This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (8 page)

When I arrived home four days later, my mother came out to the driveway to meet me. An editor at Houghton Mifflin had bought
The Patron Saint of Liars
for $45,000.

For the first time in my life, I was going to have money (paid out over three years in four installments), and the only thing I could think of to spend it on was having the air conditioner in my car fixed. It had been out for two years. Now that I had a book contract and an advance on the way, I went to a mechanic. He said the air conditioner was low on coolant, a problem that was resolved for fifteen bucks. Somehow, that's the detail of selling my first book I always remember.

The question that aspiring writers are likely to ask me (after I've politely declined to write their book for them) is how to get an agent. Obviously, I'm not the best person to address this question, since my agent found me just moments after the end of my childhood and we have been together happily ever since. Still, there are a few things I've learned along the way. My best piece of advice is to finish the book you're writing, especially if it's your first book, before looking for an agent. Most agents will tell you the same thing, unless you've already published half of said unfinished book in
The New Yorker
. Writers need agents these days. Not only are rights getting more and more complicated in this electronic age, but for the most part publishing houses no longer have slush-pile readers. Agents now do the work of sifting and sorting the unsolicited manuscripts themselves. I was recently doing a book signing when someone came up in the line and asked me how to get an agent. You'd think I'd have a pat answer down for this one but it always stumps me. Fortunately, my friend Niki Castle was standing close by and I turned the question over to her. Niki had worked at International Creative Management in New York for four years and I thought her advice was excellent: she told the woman to go to one of the online sites that list agents who are looking for new clients, and then follow their submission guidelines
to the letter
. If they ask for a twenty-page writing sample, do not send in twenty-two pages. “The smallest infractions of the guidelines can mean your work may never get read,” Niki said.

Do not assume that finding an agent or getting published is something that automatically happens to well-connected insiders. I have sent my agent countless potential clients over the years, ones I believed were worthy, and I think she's signed three of them. Publishing is still a market-driven enterprise, so an agent wants to find a great writer as much as the writer wants to find a great agent. But no agent takes on a client as a favor to someone if they really don't like the book and don't think they can sell it. Therefore, I suggest focusing your energy on the part of the equation you control—the quality of your work. You can also try to publish your work in general interest or literary magazines in the hope that an agent will find you; it worked for me. If you try that route I have two pieces of advice: first, read the magazine you're submitting to. If you aren't willing to read several back issues of
Granta
or
Tin House
, then you have no business sending them a story. Magazines really do have personalities, and you should be able to figure out if your story might fit in. Second, if you have one really good, perfectly polished story—wait until you've written some more. If you're lucky, you'll get a letter from the editor saying they liked this one but it wasn't quite right and now they'd like to see something else. That's a very depressing letter to receive if you don't have anything else to send.

At every stage of writing a book there is a sense of
If only . . .
If only I could find the time to write and if only I could figure out the third chapter and if only I could get my book finished. If only I could find an agent. If only some editor would buy my book. If only I had a good publicist. If only the book would get reviewed. If only they would do more promotion. If only it would sell. It goes on like this forever.

After Houghton Mifflin bought my novel, I went to Boston and got dressed up to meet the people at my new publishers. My editor took me to lunch at the Ritz and we ate crab cakes and drank martinis. This was twenty years ago, and at the time it felt like something that must have happened twenty years before. I've always thought that book publishing was an old-fashioned business, and Houghton Mifflin, back in their long-gone warren of interconnected houses, seemed one step removed from Leonard Woolf's Bloomsbury.

I've been at this writing job for a long time now, and yet for the most part I still solve my problems in the same ways I first learned to solve them as a college student, a graduate student, a waitress. There are certain indispensable things I came to early, like discipline. But other things, like serious research, I came to later on in my career. I have never subscribed to the notion of “writing what you know,” at least not for myself. I don't know enough interesting things. I began to see research as both a means of writing more interesting novels and a way to improve my own education. Case in point: I didn't know a thing about opera, so I figured that writing about an opera singer would force me to learn. Conducting research, which had never even occurred to me when I was young might be part of writing, has turned out to be the greatest perk of the job. I've read Darwin and Mayr and Gosse to get a toehold on evolutionary biology. I've floated down the Amazon in an open boat just to see the leaves and listen to the birds. I've called up the head of malaria research at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland and asked if I could spend the day following him around. He said yes.

As much as I love doing research, I also know that it provides a spectacular means of procrastination. It's easy to convince myself that I can't start to write my book until I've read ten other books, or gone ten other places, and the next thing I know a year has gone by. To combat this, I try to conduct my research after I've started writing, or sometimes even after I've finished, using it to go back and correct my mistakes. I try to shovel everything I learn onto the compost heap instead of straight into the book, so that the facts just become a part of my general knowledge. I hate to read a novel in which the author had clearly researched every last detail to death and, to prove it, will force the reader to slog through two pages describing the candlesticks that were made in Salem in 1792.

No matter how far I venture outside my own experience, I also know that I am who I am, and that my work will always reflect my character regardless of whether I want it to. Dorothy Allison once told me that she was worried she had only one story to tell, and at that moment I realized that I had only one story as well (see:
The Magic Mountain
—a group of strangers are thrown together . . .), and that really the work of just about any writer you can think of can be boiled down to one story. The trick then is to learn not to fight it, and to thrive within that thing you feel deeply and care about most of all. I still think that's why Grace Paley was pushing us to be better people when we were still young and capable of change.

As much as I love what I do, I forever feel like a dog on the wrong side of the door. If I'm writing a book, I'm racing to be finished; if I'm finished, I feel aimless and wish that I were writing a book. I am vigilant in my avoidance of all talismans, rituals, and superstitions. I don't burn a certain candle or drink a certain cup of tea (neither a certain cup nor a certain kind of tea). I do not allow myself to believe that I can write only at home, or that I write better when I'm away from home. I was once at a writers' colony in Wyoming and the girl in the studio next to mine dragged her desk away from the window the minute we arrived. “My teacher says a real writer never has her desk in front of a window,” she told me, and so I dragged my desk in front of the window. Desk positioning does not a real writer make. I had a terrible computer solitaire problem once. I decided that my writing day could not begin until I won a game, and soon after that I had to win another game every time I left my desk and came back again. By the time I had the game removed from my computer I was a crazy person, staking my creativity on my ability to lay a black ten on a red jack. I missed computer solitaire every day for two years after it was gone. Habits stick, both the good ones and the bad.

I've spent long periods when I've written every day, though it's nothing that I'm slavish about. In keeping with the theory that there are times to write and times to think and times to just live your life, I've gone for months without writing and never missed it. One December my husband and I were having dinner with our friends Connie Heard and Edgar Meyer. I was complaining that I'd been traveling too much, giving too many talks, and that I wasn't getting any writing done. Edgar, who is a double bass player, was singing a similar tune. He'd been on the road constantly and he was nowhere near finishing all the compositions he had due. But then he told me a trick: he had put a sign-in sheet at the door of his studio, and when he went in to compose he wrote down the time, and when he stopped composing he wrote down that time, too. He told me he had found that the more hours he spent composing, the more compositions he finished.

Time applied equaled work completed. I was gobsmacked, and if you think I'm kidding, I'm not. It's possible to let the thinking about process become so overly analyzed that the obvious answer gets lost. I made a vow on the spot that for the month of January, I would dedicate a minimum of one hour a day to my chosen profession. One hour a day for thirty-one days wasn't asking so much, and I usually did more. The result was a stretch of some of the best writing I'd done in a long time, and so I stuck with the plan past the month of January and into the rest of the year. I'm sure it worked in part because I already had the story in my head and I was ready to start writing, but it also worked because my life had gotten so complicated and I was in need of a simple set of rules. Now when people tell me they're desperate to write a book, I tell them about Edgar's sign-in sheet. I tell them to give this great dream that is burning them down like a house fire one lousy hour a day for one measly month, and when they've done that—one month, every single day—to call me back and we'll talk. They almost never call back. Do you want to do this thing? Sit down and do it. Are you not writing? Keep sitting there. Does it not feel right? Keep sitting there. Think of yourself as a monk walking the path to enlightenment. Think of yourself as a high school senior wanting to be a neurosurgeon. Is it possible? Yes. Is there some shortcut? Not one I've found. Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.

(
Byliner
, September 2011)

The Sacrament of Divorce

I
CALL HIM MY
ex-husband half the time and my husband the other half, but when I think of him, it is as my husband. This isn't because in my secret heart I want to be married to him (there is nothing I can think of wanting less) but because, like it or not, he has an important spot in my personal history. He has a title. I suppose I must be his ex-wife, since somebody told me he married again. It's been six years now. Enough time has passed that I wish him well, in a way that is so distant and abstract it doesn't even matter.

My divorce began less than a week before we were married. We had to drive out to Donelson, Tennessee, to the rectory at Holy Rosary, where we had an appointment with the priest who would perform the service. It was a good forty-five minutes from Nashville, my hometown, but marriage was a booming business that year, and the more convenient priests were already booked solid. We got lost once we got off the interstate and twisted through the dark and identical streets of tract houses with cinder-block foundations. We didn't talk about anything more important than directions. My husband thought I should know where we were, Tennessee being my state, but I hadn't been to Donelson or Holy Rosary since I was ten years old. I have a notoriously bad sense of direction.

It was June, because that was the month to get married in, and it was buggy and hot. We had been through the weekend of mandatory Catholic marriage seminars, classes full of the nitty-gritty of natural family planning (what we had called rhythm when I was growing up) and personality questionnaires (“Which tasks will you do? Which will your husband do? Which will you do together? A. Iron; B. Take out the trash; C. Make decisions about major purchases”). Now we had to see Father Kibby one-on-one and go over a few things. My husband and I were both Catholic. He wanted nothing to do with the Church but was willing to be married by a priest to make his mother happy. For me it was worth more. I was a Catholic shaped by twelve years of Catholic school. Marriage was one of the seven sacraments I had memorized along with my multiplication tables in third grade. Catholicism wasn't at the heart of marriage for me, but it was part of it. Marriage was one of the sacraments I was entitled to.

My hands were sweating from more than the heat when we got to the rectory office. We were late and shouldn't have been. Seeing a priest meant trouble, sin, confession, nothing good, but Father Kibby was young and put us at ease. He explained that he would read the questions from the sheet attached to a clipboard and check off the appropriate boxes as we answered. June bugs were thumping against the screen. At the end, he explained, we would sign the form.

Did we believe in God and the Catholic Church?
Yes.

Would we raise our children to be Catholic?
Yes.

Were we entering into marriage lightly?
No
.

Was this a marriage that could be dissolved only by death?
Death?

Death. That meant that if the marriage didn't work, my only way out was to die. He was asking me to swear to my preference for death over divorce. At that moment, before it had even started, I understood how my marriage would end.

I should have understood it anyway because even going in, I was not happy with my husband. We had lived together for two and a half years before we got married, so I had a fairly good idea of how we got along. Not well. It's difficult to talk about divorce without getting into your marriage, and yet I'd just as soon leave my marriage alone. Our general patterns were much like those of any unhappy couple, periods of our screaming and my crying broken up by intolerable stretches of silence. We were not helpful to each other. We were not kind. These are the facts: I married him when I should not have, and later on I left. I ran out the door, got a ride to the airport, and bought a one-way ticket back to Tennessee.

