Balancing Act

Lately I keep hearing women talking about their lives as balancing acts — as if daily life is a tightrope and the only way to avoid falling is to keep moving carefully forward — never looking down. An attorney friend whose firm is expanding at a rapid rate gave a Bingo party last night for a bunch of second graders and their parents, complete with two different kinds of chili (the batch I tasted was quite delicious, attributed to a recipe by Al Roker) and presented a thoughtful assortment of prizes (everyone got a prize, Bingo or not) including confetti bubble bath, soccer and basketball pillows, and a Bush-bashing book, especially for my husband. She had gone everywhere from the local toy store to Target in search of the excellent party favors, had made the chili, and the kid food (mac and cheese, pizza, bowls of healthy crudite) set the table. She was still in her work clothes. As we were leaving, she headed upstairs to check on her daughter’s friend who decided to sleep over at the last minute. Having only recently entered the land of sleepovers myself, I imagine that the night was long and perhaps sleep interrupted — or at the very least, today started very early, with crack-of-dawn pancakes. As I watched her recede up the stairs, I thought of Alison Pearson’s hilarious novel of a couple of years ago: I Don’t Know How She Does It. Everybody’s trying to do so much, and that’s it, the whole answer — there’s nothing to do but to try.

Balancing act, juggling act, tightrope — it makes me again think of Leslie Bennetts’ upcoming book, The Feminine Mistake — in which she writes about the myth of “having it all” and the pity that the phrase became so associated with feminism. There is, of course, no such thing as having it all. There is work, family, romance, health, fitness, sleep, solitude, spiritual life (whatever that means). There is reading for pleasure, travel, the absolute luxury of free time — such a luxury that many of us have no idea what to do with it when we have it. Every day, something wins out, which means something else is lost, or at the very least put on hold.

Today I am taking care of the business of writing, which means that I am not in fact writing. I have a teacher-parent conference at my son’s school. He has a swimming lesson later this afternoon, which may or may not be canceled on account of snow that may or may not start to fall. Which means I may or may not unroll my mat to do my yoga practice, which is one of the things (aside from writing) that keeps me on an even keel. Tonight, another school function. And this isn’t a whine, or a complaint, or a rant — at least I hope it doesn’t sound that way. I’m grateful for it all, the mothering, the writing, even the business of writing. And I’m aware — always aware in this sort of neurotic, Jewish, fishwifey way instilled in me by generations of worriers — that it could be otherwise. The phone could ring. Someone could be sick, or worse. The possibility of bad news is always on the other side of the rich, sometimes annoying, sometimes exhausting dailiness of life — I think that’s what helps me to understand (that is, when I’m feeling even remotely centered after a day or writing and yoga) that it’s all a blessing, not in a dumb Pollyanna way but it simply, truly is. And which is why, last night, watching the attorney-mom slowly make her way up that staircase — knowing what was ahead of her (the dirty dishes, the chaos left behind by masses of children, her daughter’s sleepover, her bulging briefcase, her buzzing Blackberry) — it looked to me like the happiest scene possible.

A Desk of One’s Own

Until very recently I had an office outside of my house, but then my landlord raised my rent and I decided — since I am “between books” — to hold off until I’m actually starting a new book before I rent an office again. That office was (bizarrely) a retail space in the small town ten minutes down the hill from my house. I could have been selling hats or scarves or real estate. I was the only person in the building who didn’t have a shingle. On gloomy days, when my lights were on, people would tell me they could see me framed by the picture window, writing as they drove by. The accountant who worked on the other side of the tissue-thin wall was possessed of a, shall we say, sonorous baritone. I found myself knowing more than I should about the tax situations of my fellow neighbors. I found myself listening to music while I wrote (in the two years I was in that office I wrote Black & White as well as a few stories) through very excellent Bose sound-deadening headphones. Sometimes–when I could still hear the accountant through the headphones, found myself aggressively turning up the volume on my stereo and playing Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations really really loud. Nothing worked. So here I am, back at home, at the desk of my own, in lieu of a room of my own.

