Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

by David Lipsky

  Smoking out a lot in high school, less in college, then involved with drinking at Harvard?

  Mmmm. I drank a lot in grad school, I drank a lot at Yaddo. But everybody did. You know? It’s real weird. I don’t know what—maybe it was a little different five years later, but the young writer deal, the thing was to go out and pound ’em with people and trade bon mot. And feel pleased at how successful we all were. And to do a little kinda, my dick’s bigger than your dick, kinda contest of wit.

  My mot is more bon than yours.

  Exactly. Which is a pretty unsettling analogue to dick size, in a way.

  This period—lasted from ’87 to—

  What, of drinking a lot?

  It’s, it’s, I’m not trying to be disingenuous, I honestly don’t remember. And I, I, just to tell you truly, that if you structured this as some—“and then he spiraled into some terrible alcoholic thing,” it would be inaccurate.

  It was more just like, I got more and more unhappy. And the more and more unhappy I would get, the more I would notice that I would be drinking a lot more. And there wasn’t any joy in the drinking. It was more like—it was literally an anesthetic. I mean, I just wanted to be dulled and blunt all the time. But the reasons for being unhappy I don’t think had very much to do with drugs or alcohol.

  So ’85 out of Amherst, ’87 leaving Arizona, then you go to Harvard …

  Yeah—I started partying a lot in grad school.

  Summer of ’87 at Yaddo?

  Yeah.

  Then Harvard that fall?

  No—I went back and lived in Tucson. I was finishing the book of stories. Let’s see. I lived with my folks for like two months, went out to Tucson, lived there for a while.

  Foundation Grant your folks gave you? That joke on the Girl with Curious Hair copyright page. [Sandwiched between the impressive “Corporation of Yaddo” and “The Giles Whiting Foundation,” there’s “The Jim and Sally Wallace Fund for Aimless Children.”]

  The “Fund for Aimless Children”—right? Yeah. Exactly.

  Yeah, they were very nice. They were like, you know, I was upstairs working all the time. And they would, like, not only cook the food, but they’d go to the store and get it. You know? It saved me a lot of time.

  Only a two-month grant, though.

  True. But I’m, as you can probably gather, not the most pleasant person in the world to live with.

  And then applied, I remember, to Harvard and Princeton, in ’88, and decided to go there.

  Why? Weren’t you bored and done with the academic environment by then?

  Yeah—I was just really stuck about writing. And um, like a lot of the reasons why I was writing, and a lot of the things that I thought were cool about writing, I’d sort of run out of gas on. And I didn’t know … I didn’t know … what to do. I didn’t know whether I really loved to write or whether I’d just gotten kind of excited about having some early success. That story at the end of Curious, which not a lot of people like, was really meant to be extremely sad. And to sort of be a kind of suicide note. And I think by the time I got to the end of that story, I figured that I wasn’t going to write anymore.

  That my whole take—that at first I thought writing was empty and just all a game. And then I realized that my take on it was hopelessly empty, and that it was a game. And it was after finishing that and doing the editing on that, that I remember getting really unhappy.

  And it sounds weird—but I think it was almost more of a like, sort of an artistic and a religious crisis, than it was anything you would call a breakdown. I just—all my reasons for being alive and the stuff that I thought was important, just truly at a gut level weren’t working anymore. Does this make sense to you personally at all?

  [Gentlemanly: He believes he’s flattering me by treating me as a matching peer.]

  It also makes sense to me in terms of what you were telling me about your history. But tell me more about it personally.

  What do you mean in terms of my history?

  Well, I mean you had done football for a while, and then you’d stopped because there were guys who were bigger than you. And then you’d done tennis for a while—I guess for about five years.

  Yeah, except that stuff’s all, you can tell by external measurements, how well you’re doing with that. The writing stuff’s all internal.

  But it may have felt to you as if there was a sort of pattern. Where you would do something for five years, and then there’d be some reason you’d be required to stop?

  Yeah—and I did heavy-duty like semantics and math logic for about five years, and then switched to writing. Yeah, you’re right; I think I really perceived myself as kind of a dilettante. Um, I don’t know, you’re right. I hadn’t realized that. I owe you sixty dollars.

  So for that reason, it would make sense that there would be a five-year point where there’d be a moving-on crisis. Except there was no physical and no intellectual reason for you to stop writing.

  It’s weird though—but I started hating everything that I did. I mean I did, I remember I did two different novellas after “Westward,” that I worked very hard on, that were just so unbelievably bad. They were, like, worse than stuff I’d done when I was first starting in college. Hopelessly confused. Hopelessly bending in on themselves in all kinds of …

  And um, anyway, the reason I applied to philosophy grad school is I remembered that I had flourished in an academic environment. And I had this idea that I could, uh, that I could read philosophy and do philosophy, and write on the side, and that it would make the writing better.

  ’Cause see, by this time, my ego’s all invested in the writing, right? It’s the only thing that I’ve gotten, you know, food pellets from the universe for, to the extent that I wanted.

