On Family History, Part II

Jacob’s fourth grade immigration project has forced me into folders and boxes, looking for more pieces of our family’s past. I kept thinking about previous generations yesterday, while sitting with Michael in our library and watching the inauguration of our 44th President. What an amazing day–one so full of hope and promise. It was a moment that seemed so unlikely in our lifetime, and nothing more than a dream in the lifetimes of generations past.

Who were these people? What were their hopes and dreams?

As days speed by in a blur of activity, attempts at productivity, and the solipsism of modern life, it’s so easy for me to lose sight of where I come from, not all that long ago. That photograph was taken in Vilna, Lithuania; none of my relatives pictured survived the war. And here is another one, of my great-great grandmother Zelda, who I believe was born in Springfield, Massachusetts:

Zelda! I look at her face (and her bosom!) and don’t see myself. But she is a part of me. They all are. And increasingly that feels like an important thing to remember.

On Equanimity

So hard to find, so easy to lose–that elusive state known as peace-of-mind. You’d think it would be within our grasp all the time. I mean, after all, what else is there, other than consciousness? And if it’s OUR consciousness, why can’t we simply switch the dial from, say, rabid self-doubt and antagonism to lovely, clear thoughts? Buddhists call it monkey mind. The mind that jumps from branch to branch–and why? Because that’s what the mind does. Because the branches are there, so enticing.

Which is why I try to sit at my desk and begin writing in the morning before the monkey (okay, the entire jungle of monkeys) in my mind starts swinging. If I begin to work–as opposed to bouncing around on the internet, which is the modern equivalent of monkey mind–I have a prayer in hell of having a decent writing day, and what’s more, maintaining something resembling peace of mind. But if I don’t? If I think I can maybe do a few other things first? Like…read the Times, check in with a friend, fill out forms for summer camp…my day is heading toward hopeless. It’s possible to start over again, to start the day again, but it requires much greater effort, and extracts a greater cost.

A friend asked yesterday if I take weekends off from writing, and I answered that I do. I don’t know how I arrived at this, but from the beginning of my writing life, I have always kept something like bankers hours. Monday through Friday, 9-5 or something close to it. Now, with a child who leaves for school at 7:30, my day starts a bit earlier, but often ends a bit earlier too. No matter. It’s enough time. Enough time, as long as I remember that these are the precious hours, and use them well.

On Discipline

A friend of mine–a magazine and newspaper journalist–keeps telling me how disciplined I am. In nearly every conversation between us, it comes up.

You’re so disciplined, she says.
No, I’m not, I protest.
Yes, you are. I’m just not built that way.
It’s not discipline!
It is. The work is your mistress.
But–

I always end up feeling vaguely frustrated by that word–discipline–that is used so often in relation to writers, particularly writers of books. Well, I have finally figured out why, along with a few other things about the way I live my life.

It’s this simple, I told my friend. If I don’t write, I feel like shit.
That’s discipline! She said.

No, no. It’s not like working out, or eating flax seeds, or something I do because it’s “good for me”. I do it because, if I don’t, I’m not quite right in the head.

I don’t do it because I have a deadline, or because I’m supposed to, or because it’s my job–though all those things are certainly true. If I didn’t spend my days writing, if I didn’t close all the flapping shutters in my mind and attempt to stay only in the single concentrated beam of light that it takes to be working on a long narrative, I would eventually lose my mind. Lose it. The only reason I am a remotely sane person is because writing organizes my inner life. It takes the swirling bits and orders them. It shows me what I don’t understand.

As Joan Didion once said, in her wonderful essay “Why I Write”: 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.

It has nothing to do with discipline.

On Book Parties

Last night, in the freezing West Village, it seemed half of the magazine and publishing worlds trooped out for a book party for this new anthology. I have an essay in the book, a piece called “Inheritance” about my mother and the way she left things when she died. As most of my readers are no doubt aware, when it comes to the writing of creative non-fiction, my mother has been my muse. When she was still around, she regularly said things to me so stunning, so impossible to believe, that it seemed all that was left for me to do was to find a way to write about it. How could I not? The material was too good. And I needed to find a way to understand a very complex, vexing woman.

Here’s the time she fell on the street and ended up in the emergency room:
When I rushed in through the doors of St. Luke’s/Roosevelt Hospital, she looked up at me from her gurney, her face black-and-blue. “Is there blood on my Ungaro?” she asked.

Or the time she called the 92nd Street Y to suggest that she teach a course on Jewish Mothers and Daughters in Literature — her qualification being that she was my mother.

Or many, many times she screamed at me that I was an ungrateful child–that she had given me life.

One of my essays about my mother that was published in a different anthology is called “Not a Pretty Story”, which pretty well sums it up.

I was struck last night, as I often am at book parties, by the strange disconnect between the writers who have, in the solitude of their own writing days, ripped apart the seams of themselves to get at the deepest possible truth of a personal story–and the swirl of champagne and the din of voices, the crowd in their party dresses. Don’t get me wrong. It was a fabulous, glamorous party–unusually so. Hosted by Robbie Myers, the editor-in-chief of Elle, and the wonderful and chic Liz Lange. Flashbulbs popped, the gallery grew warm. I saw friends I hadn’t seen in years. We were out for the evening–us writers who live in our bathrobes–in black velvet, ostrich-fringed cashmere, great shoes. We had written about our mothers, our children, our husbands, our private (made public) sorrow and guilt and fear. And now it was time to celebrate .

On Family History

My own, that is. Not the title of the novel–which, though many readers assumed otherwise, was not my own Family History! Jacob’s fourth grade class is concentrating on immigration between now and spring break, culminating in a trip to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and Ellis Island at the end of February. (I’m definitely going with the class. I’ve never been to Ellis Island.) His first assignment was to come up with a family tree. In every family there is a keeper of the tree–a cousin or an uncle who develops an interest. I have not been that person, and wasn’t very helpful when it came to filling in the missing pieces: whom among our ancestors came through Ellis Island? What year? From where? I called cousins and aunts to try to get some answers, and I also dug out a treasure that I feel so grateful to have:

That’s my great grandfather on the right, and my grandfather on the left. This is a still captured from a documentary film, “Image Before My Eyes”, that came out when I was in college. It’s a history of shtetl life in Poland before the war, and contains five precious minutes of footage of my grandfather, who traveled from New York City with his father back to the ancestral shtetl to say Kaddish at the grave of his father’s father. So the other night, Michael, Jacob and I curled up on the sofa in our library, the dogs at our feet, and took a voyage to the past. I showed Jacob the moving images of his great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, and the gravestone of his great-great-great-grandfather.

From this–

To this–

In just a few generations.

On Literary Friendship

Sometimes writers just need to be around other writers. It’s such a bizarre thing we all do, sitting alone, day after day, untangling the brambles of our imagination. When we used to live in Brooklyn, sometimes I felt overwhelmed by being around so many people who did what I do. I couldn’t take a walk without running into a friend, a foe, or just some poet or essayist or novelist I knew slightly, out walking her dog. Back in those days, I felt oppressed by so much close literary contact. There were just too many of us! How could we all be doing interesting work? But here in the country, I would welcome bumping into a fellow writer at the local cafe.

How’s the book going?
We would recognize the wild look in each other’s eyes.
The shaking of the head.
The little, helpless shrug.
Then smile, knowing we weren’t alone doing this weird thing we do.

The problem is, it almost never happens. Partly because there are very few writers where I live (well, there are some living legends but I don’t see them too often) and partly because there’s so little human contact at all. Don’t get me wrong. I like that about living in the country. It’s actually good for my work, and good for my head, if you can even distinguish the two. But sometimes I just need to get out of here. So yesterday, we all took a little ride to visit my friend Jane.

Our work couldn’t be more different. She’s a mega-bestselling writer of books that have their own kiosks in airports. I’m…well, let’s just say I’m not. She writes a book a year. I…well, let’s just say I don’t. When we’re together, we rarely talk about our work. We talk about our kids, and houses, and cooking, and how we’re feeling, and all the stuff of life. But what we see in each other is a kindred spirit: another woman who lives in her imagination and still lives in the real world, who makes something out of nothing every single day.

On Memory

The latest memoir-publishing scandal hit me even harder than all the others. Herman Rosenblat, in turns out, invented the story about his meeting his wife because she passed him apples through the fence of the concentration camp where he survived the war. The concentration camp part is true. Mr. Rosenblat is indeed a Holocaust survivor. Which, I suppose, is what makes this story sting. Why make up a story about the Holocaust, then pass it off as true? Wasn’t there drama enough? The book has been canceled (though now it may be published as fiction!) and the outcry has died down. But the cumulative lasting effect of these scandals makes me sad. I know they’re affecting the way readers approach memoir. I’ve seen the distrust, the cynicism in my students, who wonder: why should I believe this? How does the writer remember all that? Prove to me that it’s true. Show me.

The way the publishing industry is addressing this is to suggest that memoirs now be fact-checked. But how do you fact-check memory? How do you fact-check childhood? To think that memoir can be fact-checked is to misunderstand the whole idea of what memoir is. Which is to say, a story. A story told by a writer who is plumbing the depths of her memory. Who understands the sacred pact she is making with the reader. This story is what I remember. This is the truth of my memory–which is faulty, singular, mine alone. It is not The Truth. It is a small, personal attempt to wrestle with the recesses of time and history and the way memory plays on one’s mind. It is not invention. A writer writing memoir (unless that writer is actively attempting to trick the reader like Mr. Rosenblat and his fellow scammers) is engaged in the deep and very genuine process of piecing together a patchwork quilt of the past.

When I sit down each morning to work on Devotion, especially when I am writing the pieces of the quilt involving my childhood, that is where I’m headed. The past: my own history. I’m not inventing it, or supplying details that would make it better–or worse, or more dramatic–than it was. I don’t understand what the point of that would be. If I were doing that, wouldn’t I be writing fiction?

