Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life (17 page)

And the writer? Well, one solitary writer in her Connecticut 169

Dani Shapiro

farmhouse is backed into a corner of her chaise longue, every muscle tense with effort. She is in the middle. The red hot center. This is what she’s signed on for. She remembers that she is in the ocean with no land in sight, and she is building the boat. This demands all of her attention and holds it. Her coffee has long grown cold at her side. The dogs, sensing her struggle, have slunk out of the room. She is trying, oh, how she is trying, to get it right.

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“The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong . . .

but time and chance happen to them all.”

—Ecclesiastes

If you show up, if you spend many hours alone, if you wage a daily battle with your inner censor, if you endure, if you put one word in front of the next until a long line of words is formed, a line that could stretch halfway across your home, if you take two steps forward, three steps back, if you grapple with bouts of despair and hopelessness—there will come a time when you can sense that the end is not too far away. This will carry its own quiet but unmistakable confidence. You will cast aside your doubt, your skepticism, your fear that perhaps you’ve been fooling yourself all along. You can no longer tell yourself it’s never going to happen, because it
is
happening.

Your breath deepens. Your field of vision widens.

Revel in it. Take your time.

This is the best part.

If beginnings are leaps of faith, and middles are vexing, absorbing, full of trap doors and wrong turns and dead ends, sensing an ending is your reward. It’s better than selling your book. It’s better than a good review. When you’re in the home stretch, it seems the universe reaches out to support you. It meets you more than halfway. Whatever you still need in order 173

Dani Shapiro

to finish your novel, your story, your memoir, appears as if by the decree of some literary deity who understands just how hard you’ve worked, just how much you’ve struggled, and will now give you a break. A strain of music overheard on the street. A few sentences of dialogue. An interview on the car radio that solves a problem you didn’t even know you had.

Sure-footedly, you move forward. It’s not so much that you know where you’re going. You may very well not. But the landscape you now inhabit has a quality of déjà vu. Somewhere in the recesses of your imagination, you’ve been here before. You recognize it as it builds.
Of course,
you think to yourself.
Exactly.
It isn’t you, writing now. Not quite. This thing you have built in the dark, that has felt so many times like it might be your undoing, is now leading you along like a gentle giant.

You don’t know what the ending is—but you have a feeling about it. There’s a tonal quality. Perhaps an image. There will be a moment—today, tomorrow, three weeks or two months from now—when you’ll write a sentence and then stare at it, dumbfounded. It has caught you unawares. You can’t be on the lookout for it. You can’t will it, or force it, and you don’t have to, because it will feel inevitable. Everything has led to this.

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Still Writing

I can almost always feel the comment—more question than comment, really—in the second before it’s spoken. The air stills and my nerves ready themselves, sensing imminent danger.
What’s it like to reveal so much about yourself ?
The person saying this searches my face for signs or clues–-confirmation that this is, in fact, the case. There is the groping for words.

A nod to the strangeness of the interaction. Perhaps even, in certain cases, the faintest whiff of distaste. Then, finally:
How
do you do it? Don’t you feel exposed?

Over the years, I have learned to deflect this exchange so that it doesn’t leave its trace on me. So that those words don’t add up, stick to one another, form a residue. When faced with the exposure question, I bring to mind a conversation I once witnessed between the memoirist Frank McCourt and a woman he’d just met at a dinner party.

Her:
I feel like I know everything about you.

Him (not even blinking):
Oh, darlin’. It’s just a book.

It’s just a book. He delivered it with impeccable timing, and in the kindest possible way but it
.
.
.
well
.
.
.
it shut her up.

But the truth is that we can feel exposed by our books—if we 175

Dani Shapiro

let that happen. And not just the memoirists among us. Fiction can be even more exposing than memoir—a map to the inner world, the subconscious internal workings, the obsessions and fears and secret joys of the writer. So as we’re finish-ing, as we reach the end of a process that has been private and solitary, if we find ourselves starting to wonder what people will think of us, out there in the wide world, I would suggest that there’s a very different way of considering this question of exposure.

You have not stripped naked.

This thing you’ve been writing is not a diary.

Quite the opposite.

Contrary to the notion that you’ve splattered your most intimate feelings all over the page, that you are now visible without even knowing it, as if standing spread-eagled in one of those airport security machines that can see through your clothes, you have, rather, chosen every single word. You’ve crafted each sentence. You’ve decided what to put in, what to leave out. You have chinked away, bit by bit, at a story. Creating something where before there was nothing. This story has taken and shaped your history, your heritage, your subconscious mind, your ideas, traumas, concerns. And if you’ve done your job it has also transformed all this raw data, this noisy chorus, into something cohesive and rewarding.

If literature is, to use Updike’s phrase, that “most subtle 176

Still Writing

instrument of self-examination known to man,” it is also only thus because the writer has caught and wound herself around the thread of the universal. The truest and most artful self-revelation occurs when the self is subsumed to the art. The self becomes merely the vehicle. The art does not say
look at
me
. If anything, it reflects ourselves back at us, saying:
look at
yourself.

And so. I cannot tell you that you will not be on the receiving end of the raised eyebrow, the small smile, the presumed intimacy with those who will think that now they know you.

I cannot tell you that these moments will not bring with them an unease, a discomfort that will (irony alert!) in fact make you feel—however briefly—exposed by the very question. But I can tell you that the writing of a book, no matter how deeply, profoundly personal—if it is literature, if you have attended to the formidable task of illuminating the human heart in conflict with itself—will do the opposite of expose you. It will connect you. With others. With the world around you. With yourself.

