How I Became a Novelist
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.
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Fired
At first, it was almost a relief. Harriet’s treatment of others, especially a chubby senior editor who was embarrassingly eager to be friends, was cruel. Commanded to find a dozen copies of a recent bestseller to give to dinner guests, Barbara would show up at her apartment with these books and never be invited to stay for dinner. My rage expressed itself in several ways, all of them dumb. I cracked a Tiffany teacup and saucer I had given her for Christmas. I took all the mail that had accumulated and threw it away. I subscribed her to several pornographic magazines and filled in her address. And then I left.
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Work Will Set You Free. Or Not.
My father kept recommending library school. After graduating from Rutgers with a major in history and a minor in various other things, mainly English but also drama, modern dance, ceramics, and Italian, and the year in Ireland where I immersed myself in the potato famine, I graduated into the recession of 1979-80. After the stint working with the children of battered women and then running an Installation gang and then being a cocktail waitress, I could climb telephone poles, comfort miserable kids, and sort of manage a room full of drunks even though I was always giving the wrong change. Despite this bizarre job history, I knew two things: I was really smart and had no idea what I wanted to do aside from writing, which was dangerous. I had been told repeatedly that my writing was very good, even great; I kept numerous notebooks filled with stories, novel beginnings, plays, and poetry, but writing was forbidden fruit, a thing that implied I was able to be as brilliant as the famous writers my parents knew and yes, as brilliant as my father. Who thought I should be a librarian?
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