Today’s desk: a notebook open to a list I’ve started to scribble of people to invite to my book party for Black & White; a Buddha head bought last summer at a local Tibetan festival, Tibetfest; photos of my husband and son; one of my husband from when he was a war correspondent, taken on a rooftop in Somalia (this picture reminds me that there is a side to him I’ll never fully know); on the bulletin board, some favorite quotes: this one, from Nietszche, reads “That for which we find words is already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.” (I keep this one to remind me not to talk through ideas for novels or stories or essays when they’re new in my mind.) Also on the bulletin board, a print of my son’s baby feet; the paperback book jacket of Family History; more photos, which appeared in Real Simple, of my family. An invitation to the party for my friend Jonathan Wilson’s new book about Marc Chagall, coming out in March. A small grouping of essential oils (violet, lime, basil, tamarack, vetiver) which I haven’t opened in months. A pile of galleys, including Amanda Eyre Ward’s compelling new novel, Forgive Me, which will be published in June (this is the only one of the books on my desk which has migrated from the need-to-read-pile to the whew-I’ve-read-it pile); Peter Godwin’s memoir, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun; a book my editor at Anchor gave me at lunch last week, which just got a great New York Times daily review, Still Life With Husband; Old Calabria, a book about the part of Italy where we’ll be next month, sent to me by the owner of Le Sirenuse, the astoundingly gorgeous hotel where we’ll be launching the Sirenland Writers’ Conference along with One Story magazine — a copy of which is also on my desk. A manuscript of a non-fiction book about nannies. And that’s just ON my desk. Both to the left and the right of my desk there are many more. Hopefully by the time I take inventory of my desk again, at least a few items may have shifted.

Pecking and Wretched

My favorite Virginia Woolf quote of late, a reflection of hers upon finishing a draft of The Waves: “I must hastily provide my mind with something else, or it will again become pecking and wretched–something imaginative, if possible, and light.” Pecking and wretched is exactly what I feel in the months that stretch between finishing one novel and starting the next. I promised myself, when I finished Black & White, that I’d do the Trollopian thing — Trollope is reported to have simply drawn a line beneath the ending of one novel, and straightaway started the next. What that does (or what I would imagine it would do, since I’ve never managed to even try it) is to take away the fear, the dread, the self-consciousness of telling oneself: oh, I’m starting another novel. Starting a novel is such a crazy thing to do. I mean, who in their right mind would embark on something that takes years, that is an act of faith, that is like being in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight? (A poet friend of mine, when we were batting around this analogy, remarked: “yeah, AND you’re building the boat!”)

What I seem to do, these days, is this: Surf the internet. Make a cappuccino. Surf the internet some more. Start with a lofty goal: say, research for a story I’m thinking of writing. End up — and how did this happen? — browsing websites for boots, jeans, summer camps, kids’wet suits, not necessarily in that order. Debate between another cappuccino and doing my daily (okay, six times a week, okay, this week it was four) yoga practice. Decide on yoga and THEN more caffeine. The caffeine then leads to busy-work (gotta get those files organized!) which then leads to the sun setting in the sky and…what just happened?

What isn’t happening on a day such as this is writing–and since I am someone for whom writing is necessary (by which I don’t simply mean I make a living at it, but rather, that it is medicinal, it is required, I don’t quite know what I’m thinking or feeling without it)–this is not a good thing. Not remotely.

Truth and Lies

What has happened to literary memoir? It’s developed a bad reputation, like the kid on the block that everybody knows is a big fat liar. Why should I believe you? Readers are now asking of every story. Why should I trust anything you tell me? Our faith that a memoir writer is at least attempting to tell the truth as best as he or she can remember it–that faith has been seriously shaken. Last night, a student of mine asked what the difference is between a “based on a true story” made-for-tv movie and the memoirs we’re reading in class. In other words, what’s the difference between, say, a Lifetime biopic and This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff?

Of course this hasn’t been helped along by the James Frey fiasco, in which A Million Little Pieces was famously exposed, first on Smoking Gun, then on Oprah to be…well…a work of fiction. Nor has it been helped by the recent revelations about Augusten Burroughs in Vanity Fair. (Things weren’t as bad as all that, is basically how the story ends up going.) But more personally painful than these examples–which were books I frankly hadn’t been all that interested in to begin with–are stories now coming out about writers I have admired all my life. Nadine Gordimer apparently made up a first cousin in a personal history piece she wrote for The New Yorker, and laughed about it with her biographer (until he turned on her by revealing her duplicity). Vivian Gornick, whose lucid memoir, Fierce Attachments, was one of the formative books of my college years, recently admitted, in a talk at Goucher College, that some of the walks with her mother that she writes about in her book (a book in which the entire structure is dependent on these walks that Gornick takes with her mother around New York City) — well, these walks didn’t all exactly happen. Some of them were invented. She had taken creative license–a writer’s prerogative, after all.