  So I feel really trapped: Like, “Uh-oh, my five years is up. I’ve gotta move on, but I don’t want to move on.” And I was really stuck. And drinking was part of that. And it’s true that I don’t drink anymore. But it wasn’t that I was stuck because I drank. I mean, it was more that—and it wasn’t, it wasn’t like social drinking going out of control. It was like, I really sort of felt like my life was over at twenty-seven or twenty-eight. And I didn’t wanna, and that felt really bad, and I didn’t wanna feel it.

  And so I would do all kinds of things: I mean, I would drink real heavy, I would like fuck strangers. Oh God—or, then, for two weeks I wouldn’t drink, and I’d run ten miles every morning. You know, that kind of desperate, like very American, “I will fix this somehow, by taking radical action.”

  And uh, you know, that lasted for a, that lasted for a couple of years.

  Like Jennifer Beals, more or less. In Flashdance, solving Pittsburgh.

  And it’s weird: I think a lot of it comes out of the sports training. You know? (Schwarzenegger voice) “If there’s a problem, I vill train my way out of it. I vill get up earlier, I vill vork harder.” And that shit worked on me when I was a kid, but you know …

  Everyone I know—and then people like Michael Chabon—has had second-book crises.

  But my second book, it was weird, was “Westward,” and it itself went pretty well, it was just a …

  This is what’s embarrassing. I know it’s not that powerful for anybody, but I really felt like I’d blown, I’d blown out of the water, my whole sort of orientation to writing in that thing. Um, and had kind of written my homage and also patricidal killing thing to Barth. Who wasn’t the only postmodern master I’d loved. But he was, I mean, “Lost in the Funhouse” is kind of the—what would you call it?—the trumpets, the trumpet call of postmodern metafiction.

  Texture stuff in that book is really terrific also.

  Now, do you really like it or are you just being nice? Not many people like that, and what I was told is you cannot really expect the reader to have read something twenty years earlier in order to get your thing. That’s very pretentious but …

  [He thinks I mean his story, not Barth’s.]

  Um, you talk about, I’v
e said that three or four times somethin’ came alive to me, and started kind of writing itself, and that was one of them. Although it wasn’t a very happy experience.

  I have other friends who hid out in academic environments afterwards, on later books, missed the discipline, the clear hours.

  Well, it’s pretty, it’s pretty obvious, you know, what it is. What it is, is that, at a certain point you really, you have to grow up a little bit. You have to impose your own discipline—you’re not in a workshop anymore.

  I mean, my first two books had been written sort of under professors. Um, that’s very hard. Um—and you also, I mean, your first book is play, and it’s all possibility and promise. And then in the second book, it’s sort of like, “All right, the first book was very lucky and you got a chance to do this. Now are you gonna do it or not?” And it’s this whole—I don’t know. Yeah, I think, I doubt what I went through is very different than what anybody else went through. The only difference for me is that it was very sharp, and very … and it was of reasonably short duration. I mean, it was like a little under two years. But it was exquisitely—it’s the most horrible period I’ve ever gone through.

  [Beeper on his watch keeps going off.]

  Let’s talk some more about this: this is ’88—the really big difference is it was happening to you and not to somebody else.

  Sure.

  This two years is ’90 to ’go: when was the suicide watch period?

  When did I go in there?

  This is at McLean’s?

  How do you know that name?

  I know people from Boston—not from there, who know you, but who—

  No, there’s lot of places in Boston. But McLean is … Actually, I did end up going to McLean, ’cause that’s what the Harvard insurance was on the plan for.

  Liz Wurtzel went.

  God, she and I probably were on the same fucking shuttle bus from this.

  Never put on antidepressants?

  Um, I was early on, I was for about two months in college. It was for something else—oh no, I had terrible insomnia. And I didn’t want to take Dalmane because I was drinking so much. So I told this long story, and they put me on something, they put me on a tricyclic. Which, I don’t know how antidepressants are supposed to work, but this had the opposite effect for me. It made me feel like I was stoned and in hell. So, no, that was never an option.

  They talked about shock a little bit. [Like the Kate Gompert character in Infinite Jest] And I decided—in a weird way, there’s a whole chapter with sort of Kate Gompert lying there and the doctor talking, except it’s very kind of different.

  She wants it, the shock.

  She wanted it. And I could see, I could see that if this got much worse, that I would be, it’s sort of like somebody …

  [The tape side runs out.]

  • • •

  OUR PLANE IS CALLED, OUR FLIGHT IS CANCELLED

  Should we just rush the Eagle desk?

  We can wait ten minutes, because there’ll be a line there.

  I could drive us to Chicago.

  Yeah, lemme chew this for two more minutes, and then let me call Holly, and I’m gonna do what Holly tells me to do. This is the great thing, I’m not the boss. She decides, and she’ll tell me what to do.

  I’m not concerned about—I mean, I don’t mind havin’ somebody know I was on suicide watch in McLean. I’m concerned, I don’t want to make this into a romantic, lurid, tormented-artist thing. What I’m telling you is, this had way more to do with—I mean this wasn’t a chemical imbalance, and this wasn’t because of drugs and alcohol.

