Crash Course Read online

  True, I had improved over 2001, 2002. I had worked hard to build my tolerance for being out in the world, but I was shaky still. Very shaky. And I so, so didn’t want to begin a program only to quit from fear. I knew it would devastate me to come that close to a goal and then disappoint myself again. I was having a hard enough time forgiving myself for those eighteen years of dysfunction; I didn’t need another failure on the list.

  On the throughway that day, I had a Counting Crows CD on an endless loop, and I was caught in an endless loop of my own. Giddiness, and then unmistakable grief over time gone by, followed by tears of joy, and then giddiness again. I was so proud of myself, even as I was aware of how absurd it was to be moved to tears by my ability to go to a luxury spa. Because with every minute, every mile, I wasn’t just driving toward the possibility of an hour-long massage, I was driving toward my adulthood. A little late. But I was.

  The emails I wrote home that week were hilarious. Or anyway, I remember them that way. They were also endless, thousands of words in each. Accounts of my “adventures” at the Ranch. Much of the comedy was easy—pot-shots at myself for being so uncoordinated, such a disaster at anything remotely athletic, the woman in the back of the aerobics class who trips herself trying to remember which way is “left.” And then there was the personal trainer who, as I lay upside down on an enormous inflated ball, dizzy, nauseated, worrying that I might throw up, began for reasons of his own to recite a declaration of love from Romeo and Juliet—words that for one mad, disoriented moment I thought were directed to me. (They were not.) The Tai Chi teacher who stood alone with me under snowy hemlock trees, instructing me to picture my “genitals,” while holding a “ball of energy” in my hands…and then, while I struggled not to collapse in giggles, assured me he was picturing his own…The far wealthier-than-I, far better dressed, far better coiffed (which is to say coiffed at all) women discussing over dinner the Canyon Ranch “gas problem” brought on by all the fiber one is forced to eat…Time fades the humor, but in memory these were free-flowing, clever, well-timed accounts, all of them starring me, the clueless, clumsy heroine of her own personal mad-cap comedy.

  Now, twelve years later, I am not exactly known for my comic flair. I am a chronicler of grief, a cataloguer of losses. According to the critics, I am “brutally honest” about the “harsh realities of life.” I kill off my characters like so many kitchen ants. When I hear from readers it is as often as not to detail just where they were when they started sobbing over some piece of work of mine. (Subways are most common, coffee shops get second place.) I have written the occasional funny piece, but it’s surely not what anyone who knows my work first recalls at the mention of my name.

  And in fact, up there at long-ago Canyon Ranch, whatever hilarity I dispensed in my daily dispatches home, the “real” writing I was doing at night, a bottle of Jameson’s predictably enough by my side, was serious, wistful, oh, and overwrought, directive, written to impress, and, you know, pretty bad. The world was an unhappy place and I was a miserable woman. For all the explosive joy in my email life, for all of my effortless ability to laugh at myself in those missives, I was all about The Tragedy when I tried to write. And it was a slog.

  In the movie version of this episode in my life, a famous author also staying there—we meet in the sauna, I think—asks to see my work and when I show her those leaden pages, breaks it to me that I have no talent…until she glimpses the emails. “Why, you’re just trying to do the wrong thing! You aren’t a ‘serious author,’ at all. You’re a comic genius!” And a star is born…

  But in reality, the quality of my pages played no role in determining what I would write during the subsequent years. Maybe because I wasn’t exactly writing to be read. I was writing to be heard, which is not at all the same thing.

  When I look back now, I don’t only see those two entirely different streams of words I produced. I see two me’s—as clearly as if I had in fact been two different women at the time. How perfect that it was January, the two faces of Janus overlaid with those of Comedy and Tragedy. The irrepressible author of laugh-out-loud emails, looking forward, giggling with every word, dancing under a newly detected light at the end of the tunnel—because she believes that she has done it at last, has vanquished the monster of emotional illness that has kept her hidden her entire adult life. While the other author, fragile and mournful still, embodying the damage of all that fear and loss, struggles, tentative and self-conscious, to put to page why her sorrow mattered, why it had to matter, what she has learned, what she might share.

  When my first book came out, one of the most instructive things anyone said was in a nasty one star review. “I don’t know why she thinks anyone would want to read anything this depressing,” the reviewer opined. And I realized only then how little I had thought about what anyone else what might want to read. I had written what I had to write. Those Canyon Ranch emails were fun and all, but that other woman, the grieving one, she and I had unfinished business.

  Perhaps I am thinking of that trip now because after years of steady work I am between fiction projects. I’m not under contract for anything. I’m back to writing for nobody but myself. And it’s not clear to me that I know who I am these days. At least not when it comes to the work. My story collection and novel were part of one long process for me, a particular me, that chronicler of grief, cataloguer of losses. The forces that had kept me hidden needed exorcising—or something like that. I hesitate to pin down too neatly what that gust of need was in me. The “why” of all those words.

  But I know that the “why” has changed. Because I am changed. I still have my sorrows, but I no longer define myself by them. I chafe now when I imagine myself once again sitting at my keyboard to type out my hard-earned expertise on the finer points of emotional pain.

  And so I have no idea what comes next. I have no idea what kind of writer I am. I only know I am not the writer I have been. It can be discomfiting. Starting over. But maybe that’s just what we writers do—every time, with every blank page.

  In the movie version of this era of my life, I go out to the garage and unearth the hard drive on which all those emails have been waiting to be reread, and I manage to tap into them somehow. I sit among the boxes and the bags of clothes, devouring every word—and I laugh out loud, just as advertised. Though maybe I also discover that they aren’t quite as unrelentingly hilarious as I have long believed. Maybe they are even a little poignant, a telltale line toward the end of each: “So far I’m doing okay, fingers crossed” or “Nothing worrisome yet. I’m holding steady.”

  How could there not have been that nod to my reality?

  But yes, far more vibrant is the voice of the other woman I was that week. The irrepressible woman who saw humor everywhere she looked, who cast herself in the role of ditzy heroine. The one who must have believed that this day of not defining herself by early sorrow would eventually arrive.

  “Dear All,” she wrote to her worried family back home, “Just try to picture me like this…”

  Father Chronicles: Embracing Cordelia

  When I was a girl, my father would invite me to his study on the third floor of our house, take down the great white leather-bound volume of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and open it to King Lear. We would read much of the opening scene aloud, he playing Lear of course, and I cast as first one daughter then the next, reciting the elaborate protestations of love from Regan and from Goneril and then, finally, Cordelia’s fateful speech:

  “Good my lord,

  You have begot me, bred me, loved me: I

  Return those duties back as are right fit,

  Obey you, love you, and most honour you.

  Why have my sisters husbands, if they say

  They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,

  That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry

  Half my love with him, half my care and duty:

  Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,

  To l
ove my father all.”

  What followed then—in my father’s study, not in the play, though one could argue the distinction—was a lesson about the coldness Cordelia displayed, a discussion of why she should have just played along, of how hurtful that must have been to her father.

  It was a position with which I was quick to agree.

  •

  I was a skinny child, slight, pale, looking a bit like Tenniel’s Alice. I was no Cordelia, no speaker of truths, no smasher of illusions, no expert even on what illusions there might be to smash. I was in love with my father, who encouraged a kind of romantic connection between us. And being in love with my father meant inhabiting a world of make-believe so elaborate and so apart from reality it might as well have included a Queen of Hearts, a Cheshire cat, a March Hare, King Lear, and Cordelia, too. I had little sense of what made sense. I was too happy at having my father’s attention to understand what else of his I was receiving—and of course, I was also too young.

  I did not know that the romance between us was a classic way alcoholics relate to their children, a crossing of boundaries that would damage me for years. I did not know that this sort of attention, the sort that served an agenda of his, was perhaps not a perfect substitute for such things as his knowing what grade I was in that year; and I did not know that he did in some way know all this, that the knowledge of his own shortcomings lurked both uncomfortable and unattended in his heart.

  I was thirty-nine when my father died, and within three weeks after his death I began to write—for real, as I like to say. I had made attempts over the years, and had even had the sort of success that should have spurred me on—flattering workshop receptions in college, encouraging teachers. But I had always quit before completing anything that felt finished to me—as finished as fiction ever feels, which is never quite finished, just finished enough. I never let myself reach finished enough. Until my father died, at which point the floodgates opened and my work found its way into the world.

  The title of my first book, If I loved you, I would tell you this, is the opening sentence of a story I wrote in 2006 when our new neighbor built a fence in a location he was technically entitled to use but that we had believed was part of our property. The fence greatly diminished the use and beauty of our home’s entrance, and I found the whole episode staggering, in no small part because our request by the end was only that he move it six inches. His response was to take the yarn my husband had used to show where that shifted line would be—yarn accompanied by a very polite note—ball it up, and throw it onto our driveway with no further comment. He not only did what he was legally entitled to do, he did it with spite.

  My initial impulse was to write an essay on the subject. I almost never use events from my own life in fiction, so memoir seemed the way to go. The essay was to be on the question of entitlement, addressing how much of life and personal interaction turns out to be defined by the question of who feels entitled to what. But at some point, it began to feel labored, a little over-thought. I lost interest, and then, in an uncharacteristic move, I decided to write a short story about the experience instead, a story in the form of direct address from one character to another. The first line I wrote was: “If I loved you, I would tell you this.”

  The point of that line, of the whole story really, is that taking the time to work something through with someone who has hurt you, rather than just giving up, is itself a loving thing to do. And that a relationship that precludes such discussions and such mending along the way, is a relationship that also precludes an intimate, trusting love.

  My relationship to my father was indeed tragically disintimate. Replete with ritualized protestations of adoration from both sides, it lacked this single crucial aspect: the possibility that painful disclosures might also be constructive and loving ones.

  When my stories were collected, my working title was “Yesterday’s News.” I liked the way the phrase captured both the sense that the stories dealt almost entirely with the process of recovery from a loss or trauma; and also that it was a play on a way that older women, so often central to my work, are demeaned.

