How I Became a Novelist
“At the innermost core of loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one’s lost self.” –Brendan Behan
Unemployment is weird, especially in a city like New York, where everyone seems to be working, from the CEOs getting out of their limousines to the street vendors to regular people with standard jobs. As the weeks passed, I was aware my need for a routine meant I had to invent one. Since I no longer had the money for a gym, I began to run in Central Park, which was just a few blocks from my apartment. I went to more AA meetings, always a good thing and started taking marathon walks from my apartment on 69th and Broadway south to the World Trade Center.
I was deeply lonely, obsessed with reading about loneliness, and remembered a line from one of Sylvia Plath's journals, "How we need another soul to cling to." I watched people leave their apartments on Sunday mornings for brunch, fresh out of bed and lovemaking, or with their children or parents or possibly on a blind date, and I felt that scrim fall between myself and others.
photo by Nathan Dumlao
My childhood prepared me for the solitude. We lived far from most people; my parents were busy, and my sisters were the same. We kept leaving the country to live abroad, and each time, I would lose the set of friends I had finally made. However, I had hopes and dreams of wonderful possibilities. I wrote away for free pamphlets about how to give elegant dinner parties, how to enhance your natural beauty, and how to make your life a thing of beauty. I was hopeful, but that hope now seemed like a cruel lie. Cynthia was the friend who came after the moves, but now she was long dead, and I, despite my efforts, was alive. The depression was extreme, but my therapist would not agree that my life was meaningless; she loved me despite the endless whining, and because of her and my parents, I stayed alive.
Writing was all then. It felt as if I was pouring this pain and desolation into words and sentences and pages. I was typing badly on an electric typewriter, often blinded by tears. I didn't know what I was writing, but the need to tell this story was overwhelming. The need to remember my sister, her love for me, her life which had been smashed to bits by that drunk driver, my pain sliced through what I had been taught:
Deny everything.
Pretend you are fine.
Ignore what is unbearable because if you are a good person, you will bear it in silence.
I would not be silent. I kept writing, page after page, until there were hundreds, and I knew I had crossed a threshold of some sort and could not go back. There was that line from The French Lieutenant's Woman, "My loneliness was so deep… I felt I would drown in it." This was how I felt. Writing was all that kept me from giving up, allowing the water to fill my lungs and accept the final, silent dark.
One day, walking back from a run I ran into an agent I knew from working at Bantam, Doubleday, Dell. I had taken Carol Abel to lunch and we had enjoyed each other's company. "Where did you go?" she asked me.
"I was fired," I said. "I accused Harriet of lying, and she fired me."
"What are you doing now?"
I pointed to my sweat-drenched self, "Running."
She laughed. "Besides that."
"Well," I said, "waitressing and writing."
"What are you writing?"
"I don't know. It's very long. It's fiction. Sort of."
"A novel?"
I shook my head. I didn't write novels. My father wrote novels.
"If it's very long fiction, it sounds like a novel. Can I see it?"
"Really? I mean, it's probably awful."
"I'd like to read it."
By the way, this situation was highly abnormal. Agents don't usually order authors to share their manuscripts. I went to Kinko’s with my three hundred pages, made a copy, and sent it to her. After a week or so, she returned with several questions and comments and suggested edits. This was not easily done as there was no computer, just a typewriter so I retyped all three hundred pages and sent it back.
Meanwhile, I decided to get an MFA in fiction writing at Brooklyn College, the cheapest possible graduate school since it was a CUNY University with low tuition for those who lived in New York. There was a second version of the Brat Pack in literature; Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, and Tama Janowitz were writers who published novels before they were thirty. Their novels were published in paperback, and along with the work, there was a sense that these writers had been anointed as a literary power posse. There was a definite belief that you had little chance of publishing unless you knew the right people. I sort of knew some of the right people, but like my father, I was not someone who liked cliques or felt comfortable sucking up to connected people. My dad supported the Red Sox mainly because they kept losing. After working for the previous ten years, I wanted to teach and also felt ready to return to school. When I told my father, he said, "You're a loser, and that's a useless degree."
A week after being accepted into the master's program at Brooklyn College, Harper & Row offered me a book deal. This came as a complete shock as I had no idea my agent (she was now mine) had actually submitted it. The money seemed huge. My reaction was to stop answering the phone and take off for a five-day cleanse at a very unhealthy fat farm where top models were sent to starve. To say I was in shock is an understatement. Also, I knew my fictionalized portrayal of certain people in the book, Cordelia's surviving sister and her rich boyfriend, were not flattering. However, my main feeling was joy, tempered by fear. Waiting for the bus on my way back to Manhattan, I took my decaffeinated and sugarless body into a store, bought a giant coffee and a chocolate bar, and prepared to face the truth: I was a novelist.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach