Why We Write (10 page)

Kathryn Harrison

Why I write

I write because it’s the only thing I know that offers the hope of proving myself worthy of love. It has everything to do with my relationship with my mother. I spent my childhood in an attempt to remake myself into a girl she would love, and I’ve translated that into the process of writing—not intentionally, but just as I was always looking beyond my present incarnation
toward the one that would woo my mother’s attention, I’m always looking toward the book that hasn’t come out yet: the one that will reveal me as worthy of love.

I was a neurotic schoolgirl. I got straight A’s from seventh to twelfth grade, and I was class valedictorian. My grandfather offered to give me ten dollars for every A I earned. I said, “I’m not selling those A’s.” My schoolwork was the only place I felt was mine. I was in control there as I was nowhere else in my life. It taught me to be diligent, to come home and do my homework. I’m still a schoolgirl. I love the research, the homework of writing a book.

I’d planned to go to med school. I had countless fantasies of my glorious career as a physician, but once I was in college, studying art history, and I discovered that one could sit in the dark and look at beautiful things and write about them, I was irrevocably set on that path.

When it’s great, writing can be ecstatic. Even when it’s just hard, it’s always involving. The moments that are sublime—I get just enough of them that I don’t lose hope of being given another—are only so because for that moment, when even as little as a sentence seems exactly right, before the feeling fades, it offers what I think it must feel like to be worthy of love. I want praise, of course; it’s a cousin of love. But equally important to me is a bit of evidence, here and there, that a reader got it, saw what I’d hoped to reveal.

I write, also, because it’s the apparatus I have for explaining the world around me, seemingly the only method that works. By the time I was in high school I’d discovered that the process of hammering text on the page—being able to articulate things, to get them right—offered not only consolation but a place I
could live inside. Before there were thumb drives, I always carried the hard copy of what I was working on with me. I couldn’t leave the house without it. If the house burned down, I thought, I still have this. This is really where I live.

Writing is a lonely job. You have to be willing to work for months and months without anyone saying, “You’re doing well; keep going.” You have to be willing to live in a constant state of uncertainty. Not very many personalities are well suited for it. Fortunately, mine is.

When I’m in the midst of a book, that’s all I am: the person working on
Enchantments
. When I lose that connection I’m unmoored for a while. I have trouble letting go of one book before becoming wedded to another. I have any number of aborted manuscripts that I realize, in retrospect, were intermediary masks to hide behind before I got going on the book I was meant to write. Until I get traction with a new book, I can’t not write a fake book.

One thing I love about writing is that in that moment, I am most completely myself, and yet totally relieved of my self. I don’t really like spending that much time with myself when I’m not writing, but when I’m in that strange paradox of being most and least myself, I can be transcendently happy, rapturous. Those moments are rare—I’m doing really well if it’s two percent of the time—but memorable, like a drug high you have to get back to.

When you write, endless possibility exists before you. The unwritten sentence—perhaps that will be the one, the one that makes life comprehensible, the one that reveals the beauty and order under what can sometimes seem like a landscape of chaos and cruelty. Whenever someone asks me which book is
my best, I say I hope it’s the one I’m writing now. If what I have yet to write didn’t beckon with promise, I’d have no inducement to write—let alone the pressure that drives me to hammer and hammer at something until it seems acceptable, good enough for the moment, anyway, enough to be revisable in a day or a month. And so, no matter that it’s characterized more often by a feeling of failure than of success, I am dependent on it.

For me, writing is inseparable from thinking. I could say the entire undertaking is a vast cerebral construct against my demons. It’s the thing that I love. It’s my identity.

Where I write

My study is like a reliquary. I have no family of origin anymore; whatever remains of it fills the shelves and lines the walls of my office: touchstones, my favorite books, the orchids my mother used to grow in my study window in their special light. Every inch of wall is covered with portraits of my family, and portraits my older daughter, an artist, painted. I’m always happy to step into my study. I come here for solace even when solace isn’t available.

How I write

I get off on index cards. It’s pathetic but true. There’s nothing that looks better to me than a stack of index cards with a pen beside it. On my desk right now I have a pile of blanks and a pile I’ve already scribbled on, waiting to be filed in what looks like a glorified recipe box. For the book I’m working on now,
the dividers in the box say “Prophesy,” “Enunciation,” “Crowning,” “Betrayal,” “Martyrdom.”

Writing is strangely tiring for something that doesn’t involve moving a muscle. It requires an enormous amount of psychic energy. By the end of the day I’m shot—in a good way.

I can get really tense while I’m writing. As I get more fatigued, the tension builds in my body. My jaw gets so clenched, I once broke a molar while I was working. Over the decades I’ve learned what to do to offset some of the stress. My body pretty much follows along with my head. If I leave my desk happy with the day, I’m ready to let it go.

Let us now praise dirty soccer uniforms

God knows what would happen if I lived without people who need things from me. I’d be some kind of monster if there was no dinner to be made, no soccer uniform to be washed. I’d be the monkey who keeps taking coke until his head explodes.

