Who knows sometimes where stories come from? They are perhaps more attached to the author’s emotional life and come more out of inspiration than slogging. You shouldn’t write without inspiration—at least not very often. As I’ve already said, in discussing writing one shouldn’t set the idea of inspiration aside and speak only of hard work. Of course writing is hard work—or a very privileged kind of hard work. A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. A novel is a job. Story writers working on a novel are typically in pain through the entire thing. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.
A Love Story
A few days ago, I posted this quote from Lorrie Moore, on her ex-husband:
“It was easy to be a writer around him. Like, right now, I’m seeing somebody else and that’s not easy, because he’s scouring the work for signs of him. But my husband never really did that. It’s good to have someone who is mildly interested and mildly proud, and also slightly uninterested. When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute. Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.”
I wrote that I disagreed, in theory, and a commenter asked me to elaborate, and since it is 4am and sleep seems to have escaped me today, I thought I would.
So here is how I feel about being a writer and being a wife. I have never been the latter and sometimes I feel like I’m barely the former, but allow me to comment anyway.
I need my significant other to be my biggest fan. This is a scary thing to admit to yourself, and scarier still to ask it of someone, perhaps particularly so when your sense of self and who are is so entwined with what you do. Meaghan O’Connell put it perfectly (as she tends to do) recently, writing:
“Is there a bifurcation of self? Is there, can there be, a self that exists outside of the writing? Can you really put yourself, your truth, into something and then say it isn’t you?”
No, no, and no—not for me. And so a partner who finds my writing cute and amusing—who finds me darling but ultimately, condescendingly, benign and unexceptional—well, that just won’t do. I want someone who really realizes what writing is and doesn’t run a mile. Someone who realizes and appreciates and inspires.
When my ex A. and I broke up, before I stopped cursing his existence long enough to become his friend…for the few months he was out of my life completely, the one thing I found most unbearable—the thing that left me sobbing in my bed and in my car and on the shower floor for weeks, professing that I would never love again, fucking men, fuck them all—was the realization that I had lost this powerful thing, this distinct comfort and strength that comes from having the person you love cherish and celebrate and admire this part of you.
It was the first time I felt this. I had spent years dating men who acted, for the most part, mildly interested—sometimes even actively disinterested and vocally so, annoyed at the slightest indication that perhaps this was bigger than just a silly little hobby, bigger than him. And so I was blown away by this person who cared enough to show his coworkers my articles (hey look at my girlfriend writing embarrassing things about me, isn’t it wonderful), brag about me to his friends and my friends, and e-mail me excitedly minutes within reading a new piece (look, here is my favorite part and here is why!) It was the same eagerness with which I flipped through his journals and consumed his drawings and words, this feeling of awe and oh, I can’t believe my own good luck that this fascinating, talented person is sitting here, eating cereal and watching a Law and Order marathon beside me.
It was so much more than an ego stroke—though it was that, too. It lifted me up and I love(d) him for it. His head and heart were elsewhere then, and he didn’t have much room left to love me back, but for a year, A. loved this part of me—this part that sometimes feels like it is all of me, touches every corner of my insides—and that was enough.
It’s hard to say how difficult it is to find this, and the very thought that the man who was lucky enough to marry Lorrie freakin’ Moore was only “mildy proud,” well that alone is enough to make me want to throw up my hands and just give up now…whatever giving up would entail; perhaps a man who doesn’t like to read and chuckles when you bring a book to the bar and complains that your magazines are all over the house and why can’t you just throw them out every month like a normal person?
So maybe it is rare and maybe most men you date will rather watch the game than read the ninth edit to your short story. Perhaps it’s almost impossible to find someone who tolerates being kept awake by your loud typing and sighing, who will make you coffee and kiss you on the shoulder as you hunch over your laptop at some bizarre hour, rushing to meet a deadline, who will think you’re delicious even when he returns from a weekend away to find you and your unwashed hair exactly where he left you, bloodshot eyes scanning your book proposal for typos.
It is frustrating, or so I hear, to wait and wait for an answer to an e-mail or IM because you can’t help but mull, determined to say what you mean and mean what you say with nary an extraneous utterance to take back later too late. And it takes a great deal of patience and selflessness, I know, to sometimes take the back seat, to be on the receiving end of abbreviated phone calls and rescheduled date nights because you are writing and if you don’t get it down right now, you will sweat anxiously through dessert, you will stir your coffee without taking a sip and pull your hand away, distracted, when he reaches for it across the table. And perhaps you deserve to get hung up on when you call back in three hours instead of 15 minutes like you promised because you were sitting in the dark, rummaging the recesses of your brain for just the right word.
And fuck if it doesn’t take guts to say yes, you must do it, this could be great, when you ask for ridiculous things—and this one I know for sure—things like, oh would you mind accompanying me to the local sex club because I’m writing an article, and could we celebrate Valentine’s Day a little late because I have an interview that night, and could I take off my top in the name of journalism, and to do it all with a sense of humor (A., I owe you).
And it takes a confident, exceptional man, to be on board when you write about the two of you, to take a deep breath and let you glide your pen like a razor blade over the seams that join you, exposing the deformed parts, the parts that you hide from the neighbors and stuff under the couch cushions when you have guests.
I am asking a lot, I know—sometimes more than I myself am able to give. It may be impossibly much to expect of someone, to be so fiercely enthusiastic, to believe in you enough to pick up the slack during those moments you don’t quite believe in yourself. But maybe the alternative—mild interest in your “cute” words, the relationship equivalent of a there-there pat on the head—is even more impossible to imagine. And then you don’t have a choice but to ask for what you know you need. And maybe it will take a long time and some lost faith before you find it, and maybe you will need to be ready to catch up when it turns on its heels and runs a mile, and maybe you’ll have to grab its hand and hold it tight and convince it to stay awhile, but maybe it’s worth it. I think it is.
She was not good on the phone. She needed the face, the pattern of eyes, nose, trembling mouth…People talking were meant to look at a face, the disastrous cupcake of it, the hide-and-seek of the heart dashing across. With a phone, you said words, but you never watched them go in. You saw them off at the airport but never knew whether there was anyone there to greet them when they got off the plane.
Lorrie Moore, “Starving Again”
I know I’m late to jump on the Lorrie Moore bandwagon, but oh man.
I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.
