This morning I made my son breakfast, as I have every weekday morning since he was in kindergarten.  I have a system.  I take out the bread and cheese and lunch meats for his sandwich; scramble the eggs, toast the english muffin; pour the orange juice.  I make myself a cappuccino while he eats at the kitchen counter.  Then, I arrange his lunch box with military precision, learned over nine years of early morning sandwich-making.  The juice box.  The organic fruit roll-up.  The Entemann's soft-baked chocolate chip cookies.  Years ago, I used to tuck a note in with his lunch.  Full of x's and o's.  Wishing him a great day.  I would draw a little mommy smiley-face. I love you so so so so so so much.

Today I made his early morning breakfast and packed his school lunch for the last time.

He and my husband made their way down the stairs to the car, as I called after them: drive carefully!  Have a great day!  See you later! My husband and I exchanged a glance.  In that marital glance, there was all of it.  The awareness this moment is one of tremendous change.  That we are transitioning from one time in life to another.  Just as the years of baby seats and plastic apparatus and bedtime stories gave way to tennis lessons and homework and class art projects, which in turn gave way to standardized tests and middle school dramas and team victories and defeats and boarding school applications, now we are entering a new phase, one which will reveal itself to us as we enter it.  Our boy, our only boy, is going away to school next year.  There is no road map.

After they left, in the quiet of my kitchen, I glanced down at the book of Buddhist wisdom that I keep on our table, open to today's offering.  The wisdom of the day was from Pema Chodron:  "Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly."

And then I noticed the date.  And realized that today is my mother's yahrzeit,  the Hebrew anniversary of her death.  She has been gone for ten years.  I went into our dining room, where in the sideboard I keep a supply of yahrzeit candles.  It is a measure of being at this stage of life -- of having lost both of my parents -- that I am always sure to have them around.  (Our first year in rural Connecticut, I went out on the day before Yom Kippur to pick up a yahrzeit candle at the market, only to discover that I wasn't on the Upper West Side any more.)

Alone in the kitchen, having just sent my middle schooler off to his last day of eighth grade, full to the brim with the awareness that he will be going to high school four hours from home come September, I lit the candle for my mother and recited the Mourner's Kaddish.  I thought of her with sorrow, with fondness, with confusion, with love.  Anyone who has read my work knows that she and I had a complicated relationship.  I wiped away my tears, and climbed the stairs to my office.

As I write these words, I am lying on my chaise longue surrounded by books.  A former student's galley I intend to blurb, last week's New Yorker, a book for which I'm writing a literary appreciation, piles of galleys of Still Writing.  My cappuccino has grown cold by my side.  The dogs are curled up in their beds.  The house is silent.  Crows peck at the meadow outside my window.  My boy is spending his last day at the only school he has ever known.  My husband is at his office, digging in to work of his own.  Downstairs, in the kitchen, a candle flickers.

This is it -- all of it -- a rich, deep, contemplative, paradoxical life -- each hour full of the bitter and the sweet, the push and pull.  Pleasure and pain in the same breath.  The love is to risk.  To love is to let go.

On the list of cocktail party questions that flummox me (among which: What are you working on?  How do you do it, you must be so disciplined?  Don't you feel exposed?  And of course, my personal favorite, Still Writing?) there is one question for which I have never been able to develop a simple response.

What kind of writer are you?

Over the the course of the last two decades, I have written novels, memoirs,  stories, essays, book reviews.  I have written a play for a drug company (don't ask), ghost written a novel for a hair stylist, and collaborated on a few bestsellers.  For years, I wrote the back page of Travel+Leisure, for which I interviewed all sorts of fascinating people on the subject of their favorite places.  I have written more blurbs, more letters of recommendations than I can count.  I have written blog posts.  I have taught all over the world: Alaska, Provincetown, Big Sur, Lenox, New York, Positano, and written comments on the backs of students' manuscripts.  I have given dozens upon dozens of speeches, in auditoriums, hotels, back yards, churches, synagogues, yoga studios.

What kind of writer am I?

We are, each one of us, singular, but our selves are made up of multiple identities.  We live in a culture that would prefer for us to define ourselves in sound bytes, but it is dangerous, soul-deadening, to succumb to that way of thinking.  I am a mother, wife, daughter, and friend.  I am a writer and a teacher.  A Jew.  A former city dweller.  A country girl.  A yogi.  A dog owner.  A Democrat.  I like to dress up in beautiful clothes and go out to elegant dinners, and my preferred state of being is solitary, in ratty yoga gear, with my hair pulled into a clip and warm socks on my feet, as I am right now.  I am most at home when I am following a line of words on the page.  I am a social creature, but I also--in the words of my friend Sylvia --startle easily.  So what does this make me?

If there are advantages to no longer being very young (or young at all) chief among them is this: I am beginning to become comfortable with all of my selves, and all of those selves' inherent contradictions.  It is possible to be a yogi and like to drink a few glasses of wine.  It is possible to be a solitary writer living in the country, and also obsess about a pair of Jimmy Choo pumps.  It is a fact that I am a literary novelist, and also get up in front of audiences and talk about meditation, and building a spiritual life.  And that spiritual life is not at odds with the murky, doubting, complicated place inside of me that challenges me with its darkness.

What kind of writer am I?

On a good day, I am a writer who writes.  Who gets out of my own way.  Who feels less of a need to define myself with each passing year.  When we create characters on the page, we try to bring them to life in all of their complexity.  Should we really ask anything less of ourselves?

This morning I came upon this quote from Bill Watterson, creator of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, via one of my favorite blogs:

"You will do well to cultivate the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or failure. The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along."

My husband has spent a good portion of this holiday weekend down in our very messy basement starting to sort through ten years and several lifetimes' worth of things that were once important (copies of old contracts and tax returns),  indispensable (high chairs, strollers), or of sentimental value (kindergarten art work, stacks of holiday cards).  He also came across a stash of memorabilia and photographs from my childhood,  which included this photo:

At Thirteen

As soon as I saw it, a particular summer afternoon came flooding back to me.  The backyard of my childhood home.  The "fashion show" that my mother put on for the neighborhood ladies, to introduce them to her new line of tennis towels and tennis jewelry, modeled by her daughter Dani.  The way I felt, circling the swimming pool in a little white tennis dress, wearing a necklace with a gold tennis ball affixed with a sapphire eye (the motto being keep your eye on the ball).  The strange mixture of self-consciousness, embarrassment, and the awareness, lurking somewhere, that something was very wrong with this picture.  That I was being put on display -- I was well used to being put on display -- and that the whole episode was mortifying.  Did I also feel pride?  Was I enjoying, on some level, being paraded in front of the ladies?  It's possible.  I don't remember.  I am only able to touch a vague feeling of unease and numbness.  I didn't know the first thing about myself.

I am writing this from the chaise lounge in my home office.  My son and his friend are outside, shooting hoops.  My dog is crashed on the rug by my feet.  My husband is  downstairs, still sorting.  It's a chilly, New England weekend.  I am in mid-life.  A wife.  Mother.  Writer.  Teacher.  Friend.  I have lately been very aware that this journey of mine could not have been mapped out.  That the thirteen year old girl smiling bashfully in that photograph couldn't in her wildest dreams have imagined the life that would unfold for her.  She didn't even know to dream it.  Nor could she have imagined it at twenty.  Or even at thirty.

How we spend our days, Annie Dillard once wrote, is, of course, how we spend our lives.  Our lives are a chain of these days.  We grow, or we stagnate.  We form good habits, disciplines, or destructive ones.  Or sometimes both.  We learn from our mistakes, or we keep repeating them until we're in enough pain to make changes.  I can supply a narrative to my life, shape and carve the story so that it seems to make sense.  But there is no straight arrow pointing from that girl with the tennis racket to the woman on the chaise lounge.  No game of connect-the-dots.  There is only the blessed, hard work of living, and allowing life to shape us, as water shapes rock.

If I could reach back through time and whisper something to that girl, it would simply be this: be patient.  Be kind to yourself.  And wake up.

This week I have something of a breather.  My son is away on his 8th grade class trip, I'm waiting for notes from various editors, and have a few deadlines, manuscripts to read, nothing pressing.  I'm able to choose how to structure my time.  When I woke up this morning, the hours stretched out before me in all their glory.  It was a beautiful spring day, the house unusually and blissfully quiet.  No sandwiches to pack, no discussion of after-school activities.  As I sipped my cappuccino, I contemplated: yoga? meditation? back to work on an elusive short story? read the novel I'm immersed in? start the essay that's due next week? or perhaps the one that's due the week after? write down notes for a new novel, one that has been revealing itself to me in tiny, tantalizing bits and pieces?

It's now noon and I'm here to say that I have not practiced what I'm pretty good at preaching.  Here is an incomplete list of what I have, in fact, done so far this morning: checked email; answered email; dug up a link to a piece about me and sent it to my U.K. agent who is about to submit Still Writing; Googled myself; searched for an elusive pair of black high-heeled sandals that seem to be sold out all over the United States; ate half a yogurt; deleted emails; checked Twitter; tweeted; tweeted again; went on Facebook and shared a link to my husband's new movie poster; talked to the housekeeper; planned tonight's dinner; took a bath; read old notes from a phone session with a psychic.

Okay, this is embarrassing enough.  I think I'll stop.  But I imagine you get the point.  Sometimes people ask me whether I find it easier, living in the country, than I did back when we lived in New York.  My response is, to quote Jon Kabat-Zinn, wherever you go, there you are.  This is our lot in life -- even the most disciplined among us.  Wet get in our own way.  Today -- and today isn't over -- I have so far frittered away precious hours.  I have rituals to recalibrate, adjust.  I often tell my son that we can always start our day over again -- and after I finish this little post, I intend to attempt to do just that.  I will unroll my yoga mat.  Light a fire in the fireplace.  Do the things that I know will set me up for an afternoon that will be free of the "fleas of life" -- Styron's wonderful phrase -- and allow for spaciousness in my mind.  That kind of spaciousness comes from turning away from the chattering world.  From journeying inward.  From having the simple but oh-so-hard to come by practice of patience, contemplation, quiet.

