by Lamb, Wally
I am, when I write fiction, people other than myself. To write a first-person novel is to go on a journey by sitting each day in the same place — to park yourself before the page and, simultaneously, to stow away in the suitcase of some other, imagined person’s life. To see the world from a foreign perspective. That’s how I became a woman in She’s Come Undone and the embittered twin brother of a paranoid schizophrenic in I Know This Much Is True. In the latter novel, I was also a turn-of-the-century Sicilian immigrant. Although, at the time I was writing in the voice of Domenico Tempesta, the protagonist’s grandiose grandfather, I possessed no passport and had never traveled outside of the continental United States.
So I do not usually follow the standard rule espoused in creative writing classes: write what you know. My impulse, instead, is to write about what I don’t know so that I can live the life of “the other” and move beyond the limitations — the benign prison — of my own life experiences and explore tales of other imperfect, unfinished people who launch themselves from the safety and security of home into the realm of the unsafe, the unknown, because they want something, need something, that home can’t give them. Characters, in short, who are on quests. Odysseys.
My odyssey as a fiction-writer almost ended a month or so into the writing of my second novel. It had taken me nearly nine years to write my first — to manage the balancing act of hands-on parenting, full-time high school teaching, and stolen pre-dawn weekend hours for fiction writing. I was exhausted, fearful that I was a one-shot wonder, and frustrated that I was always disappointing somebody. My kids and my wife and my ailing parents all needed me, and my students needed me, too, as did my characters, neglected for long stretches and stranded on some island I could never seem to get to. I paced; I apologized; my hair fell out; I caught 3:00-a.m. reruns of Kojak and Rhoda Morgenstern. And during one such long night of insomnia, I made the painful decision to pack it in. To give up writing. I couldn’t do it; it was just too hard.
But nine or ten months earlier, on a dare from my wife, I had applied to the National Endowment for the Arts for a creative writing fellowship. And the very next day after my sleepless night of decision-making, the telephone rang and I was flabbergasted to learn that I had just been awarded one. With the $20,000 prize and, more importantly, with the faith the NEA had put in me as a writer — the message they had sent me that my stories might matter — I took a leave of absence from teaching and was off and running once again.
The NEA had given me the gift of time to experiment and learn and grow. My fellowship commenced in January of 1993. My family and I lived frugally and made the money last for the next twenty months. During that period, I wrote fiction in the morning, researched in the afternoon, and was Dad in the evening. I visited libraries, hospitals, Native American museums, and, most significantly, New York’s Ellis Island.
I read about and talked to identical twins. I spoke with and learned from families who had endured domestic turmoil and mental illness about how they survived and coped. These generous people told me stories that were heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious and, little by little, I cobbled together the knowledge I needed to write I Know This Much Is True.
And along the way, I remained grateful to the mother of a son who suffers paranoid schizophrenia and who, early into this six-year creative odyssey of mine, had jabbed a threatening finger in my face and warned that if I was going to take up the subject of mental illness, I had better get it right because the popular culture was already overloaded with stereotypical “psycho-fests” and spook shows that fueled misunderstanding and added to the already-formidable burdens of the mentally ill and their families.
And if in the end, I wrote a novel that was truthful rather than exploitative — a fiction that chips away at misunderstanding rather than adding to it — I want you to know that that book would not exist today had I not received the gift of time and the validation from the NEA. Like Sister Mercy years before, the Endowment had noticed me. And I ask that you do the same for other writers who are on their way but struggling.
Finally, I want to say that, as an American writer whose government gave him a life-altering gift of faith, it is important for me to give back. My wife and I designate ten percent of my book earnings to organizations that help the mentally ill, the victims of domestic violence, and the arts.
But more meaningful to me, personally, than checkbook benevolence is the time I spend in the slammer. My involvement with York Correctional Institution, a maximum security prison in Niantic, Connecticut, was triggered in 1999 by what I have come to think of as a serendipitous accident.
