mercilessly and eventually collapse in a heap of “I could have been better than
this.”
She pleads with me: Can’t it be different?
Can it? I want to jump out the window for what I’ve boiled down to is one reason: I can’t write a book. But it’s not that I want to die so much as have an entirely different life. I start to think that I should choose another profession—as Lorrie Moore suggests, “movie star/astronaut, a movie star/missionary, a movie star/kindergarten teacher.” I want to throw off everything I’ve accumulated and begin as someone new, someone better
.
I don’t have a bad life. I didn’t have a painful childhood. I know I’m not the first depressed writer. “Depressed writer”—because the latter is less accurate, the former is more acute. I’ve been clinically diagnosed with major depressive disorder and have an off-and-on relationship with prescription medication, which I confide so it doesn’t seem I throw around the term “depression.”
That said, I’m high-functioning—a high-functioning head case, one who jokes enough that most people don’t know the truth. The truth: I am sick with panic that I cannot—will not—override my limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude, to write well, with intelligence and heart and lengthiness. And I fear that even if I do manage to write, that the stories I write—about my vagina, etc.—will be disregarded and mocked
.
How do I reach the page when I can’t lift my face off the bed? How does one go on, Sugar, when you realize you might not have it in you? How does a woman get up and become the writer she wishes she’d be?
Sincerely,
Elissa Bassist
Dear Elissa Bassist,
When I was twenty-eight I had a chalkboard in my living room. It was one of those two-sided wooden A-frames that stand on their own and fold flat. On one side of the chalkboard I wrote,
“The first product of self-knowledge is humility,” Flannery O’Connor
, and on the other side I wrote,
“She sat and thought of only one thing, of her mother holding and holding onto their hands,” Eudora Welty
.
The quote by Eudora Welty is from her novel
The Optimist’s Daughter
, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972. It was a book I read again and again, and that line about the woman who sat thinking of only one thing was at the heart of the reason why. I sat like that too. Thinking of only one thing. One thing that was actually two things pressed together, like the back-to-back quotes on my chalkboard: how much I missed my mother and how the only way I could bear to live without her was to write a book.
My
book. The one that I’d known was in me since way before I knew people like me could have books inside of them. The one I felt pulsing in my chest like a second heart, formless and unimaginable until my mother died, and there it was, the plot revealed, the story I couldn’t live without telling.
That I hadn’t written the book by the time I was twenty-eight was a sad shock to me. Of myself, I’d expected greater things. I was a bit like you then, Elissa Bassist. Without a book, but not entirely without literary acclaim. I’d won a few grants and awards, published a couple of stories and essays. These minor successes stoked the grandiose ideas I had about what I would achieve and by what age I would achieve it. I read voraciously. I practically memorized the work of writers I loved. Irecorded my life copiously and artfully in my journals. I wrote stories in feverish, intermittent bursts, believing they’d miraculously form a novel without my having to suffer too much over it.
But I was wrong. The second heart inside me beat ever stronger, but nothing miraculously became a book. As my thirtieth birthday approached, I realized that if I truly wanted to write the story I had to tell, I would have to gather everything within me to make it happen. I would have to sit and think of only one thing longer and harder than I thought possible. I would have
this.”
She pleads with me: Can’t it be different?
Can it? I want to jump out the window for what I’ve boiled down to is one reason: I can’t write a book. But it’s not that I want to die so much as have an entirely different life. I start to think that I should choose another profession—as Lorrie Moore suggests, “movie star/astronaut, a movie star/missionary, a movie star/kindergarten teacher.” I want to throw off everything I’ve accumulated and begin as someone new, someone better
.
I don’t have a bad life. I didn’t have a painful childhood. I know I’m not the first depressed writer. “Depressed writer”—because the latter is less accurate, the former is more acute. I’ve been clinically diagnosed with major depressive disorder and have an off-and-on relationship with prescription medication, which I confide so it doesn’t seem I throw around the term “depression.”
That said, I’m high-functioning—a high-functioning head case, one who jokes enough that most people don’t know the truth. The truth: I am sick with panic that I cannot—will not—override my limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude, to write well, with intelligence and heart and lengthiness. And I fear that even if I do manage to write, that the stories I write—about my vagina, etc.—will be disregarded and mocked
.
How do I reach the page when I can’t lift my face off the bed? How does one go on, Sugar, when you realize you might not have it in you? How does a woman get up and become the writer she wishes she’d be?
Sincerely,
Elissa Bassist
Dear Elissa Bassist,
When I was twenty-eight I had a chalkboard in my living room. It was one of those two-sided wooden A-frames that stand on their own and fold flat. On one side of the chalkboard I wrote,
“The first product of self-knowledge is humility,” Flannery O’Connor
, and on the other side I wrote,
“She sat and thought of only one thing, of her mother holding and holding onto their hands,” Eudora Welty
.
The quote by Eudora Welty is from her novel
The Optimist’s Daughter
, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972. It was a book I read again and again, and that line about the woman who sat thinking of only one thing was at the heart of the reason why. I sat like that too. Thinking of only one thing. One thing that was actually two things pressed together, like the back-to-back quotes on my chalkboard: how much I missed my mother and how the only way I could bear to live without her was to write a book.
My
book. The one that I’d known was in me since way before I knew people like me could have books inside of them. The one I felt pulsing in my chest like a second heart, formless and unimaginable until my mother died, and there it was, the plot revealed, the story I couldn’t live without telling.
That I hadn’t written the book by the time I was twenty-eight was a sad shock to me. Of myself, I’d expected greater things. I was a bit like you then, Elissa Bassist. Without a book, but not entirely without literary acclaim. I’d won a few grants and awards, published a couple of stories and essays. These minor successes stoked the grandiose ideas I had about what I would achieve and by what age I would achieve it. I read voraciously. I practically memorized the work of writers I loved. Irecorded my life copiously and artfully in my journals. I wrote stories in feverish, intermittent bursts, believing they’d miraculously form a novel without my having to suffer too much over it.
But I was wrong. The second heart inside me beat ever stronger, but nothing miraculously became a book. As my thirtieth birthday approached, I realized that if I truly wanted to write the story I had to tell, I would have to gather everything within me to make it happen. I would have to sit and think of only one thing longer and harder than I thought possible. I would have
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