the barn
. It doesn’t work that way. Whether or not we are fond of our tiny corner of the universe, its all we’ve got. If we try to control it, if our egos get in the way and we decide that we want to be, say, a lyric poet, or a political satirist, or a writer of best-selling mysteries, or whatever it is that we think would be cool or important or fun, well, that is the surest way to a dead end and heartache. It is the truest lesson I know about writing—and about life—that we must always move in the direction of our own true calling, not anyone else’s.

And so, when I am quietly at work, I can just about see my mother in an enormous, floppy hat and gardening gloves, beads of perspiration on the back of her neck, her freckled arms. I can catch a whiff of the oil refineries along the Jersey 192

Still Writing

Turnpike. As if from a great distance, I hear the garage door opening, signaling my father’s return from his job in the city.

Wahoo,
he would call to my mother. His briefcase on the floor.

His loosened tie.
Wahoo, I’m home!
The
whoosh, whoosh
of the pool cleaning machine that circled the turquoise blue like a snake. The quiet Sabbath lunches, our three forks scraping against plates. The sadness I couldn’t grasp, the suppressed rage. His bottles of pills. Her closets stuffed with designer clothing. The solo trips. The separate beds. My beautiful parents, their unrealized, unarticulated dreams slowly slipping from their grasp. Their love for one another, hopeless. The air thick with what was unsaid.