Crash Course Page 2

  It’s been many years since I felt anything like the rage I used to feel at my own inability to follow through. I have never, not even momentarily, been as angry at anyone else as I was at myself for all that time. I have never been as confused by anything as I was by the prison in which I had myself caged. It takes work now to remember the intensity of those feelings, but once I do…I don’t entirely understand how I survived such unhappiness, so much self-directed wrath.

  Those were terrifying times for me. Not because I thought I would hurt myself—I was spared that particular fear. But because I knew I would never be happy, and I knew that I would never be able to be gracious in my sorrow. And I knew—I knew!—that this particular misery was mine alone.

  But I have since learned how wrong I was about the singularity of my self-sabotage. It turns out that a lot of us subvert our own desires, particularly our ambitions. It is easier for me to see this after the fact, when suffering no longer turns my gaze ever inward. So many of us don’t let ourselves have what we want. We don’t even give ourselves a chance to try, staying caught in this hellish place of knowing our dreams and being the obstacle to any chance of their fulfillment. And so we live our days in a relentless double-bind.

  It’s true that I don’t like to talk about those times. But now, painful as the memories are, I find that I very much don’t want to abandon the woman I was. I don’t want her erased from my narrative, her anger and her many failings buried in a blizzard of smiling selfies: Late Bloomer Poses With Second Book.

  When my second book came out, summer 2014, four years after my first, the phrase reentered my daily life. Late Bloomer. I remained a phenomenon—though not such a rare one—because my career began when I was already middle-aged. It’s something that strangers knew about me and asked about at conferences, at book clubs, on Twitter—and so on. And in 2010, with publication of my first book, I talked about the experience a lot.

  I spoke of my surprise and joy at having a book contract at forty-six, a story collection at forty-eight. A second act. A reinvention. And, with occasional mention of some emotional blocks, I hinted that my three children and their practical needs were the main obstacle to my writing life. “Yes, I was home with my kids full-time for more than fifteen years.”

  I participated in a narrative, crafted in large part by the subtle pressures of the optimistic story that I understood people wanted to hear, maybe even that I wanted to hear, a story less about process than product, less about reality than image, less about empathy than encouragement.

  But from one book to the next, something changed. I’ve grown (even) older and have also grown more secure in my professional identity. And it worries me now that in my rush to be a best-case-scenario role model, I may have made it all look easier than it was, turning what were significant psychological issues into everyday practical problems, like a lack of child care, like having three kids with different vacation schedules—all of which are genuine demands and distractions for any aspiring writer, but far from the true story of what pushed my professional achievements into my middle years.

  Not that there is one true story of why I couldn’t write with any steadiness until nearly forty, and then why I could. My silence is a prismatic fact, multi-faceted, reflecting emotional issues; fears of speaking my “truth”; underlying conditions such as ADD; family pressures I am still sorting through. My emergence lacks a single simple explanation, only the hard work of years of therapy; the shock of seeing my fourth decade pass, mortality seeming more real; the death of a parent whose very existence seemed to inhibit me; treatment for my ADD; and more, of course, some known to me and much not. It would be nice to have a single key to so dramatic a shift in my capacities, if only to be able to share it in the hope of helping others to become unlocked, but I only have hints and inklings, answers that briefly seem compelling and complete—each one—until I remember another explanation equally thorough, equally true.

  Though one fact does come shining through: I did not just need to clear my schedule in order to write. I needed to completely rebuild myself. And it was painful. All of it. Painful, when I wouldn’t let myself write, and painful too when I began, when I stuck with it and discovered that the demons of self-sabotage are tenacious and cruel. Painful until it gradually, so, so gradually, became less painful, bit by bit.

  And now it isn’t painful. I have my bad writing periods, but I’m no longer filled with the kind of self-loathing I harbored back in the bad old days, the Dark Ages, as I have come to think of them. I no longer yell and scream—really, ever. I haven’t for years. I can’t remember the last time I talked about hating my life, nor the last time I smacked a cooking pan onto a counter with such force that my hand ached. I don’t feel now as though I am in some kind of constant battle between my own dreams and my need to subvert them.

  I’m doing okay.

  This is the point in such essays at which I usually begin to draw some kind of lesson from what I’ve described. And if there is one here, it’s this: I am emphatically not an example of someone who first was too busy with her kids to write, and then finally wasn’t too busy with her kids to write, so wrote. I am an example of someone who was a complete head case, blocked, miserable, wasting days, years, despairing, depressed, mistreating the people around me, mistreating myself, certain that in old age I would feel a regret so keen that I feared that emotion more than I feared eventual death.

  All of which is to say, if you are in anything like that kind of shape, if you are blocked for years and years and years, you are still not disqualified from achieving your goals.

  But, to be honest, I am not writing this to send that message into the world—though if it’s helpful to someone, I’m glad.

  I’m writing this piece because for all that I craft fictions I am a devotee of truth. And recently, as I’ve looked over my prior writing about being a so-called “late bloomer,” I have felt a disconnect between the rah, rah, you can do it tone, and the sorrow that consumed me for so long—and still does when I think of those years—sorrow over the decades when I couldn’t let myself do what felt so urgent to me, and when I handled that badly. And when I saw myself as my own enemy—because I was.

