“Writer—Dan Chaon” directed by Ted Sikora. Disturbing revelations throughout!
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Where Did You Go?
A little over a year ago I got back in touch with a friend of mine from my days in grad school. She was, back then, one of the most confident, smart women writers I knew, and I really expected big things from her. We used to hang out and drink pitchers of beer and watch other people shoot hoops in the bar (this was in Iowa) and talk about writing and fiction.
She fell in love with another writer in the program, also very talented. They moved off to a respectable Southern college town with a university known for good writing, and I expected to see those aforementioned big things from them and then… they both stopped writing.
It wasn’t really the result I expected.
Whenever I think about the cult of talent, that so often believes talent in writing matters more than anything else, I think of them and the people I know like them—they have talent for days between them. A lack of talent is not what got in the way here. In other circumstances, you could suspect something cliche, like her husband didn’t like that she wrote, except… he did. In fact, it was part of the attraction. Of course things are complicated, but it wasn’t one of those situations where he was surprised to find she was a writer.
In any case, this is about something else, because what happened is that I told her how much I thought about her writing and how surprised I was that she hadn’t written since, either of them for that matter, and then said I understood, it’s hard, for they have kids now, etc. But the point is now a year later she has sent me a draft of the first story she’s written in who even knows, I’m excited to read it, and she said it helped that I reached out and said that.
I’ll admit I felt kind of shitty at the time— I regretted it out of the sense that it’s painful enough to stop writing and know you could continue without hearing from other people about it, in one way. But if you tell someone you miss their work, I think that is different, or at least, I can see she experienced it differently than I feared she would.
So if you know someone like this, consider writing to ask about where that new story is, or send a fan letter and let them know their work matters to you. People go silent for so many reasons, who knows why. It’s good to let them know they’re missed.
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The ground floor
Somewhere around 1986, an online lit pioneer told me that blogs were really going to catch on: “try it!” she said. “you’ll never write for pay again!” So I did guest-try it, decided to leave it to the pros, and only return now to say: here’s the tumblr blog where I’ll be posting new and old pieces for those who’ve asked. (I note that I’ve done this just as my pioneer blog buddy has returned to print. There should be a word for such reversals.)
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I was writing last night (and am still thinking) about public expressions of grief and general reactions to tragedies, and how I respect your right to have those public expressions even as I choose to ignore them because all they do is make me feel worse. I watched all my feeds ignite on Friday and I felt terrorized even though I feel certain that was not the intention.
But I wanted silence. And just to feel for those who had truly been hurt in a personal way. So I worked on my writing quietly and let the rest of the world be devastated as they wanted.
I have to not be on the internet now when bad things happen. This I know. I have to step away not only from the news cycle but the grief cycle. I saw a friend on Saturday who said she had spent Friday refreshing her computer, looking for news, even though she knew better than to engage in that kind of behavior. A day later, she was not well. That is what she said. “I am not doing well.”
I guess I sort of felt “better” than her because I saw what happened and then I stopped paying attention until much later in the day. I knew there was no new information I was going to get out of it. It was terrible, guns are terrible, people are crazy.
I love you all. I want to embrace you. I respect your anger. I am angry too. We are all sad. I will help when I can. But I have to get off the ride.
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On lists, favorites, and making a difference
I’ve written a bunch of “Favorite books of 2012” posts for different sites because people asked me nicely, but in general I am wearying of all the list-making and choosing of favorites going on right now. Plus, my favorite book I read this year was not published this year, but in 1975 instead. That book is Light Years, by James Salter.
Lauren Groff gave the book to me. She mailed it to me when I was living in New Orleans. Lauren is a really good book giver. Also, when she loves something, she loves with a great passion and thunder. Lauren is someone who makes a difference in this world. Anyway, it turned out to be exactly what I needed, that book. I read it very slowly and almost deliriously because the sentences were so perfect I felt like my brain was changing. I am happy to have passed it on to others since.
I was thinking about this when I was talking to a novelist friend who was bummed that his book sales hadn’t turned out as he had hoped. He was feeling like he hadn’t made an impact on the world, that he hadn’t been heard, that he wasn’t part of the bigger discussion. I told him that his books would live on in libraries, and get passed on from friend to friend. I said, “Think of how many books you’ve discovered twenty years after they were published.” You don’t know what will ever happen to what you create. There is no endgame. And you only really need to reach a few people to have made a difference.
I hope I made him feel better. I was telling the truth.
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Heart
There have been many moments in my life, especially in the past few years, when I wanted to hook myself up to a device that might keep my heart beating. Some days, I am so weary it is a struggle to breathe. I am exhausted—the tedium of my job, this life I’m pretending to live in a city that only wants to chew me up, the cruelty of everything, my mother, and how far her shadow casts even when I have no idea where she is.
As we stood in the museum, dark and cold and cavernous, my whole body was heavy in a way it had never been before. J grabbed my elbow, squeezing lightly, and it’s like she was trying to take some of the heaviness away from me. We walked slowly toward a display of scalpels, glinting as they lay beneath the glass, still so sharp the slender blades practically hummed.
I pointed to the scalpel on the end of the display. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? It takes so little to cut a person open.”
J stared at her feet. “You’ve changed.”
We continued walking. “So have you.” When we reached the artificial heart, an intricate structure of glass and steel like the building I worked in, we both leaned against the glass like little kids, our foreheads leaving oily prints on the surface of the case.
“I came here because she’s back and I don’t want her to be back and I don’t want to deal with her being back alone.”
“This is an amazing artifact. The vision it took to make something so beautiful, so necessary, I admire it.”
J sighed, her shoulders slumping like she was now feeling all of my unbearable weight of being. ”Please,” she whispered.
I reached for J’s hand, marveled at how our hands, how nearly everything about us was replicated so exactly. “You’re never alone,” I said.
It was a comforting lie for both of us and she was kind enough not to mention the uncomfortable truth, that when she needed me most, I had disappeared and left her as neatly cut open as a chest cavity, wide and bloody, waiting for the pulse of a new heart.
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Remaining
We were hers, we were a fellowship, and we remained American. These facts could not be exploded and burned away. Nor could the currency of politeness. Please, Mrs. President said, and how wonderful to be reminded that we indeed had been calm, and all it took to carry on was remaining so.
Apocalypse, after all, was a kind of liquid state. We had been warned and threatened and steeled against the inevitable and full-scale. This particular explosion, it would turn out, was just a localized attack on the forty-third floor. But we’d had monthly evacuation rehearsals and knew what to do. Our president’s jowly face dominated every available screen, repeating herself.
So our phones did not work. Nor our tablets. And this was the real terror, honestly. But I passed the time during our stairwell descent imagining Micheala within some finely rendered game realm. She wears a dream gown that brushes the pristine marble of her castle’s floor. Her scepter is handheld and topped by her own personal heart. In order for the heart to continue to beat she must think constantly of the Paragraph Optimizer who has won its grace. She is rated M for mature audiences like myself.
Graham’s head bobbed hideously in front of me, like an almond gone very bad.
Michaela seated on an old rocker draped by a pure back sheepskin throw, alongside a crackling fireplace in some land very far north and very dark, now, constantly. She does what, there? Fishes. Prepares fish. Smokes fish and drizzles it with hand-churned butter and coarse sea salt. Do not ask me by what light she churns the butter. Michaela manages.
Any of these. Anyone at all.
By the time we reached the street, our phones were back to normal. Beneath the deafening scream of sirens I felt a text buzz through and thought for a second it was her. But no. This would be J.
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