For years I have been trying to answer these questions for myself, for my readers, for my students. What’s kosher–and not kosher–when writing something understood to be non-fiction? Certain things seem fairly obvious. It’s not kosher to lie. It’s not kosher to invent, or at least not to have the awareness of inventing. Memory is a slippery business, and one’s relationship to memory changes at every single moment. It’s elusive and maddening, this working with memory. Where I stand in relation to a story I’m telling will entirely dictate how I remember–and therefore how I tell–that story. But the intention is to tell it as truthfully as I can. And that intention matters. That intention is the bond between the writer and the reader. It’s the hand that the writer extends to the reader: come with me. You can trust me. I’ve been to this place and now I’m taking you there.

I’ve been thinking about some of this because of a piece in The New York Times yesterday, about a writer, Jay Forman, who wrote a piece of journalism in Slate about monkey fishing. Years later–now–a class at the Columbia School of Journalism has exposed Forman’s piece to be wholesale invention. The latest, sad example in a string of examples. And then, over the weekend, I read Janet Malcolm‘s review in the New York Review of Books about Allen Shawn‘s new memoir, which sounds fascinating. Malcolm–always a pleasure to read for her bracing clarity–writes in the first few paragraphs of the review, about the trustworthiness of Shawn’s voice. And I found myself wondering: would trustworthiness have been mentioned a decade ago, before all these lines between fiction and reality became so impossibly blurred?

Last Mother’s Day an essay of mine was the cover story in Salon. It was excerpted from a longer essay I had written in an anthology, Maybe Baby. It was a tough, painful piece that explored some of my ambivalence about having children, after having had such a rough relationship with my own mother. In it, I reveal some very personal details about my own family’s life and recent history. Before the piece came out, my editor at Salon called. “Do yourself a favor. Don’t read the letters to the editor,” she warned me. “They’ll drive you crazy.”

Well, there’s nothing like telling a writer not to read something about herself or her own work to make sure that it will be the first thing she’ll do. At least this writer. I waited, oh, about five hours after the Salon piece was first posted before looking at the letters, which were already pouring in. Some of them were lovely, some of them were nasty — but what was surprising to me was this: some of them actually questioned whether the story I had written was true.

Now that–that had never happened to me before. That hand I extend to the reader–I had always first used that hand to carefully pick through the sharp rocks of my own history to produce something coherent and meaningful and above all true. I had believed that the reader on the other side of the page was also holding out a hand–palm open, willing to trust until proven otherwise. I had not understood until reading through those letters (a reader had actually written “I don’t believe her”) the extent to which the very truth of what I was saying was apparently up for grabs. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t.

The Feminine Mistake

For the past two weeks I’ve been carrying around a galley of Leslie Bennetts’ spectacularly good book, The Feminine Mistake, which is due out in April. I’ve read it in fits and starts–while waiting in my car to pick Jacob up at school, just one mom in a long line of ex-urban mommys in their SUV’s. All of us, cocooned in the moveable environment of our cars and trucks, listening to NPR or right-wing talk shows (the bumper stickers in our school’s parking lot range from anti-Bush to pro-life) and getting ready our small plastic bags of snacks and juice boxes. (When did cars of mothers of young children also become refrigerators on wheels? A subject for another day.) As I’ve been devouring Leslie’s book I keep thinking of women I know and the choices we’ve all made — those of us, that is, in a position to make choices. The “mistake” referred to in the book has to do with economic dependency on husbands — the giving up of work. This is something I don’t relate to — I’ve never stopped working — and yet somehow I connect to this subject matter on every single page. The Feminine Mistake is emphatically not another tiresome contribution to the Mommy Wars. Yes, it comes down on the side of work, but for reasons that have to do with the long term mental, physical and emotional well-being of women and their children. It punctures (at least to this working mom’s mind) the tiresome idea that children of working women suffer. One of the book’s more trenchant observations has to do with something Bennetts calls the “fifteen year paradigm” — the idea that over the course of a woman’s life, the raising of children actually adds up to a relatively small amount of time. I’ve heard (and felt) the argument many times that they’re only young once and it all goes by so fast and you don’t want to blink and miss your kids’ childhood — truisms that no mom would disagree with — but at the same time, a woman who “opts out” during those years can’t just simply opt back in when her children are teenagers and don’t need her so much anymore.

