I knew, from that point forward, that I was on my own, working without a financial safety net. I would have to rely on myself, which made me even more eager to be done with school, to be on my own, saving my own money, weaving my own net so that if I ever fell again, I would be fine.
What I didn’t know is that no amount of money would ever be enough to convince me that I would be truly safe. Instability marks you. It leaves you feeling permanently uneasy, as if, at any moment, everything you love could be taken away with a phone call, a conversation, a letter’s arrival, the turn of a key in a lock. I didn’t know that I’d grow up to write in what would become a very contested genre, that books like mine would be called dumb and worthless, reactionary, and even dangerous, or how I could still feel so worthless, even as the books sold and sold, even when my bank statements told me that I was a success. I could never have guessed the way the compliments and good reviews would evaporate, while the bad reviews and criticism would echo, lingering like slow-to-heal wounds, or that I’d hear them, over and over, in voices that sound like my father, or the creditors on the phone, the summer I was eighteen and worried that I wouldn’t be able to go back to college, like the life I’d imagined for myself since I was old enough to imagine any kind of life at all might be impossible, and I’d have to start over again.
I left Princeton with a transcript full of As and summa cum laude on my diploma, prestigious internships on my résumé, and folders filled with copies of the stories I’d written and professors’ letters of recommendation. Out in the world, I tried, as hard as I could, to believe in my own worth. But sometimes, especially on humid summer days, when I smell cut grass in the air or see heat lightning crackling in the sky or hear the cough and rumble of a lawn mower being yanked to life, the phone will ring and my heart will stop. The phone is still ringing; the phone will always be ringing, and no matter what the voice on the other end asks for, I will never be able to give it what it wants.
Not That Kind of Writer
Princeton was, by its nature, exclusive. It wasn’t easy to get in . . . and, once you were there, you’d continue to encounter little pockets of additional selectivity—the eating clubs you had to bicker to join; the classes you had to apply to take. The university had amazing creative-writing teachers . . . but your tuition dollars guaranteed you nothing more than a chance to study with them. You couldn’t just buy a beret, march yourself down to 185 Nassau Street, and announce that you were, henceforth, a poet. You had to submit a short story or an actual poem, and have someone read and evaluate it before you got in.
I applied to every creative-writing class the university offered. My first was with Joyce Carol Oates. There were twelve of us, freshmen and sophomores, either so desperate to impress the professor with our erudition that we wouldn’t shut up (one young man, now an award-winning novelist, was so voluble that Professor Oates, normally the most soft-spoken and even-tempered of instructors, snapped, “Mohsin, I’m talking now!”) or so cowed by her outsize reputation that we would barely speak. Professor Oates was waif-like and long-limbed, with dark curls and enormous glasses that magnified her big brown eyes. She spoke in a high, thin voice and wore loose-fitting pants and cardigan sweaters in which her spindly limbs seemed to be floating. She didn’t walk so much as drift, like she was being pushed around by a delicate breeze, like she existed on some other more ethereal plane than the rest of us.
In her class, I wrote lots of stories about teenage girls from broken homes, which I knew something about, and lots of stories about poor people in Appalachia, about which I knew much less (I’d discovered Dorothy Allison the previous summer). A piece about a boy and his mother visiting colleges was based on the trip that I’d made to look at Princeton and Penn with Fran. “I don’t know anything!” was the line I gave the boy in the story. “Not anything!” I don’t remember if I said it, but I remember that’s how I felt, and I could call up the specifics of the moment, the orange tiled floors and the smell of fried chicken and disinfectant, and how tired my mother looked, and put all of it into what, years and a number of revisions later, became the first short story I ever published, in Seventeen magazine.
I loved writing fiction and my two semesters’ worth of poetry classes. My first class was with J. D. McClatchy, who’d also taught one of my favorite non-creative classes, Modern British Poets, where we read Auden and Philip Larkin and Stevie Smith (“Not waving, but drowning”). McClatchy was an elegant man, his salt-and-pepper beard carefully trimmed, with perfectly cut tweed sports jackets, and a manner that was wry and refined but never condescending—a line in a poem about the narrator’s ability to “make my woman come” earned a lifted eyebrow and an “I doubt we’d say it just like that anymore.” In his creative-writing class, we’d spend one week on sonnets, the next on sestinas, and the week after that, villanelles. That was the class where I wrote the poem that won the Academy of American Poets Prize for 1990, which I wish I could find.
The semester after that, I studied with Ann Lauterbach, who was petite and red-haired, with outfits accessorized with green velvet capes and elegant bead and crystal necklaces. I don’t remember much of what I wrote for her, but I remember a lot about what I read—particularly, the work of a female classmate who was dating an Israeli guy. Turns out, there are many words that rhyme with “Ofer.”
Senior year was my last creative-writing stint. For Toni Morrison’s “longer fiction” class, we had to write a hundred-page section of a novel. Somehow, I got the starting time of the class wrong, barging in at ten-thirty for an eight-person seminar that had started thirty minutes earlier. It took me weeks to get over the shame. What I remember from that class was the sound of Morrison’s voice. Sometimes she would read our work out loud, in her low, deliberate tone, and occasionally she’d pause, letting a silence swell, then begin again, taking up the story in her thrilling cadences. You’d sit there, transfixed, thinking, I am truly brilliant. Then, usually on the walk back through campus, you’d realize that you were, in fact, not brilliant . . . it was just her voice that made your work sound so good.
Out of the hundred and fifty pages that I eventually turned in, there were probably three salvageable paragraphs, and one piece of an idea, which was how easily any young person with a backpack could be mistaken for a student on a college campus. The writing was showy, the point of view shifted unnecessarily, and while I knew enough to use adverbs sparingly, I compensated by piling on the adjectives. If there’s a lesson, it’s that sometimes you have to write and then discard a mountain of pages before you get to the tiny little bit of usable material. Or maybe it’s that everything serves a purpose, even pages that end up in the trash. When I read Malcolm Gladwell’s book about how it takes ten thousand hours to master a skill, I added up the months and years that I’d spent writing—as a student, as a journalist, in my spare time—before I sold my first book . . . and, sure enough, the total was just about where Gladwell said it should be. Sometimes the point isn’t to end up with something worth showing the world. Sometimes it’s just rehearsal.
Writing workshops are notoriously brutal—or at least, that’s the impression you get if you read the novels by the people who’ve survived them—but maybe the brutality doesn’t show up until you get to the graduate-level MFA programs. I don’t remember any particularly vicious zingers from my workshops, just a male classmate kindly explaining to me that “telekinesis,” while a nice rhyme for “senior thesis,” did not mean “the ability to magically make things appear out of nowhere,” and that some of my sex scenes were anatomically unlikely, if not impossible; and me gently explaining to a male classmate that it was impossible for the narrator to “marinate in the spice of your love” because marination required a liquid.
As much as I learned in my creative-writing classes, the class that taught me the most was John McPhee’s seminar, Humanities 404, the Literature of Fact, which I took in the spring of 1990.
Professor McPhee had been a New Yorker staff writer for almost thi
rty years. He’d grown up in Princeton. His father had been a university doctor. Small and slight, soft-spoken and owlish, with thick glasses and a full gray beard, McPhee would sit, or stand, at the head of a long wooden table in East Pyne Hall and speak to us in a quiet, high-pitched voice. You’d have to lean forward to hear him, and none of us wanted to miss a word. I’m sure I’m not the only student who thought that if God had let us pick our own fathers, we would have chosen someone just like John McPhee, if not McPhee himself. He was patient, he was thoughtful and helpful. He made it clear that he expected nothing less than your best . . . and he also made it clear that he’d do what it took to get you there.
