Knowing this made me want to write about it even more! I plotted out a novel about British aristocrats and secret spies and sent it to my then agent. She told me bluntly that nobody was interested in World War II and that it was insulting to write about British country houses when so many people were dying in hellish conditions in Europe. Reluctantly I put the project aside. But the idea never fully left my head.
Later I got a new (and wonderful) agent. Years went by. I was fully occupied writing my mystery series. And then several things happened. My research took me to the Duke of Windsor—formerly the Prince of Wales and then King Edward VIII—and I found that he was a big fan of Hitler and that Hitler had a plan to put him on the throne as a puppet king after a successful invasion. That was why he was sent to be governor of the Bahamas—because those islands are near the coast of America and can be patrolled by US submarines.
While I was researching all this in 2016, the United States was going into a horribly divisive election. I felt that our own current political climate had started to show worrying similarities to that of prewar Europe. Extremism and racial hatred were rearing their ugly heads. The press was being discredited and stifled, just as it had been in prewar Germany. The motive for writing about the war became more compelling. I wanted my readers to become aware of the parallels between my historical story and the real world. An element of preaching, I suppose, but more an element of warning. And so I returned to that story that had been so rudely rejected, and I reworked the focus a little. I made it into a spy novel, with Bletchley Park and MI5 involved in seeking out a traitor. But I centered it around a stately home and an aristocratic family. The novel my first agent thought was offensive won three major awards. Readers did want to know, and they cared.
While I was teaching a writing workshop in Tuscany, I learned about the German occupation of Italy, the brutal retaliations if a German was killed or German property damaged. Whole villages were assembled in the central square and entire populations gunned down: old men, women, and children. Armed with this information, my second World War II novel was much more stark and brutal, the story of survival as well as of love.
And then another book, this one set during the first great war, a subject largely overlooked by writers. I wanted to focus on the home front and not on the trenches, examining how society copes when a whole generation of men has been killed. Who does their jobs? Who becomes the blacksmith, the carter, the publican? And what happens to the women forced into roles they would not have thought possible? Another story of loss and grief and ultimate triumph. All were messages I wanted, needed, to convey. There is no mystery in killing each other over an imaginary line drawn on a map, but there is a great mystery in how we survive, become stronger, and move forward.
I do believe that if one is passionate about the subject one writes about, it shows in the writing. When I write about the wars my country has had to endure, it is in part my own story. I see these wars through the eyes of my family. My grandmother, whose husband was drafted in World War I when he was almost forty and had four small children. My mother, who had to say good-bye to a new husband and endure three long years without him, most of the time not knowing if he was alive or dead. And my relatives, for whom nightly bombings became commonplace.
So many mysteries hide secrets. I want to tell a good story, but I want the following generations to know what it was like, what people went through, and to decide it must never happen again.
I DON’T KNOW THIS WORD
– Rachel Howzell Hall –
I WAS THREE YEARS INTO MY THIRTIES, AND I KNEW LOTS of words.
Elysian.
Lollygag.
Bloviate.
Catawampus.
But then I came across a word I didn’t know.
Had never heard this word uttered before.
Since those doctor appointments had started three months after my thirty-third birthday, I’d learned fine-needle aspiration, palpate, ultrasound guidance, transducer.
I also knew cancer because everyone knows that word.
But this word?
No.
That September afternoon was the first time I’d heard it. That afternoon in September, I’d spelled that word like this:
f-i-l-l-o-d-e-e-z
During our telephone conversation, Dr. Brooks said that word. I stopped her and admitted that I didn’t understand. How, exactly, had pathology classified the five-centimeter tumor growing in my right breast? And can you spell that for me, please?
P-h-y-l-l-o-d-e-s.
A new word. Worse than defenestration. Worse than paresthesia. It was nefarious. Yes. This word was nefarious and described the cancerous mass created by rogue cells.
As I learned new words that related to my body, other words, nonmedical words, slammed into other soft places around my body. I would come home from a doctor’s appointment, and these words would be waiting for me in my mailboxes, both physical and digital. Words from editors that threatened to shred my will and disrupt my need to write after being poked and prodded all morning. I was surrounded by bad editorial words.
“It’s just too upmarket for the kinds of African American fiction we have been publishing successfully.”
I was the spelling-bee champ of 59th Street Elementary School. The author of my first published novel, A Quiet Storm. I was a married and pregnant thirty-three-year-old fundraiser for the foremost civil liberties organization in the country. And that fall in 2003—and many falls later—I would hear many mysterious words with strange spellings and hidden meanings.
Connective.
Atypical.
Unusual.
But the word of the day that September: phyllodes. That was my tumor’s name, and it was being fed by the estrogen created by my pregnancy. And it was growing rapidly, Dr. Brooks told me over the phone. The tumor needed to be removed immediately or else…
My husband, David, asked, “Or else… what?”
More words.
Metastasis.
Mastectomy.
Low grade.
Stage.
What the fuck? I was still young, and sure, I’d already had a myomectomy (another new word after another mystery solved), but… but… what had I done? Why was this happening? Why now?
During the sixth month of my pregnancy, after David kissed my forehead and said, “See you in a minute,” I was wheeled into the operating room. Flanked by two heart monitors, I learned more words.
Twilight sleep.
Demerol.
Drains.
Margins.
A prayer stayed on my lips. Lord, help me get through this. Help my baby get through this. These words I knew. These words I understood. In the surgery suite, the anesthesiologist told me to count backward from 100.
99… 98… 97…
“We are finding that what sells for us right now is the hard-hitting Sista Souljah–type material with a street-lit feel to it.”
I survived surgery. Obviously. But then, three years later, my ever-vigilant health-care team found precancerous calcifications growing in my left breast, the one that had behaved all this time. I realized then: my body was unknown to me. It liked making crazy crap that could kill me. And now, I added another set of words to my ever-expanding vocabulary.
Atypical hyperplasia.
Not always a forerunner to breast cancer, but for me, with my past? If they remained, those calcifications would very likely become cancer.
Why wouldn’t they?
Those calcifications had to go.
Of course they did.
Mammograms and imaging and contrast dyes had become as familiar to me as the three-inch scar that was now a feature of my right breast.
Fear—that emotion now as familiar as joy, anger, and love.
My daughter, at that point three years old and healthy despite the drama surrounding her birth, had kept me busy. Working at the ACLU, that had kept me busy, too.
Trying to land another book deal… this hurt more than
the operations and the scarring. Made me sicker than magnets and tubes and dyes.
“It’s been a struggle to convince booksellers that there is an audience for a story about this life.”
After the surgery to remove precancerous calcifications, I enrolled in UCLA’s high-risk program. For five years, I would receive comprehensive care—a geneticist, nutritionist, psychologist, oncologist, nurse practitioner. I was started on Tamoxifen, an antiestrogen chemotherapy that, in my case, would reduce the risk of breast cancer from developing. Five years: the length of my treatment. I was thirty-seven years old.
Do I have a long life ahead of me?
Will I receive those rewards I’d planned for myself at fifty?
Confronting my mortality, popping a pill that would (hopefully) fight my body’s need to destroy itself. How was I supposed to deal with this?
Write.
I didn’t know the answer.
I didn’t know much of anything except this: I knew words, their mystery and their power. I’d use them somehow to survive, to enjoy the life that I’d been given.
Keep writing. Keep chasing that high of publication. Riding in the backseat of a hired town car en route to the airport. The high of signing books, of staying in nice hotels on the publisher’s AMEX.
Just. Keep. Writing.
In my midtwenties, I was introduced to the writing life by working at PEN Center in Los Angeles, an organization committed to protecting the open expression of writers around the world. I subscribed to Poets & Writers and read Glimmer Train, attended readings and salons. Hung out with writers. Talked about writing. And like many young writers, I, too, wanted to land on the “30 Under 30” lists, to be featured as the next publishing wunderkind. I, too, had read those issues of Granta and had fantasized about long lines of readers waiting for signed copies of my great American novel. Fantasized about telling Oprah and the audience at the National Book Awards why I had chosen this story. Now, though, I could glimpse my fortieth birthday on the horizon. I couldn’t hit “30 Under 30,” but “40 Under 40”? Also, it was just a matter of time before the awards and the fancy dinner parties because I knew how to put words on paper, and I’d had enough traumatic experiences to write hundreds of books.
This life… my life…
Art is personal.
A black woman in America—that’s who I was. Unlike atypical hyperplasia and a phyllodes tumor, my blackness could not be surgically removed. Being a black person and writing about regular, working-class black people with working-class problems (but without that street-lit feel, without that hard-hitting shit) was not cancer. But it wasn’t a sought-after life in publishing back then.
This life… my life…
Right after college graduation, my words weren’t ready yet. I hadn’t lived, not really. Though placed in the correct order and spelled correctly and ending correctly, those words read flat and were far from nuanced. Read aloud, those words didn’t sound like me—they sounded like Toni Morrison, Stephen King, Donna Tartt, and John Grisham. Hell, I didn’t even know what my voice meant. In my twenties, my vocabulary had been informed by Cosmopolitan and Glamour, “Draw me like one of your French girls,” and “Run, Forrest, run!” My parents were healthy. I was healthy, and my body acted the way it was supposed to act. I could eat what I wanted without fear of weight gain. My complexion was flawless. My hair shone.
That all changed in my thirties. Ten years of holding my breath, of not knowing what mysteries my body would bring forth, not having the ability to describe my fear and frustration… those ten years gave me wrinkles. Those years made me sag, maybe not physically but psychologically, emotionally.
My voice, though, was being formed and honed by those hard words. I was learning, firsthand, of crafting pointed responses to women who insisted I breastfeed because “breast is best” and didn’t know that I wore a draining tube postlumpectomy. I was learning, firsthand, of faking cheer and strength when all I wanted to do was cry and crawl into bed. My seams were being ripped, all things smooth pilling and my stuffing trailing behind me. A different woman now than the young thing who had big, bright eyes and a closet full of spandex.
