Bird by Bird (16 page)

Part Four

Publication — and Other Reasons to Write

Writing a Present

Publication is not going to change your life or solve your problems. Publication will not make you more confident or more beautiful, and it will probably not make you any richer. There will be a very long buildup to publication day, and then the festivities will usually be over rather quickly. We will talk about all of this at great length shortly. In the meantime, let's discuss some of the other reasons to write that may surprise a writer, even a writer who hasn't given up on getting published. There are arenas full of potential for rich reward, where your life and your sense of self and of abundance really can be changed. (All of a sudden I cannot remember if we are allowed to use the word abundance in California anymore. I will have to get back to you on this.)

Twice now I have written books that began as presents to people I loved who were going to die. I've told you a little about my father's diagnosis of brain cancer, how all of a sudden I had a sad story to tell. It was a story rich with drama and humor, about a father and his three semigrown children living in a tiny town filled with aging hippies, trust-fund radicals, artists, New Agers, and ordinary people, whatever that means. Out of nowhere, the rug was suddenly pulled out from under the family, when it looked as if the father had a terminal illness and was actually going to go ahead and die.

So I started writing about our new life. I recorded moments of my brothers trying to help our father, trying to help one another, all of us trying to keep our senses of humor, trying to find meaning in it all, and saying what was really on our minds. There were lots of descriptions of the townspeople and the landscape that I'd already written that I still liked and could use. But the best stuff was what my father and brothers were going through right then, right at that moment. I scribbled down the funny things they said, the tender moments, the black humor, the weirdness of it all. Then I started shaping that material into self-contained stories. I showed them to my father, who thought it was great that all this pain and fear and loss were being transformed into a story of love and survival. He would hand me back my pages, raise his fist in the black-power salute, and smile. This was enough to keep me going. In a sense, I was giving him a love letter. He never got his version of the story written, but the miracle was that I finished mine while his brain was still working. He got to read the whole thing. He got to know that he and his story were going to exist long after he took off his dog suit and went to the great beyond.

Another propellant for this first novel of mine was that I found myself desperate for books that talked about cancer in a way that would both illuminate the experience and make me laugh. But there weren't very many. In fact, there was only one that I was aware of, Violet Weingarten's Intimations of Mortality, a journal of her chemotherapy, from which I got my book's epigram: "Is life too short to be taking shit, or is life too short to be minding it?" I read the book over and over, read it out loud to my brothers over the phone, then went to the library and said, "Do you have any other really funny books about cancer?" And they looked at me like, Yeah, they're right over there by the comedies about spina bifida. There didn't seem to be any. A book about our experience, showing one family's attempt to stay buoyant in the face of such a potentially flattening process, seemed like it might be a welcome present to other people with sick relatives. This is all I tried to do, to tell our family's story, because with an enormous amount of support from friends, there were laughter and joy folded into all that fear and loss. It helped my father have the best possible months before his death and the best possible death. I can actually say that it was great. Hard, and fucked six ways from Sunday, but great.

Of course, not everyone loved my book. There were some terrible reviews. My personal favorite was from a newspaper in Santa Barbara, which said that our black sense of humor made us look like a New Age Addams family. "Here's your review from Santa Barbara," my editor wrote on a note enclosed with it, "where people never die."

Fifteen years later my friend Pammy was diagnosed with breast cancer. I had been keeping a journal about my new son, whom she was helping me raise, so most of the journal entries already included her. And now all of a sudden it turned out that she was not going to be around for much longer. So I started typing up the journal entries and sending them off to my agent. Sam was getting bigger and Pammy was getting sicker, and I was writing as fast as I could, trying to get it done in time for her to read it. And I did. I gave her a finished copy four months before she died. It was another love letter, mostly to her and Sam, and for her daughter, Rebecca. Pammy knew there was something that was going to exist on paper after she was gone, something that was going to be, in a certain way, part of her immortality.

Again, there was a part of me that believed that my journal could be a gift for others, for single mothers. I couldn't find any books about single parenting when Sam was first born that were funny and sick and therefore true. There were some great books on child rearing, but none that made me laugh, and none that went into the dark side, the Seventh-Seal-with-milky-bras part. They were all so nicey-nice and rational and suggested that surely if you did this or that, the colicky little darling would come around, pull himself or herself together, get a grip. And this simply wasn't true. Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate, like having Janis Joplin with a bad hangover and PMS come to stay with you. All the available baby books recommended things like white noise to soothe the yowling little savant. So I'd sit there by Sam's side and play him Sierra Club tapes of rivers at night, complete with crickets and owls and frogs, and he'd look over worriedly for a moment, like "Are you out of your mind? Why don't you just play me a tape of shark fights?" And then he would really start to cry.

I would have felt so relieved if there had been a book written by another mother who admitted that she sometimes wanted to grab her infant by the ankles and swing him over her head like a bolo. So I went ahead and started writing one myself, as a present, as a kind of road map for other mothers.

I would have been so relieved, too, if after Pammy got sick when Sam was eight months old, there had been a book about losing your best friend that was real but also funny. So I ended up trying to write one, weaving together these two stories, of Sam and Pammy, for both of them and for anyone who might know anyone like either of them.

A couple of years later, a few months after Pammy died, two close friends of ours had a baby who was born so damaged that he died at five months old. I began to wonder if I was some sort of carrier. Sam and I spent a lot of time with the parents and their little son. They did such an amazing job and taught me so much, and their son taught me so much that I wanted other people to know about it. I wanted to write about it as a present for the parents, so that this baby would keep on living. So all those months when Brice was alive, I scribbled down notes on index cards, with no idea of whether I would ever actually write a story about him. I watched all that went on inside me: how I automatically think that closing down is safe, but that really staying open and loving is safer, because then we're connected to all that life and love. And I watched Sam watch Brice and scribbled some of this down on index cards. I felt self-conscious and vaguely ashamed that so much of what I'd written lately concerned suffering and death, but I let myself take notes anyway.

Brice died that May. A month or so later I had the opportunity to write a three-minute essay for a radio show on anything I wanted, and I asked Brice's parents if it would feel like an invasion of privacy if I wrote about their son. They said no, just the opposite. So I sat down with my index cards, and I looked through the one-inch picture frame, and started writing:

Sam saw his first dead person last month. Two friends of ours had a baby who died, and we went to spend the morning with them and the body of their son. He was five months old and weighed eight pounds, down from the ten he weighed at birth. He wore a white baptismal gown, and lay in a big basket on top of his crib, covered with flower petals from the waist down, white as a rose. There were flowers and shrines everywhere, statues of the Buddha and pictures of his Holiness the Dalai Lama (because his mother is a Buddhist) and of Jesus (because his father is a Christian). Brice looked like a small, concerned angel from someplace snowy. None of us, including Sam, could take our eyes off him. He looked like God.

"You what?" my relatives asked when I mentioned this. "You took Sam to see what?" as in, What will you take him to see next? Brain surgery? I couldn't explain why I thought it was right, except that I was taught to be terrified of sickness and death (especially early death and also, ironically, aging) and I believe this greatly compromised my life. Of course I want better for Sam.

Lots of my friends have died of cancer and AIDS. But Brice was the first dead person Sam ever saw. Sam didn't seem scared. Maybe it was because Brice looked so beautiful in death. He was an old pro at it: he had died during delivery and was resuscitated seven minutes later, and so was born a second time, but it turned out that he had been gone too long. His eyes were deep gray, and always open, and he never cried or, for that matter, smiled, or even blinked.

Brice's mother's Buddhist friends called him Cloud Boy because he was suspended between heaven and earth, not quite here, not quite there. His father's Christian friends did much of the cooking. Everyone held him and rocked him. Sam and I spent a lot of time reading to him, mostly Dr. Seuss.

"He's a good baby, " Sam assured Brice's parents one day. Not knowing how on earth they would take care of him, they had brought Brice home when he was three weeks old, because they didn't want him to die at the hospital. They just wanted him to be home with them and their friends. It was an amazing thing to be a part of. Some people saw Brice as a tragedy, thought his parents were crazy for not leaving him at the hospital. The rest of us felt incredibly sad but also that maybe we were in the presence of something holy, something that didn't have to do with personality or character or age.

"He's a good baby," Sam told me one day in the car, after we'd been reading to Brice for a while. "But he's a little funky."

When Brice died, his parents called us and asked if Sam and I would come over. They were sad but Okay. Sam brought the baby two presents that morning, which he laid in the basket. One was a ball, in case you get to play catch on the other side. The other was a small time-travel car, from Back to the Future. Brice's parents and I are still scratching our heads over that one.

After we left that morning, I took Sam to the local bowling lanes. It was another big first for him. It was all so ridiculous and real that it felt sort of sacred. We bowled in the kids' lane for an hour. "You took him where?" asked my relatives. And I couldn't really explain why. It had something to do with wanting to shake off the solemnity, with wanting to complete the cycle of life and death. Bowling is life at its most immediate—you fling a ball and the pins fall down, sometimes. And I also wanted to show Sam that the holy goes on, no matter how many balls you fling at it.

I read this to Brice's parents before I read it on the radio, and then they called everyone they knew and told them when it would be on, and they recorded it. And even though their son will always be alive in their hearts, like Pammy and my dad will be alive in mine—and maybe this is the only way we ever really have anyone—there is still something to be said for painting portraits of the people we have loved, for trying to express those moments that seem so inexpressibly beautiful, the ones that change us and deepen us.

Toni Morrison said, "The function of freedom is to free someone else," and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad that you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do? Get it all down. Let it pour out of you onto the page. Write an incredibly shitty, self-indulgent, whiny, mewling first draft. Then take out as many of the excesses as you can.

One thing I haven't told you about my famous short story "Arnold" is that besides sending it off every few months to my father's agent, I also sent it off to an important magazine editor. He sent it back with the following note: "You have made the mistake of thinking that everything that has happened to you is interesting." Now, needless to say, I was mortified. But the note ended up only helping me because it didn't stop me. Still, I sat down with great trepidation when I began to write the story of my father's illness, because of the mistake this editor said I had made, which I had made. And I tried very hard not to make it again. So first I wrote down everything that happened to us, and then I took out the parts that felt self-indulgent. I wasn't writing the book with my thumb stuck out, trying to hitchhike into history: I just wanted to write a book for my father that might also help someone going through a similar situation. Some people may have thought that this book was too personal, too confessional. But what these people think about me is none of my business. I got to write books about my father and my best friend, and they got to read them before they died. Can you imagine? I wrote for an audience of two whom I loved and respected, who loved and respected me. So I wrote for them as carefully and soulfully as I could—which is, needless to say, how I wish I could write all the time.