Amy Falls Down (18 page)

Immediately the rest began to chime in with their thoughts about writing rituals, and their own habits. Constance Lent, who Amy had always assumed was British, had a New Jersey accent. Amy liked her right away. “I don’t have a ritual. I just have a couple of spots where I think about what I’m going to write next, and another spot where I usually write, and that’s about it.” Good for you, thought Amy. Tom tried to draw her out. “And is there a particular notebook, or typewriter? Do you write at an appointed hour?” “No,” said Constance Lent, who was rapidly becoming Amy’s hero. “So, you write when the spirit moves you?” asked Tom, sounding just a bit anxious. “I guess so,” said Constance Lent. “Are all these spots in your house?” asked Tom. Amy laughed, forgetting that the mike was on. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just beginning to sound like Twenty Questions.” Only Constant Lent agreed. “Yes,” she said. “He’s getting warmer!”

“When I’m writing memoir,” said an unamused Hester Lipp, “I like to work in my kitchen.” Hester had a strong Yankee drawl—she sounded more like Vermont than Maine—and spoke very slowly, with a slight lisp. “I have a small oak table for my laptop, next to a window with a bird feeder on the other side. When I’m having particular difficulty, I—this is going to sound odd, I know—I always like to have a glass colander full of sugar peas nearby. I find that stringing the peas and popping them into a bowl really frees my mind.”

“That is so interesting!” said Jenny Marzen. “And it makes perfect sense. The act of creation requires nutrients.”

“Where do you write, Jenny?”

Jenny Marzen ate up the next five minutes with a fulsome description of her writing process, from meditation, which took place on horseback “on my old rundown ranch in the Montana hills,” to first drafts, always written on a long yellow legal pad using a number 2 pencil from her father’s old stock of Eagles. “The Eagle,” Jenny pointed out, her voice low and urgent, “was the only pencil used by Thomas Alva Edison.” “Puts a new spin on that cartoon about ‘light bulb inspiration,’” said Tom, chuckling uncontrollably, along with Jenny and Hester Lipp, who must have felt left out, because, before Jenny could spill the beans about where she typed her final drafts and what large animals and comestibles were involved, Hester brought up the topic of “different rituals for different projects.”

“As I said,” continued Hester Lipp, “I write memoir in the kitchen, but if I’m working on a novel—as I am now, for the first time in my writing life—I find that I have to write curled up in my bedroom window seat.”

“Fascinating!” lied Tom.

Hester must be pretty thin to be able to curl up in a window seat and stay put for hours. Amy pictured her as rangy and rawboned, like Kate Hepburn, without the looks. Because Tom had clammed up, Amy opened her mouth. “Hester,” she asked, “why do you suppose you write fiction and nonfiction in different rooms?” She wasn’t at all interested; she was just trying to shut down Jenny Marzen.

“I must say I don’t know,” said Hester Lipp, her voice distinctly colder than before. “I’m new to fiction—to
making things up,
as opposed to
laying out, brick by brick, the facts of my life.
” Instantly, Amy realized who Hester Lipp was, and why she had known how to spell her name with two
P
s.

Hester Lipp had written
Where the Sidewalk Starts,
an inexplicably acclaimed book of memoir, recounting—in severe language and strange, striking imagery—Lipp’s childhood and adolescence on a leafy suburban street in Burlington. Her house was large and well-kept, her schooling uneventful, her family—the members of which she described in scrupulous detail—uniformly decent and supportive.
Sidewalk
was blurbed as a devastatingly honest account of what it means to grow up middle class in America. Amy, who forced herself to read the whole thing, thought the book devastatingly unnecessary. Amy had forced herself through it because
The
New York Times
had assigned it to her for a review, and she stomped on it with both feet. Amy’s review of
Sidewalk
was the only mean-spirited review she ever wrote.

She had allowed herself to do this, not because she was tired of memoirs, baffled by their popularity, resentful that somehow, in the past twenty years, fiction had taken a backseat to them, so that in order to sell clever, thoroughly imagined novels, writers had been browbeaten by their agents into marketing them as fact. All this annoyed her, but then Amy was annoyed by just about everything. She beat up on Hester Lipp because the woman could write up a storm and yet squandered her powers on the minutiae of a beige conflict-free life. In her review, Amy had begun by praising what there was to praise about Hester’s sharp sentences and word-painting talents and then slipped, in three paragraph steps, into a full-scale rant about the tyranny of fact and the great advantages, to both writer and reader, of
making things up
. She ended by saying that reading
Where the Sidewalk Starts
was like “being frog-marched through your own backyard.”

Amy had allowed herself to beat up on Hester Lipp because
Sidewalk
had already gotten a number of raves, so one slam shouldn’t damage her, even if it did run in the
Times.
She probably wouldn’t even notice. Well, clearly that was not the case. Hester Lipp had apparently memorized the review, quoting from it just now with frosty accuracy.

Amy was aware of dead silence. “Amy,” said Tom, “are you there?”

“Pardon?”

“Would you share your own writing rituals with our listeners?” Amy guessed he was saying this for the second time.

“Actually,” said Amy, and stopped. She had planned to say something about writing down story and novel titles at random and taking her cue from them, but she was preoccupied by Hester Lipp and that book review, and then by book reviews in general, whether they were an honorable way to make a few bucks, and why not just leave the reviewing to the real critics, the ones who get to wait until a writer has died leaving behind sufficient evidence of quality and variety to warrant the spilling of more ink, the death of more trees. On the other hand, maybe she had bullied Hester Lipp into writing a good novel. Maybe she had done her a favor. Or not.

“Actually, Tom,” said Amy, “I have a number of intricate rituals. I write my first drafts in indigo ink on dozens of small Moleskine notebooks. I type out the second drafts on a green Olivetti Underwood. I shuffle the pages together five times and leave them for a full week on an unfinished rosewood table in my fruit cellar.”

“Fascinating!” Amy pictured Tom stretched back in his chair with a cold compress on his forehead.

In the background, Amy could hear someone either wheezing or giggling.

“The act of reassembling those pages gives me the time and the impetus to visualize the finished draft, which of course I always accomplish with my ancient Compaq PC, using the most basic of word processing programs.”

“You don’t use Word?” asked Jenny Marzen. “How does your publisher handle that?”

“I type my final draft in html code.”

“Wow!” said Tom.

“Why do you do that?” wondered Jenny Marzen.

“It’s obvious,” said Constance Lent. “Like driving a shift, instead of an automatic. Right, Amy?”

It was interesting how you could tell, just from a person’s voice, that she was smiling. “Exactly,” said Amy. “It brings you so much closer to the road.”

For a couple of minutes, Amy and Constance Lent batted the metaphor around, improvising upon it, playing monkey in the middle with three monkeys. Constance was particularly adept: she managed to equate “the road” with “the underlying truth of one’s novelistic effort,” sounding so serious that for a dizzy moment Amy wondered if she had misread her intent. Tom and Jenny Marzen moved in tandem through confusion into positive excitement (Amy at this point guessed that they shared the same studio; Jenny Marzen wasn’t all by her lonesome in a minor city radio station). “I guess I’m going to have to learn html code!” said Jenny.

“They’re making a joke,” said Hester Lipp, even less amused than before, but at least the woman wasn’t an idiot.

“Oh,” said Tom, and then, after a beat, “I guess the html code should have been a tipoff.”

“Tom,” said Amy, “the
dozens of Moleskine notebooks
should have been a tipoff. Do you know how much those cost? We’re novelists. We can barely afford three-ring binders.”

“MollusKEEna,” pronounced Hester Lipp.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The notebooks. The name is pronounced ‘mollusKEEna.’ Did you imagine they were made from the skin of moles?”

“I guess I did,” said Amy. “I mean, I didn’t think about it much. I noticed the
e
at the end but thought it was silent. Thanks for the information, though.” Amy meant this.
Molluskeena.
What an odd word.

“So we’re split down the middle,” said Tom gamely. “Two of you value certain rituals in the creative process, and two of you do not. I wonder if we’ve hit on a significant statistic.”

Hester Lipp wouldn’t let it go. “You thought people were buying notebooks made from rodent hide? How peculiar.”

In the background, Constance Lent was laughing helplessly.

“It’s not that I don’t have writing habits. What we’re calling
rituals,
” said Amy. “Of course I do. I just can’t bring myself to—”

“Share them!” said Jenny Marzen. “I totally respect your reserve.” She went on to joke that she had done so many interviews lately, in preparation for the upcoming publication date of her newest novel,
Blahblahblah,
that she had lost all sense of privacy. “I envy you your intact boundaries,” she said.

“I was going to say that I can’t bring myself to talk about them, because they’re so boring.” Jenny Marzen started to assure her that her rituals must be remarkable, because her work was so brilliant, but Amy cut her off mid-condescension. “I mean that all writing rituals are boring, especially to the writers themselves. Or at least to one of them.”

“Two of them,” said Constance Lent.

“So why, I wonder, did you agree to come on this program?” asked Hester Lipp. My god, the woman was angry.

“To sell books,” said Constance Lent. “And actually, in my case, also because I wanted to meet
you
.”

“Well, and of course, I wanted to meet
you,
” said Jenny Marzen. “This is a fortunate opportunity to meet all of you.”

“I meant I wanted to meet Amy Gallup.”

“I am not here to sell books,” said Hester Lipp.

Tom, who had been lying doggo, jumped back in, drowning out poor Hester. “There’s no reason we can’t change topics,” he said. “We’ve never done a show on the business end of novel-writing, and it occurs to me—”

“What a terrific idea!” said Jenny Marzen. “Although for another time, surely. We have only a few minutes left.” Shouldn’t Tom have been the one worrying about time? What was she, Big Ben? Amy couldn’t believe how much she was letting the woman tick her off. She felt like she was in high school. She hated high school.

“And I was going to propose,” said Tom, “such a show in the very near future. You would all participate, I hope?”

Somebody sniffed. Amy assumed it was Hester Lipp.

“I’ll do it,” said Constance, “if everybody agrees to discuss what advances they got for their books and how well they’ve done in royalties.”

Amy said that was a great idea, because it sort of was. Jenny worried that their publishers might object, and besides, “Isn’t that just talking shop?”

“Yes,” said Amy, “and so is schmoozing about your prewriting ceremonies, but I’ll bet our listeners would be much more interested in dollars and cents. They are avid readers, most of them, and many of them would be surprised to learn what we get paid.”

“And Jenny,” said Constance, “what do you care about offending your publishers? They wouldn’t mind. Your advances aren’t exactly a secret. The only writers who don’t publicize theirs are the ones who aren’t getting six figures.”

“I’m sorry,” said Hester Lipp, “but I’m not comfortable talking about money.”

Hester Lipp wasn’t comfortable talking about anything. Amy was feeling bad for her and so sorry about that frog-march wisecrack in the
Times.
By now she was picturing her as a creature made entirely of clichés, an angular, goose-necked, razor-lipped type, so overgrown that her thin white cardigans rode up in back. She hadn’t really grown up in that perfect suburban house. She had
festered
there, tormented by her loving and supportive family, who kept trying to push her out into the light. She probably had a giant mole in the middle of her face. “What is six figures, exactly?” asked Amy. “I always get confused. Six figures to the left of the decimal point? If so, my first advance was barely four figures.”

“Mine too,” said Constance Lent. “I do all right now, but just all right. A lot of my mysteries just sell to libraries.”

“No kidding!” said Amy.

“We’re down to the last few minutes,” said Tom, “and I’m wondering if you all have any final thoughts.”

“I think,” said Hester Lipp, “that the rituals we use in approaching our work reveal much about us and the wellsprings of our art.”

“I could not have said it better,” said Jenny Marzen. She drew in a breath as if to say more, but apparently checked herself.

Constance Lent said, “I think our writing habits have as much to do with chance as anything else. Morning people probably write in the morning. Your favorite writing spot is probably dictated by the architecture of your house and the size and age of your family. If you’re a superstitious type, you may rely on special pens and all that—and if you’re not superstitious, you’ll write with anything.”

“Amy?” asked Tom. She had to hand it to him: he was a real pro. His genial tone had not changed over the entire interview, which had been, thanks to her, sour, disjointed, and raucous, and not in a good way, and here he was, sounding eager to hear from her yet again.

“I don’t know anything,” she began, “about the writing habits of Jane Austen, or E. M. Forster, or Shakespeare, or Thomas Malory, or Mickey Spillane. Do you? In fact, I don’t remember reading about writing rituals at all until I read how Nabokov wrote his novels on index cards. It was about then that writers started to become celebrities and gurus. This was probably the same time I learned about Cheever taking that elevator to work, and I agree that’s a nice story, but the truth is, I wish I didn’t know about the index cards and the elevator. I don’t want to read
Lolita
and think about index cards. If I’m curious about someone’s life, I’ll read biography.” Amy had never felt, or been, less articulate, but she kept going. “And most writers just aren’t that interesting. They spend their time writing, which is not a spectator sport. We don’t write in order to be admired, or emulated, or wondered about. Especially wondered about! We don’t need the spotlight, and we do nothing to deserve it anyhow. We don’t save lives. We don’t tap-dance. All we do, we take what’s in our heads and try to get it down on the record. We can call it art or entertainment, it doesn’t matter. Communication is all. The leaving of a mark. The books we write … they’re the best of us. That’s what you should be looking at. What does it matter how the words got on the page? There they are.”