Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

  Let’s say your character is sitting with his grown son beneath a cypress tree on a lion-colored hillside, chewing over in the sourest possible voice the few ecstatic moments of his life, and all you are going to do this morning is to squint along with him, and listen, and possibly find out what some of those moments might have been. After a minute, you begin to see your man in someone’s grassy backyard, not long ago, playing Ping-Pong with a younger man, a hippie, and they are not competing, just hitting together, and you begin to capture this on paper, and after two sentences you begin to worry about complete financial collapse, what it will be like to live in a car, and then your mother calls joyfully to tell you that something fantastic just happened to someone who was mean to you in the eighth grade. You get off the phone, and your mind has become a frog brain that scientists have saturated with caffeine. You may need another minute to bring it back to the man’s moment in that grassy backyard. Close your eyes. Breathe. Begin again.

  I’m sorry, I wish that there were a sharper, slicker way to do this, but this seems to be the only solution. Believe me, I hate natural solutions, or at any rate they are the last ones I turn to. Two nights ago I showed up to teach my class with a raw chest and a raging sore throat, the kind that feels like cancer of the trachea. I happen to have two doctors in this class, and one of them tried to assure me that it probably wasn’t tracheal cancer, that in fact the viral cloud of mid-autumn had descended and many people were having similar symptoms. The other doctor recommended drinking really, really hot water. "Hot water?" I said. "Hot water? I should be home hooked up to an epidural, drinking codeine cough syrup, and you’re prescribing hot water?" Then I threatened to lower his grade. (Of course, this is not a graded workshop, so my students tend to roll their eyes when I threaten them.) At the break, that doctor brought me a cup of boiling water, as though for tea but without the tea bag, and I drank it. My throat and chest stopped aching about twenty seconds later.

  I hate that.

  Still, breathing calmly can help you get into a position where the workings of your characters’ hearts and the things people say on the streets of your story can be heard above the sound of KFKD. When you are in that position, you will know. I am struggling very hard not to use the word harmony here. So let me tell you a quick story.

  Last summer I got a call from a producer in New York who wanted me to fly east two days later, stay in town overnight, do her TV talk show, and fly home. I thought long and hard about whether I should—for about thirty seconds. Of course I wanted to go. But I would have to make arrangements for Sam to stay overnight with his grandparents, and I needed to catch a return flight that would get me back in time to teach my workshop the next night, and the only one that could do that involved a layover at Dallas-Fort Worth. A layover at Dallas-Fort Worth is something for which, believe me, I am not remotely well enough. So I shared all this with the producer and took off for a committee meeting I had at church.

  I was a mess. Out of the right speaker, KFKD was playing a dress rehearsal of the TV talk show and of subsequent appearances with Dave and Arsenio. Out of the left speaker was a call-in program on airplane crashes, with descriptions of what happens to the body on impact.

  I got to church and my committee had not yet assembled, but four of the church’s elders—all women—three African Americans and one white, were having a prayer meeting. They were praying for homeless children. "Can we discuss my personal problems for a moment?" I asked.

  They nodded and I told them all about my airline fears and how many moving parts there were to this trip east. They nodded again. They seemed to believe that between Jesus and a travel agent, things could probably be worked out. I sighed. My meeting was starting in another room, so I trudged off. My mind spun with images of the talk show, the airplane crash, and the madman with the Uzi at Dallas-Fort Worth. I was having a little trouble concentrating. The meeting ended, and on my way out, a little book on prayer caught my eye. I picked it up and stuck it in my purse, figuring I could look at it over dinner and then return it the next Sunday.

  All the way to the hamburger joint, I worried that I would be involved in a car accident and the book would be found on me. My survivors would know I had finally snapped, that I had become one of those fundamentalists who think the world is going to end tomorrow right after lunch. I made it to the restaurant, though, and when I sat down, I took out the little book. I opened it before I got it out of my purse so the cover wouldn’t show, as if it were the rankest sort of pornography, like Big Beautiful Butts or something. I started to read and within a page came upon this beautiful passage: "The Gulf Stream will flow through a straw provided the straw is aligned to the Gulf Stream, and not at cross purposes with it. "

  To make a long story short, I flew to New York and everything went fine. I didn’t have to stop in Dallas-Fort Worth, and I got home in time to teach my class. So now I always tell my students about the Gulf Stream: that what it means for us, for writers, is that we need to align ourselves with the river of the story, the river of the unconscious, of memory and sensibility, of our characters’ lives, which can then pour through us, the straw. When KFKD is playing, we are, at cross purposes with the river. So we need to sit there, and breathe, calm ourselves down, push back our sleeves, and begin again.

  Jealousy

  Of all the voices you’ll hear on KFKD, the most difficult to subdue may be that of jealousy. Jealousy is such a direct attack on whatever measure of confidence you’ve been able to muster. But if you continue to write, you are probably going to have to deal with it, because some wonderful, dazzling successes are going to happen for some of the most awful, angry, undeserving writers you know—people who are, in other words, not you.

  This is going to happen because the public herd mentality is not swayed by the magic that happens when mind and heart and muse and hand and paper work together. Rather, it is guided by talk shows and movie producers and TV commercials. Still, you’d probably like the caribou herd to run in your direction for a while. Most of us secretly want this. But maybe the herd is going to stuff itself on lichen and then waddle after some really undeserving writers instead. Those writers will get the place on the best-seller list, the movie sales, the huge advances, and the nice big glossy pictures in the national magazines where the photo editors have airbrushed out the excessively long eyeteeth, the wrinkles, and the horns. The writer you most admire in the world will give them rave reviews in the Times or blurbs for the paperback edition. They will buy houses, big houses, or second houses that are actually as nice, or nicer, than the first ones. And you are going to want to throw yourself down the back stairs, especially if the person is a friend.

  You are going to feel awful beyond words. You are going to have a number of days in a row where you hate everyone and don’t believe in anything. If you do know the author whose turn it is, he or she will inevitably say that it will be your turn next, which is what the bride always says to you at each successive wedding, while you grow older and more decayed. It can wreak just the tiniest bit of havoc with your self-esteem to find that you are hoping for small bad things to happen to this friend—for, say, her head to blow up. Or for him to wake up one morning with a pain in his prostate, because I don’t care how rich and successful someone is, if you wake up having to call your doctor and ask for a finger massage, it’s going to be a long day. You get all caught up in such fantasies because you feel, once again, like the kid outside the candy-store window, and you believe that this friend, this friend whom you now hate, has all the candy. You believe that success is bringing this friend inordinate joy and serenity and security and that her days are easier. She’s going to live to be one hundred and twenty, he’s never going to die—the people who are going to die are the good people, like you. But this is not true. Money won’t guarantee these writers much of anything, except that now they have a much more expensive set of problems. The pressure on their lives has actually intensified.

  Good, fine, you think. I’m into in
tensity; those are the problems I want.

  But do you really?

  Yes. I really do.

  But some of the loneliest, most miserable, neurotic, despicable people we know have been the most successful in the world.

  Right—but it would be different for me. I would not fall for my own press clippings. I would not mention my achievements all the time. I would not say things like "Boy, you think it’s raining hard today? I remember one day—I think it was the year I got the Guggenheim—it really rained hard." You’d never do that, unlike other people you could mention.

  That’s very nice. It’s all going to happen to somebody else anyway. Bank on it. Jealousy is one of the occupational hazards of being a writer, and the most degrading. And I, who have been the Leona Helmsley of jealousy, have come to believe that the only things that help ease or transform it are (a) getting older, (b) talking about it until the fever breaks, and (c) using it as material. Also, someone somewhere along the line is going to be able to make you start laughing about it, and then you will be on your way home.

  I went through a very bad bout of jealousy last year, when someone with whom I am (or rather was) friendly did extremely well. It felt like every few days she’d have more good news about how well her book was doing, until it seemed that she was going to be set for life. It threw me for a loop. I am a better writer than she is. A lot of my writer friends do very well, hugely well, and I’m not jealous of them. I do not know why that is, but it’s true. But when it happened for her, I would sit listening to her discuss her latest successes over the phone, praying that I could get off the line before I started barking. I was literally oozing unhappiness, like a sump.

  My deepest belief is that to live as if we’re dying can set us free. Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and not to sweat the small things. So every time this friend called, I tried to will myself into forgiving both of us. I had been around someone from the South that summer who was always exclaiming, "Isn’t that great?"—only she made it almost rhyme with "bright." So when my friend would call with her lastest good news, always presented humbly like some born-again-Christian Miss America contestant, I’d say, "Isn’t that gright, huh? Isn’t that gright?"

  She would say, "You are so supportive. Some of my other friends are having trouble with this."

  I’d say, "How could I not be supportive? It’s just so darn gright."

  But I always wanted to ask, "Could I have the names and numbers of some of your other friends?"

  Sometimes I would get off the phone and cry.

  After a while I started asking people for help.

  One person reminded me of what Jean Rhys once wrote, that all of us writers are little rivers running into one lake, that what is good for one is good for all, that we all collectively share in one another’s success and acclaim. I said, "You are a very, very angry person."

  My therapist said that jealousy is a secondary emotion, that it is born out of feeling excluded and deprived, and that if I worked on those age-old feelings, I would probably break through the jealousy. I tried to get her to give me a prescription for Prozac, but she said that this other writer was in my life to help me heal my past. She said this writer had helped bring up a lifetime’s worth of feeling that other families were happier than ours, that other families had some owner’s manual to go by. She said it was once again that business of comparing my insides to other people’s outsides. She said to go ahead and feel the feelings. I did. They felt like shit.

  My friend, the writer I was so jealous of, would call and say, like some Southern belle, "I just don’t know why God is giving me so much money this year." And I would do my Lamaze for a moment, and say, "Isn’t that gright?" I have never felt like such a loser in my life.

  I called a very wise writer I know who’s been in Alcoholics Anonymous for years, who spends half his time helping others get sober. I asked him what he would tell a newcomer who was in the throes of insanity or, say hypothetically, jealousy.

  "I just listen," he said. "They all tell me these incredibly long, self-important, convoluted stories. And then I say one of three things: I say, ’Uh-huh,’ I say, ’Hmmm,’ I say, ’Too bad.’ " I laughed. Then I started telling him about this awful friend I had who was doing so well. He was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Uh-huh."

  Next I talked to my slightly overweight alcoholic gay Catholic priest friend. I said, "Do you get jealous?"

  He said, "When I see a man my own age in great shape, and I feel all conflicted, wishing I were that thin and yet at the same time wanting to lick him, is that jealousy or is that appreciation?"

  It was hard to get anyone to say anything that would make the jealousy go away or change into something else. I felt like the wicked stepsister in a fairy tale. I told another friend, and she read me some lines by a Lakota Sioux: "Sometimes I go about pitying myself. And all the while I am being carried on great winds across the sky." That is so beautiful, I said; and I am so mentally ill.

  Those lines, however, offered the beginning of a solution. They made the first tiny crack in my prison wall. I was waiting for the kind of solution where God reaches down and touches you with his magic wand and all of a sudden I would be fixed, like a broken toaster oven. But this was not the way it happened. Instead, I got one angstrom unit better, day by day.

  Another piece of the solution came when a poem by Clive James, called "The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered," appeared one Sunday in The New York Times Book Review. "The book of my enemy has been remaindered," it begins, "And I am pleased." It helped more than words can say. Oh, what blessed relief for someone to be as jealous and spiteful as me and to make those feelings funny. I called everyone whose advice I had sought and read it to them. Everybody howled with recognition.

  Yet another piece of the solution dropped into place when my friend Judy said that the problem was trying to stop the jealousy and competitiveness, and that the main thing was not to let it fuel my self-loathing. She said it was nuts for me to try to be happy for this other writer. I cannot tell you how much this helped. I was raised in a culture that promotes this competitiveness, this insatiability, this fantasy of needing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and then, in the next breath, shames you for any feelings of longing or envy or fear that it will always be someone else’s turn. I was only doing what I had been groomed to do.

  So I started getting my sense of humor back. I started telling myself that if you want to know how God feels about money, look at whom she gives it to. This cheered me up no end, even though my closest friends have lots of money. I told myself that historically when people do too well too quickly, they are a Greek tragedy waiting to happen. I, who did not do too well too quickly and who was in fact not doing too well over time, was actually in the catbird seat. I was not going to end up the cocky heroine in an ugly hubris drama. This is not to be underestimated. My nerves are shot as it is; the last thing I need would be an onslaught of thunder and silent screams, with cymbals, fangs, winds pushing forest fires across the land; I mean, who needs it?

  Then I started to write about my envy. I got to look in some cold dark corners, see what was there, shine a little light on what we all have in common. Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic—jealousy especially so—but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.

  Now I felt like I was getting somewhere, after all those weeks of emotionally swimming the English Channel, cold and afraid. Then I saw a documentary on TV about a couple with AIDS. And all the pieces of the solution finally came together.

  There was a lot of footage in that movie of ravaged bodies, the sorts of bodies we usually recoil from. One of the men in the couple had an emaciated back entirely purple with Kaposi’s. But once you, the viewer, got to know the spirit inside, you could see the beauty of that sick person lying under the mounds of quilts that friends had made. You could see the amazing fortitude of people going through horror with g
race, looking right into the pit and seeing that this is what you’ve got, this disease, or maybe even this jealousy. So you do as well as you can with it. And this ravaged body or wounded psyche can and should still be cared for as softly and tenderly as possible.

  The more I wrote about it and the more I thought of the movie, the angrier I got at how often this writer friend mentioned her money to me, because that summer Sam and I had almost none, and she knew this. I kept writing about my childhood, about how often I had longed for what other girls had and for what other families seemed to be about. I taped Hillel’s line to the wall by my desk: "I get up. I walk. I fall down. Meanwhile, I keep dancing." The way I dance is by writing. So I wrote about trying to pay closer attention to the world, about taking things less seriously, moving more slowly, stepping outside more often. Eventually what I was writing got funnier and compassion broke through, for me and also for my writer friend. And at this point I told her, as kindly as possible, that I needed a sabbatical from our friendship. Life really is so short. And finally I felt that my jealousy and I were strangely beautiful, like the men in the AIDS movie, doing the dance of the transformed self, dancing like an old long-legged bird.

  Part Three

  Help Along the Way

  Index Cards

  I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, "A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost," while looking for his glasses, and that they were on top of his head. We have so much to remember these days. So we make all these lists, filled with hope that they will remind us of all the important things to do and buy and mail, all the important calls we need to make, all the ideas we have for short stories or articles. And yet by the time you get around to everything on any one list, you’re already behind on another. Still, I believe in lists and I believe in taking notes, and I believe in index cards for doing both.