What's the Point of Writing?

I got my fifth rejection letter today. Though I pretend not to care, I do. It takes something out of me each time that it happens.

So why am I doing it?

What's the point of all this?

* * * 

When I was a child I would pretend I could control the wind.

We had long uncut grass much of the time and when the wind whipped through it, it looked like a wild safari or the grasses of the Savanna. I orchestrated the movement of the wind with my arms, with mad, sweeping movements and grand gestures that demonstrated my command over nature. I was all powerful and in control — and it was transcendent. I could pretend that the chaos that was going on inside the house was far away. I'd get lost in the way the leaves of the grass would sway back and forth, looking like a silvery gray sea when the undersides of the grass flicked towards the sun, and then flipped back to a dark green sea as I commanded the wind to blow the other way.

* * * 

When I was a child I pretended I was a deep sea diver in a blue plastic pool in the backyard.

I had a snorkel and a mask and I circled about endlessly, the water warm the sun. Strips of grass and leaves floated lazily past the glass of my mask, twirling in a vortex I'd created with my circular laps. I'd pop my head up over the water, over the edge of the pool, and then taste the blue plastic while I gazed across the yard, watching dandelion puffs float through the sky. I could get lost in that world. Another world. Underwater, removed, silent and undulating with currents I'd created. I liked the feel of the grass under my feet as I ran back inside the house, pieces of grass sticking to my feet and ankles.

* * * 

Why write?

I've been wondering this since I've been trying to blog every day (or at least every week day) for the month of January. Scroll back and you'll see I'm not exactly accomplishing this goal. Why the resistance? Why the battle? Isn't this supposed to be something I love?

I've been struggling with the edits on my memoir. I'm blocked by a difficult chapter and I keep striking upon the same spot where I stop "showing" and start "telling" the story. I'm undone by this. I don't even know where to begin fixing it. And the chapter has fifty pages. I'm overwhelmed by the impossibility of the task.

So why write? What's the point?

I'm acting like it's a job or burden. I submitted some short pieces to the literary journals because I want to be read. The blog is supposed to be pleasure. The memoir is what I chose to write. These are all things I want to do. I have something in me that compels me to write. A song that needs to be sung. A song that's been stuck in my throat since I was that little girl conducting the winds and creating the currents.

Writing is not a burden.

Writing is getting lost in that magic space in my head. Writing is the lull of the wind across the tops of the grass. Writing is the warm water and the sun filtering through it. Writing is a music that only I can hear.

Maybe I want that song to be heard? Maybe I'm singing it because it needs to be sung? Maybe I'm singing because it's the only voice that I have?

I don't know.

But whatever the reason, it is not a burden. It's not a job. It's not something to feel ashamed of or to fret over.

This is magic. This is music. This is mystery. This is the only space where I conduct the song. Every note. Every measure. Somehow I keep forgetting to just open my mouth and sing.

* * * 

This is the only place where I'm free.

Tiny Little Mopeds in Your Mind.

My employer is moving to downtown Detroit after being in our current building for a bazillion years. It's a good move because the city where we are currently located is a pretty depressing place. There's a retail area/strip mall that is completely empty. There are "WE BUY GOLD" signs and a Planned Parenthood. Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge fan of Planned Parenthood. I got my prenatal care there when I was first pregnant with my son and didn't have medical insurance. But Planned Parenthoods are not usually in the most desirable neighborhoods.

I went to a nail salon once by work and it looked like a place where former nail technicians go to die. The bottles of nail polish were all dried up and there wasn't a bottle of disinfectant in sight. I think the last time it had received a good scrub was probably somewhere around the Carter administration.

I have a co-worker who used to get blowouts just down the street from our office on Fridays for $20. She was so excited she found a place to give her hair a blowout for $20! The only problem was that the hair stylist gave her said blowout while simultaneously smoking a cigarette. My friend did notice she smelled like smoke on Friday nights. So we renamed the $20 Blowout, "The Smokey Blowout."

Anyway, it's quite industrial, this stretch of a highway. It cuts through the east side of Detroit and carves a path through a town that's been left behind to slowly rot into the concrete that surrounds it as folks move further and further north and leave this old Blue Collar town behind. This is the kind of town that was inhabited by the workers of the many automotive plants that loom along this stretch of road.

Most days I look out my window and see concrete as far as my eye can see. Concrete parking lots. Concrete buildings. Concrete sky. It's a town that's been built up and beaten down by the very industry that sustains it. Anyway, moving to the thriving entertainment district of Detroit will be quite an improvement for us in many ways. Downtown Detroit has a lot going on (despite what you may have heard) and we will be right in the middle of all of it. I'll also be able to have lunch with my husband on occasion, who also works downtown. We'll be like real city folk instead of the boutique suburbanites we've become.

So there are moving boxes and oddities littering the halls of my office building now. We have to box up all of our personal belongings and take them home. Only our desk chairs and our desktops (if we have them) and two containers of office supplies and other necessities will be moved to the new location. I walked by a typewriter today. I saw an empty Miller Lite can in the sink. I sifted through artwork that my son Cracky made for me when he was a toddler and I had just started working here. He drew me as a large balloon-like lady with sticks for arms and legs. I'm so enormous that I dwarf everything else in the picture, including his Defensive Tackle father, himself, the sun, the moon. I am that god-like and all-powerful. Seven years later and I still think he sees me that way.

In other news, my teeth ache from a new Invisalign-type device my orthodontist has inflicted on me in order to shove a wayward tooth back into place. It's like the first week of braces all over again. When I take the retainer off, my teeth feel loose and wiggle in their sockets. My gums throb with the beat of my own heart. I believe orthodontia would be a good torture device. I'm surprised our leaders haven't looked into this. I mean, sure, yeah, it's cruel and painful. But all of our war criminals leave with nice straight teeth! You can't Geneva Convention us for that.

Just kidding. I don't even know what the Geneva Convention is. I write ads for a living.

I started off the week with a bizarre form of food poisoning from red kidney beans. Did you know that they're toxic when they're undercooked? Yes, yes, they are. You either need to eat them out of a can or you need to make sure you boil them for 10 minutes on the stove. Do not cook them in a slow cooker.

REPEAT. DO NOT PUT DRY RED KIDNEY BEANS IN A SLOW COOKER.

If you get nothing else from my blog today, please get that.

Apparently cooking dry kidney beans over long periods of time at 80 degrees or less increases their natural toxicity 4-5 times. I was so violently ill, I didn't know which way or out of which orifice things were going to rocket out of my body. (Apologies for the graphic nature of this kind of poisoning.) After the third or fourth trip to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I briefly wondered whether I could simultaneously reach one end of myself towards the toilet and the other end towards the sink. It was that bad. And worse. But my husband says there are some things I probably shouldn't say on the internet. This coming from a man who is known for being inappropriate and having no boundaries. So, I think I will heed his warning and keep my description somewhat vague. Needless to say, I lost 6 lbs in 6 hours on the Hell Bean Diet. Cook yourself up a batch this weekend!

Then, after all that, I got in a disagreement with my husband. (Re: He was wrong and I was right and he refused to see that.) I guess two people aren't at their best when they've projectile evacuated all the liquids out of their bodies through every available orifice. And it wasn't really a fight, fight. Like, there weren't any punches thrown and I didn't take a baseball to his brand new car. Haha. I know he just flinched while reading that. But truly, I hate conflict of any sort. So does he. Whenever we have a disagreement, we both go and nurse our wounds silently in our own little pain caves. I think we both feel as though each hurtful word has been administered like a baseball bat to the tender hood of a BMW. Hahahaha. Just kidding. (I bet he's removing all the bats from our garage right now.)

All kidding aside, I do feel beaten down. Have you ever noticed that when you start off your day with a good hard cry, you feel it in your eyeballs for the rest of the day? I can still feel the salt in my eyes, left there like tiny crystal reminders of an earlier pain.

God. Relationships suck. They are so much work. They get right down to your deepest, darkest places. The places you were most hurt when you were most vulnerable. They conjure up the ghosts of our youth and reenact them like a morality play and you're the only sinner. Blergh. "Working it out" and "Compromise" have been the mantra of my adulthood. These are relatively new words for me and so I'm having to navigate this whole "Conflict Resolution" thing like a stranger in a strange land. I thought running away from conflict solved conflict? If I run away, the conflict is far away. See? All better! This new way is complete bullshit if you ask me. But I guess the trail of disastrous relationships that I've left in my love-wake suggest that maybe it's time I tried a new way. So fine. I'm doing that, but I'm doing it under protest (even if it was my idea).

Aside from all that, I'm stuck in a rut in my book. I'm about 2/3 of the way done and I feel like it's become monotonous. I feel like I'm telling one chronological story after the other, with a neat beginning, middle and an end. I want to break free and not write in any order or not meet some specific plot device. My writing coach is helping me with that. She's given me some free-writing exercises to play with this weekend that have nothing to do with plot. I just want to roll around in the words and luxuriate there. My tiny womb of words. My dreamy cocoon of images from my youth. I want to say something beautiful that has no point.

I want to paint you a picture of a lovely boy and how he looked when he pulled up into my circle driveway in the full lush of spring. I want you to know what it was like to run out of that dark house and into the bright sun with a boy on a moped waiting there for you. I want you to know what his heartbeat felt like when you wrapped your arms around him and got away. Any away. Didn't matter where. And he never asked too many questions. He never judged.

"How bad is it?" he would ask.

And all have you had to say was, "Bad" and he would drive you away like a white knight on a tiny little moped.

Yeah, so it might've been bad, but I had a boy on a bike who would come and get me and take me away. Sometimes life gets to be too much and I close my eyes and I scoot off on a little Honda moped in my mind.

Beep beep, baby.

God it's good to drive. To have a license and a credit card. Maybe it'll take me to the mall where everything is shiny and beautiful and new. It's never that bad if you have someplace to go. Someplace to be free. Someplace where nothing ever changes, beans never go bad, and you never have to compromise like a grownup ever.

Yeah, I wanna go there.

Writing a Memoir. Getting an Agent. Getting Published. And Telling Your Mom.

Prom, bitches. Check out that 80s hair.

I've been working on my first book for about a year now. I hired a writing coach and she has helped me to keep on a writing schedule and to structure my memoir so it moves along at the pace of a novel. I want to keep the reader interested and I don't want it to suck. Yes "suck" is a literary term. You learn that in graduate school.

Also, I had the ambitious idea to write the memoir as a series of stand-alone essays. Each and every chapter has to have a neat beginning, middle and end. It has to have its own conflict. It has to resolve that conflict in some kind of satisfying way. And it has to have its own point or meaning because otherwise, why bother?

Doing this has been no small task but I am pleased with the results thus far. My favorite writers, people like David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs, Michael Chabon and Jo Ann Beard have all done this with their nonfiction so I figured, why not me? Plus it seemed like an easier way to transition from a lifetime of writing short stories, essays and blog posts into writing a longer work. Cause that shit's daunting, yo.

The book is a memoir of my childhood. It covers the time period from one of my earliest memories ... maybe around three years old ... to 19 years old. I'm knee-deep in the high school period right now and things have gotten considerably more exciting, as adolescence is wont to be.

I had a literary agent contact me a couple of months ago, interested in the manuscript. This is why blogging is no joke, people. Everything you write on the internet is a potential to attract attention, both good and bad. In this instance, it was good. This is a fancy literary agent at a fancy New York agency. Whenever I write "New York Agency" in my head, I hear the crowd yell, "NEW YORK CITY?" like they do in those Pace picante salsa ads. Yes I know "picante salsa" is not a word, but I think it makes me sound even more Midwestern for humorous effect.

I sent the agent the first 50 pages and haven't heard back yet. My coach encourages me to believe that this is a good thing, because it means I haven't been rejected yet.

This is why I pay her. Because otherwise I would be taking a lot of Xanax right now.

Knowing that first 50 pages is out there has encouraged me to want to finish this thing. I've tried to pick up the pace of late, to try to get it done. I wish I had more time to do it. The full-time job and the graduate class are infringing on that a bit, but I think I can still manage. I pretty much either work on the book or do homework from 9pm to midnight each night. I heard that Hemingway wrote only for four hours a day, from 8 in the morning until noon. That is basically my bar. It has been set. My life's goal is to be able to write from 8 to noon one day. Or even 9 to 1. That, to me, would be success. But right now, I'm living the nocturnal version of the Hemingway dream, which is okay too.

Anyway, I think I had a point with this post but now I've forgotten it. Perhaps it was merely to catch you up on the status of my first book, to tell you a little more about it, and to encourage myself to keep on writing it.

Now that I'm on the adolescence part, it gets harder in some ways and easier in others. It's easier because it's all about me. I don't have to worry about hurting my parents' feelings because the older you get, the more you are responsible for your own life and actions. When you're a little kid your parents have much more power, clearly.

I've talked to my mom about the memoir, because you can't really write about being the child of an alcoholic without telling the recovering alcoholic that you're doing so. I mean, at least if you still want to have a relationship with your parent, that is. She is incredibly awesome about it. She says, "Your story is your story, and no one else's."

That's pretty incredible, isn't it? It's a gift. Possibly one of the greatest gifts she has ever given me. You know, aside from that whole giving birth to me thing.

I'll have to remember it in case either one of my kids becomes a writer. Lord knows I've given them plenty of material.

Now I have to get back to my memoir. The current chapter is about how I simultaneously developed both a crush on a boy and an eating disorder. Some of it's funny I swear! Okay, some of it's sad. It's kind of how the whole book is looking at this point. Inappropriate humor, dark humor and a lot of brutal honesty.

Now, where did I put that Xanax?

Middle School: Dante's Forgotten Circle of Hell. Pt. 1

     

Can you feel my 13-year-old sex appeal?

I concluded my elementary school career by attending group therapy at my mother's rehab facility. To say I was ill equipped to handle middle school would be an understatement.

I recall telling my three closest friends that my mother was going away to a hospital for a while and she had a disease called "Alcoholism." I thought having a sick mother with a nameable disease would somehow normalize my life. What I didn't realize was that there were acceptable diseases — like cancer — and then there were the things one wasn’t supposed to mention.

A few days later, one of these three friends informed me that her mother said she wasn't allowed to play with me anymore. It is without malice that I now mention that her mother was quite possibly more pickled than my own, but I digress.

It's not like it was a surprise to the neighborhood that something was awry at my house. For several years the catholic school punks down the street had been heckling me on the way home with taunts of, "Your mother's a drunk!" When I was younger I hadn’t known what a "drunk" was, but I did know enough to be ashamed and to find a new route home

In the sixth grade I had already acquired a bully of my very own. For some reason, the quiet, awkward, tomboy that I was had inspired rage in this particular bully’s pre-adolescent mind. He went after me with the full-throated screams of a zealot on the playground and with whispered threats during class. We'll call him Antoine de Cadillac because his name was French and I'm from Detroit.

Antoine alternated between finding me repugnant and wanting to grab my ass amongst the book racks. It was too early for me to understand the kind of sullen loathing a pre-adolescent boy could have for a girl. This type of creature also mistakes being "unpopular" for being "easy." I would encounter more of his type later on in high school. 

However, my lack of dating opportunity never quelled my fervent desire to be choosy and to have the same blue-eyed dreamboat of a boyfriend that the popular girls had. In fact, I thought popularity was something that fell upon you like winning the lottery or getting hit by an asteroid. Although I believed it was out of my control and not likely to happen, I still felt it was within the realm of possibility.

So it was that on one golden June afternoon while all my peers were full of summer hopes and I was preoccupied with dreading group therapy at Mom's rehab, that the slope-foreheaded Antoine de Cadillac grabbed me by the collars of my off-brand Izod shirt and pinned me against a brick wall at school.

"You are a loser, Mandy. You will always be a loser. I know people in middle school and I know that you’re gonna be the biggest loser there," he said, his spittle hitting my face like tender drops of summer rain.

I managed to save face by shoving him off.

"No! You're going to be the loser, Antoine! I know people in high school! So there," I said. But I was shaken by the Frenchman's prognostication. It had the ring of a hex about it. I worried that he could either see me more clearly than I saw myself or that he had somehow French cursed me into a life sentence of unpopularity.

To read Part 2, please click here.

*This is an excerpt from my memoir, from the chapter, "Middle School: Dante's Forgotten Circle of Hell."

Writing a Memoir and Feeding the Ghosts.

This is what 45,000 words looks like.

The Buddhist story of the hungry ghosts is one I've always been drawn to. Hungry ghosts are creatures with a ravenous hunger and tiny mouths which will admit no food. These starving creatures rattle and clamor in our minds, constantly demanding food and attention that we can never satisfy.

Hungry ghosts are most commonly used as a metaphor for addiction. The addicts stuff themselves full of drugs, alcohol, food, sex ... whatever their substance of choice ... to feed a deeply spiritual and emotional hunger that can never be nourished by such things. I think hungry ghosts speak to non-addicts too. Many of us suffer from an emotional hunger that has never been satisfied no matter where we go, who we love, or what we do. We crawl around like hungry, empty beings, searching for the thing that will cure our suffering.

I'm haunted by my own hungry ghosts, of course. If you've read my blog for any time at all, you've witnessed my search for happiness, for forgiveness, for understanding.

I have hungered long and hard for a manuscript I could never finish. I've been working on it for ten years and I have been held helpless in the grasp of failure and immobility. But then I finally did something about it. I hired a writing coach last August and I was writing along at a good pace up until I hit a difficult chapter.

I started that chapter in November. I just finished it this week, if that tells you anything about how it's been going lately.

Writing a memoir isn't easy. I think we all realize it wouldn't be easy, but perhaps we think we have it in us. We think we could do it. We think one day, when we have time, we'll put it all down. The good, the bad, the ugly. We'll put it down so everyone knows it happened. So we ourselves know it happened. As if writing it down will somehow make it official and reassure ourselves that we're not crazy. We're not alone. It all happened and we survived it. Goddamn, we survived it! And isn't that beautiful? Isn't that downright inspirational?

But then comes a chapter such as this.

And I'll be gobsmacked if I couldn't write it.

The sentences came in halting spurts. A chapter a week ground down to a paragraph a week. I wrote a few sentences at a time and it felt like drawing a razor blade across my skin. It hurt to push down. It scared me on some primal level, as though getting down deep would be fatal.

I talked about it in therapy. I talked it out with my husband. I've been talking it out for over twenty years, alright? I've told this story a thousand times. I've already dealt with it. It's old news. I'm so beyond this. I'm all like, "Bitch, please" with my childhood.

*Holds hand up*

So why I can't I write it down?

What kind of black magic happens in writing it down?

How are the words on the page different than the thoughts in your head? How is it different than saying it out loud? How is it different than telling everyone you know until it almost becomes a punchline to the joke that is your life.

I don't know.

But it is.

Japanese Buddhists have a ritual called Segaki. Segaki means, "Feeding of the hungry ghosts." During this ceremony, they write the things they wish to resolve on slips of paper and then light them on fire. Their words burn up towards the heavens as ashy offerings to the hungry ghosts. Maybe that's what the act of memoir is? I didn't know it would feel so final. I didn't know why I stayed in therapy for so many years without resolution. I never realized that the act of writing it all down, in one final work, would give me such a feeling of peace.

I think I was waiting for this.

Maybe I wasn't able to do it until now? Maybe that's why it's been so hard and taken so long?

But here at last, I'm writing it down. All of it. I'm laying out my mistakes for the world to see. To say that this happened to me. I did this. And I did that. It was real. And I somehow survived it.

Writing it down is forgiveness.

I didn't expect that part.

I burn these bits of papers. These memories. I feed the ghosts that have trailed me since I was a girl. I feed them and I ask for forgiveness and the ability to forgive. I ask for mercy for us all.

I started the chapter in November. I've gone on an anti-depressant and an anti-anxiety drug in the time since it began. I've bled into the pages. The words may read easy but it was 70 words a day. Words that traveled as though on hands and knees.

And now I've finished that chapter after seven months of struggle.

The 65-page chapter. It is the behemoth in the middle of the book. It sits heavy and sunken, dipped down in the middle like an old mattress.

But it is done, motherfuckers. That bitch is buried.

(Excuse my language. I'm drunk with accomplishment.)

I have written 45,000 words of my memoir. That's 180-some pages. I've read that a memoir should be around 75,000 words, give or take. But I figure it will be done when it's done, regardless of how many words that might be. And even then it won't be done, because I plan to spend a good long time editing and revising it. So I'm in it for the long haul.

If writing it down was opening a vein and letting it bleed, the revising will be the careful stitching up of the wound. Writing is like surgery. It's medicinal. It's messy. And I'd prefer to do it under sedation, with well-sated ghosts cheering me on.