Wrinkles and imperfections are good. Talk to an artist, and she will tell you that she loves drawing interesting, imperfect faces, old bodies with crags and scars. Actresses with unmoving faces—from too much cosmetic surgery or too much Botox—won’t land many acting jobs that require emotion.
A young writer just starting out may have something to say but may not have the wisdom to make that something interesting.
Ray Bradbury said, “If you want to be a great writer, then write a million words, and when you’re done, you will be.”
I didn’t know then what I know now: all of this—drafts, rejections, query letters, more drafts, dead stories, trunk stories—would help me learn how to tell a story for readers outside English professors and writing groups. Back then, I didn’t know that I had a while to go before hitting that millionth word.
“Unfortunately, the project you describe does not suit our list at this time.”
Throughout my treatment, the rejections came fast.
I sent out queries even more quickly.
No. No. Not now. Not at this time.
I heard those words, and they came at me like lightning. But then, I learned more just as fast.
Editorial consultant, BRCA, remainders, low-fat diet?
I BOUGHT A MERCEDES-BENZ E350.
I had planned to buy this car with my big book advance or on my fiftieth birthday, whichever came first. At thirty-seven years old, though, I knew there was a possibility of never receiving that book advance or reaching that milestone birthday. My so-called gift with words would not help me obtain something I’d dreamed about since turning sixteen years old.
This car was a survivor’s gift.
A fighter’s prize.
AT THIS TIME, I ALSO WONDERED, WHAT ELSE DO I WANNA DO before my body wins and I’m forced to leave this world?
Write a mystery. A police procedural.
But I didn’t know how to write that world. Cops, robbers, dealers, murderers. Yeah, I’d lived around violence and anger, cops and dealers, gunfire and alley beat-downs, but I had no confidence in my ability to capture eighty thousand words of it.
Fear—of failing, of rejection, of not knowing—had kept me in place for so long.
After battling cancer and still being forced to stay in the ring, I understood and had experienced true fear. Ain’t nothing like signing consent forms acknowledging that you and your unborn child may not make it through the operation. Nothing like relying on a pill the size of a thought to keep cancer at bay. And it wasn’t as if I had a book contract. And at that time, it wasn’t as if I had an agent, either. No one to disappoint. I’d already self-published two rejected novels on Amazon’s Kindle platform. Could always do that with this police procedural.
What was the worst that could happen if I tried this?
What I wanted to happen was this: Terry McMillan meets Walter Mosley.
That’s who she’d be.
But who was “she”?
Didn’t know. Just…
Her name was Lou.
I knew that.
And I knew that she was my survivor’s gift. She was my fighter’s prize.
“I love the voice and characters and enjoyed reading these pages.”
Jill, a literary agent in San Diego, wanted to read fifty pages. Then the entire manuscript. Then she called on the second day of February 2012 and said a word I hadn’t heard in so long.
Yes.
At that moment—and many moments after—I didn’t understand that simple yes. I searched for hidden meanings. Turned it over in my head, searching for burrs and weeds. Even today, I sometimes squint at “yes.” Keep one foot on the ground. Hold my breath. Refuse to enjoy the moment, to enjoy the “yes” because what does that word, a key to possible moments of joy for me, mean?
Words hurt. Words confuse. And I love
d—and loathed—them.
Jill’s “yes,” though. It didn’t yank me, and I believed her. She’d love Lou Norton and my depiction of Los Angeles. Lou Norton, a native Angelena like me, who’d grown up working class. Lou had seen awful shit in her life and had straddled different worlds. She knew what it meant to hear gunfire with a brilliant blue sky above her, to see tall, swaying palm trees tagged with BPS or Rolling 60s. She had also sat in a booth next to LL Cool J at Roscoe’s Chicken N Waffles and searched the depths of her fake Gucci bag for the crumpled piece of yellow paper needed to get her clothes off layaway.
I had used my pain to create Lou—a homicide detective, she was empathetic, vulnerable, exhausted. A fully formed woman facing the sometimes impossible, a lady Sisyphus who makes it up the mountain only for that rock to careen down the other side and into her car. I didn’t give her sickness or disease to contend with. I didn’t want her traumatized by her body. I couldn’t be that cruel.
Jill would help me find a home for Lou Norton. She would find me another “yes.”
NEW WORDS LEARNED WHILE ON SUBMISSION:
No.
Engaged.
Relaunch.
Track record.
Connection.
No.
ON THE DAY BEFORE MY FORTY-THIRD BIRTHDAY, I COMPLETED my five-year Tamoxifen regimen. I’d done it—survived my battle with disease and survived my chemotherapy. No more mysteries except for writing them and learning more about this Lou Norton character. Two months later, though, my right ovary exploded, and my nine-year-old daughter found me writhing in pain on the bathroom floor.
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