I do feel very lucky that my job doesn’t involve a set number of hours each day or an unsympathetic boss. I make my own schedule and that allows me to be one of the SUV moms waiting in line at school pick-up — at least some of the time. It allows me to stop what I’m doing at 3 in the afternoon to go to a school play. But I’m so aware that the culture of these schools assumes that mothers can do exactly that — drop work, stop work — in order to be there at everything from bake sales to book drives. It’s endlessly confusing and honestly I think all of us feel pretty crappy about it. The stay-at-home moms, the working moms — all of us just trying to be the best parents we can while at the same time not completely losing our way in the forest.

Teaching at a Spa

This week I’ve been teaching memoir writing at The Mayflower Spa, which is an unbelievably beautiful place ten minutes from my front door. My best friend Lisa and her family created this spa–built it from the ground up–and when it opened she asked if I’d consider teaching memoir there. I agreed with trepidation. I’ve taught undergraduates, graduate students, private students — but teaching at a spa? It seemed…I don’t know…not serious. Worrisome, even.

But then I spent this week teaching there, and I have to say it has been one of the most intense experiences of my teaching life. These women had stories to tell. Some were bitterly funny, some were impossibly sad. All were genuine seekers of how to shape their stories on the page. And I — who otherwise would have spent the week fretting by the phone, waiting to hear from editors and publicists, checking my email fifty-five times an hour — spent my days sipping mint tea and focusing intensely on my sweat-suited charges. By the end of my time at the spa, I wanted to take them all home with me and keep going. But I can’t offer them Thai massage after memoir writing. Much less something called the deep blue lavender embrace.

Egg Donation Story

I’ve been writing about some of the deepest aspects of my personal life for as long as I’ve been writing–and at this point, it doesn’t seem strange to me (at least most of the time) to have some of the intimate details of my life be available to people I don’t know. One of the reasons why it doesn’t seem strange is that the act of crafting a story turns it into something other than “my life”. I am not interested in the confessional. Confession is almost always boring and certainly its details don’t feel universal. Nor am I interested in catharsis. Writing memoir is quite the opposite of cathartic. If anything, it creates an even deeper river of feeling. Sometimes I’ll meet someone at a dinner party who has read my memoir, Slow Motion, and he/she will say: I feel like I know you. And I always feel like responding: no, you don’t. You read my book. My book isn’t me. Not exactly.

I have an essay in this month’s Elle magazine that is highly personal, about my journey through the strange, strange land of reproductive technology in a quest to have a second child. I write about choosing an egg donor and then–ultimately–changing my mind. My husband Michael and I spent the better part of a wacky year involved in this world, and once we decided not to move forward, all I wanted to do was to write about it. The going through it, the writing about it, and ultimately the publishing of a piece about it–all are completely different experiences. I’m glad the piece is out there–even though of course it makes me feel exposed. As soon as the piece was published, I got angry calls and emails from the heads of certain egg donor agencies. Just the other day, a friend called from L.A. to tell me that the reproductive endocrinologist we had been seeing there, Vicken Sahakian, M.D., was on the front page of the L.A. Times because he had inadvertently gotten a 65 year old woman pregnant with twins. Inadvertent!

Why Moments of Being?

In trying to come up with a name for this blog I found myself thinking about my favorite writer, Virginia Woolf, and her memoir, Moments of Being. In it, Woolf writes about the difference between the “cotton wool of daily existence” and true moments of being, by which I think she means aliveness–an absolute awareness of the importance of the present moment.

Woolf might have blogged if she were writing in 2007. As it happens she kept detailed, incredibly vivid journals. One of my prized possessions is a first American edition of her diaries, which I keep within reach on my desk. Almost every time I dip into it, I find myself writing something down. Here’s one:

“Reflection: It is presumably a bad thing to look through articles, reviews, etc. to find one’s own name. Yet I often do.”

So Woolf would probably have googled herself! What a relief. With my new novel, Black & White, coming out in just a few months, my mind is an anxious animal, darting all over the place. Possibly the craziest part of being a writer is this divide between doing the work itself and then putting that work out there in the world. The near-hermetic quiet required to create the universe of a novel–and then the frenzy (and you want a frenzy!) of that novel becoming a public thing.

Wesleyan Reading

Worried Sick

“My husband and I have a running joke. Every once in a while, usually late at night, I ask him a question that begins timidly, like this: “Can I ask you a question?”…