My husband and I met in grad school, at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He could see immediately that I wasn’t somebody who should be living alone. My fridge was always empty. I have no talent for self-preservation. I owe my stability to the people I care about. There’s no going off the rails when you have children. I don’t know how much work I’d get done without my family to keep me in line.

When he married me, my husband knew he had somebody on his hands with a lot of baggage. He’s a pretty intuitive man. He understood that there were limited ways in which I could keep myself stitched together, and writing was one of them.

Writing is a job. If you’re going to do a job, you’re going to
do it every day. You’re going to get enough sleep, and not fall into dissolute habits. I never had a romantic idea about writing. In grad school other people would spend the evening drinking, then tear home to write something at three in the morning, thinking the work would be exceptional because of the exceptional circumstances under which it had been produced. You don’t write by sitting in a garret thinking the muse might arise under some particular circumstances.

The thirty-six-hour day

During the late 1980s, I worked as a book editor at Viking Penguin. I loved the job. It was very interesting, and it was useful for me to get over what had previously seemed a fortified wall between publishing and writing. It demystified the process of publishing a book, which I think is a very good thing. But, after I’d been working at Viking for six months or so, my husband said, “This is really stupid. You’re working on other people’s writing instead of your own.” So I began getting up at five in the morning, to write until seven, when I got ready for work. That’s how I wrote my first novel.

When I finished it, I showed it to an editor I’d worked with at Viking. She told me to send it to Amanda (Binky) Urban, one of the most powerful agents in New York. I was terrified, but I did. Two days later I got a call from Binky’s assistant, saying Binky wanted to see me. I hadn’t expected her to take me on as a client—my fear was that Binky had summoned me to her office to chastise me in person for having the audacity to approach her. I’d been working at Viking for a couple of years, and was about nine months pregnant, when I appeared in Binky’s office.
She greeted me by reading me the list of editors to whom she was going to send my manuscript. She said she was going to hold an auction. I sat there gravidly, dumbly nodding. When I left I called my husband. He asked what happened, and I told him I wasn’t sure. He said, “Is Binky Urban your
agent
?” I said I guessed she was, but I’d been so certain of rejection that I just didn’t believe it. I went back to my desk at Viking. That was on a Friday. The following Monday, Binky called and said she had a preemptive offer from a big editor at Random House. I’d been preparing myself for years of rejection. I wasn’t prepared to be handed a golden ticket to skip over all of that.

My grandmother was living with us at the time, and by the time the book went into production I had a baby on my hands as well. I needed thirty-six hours in a day, and my husband was now working as an editor while writing a novel, but we both knew he doesn’t need writing in the same way that I do. So he kept his job and I quit mine. It was scary to leave an office with colleagues and regular paychecks. It was a gamble, and it paid off—that was in 1990, twelve books ago.

Headiest experience

The best and the worst, the most exciting and most awful experience I’ve had as a writer was working on
The Kiss.
I wrote it after spending years in psychoanalysis, trying to understand what had happened between (among) my mother, my father, and me. What I wanted—what I thought I wanted—was something like a pie graph revealing each of our slices of culpability.

Finally I had this shining moment of clarity. I realized I’d
reached an impasse, that assigning blame wouldn’t help me to tell the story. I saw who we were, my mother, my father, myself, and I thought, I can just write about what happened. I can try to reveal what happened in ways that make it an understandable story, even if it’s not one anyone wants to hear.

Once I started, I realized I’d been writing
The Kiss
in my head for a decade. There were sentences I’d revised more than once without ever writing them down. It spilled out of me, not without effort, but in a white heat. I woke up at three every morning, got my kids to school at seven, went back to my desk till they got home at three thirty, and went back there after they were in bed and wrote till midnight. I’d lie down next to my husband for a few hours, then get up and start again. I was afraid that if I stopped I might not keep going.

When the book was published, it sparked a huge debate about what was okay to write about. I believe that you can write about anything. Nothing should be excluded from the world of books; that’s what books are for. But I got reviews whose last words were “shut up.”

It was very difficult to be pilloried in public. I read my reviews because I’m always looking for constructive criticism, but the reviews of
The Kiss
exposed me to things that were really ugly: character assassination, slander.

I understand myself to be a writer who people aren’t tepid about. People tend to really like my work or find the subjects I choose—the ones that choose me—offensive. I like being that writer, not the writer whose work you read and forget.

I like to hit a nerve. I like to hear from some people that a book of mine saved their lives and hear from others, “You ought to be locked up.” Tepid responses make me feel I’ve failed somehow.
I don’t portray myself as who I want to be. I portray myself as who I am.

If
The Kiss
had been written by a man; if my father, say, had written about us, he might not have been attacked, as I was, for being honest about a shameful thing. I came out of that publication banged up, but it was a good thing for me overall. I realized that I couldn’t do anything to make people say anything worse about me than they’d already said. So it was freeing.