I remember a weekend in Atlantic City. I’m small, sitting in a hotel room, and everything smells cold. I’m nine, maybe ten, and I’d never been in a hotel before and I touch the soaps, run my hands over the faucets of the sink and tub and count the minutes, hours, until my mother and her husband return from the casino. But day folds into evening and I fall asleep in front of the television because Manny is on a heater. He’s playing cards and he can feel the win, practically taste it, but like many gamblers the feeling is only hunger. A need that is rarely satiated. A taste that is never satisfied. And I’ve never used the word until I started writing seriously. Until I felt what it was like to be completely absorbed by what you’re creating.
Yes, friends, I’m on a heater.
I’ve never understood folks who sit at the computer and write for hours a day. At Columbia, we used to joke about Joyce Carol Oates and how she’d crank out a novel every year when it took us months to write a short story. I’ve been writing for over forty years (half of which I’ve been publishing professionally), and I’ve never been that kind of writer. The work comes when it comes and my only obligation is to service it when it does.
During this break, this respite when a dear friend of mine has been generous to lend me her home, for free, I thought I’d write more. I thought the words would come fast and furious but the only thing that arrived was anxiety and sadness. Sadness when my pop would text me photos of his new dog and talk about his new family, the wording of which made me feel like I was deliberately excluded. Anxiety when I stared at my computer, willing myself to work, to hustle, but it wasn’t depression that stopped me. It was me growing tired of the career I excelled at. Me always feeling like a whore looking for her next trick to turn. Me wondering if I’ll be homeless even though I have a pedigree education because this is America and the only assurance is no assurance.
So, the words didn’t come or they come slowly. Glacial pace. Instead, I focused on my reselling business, which brings in the money to keep me afloat and I think about how I can never move back east unless I’m in a body bag. It’s either west or out of the country but I sit in my friend’s beautiful home, knowing this space is temporary, wondering if I’ll ever feel permanence. If I’ll ever grasp home.
I don’t push it. I open my laptop in the morning and see what happens and nothing did until recently. Until I found myself twenty pages deep into a new story about a character that’s always fascinated me—Kitty Lister.
People, like me, who have had a childhood marked by constant trauma and fear don’t have the safety equilibrium most enjoy. Since we’re in a constant state of alert, we become used to the darkness and it’s almost frightening when we’re faced with normalcy, with calm. This is why I can’t sleep in silence or why horror movies calm me. And so I’ve reconciled with the fact that I’ll always write about strange dark things because it’s what I know. It’s what makes me feel most comfortable. The only challenge has been mixing in that light. Cleaving to that hope.
So, I’m writing a new story in my Lister series. Kitty is older, much older, and her story is juxtaposed with a teenager who’s grown up in front of the camera—her family a famous YouTube channel. The matriarch, a honey-haired monster. I had one idea going into this story—the teenager, now adult, confronts Kitty, the murderer of her abusive murder in a confrontation that is cataclysmic. But as I kept on with the story it occurred to me that binaries don’t exist. That while this character can hate a woman for murdering her mother, she can also feel reprieve, a sense of relief that the abuse is over. That this child, now woman, can, in fact, become an abuser.
I like complicated stories.
As I write, I hear the refrain—nobody cares. Nobody’s waiting for your work. You are no longer the bright, shiny thing. You are not the smiling writer with a cherub child and a happy life—a woman infinitely more palatable than me. You are strange. You are the medicine that doesn’t go down easily. But I keep going for me.
And what’s been interesting is witnessing my voice evolve. For the last decade, I’ve been obsessed with language at the expense of plot and character. I cared about every word and how it moved. Now, I’m watching myself get a little relaxed. The sentences aren’t as tight and the story feels like a person telling it than a writer writing it. It’s as if it’s now important for the reader to hear my actual voice along with the way sentences are constructed. This is the beauty of art—watching it shape-shift without you knowing it.
Last night, I woke from a dream. I was in Wisconsin, one of those small towns, and I had a food shop. I was making things and living in a small house surrounded by animals. And the detail was so real I woke from my dream confused. I bolted up at two in the morning and walked around the house realizing that I am, in fact, in Southern California. I do not, in fact, have the kind of money to buy a house or run a shop even though I once did.
I wake later, at a normal hour, and continue this story I’m writing for the book who knows if anyone will see, feeling pulled. Pulled by reality—what next. Pulled by desire—I no longer want to do what I’ve been doing, but the fear. Pulled by the anger—I could’ve saved more money than I did. I hate that my waking hours are a tug of war between art and money. The fear of can I keep writing if I have no home, no place to go home to?
Anyway, I am happy. I am writing. I am on a heater. But I’m also thinking about the small shop where I sell my bolognese and a home surrounded by cats, dogs, owls, and pigs who demand belly rubs and all the love. I think about all the love.
I love your voice! Feels like listening to a good friend.
You've developed quite a relaxed, welcoming, conversational style for someone who is on high alert all the time. I feel invited by your writing to linger in the spaces between your words, so something is working there. Just so you know.