Having by then taught writing to high school students for twenty-five years and then to university students for another two, I had just resigned from teaching so that I could work full-time on my third novel. Now, at the time, I had a third book contract and precious little else. No plot, no characters. Just some advance money from the publisher, and a recurring image in my head of an empty prison cell with the door swung open, and a working title which I’d plucked from a gospel song: Said I wasn’t gonna tell nobody but I couldn’t keep it to myself, what the Lord has done for me. My book contract reads: Due June of 2004 from Wally Lamb, a book-length fiction manuscript.
Reluctantly, I said goodbye to my university students and colleagues, emptied out my office, and returned the key to the English Department secretary. I was closing the door on teaching, literally, when the phone rang. On the other end of the line was Marge Cohen, the librarian at York prison. Two suicides and several more attempts had triggered an epidemic of despair, Marge explained, and the prison school faculty, groping for something that might help, thought that writing might be useful to the inmates as a coping and healing tool. Would I come? For free? Yes, I promised. Once. For ninety minutes.
On the hot summer day when I kept my promise, thirty inmates elected to attend my program. Dressed identically in maroon T-shirts and pocketless jeans, they entered in all colors, sizes, and shapes. Their attitudes ranged from hangdog to Queen of Sheba. Most had shown up not to write but to check out that guy who’d been on Oprah. I spoke. We tried some exercises. They asked questions: You met Oprah? What’s Oprah like? At the end of the session, they challenged me to return. I said I would if they promised to write something. Anything. Two pages, minimum. We’d listen and react to one another’s work. Each woman’s draft would be her ticket into the workshop.
At session two, fifteen of the original thirty were no-shows. Crystal wanted compliments, not feedback. Asaya said she’d meant to be vague and unclear — that her business wasn’t necessarily the reader’s business. Diane, at fifty-four the senior member of the group, eyed me suspiciously. She’d written under a pseudonym, Natasha, and sought reassurance that I would never, ever read her work aloud. I predicted Diane would be gone by session three.
But it was at the end of session three that Diane couldn’t keep her writing to herself. Her shaky hand went up. She asked if she could read what she’d written. Then, in a soft, tentative voice, she began a disjointed three-page chronicle of her horrific life story: incest, savage abuse, spousal homicide, lawyerly indifference, and parallel battles against breast cancer and the dark depression that often accompanies long-term incarceration and shuts down hope. When Diane stopped reading, there was silence. Then, applause. The dam of distrust had been sledgehammered. The women’s writing began to flow.
It’s been two-and-a-half years since those first sessions. The brave writers who have stayed the course have faced their demons without flinching, revised relentlessly, and become a community. Through their autobiographical writing they have given voice to a voiceless population, and I have come to know them not merely as the drug abusers, gang members, thieves, and killers they have been, but also as the complex, creative works-in-progress they are. Each woman has discovered the intertwined power of the written word and the power that resides within, even at an institution that exists to render her powerless.
They are tough cookie
s, these students of mine, not because of their crimes but because they will be neither defeated nor silenced, and I am proud to tell you that the anthology of their autobiographical writing, which I am currently editing, will be published by ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2003. Its title is Couldn’t Keep It To Myself: Testimonies From Our Imprisoned Sisters.
I have learned a lot from these gals — important, useful stuff for me to know both as a writer and as a human being. When you give, you get back. The NEA taught me that. Please continue to safeguard the awarding of fellowships to writers of promise and to work toward bringing in from the cold our brothers and sisters who paint and sculpt and dance and make art with cameras. Art, as you know, illuminates life and in these confusing and scary times, we can all use a little illumination.
Thanks for listening.
