So You Want to Write

by Marge Piercy

  Exercise: Creating a Satire

  Can you think of a trend in our society that drives you crazy? The newspapers are full of absurdities every day. Can you narrow one down to a sentence?

  Try to fill in the blank: I hate it when . (Go ahead: indulge the inner curmudgeon.)

  Vonnegut placed his warped notion of reverse discrimination 120 years into the future (he published “Harrison Bergeron” in 1961). Voltaire used the kingdom of Westphalia to illustrate his disdain for a popular philosopher in his day named Leibniz who preached “everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds,” advocating people’s meek acceptance of their fate.

  Is there a philosophy that drives you nuts? Or a development in our society that you find ludicrous? Write a short piece in which the inevitabilities of that idea, or the logical conclusions of that societal trend become the norm or the law of the land. Make them ridiculous rather than horrific. Pile on the details. (Think of Vonnegut’s 300 pounds of clanking junk, the red ball for a nose and heavy glasses with wavy lenses that Harrison Bergeron was forced to wear in order to bring his natural born talents down to the level of everyone else.)

  15

  A Scandal In The Family

  Every book has a story behind it that is usually as interesting as the book itself. Whether it’s the adventures of the author’s research trips or the fights with her editor; the funding that was cut at the last minute by the National Endowment for the Arts or the shipment of galleys we received from the printer—missing all punctuation—I never tire of trading these stories at sales conferences and writers’ workshops.

  Because with every success recounted—and a published book, no matter how disappointing its sales may be, is a success—I take away hope for publishing another. The story of The Kitchen Man has been interesting to writers in our workshops who have faced issues of writing about people they love or in some cases failing to write because they could not face these issues. In some workshops, I’m asked to read the offending material, so I’ve included it in Appendix I of this book.

  In the winter of the year I turned thirty years old, I was drinking a great deal of bourbon and listening to Bessie Smith albums every night upon returning from a job building a house. For one hour every morning, long before first light, I would climb out of of bed, make a pot of strong coffee, feed the cat Jim Beam, whom I’d named after the bourbon, and work on a novel about a waiter. It was called The Kitchen Man, named after the Bessie Smith song. I had been a good waiter (I judge this by my tips, which were sizable) but a complete failure at the building trades (I judge this by the number of times I was ordered to re-make windows I had framed, and once, a sleeping loft, which seemed to sway in mid-air like the gang plank in a Popeye cartoon.) My mind was occupied. I was thinking about the novel all the time, stopping to scribble jokes on scraps of wallboard, muttering conversations I would assign, the following morning, to my characters. In this way I managed to complete and revise a four hundred twenty-five page draft in a little over a year. It was accomplished enough to get me a good New York agent, which I defined at the time as someone who had at least one client who had written a best seller and took me to lunch in a restaurant with a wine list.

  For the next two years, the book made its way to twenty-four mainstream publishers. In those days there were many more New York publishers. Their rejections ranged from the condescending (“Mr. Wood is a writer whose next book just might be good.”) to the absurd (“I cannot publish this book because I hate the protagonist. He reminds me too much of myself.”) I was aware too of a disjointedness of opinion that I could not dismiss. Many people who read the novel—I am talking here about other writers, some quite famous ones, and avid readers, as well as audiences who heard excerpts at readings—liked it very, very much. I kept being told how the book spoke to them of families like their own, of body types and neuroses like their own, of what they always feared went on inside pretentious restaurant kitchens, of people they recognized from life but not literature. So, I kept sending it out.

  I was aware at the same time that although I was a moody, envious, border-line alcoholic, given to pitiful, stentorian sighs (literary biographers will note that my wife’s output, prolific by any standard, increased greatly when I got an office outside the house), the fact that I was not published saved me from a confrontation with my mother and father who were realistically, if not sympathetically, rendered characters in the book. It was certainly the case that the guilt I felt about what I had written had fed my ambivalence about seeing it in print. When the agent gave up on the book I refused to follow my wife’s advice to submit it to an independent press that might have been open to something quirky and not recognizably commercial. I told myself it was either a big time New York City publisher or nothing.

  After a year and another draft in which I cut a hundred pages, I did send it out to two small presses or, rather, my wife dared me to shut up and stop moaning about it and send it out. Within a month I received an acceptance letter from The Crossing Press, then in Trumansburg, New York, and a few weeks later a contract. I was real. I was to be a published novelist, and if it was with a publisher many people outside the business had never heard of, this fact might work in my favor. My parents, who encountered books mostly in airports and suburban malls, were never likely to come across it. When my mother and I spoke, I never denied that it was going to be published, I just never mentioned it. I was working as an artist-in-the-schools at this time and as a sixth grade teacher phrased the question in the fetid confines of the faculty lounge as I announced its publication to my colleagues, “Who the hell’s gonna care about a book published in a place called Trumansburg?”

