by Sigrid Nunez
On Broadway, at Astor Place, I see a dog all by itself surrounded by belongings: a full backpack, a few paperbacks, a thermos, bedding, an alarm clock, and some styrofoam food containers. It’s the human absence that makes the scene so unbearably poignant.
I see a drunk who’s pissed himself sprawled in a doorway. I Am the Architect of My Own Destiny, his T-shirt says. Nearby, a panhandler with a handmade sign: I used to be somebody.
In a bookstore: a man goes from table to table, laying a hand on this book then that one without examining any one of them further. I follow him for a while, curious to see which book this method tells him to buy. But he leaves the store empty-handed.
Here is something I did not see but would have seen if I’d rounded the street corner just minutes sooner: a person jumping from the window of an office building. By the time I got there the body had been covered up. All I was able to find out later was that it was a woman in her late fifties. Just before noon on a fine fall day, on a densely crowded block. How did she judge it, I wonder, so as not to hit anyone? Or was she just . . . were we all just . . . lucky.
Graffiti on Philosophy Hall: The examined life ain’t worth it either.
• • •
A literary awards ceremony at a private club on the Upper East Side. I emerge from the subway at Fifth Avenue. The club is six blocks away. I see two people who’ve also just come up from the subway: a woman who looks to be in her sixties accompanied by a man about half that age. They could be going any of a million places in that neighborhood, but it occurs to me that they’re headed where I’m headed. Which turns out to be correct. What was it about them? I can’t say. It’s an enigma to me that people in the literary world should be so identifiable. Like the time I passed three men in a booth in a restaurant in Chelsea and pegged them even before I heard one say, That’s the great thing about writing for The New Yorker.
• • •
In the mail, an advance reading copy of a novel and a letter from the editor: I hope you’ll find this debut novel as deceptively profound as I did.
• • •
Lecture notes.
All writers are monsters. Henry de Montherlant.
Writers are always selling somebody out. [Writing] is an aggressive, even a hostile act . . . the tactic of a secret bully. Joan Didion.
Every journalist . . . knows . . . what he does is morally indefensible. Janet Malcolm.
Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does more than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read. Rebecca West.
There seems to be no remedy for the vice of literature; those afflicted persist in the habit despite the fact that there is no longer any pleasure to be derived from it. W. G. Sebald.
Whenever he saw his books in a store, he felt like he’d gotten away with something, said John Updike.
Who also expressed the opinion that a nice person wouldn’t become a writer.
The problem of self-doubt.
The problem of shame.
The problem of self-loathing.
You once put it like this: When I get so fed up with something I’m writing that I decide to quit, and then, later, I find myself irresistibly drawn back to it, I always think: Like a dog to its vomit.
If someone asks me what I teach, one of my colleagues says, why is it that I can never say “writing” without feeling embarrassed.
• • •
Office hours. The student refers to a certain fact about his life and says, But you already knew that. No, I say, I didn’t. He looks annoyed. What do you mean? Didn’t you read my story? I explain that I never automatically assume a work of fiction is autobiographical. When I ask him why he thinks I should have known that he was writing about himself, he looks puzzled and says, Who else would I be writing about?
• • •
A friend of mine who is working on a memoir says, I hate the idea of writing as some kind of catharsis, because it seems like that can’t possibly produce a good book.
• • •
You cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing, warns Natalia Ginzburg.
Turn then to Isak Dinesen, who believed that you could make any sorrow bearable by putting it into a story or telling a story about it.
• • •
I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest. Woolf is talking about writing about her mother, thoughts of whom had obsessed her between the ages of thirteen (her age when her mother died) and forty-four, when, in a great, apparently involuntary rush, she wrote To the Lighthouse. After which the obsession ceased: I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.
Q. Does the effectiveness of catharsis depend on the quality of the writing? And if a person finds catharsis by writing a book, does it matter whether or not the book is any good?
My friend is also writing about her mother.
Writers love quoting Milosz: When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.
After I put my mother in a novel she never forgave me.
Rather than, say, Toni Morrison, who called basing a character on a real person an infringement of copyright. A person owns his life, she says. It’s not for another to use it for fiction.
• • •
In a book I am reading the author talks about word people versus fist people. As if words could not also be fists. Aren’t often fists.
• • •
A major theme in the work of Christa Wolf is the fear that writing about someone is a way of killing that person. Transforming someone’s life into a story is like turning that person into a pillar of salt. In an autobiographical novel, she describes a recurring childhood dream in which she kills mother and father by writing about them. The shame of being a writer haunted her all her life.
• • •
I wonder how many psychoanalysts actually do for their patients what Woolf did for herself. I bet not many.
• • •
They can debunk Freud’s ideas all they want, you said. But no one can say the man wasn’t a great writer.
Was Freud even a real person? I once heard a student ask.
It was a psychoanalyst, of course, who came up with the term writer’s block. Edmund Bergler was, like Freud, an Austrian Jew, and he was a follower of Freudian theory. According to Wikipedia, he believed that masochism was the root cause of all other human neuroses, that the only thing worse than man’s inhumanity to man was man’s inhumanity to himself.
(But a woman writer has a double dose, said Edna O’Brien: the masochism of the woman and that of the artist.)
• • •
The invitation was to teach a writing workshop at a treatment center for victims of human trafficking. The person who asked was someone I knew, or rather, used to know: we had been friends in college. Back then she, too, wanted to be a writer. Instead she became a psychologist. For the past ten years she’d been working at the treatment center, which was connected to a large psychiatric hospital a short bus ride from Manhattan. The women she worked with had responded well to art therapy (I would later see some of their drawings and find them highly disturbing). She thought writing might be even more helpful, as it appeared to have been very helpful to other trauma victims, such as war veterans with PTSD.
I wanted to do it. As a community service, as a favor to an old friend, and as a writer.
I thought of the baroquely pierced and tattooed young woman I’d met some months earlier, in a workshop I’d taught at a summer writers’ conference. It was a fiction workshop, though what she was writing was closer to memoir—call it autofiction, self-fiction, reality fiction, whatever—the first-person story of Larette, a sex-trafficked girl.
Her writing was good for three main reasons: a lack of sentimentality, a lack of self-pity, and a sense of humor. (If the last sounds unlikely, try to think of a good book that, no matter how dark the subject, does not include something comic. It’s because a person has a sense of humor that we feel we can trust them, says Milan Kundera.) One of those life histories that had to be toned down to avoid straining belief. (Readers would be amazed how often writers do this.) She had spent two years in a residential recovery home, fighting drug addiction, shame, and the temptation to flee back to her pimp, whose name was tattooed in three different places on her body. Later, she enrolled in a community college, where she took her first writing course.
Like many people I’ve met, she believes that writing saved her life.
About writing as self-help you were always skeptical. You liked quoting Flannery O’Connor: Only those with a gift should be writing for public consumption.
But how rare to meet a person who thinks what they’re writing is meant to stay private. And how common to meet one who thinks what they’re writing entitles them not just to public consumption but to fame.
You thought people were on the wrong track. You thought that what they were searching for—self-expression, community, connection—would more likely be found elsewhere. Collective singing and dancing. Quilting bees. That’s where people would have turned in the past, you said. Writing was too hard! Not for nothing did Henry James say anyone who wants to be a writer must inscribe on his banner the one word loneliness. Frustration and humiliation, Philip Roth said writing was. He compared it to baseball: You fail two-thirds of the time.
That was the reality, you said. But in our graphomaniac age, the reality had gotten lost. Now everyone writes just like everyone poops, and at the word gift many want to reach for a gun. The rise of self-publishing was a catastrophe, you said. It was the death of literature. Which meant the death of culture. And Garrison Keillor was right, you said: When everyone’s a writer, no one is. (Though, in fact, this was exactly the kind of statement you used to warn us to be on guard against: sounds good, but if you press on it, it falls apart.)
None of this was as new as it might sound.
To write and have something published is less and less something special. Why not me, too? everyone asks.
Wrote French critic Sainte-Beuve.
In 1839.
Not that you discouraged me from teaching at the VOT center. I imagine it could be very depressing, you said, but it won’t be uninteresting.
In fact, it was your idea that I should write about it.
• • •
The women at the center were encouraged to keep journals. Or, as my friend the psychologist put it, to journal. The journals were meant to be private, she said. Some of the women had been alarmed by the thought that someone might read what they’d written, and she’d had to assure them this wouldn’t happen. They could write whatever they wished, with perfect freedom, knowing no one else would read it. Not even she would read it.
She suggested that those for whom English was a second language write in their native tongue.
Some women were careful to hide their journals when they weren’t using them. Others carried their journals always with them. But a few insisted on destroying whatever they’d written immediately or soon after they’d written it. And that was fine, too, she told them.
The women were asked to write every day for at least fifteen minutes, quickly, not stopping to ponder too long or let themselves be distracted. They wrote in longhand, in notebooks provided by the center (my friend believes in studies that show longhand is better for concentration and that a lined page is more welcoming than a blank screen for receiving intimacies and secrets).
Of course, there were some who refused to journal.
The same women who get angry with me for expecting them to revisit bad experiences, she said. You have to understand what these women have been through. For most of them the abuse didn’t begin with the trafficking. (I must have experienced violence from birth.) Some were deliberately put in harm’s way—in some cases out-and-out sold—by members of their own family. And just because they’re not being abused anymore doesn’t mean they’re not still hurting. At some point I always ask them what they think would be the best thing that could happen to them, and I can’t tell you how many say, I think the best thing for me would be to die.
But there was a group of women who took happily to journaling, often writing for much longer than fifteen minutes a day. My friend wanted to give these women a chance to be in a workshop, a safe place where they could not only write but share their writing with one another and an instructor. Among those who’d signed up, she said, I could count on a certain level of English, though not every one was a native speaker. Even the native speakers, however, had expressed worries about their writing ability and were particularly concerned about spelling and grammar. She had told the women that, as in their journals, they should pay no attention to spelling and grammar.
So it’s important that you ignore those errors, she told me. I know that won’t be easy for you, but these women have enough problems with self-esteem, and we don’t want to inhibit them.
I thought of a poem by Adrienne Rich that includes lines written by a student in the open admissions program in the City College of New York. People suffer highly in poverty. . . . Some of the suffering are:
My friend showed me examples of the artwork the women had done: headless bodies, houses in flames, men with the mouths of ferocious animals, naked children stabbed in the genitals or through the heart.
She had me listen to tapes of testimony some of the women had given, and the drawings came alive.
I keep calling them women, she said. But we see many who are still girls. And those are some of the most tragic cases. We have a fourteen-year-old who was rescued last month from a house where she’d been kept chained to a cot in the basement. When the sexual abuse is compounded by captivity—that’s when the damage is most severe. At the moment this girl is unable to speak. There’s nothing wrong with her vocal organs—not that doctors can find, anyway—but she insists on remaining mute. We see this kind of psychosomatic symptom from time to time: mutism, blindness, paralysis.
My friend wanted me to watch a Swedish film called Lilya 4-Ever. In fact I had already seen it, years ago, when it first came out. At the time, I didn’t know that it was based on a true story. I didn’t know much of anything about it; I had decided to see it one day on the spur of the moment because I had liked an earlier film by the same director and because it was playing close by. It is more than possible that if I had known what to expect I might never have gone to see Lilya 4-Ever. As it was, the experience was indelible: even more than a decade later, there was no need for me to see it again.
Lilya is a sixteen-year-old girl living with her mother in a bleak housing project somewhere in the former Soviet Union. She believes that she and her mother and the mother’s boyfriend are all about to emigrate to the US, but when the time comes Lilya is left behind. Then a heartless aunt takes over the apartment where Lilya has been living, forcing her to move into what is no more than a filthy hole. Abandoned, moneyless, Lilya skids into prostitution.
From the people around her, Lilya has learned to expect only cruelty and betrayal. The exception is Volodya, a boy a few years younger than Lilya who is much abused by his drunken father. Volodya loves Lilya, who befriends and shelters him after his father throws him out. Together the two waifs share a few happy moments. But, for the most part, Lilya’s life is grim.
Hope arrives in the form of a handsome, soft-voiced young Swede named Andrei. He tells Lilya, who falls instantly in love with him, that, with his help, she can move to Sweden and start a new life. She jumps at the chance, in spite of what this will mean for Volodya, who in fact responds to the departure of his only friend in the world by killing himself.
Volodya continues to ap
pear in the film in the form of an angel.
Lilya arrives in Sweden, alone (Andrei has promised to join her later), and is met at the airport by the man she’s been told will take her under his wing. The man drives her to her new home, a tower apartment high above the street, and locks her in. Rapunzel, Rapunzel. He is the first to rape her. Lilya’s new life has begun. Now day after day she is delivered into the hands of clients—a broad range of ages and types—none of whom allows either her obvious youth or the obvious fact that she is acting against her will to interfere with his lust. On the contrary, everyone behaves as if sex slavery is what Lilya has been put on this earth for.
The first time she tries to escape, Lilya is caught and beaten. The second time, she finds herself on an expressway bridge. Though help in the form of a policewoman is near, Lilya panics and jumps.
• • •
After she jumped, the girl on whose life and death Lilya 4-Ever was based was found to have on her body some letters she’d written. This was how her story came to be known.
• • •
When I saw the film, alone, at my small neighborhood art house, it was a weekday afternoon. Only a handful of people were in the audience. I remember, after it was over, having to wait so that I could compose myself before leaving the theater. It was a humiliating feeling. Several rows ahead of me sat another woman who’d come to the theater alone and who was now sobbing. When I finally left she was sitting there still, still sobbing. I felt humiliated for her, too.
• • •
According to my friend, Lilya 4-Ever has often been shown to humanitarian and human rights groups and in schools in areas where girls are known to be especially vulnerable to traffickers.
Not brutal enough was the response from a group of Moldovan prostitutes who were asked to watch the film.
Even more shocking, to me, was hearing the director say that he believed that God took care of Lilya (like Volodya, after her death she appears on-screen as an angel), that without this belief he could not have made the film. I think I would have killed myself, he said.