—Wally Lamb
1
On the afternoon of October 12, 1990, my twin brother Thomas entered the Three Rivers, Connecticut Public Library, retreated to one of the rear study carrels, and prayed to God the sacrifice he was about to commit would be deemed acceptable. Mrs. Theresa Fenneck, the children’s librarian, was officially in charge that day because the head librarian was at an all-day meeting in Hartford. She approached my brother and told him he’d have to keep his voice down or else leave the library. She could hear him all the way up at the front desk. There were other patrons to consider. If he wanted to pray, she told him, he should go to a church, not the library.
Thomas and I had spent several hours together the day before. Our Sunday afternoon ritual dictated that I sign him out of the state hospital’s Settle Building, treat him to lunch, visit our stepfather or take him for a drive, and then return him to the hospital before suppertime. At a back booth at Friendly’s, I’d sat across from my brother, breathing in his secondary smoke and leafing for the umpteenth time through his scrapbook of clippings on the Persian Gulf crisis. He’d been collecting them since August as evidence that Armageddon was at hand—that the final battle between good and evil was about to be triggered. “America’s been living on borrowed time all these years, Dominick,” he told me. “Playing the world’s whore, wallowing in our greed. Now we’re going to pay the price.”
He was oblivious of my drumming fingers on the tabletop. “Not to change the subject,” I said, “but how’s the coffee business?” Ever since eight milligrams of Haldol per day had quieted Thomas’s voices, he had managed a small morning concession in the patients’ lounge—coffee and cigarettes and newspapers dispensed from a metal cart more rickety than his emotional state. Like so many of the patients there, he indulged in caffeine and nicotine, but it was the newspapers that had become Thomas’s most potent addiction.
“How can we kill people for the sake of cheap oil? How can we justify that?” His hands flapped as he talked; his palms were grimy from newsprint ink. Those dirty hands should have warned me—should have tipped me off. “How are we going to prevent God’s vengeance if we have that little respect for human life?”
Our waitress approached—a high school kid wearing two buttons: “Hi, I’m Kristin” and “Patience, please. I’m a trainee.” She asked us if we wanted to start out with some cheese sticks or a bowl of soup.
“You can’t worship both God and money, Kristin,” Thomas told her. “America’s going to vomit up its own blood.”
About a month later—after President Bush had declared that “a line has been drawn in the sand” and conflict might be inevitable—Mrs. Fenneck showed up at my front door. She had sought me out—had researched where I lived via the city directory, then ridden out of the blue to Joy’s and my condo and rung the bell. She pointed to her husband, parked at the curb and waiting for her in their blue Dodge Shadow. She identified herself as the librarian who’d called 911.
“Your brother was always neat and clean,” she told me. “You can’t say that about all of them. But you have to be firm with these people. All day long, day in, day out, the state hospital van just drops them downtown and leaves them. They have nowhere to go, nothing to do. The stores don’t want them—business is bad enough, for pity’s sake. So they come to the library and sit.” Her pale green eyes jerked repeatedly away from my face as she spoke. Thomas and I are identical twins, not fraternal—one fertilized egg that split in half and went off in two directions. Mrs. Fenneck couldn’t look at me because she was looking at Thomas.
It was cold, I remember, and I invited her into the foyer, no further. For two weeks I’d been channel-flipping through the Desert Shield updates, swallowing back the anger and guilt my brother’s act had left me with, and hanging up in the ears of reporters and TV types—all those bloodsuckers trying to book and bag next week’s freak show. I didn’t offer to take Mrs. Fenneck’s coat. I stood there, arms crossed, fists tucked into my armpits. Whatever this was, I needed it to be over.
She said she wanted me to understand what librarians put up with these days. Once upon a time it had been a pleasant job—she liked people, after all. But now libraries were at the mercy of every derelict and homeless person in the area. People who cared nothing about books or information. People who only wanted to sit and vegetate or run to the toilet every five minutes. And now with AIDS and drugs and such. The other day they’d found a dirty syringe jammed behind the paper towel dispenser in the men’s restroom. In her opinion, the whole country was like a chest of drawers that had been pulled out and dumped onto the floor.