  At least one person did. The publicist. He had two essential qualities that elevated him, in my mind, to the best publicist I have ever worked with: he loved the book and he was fearless on the phone. At that time there was no Oprah’s Book Club but if there were he would have tracked her to the ends of the earth. He sent it everyplace—The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Toronto Globe and Mail—followed up doggedly, and it worked. The wacky small press novel about an overweight gourmet waiter was widely reviewed. Not long after pub date, I got a call from my mother. “Why didn’t you tell me your book came out?”

  “You mean The Kitchen Man?” Duh. “I don’t know, Ma. I must’ve forgot.”

  “There’s a big review in the Sunday New York Times.”

  But my parents only read the New York Post. I had thought I was covered. “How did you know?”

  “Your aunt called from Arizona. I’m going out now to buy the book.”

  “Don’t do that!” I said. “What I mean is, a mother should never have to pay for her son’s book. I’ll send it to you.” I had bought myself some time.

  Up to that point, I had never had a conversation with my parents about the pain I had felt growing up, about their treatment of each other and their verbally poisonous fights. Looking back on my life now, coming of age as a suburban fat kid whose struggling parents were ashamed of him seems a humorous footnote, but at thirty years old the attendant anger was still so much a part of me that in writing my first autobiographical novel, I had to include it. There was no way to write about myself otherwise.

  It took me a week to decide to send the novel and during that time I came up with the scheme of using a razor blade to neatly delete chapter four. But the publicity man was doing his job, capitalizing on good reviews to get even more print media attention. The book was gaining momentum. Paperback reprint offers from the large New York publishers were coming in. Movie producers were calling; so were the relatives. Before I got around to sending the book, my mother called to inform me that she had bought it. That she was liking it.

  “Really! How far did you get?”

  “Just up to chapter three.”

  I did not hear from her for some weeks after that. When I did finally force myself to call on Sunday morning, her response was predictably cool. “Oh, I got really busy. I sto
pped reading it,” she said.

  “How far did you get?”

  “Chapter four.”

  “Is that him?” I heard my father’s rumbling behind her. He took the phone.

  “Hi, Pop.”

  “Hey, I read your book.”

  “What did you think?”

  “Well, you didn’t treat me too bad.”

  “I didn’t?”

  “But you really socked it to your mother!”

  The conversation ended. The momentum of the book continued. A paperback sale was negotiated. And a movie option. I agreed to be represented by the William Morris Agency. I signed a deal to write the screenplay for Universal Pictures. I still was avoiding speaking to my mother about the book. It hurt me that my success had caused her embarrassment. But it also hurt to feel that my experience was not mine to write about. Was it not my side of those years together? Didn’t the right to tell the story of my own life belong to me?

  My mother and I continued to have shallow, careful conversations until in one of them, many months later, she said, “Did you really feel that way about us? That we were so bad to you?”

  I did. And yet I didn’t. That is, they were my parents: I loved them and recognized that we had gone through some tough times together. I understood that my mother had married in her teens, and that my dad was just twenty years old; that they themselves had difficult parents, that finances never ceased to be an issue. I understood all the reasons why they were the way they were. Because she had brought up the question, I was able to tell my mother that yes, it had been bad for me, but that I honestly felt they had always tried to do their best. I believe she heard that. I cannot say that we patched up all differences and became a tight mother and son. I can say that it was a start. From that point forward we stopped lying about the past; we acknowledged there had been some good times but by and large those years had been difficult for all of us.

  My father read and re-read the book and bought copies to give to friends. He was not a man who had a vocabulary to express such things, but I believe that seeing himself in print made him feel his days on Earth had been documented and were therefore more important, that I had rendered his life as art. My brothers were amused by what I had written but not particularly moved. Years younger, they did not have the same experiences or, because my folks had managed to solve many of their problems and change over the years, the same parents. My writing was in no way prescient. Neil Simon, Phillip Roth, and hundreds of other writers had been lampooning the Jewish-American experience for years. Still, my mother became very proud of her son the novelist and began to send me articles by children who had written about their families, often with a note that said, “Oh, what you wrote about me is nothing compared to this one!” She even redefined our cheap relatives as those who took my book out of the library but wouldn’t buy a copy. I have had the feeling, moreover, that my mother has been somewhat disappointed in my subsequent books because she was not in them.

  I’m not about to revise the experience and pretend it was pleasant, but neither can I say I’m sorry. I wrote what I had to write. It was the truth of my side of the experience. It may have hurt my parents to read it, it may have embarrassed them, but it did not kill them. It did not cause them to suffer nervous illness. It did not make them lose their jobs. It did not cost them any friends. Growing up together was not easy for any of us. The novel bore witness to those difficult years. In the way shared tragedy sometimes does, it brought us closer together.

  Writing about my family with emotional honesty and seeing it through to being published was my choice. Since every family is unique, I would never advise someone else to take this risk. In all our classes, and in the relevant essays in this book, we emphasize the various distancing techniques that writers sometimes use to write about those close to them. But simply changing a person’s name or disguising their appearance and details about them is not always sufficient protection from charges of libel. You cannot make false or defamatory statements about living people. You cannot subject a person to undeserved publicity without permission. The law is complex and we readily admit our ignorance. In all our workshops, we warn participants about the possible legal implications involved in writing about real people. We mention the advisability of seeking out attorneys who specialize in intellectual property issues, libel and/or invasion of privacy. We offer the titles of books that can inform you about these issues and we strongly advise people to consult them.

  But having mentioned the risks, there are certain things I’ve discovered for myself:1. We live in a society in which the most heinous and embarrassing human behaviors are merely fodder for sitcoms and daily talk shows. What you may agonize about revealing might make the average reader yawn.

  2. Revealing the truth as you see it might explain a person’s life in a way that makes their behavior far more explicable than covering it over would.

  3. Sometimes people really don’t mind being written about because you are enabling them to see their lives in a new perspective. My father read and reread my novel many times; my mother gives away copies as gifts. Some people thought my parents were treated very callously in the book. My parents ultimately felt that I had helped them to understand their own lives, and our most difficult years as a family, from a useful perspective.

  4. Your job as a writer is to make people real. Cartoon characters and walk-ons don’t make a story breathe. You’ve got to allow the reader to see a well-rounded picture of your important characters and that includes the contradictions in their personalities, all the surprising but often not very flattering dualities that make each of us interesting and unique.

  5. Most important to me is that by telling your truth, you help readers accept the truth about themselves. By admitting that your family might have had problems, you’re helping others out of their shame and isolation. You’re helping them understand that their lives might not be perfect, but neither is anyone else’s. There’s a great backlash today about our confessional society. I admit, daytime TV talk shows and all the dependency literature we’ve endured have us wondering whether people shouldn’t keep their sordid histories private. But to my mind, it was worse “back in the day” when the archetypes of the solid American middle class family bore no resemblance to the problems and the tensions I walked into when I came home from school, making me feel my family was a shameful secret.

  6. There are many ways to view any experience. How you experienced a particular incident may be very different from someone else who was there.

  7. In your memoir or your novel, you are writing, not for now, not for the evening news, or the weekly magazine, but presumably for years and decades to come. You are attempting to distill experience into art. What is tender and emotional now may not be so in time. You are banking on the fact that it is the rendering of events and emotional truth that is important; that the identities of the actors is less important than the play itself. You are attempting to fill the facts with meaning.

  One last footnote on the publication history of The Kitchen Man. One might have thought that twenty-four rejections would have made me skeptical about large conglomerate publishing companies being the proper home for a comic literary novel. But the year after it came out, I was flush with all the attention and thought that a writer of my stature would be best served by a large New York publisher. Although the Crossing Press would have gladly brought out a paperback edition, I pressed them to sell the rights to a major paperback house. Over the years, the book slowly gained a following. I was being invited to read at colleges. In fact the book was being taught at some. One day my new editor called to tell me that she was sorry (she actually was) but she had just received notice that the book had been recycled and was no longer in print. Yes, it had been selling; but not enough to justify keeping it in inventory.

  It’s a strange experience to see a book of yours go out of print, to have two or three years of your life pulped. It’s listed in your résumé. Academics mention it when they introduce
you, but it’s a little like a story you tell that you can never prove, or a deceased friend that exists in your memory only. When we started Leapfrog Press, we brought it back into print as our first book—partly because there was a continuing demand and partly because we were just learning how to publish and decided our early mistakes should be on our own work, not somebody else’s.

  By the way, no one was more upset when the book went out of print than my mother who, by that time, was buying five or six copies for friends every holiday season, and now had to begin the tedious search to find copies in used book stores.

  16

  Work And Other Habits

  In talking about barriers to creativity, we are also talking about daily life and daily habits and how we live our lives in general and in particular, and also how we can help each other overcome these barriers.

  One way to begin breaking down the inner barriers to creativity is in small local groups, in collectives, in workshops, with other writers who come together to try to keep each other working, productive, sane, alive, and who try to help.

  What’s most important in a workshop, whether a formal one or one you put together from an ad in a coffee shop, is being committed to helping each other do what that writer wants to do, not what you want to do or what you think that writer should want to do.

  Let’s say you’re in a workshop with other fiction writers. You write tough laconic prose and you like things to be dry and clear and crackly. Someone in the group writes about their childhood sexual abuse. This is emotional stuff and it is written about in an emotional way. It’s everything you would never do on paper. Your natural response may be boredom, sarcasm, embarrassment or the intellectual equivalent. But that helps nobody. What you have to do is to distance yourself from your distaste and figure out how the writer can do what she is trying to do and do it better. It isn’t anything you would ever write or even care to read, but you aren’t Everyone. If the other writer can pull it off, some people will want to read it. Your obligation in any workshop is to offer comments in good faith about how the writer can do what she wants to do, not what you want to do.