  I no longer want the record sanitized, this story of mine, replete as it is with good fortune, to be recast as only a happy narrative, or as one in which everything fell into place with no damage done. You can’t be that frustrated for so long, nor that filled with self-loathing, then emerge without sustaining injury. And to the extent that anyone’s paying attention, I don’t want to give the impression that beginning a career twenty years after you’d hoped is a simple or painless experience for anyone.

  The odds are that if you know someone who has “bloomed” late, that person is carrying serious grief over time gone by. As much as every late bloomer’s story can seem like a happy one, it is almost certainly something more. If you stop long enough to ask what lies behind the eventual success—of whatever kind, of whatever degree—you are likely to find a well of pain that may be obscured by relief and gratitude, and possibly, too, by the subtle pressure of other people’s needs to see the positive outcome to the exclusion sometimes of much else. You may find a far more interesting story than the one you think you know.

  But that’s hardly true only of late bloomers.

  And that is why I wrote this essay, and why I write the sort of fiction that I write, the sort that earns itself adjectives like “brutal” and “sad.” Because nobody’s life is simple. And I want to tell this truth: Nobody, no matter what gifts they are given and what joys they embrace, nobody comes out of life wholly unscathed. Everyone has an important, and yes, very often a painful story to tell—whether they choose to share it or don’t.

  And who knows, maybe that is the simplest explanation, after all, for what kept me so silent for so long. I wanted to tell the truth, and I was afraid of what would happen if I did.

  But then I did. And life improved.

  There’s a moment toward the
end of my novel when my narrator, detecting in her husband vestiges of the many people he has been, the boy, the man she married, the man by then in his fifties, wonders, “How was it that any one of us could walk across a room, without our own multitudes tripping us up?” She concludes, “Maybe none of us could.”

  Of all the lines that I wrote in the book, this one rolls through my thoughts every day: Maybe none of us could.

  And then: Maybe none of us should.

  My Default Man

  My default man is a bit passive, and he’s a good guy, solid—or anyway he seems to be, though he’s prone to sexual straying now and then, which argues against that first impression; but the guilt, it tears him up. He’s late forties, early fifties, good-looking in an aging-athlete-wearing-glasses kind of way. And he is married. Or he has been married, but screwed it up somehow. Or he has been married but his wife left him for someone a little less dependable, a little more exciting. Because—that occasional sexual indiscretion aside—he is dependable, arguably to the point of being dull. And he’s a good father too—to daughters especially, with whom he has that relationship where they know him a little better than he knows himself, which makes him appear to be sheepish in a lovable way. Daughters who say things to him like, “Oh, Dad. You poor old fool.” Because he’s really just a big befuddled softy inside. And he has a one-syllable name, often one that involves a “k.” Jack. Hank. Mike. He’s kind of a big lunk is the truth—which also ends with a “k”—and you can’t help but like him even if you wish he’d take a little more control of his life.

  And there he is, every time I sit down to write. Waiting for me. Bill. Joe. Dick—if it weren’t for the need to explain why anyone named Richard would choose to go by Dick, especially this guy, who emphatically would not. He is there, fully-formed, and ready to be kicked around a bit by the women in his life, even as he passively slips into a bed or two that he probably should avoid along the way.

  And I, at my keyboard, am dismayed to find him there. Because for all that he seems so passive, so close to bumbling at times, it turns out he is tyrannical with me. A fool for every other woman in his life, he is my master, outsmarting me perpetually, insisting not so much on my attention as on my collusion in keeping him front and center in my work.

  I don’t know from where he came. I used to have a default woman, but she was pretty clearly me. Every time I started a story, there she’d be. To rid myself of her I put myself on a short-term diet of writing stories only from a male point of view. I hoped that would teach me to grow better at making people up—as opposed to unintentionally reproducing myself on the page, though a wispy, unbelievable version of myself. And it was a good idea. That decision helped me write women who aren’t me, mostly because when I wrote women as secondary characters I felt freer to give them characteristics that weren’t mine. (Ah, ego!) But then, in my place, he turned up. Whoever the hell he is.

  He isn’t my father. I should just get that out there. And he isn’t my husband. Nor either of my brothers. He isn’t any man I know. I have been dealing with him for many years at this point and believe me I have tried to trace his origin, and it isn’t to be found in human form.

  So what is he? Other than an embarrassment and a foil all at once? My best guess is that he’s a neurotic tic, and he’s a tool. Literally. He is the tool to which I instinctively turn when I start writing and am in my most unintentional state of mind. He is the guy whose sole purpose in “life” is to pull the writing out from my inchoate, creative being—which he alone can do because something about him puts me in immediate touch with the wounds from which my fiction writing grows.

  But I say that like it’s an obvious thing, that writing grows from wounds. So I should add, I make no claim that everyone’s does; but at this point in my life, having written for quite a while and having gone through many years when it was impossible to write, I am convinced that the reason I write is to occupy what feels like a masterful proximity to those emotions that have caused me most pain. I write to convince myself I can fix those things somehow—or at the very least understand them. I write to heal myself.

  I’m not talking about anything conscious here. I have never had the thought: I could use a little therapy right now, so how ’bout writing a novel instead? In fact, I barely have a conscious impulse to write. I have instead an itch. A discomfort when I don’t write. But not exactly a desire to tell stories. There aren’t plots crowding my mind. And I never know what stories I’m going to tell until they are told. But I carry a kind of hunger, or maybe the better image is a barometer that when erratic sends me to my keyboard once again to find calm. And, to find him, which is irritating from a craft perspective—Lord, can’t I come up with another man?—but probably necessary as a neurotic link to my own creativity, a kind of unassuming doorman to the door that I keep shut against ancient woes.

  I suppose he is my imaginary friend, the companion who has been shaped by my earliest psychological distress and whom I intuit, as a child intuits the role of her imaginary friend, has a role in helping me conquer that distress. Maybe he is a transition object of sorts, a security blanket to clutch as I peer into places that frighten me.

  But yes, he is irritating from a craft perspective. No one wants people saying, “All of her men are the same!” So I change him. I have tricks for that. Jack becomes Jeremy, and oddly, just the introduction of two additional syllables frees me up—to give him a bad temper, say; or make him a bit cannier than he generally is when he springs fully-formed from my head. Sam becomes Harris, and morphs into a misanthrope. Hank becomes Owen and is capable of torturing his wife into paroxysms of jealousy. No more Mr. Nice Guy. The initial tweaks are small. This odd business of lengthening his name. The forced addition of idiosyncratic gestures. And then, as I gain more control, I can work on the larger stuff, truly change who he is, sharpen that passivity, tame that wandering libido—or not. But in any case, I can consciously craft a character out of the one I unconsciously, reliably produce.

  Though sometimes I still see Jack there, and Hank.

  I believe that we all have them. Default men, or women, or dynamics, or children, or settings, or conflicts. And I believe, for all my ambivalence about my own, that we all need them, too. These repeated figures, repeated tropes, are the denizens and the pillars of the obsessional, wounded parts of our own creativity—which is to say, our creativity. They remain fairly unchanged over time, as our obsessions and fears are largely unchanging through adult life, set into us early on. So yes, we need them, the repetitions, the familiar scenes and gestures; but then we also need to recognize them for what they are, master them as we move from draft to draft, from the state of intuitive creativity to a state in which the intellect, increasingly guided by intent, kicks in.

  This process is much on my mind whenever I begin something new, only to find that he is already there. That guy. My imaginary friend. And I’m learning to give in to him—at first. Let him look embarrassed as he talks about the wife whom he disappointed; allow his daughter to condescend to him in that affectionate way the daughters of my imagination have. Because for all that Jack and Hank and Mike and Bill irk the hell out of me when they first reappear, I recognize that without them I would be stuck, caught in a Scylla and Charybdis of my own: the fears behind my creativity too powerful, the dangers of my intellect stepping in to quell them, too real. I would think too strategically when intuition should still be my guide. I would lose my way back to the source of my writing. Or maybe, without my lunkish, sheepish companion, so essentially dependable, even dull, I would simply lose my nerve.

  And so we soldier on, he and I. That’s the sort of thing he’s best at: soldiering on. Bearing up. Muddling through. And I even let myself enjoy his slightly inarticulate company, his inexplicably irresistible charm—knowing, as I do, that there will be plenty of time to add a couple of complicating syllables later on.

  Agoraphobia, Writing, and Me:

  Fear and Laughing at Canyon Ranch

&nb
sp; In January, 2003, I got in my car and drove a few hours to a luxury spa—Canyon Ranch, in Massachusetts. I’d never been to a spa before (nor have I been since), but that unaccustomed indulgence was the least of what was going on. At forty years old, I was the mother of three children, the wife of one very understanding man, and I was an aspiring writer. I was also a recovering—I hoped—agoraphobic. For eighteen years I had been terrified to leave my home. I had done it, in the course of raising my kids; in the course of the law school years I put in between marriages; in the course of dating the aforementioned husband I’d been married to for eight years by 2003—and in the course of attending a weekly writing workshop in Philadelphia over the preceding eighteen months. So, no shut-in, I. Except for the other seventy-five percent of the time, when I stayed inside, experiencing the crippling panic attacks that almost invariably followed those necessary outings.

  Forty-one minus eighteen is twenty-three. At twenty-three I married for the first time and around that time, the panics began. At twenty five, I had my first child, giving me a semi-plausible pretext for staying tethered to my home. And tethered. And tethered. Those few days in the bizarre atmosphere of a spa—hardly adventure travel, I know—constituted the first trip I had taken on my own since 1976, the first time in all my forty years that I’d stayed in a hotel room by myself.

  It was an Event. Not just for me, but for my husband and children. For my mother and my siblings. For the few friends close enough to understand the significance of Robin Out Alone, on the road. And it was a trial run—necessary because the writing thing was getting serious. I wanted to apply to a low residency MFA program, to send out the forms that had been buried on my desk for over a year. But if going to the grocery store reliably resulted in an emergency call to my shrink…