Professor McPhee taught his seminar just once every other year. Because it was about how to write nonfiction, it wasn’t part of the Creative Writing program, and so it met in the Humanities building, in a beautiful, wood-paneled room with enormous windows and high ceilings. Admission was by application, he accepted only sixteen students, and the only grades were Pass and Fail. You weren’t competing for As, but for his approbation. Every week, you would turn in a piece, and you’d meet with Professor McPhee every other week to discuss your work, which would be returned covered in his neat, penciled annotations—a word circled here, a phrase crossed out there, queries and comments written in the margins, a summary of his thoughts at the end.
He believed that any piece of writing could be improved through stringent, concerted, lengthy revision. He did not teach his students to wait for the Muse to whisper in our ear, or to hope for a flight of inspiration to loft our prose to the heights of brilliance. Writers were not people who hung around on misty mountaintops. We were not divine wind chimes waiting for the right breeze to blow. Writers worked—like sculptors hacking and chipping away at slabs of marble; like jewelers selecting the proper metals and polishing the best gems; like plumbers or HVAC guys, going into the unlovely guts of a building, unscrewing rusty pipes, cleaning dusty vents, fixing and building from the inside out . . . and revising, revising, revising. Every piece of prose had to be whittled and buffed, fine-tuned and reworked and rubbed down and polished again, until it was as close to perfect as you could get it.
Classes met for three hours on Monday afternoons. We’d sit around the rectangular table in that grand room that seemed to whisper all the boldfaced names who’d studied with Professor McPhee, the prizes he’d won, the books that he’d written, the luminaries he’d profiled, and, most of all, the name of the vaunted New Yorker.
We learned to think about the shape of a story, and its component pieces, building each one—the opening paragraph, the final words, the transitions and descriptions and dialogue—as best as we could, fitting them together with care, until the structure was invisible to the reader, and the author, too, disappeared. Writing, at least the way John McPhee taught it, promised the thing I most craved—namely, invisibility. Leading protests and giving speeches were all well and good, but writing could be just as powerful, just as persuasive . . . and it didn’t involve a physical self. A writer wasn’t a body, just a byline. My words would be sharp and spiky, punchy and pointed; my stories would be swift and lean, sleek and enviable, moving fast and hitting hard. I would not, I vowed, write like a fat girl.
During Week One of the class, Professor McPhee paired us up and had us interview, and profile, one another. It was a punishing task. He got to know us—both from the pieces that had been written about us, and from the way we described someone else. We had to learn to balance accuracy and sensitivity (you didn’t want to dwell on the bad skin or bad reputation of the guy, or girl, you’d be seated across from for the rest of the school year). Week Two, you had to go find a piece of abstract art on campus and describe it (I wrestled with a Henry Moore work, affectionately called “the doughnut,” an asymmetrical oval of greenish-tinted marble that proved easier to sit inside of than to write about).
In the succeeding weeks, Professor McPhee would bring in a friend or a colleague—a documentary filmmaker, a publisher, a married pair of archaeologists. We’d ask questions (or, in the case of Roger Straus, of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the subject would deliver a rambling, hilarious, profanity-laced monologue, while Professor McPhee sat, chuckling and occasionally wincing from his seat in the corner). We’d then go off and write a profile of our subjects, one of whom was a documentary director named Tom Spain. I was offended by something he’d said that I’d found sexist, so my piece let him have it. I remember McPhee’s notes, penciled in the margins: “If humor is tragedy plus time, this needs more time.” It wasn’t the first occasion I was forced to think about the line between funny and mean, between punching down, not up, to figure out how to write about the things that made me angry in a way that was powerful, not didactic or unhinged.
As the semester progressed, we were allowed to choose our own topics. I wrote a piece on English bulldogs, the most unnatural of animals, bred to live short, violent lives that would end during fights with bears or bulls; so anatomically implausible that they needed human intervention to mate and give birth. I wrote about the vexing history of the Miss America pageant, which, then and now, is one of my guilty pleasures. Understand that, when I say “wrote,” I mean rewrote. Page by page, sentence by sentence, again and again and again. It was hard but exhilarating, the kind of effort that left you wrung-out and hot-eyed and proud because you knew you were doing what the pros did. Even John McPhee, a Pulitzer Prize winner, wouldn’t dream of turning in a first draft. Or a second, or even a third. Writing was rewriting. It was the most important thing I learned that semester and, probably, throughout all of college.