That practice that can be shattered with the click of a mouse -- just checking one more thing.  The internet is the writer's crack cocaine.  It just is.  At times, I find myself in its thrall.  I long for the movement of a pen across the page, a notebook on my lap.  I long for the capaciousness  and focus that comes from hours of undivided attention.  It is not when I'm at my busiest that I click away the hours.  No.  It's when the hours seem endless that I squander them.  And we all should know better than that.

A few days ago, while looking up a book I was interested in reading on Amazon.com, I suffered a momentary setback and broke one of my own  rules--a rule I keep in place out of self-preservation: I searched my own name, and began to read about myself online.  In this particular case, since I was on Amazon, this involved reading reviews of some of my books.  Amazon has this helpful little sidebar (not) in which someone browsing can see an example of a five star review and an example of a one star review.

Which do you think I was interested in?

Right.  I clicked on the one star review for Slow Motion, the memoir I first published in 1998.  When a writer is in an evil, self-Googling mood, she is not on the hunt for glowing reviews, positive feedback, happy and generous people.  No.  A writer in the midst of self-Googling is stuck in the muck of her own mind.  She is flailing, tumbling head over heels down a slope that can only end in pain and insult.  Pretentious cry baby, one reader offered.  She had read Slow Motion in a women's lit class.  But it was a review right beneath it that caught my eye: Why did she omit her 1981 marriage?

Someone had done her research.  She had dug up details about my very brief marriage at the age of eighteen--she even knew what the poor, hapless fellow who had the bad sense to marry me had done for a living (he owned an art gallery/clothing store).  She was infuriated that I hadn't written about that baby marriage in the pages of Slow Motion.  That I had somehow duped the reader by not revealing everything about my  life.

What is the job of the memoirist?  Is it to tell all?  Or is it to carve a story out of memory?

I always begin classes on memoir by discussing with my students  the difference between autobiography and memoir.  Autobiography presumes that the person writing the book is important, and the reader is drawn to the book out of a desire to know more about that person.  It would be unreasonable for Hillary Clinton, say, to omit an early marriage from her autobiography.  But memoir is story-telling.  No one reads Slow Motion or Devotion because they want to know more about Dani Shapiro.  They don't read This Boy's Life because they want to know more about Tobias Wolff.  Or Lit because they're determined to get to the bottom of the question: who is Mary Karr?  No--these memoirs are stories, hewing as closely to the truth of the writer's memory as possible--but not letting it all hang out.  Part of the art of memoir is seeing, and recognizing the story itself.  Life is messy.  Art takes gathers up the chaos and gives it form.

If I had written about that early, baby-marriage in Slow Motion, the reader would have misunderstood me.  The reader would have imposed certain societal ideas (divorce equals maturity, for instance) onto me, thereby not understanding the extreme childishness, the amoeba-like lack of sense of self, and yes, the innocence, that propelled me into the circumstances I wrote about in my memoir, of a long and garish affair with an older married man.  If I had portrayed myself as a teenaged divorcee, it would have confused the reader.  It would have, in fact, misled the reader, even though it was a fact of my life.  And so I left it out -- and wrote about it later, in a piece in The New Yorker, a piece where that information was useful to the narrative.

I am aware that this is incendiary stuff.  That perhaps some people feel that omission is on a par with invention -- which is an idea I find infuriating myself.  I wanted to write back to that Amazon reader and say: I don't owe you my life served up on a platter.  We writers who mine our personal veins, who find the stories in our own lives and dive deep, searching for the ways to make order out of chaos, are not doing so because we want to be reality TV stars, or because we're exhibitionists, or narcissists.  We are not publishing our journals, or imagining ourselves to be so important that people are actually interested in the details of our lives.  No.  We are taking those details and lining them up, amazed, astonished, rapt the way a child might be, building blocks to form a tower.  We are attempting to make sense out of what we can -- to reach out a hand to the reader across a rough sea of isolation and separateness and offer up something that has shape, integrity, even beauty and symmetry.

Just like life?  Hardly.  But that isn't our job.

As I write this I am lounging on an enormous bed––whatever  size is larger than King––in an antique filled bedroom high above the Amalfi Coast.  It's mid morning on Palm Sunday in Positano.  The doors to my terrace are flung open.  In the distance, the Le Galli islands rise like humps of a primordial sea creature in the distance.  Bells clang  in the village square.

Morning at Le Sirenuse

It is the end of a week of teaching.  Of spending time with some of my favorite people in the world.  Of making new friends, delving deeply into the work of people who began the week as strangers and ended the week with hugs and tears.  It's always this way at Sirenland, but somehow this year feels even more poignant to me.  We have been coming here for seven years now.  My son has grown up in this hotel.  The lovely people who work here feel like family when we arrive.  And nowhere in my life do I feel, more acutely, the passage of time.

This morning, when the last of the cars left the hotel's driveway to make the long, windy trip from Positano to Naples, and the last of our friends waved goodbye -- departing for London, Paris, Rome, and eventually for the States, I realized that I have somehow become a person who worries less.  I'm not quite sure how this has happened.  Anxiety has defined my inner landscape for so much of my life.  You might say that it has driven me -- as a writer, as a wife and mother.  Certainly it has been central to my subject matter.  But now--in midlife--it has vanished.

Positano

Travel safe, I say to my friends.  See you next week in New York.  Or next month, in the Berkshires.  Or over the summer, in Provincetown.  Or next time my husband and I are in Los Angeles.  Or next year, back here in Positano.

Poo, poo, poo, my grandparents and parents used to say.  Or Kain Ayin Hora --a Yiddish expression meant to ward off the evil eye.  The idea was: don't ask for too much.  Don't make assumptions about the future -- especially not happy assumptions.  A peasant version of God willing, or please God, or any of those other familiar expressions.

But as I said goodbye to my friends this morning, and as I prepare to make the trip home with Michael and Jacob--airports, multiple flights, the kind of thing that used to fill me with paralyzing dread--I search myself for signs of the old terror...and find none.

This is not in any way because I am less aware of life's fragility.  It may even be because of a heightened awareness that this--this morning, this blue, blue morning, these clanging church bells, my husband standing on the balcony overlooking the sea, my son who I swear has grown an inch on this trip, the friends and their children who have also grown up at Sirenland, the call from my 96 year old uncle about an upcoming birthday celebration for him (his wife called it "wow plus one!")--this is it.  The whole megillah.  In the human catastrophe, this very moment is one of peace and tranquility and hope.

Will it always be so?

Of course not.

But it is precisely what we have today, at this moment.

I forget every time the feeling that hits me when I have finished one book but have not yet begun another.  This between-books limbo is, for me, like a long, slow leaching of color from the world.  A steady decline of mood and connection to the universe until one day I wake up and hardly know who I am.

Because the way I know myself is through the written word.  The ways in which I am able to access any understanding of what makes me tick, how I see the world around me, what I feel, what I know, is through the daily practice of grappling with the page.  The grappling itself is the point.  Ideally something comes of that grappling, eventually.  Every story, novel, essay, memoir begins with that dive, that free fall, that willingness to not know.  We begin with the barest of ideas, a flickering image, a phrase, just outside our grasp, and we begin to try to capture it by sitting with the page and seeing what emerges.

When I'm not engaged in this process a depression settles in.  This time, I think, this time it's different.  I become convinced that my imagination has taken leave of me.  That I will never become obsessed with a character or a story again.  My mind starts spinning all sorts of stories--and not the good kind of stories.  I feel as if I have split in two, and part of me is on a small boat without oars, drifting slowly out to sea, carried by the tide, watching the other part of me standing on the shore, watching.  Writing brings these two aspects of my nature together.  It weaves the observer, the story teller, the thinker, the dreamer, together into one woman.  It silences my demons by putting them to good use.

As I write I am in a quiet hotel room.  Room service coffee is cooling at my side.  My laptop is balanced on a pillow.  Light streams in from the floor-to-ceiling windows facing east over New York City.  But even this––this small act of thinking about the in between––brings me back inside myself.  I am not aimlessly drifting.  The room sharpens, comes into focus.  My interior life becomes heightened, once again making itself known to me

Do you know those lists of how much time we spend, over the course of a lifetime, brushing our teeth, or taking out the garbage, or talking on the phone, or grocery shopping?  I want to diminish the time I spend in the in-between.  Like Virginia Woolf's cotton wool, the in-between is a muffled, deadening place.  It is soul-eroding.  You would think it might be a time of gestation -- roots beginning to form beneath that frozen ground -- but you would be wrong.  The real gestation happens on the page, just so.  A writer's fingers moving along a keyboard, a pen scratching words.  The next word appears, then the next.  And the next.  And suddenly the sky brightens.  The day beckons.  The simple, elusive act of beginning.  The practice itself, the very point of the thing, and suddenly the in between is revealed for what it really is.

It is all we  have.

As I write this I'm somewhere between LA and New York, sitting next to my sleeping husband.  It is the first time -- I am tempting fate by admitting this -- that we have ever taken the same flight together, without our son.  We've each taken countless flights solo.  And we've flown together as a family (the crazy thinking being that if we go down, at least we're all together).  We've even boarded two separate flights to the same destination, reuniting at the airport in some far-flung place.  But never have we sat together, scrunched into our seats, the two of us high above the planet as somewhere below us, our thirteen year old is watching a football game.  As risks go, I have grown more pragmatic over the years.  Statistically speaking, we're in better shape than if we were driving, or even taking a walk down a country road.  Risk and the calculations, rumination, and determinations surrounding it -- whether avoiding it or embracing it -- has been a tape looping through my head for so long that I don't know who I would be if I weren't thinking about it. I am a mama bear, a wife, a friend, a niece, a teacher, and I am always thinking of how to keep myself and those I love safe from any imaginable harm.

But when it comes to the writing life, risk is what it's all about.  Lately, I've been reading a lot of books that play it safe.  Conventional narratives, characters whose edges are smoothed out to a palatable degree.  Can I just say it?  These books bore me.  I'm bored.  It's like eating muesli when I want a charred, juicy steak.  I want to read about messiness.  I don't need the pieces to fit together in fiction -- I mean, when do the pieces ever fit together in life?  I want to encounter characters who feel, who do the unexpected.  Who think human thoughts -- no matter how dark and flawed and uncomfortable.  I want to be reminded of my own inner landscape, my own complex humanity.  I want to connect -- with the book, with myself.  In a recent re-reading of Mrs. Dalloway, I was amazed, as I always am, by the way that Woolf renders Clarissa Dalloway almost see-through, as if we were watching an MRI of her internal life, all the while that she is going about her daily business ––the inner and outer equally accessible.  I felt this thrill of discovery too, when reading Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins, a novel in which the author took risk after creative risk but somehow never lost control of his taut narrative, his story.  Walter writes like no one has ever said no to him.  No.  He writes like he has learned not to say no to himself.

If we are to write work that is alive, we have to be willing to head out there on that high wire.  Every day, we have to place one foot, then another, on that thin, quivering line and let go of our ruminations and questions about what might happen.  Maybe it won't work.  Yeah.  Maybe it will suck.  Maybe I'll waste my time and precious energy on a piece of prose that will be dead on arrival.  And indeed, yes you may.  But how else are we supposed to discover what's in there -- in the teeming, writhing darkness?  In the frozen tundra?  If we're sitting alone in our rooms, engaged in this solitary life -- a life filled with uncertainty, with constant self-doubt, oh, yes, and with risks of a very practical sort -- no one gives us a pension and a retirement plan, after all -- then we damned well better be sure that we're spending it all, shooting it all, holding back nothing.  We need to give it up to the page, not just when it feels good, not when we feel in control of it, but every single time.

Yesterday morning, as I was getting dressed for an appearance at a speaking engagement, I stood in front of my open closet doors and sorted through my speaking-engagement clothes.  Dark jeans or black pants, a silk blouse of some sort, a nice sweater or jacket.  Boots with heels.  I put on some make-up--just enough to hopefully erase the signs of the previous night, which involved a late dinner with friends at my favorite restaurant.  I put my hair up, chose earrings, a necklace.  A spritz of perfume.

It was a Sunday morning.  My husband was in his office, getting ready for a month-long process of editing his film.  My son was lolling in bed with his ipad.  The dogs were crashed on the floor.  And I was making the shift from my private self to my public self.  And it wasn't easy.  As I dressed, the feeling I had was one of arming myself -- not because I wasn't looking forward to the event (I was) but because, for writers, going out into the world requires some doing.  We spend our lives in a solitary way.  I write this, I am sitting on my chaise lounge in the clothes I slept in and a pair of socks from one of those in-flight kits.  I will probably not speak to a soul all day, unless you count the dogs (here, the dialogue consists of, bujabujabu, and i love you do you know that? and who wants a treat?)  My own face will surprise me in the mirror, should I pass a mirror, because the act of writing is, for me, a kind of self-forgetting.  Take someone who lives in this realm of self-forgetting and put her in front of an audience, and there you have it.  The dilemma.  The modern writer's conundrum.

I worry that I will be misunderstood.  That the lovely people who booked me for yesterday's engagement will think I didn't have a good time (I did!).  What I'm getting at here is the complexity of being a person at once deeply private and shockingly public.  A person who spends days--weeks--speaking as little as possible, a person for whom the word "hermitage" is appealing, and a person who sits in front of an audience, speaking into a microphone, telling stories (jokes, even!) and looking--in fact, being--comfortable.  It's a split-screen, this writer's life.  And what I have discovered, over these recent years when I've been doing a lot more public speaking, is that it requires a kind of armor.

This armor extends beyond the dark jeans, the silk blouse, the make-up.  The absolute vulnerability necessary to write something real, honest, and universal is at odds with the public self.  Yesterday, during my event, there was a woman in the back row (there's always one) who, every time I looked her way, rolled her eyes.  I mean, really rolled her eyes.  A full eye-roll, heavenward.  Her body language said: I'm not buying it.  It said, I'm bored to tears, when will this be over?  Now, the rest of the audience seemed very engaged, even rapt.  But because I'm a writer––because I am a sensitive creature with less armor than most––and, because in order to give a good talk, I in fact need to be vulnerable, I directed my talk to the eye-roller.  I couldn't stop thinking about her.  How was I failing?  Where was I going wrong?  Why, oh why, didn't she like me?  It's the next day, and I'm thinking about her still.  This is no different from writers who can quote you chapter and verse from their negative reviews, but not a word from the glowing ones.  Or writers who troll their Amazon pages, only stopping to take in the one star reviews.

So what is the armor, then, that allows us to take part in the world around us, a world that will sometimes feel like just too much, a world that might insult us, or hurt us?  For the writer, I think there's only one answer, and I'm doing it right now.  It's to return to the solitude.  To the chaise lounge, the dogs, the pajamas.  To return to the page, the blank and glorious page, and look up, hours later, realizing that the armor has slipped away.

I'm writing this in a crowded cafe in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina.  My thirteen year old son is sitting across a round table from me.  We're both clacking away on our laptops––he's ostensibly doing homework.  He's drinking a vanilla steamer.  Me, a cappuccino.  It's loud here.  Conversation, music, a blender making smoothies.  Our suitcases are under the table, because we're being picked up in a few hours to be taken to the airport--on our way home after five days visiting my husband, who is directing his first film here.

How do we hold on to ourselves when life isn't routine--which is to say, most of the time?  I am a creature of habit, quite possibly neurotically so.  I eat the same thing for lunch every day, for instance.  I make my bed the minute I awake in the morning.  I have certain requirements: solitude, silence, enough hours, caffeine.  But for a while now, nothing has been routine.  I've finished a book, and am nowhere near starting a new one.  (I'm never near starting a new one until the day I do.)  I've been writing a little of this, a little of that.  My husband is away for months.  My kid is in eighth grade, and we're looking at high schools.  It's a particularly rich, completely nutty time.

In the midst of this, yesterday, someone (okay, a lady blow-drying my hair) asked me where I find inspiration.  The question stopped me, for a moment, because I realized that I was very far from inspiration because the practices that allow me access to myself behind myself (to paraphrase Emily Dickinson) had fallen by the wayside.  I hadn't packed my yoga mat on this trip.  I had only managed to practice once.  Meditation?  As if.  Reading?  I had brought Cloud Atlas with me on the flight down, but had read this instead.

"Everywhere," I answered the hair stylist.  "I find inspiration everywhere, as long as my eyes are open."

Ah, but this is it--what it's all about--this openness.  We writers (if I may generalize) are such sensitive creatures.  I've heard it said that we're born with one less layer of skin than most people.  Maintaining this openness -- when in the midst of the noise, the crowds, life's dailiness, can be incredibly challenging.  When I'm home and in my routine, I find it easier to be open because my routines support me.  But it's a luxury, and unrealistic, to think that I can live that way all the time.

So I look around me.  The boy, scribbling now in his math notebook.  The woman behind the counter who also works in the local theatre.  The smells and tastes.  This unfamiliar town.  I remind myself to breathe deeply, to fill my lungs, to stop protecting myself...from what?  This noise, this pace, this tumult, right now, today, this is my life.  If I am not present for it, if I'm simply getting through it until I'm finally back in my house on top of the hill with my bed made and my yoga mat unrolled, my favorite yogurt in the fridge, the silence and space and solitude I crave but can't always have––well, then.   All sorts of gifts may pass me by.

"Stories seem to say everything happens for a reason, and I want to say, no it doesn't."  These words from David Shields recently stood out for me, as I've been mulling over the reasons why my work, for the past number of years, has grown more and more fragmented.  I've been less interested in traditional narratives, but instead, have found myself––in Devotion, in a new essay called "Evil Tongue" that will be coming out here, and in my new book, Still Writing––writing in a puzzle-like, mosaic structure in which the white space between pieces, the juxtaposition of this piece against that, are part of the story itself.  Why?  I've been wondering.  Especially when my novels, up to this point, have tended toward traditional narrative.  What's going on?

The more I live, the more I find myself conscious both of pattern and of randomness.  Of senselessness, and the need to impose order on what otherwise feels chaotic, a jumble, like hundreds of pieces of a complicated puzzle strewn all over the floor.   We turn to the left, walking down the street, and run into an old friend--an encounter that changes the course of our day, or perhaps even the shape of our lives.  (Who knows?)  We turn left, walking down the street, and a piece of concrete falls from the roof of a building and slams... where?  If we've stopped to tie a shoelace, it falls a few yards in front of us.  If we've hurried, quickening our step, it falls... Well, you get my point.

I have a feeling that those of us who spend our days alone in our rooms working out stories on the page and in our heads obsess about the question of pattern and randomness.  On the idea of imposing reasons and order, thereby shaping events, creating a narrative out of the puzzle pieces.  In a story I once wrote called "Plane Crash Theory", the couple at the center of the story neglects to buy carpeting for the stairs of their brownstone.  A babysitter slips on the stairs -- and their baby is put in jeopardy.   Their financial irresponsibility, the wife's decision to place a vase of flowers in an indentation near the top of the stairs (called, in one of those great gifts life hands writers sometimes, a "coffin") -- all of these are puzzle pieces.  That was a story that couldn't have been written in a linear way.  One thing did not lead to the next, and the next... but in the mind of the wife, who narrates the story, they began to adhere to one another in a way that spelled disaster.

I've just turned in Still Writing.  (I know... I buried that lede.  More on my new book later, but suffice it to say for now that I will no longer be able to say that I'm still writing Still Writing.)   And as I think of what's next, once again I find myself drawn to the fragments, the shards, the great mystery and the desire––that obsession that I think we all share––to make sense out of this wild, improbable, accidental, singular life.

I've been thinking a lot lately about why I write.  Which, of course, is the title of George Orwell's 1946 essay, which was then stolen by Joan Didion for her 1976 essay, and most recently by our new poet laureate, Natasha Trethewey, in a February 2011 essay on poetry, history, and social justice.  Why write?  As I am finishing (yes, finishing) my new book, Still Writing, I come back, again and again, to the question of my own motivation,  formative thought, feeling, geography, history–-all of which has led to this strange, out-of-step life.  It is a life of surprising gifts, unsurprising indignities; despair, elation, rejection, and––to use Martha Graham's phrase––queer, divine dissatisfaction.  A life that I did not choose to live–but one that chose me.

Why write?  Orwell's essay is about political purpose.  "I cannot say with certainty which of my motivations are strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed; and, looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives, and humbug generally."

Didion's essay is, at its core, about emotional and intellectual clarity:  "Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."

My favorite passage in Trethewey's recent essay is her response to the question, why poetry?  "Because poetry ennobles the human soul; it opens--not closes--our hearts.  Poetry matters not only because of its aesthetic beauty, but also because of the possibility of humane intelligence--its ability to teach us what we have not known, to show us what we have been blind to, to ask us the most difficult questions regarding our own humanity and that of others.  Across time and space, it shows us how we are alike, not that we are different."

There you have it, all of it, the whole megillah.  We are creatures of our moment, of our birthplace ("Geography is fate" said Heraclitus), of our circumstances, our loves and our losses, our preoccupations, our obsessions––which is to say, our themes.  We cannot free ourselves of these any more than we can shed our own skin.  And why would we want to?  They are our own small corner of this universal crazy quilt.  Why write?  To shine a light; to right a wrong; to shape chaos into art; to know what we think; to pose difficult questions; to challenge our own beliefs; to connect.

Because we have to.

I've been thinking lately about courage and confidence and how these are two words which might seem, on the surface, to be closely related, but actually have very different implications when it comes to the writing life.  Confidence is highly overrated.  Show me a confident writer, and in all likelihood you will also be showing me work that falls short of originality or greatness -- because originality and greatness come from the willingness to take risks.  To leap into the void.  To do what scares you.  And while it may seem that this leap would take confidence, what it really takes to leap is courage.  Which is a whole other kettle of fish.

Courage involves feeling your fear -- and doing it anyway.  There isn't a day when I sit down to write that I am not afraid.  Oh, this fear can disguise itself in any number of ways: it can look like resistance, or exhaustion, or distraction, or despair.  It can even look like online shopping.  But what it is, really––bottom line––is the fear that I won't be able to pull it off.  Whatever vision exists in my mind, whatever perfect iteration of an idea, will never be achieved.  So why bother?  Why even try?

I've been reading quite a lot of work lately that plays it safe.  Some of this work is very good, technically.  It reads smoothly, it contains within it some lovely imagery, some fluid sentences.  But in the end, I walk away from the page, already forgetting.  If we are going to spend our lives sitting alone in rooms––I don't know about you, but I'm still wearing this morning's yoga clothes, haven't even practiced yoga yet, and haven't left the house today except to walk the dogs––if we are going to live this strange, out-of-step existence,  sometimes lonely and certainly filled with rejection and indignity––then the reward for that, counter-intuitive though it may be, is to face our fears, to make the leap, to dare, to be willing to fall flat on our faces, every day, every single time.

I just came across this phrase in a Paris Review interview of William Styron, conducted in Paris, in 1954, by George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen.  When asked if young writers of that time were at a greater disadvantage than writers of previous generations, Styron responded: "Hello no, I don't.  Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word––life (emphasis mine).  Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls 'the fleas of life'––you know, colds, hangovers, bills, sprained ankles, and little nuisances of one sort or another.  They are the constants of life, at the core of life, along with nice little delights that come along every now and then."

