Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

by Dani Shapiro

  Over the years, I have learned to deflect this exchange so that it doesn’t leave its trace on me. So that those words don’t add up, stick to one another, form a residue. When faced with the exposure question, I bring to mind a conversation I once witnessed between the memoirist Frank McCourt and a woman he’d just met at a dinner party.

  Her: I feel like I know everything about you.

  Him (not even blinking): Oh, darlin’. It’s just a book.

  It’s just a book. He delivered it with impeccable timing, and in the kindest possible way but it . . . well . . . it shut her up. But the truth is that we can feel exposed by our books—if we let that happen. And not just the memoirists among us. Fiction can be even more exposing than memoir—a map to the inner world, the subconscious internal workings, the obsessions and fears and secret joys of the writer. So as we’re finishing, as we reach the end of a process that has been private and solitary, if we find ourselves starting to wonder what people will think of us, out there in the wide world, I would suggest that there’s a very different way of considering this question of exposure.

  You have not stripped naked.

  This thing you’ve been writing is not a diary.

  Quite the opposite.

  Contrary to the notion that you’ve splattered your most intimate feelings all over the page, that you are now visible without even knowing it, as if standing spread-eagled in one of those airport security machines that can see through your clothes, you have, rather, chosen every single word. You’ve crafted each sentence. You’ve decided what to put in, what to leave out. You have chinked away, bit by bit, at a story. Creating something where before there was nothing. This story has taken and shaped your history, your heritage, your subconscious mind, your ideas, traumas, concerns. And if you’ve done your job it has also transformed all this raw data, this noisy chorus, into something cohesive and rewarding.

  If literature is, to use Updike’s phrase, that “most subtle instrument of self-examination known to man,” it is also only thus because the writer has caught and wound herself around the thread of the universal. The truest and most artful self-revelation occurs when the self is subsumed to the art. The self becomes merely the vehicle. The art does not say look at me. If anything, it reflects ourselves back at us, saying: look at yourself.

  And so. I cannot tell you that you will not be on the receiving end of the raised eyebrow, the small smile, the presumed intimacy with those who will think that now they know you. I cannot tell you that these moments will not bring with them an unease, a discomfort that will (irony alert!) in fact make you feel—however briefly—exposed by the very question. But I can tell you that the writing of a book, no matter how deeply, profoundly personal—if it is literature, if you have attended to the formidable task of illuminating the human heart in conflict with itself—will do the opposite of expose you. It will connect you. With others. With the world around you. With yourself.

  RISK

  The writer Valerie Martin once said that there are three kinds of dispositions: a good disposition, a bad disposition, and a writer’s disposition. This simple statement has stayed with me because there is something about the writer’s disposition—or the artistic temperament—that requires a particular fusing of traits. If any one of these traits is missing, the whole delicate apparatus will eventually fall apart.

  There is the gift, of course, which is inseparable from—though not the same as—a need, a hunger for expression. It is possible to have the gift without the need. It is also possible to have the need without the gift. The former can lead to a happy and contented life. I have seen promising young writers discard their gift, shrugging it off like a wrap on a warm summer evening. They don’t care. They don’t want or need it. The other, however, is a painful situation: the hunger for self-expression without the gift—that ineffable thing you can’t teach, or buy, or will into being. This story often ends in resentment and unfulfillment. Then there is endurability—Ted Solotaroff’s word—the ability to withstand the years in the cold, the solitary life, the affronts and indignities, the painful rejections that never end. The gift and the hunger are nothing without that endurability. But up there with the gift, the hunger, and endurance is another trait, without which the writer’s life can’t possibly work.

  Remember that New Yorker cartoon about writer’s block? In the frame entitled “Writer’s Block: Permanent,” the writer is standing in front of a fish store bearing his name. While this cartoon is about that old bugaboo, writer’s block, it’s also about risk aversion. The writer-turned-fishmonger caved in to what John Gregory Dunne called “failure of nerve.” And even though he’s just a cartoon character, I think of him often. His resigned posture. His joyless gaze into the middle distance.

  The writing life is full of risk. There is the creative risk—the willingness to fall flat on our face again and again—but there is also practical risk. As in, it may not work out. We don’t get brownie points for trying really hard. When we set our hopes on this life, we are staking our future on the contents of our own minds. On our ability to create and continue to create. We have nothing but this. No 401(k), no pension plan, often no IRA, no plans—god knows—for retirement. We have to accept living with profound uncertainty. I have a friend, a talented journalist with a solid but undecorated career, who has made his choices, again and again, based on his assessment of safety. This assignment and not that one. This book proposal. That magazine contract. When I listen to him talk about his fears—what will happen when he gets older, when he and his wife can’t work as hard anymore, when it’s time for their kids to go to college—he unwittingly throws me into a panic. I become acutely aware of the choices that I have made, and continue to make every day—well into midlife now.

  There are no half measures when it comes to risk. Risk means that gut-wrenching feeling, having your heart in your throat, not knowing what the next book is, not knowing where the next check is coming from or when, not being able to project a year, two, or ten into the future, not having a plan. Which is not to say that writers are irresponsible children. I have a mortgage that somehow gets paid each month, along with health insurance premiums. My husband and I have modest savings and wills. But our finances would give my journalist friend a heart attack. We are always one potential disaster away from . . . well, potential disaster. A health crisis. A tree falling on the roof. A disability. What then?

  Of course this keeps me up at night. My husband and I walk a path lit by uncertainty. We are always accommodating to a new situation. We never know what the next day will bring. Our lives are affected by other people’s opinions and decisions. We are building skyscrapers from the top down. Sometimes, we end up with a pile of rubble. Occasionally, a gleaming tower.

  Our son has a front-row seat to our joys and disappointments. One year, in Paris, the three of us went out to a late dinner to celebrate my memoir Devotion’s improbable and completely unexpected appearance near the top of the Los Angeles Times best-seller list. Another year, he saw his father, pale and anxious because an investor had pulled out of a film that had already gone into preproduction.

  But what I hope is that Jacob sees his parents doing what they love, doing what they must. Every day is different. Surprises happen. In our household, it’s feast or famine. All this may make him want to be a fishmonger when he grows up. He may long for security and consistency. And who could blame him? But if he is an artist—if he possesses that fusion of gift, hunger, endurability, and, finally, a willingness to embrace risk—he won’t have much choice in the matter. This life chooses us.

  ON HAVING THE LAST WORD

  I can’t tell you when my mother and I began the fight that lasted the whole of our lives together but I know the moment it ended. On a beautiful late spring evening, I pulled into my driveway and saw Michael standing on our front porch, phone in hand. I lowered my car window and he looked at me and I knew that my mother was dead.

  The final years of our relationship had been marked b
y long periods of estrangement. When Jacob was ill, I couldn’t tolerate her selfishness, her sudden rages. Even this—my child’s illness—became a weapon in her hands, one that she used to hurt me. The more I pulled away in order to protect myself, the more she went on the attack. I stopped answering phone calls, letters, faxes, messages, UPS deliveries. Everything I had in me—everything I had to give—went to my son. It was only after Jacob was stable and my mother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer that I once again tried to be a daughter to her. I visited her in the city, held her hand at doctors’ appointments, brought her to our home in Connecticut. As she drifted in and out of consciousness, I sat by her bedside. Friends suggested that this was an opportunity for closure; perhaps she and I would finally be able to talk things through. But I don’t believe in closure. My relationship with my mother was going to die as it had lived: tortured, dangling, forever mired in lost opportunity and sorrow.

  The most difficult writing assignment I have ever undertaken was my mother’s eulogy. There were no other children. No friends. Hardly any family. I wanted to be true to my mother—to her vitality, her powerful instinct for survival—but I also wanted to be true to myself. As I wrestled with what to say, I came to realize something profound: because I was alive, and she was dead, I would, for the rest of my life, have the last word.

  Up until the time that she fell ill, my mother had a voice—and she used it. If she felt angered, or wronged, by something I had written, she wrote to me, or called and yelled; she wrote to newspapers; she complained to booksellers; she proposed that the 92nd Street Y allow her to teach a course about the mother and daughter in Jewish literature. During the years of our estrangement, she showed up at my readings and glared at me from the back row. When it came to my writing life, her rage was part of our dialogue. I wrote, she ranted. But then she was dead. Gone. She would never again fight back. I could write whatever I wanted, with no fear of wounding her, and without fear of repercussion.

  Right?

  Well, no. Not quite. Because I have discovered that having the last word comes with some very heavy baggage. After a person is gone, everything we write about them becomes a eulogy of sorts. It extends and expands their identity and reputation in the world, even if just among a group of readers. Literature is more permanent than the characters who live within its pages. And so the grappling begins. We weigh our responsibilities against our creative impulses. We wonder if simply being aware is enough—its own protection against doing damage. We decide, ultimately, what we, the living, can live with. Because we do have the last word—all of us, whether writers or not. Because we are here, walking this earth, striding over bones, breathing ashes. We remember. That memory is part of our consciousness. And if we are writers, we do what writers do with our consciousness: we set pen to page and see what emerges. We do not do so with impunity but, rather, with grave misgivings, courage, empathy, discomfort. With unresolveable questions in our hearts. We know that some day we, too, will be gone. That this last word is fleeting. That this last word is not, in fact, the last word. But it is all we have.

  TRIBE

  As I write these words, I am, of course, alone. It’s the middle of the day and I have barely stepped outside except to pick up a couple of envelopes full of books and manuscripts that FedEx left on the porch. I have spoken to no one since seven o’clock this morning. I’m wearing the ratty T-shirt I slept in last night. The house is silent. A crow caws outside my office window.

  These solitary days are my lifeline. They are the lifeline of every writer I know. We hold on to our solitude, fiercely protect these empty days. But at the same time, we long for community. We have no water cooler. No office gossip. No Friday night drinks after work. No weekend softball game. We’re outcasts and loners, more comfortable being out of step than part of a group. If pressed, you’d find that most of us had not pledged sororities or fraternities in college. We don’t tend to be members of clubs. We approach themed parties, baby showers, boys’ nights out, with something like dread. Back when I lived in Brooklyn, our house was in a neighborhood lousy with writers. A quick trip to the corner bodega meant running into writer friends who were out buying a roll of paper towels, sneaking a cigarette. And though from my rural hill, it’s easy to feel sentimental about those encounters, at the time, I recall a certain discomfort on both sides, especially if it was in the midst of a writing day. We liked each other, sure—we might even have a plan to meet later that evening for a drink—but right then we didn’t necessarily want to be reminded of each other’s existence. We were working.

  This prickly, overly sensitive, socially awkward group of people is my tribe. If you’re a writer, they’re yours as well. This is why I’ve never really understood competition and envy among writers. We are competing with ourselves—not with each other. And when we do encounter each other, whether at readings, or conferences, or online, hopefully we recognize ourselves and the strange existence we all share. We realize that we are part of the same species and that we need one another to survive. Though we write our books alone, ultimately everything we do involves some collaboration. Every good book you’ll ever read has the thumbprints of other writers all over it. As we finish a manuscript we may find ourselves thinking of who to turn to, who can help us. Who will read us with generosity and intelligence and care. From where I sit, I can see a pile of manuscripts and galleys across my office floor. They are books by students, former students, teaching colleagues, friends, and strangers—sent to me for blurbs, or with requests to help them find an agent, or whatever. I try to help when I can. When the work is good, I’m eager to be a part of ushering it into the world. Nothing excites me more than wonderful writing. It lifts me up. It shows me what is possible. And it makes me feel connected to this larger community of writers in the world.

  A long time ago, I sent a draft—actual manuscript pages—of an early novel to an idol of mine, the writer Tim O’Brien whose The Things They Carried is one of my favorite books. I got his address from a friend, wrote him a note, and stuffed my manuscript into a manila envelope. I knew that many writers of his stature had sworn off blurbing, believing the whole process to be corrupted and ennervating (a view I sometimes share). I had, in fact, recently received a five-page, single-spaced, typewritten letter from a well-known American novelist, explaining to me his policy of not blurbing. Tim O’Brien and I shared no one in common. He was not a cousin of my best friend’s best friend from camp. So I sent off my manuscript with no real hope. A couple of weeks later, I received a thin letter back. I stood in the lobby of my apartment building and ripped open the envelope.

  Dear Dani Shapiro, it began. It is now three o’clock in the morning—

  I began to cry.

  —and I have just finished your beautiful book.

  I can still see the black ink on the plain white sheet of typing paper, the handwritten scrawl. I’m happy to offer a comment—

  Tim O’Brien had stayed up until three in the morning reading my manuscript. He opened the envelope, began to read, kept reading. He had then felt moved to write me back, along with precious words of support. These twenty years later, I still have not met Tim O’Brien but he is part of my community. I will forever be grateful to him, not only because of his act of generosity to a young writer, but also because he taught me a lesson I have come to live by. I don’t forget what it was like. I reach out a hand when I can. I remind myself every day that it’s about the work. I am here in Connecticut. You might be in Missoula, Montana, or Taos, New Mexico, or Portland, Oregon. You’re in a café, or at a writers’ conference, or at your kitchen table. The words have come easily to you today, or you feel like your head is about to explode. You’re a household name, or laboring in obscurity. I am here, and you are there, and we are in this thing together.

  PATIENCE

  I think of her still. She was one of my most gifted students, and she was endearing, vulnerable—the kind of young woman who compels you to take her under your wing. Which I did. I t
ook her in, crossed all sorts of boundaries. I read and edited her work outside the confines of class, met her for coffee, for drinks, had her to my home for Thanksgiving. She was a quivering creature—everything about her shook: her hands, her legs, her voice. Her fingers—what I most remember are her fingers—bloody and raw, bitten to the quick. Her prose was a wild, galloping horse. Untamed and gorgeous. She ricocheted from the sacred to the ordinary and back again, jammed erudite references into brief asides, created worlds within worlds within worlds.

  When she asked me—halfway through her first novel—what I thought about her getting an agent, I told her to wait. I urged her to finish it first. To spend more time writing in the dark. I counseled patience. She nodded, shook. Bit the skin around her fingernails. She was in a graduate writing workshop filled with good writers. They were all driven, all anxious about being young but not that young. How many years did they have before they would no longer be considered precocious? How many years to make the lists—you know, “Thirty-five under Thirty-five,” “Twenty under Forty.”

  When she came back to class after winter break and told me that she had an agent, I wasn’t surprised. And when the agent sold her unfinished first novel as well as an unwritten second novel in a two-book deal so substantial that it was covered in New York Magazine, I was also unsurprised. She was rare, an original. But I still felt she should have held off. The book wasn’t ready, and now she had a deadline. She had an editor, a publisher, the pressure of a hefty book advance.

  In my workshop full of panicked MFA students, I probably don’t have to tell you how this news was greeted. Students wept in my office. They were sure this spelled the end for them—as if writing were a race. As if the success of one young writer somehow robs another. They were sure that she had grabbed the brass ring. That there was a brass ring. The delicate balance between creativity and ambition, patience and impatience, private and public had been upended.