People ask me,
If you knew it wasn't working, why did you marry him?
And all I can say is, I didn't know how not to. I believed I was in too deep before the invitations were ever mailed, before the engagement. Maybe it was inexperience or maybe I was stupid. The relationship had a momentum that was taking us to this place, and I couldn't figure out how to stop it until a night four nights before my wedding, when the choice was presented in very simple terms: death—my death—or divorce. I was twenty-four years old. My husband was thirty-one. The only way off a runaway train is to jump, but at that moment the ground looked to be going by so fast that I was paralyzed. And so I lied. I said yes.

Yes, this is a marriage that can be dissolved only by death.

I
divorced my husband not much more than a year after I married him, a fact that I still find myself fluffing up by saying we were together for four years. But that's a lie, too; it was less than that. Oh, I longed for five years of marriage. I craved ten. I wanted to say, See how I tried? I did everything I could, God knows; there was nothing left for me to do. Sticking out that one year took every ounce of courage I had. But a year sounds like nothing, not a marriage but a breath, a long date. In my mind, after I had left my husband, women stopped me on the street and said to me,
Put your one year against my fifteen, twenty, thirty-eight. Put your slim, never-had-a-single-baby hips beside mine—four children. Look at the entrenchment of a lifetime spent together. Who owns this house, that photograph? What you had was nothing.

Of course, no one said this, at least no one who had been divorced. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Without knowing it, I had stumbled into the underground and was given the secret handshake to the world's largest club. The Divorced. We were everywhere. The insurance man called me the week after I left to say that my husband had removed me from all the policies and I had to sign in approval because I was, at that point, still married. But then our insurance man confided in me, “You don't have to do this. You're going to need to take some time.” The receptionist at my divorce lawyer's office called back the day after the papers were filed to see how I was doing. It turned out that the receptionist's marriage had ended, too, and this was her first job after having spent half her life as a stay-at-home wife. And when I applied for my own credit card and the woman on the phone said to me, “Are you married or single?” and I didn't know the answer, the woman on the phone dropped the questions and called me honey. “Honey,” she said, “I know.”

They had empathy, a word I understood for the first time, because suddenly I had it, too. It was, perhaps, my only emotion outside of depression and guilt. Days after I left my husband, I propped myself up on my mother's sofa and watched the guests of Oprah Winfrey. I watched women with no education and six children, women without a single safety net beneath them, who day after day were abused by their husbands for cold food or misfolded towels or the sheer fun of it. I watched men and women from the studio audience stand up and say, “I have no sympathy for you! Why don't you get out? If someone raised a hand to me even once I'd be out of there. Don't you have any self-respect?”

I leaned forward. I knew that voice. I had been that audience. I had thought I would never stand for anything short of decency and kindness. I thought that anyone who accepted less must be a willing participant, must like it on some level. But at that moment I wanted to be up there on that stage. I would rise out of my soft bucket chair, unclip my microphone. I would put my arm around the shoulders of the guest and whisper in her ear, “Honey, I know. Things happen that you never thought were possible.” I didn't have any children, and I had a wonderful family who met me at the airport when I came home and kissed me a hundred times. I had a good education and a lot of friends. My husband didn't hit me, a fact he pointed out often. I was married for only a year, and with all I had going for me I barely scraped together the strength to leave. You get so worn down, it's hard to think of how you might find a suitcase, much less where you'd go or how you'd get there once it's packed. It wasn't just strangers I was starting to understand. My mother had divorced my father when I was four. Two years later she remarried. My mother and stepfather spent the next twenty years trying to decide whether or not they should stay together. While growing up I had never faulted her for the divorce, but I hated what I thought was her weakness. My mother didn't want to be wrong a second time. She wanted to believe in a person's ability to change, and so she went back and back, every resolution broken by some long talk they had that made things suddenly clear for a while. I wanted her to make her decision and stick to it. In or out, I ultimately didn't care, just make up your mind. But the mind isn't so easily made up. My mother used to say the more lost you are, the later it got, the more you had invested in not being lost. That's why people who are lost so often keep heading in the same direction.

It took my own divorce to really understand, not just to forgive her, but to think that she was doing the very best that could be done with the circumstances at hand. I understood how we long to believe in goodness, especially in the person we promised to love and honor. It isn't just about them, it is how we want to see ourselves. It says that we are good people, patient and kind.