Are you nodding in recognition?  The fleas of life.  It's so easy to let them get in the way.  Or to become so busy swatting at them that we get nothing else done.  To be honest, I have just had one of those days.  Oh, I accomplished a lot, if you consider making dentist appointments, arranging upcoming travel, answering emails, taking care of a few literary obligations, and collecting the mail to be accomplishments.  After having been away for the past three weeks in Europe (I know, cry me a river) I'm wary of my manuscript, which has assumed an air of danger in my absence, like a caged and feral animal I have been neglecting.  As Annie Dillard has written about neglecting work: "You must visit it every day and assert your mastery over it.  If you miss a day, you are quite rightly afraid to open the door to its room.  You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, 'Simba!'"

The fleas of life are always buzzing about.  On good writing days, we're able to ignore them and get to work––and once we do, they miraculously vanish.  But on bad writing days, the fleas take over.  They become a thick, grey wall that we can't see through, and we get distracted by them, we give up, we lose the day.  It's a parodox I think about a great deal.  In order to write, we need to push past our own frustration, resistance.  We don't begin in placidity.  We begin, most of us, most of the time, feeling like our heads are about to explode.  We feel surges of energy running through our bodies; we are barely able to contain them.  But then––once we have begun, we settle down at some point.  The fleas disappear.  When asked in the same interview whether his emotional state has any bearing on his work, Styron responded: "I guess like everybody I'm fouled up most of the time, but I find I do better when I'm relatively placid.  It's hard to say, though.  If writers had to wait until their precious psyches were completely serene there wouldn't be much writing done.  Actually––though I don't take advantage of the fact as much as I should––I find that I'm simply the happiest, the placidest, when I'm writing, and so I suppose that that, for me, is the final answer."

If we wait for the fleas of life to disappear––or if we succumb to our own frustration, our own fouled-up-ness, the discomfort that goes hand-in-hand with sitting down to write––we will be waiting a good long time.  And we'll be in danger of forgetting the feeling–– ironed-clean,  lucid,  clear, even hopeful––that visits us at the end of a day spent writing.

It isn't easy, is it?  Let me back up, for the sake of perspective, and point out that obviously there are other ways of living that are a whole lot harder.  That, as I sit in my bathrobe on my chaise lounge in my little study with my two dogs crashed at my feet in my empty, quiet house looking out the window at stone walls winding through vast meadows, trying to come up with just the right words, or even an approximation of the right words, I am not comparing my circumstances to, say, the construction workers who are on lifts right now to the ninety-sixth story of a building site, or, god knows, journalists trying to shed light on the situation in Syria, or the emergency room nurse on the overnight shift.  No.  I'm simply saying that it isn't easy, this business of creating something out of nothing.

Why do we do it?  I can tell you why I do it.  I write because, if I didn't, I would likely lose my mind.  I write because, in writing, the world around me begins to assume a shape.  I write because, when I don't, I feel not-quite-alive, at a remove from everything and everyone I love.  I don't write because I enjoy it.  I don't write because it's fun.  Honestly, it's so rarely fun.  Other words come to mind: satisfying, intense, engaging, maddening, absorbing, surprising.  But not fun.  Having written is another story.  That spent feeling at the end of a long writing day, a day in which one has wrung out every last bit of what was possible, that feeling, I'd wager, is part of what we writers live for.

Still, even twenty years into this writing life, I sometimes hold on to the expectation that it will be...easier.  Not the work itself, but the life.  How many of us, especially these days, are living under a cloud of anxiety?  We wonder about the future of books.  Of publishers.  Of agents.  All of the old signifiers have vanished.  Book tours?  Not so much.  And even for those who go on them, they're not what they used to be.  They're pit stops at hotels overlooking  interstate highways, appearances at bookstores where the audience consists of five people: the bookstore manager,  two of  your local cousins, a young woman inexplicably crying in the third row, and a homeless man who shuffles in and promptly falls asleep.  Publication date, for most, is the tree falling in the forest.  The sound of one hand clapping.

And so.  Why is this not depressing?  (Oops, sorry.  Maybe it is, just a little bit.)  I'll tell you why.  I just looked up from my screen and once again looked out the window.  Then I glanced around my little office: by my feet, my manuscript of Still Writing, along with The Writing Life by Annie Dillard, and a book of drawings made of poems by Mark Strand.  On the table next to me: a cup of coffee rests on top of Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner; The Book of Awakening by the brilliant Mark Nepo, which I have been reading at the start of most days; Daniel Mendelson's The Lost.  On the wall facing me, a bulletin board covered with index cards, scribbled with notes and ideas.  On this bulletin board, something catches my eye: a quote I don't remember finding or putting up there:

"The first task, though not the most important task, is to quiet the busyness in your mind.  The second task is to find your song.  And the third task is to sing your song."

We get the opportunity, every single day, to quiet our minds.  To find our song.  And to sing it.  Once, when I was in graduate school, a mentor of mine put the writing life into perspective: "All we have a right to expect," she said, "is the chance to do it again."  This––the singing of the song, the opportunity to wake up in the morning and do it again––is the beginning and the end of what we can hope for.