The Art of Survival

“We all tell our own story with conviction and passion...and the proof of a successful creative career is how inventive and complex our variations on that story can be.” – Sally Mann

Reading Sally Mann’s book, Art Work: On the Creative Life, presents an argument for persistence, the rejection of fortune for the sake of owning your vision and a helpful chapter on rejection, a word most of us hate but also accept as the unwanted payment for effort. Once I submitted a novel that was returned so quickly, I imagined throwing it over a wall and having it immediately tossed back. Yes, it was years of effort sent packing within a matter of days. Did that stop me? No. Neither did the reaction of my parents when I summoned them to listen to my first story that began, “They were like two ships passing in the night. Her eyes were velvet blue, and her cheeks were the color of roses.” I had discovered clichés and was captivated by language. They listened, sighed, left halfway through with a single remark, “How terrible.”

photo by Eugenio Mazzone

I was not discouraged. It seemed to me you simply went on and found exquisitely written inspiration in poets and novelists. I kept a journal of lines, “Rose of memory. Rose of forgetfulness,” from T. S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday and when a boy who knew I had been hurt by a grown man, I was a mere fifteen, said he would give me “a dozen dead red roses” I understood the circle of creation, reality, and life. It was thrilling to absorb this terrible beauty. I had suffered. I wrote about those feelings and if no one cared, I was not to be stopped.

Ah, rejection. After my parents there was a seamless list of noes. My submission to the high school yearbook, my story sent to the New Yorker rejected by Roger Angell for whom I had babysat for several years. “We all read your story, and no one liked it.” At least, that is what I remember in his kind letter that went on to describe my wonderful babysitting. I imagined the staff of the New Yorker clustered around my poor manuscript, shaking their collective heads. I wrote a murder mystery and was told I should stay away from genre fiction. I submitted little, yet was always shocked by the sting of rejection.

Finally, after being fired and unemployed, grieving a lost sister and attempting to get sober, I sat down daily for hours and wrote a novel about grief, a daughter’s anger at her father, and the importance of survival. It was sold to a big publisher for an amount of money that seemed enormous at the time. I started an MFA program and wrote my second novel which was rejected by that same publisher but found a home in the United Kingdom. 

After a brief affair with my British publisher I returned to the United States, began to teach and spent the next thirteen years reading rejection letters from publishers who praised my work but felt they could not offer me a home. Meanwhile, after a terrible first marriage, I remarried a successful journalist, moved to London with him and had a baby. This baby was everything except a muse. He was my sun and moon, my joy and everything good but my capacity for disappearing into a story was gone. I taught and wrote and mothered but nothing was good enough for the publishers and having had early success of sorts I was no longer something new and shiny.

Fast forward to 2003. I was living in Chicago, still teaching but now it was high school English, I had divorced and remarried a Chicago ironworker and despite a complete lack of encouragement, was writing a novel in the early morning hours before I drove to work at the massive urban high school where I attempted to instill a love of literature and writing in teenagers who tolerated my passion. I adored them. The night before my third novel went to auction, my husband was combing lice out of my hair, lice we had all been given by my youngest stepchild and when I said, “I will never be published again,” the response was silence. 

The next day my agent called to tell me my book had sold for six figures to my original publisher. This was like someone handing you a box and saying, “Here. This is the thing you’ve wanted all your life. Now, you have it.” I fell apart. I hid it reasonably well, toured and spoke and appreciated the rave review in The New York Times, but inside I felt guilty and sad. This didn’t matter since the success of my book faded. But I kept writing. That was twenty-one years ago. 

This fall I will have a novel published by a new imprint dedicated to midlife women,  called Empress Editions, inspired by my memoir that I was posting on Substack. It is called MotherPerson and I finally understand there is nothing in art or success or love or revenge or acceptance that will change you. Mann is brutally honest about the mistakes she has made and the random nature of success, but she is also radically devoted to improving, growing, challenging herself to do work that expresses her vision of the world. This is how I go on.

“Regardless of our medium, we all tell our own story, the story we care about and the only story we can tell with conviction and passion. We tell it over and over again, and the proof of a successful creative career is how inventive and complex our variations on that story can be.” Sally Mann, Art Work: On the Creative Life

– Molly Moynahan