Housekeeping

on leaving to come home

I woke up Sunday morning with my head full of words for you. It has been so long. Over the last two years these essays have changed and evolved and I want to go back to what’s true and certain—me, not knowing.   

I created The Noble Try in the wake of twenty-four rejections on a manuscript. The writing was praised, but the book deemed “too quiet” for a debut. It was the story of two rural girls, falling in love on bicycles, riding around in the velvet night, unraveling family secrets. “It would be better,” I was told, “if we started with one of them dead in the river.” I was never going to write a book that started with a girl dead in the river because, except for the inimitable Marlena, that’s not the kind of book I read.

This was September 2020. I understood why, in the wake of national horrors and necessary corrections, editors were wary of a subtle coming-of-age story about two white girls. But that’s my story. For a few months, I went to sleep and woke up with a sore throat and a wet face. No sounds came out, which is the worst kind of crying. I forgot how private and heavy grief feels—extra lonesome when you work on something for three years and it only gets a few dozen eyeballs. 

How do you manage being a storyteller whose story is unwanted? I began telling new ones, here.

I remember taking a walk with a dear friend, Elisabeth—also an incredible literary agent—and saying to her: “I’d like to be brave enough to show people the process of a struggling writer. I think I need to start a blog.”

“What would you call it?” she asked me.

“The Noble Try,” I said. “Because it’s the trying I admire.”

Too many nights I woke up thinking it’s time to stop writing. I wanted to let other creatives know that the gatekeepers don’t determine the worth of a process. And I ached to be seen.

It turns out I had a lot to reveal, not just about writing, but about living. With your generosity, I walked myself home; each essay a step towards my truer voice. In the gap since my last piece, I’ve found myself back in the 12-step rooms where they like to say: “if you want to heal it, reveal it.” That was happening here. And I am so grateful.

Then, a snag: the better these “did,” the more I felt I owed you a tidy, secular sermon. Some pieces felt burdensome to write and, I feared, tiresome to read. Also—your intelligence intimidates me. More than once I read a comment or an email while cooking and I had to put my spoon down and sit at the edge of my bed and read and re-read what you wrote. It’s humbling when a reader offers a response more intelligent and considered than the piece itself. Here, it’s not rare.  

I’ve been quiet for reasons that are both flimsy and concrete. Flimsy: my paralytic perfectionism that makes me think I need an arrival to begin. Like…before I give you an essay, it must include an embedded lesson. Or I need a book deal to substantiate my thoughts on the writing process. Concrete: I’ve spent the last four months finishing the first draft of a manuscript. Also, I’ve been growing a baby.

In May, I encountered some comically terrible and simultaneously liberating news. The shitty first draft about my favorite little girl, Marion Day, is really shitty. The novel will need to be re-written, scene by scene. This winter the essays dropped away alongside the most challenging stage of my crafting: when stuff happens. The glorious set-up I wrote last summer had ended—I now knew that Marion buttoned her oxford shirts to the very top and that her grandma, Sylvie, had knuckles as think as leather and as soft as silk. It was time to put my people into conflicts. I can’t tell you how many manuscript zombies I have in my writing folder A/K/A books that get one-third written, then abandoned. At action, I collapse.

But I ploughed on, like Brave Irene clutching her mother’s dress box against the winter’s wind. I finished. I made some insanely propulsive plot choices to carry Marion through and it turns out…they do not work at all.

Last week, I went on a spiritual/ writers retreat where I processed the shittiness of the current draft. First, I panicked, then denied its horribleness, then I tried to plan a fix, but nothing came. Flying home over the black Atlantic on Saturday night, my mind empty, I received a godly download, which became a new, longhand outline. Monday, I sat down from nine to noon and began again.

Today I’d like to thank you for abiding the emptiness of this space. I got caught in the action point here, too. There were suddenly so many readers and the essays had such momentum and enthusiasm. “Make it paid,” my mentor said. I balked. But for the last few months I’ve been waking up—as I did at 2:30 Sunday morning to write this—with so many thoughts. Most of them are questions or observations without a conclusion. One of them is the sneaking belief in a currently un-sellable book.

On my trip, I remembered the glorious relief of powerlessness and a beginner’s mind. I feel safer at the humble bottom, free of manufactured certainties—personal pep talks, etc. I don’t know if I’ll ever get published by one of the big houses. I do know that when I work from nine to noon, I produce books, and that’s all I can do. I take comfort in Shunryu Suzuki’s famous words: “If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”

So, I’m back, asking permission not to be your teacher. I don’t have anything to teach. I just have a million doubts battling against one hope. Maybe it’s the same for you.

I booked last week’s trip months before I got pregnant. Many times, I thought of canceling. I’m pregnant enough to look and feel vulnerable; I had no idea what the retreat center would be like, nor had I heard of the town. I didn’t know a soul going. I left Saturday at four in the morning, the whole house still and black. I cursed one of Augie’s smelly Nikes, which tripped me while I rolled my suitcase to the door. I was blind, fretting over my hideous manuscript, which will most certainly not be a tidy package by the baby-deadline in September.

I blinked at the Newark fluorescents, raw as an open nerve. All my defenses were at home, waking up. But it took less time than I expected to feel like a spirit in the world; gleeful, delighted, the way it felt to travel alone at fifteen, eighteen, twenty. The world is as bright and alive as I let myself be.

The first three hours in Costa Rica were spent lurching on a pot-holed road, trying not to vomit, pressed skin to skin against a stranger. The jungle smelled like pepper. Howler monkeys cried all night. The air was hot and wet and drew open my skin. My brain got very quiet.

Until it said to me: you aren’t using your gifts. It meant you.

I returned in the middle of the night last Saturday, the same shoes littering our brick floor. And they smelled like home. I moved through the house, sniffing: the wooden kitchen; damp ash in the fireplace; the residue stink of an owl pellet I saved in the junk drawer, wanting to dissect with the boys until I realized it was full of rotting mouse. I climbed into our bed and enjoyed the enormity of the moon. I knew how to turn to make the windowpane shade my eyes as bright silver pooled across the sheets.

It's a gift to go away, to remember the glorious ordinary. The spiritual retreat is not the headline today. What matters is the musk of Augie’s sneakers. It’s me saying yes to the call to write to you in the night. I’ve got something to offer, but it’s no answer: my book sucks, but I’m trying. Nine to noon. Please, let me tell you about it.