Writing and Breathing
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” – Ray Bradbury
Driving home from a movie last week, American Fiction, to be precise, my husband asked me what I thought, and as I tried to articulate my feelings, I started to cry. While I have been in this business for what feels like a very long time, published, unpublished, known (on a small scale), anonymous, and everything in between, I have recently felt something close to despair, which, for me, an inveterate optimist and, realist is alien. I grew up in the business of publishing, book reviews, my father's novels, knowing famous writers, listening to adults discuss books and critics, and wanting something different, but it was in my blood and would not be denied.
I tried. I listened carefully to the terrible things my father said about rejections, connections, and the acceptance of nepotism and mediocrity. Still, he never maligned writing, and as a child, I stood in our backyard watching him, his head framed by the window, yellow legal pads and a typewriter, cigarette smoke curling above his head, and witnessed total happiness. Yes, happiness, but also silence. Until I was published, until I persisted despite success followed by failure followed finally by large-scale success, we had never spoken as colleagues about this wretched business. I had earned his respect on some levels by publishing two novels and weathering endless rejections.
photo by Alice Hampson
In fact, it was not that endless because my submissions were always curated and probably too narrow. Having my early novels published by the top companies put me in a weird limbo. A literary writer whose sales were never great, I had agents who aimed high, so I fell hard. When trying to submit on my own to small presses, the experience could have been better. One manuscript was returned so quickly that I had a fantasy of my poor book being tossed over a wall and then tossed back unread.
I experienced literary success with my third novel and was treated to readers' responses to my work. It was still mostly pre-social media, so these feelings came via Amazon reviews or personal letters. It was astonishing that people read my book and were inspired to say something kind. The reviews were stellar, including a full-page Sunday Book Review in The New York Times that was a rave. How did I handle this success? On the whole, poorly. The dream had manifested, and I was not prepared to be praised. Who knows why the joy, on the whole, eluded me? My father's bouts of wild drinking after his novels failed to rise to the top, whatever that top was, his violence towards my mother and my own wonderful and terrible childhood ill-prepared me for exploiting my connections. While I enjoyed a small book tour, I kept teaching high school and looked forward to obscurity, which came fast.
What caused the tears? Days earlier, I had received yet another rejection from a significant source of creative non-fiction fame, a column that had once accepted an essay of mine, but when I joyfully shared this news with my ex-husband, unaware he harbored resentments beyond anything I could imagine, he called the paper's editor and demanded my essay be canceled, threatening some sort of literary violence. They did not comply immediately. The paper asked for a revision, which he was allowed to read, but when he again protested, my big break disappeared. Since then, I have tried to submit to this same editor, and each time I have received carefully worded rejections. Of course, this is probably a result of the work's weakness, but the wound of that betrayal had not, as I hoped, healed. We share a beloved child, and I had to understand my role as a mother was more important than anything else in my life.
I grew up in a world with standards that were nearly impossibly high. My parents, both Harvard graduates, and my father, a PhD, were brilliant, funny, and wildly critical. As a child, I barely touched books meant for children, almost immediately reading Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Austen, Woolf, Dickens, and Hardy. I was exposed to Fellini and Truffaut, adult conversations that were inappropriate and enthralling, and adults living life at a speed difficult for their children to match. I was a teenage alcoholic, sober by my mid-twenties and sober still. I want to own this history without the judgment that seems to accompany every choice I have ever made as a writer. Writing, like teaching, is everything good in my life, which also means it needs to be protected and allowed to falter without my rushing forward, declaring I am done. Yes, it is very hard and sometimes awful, but it is also the thing that saved my life. Over the years, the question has been posed, "Are you still writing?" I silently think as I affirm that I am, "Yes, I am breathing, I am alive, I am a writer."
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach