Working and Writing

When I was a kid, I never wanted to be a ballerina or an astronaut. I wanted to be a writer. I wrote all through school. My undergraduate degree is in Writing. I kept a journal for twenty years. Yet I haven’t written a creative word since 2006. I often wonder if I’m being a sell-out because I have a totally square day job. *

Then I heard author Abraham Verghese (Cutting for Stone, My Own Country: A Doctors Story) at the Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures Monday Night Series. Verghese is an Infectious Diseases doctor who also happens to have an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. He spoke eloquently about having a calling in life. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham is what inspired him to become a doctor. A very specific quote from it motivated him to write:

“Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income half the possibilities of life are shut off. The only thing to be careful about is that you do not pay more than a shilling for the shilling you earn. You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer.”

Verghese believes that if you have a job you love and pays the bills, you’re darn lucky. (Because despite the prevailing wisdom, suffering doesn’t make you more creative.)  And if you are able to write too, well, that’s gravy.

So. I’m going to write. Here are the books that inspire me to write.

For the language

• A Partisan’s Daughter by Louis de Bernieres, an odd love story about the seduction of storytelling.
• Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, terrorism and opera.
• Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.”

For the characters

• City of Thieves by David Benioff, a Jewish soldier in Russia, a dead German paratrooper, larger-than-life deserter Kolya.
• World Without End by Ken Follet, a peasant’s wife, a knight, a builder and a nun.
• Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende, the beautiful slave Zarité, French aristocrat Toulouse, Haiti, New Orleans.

For the story

• Cathedral of the Sea by Ildefons Falcones de Sierra, the building of the Santa Maria del Mar in 14th Century Barcelona.
• A Blade of Grass by Lewis DeSoto, two young woman surviving a civil war in post-colonial Africa.
• So Much for That by Lionel Shriver, a darkly moving (and funny) story about the failure of the United States health care system.

For the voice

• Room by Emma Donoghue, the voice of Jack, a five year old boy.
• The Book Thief by Marcus Zuzak, the voice of Death (quite kind, actually.)
• Dog Boy by Eva Hornug, the voice of an abandoned Russian toddler and a pack of wild dogs.

Hopefully I write the next Great American Novel and get filthy rich. However, in the event that I don’t, at least I have a job I love.

-suzy 

*This is a patently ridiculous worry, as I went to graduate school (and I hate school) to get this specific job and kind of love it.

The Wendy Chronicles

It’s been a little over four years since Wendy Wasserstein died, and I still miss her.  Not, obviously, in the way her relatives and friends do; that’s presumptive in the extreme.  It’s Wasserstein’s literary absence that smarts, the loss of a wise and witty author gone too soon.

Best-known for her multiple-prizewinning play, The Heidi Chronicles, Wasserstein’s body of work also includes humorous essays and one smashing novel, the kind of fictional debut that hurts to read because it’s so good, and there will never be another.  As if to atone, Wasserstein did leave behind various recordings that, when read alongside her literary work, flesh out our posthumous portrait of the quirky, determined author.

Whip-smart, and packed to the gills with artistic and cultural references with which you might not be familiar — I made more than a few trips to the library the first time I read Heidi Chronicles — Wasserstein’s writings constitute encyclopedic coverage of women’s history within a particular context. Her entry in the Jewish Women’s Archive succinctly explains her singular position in contemporary American literature:

Wasserstein made a special place for herself in the American theater by being one of the first women to stage women’s issues with the astute and comic eye of a social critic. As her characters, accomplished women who are trying to find fulfillment in their personal and professional lives, discover that it is impossible to “have it all,” they gain a better understanding of who they are. Although she resisted being labeled a “feminist” playwright, arguing that men are not subject to such labels, she was seriously troubled by the unjust inequities based on gender that she saw in American society. Therefore, her plays continued to focus on women struggling to define themselves in a “postfeminist” America that still suffered from the backlash of sexism, homophobia and traditional values but also from the problem of liberal entitlement. Her writing not only reflected her passionate interest in women but also revealed the fact that she was Jewish and a New Yorker.

On the surface Wendy Wasserstein and I have next to nothing in common, but when she speaks of what unites all women — our desire to succeed on our own terms, and to make peace with women whose terms are not ours — I feel a sense of kinship that transcends the boundaries of age, religion, class and privilege.  Reading Wasserstein has taught me to keep my heart as open as my mind, and to laugh at the obstacles in my path, even as I work diligently to strike them down.

This is, of course, one of the reasons we read:  to learn from those who sing with different voices.  Their compositions are meant to encourage us, not to copy theirs, but to inspire our own.

–Leigh Anne
uncommon woman in training