  This was more just, I think I had lived an incredibly American life. That, “Boy, if I could just achieve X and Y and Z, everything would be OK.” And I think had really—I think I got very very lucky. I got to have a midlife crisis at like twenty-seven. Which at the time didn’t seem lucky; now it seems to me fairly lucky. And I know that you don’t quite believe some of my stuff about like why I’m not gonna take money for this book. But now maybe now you can understand. That period, nothing before or since has ever been that bad for me. And I am willing to make enormous sacrifices never to go back there.

  And if giving up the chance at a lot of money for this book—it’s an acceptable, that’s an acceptable price, and it’s not because I’m a great person. It’s because I think I got really lucky, feeling like I got given certain other reasons to work and to live during this time, and I do not want to fuck with it. I don’t. So I live—so I’m real careful now. And it’s also why I think I cultivate normality.

  [Hard to feel steady with someone saying this: Normality can’t be cultivated, in the same way, as David points out in the books, that you can’t try to be sincere. You either are sincere or not: It needs to be affectless.]

  Um, the thing about shock is, I never had shock, and they never gave me shock. But I realized, I realized, I sort of got an idea of the continuum I was on. You know? And at one side was the way I usually was. And I could see—there’s a fair amount of stuff in the book about depression, that is not, it’s not exactly autobiographical, but it’s lookin’ I think about a quarter mile farther down on the road. I mean, I could see the filter dropping over my vision, you know, I could see the distortions.

  And I think at a certain point these folks—have I ever met? Yeah, I met somebody there who’d been given shock, which scares the shit—you know, I’m like you, my brain’s what I’ve got. The idea of the brain being hurt—but I could see that at a certain point, you might beg for it, the same way, like in Alien, they say, “Kill me, kill me.” You know? Because it would be—right? There’s a thing in the book—I like this thing in the book: when people jump out of a burning skyscraper, it’s not that they’re not afraid of falling anymore, it’s that the alternative is so awful. And then you’re invited to consider what could be so awful, that leaping to your death, you know, seems like an escape from it.

  And I admit I have got a grim fascination with that stuff. I’m not Elizabeth Wurtzel. I’m not biochemically depressed. But I feel like I got to dip my toe in that wading pool and, um, not going back there is more important to me than anything. It’s like worse than anything—I don’t know if you’ve had any experience with this. It’s worse than any kind of physical injury, or any kind of—it may be what in the old days was called a spiritual crisis or whatever. It’s just feeling as though the entire, every axiom of your life turned out to be false, and there was actually nothing, and you were nothing, and it was all a delusion. And that you were better than everyone else because you saw that it was a delusion, and yet you were worse because you couldn’t function. And it was just, it was just horrible. And trying to be at Harvard, and to read about “freedom of the will” with John Rawls while thinking this way was just extremely unpleasant.

  Anyway, that’s that story. And I don’t mind—it’s not a privacy issue. I’d be concerned: I don’t want to come off like I’m romanticizing it or something. [Somehow this is the saddest.]

  Not at all how it sounds. It clarifies to me why you don’t want to fuck with your rhythm.

  [Typical shift: Slurp-spits an ice cube into his glass; he’s chewing tobacco.]

  Just between you and me, so I feel like I’m talking. Is that, do you have any experience with anything like this?

  • • •

  LATER

  I think part of it, I just had never lived, everybody I knew was in that world. I had no idea, I had no idea that 90 percent of what I was getting out of books I really loved was this sense of a conversation around loneliness.

  [We’re standing at the entrance to Bloomington airport, smoking next to electric doors, talking about school and writing.]

  I thought it was all, I really thought I was a head. That I was nothing but a head. And I think this period in my late twenties, when my head hurt so bad, that I had to find some other part of my body, you know, to like live in. And that I even started to suspect—and it’s not like I had any kind of experience. Or I�
��ve come to any conclusions. It’s more like I just threw a lot of stuff out.

  And the great irony about this—maybe you can understand this. I, I, I’m not being disingenuous, the stuff about the fuss about the book [the soft glaze he keeps using for it: “the fuss about the book”], and people thinking the book is great, is nice. But the thing I really like is that it’s not more important to me. You know? Like, like I really loved workin’ on this book. I worked as hard, harder on it, than anything. You know? And I decided this is a little experiment. I was gonna do it for the sake of the book. Fuck it. If I couldn’t even sell it, fuck it. You know? That I really sort of—you know at the end of Thief, when James Caan tears up the picture of his life?

  Michael Mann. I didn’t see it.

  Really? That’s not a bad movie. Well, the end is kind of stupid.

  It means to me like, this is sort of what happened to me. You know, it was probably very much the same for you. You know, you’re in Brown, who’s gonna make it, who’s not? And then you get, like, you start being able to make a living. So you get all that affirmation from the exterior, that when you’re a young person you think will make everything all right. And I realize that sounds reductive and pop psych or whatever. But to realize—like you say, when it happens to you, when you yourself realize, “Holy shit, this doesn’t make everything all right.” Um, for me, it fucked with my sort of “metaphysics of living” in an incredibly deep way.