Ever since I began publishing books, and ever since I became a mother, I have marked the passage of time in two ways: that was the year I published my third novel, I’ll think. Or that was the fall my son started kindergarten. Books and babies: two kinds of births.
I was between my seventh and eighth books—Devotion, a memoir about my midlife existential and spiritual crisis, and Still Writing, a book about the craft and process of writing—when Oprah Winfrey called. As is true of moments that pierce the cotton wool (as Virginia Woolf called it) of daily existence, the scene remains vivid: a midtown Manhattan corner during rush hour, outside a library where I was about to teach a fiction workshop. I saw my agent’s name on my phone and assumed it was bad news, so I didn’t pick up. It had been a disappointing time in my literary career for reasons that have receded into the foggy annals of unfulfilled hopes, and I figured I’d put off whatever misery awaited me until after my class. But then my phone rang again.
A few months later, in Chicago, I emerged from quite excellent hair and makeup, and walked down a long corridor with a producer. Or I should say I teetered. I was wearing a pair of very high heels I had bought that morning. The corridor seemed designed to intimidate. Framed photos of Oprah with Obama, with both Clintons, with both Bushes; Oprah with Tom Cruise, with Maya Angelou, with Big Bird. Just in case a guest might have made it to the start of the corridor feeling loose and confident, walking this gauntlet would take care of that. My legs wobbled. The studio swayed. My old friend Imposter Syndrome jumped onto my back. The producer took one of my icy hands in hers. She reassured me that I was here because Oprah wanted to talk with me. That I had been chosen because I had something she deemed worth sharing with her legions of devotees. I thought I might throw up.
“Do you want to know the secret to going out there?” the producer asked.
Yes, I definitely wanted to know the secret to going out there.
“Just be yourself,” she said.
Be yourself. It sounded so simple. I had lived, up to that point, a fairly examined life, as examined lives go. I was a novelist, a memoirist, a public contemplative. I had a daily yoga and meditation practice. I had been in therapy, on and off, with an array of psychoanalysts (Jungian and Freudian), psychologists, psychiatrists, and clinical social workers since I was a teenager, always attempting to parse a question that had morphed over the years from Am I okay? to Why am I okay?
I believed the page, above all, to be the locus of my self-knowledge. In book after book, whether fiction or memoir, I had followed the line of words, Annie Dillard’s beautiful phrase, like a trail of breadcrumbs, trusting, or at least attempting to trust, the capacity of the unconscious to reveal itself through pattern, image, language, character, and metaphor. Stick with the page long enough, stumble bravely along, and eventually a coherent narrative will reveal itself.
Just be yourself. Here’s how I would have defined myself at the time: I was a writer, a wife, a mother. I was a daughter. I was Jewish and had been raised in—and fled from—a religious home. Escaping, I have come to realize, was both my salvation and private sorrow. Most children wish to please their parents, and I had amply disappointed mine. I had been through some hard things. I had a rocky adolescence and young adulthood (I doubled down after fleeing from that religious home). My father died in a car accident when I was in my early twenties; that same accident left my mother hospitalized for the better part of a year. In the aftermath of that loss, the discord—you might even call it a blood feud—between my father’s relatives and my mother’s put me, an only child, in the middle. A rare disease nearly took my son from us as an infant. But I had weathered these crises, or so I told myself. I had done the work of making meaning out of madness, which, as any trauma-informed therapist will tell you, is the path to making ourselves whole, or at least as whole as possible. I taught an annual retreat for hundreds of students titled The Stories We Carry: Turning Chaos into Art. The course’s title had become something of a life philosophy; finding the words, shaping a story, had given many of these struggles a form I could bear.
I settled into my comfy chair next to Oprah and got mic’d up. She admired my high heels, and I told her that they were my Oprah shoes. (Indeed, I have never worn them again.) She held in her lap a copy of Devotion, with dozens of colorful Post-its in the margins. Post-its! From Oprah!
And then we began. I don’t remember much of the conversation. Cameras were everywhere, and blinding lights, and huge screens on which, if I wasn’t careful, I was apt to catch a glimpse of a blown-up version of myself. I know we talked about my childhood in an Orthodox Jewish family; my parents’ accident; my young son’s question about whether I believed in God, which—given that God had loomed large in my own childhood—sent me spiraling into the crisis that informed the book. We discussed my penchant for self-destruction in my early twenties, which I shook off only after my father’s death. (Months later, when the show aired, Oprah’s intro went something like this: Booze, drugs, and bad boys led author Dani Shapiro down a dark path . . . Yikes, Oprah. My middle-schooler was watching.)
But here’s what I do remember: Oprah wasn’t buying it. She wasn’t buying me. I was trying my damnedest to be myself, but it seemed the person I made myself out to be wasn’t making sense to Oprah. Several times, I caught a look on her face, a slight narrowing of her eyes, a subtle turn of her head. An assessment. If there had been a thought bubble floating above her, the caption would have read: Bullshit.
Oprah had my number. The thing is, in spite of all the therapy and self-analysis and narrativization of so much that I’d already experienced, as it turned out, I still didn’t have my own number. As I sat on that soundstage earnestly answering her questions, something was amiss, and she knew it. The story of me did not make sense. The parts didn’t add up. Decades would pass before I would finally understand the feeling I’d had since I was a small child—a hissing, staticky sense of alienation that left me cut off not only from other people, but from myself. At times, I wondered if perhaps I was invisible, or maybe not quite real. Something was lodged between me and the world around me, and no matter how I tried to write my way into awareness, it remained just beyond my grasp. In Buddhist philosophy, it is said that when it comes to dharma, or life’s purpose, if you’re off by a centimeter, you might as well be off by a mile. That centimeter, that strange disconnect, plagued me. Why was it there?
I never intended to become a memoirist. Truthfully, I dislike the term and its connotations. Recently, at a local restaurant in our small town where everyone knows everyone, an acquaintance asked me what my next book is about, and before I could answer, he answered for me himself. What’s your next book about? You? Memoirists are suspect creatures. We must be self-absorbed. We must think we have astoundingly interesting lives. We must be narcissists. And if we’ve had the temerity to write more than one memoir—I have published five—well then. As my former agent, when I was between books and contemplating another memoir, warned: “If you write another memoir, that’s it. You’re in the memoir business.” Would she have said that to a novelist? To a poet? If you write another poem, that’s it. You’re in the poetry business. It was a tell. My agent believed memoir to be a lesser, or less literary, form. Which is why she’s my former agent.
But this isn’t a rant about the indignities of being a memoirist. It’s an inquiry into a series of questions I’ve often pondered. Why did I find myself turning to my own life, my own family history, again and again? The world around me was infinitely more compelling. My literary roots, my MFA—the way I had always thought of myself was as a novelist. I felt tremendous freedom from the old autobiographical haunt whenever I found myself creating a fictive world, writing novels that told it slant. Even so, the stories I conjured often returned, like homing pigeons, to the land of secrets. Why couldn’t I just let it go? Why, each time I thought I was finished with memoir, did I find myself, instead, digging around for more answers? Each memoir was a singular and satisfying excavation, but in the end, I was left with a powerful, incalculable longing. Why was I terrified so much of the time? From where arose the debilitating anxiety and panic that lived just beneath a carefully cultivated surface? I was trying to solve a complex equation that might look something like this:
Am I okay? → why am I okay? + what was the locus of my mother’s rage? + why was my beloved father so sad and distant? ÷ why didn’t I fit into my family? + isolation / numbness / secrecy + crisis of identity / non-belonging + who the fuck am I, really? = a mystery I hope to understand before I die.
I had been writing for my life, all my life. As a child, I intuited this, then as an adult I came to be certain of it. Is it overly dramatic to say writing saved me? Perhaps, but it is nonetheless true. Sitting quietly with the page was—has always been—my medicine. That long line of mental health professionals couldn’t help me, though some of them tried. I’m sure I was a confusing patient. Certainly, I was a confused patient. The talking cure was useless. My spoken narratives were designed to please and entertain, to seduce rather than to engage and grapple; words upon words wound themselves into false narratives eloquent enough to sound true.
When I’m not writing, I’m not well. When I’m not writing, I’m disconnected from myself and the world around me. This has always been the case since I was a child, scribbling madly as if trying to write myself into being. Along with writing stories, I kept copious journals well into my adult life. The very act of putting words on paper, whether or not they were meant for public consumption, was self-defining. I couldn’t tell you what animated my innermost self, but I could look back at what I wrote. That’s it, I have sometimes thought when I’ve dared to revisit my own work, or even my journals. Exactly that. By which I do not mean that the work itself is great. That’s for others to judge. I simply mean that my thoughts, fears, observations, desires, become satisfyingly visible to me. To take it a step further: I become visible.
I recently found a box of my early writing while attempting to organize my basement. Basements are excellent metaphors. Under a house, as if under the skin and sinew and musculature of a human, lurks all that has been stored, hidden, abandoned, festering, forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind—or, at least, out of sight, out of conscious mind. In this box, there were typewritten stories on onionskin paper. They were terrible, their flowery, earnest language mortifying. But they were trying to get at something. They all seemed to be circling around the same subjects: family and identity and the keeping of secrets. I would try one way in, then another, then another, pursuing a chimera that disappeared around every corner.
Just be yourself. This is, of course, the work of a lifetime because the self continues to evolve. As the decades pile on, shit happens. Regardless of whether we grow or diminish with age, we change. We are each a ship of Theseus, our cells turning over every seven years. Neuroscience tells us that even our memories rewrite themselves each time we recall an event, person, or place—a process called reconsolidation. This is true of all human beings. But if we’re writers, this reconsolidation through time becomes a matter of urgency. The greatest artists and writers among us, those I turn to again and again—Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stegner, Anne Truitt, Joan Didion—display, even in their earliest work, a sense of inner clarity: this landscape, this corner of the world, these people, these preoccupations, these obsessions, these themes. An arrow can be traced from the earliest sentences of these writers to their final ones. They had, it seemed, been themselves all along.
I do not believe this has been true of me, though perhaps time will prove me wrong.
I am now going to subject you to a couple of paragraphs from my first novel, written in my mid-twenties, when I was a graduate student freshly grieving the loss of my father:
On my first day of seventh grade, my mother dressed me in argyle socks, a kilt, and a fair isle sweater. She brushed my blond hair until it gleamed, fastening yellow barrettes along my temples.
She stood back, holding me at arm’s length, examining me with scrupulous care.
“Beautiful, just beautiful,” she sighed.
“Bee-you-ti-ful,” echoed Bea, her best friend.
“We could have used you in the camps, little blondie,” Bea told me.
“Tell me again, Aunt Bea,” I said. I always loved to hear this story.
“When we were in Treblinka, twelve of us dug a tunnel and escaped into the woods. We lived off whatever we could find. But for our bread, we would send a child . . . the fairest child in the town . . . to beg for bread. We needed you. The fairest of them all. A regular little shiksa, you are.”
My mother listened, bending her head toward her steaming coffee.
This day marked the beginning of her part in my education. My father had the first half: elementary school. He sent me to a yeshiva, where I learned Hebrew, where I had habits ingrained in me, habits he hoped would last me the rest of my life.
My mother had the second half. This was their agreement. So I went off to prep school, wearing my preppy coat of armor.
My father did not say goodbye to me that morning. He left before I was out of bed.
“A new beginning for my beautiful daughter,” my mother whispered. “Remember, people will tell you many things you may not understand. Trust no one. No one except for me. Your best friend will never tell you, but I will always tell you the truth.”
Good lord, I can hardly bear it. Within this passage, syncopated in the spaces between what’s expressed and what isn’t, are clues to so much of myself to which I did not yet have access, and in fact would not have access to for another thirty years. I was operating in the dark, and yet that line of words was doing its best to lead me somewhere: What was the locus of my mother’s rage? Why was my beloved father so sad and distant? Why didn’t I fit into my own family? The twenty-five-year-old grief-stricken writer at work on her bildungsroman was pretty sure she knew the score. We cannot suspect what we cannot imagine.
That little blond girl. She was my semi-autobiographical narrator. I named her Lucy Greenburg. Much was made of Lucy’s blue-eyed prettiness, her distinctly non-Jewish appearance, which had also been true of me as a child. Lucy’s mother treated her like a prized possession, an object. And her father was a hazy figure, a vexing combination of warmth, love, and absence. This had also been true for me, as a child.
The novel ends with a car accident, in which Lucy’s father is killed and her mother’s body shattered. This was a rookie mistake. That accident did not belong in the novel, but twenty-five-year-old me, writing for her life, was not in control of her material. I was trying to put the pieces together—to arrange whatever pieces come your way, as Woolf wrote in A Writer’s Diary—and that is what came. William Maxwell, when asked in an interview what he wished he could say to his mother, who had died when he was a child, responded: “Look—I wrote all these books for you.”
In writing about my absent father, I was trying to bring him back to life. It was the start of a one-way conversation that lasted for many years, and in some ways, continues to this day. Kurt Vonnegut once said that every writer writes for an audience of one. My audience of one was my father. In my desire to make meaning out of this gaping loss, to make him (posthumously) proud of his errant, rebellious daughter, I kept training my lens on him every which way, trying to understand him in death the way I had never been able to in life. My early and mid-career work reveals this trail of breadcrumbs, perhaps most notably in a Personal History piece I wrote for the New Yorker the year my first memoir, Slow Motion, was published, which also happened to be the year I turned thirty-six. By that same age, I realized, my father had been divorced by his first wife and widowed by the tragic loss of his second. He and I had never spoken of either marriage. Perhaps if he’d lived longer, we would have, though I doubt it. The last lines of “The Secret Wife”:
For all the years of my childhood, my father walked gingerly, as if constantly aware that collapse was possible, and as the tension in our home grew he became quieter and quieter. Sometimes I would try to catch his eye, to wink at him, to let him know I understood. But I didn’t understand. And he continued sliding away.
In my book on process and craft, Still Writing, which was published in 2013, I included a small chapter titled “Snooping”—the idea being that all writers begin, in childhood, as what Jayne Ann Phillips has referred to as “angelic spies.” Here I am writing about my tenure as a secret agent:
Control was important. It wasn’t the messiness of life that we were girding ourselves against. Secrets floated through our home like dust motes in the air. Every word spoken by my parents contained within it a hidden hard kernel of what wasn’t being said. Though I couldn’t have expressed it, I knew with a child’s instincts that life was seen by both my parents as a teeming, seething, frightful hall of mirrors. Something had made them scared. They tried to protect me from themselves, from their own histories—das kind one of them would whisper harshly and they’d stop talking after I entered the room. I loved my parents, but I didn’t want to be like them. I didn’t want to be afraid of life. The trouble was, their way was all I knew.
And so I spent my childhood straining to hear . . . with no siblings to distract me, I had plenty of time, and eavesdropped and snooped in every way I could devise. I lurked outside doorways, crouched on staircase landings. I riffled through filing cabinets, haunted my mother’s closets. What was I hoping to find? A clue. A reason.
Four years after I wrote these words, that angelic spy finally got her reason. Up until that point, I had honed my narrative, both on and off the page. I was the only child of older parents. My mother and father each had previous marriages. They were unhappy, but this was their last chance and they were sticking with it. They were too old; it was too late. My father was depressed, suffered back pain, and eventually became addicted to prescription drugs.
