by Dani Shapiro
Her most impassioned work was epistolary, and her Smith Corona was her weapon: she wrote letters to the mayor, the rabbi, the president of the United States. The letters were full of emphasis, as made clear by whole paragraphs in capitals, rows of exclamation points, sentences underlined in red pen or yellow highlighter, or sometimes both. My mother was filled with what seemed to be a bottomless ire. She was fueled by self-righteous indignation, which was only made worse when the mayor, the rabbi, and the president of the United States didn’t personally write back.
Tikatikatikatikatika, ding! Tikatikatikatikatika, ding! A girl falls asleep each night to the song of a typewriter. A girl—once again I become a character in my own childhood—feels the unhappiness simmering beneath her mother’s determination. The girl tries hard to please her mother. (Many years later, when she’s a grown woman, one of her aunts will turn to her and say: “Do you want to make your mother happy? Do you really, really want to make your mother happy?” Oh, yes. Yes, she did. “Well, then move in with her,” the aunt said.) And back then, the girl believed that her very survival depended on being good, and pretty, and accommodating, and all the things her mother wanted her to be. She had no way of knowing that it was a losing battle. That no matter what she did, she herself would someday be identified as the cause of her mother’s misery. Eventually, she would be the recipient of long letters—carbon copies—covered with red ink and yellow highlighter and rows of exclamation points.
“How dare you?” Once I was a grown woman—a writer, a teacher of writing—this came to be one of my mother’s favorite rants. “How dare you?” As I sit on my chaise longue covered by the antique Tibetan blanket, my dogs sleeping by my feet, the wind blowing hard outside my window, my small computer balanced on my lap, books and papers all around me, my mother gone eight years now, I can still hear her trembling voice as clearly as the clacking keys of her typewriter. I never asked her: What was it that I had dared? What was so terrible that I had dared to become?
BEING PRESENT
How many times have you been driving along in your car, or biking, or taking a long walk covering miles, a changing landscape, when you suddenly become aware that you have no recollection of the distance you’ve traveled, the sights you’ve passed without taking them in? Where were you? Oh, you were floating around, ruminating on something that happened yesterday, or five years ago, or about plans for tomorrow, or next summer, or even what to cook for dinner. We’re so rarely in the present. A favorite yoga teacher often has us begin class in child’s pose. As we lie there with our foreheads pressed to the mat, she’ll tell us to drop down. Drop in.
Sometimes when I’m at my desk, I’ll realize that I have contorted myself completely, and I haven’t moved for hours, and that my legs have fallen asleep. I am elsewhere, not in my body, not in the room, not in my house. This may mean that I’m deeply engaged in the story I’m writing—that I have transported myself to the universe of my characters, but ideally, I want to be in both worlds: the one I’ve created in my mind, and also the one that’s all around me. Because if I’m present, I will miss nothing. As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness. How are we meant to witness if we’re not in the room?
Feel your feet on the ground. Your butt in the chair. Your elbows on the desk. Feel the pen in your hand, or the pads of your fingers against the computer’s keys. Feel the breath moving in and out of your belly. The weight of your head on your neck. Your jaw: Is it clenched? Mine almost always is, unless I remind myself to release it. The further I get into this writing life, the more help I find I need. There are days when I am trapped in what Virginia Woolf called cotton wool: dazed, unfocused states in which the hours collapse, one flattening into the next. Days in which I am not entirely alive. Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand. If we’re writers or artists, we can’t afford to live this way. We have to recognize the cotton wool, and cut through it.
My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach. Essential oils with names like concentration and focus and inspiration—the kind of thing I might have laughed at when I was younger. I could pretty much open up a new-age gift shop, if the writing thing ever dries up. But really, all that stuff is there to remind me to stay in the present, no matter how uncomfortable it is. Sometimes I can hardly stand it—that dropping in. It’s scary, boundless, infinite. It can feel like a free fall. But I know it’s where my best work lies.
Each of us finds our own ritual to cut through the cotton wool. We can be gentle or harsh with ourselves. We can go for a run, or drop to the floor for twenty push-ups, or slam our fists down on our desks, or blare music until it’s noisier than the noise inside of us. Hell, we can drink or do drugs—a short-term strategy that almost always ends badly. But whatever the ritual, we are attempting to see and hear and taste and smell and touch life around us. Otherwise, we escape ourselves, leaving our bodies behind like the shells of cicadas. Is it going to snow tomorrow? Was yesterday’s meeting productive? Why did she say that to me? What did he mean by that? Who cares? We can’t know. But it is in the present—not in the past, and most certainly not in the future—that we are able to see the landscape, to feel the range of our humanity, to travel every uncomfortable mile.
AMBITION
For a number of years, when I was on the faculty of a graduate writing program, each spring a large envelope filled with manuscripts—the work of prospective students—appeared in my mailbox. It was a competitive program, and only a few writers would be offered admission. I pored over each application carefully, as if I held in my hands nothing less than the fragile, beating heart of each person who had applied.
