I WRITE to you from my day off. To say I have never been happier would be a perverse and unwarranted lie. I have obviously been happier. But somehow despite my circumstances—circumstances of my making, less than ideal; does their maker make them better or worse?—I am happy at least to not be miserable about it. Anxious, yes. Highly strung? Without a doubt. But I have not fallen into one of those horrible floppy piles for a while, not since Sock died (our Chihuahua-mix puppy who died at seven months of age in early September last year), and my grief after his death was a solid, tragic thing, not a something produced by the vague and untethered problem of being powerfully alive and yet not really seeing the point in that. My favourite funny line from Madame Bovary is, as I tell everyone at all times: “She both wanted to die, and to live in Paris.” I love it so much I put it in my brilliant, if unwritten, novel.
Occasionally when I look at my inbox, I see that someone new has subscribed to this newsletter. I’m sorry to tell them/you: I don’t write this newsletter anymore. I even deleted the archive of the letters I wrote over the few years in which I did write it, regularly, when it resembled something like a diary. There were too many letters there and too many of them were functionally deranged! I wanted to keep the newsletter in some capacity, though, in case the urge ever struck me again to write it, or (more likely) if I had a book I needed to ‘publicise,’ which would be a good time to use this mailing list (‘sorry’). I’m happy, probably, because I don’t have a book to publicise. Was it Virginia Woolf who said “I hate writing. I love having written.”? Real quote, or one plucked from an uncited tweet? Well I fucking hate having written but I do like to write.
When I stopped writing the newsletter, I also unsubscribed all but the most sporadic of the other newsletters. Their constant presence in my inbox caused me stress, I wanted a break from them just as I wanted a break from myself. Who knows why anyone writes these newsletters. The sporadic ones, sure. Them I understand; it can be soothing to reach over the threshold and be read in real-ish time during the months or years between publishing ‘proper’ (by which I mean ‘edited’) work. The weekly ones, or worse, twice, thrice weekly!; these came to frighten me. I couldn’t help but panic on behalf of their authors. How much content can a person meaningfully write, even when factoring in all the possible angles on the onslaught of world events? How many times can a reader read the same circular insights written with the same stylistic flourishes? Most people who know about the big newsletters, the American ones that generate serious revenue, argue that their authors are simply can’t stand to be edited. Oh, how I long to be edited. Discipline me out of my worst and laziest habits of expression and the narrowness of my perspective! I even had to unsubscribe from Mary Gaitskill’s newsletter because I started seeing her as an unbalanced if ordinary person, rather that the mistress of sexual perversity and restraint I wanted to believe she was. There is The Paris End, and what I’ve read of it is great (Sally Olds on Jordan Peterson was the best essay on the internet I’d read in a very long time), but I admit the pace of publication, of them all, freaks me out.
Deleting the Little Throbs archive was also a means of aligning my output with my reality. Before, rightly or wrongly, I understood myself to be an absolute non-entity who was read by—at most—a small sub-section of my nice friends and respected enemies, and then only the ones who also wrote. This may have been false, but my perception that no-one read my work and no-one ever would gave me a sense of irrelevance and anonymity that made it possible to publish deranged, sometimes intensely personal things without feeling the consequences of exposure. Publishing a personal book, even a small book like Blueberries during a period in which books were for most people irrelevant, stupid things, confronted me with the reality that publishing is by definition a public act, and that the perception of others can be damaging and painful. It took longer than it ought to have for me to recognise that I needed to protect some, or most, or maybe even all of my private life from strangers, whether readers or colleagues, because people can get strange ideas about what they know about someone from their writing, or from the gossip that circulates around networks of publication. I was and am still shocked by the huge gap between reality—facts!—and a person’s—my!—ability to maintain their delusions, namely the delusion of invisibility.
Gladly I am now free of all delusions. I am aware that when I write it is within a given public, however small, and that while I would like to enter into that public writing that honestly and excoriatingly examines private matters, I’m aware of the costs of that for the writer, which are often greater than the rewards—until they’re not. A friend argues that this is why writers should try to get as much money as we can for our writing; this builds at least a protective boundary between the work and the worker, a sense that we haven’t needlessly exposed nor exploited ourselves, and I agree. But some of us are just born wrong; I don’t know how I would even begin to do that beyond very occasionally asking editors if they can throw in an extra few dollars to smooth over commissions that pay, factoring in inflation, 30% less than they did when I started writing for magazines in 2009, when I really did not have a single reader. It’s not really their fault; not mine either.
In the space of being morally dwarfed by the escalating global catastrophes and the very minor but sickly feeling of being caught with one’s pants down, more than once, hovering over a hole in the ground, what can one do but write fiction? In 2020/21 I half-wrote a non-novel that went in the bin, and that felt great, and it made space for this one, Mummy, which has a good beginning, a difficult ending and a sloppy, dreadful middle bit. Finishing it seems achievable, and I’m writing it down here to build an infrastructure of (minor) public shame should I lose the will to soldier through the sloppy, dreadful sections. When my teaching ends I will hide out at a residency and write it for days in a row followed by days in a row. Then I’ll be unemployed, the ideal condition for finishing a novel. Maybe that’s why I’m happy, because I’m almost writing like a normal writer, writing a weird novel not about me or even really my private melodramas, and a few little things on the side, which I might care to ‘publicise’ here.
Probably I’ve already given up some secrets in this letter, but in an effort to be distant, reserved, and self-respecting, I’ll just point you to some books I’ve enjoyed recently. After a long break from contemporary fiction I seem to be able to tolerate it again and in some cases even really like it. Send me recs for summer vacation leading into unemployment!
Chrysalis by my brilliant colleague Anna Mecalfe
Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan
Love Me Tender by Constance Debré
Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada
The Infatuations by Javier Marías
The Loser by Thomas Berhnard
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
All of Annie Ernaux I’d not already read, my favourite being A Girl’s Story.
And currently reading (all great so far!):
Mercy by Andrea Dworkin
The Cellist by Jennifer Atkins
Listening to the audiobook of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.