1st BOOKS: Reading and Writing with Friends

I could not be more delighted to be hosting Ellen Sussman today. Her third novel, The Paradise Guest House, released yesterday. Ellen’s last novel, French Lessons, was a New York Times bestseller, and this one is even better. Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, says of it, “Two survivors of Bali’s terrorist bombing find love and spiritual rebirth on an island whose inhabitants believe in reincarnation in Sussman’s touching panorama of paradise… [celebrating] lovers, quiet healing, and the sweetness of the island and its people.” Ellen is also a fine writing teacher, a vicious poker player, and a lovely friend! Enjoy her post, and do check out The Paradise Guest House. – Meg

I think we all have had someone in the past tell us we’re not very intelligent or creative or attractive. My parents told me that I was the smart one and my brother was the nice one. (really.) My high school creative writing teacher told me to never write another poem in my life.  (really.) My high school guidance counselor told me that I’d never escape my roots.

Let me explain that one. My parents were first generation Americans, born right after their parents arrived from Russia. My parents didn’t speak English until they went to school. They grew up in the Bronx and in Trenton, NJ, both pretty poor. My father is one of those guys who made the American dream work for him. He bought a bus, started a bus company and made money. But when I went to high school in Princeton, having grown up in Trenton, I saw real money for the first time. That guidance counselor was a wealthy preppy, just like most of the students. When he said I’d never escape my roots, he meant that I couldn’t become a writer because I didn’t come from the right kind of world.

When we sit down to write, I think all of us hear the voices of our past that tell us we suck, that we can’t write and shouldn’t try. I tell my writing students that we should push those voices out of our heads and somehow find the gumption to believe in ourselves. We can write that book.

But I think I do it a little differently than that. When I sit down to write I hear the voice of that guidance counselor. And I tell him: you’re wrong, Mr G. There were no books in my house growing up and my parents weren’t college educated and  yet: I’m a writer. I did it. I like a challenge.  And I had to prove you wrong. – Ellen

Nichole Bernier’s fabulous The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D – which was a finalist for the New England Independent Booksellers fiction award – is just out in paperback. J. Courtney Sullivan calls it, “a compelling mystery and a wise meditation on friendship, marriage and motherhood in an age of great anxiety,” and the Washington Post says, “Bernier’s excellent storytelling skills will keep you pondering long after the final page.” Nichole is a journalist by training – she won the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s award for long-form literary journalism and has written for Psychology Today, Elle, Health, Self, Salon, and The Huffington Post. Her post … well, I don’t want to spoil it by saying too much, but her take on what publishing a novel does to your life is charming, and funny, and so very very true. – Meg

My book’s launch party felt a little like a wedding. Well, one where my five children had already been born, and were racing around jacked up on chocolate-dipped strawberries.

The bash was in an old brownstone in Boston. There was a long brass bar and passed hors d’oeuvres, a few speeches, some roasting. I read a bit from the first chapter in front of friends who appreciated the efforts it had taken to get there, and wore teetery yellow shoes more than a few inches beyond my comfort zone. (My fear and secret thrill: I’ll never be able to chase the kids in these.)

In the past 10 years of my writing life, I’d gone from being a magazine journalist/mother of one to being a sometime-freelancer/mother of five. That evening of the launch party felt like another line of demarcation down my life: before kids, after kids, and kicking it back into gear. Here I was, burning rubber in my Sienna minivan cocoon. Just look at that S car go.

Shortly after the launch party we got an au pair for the summer, and I started traveling for readings at bookstores. It was both heady and humbling: One night an audience of 75 and the next just a few people, including several who had to, because they worked there. Mornings, I’d get in a rental car and drive to bookstores that weren’t stocking my book in hopes they might give it, and me, a chance. My father asked in an email what it felt liketo be on book tour. I told him that while one person did squeal excitedly to meet me (I’m pretty sure she mistook me for someone else), a lot of the time it felt like being a Fuller Brush salesman, hawking your wares door to door. Brushes you’d made yourself. Plucking one horsehair at a time from a pissed-off rodeo bronco.

The truth is, I love it. Just about every single bit. After a pretty intense diaper decade there is a sense of settling back into myself, with the miscellaneous scattered parts — personally, maternally, creatively, professionally — coming into alignment. I feel incredibly fortunate that all the years of of being the crazywoman writing in the attic have resulted in something I can hold in my hand, and share.

But with the sharing came traveling, time away from the kids and from a household that operated, on the best of days, like a catamaran flying a hull. I created this travel schedule myself, and had anticipated it for forever three months. The bigger trips shimmered on the calendar like tinsel and Easter grass. Why was I so excited? Did I think I was going to shed my momma skin and slip back into the my 20s professional self, the travel and independence, the adult stimulation and striving? The shoes?

But to be honest, I had dreaded it, too. I imagined reading in a Chicago bookstore and receiving a call from a hospital back home. Or almost as bad, a simple text message that I’d failed to call in time before bed, and small people were sad. (Which happened.) My husband was able to come on several trips — my parents gave us babysitting as a Christmas present — which was wonderful. He’s my best supporter and critic, and things are just plain more fun with him around. It reminded me of the early years of marriage, zipping around at the top of our games.

But a funny thing happened once I got home and started doing the regional events this summer: I wanted my kids around, too.

I started feeling this way when some health issues hit my parents and father-in-law, and all three needed surgeries. Home didn’t feel like something that was functioning just fine back there. Home felt like something that needed to be in my back pocket, my tote bag, the train seat beside me.