  But the title was a non-starter for my publisher as it violated the number one rule of titles: Don’t give reviewers ammunition. Don’t make it easy for some nasty critic to say: “These old-fashioned stories really are yesterday’s news!” (Which, as an aside, answers the question of why no one ever calls a novel This Piece of Shit Book.)

  I won’t list the dozens of title possibilities we canvassed, but I was the first to suggest “If I loved you, I would tell you this,” and also the first to decide it was a terrible idea. What a mouthful! I couldn’t imagine saying it out loud every time someone asked me the name of my book. But, for better or worse, my publisher was in love, and so set about convincing me of its virtues, in part by showing me the degree to which the theme of speaking the truth, of speaking difficult truths, of lives turning on the question of who discloses what hard truth to whom, dominate the book, central to nearly every story.

  There are two kinds of obsessions for a writer. There are the ones of which we are aware—which for me include such things as interiors of houses, representational art, and on a somewhat deeper level, loss and recovery from loss. Betrayal. Redemption. And then there are the ones of which we are unaware—until somebody points them out. These can feel oddly embarrassing, as we learn that we have unintentionally exposed a deeply personal vein.

  Rereading my stories through the lens of that one line, “If I loved you, I would tell you this,” made me feel stupid, obvious, and yes, embarrassed. That reaction has faded, and I’ve recovered my ability to read the book without that particular theme blinking in red lights when I do, but, at the time, the revelation that I was consistently and unknowingly hitting on one particular theme was an unsettling one.

  It took several years after that for me to begin another project that “took.” There are myriad reasons for that, but a feeling of self-consciousness certainly played a role. I was under contract and I felt watched, as if my editor had nothing better to do than wonder where my pages were. And I felt too a different form of self-consciousness, as though I knew too much about myself. With each work that I began I would either avoid all issues of truth-telling and disclosure, or I would see them emerge and abandon the work, knowing that with its heart revealed to me, I would no longer write from my own.

  When I finally embarked on the novel that “took,” I convinced myself that I had banished the subject of prohibited speech. The story takes place long after the secret of an affair has been revealed, and is overtly about another of my obsessions, one that hadn’t been explored as thoroughly in my stories: the subject of betrayal, not just marital or sexual betrayal, but betrayal of all kinds. When people asked me what the book was about, I always described it as the story of a couple trying to recover from a confessed betrayal, and of friends dealing with a betrayal as well. To clear the book even more thoroughly of all secrets, in the first sentence the narrator discloses to the reader that her husband is going to die. On both a textual and meta-textual level, everything has been told before you’re even one chapter in.

  But a funny thing has happened in the years since I finished the book. I have found myself rethinking it, and I would no longer describe it as a story primarily about a couple trying to recover from the woman’s affair, or friends coping with disloyalty. I would describe it this way instead: “Life Drawing is a novel about a woman whose father made many important subjects in her life taboo when she was a young girl. This prohibition on honest discourse so shaped her that she has a shaky hold on the way truth-telling is sometimes beneficial and sometimes damaging, a lack of insight that leads to a tragic end.”

  And I might quote this line in which the narrator, in response to a conversational awkwardness with her husband, makes a revelation: “This wasn’t my first experience living under a regime of unspeakable subjects. I was well-practiced. After my mother died, my father mandated that she not be mentioned, so
by the time my conscious memory of childhood kicks in, I was already trained to short-circuit the flow between my thoughts and my voice.

  “There were very few ways in which Owen reminded me of my father—at certain points just the idea of any similarity would have horrified me—but in fact both had played this censoring role in my life, rendering my speech a kind of topiary, trimmed and trained and shaped to please.”

  These sentences appear on page twenty-seven, hardly buried in the book.

  So how I could not have known that I was back in familiar territory? It seems so obvious, now—the crucial sub-plot of the father forbidding certain speech. How could I not have heard the resonances with my own life?

  The best answer I know is that we writers protect ourselves as we work—when it is going well. We make ourselves immune to observations and insights that might hold us back; and this blindness can be a mark of a productive writing period. The best of my writing requires a kind of imposed stupidity about what I’m doing. I wasn’t able to write a book until I had convinced myself that I’d moved away from this theme; but I am certain that I couldn’t have written a book had I actually moved away from this theme.

  It’s a blessing really that we are capable of being obtuse about what we reveal. Remove the unintended obsessional layer from anyone’s work, and you almost certainly remove the layer that produces urgency. Read work that lacks urgency, and you will often discover a piece that was over-thought, pre-planned, written to fit a formula or an idea, a piece in which the unconscious obsessions of the author have had no room to thrive. A piece, perhaps, in which the author has too successfully protected herself from exposing herself.

  When I think of beginning another book or story now, it is this for which I most fervently hope: Please let me be an innocent as I write, let me not understand the process too well, let me be surprised again at what comes out—even if it is, as it likely will be, the very same thing I have written a thousand times before. Please, allow me to tangle with Cordelia once again, for all the world to see.