All these narratives were true; they just weren’t the whole truth. I was off by that centimeter that might as well have been a mile. That persistent sense of otherness, sharp and painful, turns out to be the sequela of a massive secret. In 2016, twenty-six years after that flawed bildungsroman, eight books into my writing life, I learned that my dad had not been my biological father. My parents had gone on a lonely and harrowing infertility journey that took years and resulted in my secret conception with the sperm of a donor (Das kind!). After being raised as a religious Jew, I learned that only half my DNA came from my Eastern European Ashkenazi ancestors; I was also, in fact, descended from folks who sailed to the new world on the Mayflower, and were early New England settlers. The two people who made me, genetically speaking—my middle-aged mother and the young medical student sperm donor—would never have known one another, much less gone out on a date, much less schtupped. The peasants of the shtetl and the Daughters of the American Revolution collided in a fertility clinic, and a writer was born.
My parents were told never to disclose to me the truth of my paternity. That’s one hell of a centimeter. “Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still,” Thoreau wrote. Was it this that puzzled Oprah during our conversation? There was a disconnect between the book she had read and underlined and festooned with Post-its and the woman who wrote it. My words on the page were truer, more sharply defined, than I was. The page was where I came closest to knowing my own bone, even as the tension within me grew with each passing year.
Once I began research on the memoir I would eventually write about the unearthing of my secret conception (What’s your book about? You?) I came upon a psychoanalytic theory that answers not only the glaring question of how it was possible not to see something that was so patently obvious but also offers a way of thinking about the creative process. Coined by the British psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas in the 1980s—the decade in which I was flailing in the most wild and puzzling way, as if enacting a wholly unconscious drama—the theory is called the Unthought Known. Bollas’s book on the subject, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known, describes the possibility, often rooted in early childhood, of “a form of knowledge which has yet to be thought.”
Bollas, who, not incidentally, is also the author of several works of fiction, understands certain art forms as ways of getting at the unthought known: “I’m sure that psychoanalysts could learn a great deal about this form of knowing from modern dance, where the dancer expresses the unthought known through body language.” He adds that “it may well be that musical representation is somewhere between the unthought known and thought proper.” Bollas continues: “I also include in the concept of the unthought known those experiences in a child’s life that were simply beyond comprehension . . . because events beyond comprehension are disturbing and yet seem life defining.”
That childhood sense of not being quite real dogged me into adulthood. Apparently, I had earned it. The stories I was told about my birth were a lie. My ancestors—those somber faces peering back at me from the walls of my childhood home—did not belong to me. Even my birth certificate was a false document. But part of me knew it (in my own bone?), and I believe that this knowing without thinking, this snooping, angelic spying, unearthing, lurking—this ongoing management of panic and anxiety, finding the inflection point where it was tolerable—this sheer determination to build a safe structure out of words, out of sentences, and then crawl inside of it—is what made me a writer.
Save nothing, I tell my students. Not for a rainy day, not for when you’re stronger, or less haunted, or your parents have died. Save nothing, because it is in hurling ourselves at the page that the invisible becomes visible, that the thoughts become known, even if not to us, not now, not right away. Save nothing, because the language you find today will be different from the language you will find tomorrow, in one year, or five, or ten, or fifty.
It is an irony that following the line of words did not lead me to the truth of my paternity. It would be too neat and tidy, too literal and not believable, for there to have been an aha moment (Oprah reference intentional) where the unthought known tunneled its way, like a tiny, elegant creature, from the shadows of my unconscious into the bright, conscious light of day; for the pieces to have arranged themselves, at long last, into a coherent whole. That didn’t happen because it couldn’t happen. The unthought known was very nearly lethal. Thinking it would kill off the self I had been, the foundation of my identity, the building blocks of my psyche. And then I would have to undergo the impossible task of building a new one.
Instead, I wrote book after book. When I look back at all that early work, the spines lined up like obedient soldiers on a shelf in my office, I begin to feel compassion for that young writer who was trying so hard to know something she could not. I worried, when I first made my discovery about my dad, that all my writing about him, about us, about the strangeness of our family, the toxic shimmer in the air of our home, would feel somehow like I had gotten it wrong, rendering a whole shelf full of books irrelevant.
I thought back to the time when Devotion was about to be published, and I was in the attendant froth of literary anxiety, a wise friend offered what felt, at the time, to be salient advice. Sweetheart, you’ve written a book about what you know now. It was a comforting thought: I might know a little more later. The next day, even. Or certainly by the time I got around to the next book. The unthought known did not shove me from behind, suggesting that there might be a shocking amount more in store for me, a whole hidden history. Early in my memoir about my discovery, I wrote: “I always knew there was a secret. What I didn’t know: the secret was me.” We cannot suspect what we cannot imagine.
I don’t want to do myself a disservice by portraying a hapless writer, aimlessly flailing. I was not aimless. Nor was I flailing. I was taking aim, book by book, page by page, again and again. I was shooting off my arrows. I was collecting them from outside the bullseye, then shooting them off again. Along with save nothing, I also tell my students to go to the places that terrify them. Beneath every sentence lies cracks and fault lines. Pry apart those seams to see what lies beneath. A professor of mine once told me, “You know how to write a beautiful sentence. You just need to be sure it means something.” His words stung, and I took them to heart. I don’t trust the beauty of language for beauty’s sake anymore, though certainly as a writer just starting out, I did.
Instead, I go to the terror, or at least I try to. My husband, also a writer, is my first reader and has been for nearly thirty years. (When we had only been dating a few weeks, I gave him a hundred manuscript pages of my first memoir to read. I lay in bed, my heart racing as I listened to the sound of pages flipping in the next room.) He reads me closely and is particularly attentive to moments where I skate over those fault lines. He taught me something that I now offer as a piece of advice—instructive, too, for the ways in which life lived off the page differs from life lived on the page. Off the page, at a cocktail party, say, you might want to devise smooth, articulate answers to questions that feel intrusive or triggering or uncomfortable. I’ve done this myself, many times. About my parents’ accident, I would rattle off, if asked if my parents were living: “My father died in a car accident and my mother was also in the car and was badly injured. She had eighty broken bones.” It was designed to give just the right amount of information, no more, no less, in a way that didn’t cost me too much emotionally and shut the subject down. (Unless the questioner had no boundaries, in which case, their rudeness was on them.) But that practiced language had also found its way into my written work over the years. When I learned how to flag them, I began to see that these were spots that were scary, uncomfortable. Best to skate quickly and get out of there before anybody notices. But of course, readers notice. They don’t necessarily know why something feels muted or dishonest. But they can feel it: their own literary version of the unthought known.
Stay in those gnarly places. Let the ice crack beneath your skates. Risk it all. Risk everything, because writing is a punishing way to spend a life—alone in a room, year after year, wrestling with words—and what makes it worthwhile is exactly this. The choreographer Martha Graham called such a sensation “the queer, divine dissatisfaction.” A writer who has found the words—the illuminating phrase, the jagged shock of recognition, the metaphor that lands—is, at least for a brief moment, suspended in that magical place that will never be comfortable, but comes close to what the Buddhist meditation teacher Jack Kornfield describes as taking your seat halfway between heaven and earth. And that feeling is precisely as ephemeral and glorious as it sounds.
Save nothing. Sit with the terror. The unthought known. Queer, divine dissatisfaction. Why would anyone sign up for such a life? Do we, in fact, sign up? Do we voluntarily commit ourselves? Or, as I suspect, are we driven by a compulsion, a powerful and primal urge to deploy each of our senses, our entire instrument, in the service of meaning-making? It is the work of my life to attempt, each day, to stay in this sacred place of following the line of words; to “intervene in the dynamics of loss,” as Jayne Ann Phillips writes in “Outlaw Heart”: “to insist that sorrow not be meaningless.”
