Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life by Dani Shapiro Page A
Book: Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life by Dani Shapiro
Read Free Book Online
Authors: Dani Shapiro
Tags: Non-Fiction, Writing
Ads: Link
in that doctor’s office I was staring straight into the dark heart of that likely outcome.
106
Still Writing
Over the next weeks—a frenzy of trying to calibrate the experimental medication that came via FedEx from Canada, of doses around the clock, of waking a sleeping baby at three o’clock in the morning to drink down the medicine that was or wasn’t going to save him, and then the months of vigilance that followed: was that a seizure or just a hiccup?—my usual way of moving through life was no longer possible. I could not hover at an outsidery distance. I was not filing away details for later. Being a writer offered me no protection. In Lorrie Moore’s story “People Like That Are the Only People Here,”
a surgeon tells a writer-mother that her baby has a Wilms’
Tumor. (“Is that apostrophe s or s apostrophe,” she asks.) The writer argues with her husband, who wants her to sell a story about it. She calls what is happening to them “a nightmare of narrative slop.”
I had always shaped narratives out of my life’s most painful and difficult circumstances. I had held to a belief—as necessary to me as a heartbeat—that this was a redemptive act; to create a coherent narrative out of sorrow or grief was genuine and worthwhile. But as I fought for the survival of my own child the failures of narrative seemed to taunt me. John Ban-ville wrote about Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s memoir about the death of her only daughter: “Against life’s worst onslaughts, nothing avails, not even art. Especially not art.”
Each day, I climbed the stairs of our Brooklyn brownstone 107
Dani Shapiro
to my third-floor office and stared blankly at the wall. I was a writer who couldn’t write. A writer who didn’t see the point of writing. Words on paper couldn’t save my child, and they could no longer save me. It felt as if I had chosen to spend my life in the most frivolous way possible, making up stories.
Narrative slop. Why wasn’t I the research scientist who had invented the drug that was stalling our son’s seizures? Now that was important. What if he had decided to become a poet instead? What then?
But writing was how my husband and I both made our liv-ings, and we had a mortgage and doctors’ bills. I had to write.
I had no choice. I continued to stare at the wall until—it took the better part of a year—a story started to form at the center of the most shaken place inside of me. As my boy began to heal, I began to write a novel about maternal anxiety. What else was there? I was a big, quivering heap of maternal anxiety.
I wondered if I would ever find any other subject interesting, ever again. Love and the terrifying, concomitant potential of loss, were, for a long time, my only subject. I had been forever altered by our brush with catastrophe. It was written on my body. My instrument had changed. And I now understood that it would continue to change. That there would be more befores and afters ahead. Fighting it was futile, impossible. Accepting, even embracing this, was the true work, not only of being a writer, but of being alive.
108
Still Writing
Beginning Again
We may be halfway through a novel, an essay, a story, or a memoir or we may be nearing the finish line on a piece that has taken us years. But wherever we are in our work, we have never been exactly here, today. Today, we need to relearn what it is that we do. We have to remind ourselves to be patient, gentle with our foibles, ruthless with our time, withstanding of our frustrations. We remember what it is that we need. The solitude of an empty home, a walk through the woods, a bath, or half an hour with a good book—the echo of well-formed sentences in our ears. Whatever it takes to begin again.
When I was first learning to meditate, this idea of beginning again was revelatory. It still is. The meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg speaks of catching the mind scampering off, like the little monkey that it is, into the past, the
106
Still Writing
Over the next weeks—a frenzy of trying to calibrate the experimental medication that came via FedEx from Canada, of doses around the clock, of waking a sleeping baby at three o’clock in the morning to drink down the medicine that was or wasn’t going to save him, and then the months of vigilance that followed: was that a seizure or just a hiccup?—my usual way of moving through life was no longer possible. I could not hover at an outsidery distance. I was not filing away details for later. Being a writer offered me no protection. In Lorrie Moore’s story “People Like That Are the Only People Here,”
a surgeon tells a writer-mother that her baby has a Wilms’
Tumor. (“Is that apostrophe s or s apostrophe,” she asks.) The writer argues with her husband, who wants her to sell a story about it. She calls what is happening to them “a nightmare of narrative slop.”
I had always shaped narratives out of my life’s most painful and difficult circumstances. I had held to a belief—as necessary to me as a heartbeat—that this was a redemptive act; to create a coherent narrative out of sorrow or grief was genuine and worthwhile. But as I fought for the survival of my own child the failures of narrative seemed to taunt me. John Ban-ville wrote about Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s memoir about the death of her only daughter: “Against life’s worst onslaughts, nothing avails, not even art. Especially not art.”
Each day, I climbed the stairs of our Brooklyn brownstone 107
Dani Shapiro
to my third-floor office and stared blankly at the wall. I was a writer who couldn’t write. A writer who didn’t see the point of writing. Words on paper couldn’t save my child, and they could no longer save me. It felt as if I had chosen to spend my life in the most frivolous way possible, making up stories.
Narrative slop. Why wasn’t I the research scientist who had invented the drug that was stalling our son’s seizures? Now that was important. What if he had decided to become a poet instead? What then?
But writing was how my husband and I both made our liv-ings, and we had a mortgage and doctors’ bills. I had to write.
I had no choice. I continued to stare at the wall until—it took the better part of a year—a story started to form at the center of the most shaken place inside of me. As my boy began to heal, I began to write a novel about maternal anxiety. What else was there? I was a big, quivering heap of maternal anxiety.
I wondered if I would ever find any other subject interesting, ever again. Love and the terrifying, concomitant potential of loss, were, for a long time, my only subject. I had been forever altered by our brush with catastrophe. It was written on my body. My instrument had changed. And I now understood that it would continue to change. That there would be more befores and afters ahead. Fighting it was futile, impossible. Accepting, even embracing this, was the true work, not only of being a writer, but of being alive.
108
Still Writing
Beginning Again
We may be halfway through a novel, an essay, a story, or a memoir or we may be nearing the finish line on a piece that has taken us years. But wherever we are in our work, we have never been exactly here, today. Today, we need to relearn what it is that we do. We have to remind ourselves to be patient, gentle with our foibles, ruthless with our time, withstanding of our frustrations. We remember what it is that we need. The solitude of an empty home, a walk through the woods, a bath, or half an hour with a good book—the echo of well-formed sentences in our ears. Whatever it takes to begin again.
When I was first learning to meditate, this idea of beginning again was revelatory. It still is. The meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg speaks of catching the mind scampering off, like the little monkey that it is, into the past, the
Similar Books