• • •
My family was always on my mind during those four years. For my last paper for Professor McPhee, I wrote about a spring break trip I took with my sister, Molly. We visited Florida and Molly was in rare form, whether she was angrily filling out an airline evaluation sheet (“Was not provided with beverage of my choice”) or going to the movies with me and Nanna and Nanna’s gentleman caller, Harold, and messing with the senior citizens who go to the movies to act as interpreters for their hearing-impaired friends and loved ones.
“Jen,” wrote Professor McPhee. “This is just first-rate. That is, it is tightly composed and it is funny. It asks questions: Is the dialogue noted or recollected? If noted, when? What percentage of the fact is fact? 100? Where did you go to grade school and high school? Did you have a teacher who liked to teach writing? Has Molly read this? How—if so—did Molly react? Polish it up—one more time—and send it around. Publish it. Molly will sue. But you have insurance. You know how to tell a story.”
Travels with Molly
Jennifer Weiner
April 20, 1990
My mother’s sister, Marlene, and I are at gate C-12 in the Detroit Metro Airport, waiting for Molly. I have flown in from Newark, she is soon to arrive from Boston, and after Aunt Marlene has entertained us for our hour-long wait, we’ll be on our way to Florida together. From our vantage point at the big glass window Aunt Marlene and I watch Molly’s plane lumber into position. Passengers wearing pale, dazed expressions that spell “In Transit” begin to flood out of the corridor linking plane to airport, and we scan the crowd for my sister. Stomping off the plane, she’s not hard to pick out.
Molly stands five foot four in her ratty blue canvas sneakers. Her travel outfit is composed of a pair of white canvas overalls, a faded Run-D.M.C. T-shirt, and a lime-green oversize windbreaker. A green fanny pack is slung loosely around her waist, and dangling from her neck are two gold necklaces, one silver chain, and a leather thong bearing a three-inch plastic replica of a vase. Her dark brown hair is piled haphazardly upon her head, and her tiny round mouth is pursed in its customary grumpy frown. Her small brown eyes monitor our progress. My aunt Marlene reaches her first. She hugs Molly warmly. “I’m so glad to see you!” Molly twists out of the embrace and air-kisses Aunt Marlene’s cheek.
“I have a kidney infection,” she announces, by way of hello. She hands me her luggage with an
imperious gesture. “Take this, oaf,” she says.
The three of us walk toward the frequent fliers’ lounge. Aunt Marlene has the athletic gait of a longtime runner. Molly’s walk is a strange, loopy bounce, somewhere between a runway model’s haughty stride and a criminal’s defensive shuffle. Loaded with Molly’s luggage, I struggle to keep up, but the pair is well ahead of me. Through the stale, anonymous airport air, I can hear Molly discoursing upon her school.
“Yeah,” she declares, in her hip, sarcastic tone, “it’s pretty much a dump . . .”
The frequent fliers’ lounge offers a number of snacks, all of which appeal to Molly. I select a plum. Molly looks at it longingly.
“Can I have your plum?” she wheedles.
Aunt Marlene snorts, “Get your own plum, they’re right over there.”
“I,” Molly declares regally, “have a kidney infection.”
“Probably just have cramps,” I mutter, but hand her the plum. She accepts it with a brief inclination of her head. She devours the fruit with noisy relish, and turns to me with her hand raised as if she wants to slap me five. When I put my palm out, she bends over and neatly spits the plum pit into my hand.
“This is disgusting,” observes Aunt Marlene. Molly laughs cheerfully.
“Kidney infection!” she says. Heads turn, and the businessman in the next seat sniffs audibly, collects his briefcase, and moves to the other side of the room. Molly watches me get up to throw her pit out.
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