Of the hundreds of applications I evaluated, one stands out in memory: I began, as I always did, with a quick scan of the letters of recommendation, and then settled down to read the statement of purpose. Why did this writer want to pursue a graduate degree? The motivation for applying was an important factor in choosing successful candidates. I looked for passion, humility, kindness—qualities that would be valuable around a workshop table. I also kept an eye out for egoism, hubris, aggression.
I don’t really see the point in studying writing, this statement began. I’ve already been told by many people that I’m a genius.
I shook my head, as if the words might rearrange themselves on the page. I read on:
I intend to become an internationally famous writer, to win a Guggenheim and live and work in the south of France.
I kept reading, fingers crossed that maybe this was a misguided attempt at a New Yorker “Shouts & Murmurs” column. But no. This guy wasn’t kidding. The statement continued in the same vein. I don’t remember the work—or even if I read it. I was so annoyed as I looked around my overheated, cluttered academic office.
There’s nothing wrong with ambition. We all want to win Guggenheims and live and write in the south of France, or some version thereof—don’t we? But this can’t be the goal. If we are thinking of our work as a ticket to a life of literary glamour, we really ought to consider doing something else. When I was first teaching, a student came up to me and asked if she should become a writer, or go work for Merrill Lynch. “Merrill Lynch!” I replied. Not because this student wasn’t talented, but because she was even able to formulate that particular calculus.
The only reason to be a writer is because you have to. Most of the time, even if you’ve achieved publication and are lucky enough to be one of the few writers left in the country who are sent on book tour, you will find yourself in some small city where you know no one, in a hotel right off the highway that smells like room sanitizer, getting ready to give a reading where you might have an audience of five people sitting on folding chairs, two of whom work for the bookstore, two of whom are distant cousins of yours, and one of whom is a homeless person who gets up halfway through your reading and shuffles out. (True story.)
The real work involves a
different kind of ambition: the creative kind. No writer I know is confident in her work. Just as Raymond Carver marked up his published stories with his red pencil, writers cringe when forced to reread our own prose; we’re plagued by the certainty that we haven’t quite achieved what we’d hoped we could. The work is only as good as our small, imperfect, pedestrian selves can make it. It exists in some idealized form, just out of reach. And so we push on. Driven by a desire to get it right, and the suspicion that there is no getting it right, we do our work in the hopes of coming close. There’s no room in this process for an overblown ego. A career—whether it takes us to Cap d’Antibes or to the Staybridge Suites off the interstate—can be the result, but if it’s the goal, we’re lost before we’ve even begun.
FOG
E. L. Doctorow once compared writing to driving down a country road on a dark and foggy night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make it all the way home just by slowly creeping along. So many of us, particularly fiction writers, think that it’s our own dirty little secret: we’re writing a novel or a story and we can’t see where it’s going. We think that other writers are the captains of their ships, navigating with a sense of clarity and purpose from one port to the next. But we—we have this shameful, idiosyncratic way of working in which we hardly know the next sentence.
Psst . . . guess what?
Unless we are writing a whodunit, or an intricately plotted thriller—writers rarely know where we’re headed when we start out. I began my novel Family History with a character, a woman in her late thirties named Rachel Jensen, who was lying in bed in the middle of the afternoon, watching home movies. Clearly, something terrible had happened. But what? I thought it might involve her children and her marriage. She replayed home movies again and again, searching for clues. I searched for clues along with her, as she lay there in the darkness. Over the course of the two years it took me to write that novel, the story took shape one word at a time. I discovered what had happened to the Jensens just as if I were driving through that foggy night, keeping an eye out for signposts.
I always think I should know more. That I need more information. That I should outline, perhaps. Or do some research. But really, I need to remind myself that this not-knowing is at the heart of the creative endeavor. Paradoxically, the not-knowing is often what creates the energy, portent, and momentum in the piece of work itself. One of the truest pleasures for the writer alone in a room is when our characters surprise us by doing something unexpected. And so, as we are beginning, the most liberating thing we can do for ourselves is to exist in this state of heightened interest. It’s a bit like standing at the edge of a playground, watching our children make their way in the world. What will they do next? What has happened to them? Do you really want to go over there? Who’s the bully in the sandbox?
It requires faith in the process. The imagination has its own coherence. Our first draft will lead us. There’s always time for thinking and shaping and restructuring later, after we’ve allowed something previously hidden to emerge on the page.
LUCK
I applied to college during my junior year of high school. I was sixteen—a very young and confused sixteen. My family’s religious observance had hampered certain aspects of the usual teenage rebellion. While my friends were out in the woods drinking beer and smoking pot, I was sneaking off to eat a slice of bacon, sure that God would strike me dead. (To this day, I have an uneasy relationship with shellfish, afraid that I’ll eat a bad shrimp and end up dying of anaphylactic shock.) I look back now and try to understand where I found the nerve to apply to college early. My parents didn’t help me. They knew I was applying but they never thought I’d get in. I was a middling student, good at some subjects (English) and terrible at others (math). I was something of a pianist, having studied classical piano for most of my life, and I’m convinced it was this—the cassette tape of me playing Mozart’s Sonata in A Major—that got me into better schools than my academic record deserved.
