Quitting
“I wish I knew how to quit you.” —Jack Twist, Brokeback Mountain
I’ve quit many things, jobs, addictions, husbands, smoking, drugs, self-hatred, countries, and friends. I quit drinking at twenty-six, left a well-paid job with New Jersey Bell telephone at twenty-three, divorced two husbands, quit several cities sometimes willingly, sometimes not; San Francisco, Hoboken, Brooklyn, New York, London, Dallas, and, recently, Chicago. I quit my teaching job at a huge urban high school after I created a writing center and had the running of it taken away; I quit being an adjunct college instructor because the pay was so terrible; I quit weaving because I ran out of steam. After I broke my leg so badly, I stopped hard aerobics and couldn’t walk for three months; I quit yoga because I was no longer devoted. I quit one violent husband I didn’t like, and another I loved very much, but the marriage wasn’t working. I quit multiple days of long-distance biking because I was over it, trying to lose thirty pounds without dieting, and quit staring at the mirror and telling myself I was fat. I quit a boyfriend once who said he loved me after one date, and I quit another who was convinced we should get married and another who told me he admired my upper arm strength. I quit a friend after we reached an impasse, and I’m always trying to quit reality television.
photo by Robert McGowan
The other day I posted on Facebook that I was contemplating quitting writing, but that was a lie. Writing feels like it’s trying to quit me (I need an agent and a publisher), but I know how good I am and know I have a right to get published again. However, the standard response to me at the moment is a variation of ”I love your writing but, the writing is excellent but, you have a fantastic voice but,” so I circled back to the stupid promise of giving up not wanting anyone to say, “Don’t,” although people did.
I have been writing since I was taught to read after being physically abused by an old Irish first-grade teacher who kept hitting me with a yardstick. American kindergarten is all about carrying your chair, snacks, and naps. I was taught to read by a relative of William Butler Yeats, who was also very handsome. My parents thought the whole thing was silly, but I was sure I was going to be killed by this woman. After that, I read everything: instruction manuals, encyclopedias, D.H. Lawrence, all the classics, all the junk, magazines, cereal boxes, everything I could possibly read. And I started writing. Poetry, fiction, letters, journals. I sent away for things like dinosaur bones which almost cost my parents thousands of dollars before they were returned. I had pen pals and copied other writers’ words into my notebooks. I had hundreds of notebooks with half-finished novels, short stories, poetry, shopping lists, letters, and diatribes about men and my mother and my inability to stop drinking. I read things aloud. I read Annabel Lee over the loudspeaker in seventh grade especially liking the part where Poe says, “chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.” I brought a copy of Frank Zappa’s Willie the Pimp, to read in front of my fourth-grade class because my sister said I should. I wrote both my parents’ obituaries. After I started to publish novels and short stories, I read at Nell’s, a super cool eighties NYC club standing on a pool table in a see-through Halston dress. I read at the Nuyorican Poets Café in front of many hipsters, at fundraisers, large crowds, and three people at a bookstore. It was all good.
I’m a writer. You can’t break me. But I’d appreciate an agent and a book deal like in the past, maybe a publicist and someone designing my book cover. I want to be reviewed in the New York Times again, where I received a full-page glowing rave, or anywhere because that means I have an audience, and I can feel my readers want the truth.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach