Writing Is My Drink (23 page)

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W r i t i n g i s M y D r i n k

he listened sympathetical y and then pointed to the manuscript

beside me and asked, “So, is it honest?”

Uh.
Light Sleeper
—I can trash it a bit because (1) I wrote

it and (2) I know now that it’s never going to be published—

was not a terrible book and not a dishonest book. In fact, it was

pretty honest about my own aversion to parenting and my slow

conversion to involved motherhood. Yet, I knew even then that

there was something missing, though I didn’t understand then

that the problem lay in the narrator’s complete glossing over of

her marriage. A few months after this meeting with Frank, the

marital fissure the memoir had nicely plastered over would be-

come impossible to ignore, but I wasn’t there yet.

I looked at Frank. Like my dad, Frank had sad eyes in a

happy face. Like my dad, he expected you to tell him the truth.

“It seems like there’s levels of honesty, right?” I final y said.

“Go on,” he said, leaning forward.

“Wel ,” I said, stalling a bit, as I real y didn’t know what I was

about to say. “You can write a memoir that goes this deep”—I

waved my flattened hand to indicate the level of the desktop—

“and people will say, that’s honest, that’s brave, maybe even

‘Wow.’”

“But?” Frank said, leading me into the water a little further.

“But there’s a much deeper story. Maybe it’s down here,” I

said, my hand waving between our knees. “And maybe nobody

but you knows it, but if you told
that
story, that would be the real y honest one.”

“I like that,” he said, leaning back in his chair, making me

think for a millisecond that I was off the hook. “And so, where’s

this book?”

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I paused just for a beat and then leveled my hand just slightly

under the desktop, saying, “Maybe here.”

“Not bad,” he said, “not bad.”

We talked a bit more about other things—about the confer-

ence, the weather—and then it was clearly time for me to go.

It was the do-or-die moment, and my heart was beating very

quickly.

“So, one more thing,” I said, meeting his gaze. “Would you

be comfortable writing a note of support for my writing?”

He looked a bit shocked but recovered quickly. “I’d be happy

to,” he said.

I thanked him profusely, and with a great deal of awkward-

ness I made it out of the chair and out the door.

I received the letter in the mail six weeks later, and what

surprised me the most was that it was handwritten. Then I re-

membered the contempt he’d shown in class for writing done on

computers. “It’s not writing,” he’d said. “It’s just tapping.”

I read the letter over and over and then I folded it care-

ful y and put it back in the envelope. He told “To Whom It

May Concern” that I was a writer who would be heard from.

“Yes, she’ll be heard from,” he repeated at the end, convincing

me final y. I understood now that no matter whom I might

pass this letter along to, the letter was for me. It was a letter of encouragement. It was the letter from an older person telling

a younger person that they can do it. Sometimes those older

people are fathers. Sometimes they’re fathers telling you that

they are proud of you.

• • •

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There’s a fine line between sitting on a barstool telling stories

and writing a memoir. Part of my inheritance as a writer is a

feeling of being off-center, of being a transplant, an impostor;

but another part of it is the New World Irish culture in which

I came of age, a culture where sitting around, swapping endless

stories, is a completely legit way to spend a Friday night; a world where the person who knows exactly how long to pause after

the phrase “and then I said to him” is the person who holds the

floor the longest.

When I went to register for college, the registrar pointed out

the disconnect between the last name on my birth certificate

(my biological father’s) and that on my high school transcripts

(my stepdad’s). I no longer wanted to feel like an impostor, so

I changed my last name back to “Nestor,” but I still felt like an

impostor and I still felt like I belonged to my stepfather.

When I final y got the chance to use the blurb Frank had

written, it wasn’t for the motherhood manuscript that had sat

between us that day. It was for a memoir about my divorce. I

worried that I was stealing the words from him, that I was once

again an impostor, but when my editor tracked him down to

make sure he was okay with me using the quote, he wrote back,

“You can quote me from here to infinity.”

Frank, I wil .

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Try This

1. Think about two people in your life who’ve taught you a simi-

lar lesson. Write about those two people in one story united

by the lesson’s theme.

2. Think about a recent piece you’ve written or a piece you are

currently writing and answer Frank’s question: “Is it honest?”

If the answer is no, write for ten minutes on the topic of the

piece more honestly, reassuring yourself that no one needs to

see what you’ve written. You can decide later what you want

to do with this new honesty, but for now just let yourself go to

that deeper level.

3. A literary legacy can be as simple as having a family tradi-

tion of storytelling. Identify your literary legacy. Write for ten

minutes on these questions: What did you learn about sto-

rytelling in your family? Who were the people who held the

floor? What did you learn from them?

4. Write about this question: What did you learn from your fa-

ther about storytelling or about having a voice and power in

the world? How was it similar to or different from what you

learned from your mother?

