Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life (3 page)

21

Dani Shapiro

As I write these words, I am sitting in a small chair uphol-stered in a blue-and-white checkered pattern, my feet resting on an ottoman. I am in a guest bedroom in a large and empty house that belongs to a friend. My own home just a few miles away is uninhabitable because of a freak autumn blizzard that caused a loss of power all over New England. For the past couple of days I have burrowed into this chair and haven’t moved for hours. I learned to make myself a cappuccino—caffeine being one of my requirements—using my friend’s machine.

I’ve worked well in this blue-and-white checkered chair. In this strange time-out-of-time, while my son has been sledding with friends and my husband has been driving around helping marooned motorists, I have been here in the silence, save for the hum of the generator. No one knows where I am. The Internet is down. The phone won’t ring. There is no laundry to do, no rearranging of the spice drawer. And so this guest room in a borrowed home has become my room of my own.

We writers spend our days making something out of nothing. There is the blank page (or screen) and then there is the fraught and magical process of putting words down on that page. There is no shape, no blueprint until one emerges from the page, as if through a mist. Is it a mirage? Is it real? We can’t know. And so we need a sense of structure around us. These four walls. This cup. The wheels of the train beneath us. This borrowed room. The weight of this particular pen. Whatever 22

Still Writing

it is that makes us feel secure in our physical space allows us to make the leap, hoping that the page will catch us. Writing, after all, is an act of faith. We must believe, without the slightest evidence that believing will get us anywhere.

Recently I was wandering through one of my favorite stores in a town near my home, and I saw a chaise longue. It wasn’t just any chaise longue, it was the perfect chaise longue, the one I had been dreaming of, the one I hadn’t even known existed. Delicate yet sturdy, covered in an antique Tibetan blanket
.
.
.
oh, how I wanted it. It wasn’t cheap, and I’m not in the habit of buying furniture on impulse, or really at all. I took a photo of the chaise with my phone, and occasionally, in the days that followed, I’d sneak a peek. I went back to the store often enough that the saleswoman asked me if I was coming to visit my chair. Finally, I plunked down my credit card, feeling slightly sick to my stomach. There are a lot of things we need in our home more than a chaise longue covered by an antique Tibetan blanket. A generator, for instance. But I had to have it, and here’s why: although I have an office in my home, it had grown stale. My desk was piled high with papers, mail, and various forms that had nothing to do with my writing life.

My office had begun to feel like a prison rather than a sanctu-ary. It’s walls no longer supported me and the view out my window might as well have been of a brick wall rather than a lovely meadow. I needed a change. I knew I would write well, 23

Dani Shapiro

that I would curl up and
read
well, in that chaise longue. I would settle myself on that soft Tibetan blanket, my notebook in my lap, books strewn all around me. Safe and secure in that space, I’d dare to dig for the elusive words.

In my yoga practice, I have been taught to begin in mountain pose. Mountain pose—standing with feet slightly apart, with head, neck, and pelvis in alignment, eyes softly focused, face relaxed—is a grounding pose. Until we can feel the ground beneath our feet, supporting us, we cannot attempt the other poses: eagle, dancer, warrior. We need to be rooted before we can fly. And although those other poses might look more challenging, sometimes it feels as if mountain pose is the most challenging of all. To be still. To be grounded. To claim one’s place in the world.

In our New Jersey neighborhood when I was young, a family called the Adlers lived a few blocks away. If you can have a crush not just on one person but on an entire family, I had one on the Adlers. The father, mother, two sons and daughter seemed to be everything my small family was not. Their house was alive with comings and goings. Cars and bicycles filled 24

Still Writing

their driveway. They always had visitors for weekend lunch, and dined outdoors in warm weather, the sound of their easy conversation drifting through the hedges that separated their backyard from the street. They were content with each other—

a family who sought out the company only of itself.

Most Sundays, I would ride my bike in circles around their block until one of them would notice me and wave me over.

The kids were all older than me, and they took me in, sort of the way you’d take in a cute but needy stray cat. I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, and they would gently tease me.

Harvey and Eddie Adler would tell me that they’d wait for me and marry me some day. They were both in medical school, and on weekends they’d bring home girlfriends—beautiful, sophisticated, long-haired young women who wore stacked-heel boots and dangling earrings, who were in law school or did social work or advertising. I wanted to be them. I wanted to skip my teenage years entirely and leapfrog into adulthood.

I wanted out of my parents’ quiet house and the feeling I couldn’t shake that something was very wrong.

Sorrow had by then taken up a permanent place in our home. My father injured his back and underwent spinal fusion surgery, which at the time was quite dangerous. Now I understand the chronic pain that would have driven a man to sign up for an operation that carried with it a real risk of paralysis.

But back then, I watched my father fade into an angry, rigid, 25

Dani Shapiro

stricken figure who hung in traction from the door of our den, the folds of his neck squished around his face by a brace, watching
Hogan’s Heroes
. I didn’t know about the failures, both real and self-perceived, that had become too much for him to bear. I didn’t know about the Valium and codeine that he had begun to abuse. I didn’t know anything about my parents’

marriage except that a brittleness existed between them, the air so dry that it seemed always ready to ignite.

It would be twenty more years before I would get the assignment from
The New Yorker
and, through the writing of it, begin to understand. I exhumed the ghost of my father’s early marriage to a young woman who was dying of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma as she walked down the aisle. A woman whose name had never been uttered in our home but who was later described to me, by relatives and friends I interviewed, as the love of his life. As a writer, I assembled and arranged the pieces of my griev-ing young father on the page until they became a portrait—true to memory, reporting, imagination. A collage and an elegy.

All I knew then, with the canny survival instincts of a teenager, was that the Adler house was way more fun than ours. Harvey and Eddie played tennis with me, and on another neighbor’s court I became a strong player, slamming the ball boy-style, low over the net, but mostly I was eyeing Eddie’s thighs, his blond hair glistening in the sun. That tennis court, those young medical students, their noblesse oblige 26

Still Writing

willingness to call me into their midst—those were the hours in which it seemed a door opened to a brighter, easier, happier future. Who knew? Maybe Eddie
would
wait for me.

The year I turned sixteen, the youngest Adler, a dark, wild beauty named Joyce, was found lying unconscious on the floor of her college dormitory room. She’d had a stroke—a freak aneurysm—from which she never recovered. She and I hadn’t been close—I was an interloper, she tolerated me—but I had admired and envied her for what I imagined to be her perfect life. The first time I went to visit her, at a rehabilitation center in New Jersey, she was propped in a wheelchair, her eyes unfocused, her face contorted. She remained quadriplegic and unable to speak, but fully conscious, for the next twenty years until she died. This was my awakening.
Randomness, sudden-ness, the fickle nature of good fortune
. These drilled themselves into me, and eventually became the themes central to all of my work. I started sleeping with Eddie Adler when I was seventeen, and he very quickly broke my heart.
Things are not what
they seem
. The Adler parents were never again able to look at me without thinking:
Why not you?
My father, pale and winc-ing in pain. A lazy Susan in the center of our kitchen table, slowly filling with narcotics. My mother, who hadn’t paid attention to her wedding vows.
For better or for worse.

From the chaise longue, the subway seat, the borrowed room, we see: a man hanging in traction, his angry wife, the 27

Dani Shapiro

strong, tanned thighs of a callow medical student, a beautiful, ruined girl. We see: a still and silent house, a bicycle circling, a girl who is lost, who is confused by all she sees, for which she doesn’t have language. She will grow up to find the language.

Finding the language. It’s what we can hope for.

Ann Sexton once remarked in an interview, when asked why she wrote such dark and painful poems, that pain engraves a deeper memory.
Pain engraves a deeper memory.
Think of a time in your own life when you have experienced a sudden shock, a betrayal, terrible news. Perhaps you remember the weather, the quality of the breeze, a half-full ashtray, a scratch on the wooden floor, the moth-eaten sweater you were wearing, the siren in the distance. Pain carves details into us, yes. I would wager, though, that great joy does as well. Strong emotion, Virginia Woolf said, must leave its trace. Start writing, grow still and quiet, press toward that strong emotion and you will discover it anew. The Adlers were the first of a particular kind of hurt for me. And so they stayed alive inside of me. They are alive still.

These traces that live within us often lead us to our stories.

Joan Didion called this a
shimmer around the edges
. Emerson 28

Still Writing

called it a gleam. “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within,” he wrote in his great essay, “On Self Reliance.” “Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.”
Because it is his.

That knowledge, that
ping,
the hair on our arms standing up, that sudden, electric sense of knowing. We must learn to watch for these moments. To not discount them. To take note:
I’ll have to write about this
. It can happen in a split second, or as a slow dawning. It happens when our histories collide with the present. When it arrives, it’s unmistakable, indelible.

It comes with the certainty of its own rightness. When I first met my husband, at a Halloween party, I thought:
There you
are
. It’s a bit like that with our subject matter. We don’t walk around trolling for ideas like people on beaches with those funny little machines, panning for coins; we don’t go looking on the equivalent of match.com in search of Emerson’s gleam.

But when we stumble upon it, we know. We know because it shimmers. And if you are a writer, you will find that you won’t give up that shimmer for anything. You live for it. Like falling in love, moments that announce themselves as your subject are rare, and there’s a magic to them. Ignore them at your own peril.

29

Dani Shapiro

If you’re waiting for the green light, the go-ahead, the reas-suring wand to tap your shoulder and anoint you as a writer, you’d better pull out your thermos and folding chair because you’re going to be waiting for a good long while. Accountants go to business school and when they graduate with their degrees, they don’t ask themselves whether they have permission to do people’s taxes. Lawyers pass the bar, medical students become doctors, academics become professors, all without considering whether or not they have a right to be going to work.

But nothing and no one gives us permission to wake up and sit at home staring at a computer screen while everybody else sets their alarm clocks, puts on reasonable attire, and boards the train. No one is counting on us, or waiting for whatever we produce. People look at us funny, very possibly because we look funny, strange, and out of sync with the rest of the world after spending our days alone in our bathrobes, talking only to our household pets, if at all. I can’t imagine what my UPS

delivery guy thinks when I crack open the door to sign for a package.
There’s that weird lady again.
My husband, who has been a successful journalist and screenwriter for most of his 30

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adult life, was in his forties before his father stopped asking him when he was going to get a real job.

Sure, there are advanced degrees in writing and various sig-nifiers that a career might be underway, but ultimately a writer is someone who writes. And a writer who writes is one who finds a way to give herself permission. The advanced degree is useless in this regard. No writer I know wakes up in the morning and, while brushing her teeth, thinks:
Check me out, I have
an MFA
. Or, for that matter,
I’ve published x number of books,
or even,
I’ve won the Pulitzer Prize
. There is no magical place of arrival. There is only the solitary self facing the page.

It’s strange and challenging, glorious and devastating, this business of being a writer. Every day, a new indignity. The rejection is without end. Almost any short story you ever see published in
The Atlantic Monthly
or
Harper’s
has been rejected first by
The New Yorker
. Press many of us—including those you’d think might have moved beyond this—and you will discover that we can quote you the most painful passages from our worst reviews. We can give you a list of critics who are dismissive of our work. We’ll tell you which judge on what academic committee blackballed us. On some mornings, these rejections, reviews, enemies seem to stand between us and our work like a mutant army.
Who are you to give yourself
permission to write?
They seem to shout. We writers are a thin-skinned, anxious lot, and often feel like we’re getting away 31