If I couldn't see my way clear to leave my husband before we were married, I hadn't even begun to take into account the complications that lay ahead. We had a job together, a split position in a college English department, adjoining offices. We had an Oldsmobile, a stacked washer-dryer. We had his family and mine. We had been married. I had promised, sworn, and I believed I was only as good as my word. But as I slowly began to realize that all the problems between us that I had counted on to change would never change, I started running over the list I kept in my head, a secret tally of things that stood between me and my freedom. The dining room suite? Don't need it. The job? I'll give it up. His parents, whom I cared for, who would certainly never speak to me again? Gone. It was a row of obstacles, each one a little more perilous than the one before. At every turn I thought,
Not this. I can't give this up, too—
but then I would.

The moment I decided to leave changed everything for me. I did the impossible thing, the thing I was sure would kill us both, and we lived. And I kept on doing the impossible. I moved home and became a waitress at a T.G.I. Friday's, where I received a special pin for being the first person at that particular branch of the restaurant to receive a perfect score on her written waitress exam. I was told I would be shift leader in no time. I was required to wear a funny hat. I served fajitas to people I had gone to high school with, and I smiled.

I did not die.

Sometimes I would spend half the morning in the shower because I couldn't remember if I'd already shampooed my hair and so I would wash it again and again. I would get so lost on the way to work some days that I had to pull the car over to the side of the road and take the map out of the glove compartment. I worked four miles from my house. When I woke up at three a.m., as I did every morning, I never once knew where I was. For several minutes I would lie in bed and wonder while my eyes adjusted to the dark. After a while it didn't frighten me anymore.

In time, a lot of time, after I left Friday's and Nashville on a fellowship that allowed me to write my first novel, I came to see that there was something liberating about failure and humiliation. Life as I had known it had been destroyed so completely, so publicly, that in a way I was free, as I imagine anyone who walks away from a crash is free. I didn't have expectations anymore, and no one seemed to expect anything from me. I believed that nothing short of a speeding car could kill me. I knew there was nothing I couldn't give up.

One night, years later, on the other side of the country, I was giving a boring, obligatory dinner party. Among my guests were a man and a woman, both married but living apart from their spouses because of jobs. They must have been paired together at every social outing, though their missing spouses were all they had in common. Late in the evening, the conversation turned to where we had lived in the past. It came out, after a long series of questions, that the woman had been married before, that the husband she had now was her second husband.

I asked her when she was first married.

“A long time ago.” She waved her hand, indicating somewhere back there. It was a gesture I knew. “Another life.”

“I was married,” I said in solidarity.

“Well, there you go,” the man said. “Two out of three marriages end in divorce. I'm married, both of you are divorced.”

But the woman had remarried. Where did that leave us? “I thought it was one out of two,” I said.

And maybe because he was feeling secure with his wife who was a thousand miles away, he shook his head. There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness. “Two out of three,” he said.

When you think of that statistic, think of me. I'm the one who did it; I divorced. I pulled the moral fabric of this country apart.

T
ime
magazine ran an editorial not long after that by a man who cried out for “supervows” in this age of disposable marriages. Supervows would demonstrate a higher level of commitment. They would be part of a more serious ceremony. There would be promises, legal and binding, that the couple would submit to lengthy marriage counseling before divorce, that they would seek divorce only after being married a certain length of time. Divorce, the writer said, had become too easy. Waltz in, waltz out.

Waltz in, maybe. Make marriage harder if you want to. Outlaw those Vegas chapels with the neon wedding bells, require marriage applications modeled after tax forms, but leave divorce alone. It's grueling. I have never known anyone who went into a marriage thinking they would have to get out, and I have never known anyone who got out simply. To leave, you have to involve the courts. You have to sue the person you live with for your freedom. You have to disconnect your life from another life and face the sea alone. Never easy, blithe. Never.