Be Careful What You Wish For
“When the Gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.”
–Oscar Wilde
I was always aware of the magic and the misery of being a writer. Like most children, I watched my father carefully and, witnessing both the triumph of his work being praised and the bitterness of rejection, I had a skewed vision of what it might mean to commit. Thus, I did not. While taking a full load of English classes, I majored in history and dismissed suggestions to submit my fiction despite high praise from many qualified people. While I might have been regarded as a child and adult who wrote, I basically saw the profession as hopeless. I failed to submit anything until I was fired from my job and had the time to think about writing something like a novel. How did I write that novel? At waitress stations and on the subway, waiting for buses and doctors, in moments between breakfast and leaving for work, during nights when it was possible to stay awake, typed on an electric typewriter, revised and edited sometimes based on my refusal to retype something.
Hemingway, I believe, advised writers to always have some sort of time pressure to keep the tension up and something left unfinished to inspire urgency. There was never enough time, but writing that first novel, which fictionalized my sister's death, was also deeply painful. I would have to stop when tears choked me or I felt deep shame about daring to tell such a terrible story. We were all about denial, secrets, and repression, but I was always the child who screamed out that the emperor was naked.
When my father drove me to Princeton Junction to catch the train back to New York after visiting, we passed a pig farm, and he would say he liked pigs because they were smart. We would discuss those pigs and their potential for great things. This ritual comforted me. As the daughter of a remote, brilliant man, I longed for his attention and praise. While my mother's approbation, “you are beautiful, good and smart,” barely registered, my father’s full focus on me with ideas about my choices in life felt close to overwhelming.
During most of these trips home, I was in a state of turmoil, resenting my mother or grieving for my sister, or batshit crazy with drugs and drinking. But those errands, picking up some milk or wine for dinner when I was little felt wonderful, I rarely had him to myself. I held my breath, hoping he would recognize my worth and express his love. I listened hard, especially when he, on rare occasions, talked about writing his novels. It appeared to be a combination of fairy dust and drudgery. For so many years I had stood in the doorway of his "back house," watching him, yellow legal pad, a cigarette, in deep, deep concentration. He only looked up when I told him dinner was ready. Sometimes I stood next to him, as close as possible, and inhaled his scent of cigarettes and literature.
As children, when we left for a long trip, Daddy always went back inside the house after we were all in the car. My sister once told me he wrote his novels in these odd gaps of momentum. I thought he was checking the oven, but she said, "This is when he writes his novels." As usual, I believed her and imagined him grabbing those moments at the typewriter, finding the perfect sentence before we drove away.
I thought writing tortured him. He would come in from his backyard office with a sheaf of papers, read aloud to my mother, and then, often, get drunk at dinner and act hateful. A book would be published, and there would be lots of excitement. My sisters and I swore we would go to all the bookstores (back then there were many) and ask for his book and if they didn't have it, demand it be ordered immediately. He circled one sentence in the first manuscript I showed him and said it was good. Nothing else was circled. I took my book and slunk off.
When I was accepted into the MFA program at Brooklyn College he told me it was a stupid decision and I was a loser. I went away to upstate New York to a cheap health spa and cried for days. Then I returned to my answering machine with the news that Harper & Row wanted to buy my first novel. It was the dream. I didn't call my parents. I didn't call anyone. I went to Zabars and bought a coffee cake and some lox and then I stayed home and worried. Finally, I called my mother and told her. "Let me put Daddy on the phone," she said. "No," I said. "Just tell him." She was quiet for a second. "We didn't help you at all," she said. "You did this on your own."
But I wonder about that. I dated a plumber once; his father was a plumber and his grandfather, and I thought this was just the family business. Writing novels wasn't something alien and amazing. It was simply what my brilliant, angry father did. He had a miserable childhood and an alcoholic father, and he wrote a book about it. A speeding, drunken driver killed my sister and I wrote a book about a sister being murdered and the youngest sister nearly killing herself from grief. This was what happened to me.
When my book, Parting is All We Know of Heaven was published, I met my parents at a St. Patrick's Day party in Manhattan. By the time I arrived, my father had had a lot to drink. He told me I was wrong to write about my sister and that he thought I should reconsider my decision to be a writer. He was mean to me and I ended up the night curled into a fetal position on my boyfriend's bed. "I can't believe you care about what he said," my boyfriend said. "Why do you care?"
I went to therapy and sat across the room from the woman who had saved my life after my sister was killed. She asked me, "Is that your book?" I nodded. "Can I see it?"
I handed it to her. "He doesn't love me, "I sobbed. "I wrote the book so he'd love me." The truth was humiliating and sad. She smiled and said. "But you wrote a book, Molly. I'm so proud of you." The writer inside me, my father's daughter, drew herself up and smiled back.
photo by Zac Ong
Still, life was unexpectedly complicated by this publishing triumph. One day, running in Central Park, I heard my name being called and looked back to see myself pursued by The Linen Guy, whom I had not seen in years. After I stopped working for him, divorced my husband, got sober, and moved to Manhattan, we fell out of touch. Problematic was his less than flattering appearance in my novel. Despite the name change and the circumstances of my family, his character as an adulterous lover was obviously based on him. Briefly, I considered an attempt to outrun him, but he was in excellent shape.
"What are you doing here?" he said.
"I live here now."
"You look amazing."
"I stopped drinking."
"Can I take you out?"
I was thin again. But I didn't trust him. "Are you divorced?"
"Yes. I have a place in the West Village. Let me take you out."
The promised advance was not forthcoming, and it would be nearly a year before the actual book was published. What harm could it do to be fed by this person who would definitely take me somewhere fancy? He had always made me laugh. In his own arrogant fashion, I felt he cared for me. So I agreed. As we grew closer, started sleeping together, and making tentative plans for the future, I felt my book hanging above my head like a guillotine. He was portrayed as a cheating, entitled man who had a sadistic streak during sex. Still, until he announced a buying trip to China that would keep him out of the country for at least a month, we were just dating. I told him about the book deal but remained mute about the details of the story, details that included his house in the Hamptons where I once opened a closet to see all his then-wife's clothes. Oddly, I had somehow decided he was not real, but he was, and my memory was flawless.
I gave him a copy of the manuscript a few days before he left for China. "Read this," I said. "Call me when you get home if you still want to."
He never called.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach