The only sign of darkness was that I was trying to begin work on my second novel and it was not going well. Each week I abandoned it by Friday and returned to it on Monday, as if it was a bad love affair. I think I suspected even then that the novel would take me over a decade to finish. But the apartment made my despair easier to bear.
Whatever was happening with my writing, I liked to sit and watch the clouds go by over the city. It was like living in the sky. The windows were large and ancient, original, framed in black iron, and they had old latches that needed looking after or they’d rattle in the high winds and a pane might crack. There were two balconies, one quite small, suitable for standing on alone or with one other person, for a cigarette and a whiskey. The other was good for sitting down with company. These were lined with a mix of plants, some dead, some alive, but as the sun set you never saw them. Instead you saw the city, and you counted the landmarks in the view. Which, I learned when I lived there, cost money. Each landmark you could see added something to the price. It was funny to think of the Empire State Building adding, say, $15,000 to the value of your apartment if you could see it. Every time I watched the skyline light up at night, it felt like counting money.
I HAD SUBLET OFTEN in this life, but this time was different. In previous sublets, I’d been around other people’s things, but here I was with my own, and I found I liked my things in this apartment in a way I hadn’t before. I had never been much for furniture, and had never spent more than a few dollars on any particular piece, because what was the point of having things if you couldn’t write? You would only sell them in order to write, as I’d learned early on in New York, standing in line at the Strand to sell a few used books just to pay for lunch. The books on my shelf after all this time have withstood at least a thousand moments when I scanned them, deciding which ones I could or could not turn into money in order to eat, if this or that check failed to come through. A library of survivors.
I think writers are often terrifying to normal people—that is, to nonwriters in a capitalist system—for this reason: there is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have the time to write. Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes time.
If I could be said to like things, they were books, but I had a few good things all the same, or not-terrible ones, and here they looked stylish, even a little grand, in a way they never had in my previous apartment in Brooklyn. I had a red leather couch and wingback chair that had once been in my late father’s office, and that looked very rich here, alongside an antique table with corkscrew legs, bought from a friend leaving for Los Angeles. If I was going to act like a man who belonged in a co-op building, a part of the charade of living here, apparently, was having the furniture of such a man.
All of this was lit lovingly by my friend’s Italian chandelier, decorated merrily with glass pears, grapes, and apples. When the news came that fall that I had won both a Whiting Award and an NEA fellowship, I began to call it my lucky chandelier. Either of these awards would be enough to make you feel you’d had a good year, but winning them together was to me a clear sign that the magic promise of the apartment was real. Surely it will be easier now, I told myself. Surely this is what it means to have made it. I think many writers pass through this. But believing trouble is gone forever is the beginning of a special kind of trouble.
ONE SATURDAY MORNING A month after moving in, I went to the elevator and, when the doors opened, there was Chloë Sevigny, standing against the back wall.
I am not easily or often starstruck. But I had loved her ever since Boys Don’t Cry, when in the course of a single movie she became, to me, one of the most important actresses of my generation. Now here she was.
Her eyes were level, focused on some middle distance, far from anything in the elevator shaft. She was wearing spectator pumps and a white Burberry Prorsum trench coat, belted, the collar up. A hapless-looking skinny boy, his arm covered in sleeves of tattoos, accompanied her. He was dressed in a trucker hat, expensive jeans, and a wifebeater shirt, and he looked around in dismay, as if there might be some hidden exit in the elevator he could use, if only he could find it.
The elevator descended quietly, and somewhere around the tenth floor she said, without looking at him, “Did you give them my name?”
He said nothing as the elevator descended. I remembered it was Fashion Week; the Marc Jacobs show was that morning. She was likely on her way, though it could have been anywhere, anything.
“Did you. Give them. My. Name?” As she spoke each of these words, they were wrapped in fire, hanging in the air, perfectly timed to the floors flying by, the last said just before the elevator finally stopped. Her companion still said nothing. The doors opened and she flew off through the lobby, those spectator pumps flashing and echoing on the marble floor as he chased behind her.
I never saw him again. Her, however, I saw regularly. The elevator became a little theater of her. The doors would open and she would be there, sometimes dressed very elegantly, sometimes in a tank top and Daisy Dukes, a bottle of Woolite perched on her hip, going to the basement to do a little laundry. It was the best ad Woolite never had. She soon would nod when she recognized me, before the doors closed again. But I never intruded on her, never spoke to her.
We continued like this until one day in the lobby, as I got my mail, the concierge, a sweet older woman who I think had decided she didn’t care that I was living there illegally, said my name. I went over to her. “Alexander, Chloë here is interested in seeing the apartment. She understands it is for sale.”
I turned. There “Chloë” was, looking at me expectantly.
I don’t remember what she was wearing then because my mind went white. It still seems to me she is more beautiful in person, or on film, than in photos. Something happens across moments with her that isn’t apparent in a still. “Is it for sale?” she asked, her direct attention blinding me.
I tried to stay calm as I answered. “Yes, it is.” I remembered a warning from my friend: “Do not show the apartment on your own,” she had said to me. “Only the broker shows it.”
But this is Chloë, I said to myself then. I decided to disobey my friend exactly once.
I will always remember what happened next: her walking around the apartment, saying, “I’m subletting from a friend upstairs and I think she should just buy this place and just go through the floor. I mean, it’s so cheap, don’t you think?”
We were both subletters, then. My affection for her quickened. I didn’t think it was cheap, though, not at all. My friend was asking $579,000 for it, about a thousand dollars a square foot. A few weeks earlier, I’d stood in the bedroom of the apartment with a friend who’d asked the price, and when I told him, he outlined a square foot in the air with his hands. “Fill it with a thousand dollars and then do that five hundred seventy-nine more times, and then it’s yours,” he said.
Here in front of me, Chloë was like an apparition, an emanation of all of that money, ambition, and desire, glowing as she walked the rooms. My impostor self wasn’t going to let her know that I was not just like her, not now, not in the face of our idol. And so I felt myself nod at the idea that it was cheap, like I agreed. But now the extent of my charade was apparent to me, and the joy of her being there was tinged with shame.
“It’s a steal,” she said, looking out at the view and turning back to me. “She has to buy this, don’t you think? I mean, the view is so beautiful. She’d be stupid not to buy it.”
I nodded—I didn’t know her friend—and gave her the broker’s card, and then she left.
She knew I couldn’t afford it when she said her friend should buy it. This was also a way of saying she couldn’t afford it, either.
There were lots of reasons not to buy in the building at the time, another friend revealed later. The maintenance fee wa
s high. The building was brick, which can crack with age, and the mortar would eventually need repointing, never good for a long-term investment. The apartment eventually sold to a school administrator, someone with family money. Someone who belonged there more traditionally. I miss it still. But I would never move back, even if I could now. I would miss the way it was with her upstairs.
I SPENT THE REST of my stay there as I had before, but now, when I was on my balcony I heard Chloë on hers, wishing I had the nerve to leave a copy of my novel for her in the lobby with a note. But I never did. It felt terrible and sad to do something like that, like a compromise with someone I’d never agreed to be. Someone else would have found a way to be upstairs, I think, but that was not me. And so it was I last spoke to her, right before I moved out, in the lobby again, getting my mail. She passed me and said, “Hey, Alexander,” and smiled. I paused, paralyzed by love, before saying “Hey” back, like it was any other day.
The real me, it turned out, was too shy to explain I was leaving. He was in charge again, he had his reasons, and he sometimes told me them. But I left happy she knew my name.
The chandelier I took with me. It hangs in my kitchen now.
The Autobiography of My Novel
1
THE QUESTION CAME AMID some more ordinary ones: How long did the book take to write, and did you do any research? Seven years, and yes. And then: Were you a victim of sexual abuse yourself?
Yes.
Why didn’t you just write about your experience? the reader asked me. Why isn’t it a memoir?
I looked at him and felt confused for a moment. I didn’t understand the question immediately. The questioner sounded annoyed, as if I were deliberately hiding something from him. As if he had ordered steak and gotten salmon. Had I chosen? I felt in the presence of conflicting, confusing truths. I was talking with a book club in downtown Manhattan, on Wall Street, a paper cup of coffee on the table in front of me. All of us were seated around a conference table, blinking under a fluorescent light that felt, along the skin and eyes, both thin and heavy at once. Like this question.
The questioner was an otherwise nice white man, a few years older than me, I guessed. He would have been in high school when it all happened to me, and I wouldn’t have told him about it then. That I could even speak to him about it now was not lost on me.
The things I saw in my life, the things I learned, didn’t fit back into the boxes of my life, I said. My experiences, if described, wouldn’t portray the vision they gave me.
I saw the room’s other occupants take this in.
I had to make something that fit to the shape of what I saw, I said. That seemed to satisfy them. I waited for the next question.
That afternoon, I tried to understand if I had made a choice about what to write. But instead it seemed to me if anyone had made a choice, the novel had, choosing me like I was a door and walking through me out into the world.
I BEGAN IN THE summer of 1994. I had just finished my MFA and moved into an apartment with my younger brother and sister off Columbus Avenue, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. My brother was starting his first job in finance, at a stockbrokerage. My sister was beginning her studies at Columbia University. I used to joke that we were a little like the Glass family from Salinger’s novels and stories, except our mother was in Maine, alone with her own troubles. But the truth was more complicated, and more melodramatic, than the world of a Salinger novel. My mother had been betrayed by a business partner who vanished, leaving behind altered partnership agreements indemnifying her for his debts. When she declared bankruptcy, she also sold our family home. She had mostly hidden her problems from us until they could no longer be hidden, and to this day I think we three siblings moved in together in New York at the same time she was forced out of our family home because it was the single self-protective gesture we could make that was entirely under our own control.
The means by which I had made my way in the world prior to that summer were coming to an end. Grad school was over, as was my accompanying stipend. My inheritance, a fund left to me after my father’s death and meant for my education, was likewise almost spent—the move back to New York would exhaust it. I had not won any grants or gotten into any of the postgrad programs I had applied for. The despair I felt as each possible future I had dreamed of dropped away with yet another rejection was the surface of me; underneath that, on the inside, I could feel my family fracturing. Myself, too.
I kept seeing reports that summer of other writers, some of them friends of mine, selling their novels, some of them, unfinished, for what seemed like outlandish sums of money. I thought it was my turn when a friend from college, who worked in the fiction department at The New Yorker, asked me for stories, and I sent her part of my then novel in progress, what was to be a book about AIDS activists in the late 1980s in New York and San Francisco. While she found the excerpts weren’t right for the magazine, she admired what I submitted enough to send the pages to an editor she knew at William Morrow. The editor, in turn, liked the pages enough to tell me he wanted to have his house consider the unfinished novel for publication. This interest quickened the interest of a friend’s literary agent, who became my first literary agent, and I spent a happy ten days hoping this was it. But the house eventually passed on the novel, thinking it would be too large to publish based on my synopsis. “They fear it will be six hundred pages long,” my new agent said. Her advice: “If you finish it, then no one will be guessing how long it will be, because we’ll know, and we’ll just send it out then.”
I tried to master my desperation at this news. What happened next was a product of my cynicism, my youth, and my anger. By now, it was clear our apartment was too expensive for us, at least based on the money we actually were earning, and that my sister, due to our mother’s bankruptcy, would have to leave Columbia.
I could have finished that first novel already in progress. In just a year’s time, as if to mock me, several novels more than six hundred pages long would appear, and the year after that, Infinite Jest, weighing in at 1,079 pages. Length was not the issue, though. I could have tried even one other publisher. But I didn’t. Instead, I became obsessed with the idea that I could sell an unfinished novel and that the money might be enough to save my family. I began what would become my first published, finished novel with the idea that autobiographical fiction was as easy as writing down what was happening to me. I turned my back on the experimental novel I’d put forward, and told anyone I knew, “I’m just going to write a shitty autobiographical first novel just like everyone else, and sell it for thousands and thousands of dollars.” And then I sat down to try.
THE STORY OF YOUR life, described, will not describe how you came to think about your life or yourself, nor describe any of what you learned. This is what fiction can do—I think it is even what fiction is for. But learning this was still ahead of me.
I knew what I thought was normal for a first novel, but every first novel is the answer to the question of what is normal for a first novel. Mine came to me in pieces at first, as if it were once whole and someone had broken it and scattered it inside me, hiding until it was safe for it to be put back together. In the time before I understood that I was writing this novel, each time a piece of it emerged, I felt as if I’d received a strange valentine from a part of me that had a very different relationship to language than the me that walked around, had coffee with friends, and hoped for the best out of every day. The words felt both old and new, and the things they described were more real to me when I reread them than the things my previous sentences had tried to collect inside them.
And so while I wrote this novel, it didn’t feel like I could say that I chose to write this novel. The writing felt both like an autonomic process, as compulsory as breathing or the beat of the heart, and at the same time as if an invisible creature had moved into a corner of my mind and begun building itself, making visible parts out of things dismantled from my memory, summoned from my imagination. I was
spelling out a message that would allow me to talk to myself and to others. The novel that emerged was about things I could not speak of in life, in some cases literally. I would lie, or I would feel a weight on my chest as if someone was sitting there. But when the novel was done, I could read from it. A prosthetic voice.
PRIOR TO THIS, MY sentences were often criticized in writing workshops for being only beautiful, and lacking meaning. I felt I understood what they meant, and worked to correct it, but didn’t really think about what this meant until the novel was done.
I’d once organized my life, my conversation, even my sentences, in such a way as to never say what I was now trying to write. I had avoided the story for years with all the force I could bring to bear—intellectual, emotional, physical. Imagine a child’s teeth after wearing a gag for thirteen years. That is what my sentences were like then, pushed in around the shape of a story I did not want to tell, but pointing all the same to what was there.
I have a theory of the first novel now, that it is something that makes the writer, even as the writer makes the novel. That it must be something you care about enough to see through to the end. I tell my students all the time: writing fiction is an exercise in giving a shit—an exercise in finding out what you really care about. Many student writers become obsessed with aesthetics, but I find that is usually a way to avoid whatever it is they have to say. My first novel was not the first one I started. It was the first one I finished. Looking at my records, I count three previous unfinished novels; pieces of one of them went into this first one. But the one I finished, I finished because I asked myself a question.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Page 18