Many days, I fail miserably. But tenacity has been one of my life’s saving graces, or another way of putting it would be a word the literary critic Ted Solotaroff used to great effect in his essay “Writing in the Cold”: endurability.When we sit with the page, we are practicing this kind of endurability. We are facing our fears and insecurities, silencing the voices in our heads that tell us we simply can’t. And in so doing, we are feeling our way in the dark toward something that just might be real and true. It is the best medicine I know.
Carl Jung, that great diviner of the netherworld, once wrote that “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” In this way, as in so many others, the making of art and the making of a life are overlapping endeavors. The sculptor and writer Anne Truitt, whom I was too intimidated to meet when we crossed paths at Yaddo in the mid 1990’s (she was in her eighties and I was in my early thirties), published several volumes of journals over the course of her long life as a working artist. In one titled Daybook, she writes:
And after the sculpture stands free, finished, I have the feeling of “oh, it was you,” akin to the feeling with which I always recognized my babies when I first saw them, having made their acquaintance before their birth. This feeling of recognition lasts only a second or two, but it is my ample reward.
Those flashes of recognition are sacred windows into the unthought known. Oh, it was you. But of course, we can’t remain in those windows. The light becomes blinding. The recognition becomes too much to bear. Or worse, it vanishes. So instead, we get back to work. We begin again. We fail better. Those glimpses sustain us, and after a lifetime—an accrual of them—they become imprinted upon us, like code we once knew and have all but forgotten. If we’re lucky, our books outlast us for others to decipher. If we are steadfast, maybe the arc from our first sentences to our last will be that of a writer whose aim was true to her own dharma, her own life’s purpose.
Before I discovered my unthought known, my work had undergone a shift that began with Devotion, and then grew into a high-wire act in my memoir Hourglass. It was a fragmentation of narrative. Both as a reader and a writer, I found myself increasingly drawn to puzzle-like structures, to white space, collage, mosaic. This had begun years earlier with my love for Virginia Woolf, but now I was pulled to the work of my contemporaries in which the reader is challenged to put the pieces together: David Mitchell, Rebecca Solnit, Jenny Offill, Maggie Nelson, Jennifer Egan. I didn’t contemplate why this shift in my reading and writing habits might be taking place. It felt exciting and right. That was enough. I became fond of telling people that I had broken up with narrative, though in fact, it was more like narrative had broken up with me first. (It’s not you, it’s me.) At public readings, I would gleefully announce that I was reading from a book that had no plot, much to my publisher’s consternation.
In retrospect, it seems obvious that this breakup with linear storytelling was my unthought known at work. My unconscious was driving me in a direction of understanding that smooth and seamless narratives are inherently suspect. Simmering beneath the surface are fissures, maps to the infinitely more complex. If we are attempting to illuminate interior life (our own or a character’s) then time becomes fluid. Memory and imagination do not hew to the linear. Past, present, future, all seen through an ever-turning kaleidoscope.
In writing about my discovery, as is true, I imagine, of whatever I will write for the rest of my life, I had to hold a kind of uncertainty, an awareness that I will never be sure that I know the story. I’ll be offered glimpses—Truitt’s ample reward—nothing more. And that, I think, is a good way to feel when we face the blank page. Perhaps instead of polishing our narratives until they gleam, until they become mirrors that reflect our own faces, we need to remind ourselves that life itself is a trek over uncharted terrain. We will never be able to hold it all in our gaze, but we can take one step, find our footing, then take another. We can pay attention. What a gift that is. We can grow ever more alive to our innermost urges, to our unwritten stories. In the words of Dolly Parton—and really, who better to contribute a quote at the end of a craft essay?—we can find out who we are and do it on purpose.