Why did I do it? I was desperate to get away from home. Life with my parents was unhappy. Though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I think I was afraid that if I didn’t leave soon, I never would. Guilt and remorse would glue me to the spot. My parents’ troubles seemed to be my fault. They fought over me as if they were two dogs and I was the bone. They each wanted me for their own, and in the process I was being trapped. To escape, I started to tell a lot of lies. I lied to my parents, to my friends, to my high school boyfriend, to Eddie Adler, to anyone who would listen. My own lies baffled me. I couldn’t keep track of the stories I had told. Why was I making them up? Why was I pretending things had happened—often painful, dramatic things—when they hadn’t?
The week before college acceptance letters were to be mailed out, I stopped eating. I was thin to begin with, and this hunger strike appeared to my well-meaning family pediatrician to be anorexia and so I was admitted to the hospital. I’m shaking my head as I write these words, because I know how it sounds—it must have been very serious for them to have hospitalized a sixteen-year-old girl who wasn’t eating—but in truth, it was a tremendous overreaction, one of several that my parents had over the years, in which I was thought to be desperately ill. One time, a swollen gland in my neck led to a spinal tap and ultimately to surgery to remove the offending gland. And so I lay there at our small, local New Jersey hospital, being fed intravenously, until the morning my mother arrived at the hospital holding a thick, unopened envelope from Sarah Lawrence College.
I sat up and ate some soup and a few saltines. The intravenous lines were removed. I remember the dress I wore as I left the hospital on that warm April day: delicate, white, floaty. I was thin, but I felt strong, renewed. That envelope was my ticket out, and though a few more acceptances came in that week, my instinct told me that Sarah Lawrence—a small liberal arts college near New York City—was where I belonged. It’s easy to make sense of it all in retrospect. To say: I knew I wanted to be a writer, that Sarah Lawrence had a faculty full of great writers who commuted there from New York City to teach, men and women who would become my mentors and surrogate parents, forever changing my life. To say: I had a plan for who I would become. But none of this was the case. Connecting the dots of a life can only be done backward, forensically. It’s possible now to see how Eddie Adler, the lying, the starving, the white cotton dress, the thick envelope led—over the course of three decades—to the quiet house in the country, the piles of books, the husband and son, the solitary days. It’s also possible to see that there are other ways it could have gone. Remove any of those elements—change a single detail—and the story spins off in another direction.
GUIDES
One of those working writers who was teaching at Sarah Lawrence when I first arrived was a short, sturdy woman with a cloud of white hair and the kindest face I’d ever seen. Grace Paley was legendary. She spoke the way she wrote, with the street cadence of a Brooklyn-raised Jewish immigrant’s daughter, and she was wise, humble, gentle, and incisive. I often found myself on the verge of tears when I was in her presence.
I was a girl in need of a new family. I became one of Grace’s many surrogate children. And though I wasn’t ready—though it would be another six years and a whole lot of heartache before I began to change into the woman I’d hoped to become—I recognized in her then something I wanted: a feeling mind, a thinking heart. A lived life. I flailed around, aimless, self-destructive, deluded, and without hope for years after my first encounter with Grace, but I knew there was another way to be. I had seen it in her. I just didn’t know how to get there.
I only had a few workshops with Grace in college and in graduate school, and they were often canceled, a note tacked to the door announcing that she was in jail again, imprisoned for civil disobedience, but her advice stayed with me. “If I love a sentence I’ve just written enough to get up and go into the other room to read it aloud to my husband, I know I should cut it,” she once said. I didn’t know what she meant at the time
. Wasn’t it good to love your sentences? Now I know she meant simply this: don’t admire your own work, not while you’re writing it. “I do my best writing in the bathtub,” she said. I thought she meant she sat neck-deep in suds, scribbling. Now I realize that she was talking about the importance of getting away from the page to let the mind wander and solve problems. To this day, I’ll think of some casual remark she made when I was her student, and I’ll realize: Oh, so that’s what Grace meant. She, among others, is in the room when I write. All my mentors—Esther Broner, Jerome Badanes—they’re gone now, and writing their names here feels like a form of Yizkor, the Jewish prayer for the dead. They were—they became—my family.
If we keep our eyes open, we will encounter our true teachers. We don’t even need to know them. Virginia Woolf is my teacher. I keep her near me in the form of her A Writer’s Diary. I flip the book open to a random page and encounter a kindred spirit who walked this road before me, and who—though her circumstances were vastly different from my own—makes me feel less isolated in the world. Though we are alone in our rooms, alone with our demons, our inner censors, our teachers remind us that we’re not alone in the endeavor. We are part of a great tapestry of those who have preceded us. And so we must ask ourselves: Are we feeling with our minds? Thinking with our hearts? Making every empathic leap we can? Are we witnesses to the world around us? Are we climbing on the shoulders of those who paved the way for us? Are we using every last bit of ourselves, living these lives of ours, spending it, spending it all, every single day?
WHAT YOU KNOW?