I’d answered the door barefoot. My feet were cold. “What do you want?” I asked her. “Why did you come here?”
She’d come, she said, because she hadn’t had any appetite or a decent night’s sleep since my brother did it. Not that she was responsible, she pointed out. Clearly, Thomas had planned the whole thing in advance and would have done it whether she’d said anything to him or not. A dozen people or more had told her they’d seen him walking around town, muttering about the war with that one fist of his up in the air, as if it was stuck in that position. She’d noticed it herself, it always looked so curious. “He’d come inside and sit all afternoon in the periodical section, arguing with the newspapers,” she said. “Then, after a while, he’d quiet down. Just stare out the window and sigh, with his arm bent at the elbow, his hand making that fist. But who’d have taken it for a sign? Who in their right mind would have put two and two together and guessed he was planning to do that?”
No one, I said. None of us had.
Mrs. Fenneck said she had worked for many years at the main desk before becoming the children’s librarian and remembered my mother, God rest her soul. “She was a reader. Mysteries and romances, as I recall. Quiet, always very pleasant. And neat as a pin. It’s a blessing she didn’t live to see this, poor thing. Not that dying from cancer is any picnic, either.” She said she’d had a sister who died of cancer, too, and a niece who was battling it now. “If you ask me,” she said, “one of these days they’re going to get to the bottom of why there’s so much of it now and the answer’s going to be computers.”
If she had kept yapping, I might have burst into tears. Might have cold-cocked her. “Mrs. Fenneck!” I said.
All right, she said, she would just ask me point-blank: did my father or I hold her responsible in any way for what had happened?
“You?” I asked. “Why you?”
“Because I spoke crossly to him just before he did it.”
It was myself I held responsible—for having tuned out all that babble about Islam and Armageddon, for not having called the doctors and bugged them about his medication. And then, for having gone to the emergency room and made what was probably the wrong decision. That Sunday at Friendly’s, he’d ordered only a glass of water. “I’m fasting,” he’d said, and I’d purposely asked nothing, ignored those dirty hands of his, ordered myself a cheeseburger and fries.
I told Mrs. Fenneck she wasn’t responsible.
Then, would I be willing to put it in writing? That it had nothing to do with her? It was her husband’s idea,
she said. If I could just write it down on a piece of paper, then maybe she could get a decent night’s sleep, eat a little of her dinner. Maybe she could have a minute’s worth of peace.
Our eyes met and held. This time she didn’t look away. “I’m afraid,” she said.
I told her to wait there.
In the kitchen, I grabbed a pen and one of those Post-it notepads that Joy lifts from work and keeps by our phone. (She takes more than we’ll ever use. The other day I shoved my hands into the pockets of her winter coat looking for change for the paperboy and found dozens of those little pads. Dozens.) My hand shook as I wrote down the statement that gave Mrs. Fenneck what she wanted: food, sleep, legal absolution. I didn’t do it out of mercy. I did it because I needed her to shut her mouth. To get her the fuck out of my foyer. And because I was afraid, too. Afraid for my brother. Afraid to be his other half.
I went back to the front hall and reached toward Mrs. Fenneck, stuck the yellow note to her coat lapel. She flinched when I did it, and that involuntary response of hers satisfied me in some small, cheap way. I never claimed I was lovable. Never said I wasn’t a son of a bitch.
I know what I know about what happened in the library on October 12, 1990, from what Thomas told me and from the newspaper stories that ran alongside the news about Operation Desert Shield. After Mrs. Fenneck’s reprimand by the study carrel, Thomas resumed his praying in silence, reciting over and over Saint Matthew’s gospel, chapter 5, verses 29 and 30: “And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee . . . and if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee: For it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.” Thomas removed from his sweatshirt jacket the ceremonial Gurkha knife our stepfather had brought back as a souvenir from World War II. Until the afternoon before, it had hung sheathed and forgotten on an upstairs bedroom wall at the house where my brother and I grew up.