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12

F is for “Failure,” “Flawed,”

and “All Effed-up”

There is no way to become a published writer without becoming

a rejected writer. There is no way to succeed—whatever your vi-

sion of success might be—without going through a dark tunnel

of failure, though how long that tunnel will be for you, I can-

not say. And even when you’ve achieved whatever benchmark

you’ve labeled for yourself as “success”—maybe somewhere

between your mom’s friends at her retirement center thinking

you’re great and jetting to Sweden to pick up your Nobel Prize—

you will still continue to be rejected. You will still fail. You might as well get used to it. A wise therapist once said to me, “You can’t avoid heartbreak, and if you try, you’ll just end up living a half a life and you will
still
experience heartbreak.”

It seems to me that living a half a life is in
itself
heartbreaking.

Rejection can be painful, but for writers, it is an unavoid-

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able occupational hazard. Every work has its troubles. This is

ours. Don’t avoid the sting. Keep writing. Keep sending out your

work.

I know: Easier said than done.

Most of us can’t help but take rejection personal y, can’t help

but interpret rejection to mean that we’re not good enough.

Whenever my work is rejected, I am instantly that eight-year-

old girl with the lick of hair standing straight up in the class

picture, the girl whose paper has ripped as a result of desperate

erasing. It doesn’t take much for me to flash to the shame place,

that hot spot in my core that emits the cel ular message that I’m

inadequate, that there’s a flaw that runs through the stone, that I real y am the girl who—as my sixth-grade teacher noted on my

report card—makes “deplorable errors.”

Sometimes, we don’t even need anyone else to turn our work

down for us. We do it ourselves. After a few months or even a

few years of writing, we look at what we’ve produced and all we

can see is how far short of the mark it fal s compared to, say,

Alice Munro’s or Chekhov’s. But writing has an insanely long ap-

prenticeship period. It’s practical y un-American to say that you

might work at something for a decade before getting results that

don’t make you cringe, but in my experience and from what I’ve

seen in other writers’ careers, that ten-year estimate is not un-

reasonable. That ten years can be full of minor and major com-

mercial successes and “failures,” but no matter how the reading

and buying public might be experiencing us, we are not ful y

cooked as writers for many years. Yes, there’s a few boy and girl

wonders out there, but they’re the exception not the rule. The

rule is long hours. The rule is low pay or no pay.

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The list of what we can’t control is endless. We can’t control

how others will read our work, who will like it and who will not.

We can’t control acceptance. When I started going to Al-Anon,

a Twelve-Step program that offers support to the friends and

family of alcoholics, a few years ago, I started to hear the sug-

gestion: “Do your part and then let go of the results.” To say that following this advice has been a struggle for me is an understatement. I’ve always been obsessed with results. When I first

started to send out work after grad school, I wanted publica-

tion with a fever akin to lust. I craved it with my entire being.

And on the positive side of the equation, that craving—as most

cravings do—set off a chain of activity needed to reach my goal:

researching magazines, writing, networking, asking questions,

more writing, attending readings and conferences, rewriting.

The dark side of the craving was the conviction that this

hunger could be satisfied by a single external source and obses-

sive thinking about how that source might manifest. I was a bit

ashamed of my lust for publication. I tried to keep the extent of

my desire under wraps. I remember hitting an apex with this

frustrated desire in early 2002. I went to a reading by Terry Tem-

pest Williams at Town Hall in Seattle, where she read a beautiful,

moving piece about 9/11. It was the first time I’d heard a writer’s take on 9/11 and I was moved by her description, but also by her

presence and her authenticity. I felt an awe for her stature as a

writer and a public person, which had grown considerably since

I’d met her six years earlier.

After the reading, I lined up with a zillion other people for a

book signing. I was eager to reconnect with her again, although

I doubted she’d remember me. But when it was my turn and I

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said “I don’t know if you remember me . . .” she jumped in and

said she remembered me from the faculty development seminar

in Utah a few years back. She wanted to know what I was doing

now—she was very gracious and seemingly interested—and I

told her about coming to Seattle to do an MFA and my fledgling

writing career. And then it was time to go.

On the drive home, I felt sorrow fill me from my shoulders

to my feet. Why should I feel sad? I had a nice evening. I got

to talk to Terry, who’d been a role model for me and who I still

looked up to as a person of letters who used her gift to make

people think and feel. Why shouldn’t that make me happy? Was

I jealous? That seemed a likely answer, but it wasn’t quite it. And then I realized I was sad because I wanted to be a peer or at least a near peer to Terry. I didn’t want to be a fledgling writer any

longer. I wanted the two of us to share something genuine. I

wanted to be in her tribe.

I realized that this was part of why I was so hungry for pub-

lication. I wanted to be recognized as a writer and I wanted to

be a part of a community of writers as a peer, not as a groupie. It seemed that I had more in common with writers than with any

other group of people. Except for one thing: I was barely pub-

lished. How would my people recognize me until I had proven

myself as a writer?

It was dawning on me that my lust for publication wasn’t

shameful. Yes, I wanted glory, fame, and gold, but mostly I

wanted recognition and legitimate membership in the commu-

nity I already considered my own. And I wanted something else:

a readership. I wanted people who were not my friends or blood

relatives to read my work. I wanted my work to stir them the

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way that I had been stirred by Terry both that night and six years