The writer Valerie Martin once said that there are three kinds of dispositions: a good disposition, a bad disposition, and a 177

Dani Shapiro

writer’s disposition. This simple statement has stayed with me because there is something about the writer’s disposition—or the artistic temperament—that requires a particular fusing of traits. If any one of these traits is missing, the whole delicate apparatus will eventually fall apart.

There is the gift, of course, which is inseparable from—

though not the same as—a need, a hunger for expression. It is possible to have the gift without the need. It is also possible to have the need without the gift. The former can lead to a happy and contented life. I have seen promising young writers discard their gift, shrugging it off like a wrap on a warm summer evening. They don’t care. They don’t want or need it. The other, however, is a painful situation: the hunger for self-expression without the gift—that ineffable thing you can’t teach, or buy, or will into being. This story often ends in resentment and unfulfillment. Then there is endurability—Ted Solotaroff ’s word—the ability to withstand the years in the cold, the solitary life, the affronts and indignities, the painful rejections that never end. The gift and the hunger are nothing without that endurability. But up there with the gift, the hunger, and endurance is another trait, without which the writer’s life can’t possibly work.

Remember that
New Yorker
cartoon about writer’s block?

In the frame entitled “Writer’s Block: Permanent,” the writer is standing in front of a fish store bearing his name. While 178

Still Writing

this cartoon is about that old bugaboo, writer’s block, it’s also about risk aversion. The writer-turned-fishmonger caved in to what John Gregory Dunne called “failure of nerve.” And even though he’s just a cartoon character, I think of him often. His resigned posture. His joyless gaze into the middle distance.

The writing life is full of risk. There is the creative risk—the willingness to fall flat on our face again and again—but there is also practical risk. As in,
it may not work out.
We don’t get brownie points for trying really hard. When we set our hopes on this life, we are staking our future on the contents of our own minds. On our ability to create and continue to create.

We have nothing but this. No 401(k), no pension plan, often no IRA, no plans—god knows—for retirement. We have to accept living with profound uncertainty. I have a friend, a talented journalist with a solid but undecorated career, who has made his choices, again and again, based on his assessment of safety. This assignment and not that one. This book proposal.

That magazine contract. When I listen to him talk about his fears—what will happen when he gets older, when he and his wife can’t work as hard anymore, when it’s time for their kids to go to college—he unwittingly throws me into a panic. I become acutely aware of the choices that I have made, and continue to make every day—well into midlife now.

There are no half measures when it comes to risk. Risk means that gut-wrenching feeling, having your heart in your throat, 179

Dani Shapiro

not knowing what the next book is, not knowing where the next check is coming from or when, not being able to project a year, two, or ten into the future, not having a plan. Which is not to say that writers are irresponsible children. I have a mortgage that somehow gets paid each month, along with health insurance premiums. My husband and I have modest savings and wills. But our finances would give my journalist friend a heart attack. We are always one potential disaster away from
.
.
.
well, potential disaster. A health crisis. A tree falling on the roof. A disability. What then?

Of course this keeps me up at night. My husband and I walk a path lit by uncertainty. We are always accommodating to a new situation. We never know what the next day will bring. Our lives are affected by other people’s opinions and decisions. We are building skyscrapers from the top down.

Sometimes, we end up with a pile of rubble. Occasionally, a gleaming tower.

Our son has a front row seat to our joys and disappoint-ments. One year, in Paris, the three of us went out to a late dinner to celebrate my memoir
Devotion
’s improbable and completely unexpected appearance near the top of the
Los Angeles Times
best-seller list. Another year, he saw his father, pale and anxious because an investor had pulled out of a film that had already gone into preproduction.

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Still Writing

But what I hope is that Jacob sees his parents doing what they love, doing what they
must
. Every day is different. Surprises happen. In our household, it’s feast or famine. All this may make him want to be a fishmonger when he grows up.

He may long for security and consistency. And who could blame him? But if he is an artist—if he possesses that fusion of gift, hunger, endurability, and, finally, a willingness to embrace risk—he won’t have much choice in the matter. This life chooses us.

I can’t tell you when my mother and I began the fight that lasted the whole of our lives together but I know the moment it ended. On a beautiful late spring evening, I pulled into my driveway and saw Michael standing on our front porch, phone in hand. I lowered my car window and he looked at me and I knew that my mother was dead.

The final years of our relationship had been marked by long periods of estrangement. When Jacob was ill, I couldn’t tolerate her selfishness, her sudden rages. Even this—my child’s illness—became a weapon in her hands, one that she used to 181

Dani Shapiro

hurt me. The more I pulled away in order to protect myself, the more she went on the attack. I stopped answering phone calls, letters, faxes, messages, UPS deliveries. Everything I had in me—everything I had to give—went to my son. It was only after Jacob was stable and my mother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer that I once again tried to be a daughter to her. I visited her in the city, held her hand at doctors’ appoint-ments, brought her to our home in Connecticut. As she drifted in and out of consciousness, I sat by her bedside. Friends suggested that this was an opportunity for closure; perhaps she and I would finally be able to talk things through. But I don’t believe in closure. My relationship with my mother was going to die as it had lived: tortured, dangling, forever mired in lost opportunity and sorrow.

The most difficult writing assignment I have ever under-taken was my mother’s eulogy. There were no other children.

No friends. Hardly any family. I wanted to be true to my mother—to her vitality, her powerful instinct for survival—

but I also wanted to be true to myself. As I wrestled with what to say, I came to realize something profound: because I was alive, and she was dead, I would, for the rest of my life, have the last word.

Up until the time that she fell ill, my mother had a voice—

and she used it. If she felt angered, or wronged, by something I had written, she wrote to me, or called and yelled; she wrote 182