I adjusted my travel plans, put rollaway beds in small spaces. Reading in New York was more fun with my two oldest along; they were wide-eyed at the hotel mini-bar candy, the Empire State Building, Greenwich Village street vendors, Amtrak’s café. Likewise, on Cape Cod, the highlight of a reading was my dinner date afterward — my four year old so giddy about the high patio over the dunes, that he dropped the ketchup bottle down into them. Ooops.

Back to the launch party, which I’d both hoped and feared would represent a thick yellow line down the middle of my life. Toward the end of the evening, as I sat signing books, my oldest child walked up. My 11 year old, my mature one. He interrupted my conversation with the publisher of a magazine where I’d once worked to hand me his stained napkin and empty kebab stick. “Here, Mom, I can’t find the garbage.”

Here Mom, I can’t find the garbage.

And that — along with the fact that after the party, I was squatting in those vertiginous yellow shoes to change a diaper — perfectly summed up the line of demarcation. Sure, there was stimulation and striving, but mostly, the change to my life was invisible. Because of course there’s no going back to that person in her 20s, and nothing had substantively changed in the watchworks of my daily mamma world. Nor did I want it to. Except every so often, the shoes. – Nichole

Monica Wesolowska’s first book, Holding Silvan, was decades in the making, but when Monica was finally emotionally ready to write the story of her first child, the time she’d spent writing served her well. Kate Tuttle, writing in the Boston Globe, says, “In precise, luminous prose she chronicles an unbearable loss that nonetheless was filled with the joy she felt in being her son’s mother. ‘I’m trying to find the story of Silvan that I’ll someday tell myself,” Wesolowska writes. “I want it to be a story that I can bear to hear, a story of loving him well.’ It is.” Monica’s story of how she came to write Holding Silvan is filled with that love. – Meg

I began in earnest around seven or eight. I’d write a story, revise it, illustrate it, then add it to the collection I was writing for my sister, complete with a cover. From the start, I was setting myself up for disappointment—for it wasn’t just to please myself or my sister that I wrote. No. With writing, I hoped to heal the world. Unifying my stories were characters who were isolated, through bad luck, poverty, meanness, misunderstanding. Friendship would save them: a lonely rich family befriends a happy poor one; a scary dragon proves he’s nice; a sad coat finally gets a girl to wear him.

In fifth grade, I decided happy endings were cowardly. I started a novel about a gypsy who would die alone in a storm in a cemetery. But when I got to the death scene, I couldn’t write through my tears. Worse, this thing I called a novel was only a few pages long. In frustration, I hid my yellow legal pad in a drawer, and by the time I was ready to go back to the drawer, my novel seemed to be gone.

If I could go back to my younger self, I’d say, “Don’t take it all so hard. There’s no need to shoulder the pain of the world. You’re having a lovely childhood. Try having fun while writing.” But writing is a strange thing. Without knowing anything about the tortured artist, I acted like one.

After college, when my betters warned me that the “writing life is hard,” I shrugged and hunkered down for the duration. Like a gambler who sacrifices everything, I worked odd jobs, struggled over revisions, endured rejections, all for the occasional high of a good morning writing. By then I understood that good writing wasn’t the same as the earnest propaganda of my youth, but sometimes I wondered if my writing life wasn’t actually taking me further from the very world I’d once hoped to “heal.”

By my early thirties, I’d married but held off on having children in the hopes of “making it” as a writer first. I suppose I thought having a book out in the world would ensure I remained a writer even as a mother. But when I reached 35 without a book, I knew I shouldn’t wait any longer.

Those nine months of pregnancy were fecund ones for me. The torture of writing dissipated.  I wrote with raw power. I sent a collection of stories out. Agents asked to see a novel. I began a novel. I sent that out. Ripe with confidence, I went into labor one night at dinner. My contractions soon became regular, we went to the hospital, I labored normally, and everything seemed fine. Until the worst thing possible happened. To me. To us. To our son Silvan.

In another era, Silvan would have died at birth. He would’ve been one of countless babies who didn’t make it. But with modern medicine, he could be revived and tested and we learned that some time during labor, for unknown reasons, he’d been asphyxiated.  Now his brain was dying. To stay alive, he needed machines. But to stay alive with almost no brain didn’t seem like a life to us. So instead of machines, we chose to hold him, to love him, and to let him go.

While Silvan was still alive, my life as a writer meant nothing to me. Being Silvan’s mother meant everything. When a writer friend said, “You should be writing all this down,” I was horrified. What mattered more to Silvan, my words about him or my arms?

In the stunned and empty months following Silvan’s brief life, I thought I’d give up writing. If all I’d ever really wanted to do with my life was help others, why not become something more useful than a writer— like a hospice worker, a grief counselor, or a teacher?

But for myself, I kept a diary about Silvan. For myself, I recorded hundreds of pages. For myself, I painstakingly transcribed them onto the computer so I could read them later. Or was it only for myself?

Creation is mysterious. For years, I worked hard at my craft. I learned about scene and tension and climax. But rarely did a story come to me easily or satisfactorily. I revised my work into ruins. The tiniest fraction of my efforts got published. But still I wrote. Even after Silvan had died, and I’d grieved heavily and gone on to have two more children, when I went back to fiction, I still struggled to write anything that mattered.

And then one day, I was ready. It was time for Silvan’s story. By the end of the first day, I had 60 pages. By the end of three months, I had a first draft. Three more months to revise. Two weeks to get an agent. Six months to sell it. 18 months to hold my book in my hands.

10 years from Silvan’s brief life, 40 years from my first attempts as a writer, I have a first book. Though I may have worked hard at it, the truth is that Holding Silvan didn’t feel hard to write. I wrote it for Silvan, and I wrote it for myself, and somewhere between the two must lie the secret of writing for others. – Monica