Writing Is My Drink (6 page)

required to write like a child and revise like a grown-up.

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But it can be found; even if you have to stumble forward in

blind faith, you can start down the path. You can sit through all

the bad first drafts, revisions, and doubt. You can face all the

places you’re sure you fall short and keep going. You can push

past the doubt, the fear, and the part of you that’s afraid of wanting something this much.

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Try This

1. As fast as you can, make a list of times when you could not ac-

cess trust in yourself. Hint: Here’s what not accessing the trust

looks like. You had a hunch and you didn’t follow it. You knew

the relationship would fail but you started in on it. Your inner

voice said, “Do it,” but you didn’t. Your inner voice said, “Run,”

and you stayed. You watched TV instead of going to the party.

You were ashamed. You said you “couldn’t” when in fact you

just “wouldn’t.” You passed on the free plane tickets. When you

had an idea, you batted it away. When you wanted something,

you told yourself it was too much to hope for. The novel in the

drawer. The unmade phone cal . The made bed. The unsung

song. The words you didn’t say. The class you didn’t take. The

questions that burned inside you but you wouldn’t ask.

2. Write for five minutes without stopping about one of these

times.

3. As fast as you can, make a list of times when you were able to

access trust. You wrote without thinking. You skied fast. You

dove in. You didn’t stop to feel guilty. You bought the art sup-

plies. You followed the hunch.

4. Write for five minutes about one of these times.

5. Pick two more times—one from each list. Write about them

together.

6. Make a list of the people who’ve helped you to trust in yourself.

7. Post this list near your writing desk.

8. When you get scared, look at the list.

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3

How I got through My

Worst Block Ever

(and How you Can too)

Before Mary Karr’s
The Liars’ Club
and Frank McCourt’s
Angela’s Ashes
ushered in the memoir craze that ignited in the mid-1990s, only a few lone-wolf memoirs could be spotted on

the horizon: Maya Angelou’s
I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings
; Maxine Hong Kingston’s
Woman Warrior;
Russell Baker’s

Growing Up
; Tobias Wolff’s
This Boy’s Life
; arguably even James Baldwin’s
Notes of a Native Son
. The civil rights, gay rights, and women’s rights movements of the 1960s fostered our sense of

the importance of the individual’s story of awakening. The early

seventies gave rise to the New Journalism, a quirky first-person

nonfiction that lived in the no-man’s-land between journalism

and memoir (Hunter S. Thompson’s
Fear and Loathing in Las

Vegas
, Joan Didion’s
Slouching Toward Bethlehem
). The literary conditions that would herald in new bookstore shelves labeled

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“Memoir” were falling into place, but for the most part, rabid

fans of first-person realism like myself depended upon the au-

tobiographical novel, such as Sylvia Plath’s
The Bell Jar
,
Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
,
Erica Jong’s
Fear of Flying
, and Nora Ephron’s
Heartburn
.

Aside from those few important exceptions, we didn’t have

the possibility of memoir as a genre in the eighties, the time

when I first dreamed of becoming a writer. It was a dark time.

Duran Duran dark. We didn’t have memoir, but we did have the

Brat Pack. We had
Less than Zero
; we had
Bright Lights, Big City
.

And we had Tama Janowitz and her damn
Slaves of New York
.

These writers were writing a sort of
cinéma vérité
fiction, fiction that read like memoir, but memoirs of a particular class and

place, memoirs of everything that I was not.

These books sprung from the self-referential impulse of

moneyed, big-city youth—in New York or LA, usual y—a few

years out of the Ivy League. The main characters possessed

plenty of resources, breeding, and powerhouse networking con-

nections to fall back on when the coke ran out. And they were

male, except for Janowitz. So it was Janowitz who became the

focus of my first case of writer envy. Like me, she was female

and writing about “real” stuff. Unlike me, she had oodles of long

hair and a tiny waist, and lived a groovy Lower East Side life that people actual y wanted to read about.

I loved
Slaves of New York
and I hated it. I hated it because my life was so impossibly off-center. I spent my coming-of-age

years in Canada, not New York. I went to a community col-

lege, not Yale, and at the time
Slaves
hit the bookstores, I was living in the middle of the desert, waiting tables in a Cajun

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restaurant. I was twenty-five and just about to receive the col-

lege degree I should have received three years earlier if I hadn’t

dropped out to travel, party, make batik T-shirts, waitress, and

drink coffee by day and vodka cranberries by night with other

aimless youth. In between all that, I read a lot. Although I pos-

sessed an amorphous desire to be something called a
writer
, I didn’t know what I wanted to write. I knew no writers. I had

no idea where to begin the career trajectory that goes from

waitress to writer.

But like almost every other time when I’ve needed to figure

out the way, a friend came along with idea to get me headed in the

right direction. One of my fellow waitresses, Sara, had won a writ-

ing contest when she was a senior at Barnard the year before. Like

every other waitress I knew, she was a ball of potential genius that orbited around the streets of Santa Fe without purpose; we were

all on hold together, waiting for our miracles. I read Sara’s prizewinning short story—full of gritty East Coast realism and disen-

franchised youth, very pre-memoir in the tradition of Bret Easton

Ellis and the gang—and got inspired. I’m pretty sure it was Sara

who suggested I consider applying for entering an MFA program,

so I semi-randomly picked one—UC Davis—and set my sights

on it. It probably wasn’t the wisest decision to apply to just one

school, and for that school to be in the middle of a farming valley where I knew exactly no one, but from what I can remember, my

distorted thought process looked like this: (1) even though I never finish anything I write, I will get into any school to which I apply, and (2) UC Davis is vaguely near San Francisco, which is where

I’d real y love to live if I had the courage.

So the application process began. First up: the GRE. Let’s

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just say, apparently you
do
need to study for it—that’s real—and if you’re taking the subject test as well as the maddening general

test, you might want to bring a lunch, as you’ll be at the industrial wasteland testing site for eight hours, and without a lunch you’ll

almost be hal ucinating around two p.m. when you’re deciding

between darkening the bubble beside the name “John Milton” or

the one beside “Jonathan Swift.” The general test was 3.5 hours

of questions like this: At the diner where Suzy works, she can

serve sorrel soup only on days that begin with the letters
F
or
T
.

She can never serve sorrel soup on a day after she’s served lentil

soup and never before a day when she will serve split pea soup.

If she served lentil on Sunday and pea on Wednesday, when can

Suzy serve sorrel soup this week?

I just kept thinking: Suzy is fucked.

And: What is sorrel soup?

For 3.5 hours.

UC Davis’s creative writing program required a subject test

in English literature, for which I was mildly prepared. I minored

in English and knew a ton about, oh, three writers, all of whom

were twentieth-century women never mentioned on the test.

My knowledge of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Donne was spotty.

I survived this three-hour ordeal and was actual y pleased that I

ended up scoring around the 50th percentile, which says loads

about me and my high standards for myself.

Most of the weight of the application rested on the twenty-

page fiction sample, which should have been my first clue to my

supreme lack of readiness for an MFA program. I possessed not

one finished story. Instead I had scraps: dozens of half-written,

autobiographical stories that ground to a halt on page six. It was

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a very odd station in life to have arrived at, this place of certainty that writing was my fate and yet having not one piece of hard

evidence prove it.

I set to work. I typed away, and I balled up pages and threw

them on the floor as I’d seen writers do in movies. I wrote

about a waitress living in Santa Fe who spent her nonworking

hours hanging out with well-educated waitresses talking list-

lessly about hazy futures and drinking coffee and vodka cran-

berries. Like
Less Than Zero
, it was written in the terse prose style that is third-generation Hemingway and described the

lives of self-important and underemployed youth. Unlike
Less

Than Zero
, the characters lived in the middle of the desert and without the good cars, clothes, or sunglasses. And unlike
Less

than Zero
, the narrator never got into any real trouble because that would require revealing too much about myself. Can we

say “best seller”?

A few months later I found out I did
not
get into Davis (you saw that coming, I know). Feeling as if my writer dream had

been permanently defeated, I decided to pursue a MA in Eng-

lish literature instead. By that point I had actual y gotten up the nerve to move to San Francisco, so I chose San Francisco State

by default based on its proximity and willingness to allow any-

one with the ability to pay tuition into their MA program.

After just a course or two, I quickly became mired in the

nefarious world of literary criticism in which Derrida and Fou-

cault are lords. The year is 1987. Literary criticism has replaced

Bordeaux as the most popular French import. No one real y

knows what they’re doing with this loopy French stuff, so it’s

the Emperor’s New Clothes all over the place. We read all the

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classics but never to admire them. We call the writing “text” and

we never say “the writer,” we say “the author,” but we never talk

about the author or what the author intended or might have in-

tended because the author doesn’t matter. The author is the mere

conduit of text. Text is bigger than the writer because language

is born out of power structures that are bigger than the writer.

It’s political, baby. It is ignorant to speak about the writer. Got it?

So, for the next two years, I read other writers instead of

doing my own writing. I did textual analysis and wrote essays

about the text, thereby creating more text. Instead of being a

writer, I dated one. And yes, writing the seminar papers caused

me a great deal of angst, but I got through them somehow and

everything was going well enough until: the Thesis.

To graduate from the master’s program, one needed to write

a hundred-page thesis. This was something I’d certainly known

from the start of the program but had stalled thinking about,

the same way one delays thinking about IRA contributions until

one’s knees give out and about emergency preparedness until

the ground is shaking below your feet. But now there was noth-

ing else to do—no more courses to take, no more forms to fill

out—except write the thesis, which was always referred to as the

Hundred-Page Thesis. Like the Hundred Years’ War, its length

was never separate from its identity.

After all the collegiality and stressful-but-doable assign-

ments of the courses, I now felt like I’d been marooned on an

island and my only means of escape was this daunting task. My

sense of isolation doubled overnight when my writer boyfriend

broke up with me without warning. Actual y, there had been

warning, but I’d refused to acknowledge it.

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The warning looked like this: