Writing Is My Drink (22 page)

ostensibly available to fill the role that under other circum-

stances would’ve been my mother’s: the role of listener. Being

the listener meant being the receiver of stories, of wisdom, of

insights. Sitting in the listener’s seat meant attending to an-

other person’s need to tell a story, which for me meant put-

ting on hold my own need to express. I was never
asked
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listen, but I felt with my new dad, my grieving dad, that listen

was all I could do.

Back in the role of listener in Frank’s class—after the lion of

my ambition temporarily gave up the hunt and found a shady

spot in the corner to col apse—I fell drowsily under the spell of

Frank’s dad voice. His stories were intimate, and like the other

students in the class I quickly felt as if I knew Frank better than I actual y did. Within the first days I had the sense that Frank

was someone I’d known most of my life. His stories were full of

longing: a longing to write, for recognition, for home. His voice

was a minor chord in an Irish key—the perfect pitch for the sto-

ries of what might have been and for making me long to have

my dad back: not just my dad as I knew him before he died in

1997 but my dad as I knew him in a time when all things were

still possible; my dad of pub nights; my dad before he knew his

daughter was dying, before innocence was lost. I still needed my

dad and yet he was gone. But Frank—my one-week father
in

loco
, arguably the father of the modern memoir—was here, and that comforted me.

In the role of listener, I found myself thinking about the

role of the storyteller and what it takes to earn your audience’s

consent to hold the floor. Recently, one of my students told me

that’s why she wants to publish her memoir. “It’s like you’re at a

party and everyone is taking their turn to talk. I feel like ‘Okay, it’s my turn to tell my story.’” The need for a turn is a primary

one. And as I listened, I realized the most obvious thing in the

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world: The storyteller is the person sitting in the power seat, the seat that I’d secretly and not so secretly yearned for since my

dining room table days. Of course, Frank had an extra boost of

power because he was a Pulitzer Prize winner, a
New York Times

best-selling author, and one of the few living authors who was

nearly a household name. But maybe it was the reverse; maybe

he became a celebrated writer because he was powerful, because

knowing how to the hold the floor was his gift.

When I met my stepfather Bil , I was functional y fatherless,

living in an extended family of women without a male in sight in

the days before feminism was back on the map. I was a kid who’d

lived outside of the power circle all my life, and it seemed like

I absorbed the impact of all Bil ’s starched-white-shirt power in

an instant. Everything that I learned about him after that simply

supported my initial assumption of his regency: the casual way

he held the menu as he ordered for the whole table; the way

his beige trench coat folded perfectly over his arm; the way he

entered a room, a conversation, or a relationship as if he had

the right to be there, and that there was nowhere in the world

where he’d be excluded or unwanted; the way he argued about

world affairs as if they were matters of personal business—as if

his opinions might change the course of nations, even when the

setting for that oration was just a dining room table and his only

audience a teenage girl.

Bill spoke French, had studied engineering at McGil ,

worked in downtown Vancouver at the top of a very tall build-

ing, and occasional y was interviewed for the nightly news. He

knew manners I had never imagined existed: working your way

through the silverware from the outside in, the role of the but-

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ter knife and its relationship to the very important bread plate,

the napkin unfolded halfway on your lap, the importance of the

question “Whom may I say is calling?” He told me that proper

manners would ensure that I’d be comfortable dining with “pres-

idents, queens, or ordinary people,” which invited me imagine a

tremendous future unfurling in front of me like a red carpet, a

future full of dignitaries and foreign travel. He treated everyone

with respect, a behavior I understood to be a function of his

power; he could afford to be respectful because he himself was

treated with respect.

Of all these displays of privilege and power, however, none

seemed as remarkable as his ability to hold the floor. The cir-

cumstances didn’t seem to matter; when he spoke, people fell

quiet and listened. I loved the sound not only of his voice but

also of the silence around his voice. The hush. What could be

more powerful than people listening to what you say? For most

of my adolescence, it didn’t occur to me that power could be

mine. Wasn’t it enough to warm my hands by its fire?

I had that same feeling as I watched the class fall under

Frank’s spell as he acted out conversations with truculent, in-

ner-city youth and described scenes sitting by the fire, writing

Angela’s Ashes
in longhand, the tenor of his story rising into crescendos and then falling back almost to a hushed whisper.

When my stepfather died, it felt like I’d lost my connection to

this brand of power. But those days in Frank’s classroom made

me feel like it was within reach again, that maybe he could hand

it to me.

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On the second night of the conference, a book signing and

cocktail party was held in one of the main campus buildings.

Because of its Hamptons location, the conference skewed a

little less literary and a tad more
People
magazine than most writers’ conferences. Lesser-known celebrities nipped in and

out, attending random readings and lunches. I spent a good

bit of mental energy trying to figure out how this odd as-

sortment of people were connected to each other and never

truly cracked the code, but amongst us commoners a famil-

iar face would occasionally drift—Jane Pauley, Gary Trudeau,

Alan Alda—and not wanting to be total buffoons, most of us

fledgling writers pretended it was natural to be standing in

the bathroom line with Jane Pauley. Oh, but of course, Mel

Brooks has dropped by.

The social incongruence of these odd celebrity sightings in

a social setting more commonly known for its dowdiness added

to my feeling of displacement in the world. A West Coaster in

the Hamptons, a married woman whose marriage was about to

blow apart, I walked into the book party with my social anxiety

dialed to high until I spotted Frank across the room.

I made my way over to him and asked him to sign my copy

of
Angela’s Ashes
, which he did, and I put the book into my purse. Then the flock of fans around him grew, and I drifted

away and found wine, food, and other fledgling writers to hang

out with. That night back in my dorm room, I final y dug my
An-

gela’s Ashes
out of my purse. I turned to the title page, and there it was in his scrawl: “For Theo—To a hell of a writer! Frank McCourt.” I closed the book and opened it again. It was still there:

the casual endorsement that made me feel like I’d been handed

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a bolt of lightning. And that loose but old-fashioned cursive: It

could’ve been my dad’s.

After my parents married in a private ceremony at the retire-

ment center where my grandmother, Nonnie, lived, my new

dad, my mom, and I went to Los Angeles to stay with a friend

of my mom’s for a few days. I’d just turned ten, so it didn’t occur to me to question the sanity of two middle-age people marrying

each other after just one year of a long-distance dating, to ques-

tion the fact that my new brother and sister had met me just one

time.

In the course of the next year, my mother, Bil , and I silently

col uded in the process of erasing whatever wisp of a tie I might

still have had with my real father. Shouting out from a Topanga

Canyon swimming pool, I called Bill “Dad” for the first time. I

had to get up my nerve to do it, like I was asking for a raise. I

thought maybe calling it from my spot at the lip of the pool to

his chaise lounge was a safe experiment. When he turned au-

tomatical y without a flinch, I decided that was it: He would be

“Dad” from there on out. I wouldn’t turn back. It had taken too

much for me to take that first step toward him, ground too hard

earned to ever surrender.

My dad began teaching me everything I imagine girls with

fathers know. The first job he took on was teaching me to dive, a

daunting task if there ever was one. His hours of patient coach-

ing resulted in a total of one completed dive, results that encour-

aged him enough to go on to teach one of the most physical y

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timid children in the history of civilization to water-ski, to snow ski, and, later, to drive stick. When we arrived in Canada, my

mother registered me in school under my stepfather’s name.

No birth certificate was needed back then to support her claim.

From then on, I was my dad’s girl, an Irish girl without a drop

of Irish blood, a Mehaffey. But I would always understand my-

self to be an impostor, a girl who was passing as connected, as

fathered, as more powerful than she actual y was.

That week in the Hamptons, when I wasn’t in Frank’s class, I was

using my time productively: alternating between disheartening

cal s home and obsessive e-mail checking as I waited to hear

some news from my agent. Final y, there was an e-mail from the

agent’s assistant, who suggested it wouldn’t be a bad idea to ask

Frank for a letter of support. It could help, she said. A lot.

Ask?

Sure, and then I’ll dive into icy, shark-infested water and take

a swim. Ask? Even the word, when isolated from other words,

sounds frightening:
“Ask.”

I walked away from the computer and stumbled across the

manicured lawns toward my cinder-block dorm room. Ask.

How insane was that? Who would do that?

Throughout the week Frank held one-on-one meetings with

each of his students. It’s a generous thing to do—anyone who’s

taught will tell you that. It always takes more time and energy

than the half-hour allotted meeting time would suggest. My

meeting was on Thursday, and by Wednesday afternoon I was

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convinced that I needed to ask him for the letter. It was a risk

worth taking. I knew it bordered on outrageous, since he barely

knew me well enough to write such a letter, but I also knew that

publishing was full of endorsements built on more tenuous con-

nections and that endorsements made a difference. But all that

didn’t stop me from being crazy scared. Besides fear of rejection,

I worried that whatever small impression I’d made on him might

change. I wanted for him to know that I genuinely liked him and

appreciated him. I didn’t want him to see me as yet another per-

son who wanted something from him, although of course that’s

exactly what I was.

I’m a one-on-one person. I get a little confused in groups,

a social vertigo that perhaps is the result of having been raised

as if I were an only child. In groups, I don’t know which way

is up or where to look and what’s okay to say and what’s not.

I either say barely anything at all or hog the floor with fran-

tic ramblings and show tunes. When I like someone, I want

them to myself, and when I have one-on-one time with some-

one I like or admire, I am disproportionately jubilant. And so

as anxious as I was about my individual meeting with Frank

McCourt, part of me was giddy with the idea of getting to

talk to Frank all by myself. And so during our meeting I had

this odd sensation of bifurcation: Part of me was sitting in

the classroom, the other was up on the ceiling pointing down

and saying, “Look! There she is, talking with Frank McCourt

about writing!”

Down on the ground, Frank and I talked about my
Light

Sleeper
manuscript, which for some reason I’d dragged into the meeting with me. I told him about the slow-footed agent, and

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