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.”

My only child is becoming a father in a few weeks. His stepfather has eight grandchildren. When we married, they were traumatized teenagers who had little use for a substitute mother, their own mother close to death from drugs and drinking. She’s still alive. Despite a certain lack of understanding what it means to be an adult; my husband is an adored grandfather. I, on the other hand, suggested they call me, “Whose that lady?” when he asked what name I would choose as their step grandmother. Yes, I wish them happy lives and support his relationship with them, but I saw myself as an adult friend, a resource in case of crisis.

I tried so hard to use literature to change the truth. Reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn I knew this father was portrayed as a drunk who loved his daughter, the daughter devoted and yet fully aware her father can’t protect her from the reality of his addiction, was just like my father, I was like his daughter, I did not want this. I did not want to understand why Lear grieves as Cordelia takes her own life, unable to bear her father’s mad anger, why Milton’s daughter transcribes Paradise Lost for her blind father, and why I asked him to read my work despite some of the cruelty of his feedback. 

There was once a fantasy man, silent, slightly dangerous, tall, handsome, frequently masked. Yes, I was in love with the Phantom from the comics, the the Phantom who lived in a place called Bengalla, in the Skull Cave, with Hero the white horse and his wolf, Devil. Unfortunately, he had a sexy, adult girlfriend named Diane Palmer whom I ignored. After all, as a nine-year-old girl whose mother cut her crooked bangs, I could not compete with the large-bosomed Diane. But then there was The Highway Man who in the poem, loved Bess, the landlord’s daughter. Bess warns the highway man away from an ambush by shooting herself with a musket but then he returns to the inn and is shot. His ghost still rides the road to the inn. I used to read this poem aloud to our cleaning ladies who found my obsession with love and death odd in someone so young and seemingly safe in a New Jersey farmhouse. And don’t get me started on vampires!

In 1969, I was twelve and when my father said he was going to drive to Washington to protest the Vietnam War, I asked if I could go with him. The year before had been marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the Chicago Democratic Convention which was televised live, and violent antiwar demonstrations on college campuses. My oldest sister was attending Radcliffe, and I was terrified that she was going to be killed.

Until now I have never, yes never, experienced writer’s block. If I had nothing to say, I did something else; baked bread, went to the movies or a museum, walked, read a book. I was fine to not be writing. If I had nothing to say I was able to redirect and find a way to feed my creative life. But this feels different. There’s a pause which I’ve experienced before, waiting to hear from an editor or agent. But this pause is uncomfortable, and I can’t seem to avoid bad things like scrolling on my phone to watch videos of cats wearing hats, beating up bewildered dogs or simply staring the way cats frequently stare. Or insanely unhealthy food being prepared by skinny, chirpy women; pounds of butter, condensed milk, peanut butter. or chocolate baked into cookies or cakes.

I come from a subversive stock. No, my parents never overthrew a government, but they were people who looked at certain institutions and made fun of them. The first time my mother saw my new baby, she said, “With that much head, you expect more body.” Another time, after my father had broken a bone in his neck and I said he looked like a poet because his hair had grown so long, my mother said, “Yes, a poet coming out of a drain,” because of his neck brace. Their wit and intelligence made it hard to condemn this behavior. When my father was a visiting writer at Bread Loaf, a venerated literary summer school, he kept threatening to put on what he described as his “Irish serf hat” and grovel on the lawn of the Director. He refused to socialize with the acceptable, high value people and instead hung out with the runaway nuns, very common during the seventies.

I’m not sure if it was WWI or the Irish potato famine that caused my grandmother to be such an enemy of the plump, the chubby, the…fat. She passed this down to my parents who, especially my mother, were capable of judging an entire population based on their weight. When they visited me in Chicago they told me, “We love it here. Why is everyone so fat?” Which they weren’t except they were but who cares? My years of living in New York City during the eighties, one of the most fatphobic decades ever, being broke so I walked nearly everywhere but also like most New Yorkers took public transportation which burned plenty of calories.  I had seen eating disorders up close, a woman I stayed with in Paris kept horrible bits of food in jars all over her flat and often arrived at the end of a restaurant meal to eat scraps from the table.

I was in an Uber headed to the airport when Rod Stewart’s raspy voice singing Tonight’s the Night filled the car with some of the most sexist, disturbing lyrics I’ve ever heard in my life. I came of age in the seventies. It sucked. Sex was everywhere and because of the lack of AIDS and a plethora of ways to not have a baby, it was offered the same way you might offer someone a glass of water. At least where I grew up. And then there was this.

In 1982 I was twenty-five, my eldest sister was alive and well, my best friend had been killed four years earlier. I was trying to get sober, obsessed with my weight and men and my parent’s approval. I wanted to write and act and not drink again. I would drink again. My roommate would wake from her coma and recover because she was determined to take her life back. I wish I better understood how hard that was for her. From my perspective ( forty years plus ), this girl is a mess, funny, angry, needy, confused. Constantly doubting herself in terms of men and I can’t remember who 98% of these men she mentions were! Apparently, I was good at meeting them, not so good at keeping them in my life probably because I was spinning too fast to be held down. And, trying to figure out my father. A dead-end for sure.

There were many untold stories in my family. Most of my story remained untold until I discovered the comfort of writing, all of it in a journal until I began to get published in my late twenties. There were descriptions of things I had kept secret, a rape, excessive drinking, my suffering as a child of an adored father who had black, drunken rages, my own alcoholism, the heartbreak of falling in love and then out, my own shame until I stopped drinking and believed someone who told me my writing had power.

“For someone who just had their first novel published, you seem less than happy.” I was lying in a fetal position on my then boyfriend’s bed, a writer for Rolling Stone magazine, said novel clutched to my stomach sobbing, because my father had been mean to me. Thirteen years later when novel number three was published, I was having a screaming fight with my ex-husband during a physical exam which inspired my then doctor to put me on Prozac and recommend I get more sleep. When the first check arrived, I carefully signed the back and then, inexplicably, found an envelope and a stamp and mailed it to someone who had nothing to do with the book. I then announced I had lost the check and was certain my publisher would refuse to replace it and burst into tears. I handle success poorly.