On Impermanence

We lost power for about an hour and a half last night. We had just finished dinner and I was in the middle of one of those ridiculous parental power struggles with Jacob, who was insisting that the brand of ice cream sandwiches we had in the freezer wasn’t the “right kind”. I was in the middle (I swear this is true) of saying something about starving children in Africa. Michael was smirking at me. Then–just like that–all went dark and silent. The hum of the freezer, the ticking of the clocks, the low level constant noise that we live with, without ever noticing. We lit candles, started a fire in the fireplace, found flashlights. As power outages go, it was perfect. It lasted exactly the right amount of time. Long enough to feel like an adventure, but brief enough to avoid becoming a huge problem.

An ice storm had been hitting us all day, the trees, bushes, windowsills encased and glittering. This morning, when we woke up, the world outside our windows shone silvery in the sunlight. Our post-ice-storm world has a bleak, bittersweet kind of beauty. It’s hard to take it in and enjoy it, knowing how much damage will be wrought, how many branches will crack, how many trees will fall.

I keep a book of Buddhist wisdom open on our kitchen table, and we turn a page each morning. The entry for today–a piece of wisdom from Shabkar–is this:

“Like the birds that gather in the treetops at night
And scatter in all directions at the coming of dawn,
Phenomena are impermanent.”

The awareness of this impermanence–in myself, in the world around me–can, at its best, force me into the present moment. The ice on the trees. The sun streaming in. The sound of a snow plow in the distance. My manuscript waiting for me to enter it, this morning. The boy back at school. The husband cozy in his office. The dogs sleeping. This, right now, is all there is.

On New Beginnings

Happy New Year. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for some peace and quiet. The holidays, while lovely, were also way too busy. Today is Jacob’s first day back at school, and tomorrow it’s meant to snow. A lot. Which probably means that I have to adjust my expectations about what kind of week this is going to be (e.g. highly productive). Unless it can be considered productive to bake more cookies and cook more soup, which is what we seem to do on snow days.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to begin–both as a creative act, and in life generally. It was Joseph Brodsky who once said: “Endings are difficult, beginnings are nowhere to be found. But oh, to begin, to begin, to begin…” In working on Devotion I am beginning again constantly. I finish one piece of the puzzle and there is empty space, blank white space before the next one begins. On good days this feels exciting, associative, an adventure. On not-so-good days, it feels more like my head is going to pop off and go flying into the ether. But it doesn’t matter how I feel. All that matters is that I sit down and do the work.

The other day, Jacob and I were leaving a hotel together, and I left my laptop case along with the manuscript for Devotion with the lady behind the check-out desk while I went to dig the car out of the snow. Jacob asked:

“Mommy, what would happen if you lost Devotion?”
“I don’t know honey. I don’t want to lose Devotion–that much I know.”
“But if you lost it, would you have to start all over again?”
“I guess I would have to start all over again.”

The nature of this book has turned my attention to the beauty that can be found in randomness. In the connections that are made, seemingly with no order, that make something surprising happen. Something out of the ordinary, special, and somehow true. This morning I stumbled on this youtube video made by a writer from Chicago, Amy Krause Rosenthal. I don’t know her, though we exchanged emails a few years back after I admired a piece of hers about motherhood and midlife. Take five minutes and watch it. It made me smile, and it started my day on a hopeful note. Thanks, Amy.

On the Inner Critic

We all have one. Some of us have a whole chorus of them. That little voice whispering in your ear, that gremlin sitting on your shoulder as you write. The sole purpose of this whispering gremlin is to tell you some version of the following:

You can’t do this.
Who do you think you are?
You’ve done it before, but this time, you’ll fail.
This project is worthless.
You’ve lost it, babe.
Better throw in the towel.
Or just simply: this sucks.

When I was starting out as a writer, I used to think that after I finished my first book, that little voice would go away. It didn’t. Then I thought that after I got my first positive review in the New York Times Book Review, it would go away. It didn’t. Then I thought that when I started publishing in The New Yorker, it would go away. Or had a bestseller. Or…I think you’re getting the point. Not only does that little whispering voice not go away…it gets louder. Seven books later, sometimes it practically shouts. Precisely because it’s an inner voice. Your inner critic doesn’t actually care what happens in the outer world. Accolades don’t silence it. If anything, it gets fed by success, because on top of “you can’t do it” comes the particularly insidious “you’ll never be able to do it again”.

It can be confusing, too, the inner critic, because sometimes he (or she) is right. Suppose the work really does suck! Sometimes it’s best to throw in the towel. So how’s a writer supposed to know when to listen? I think the answer is this: it’s best never to listen to the inner critic. A writer has to develop her own other way of judging her own work–and only after the work is well underway. The inner critic tends to leap in at the beginning, or even before the beginning.

You can’t do that!
Why even try?
That’s a silly idea.

This–certainly–is not the time to listen. This is the time to make peace with the inner voice. I’ve come to think of it as an animal whose ruffled feathers I can tame. I try talking to it. Later, I’ll say, soothingly. I’ll check back in with you later. But for now…what the hell. I’m going to shut you up, and take a flying leap.