Writing Is My Drink (16 page)

sweet voice of children’s books that described a life sterile with

perfection.

The Happy Hooker
came through the sixth-grade informa-

tion pipeline in an old, crinkly lunch bag. It was passed this

way—in the ancient way that knowledge is passed—from hand

to hand through the sixth grade. No one real y knew whose book

it was or who’d started the chain, but we all revered the impor-

tance of the book, and we were all united by the fact that we had

read the same story and we’d all gone to the same lengths to hide

it from our parents. Once in a while we’d check in on who had

it at the moment and then nod sagely, knowing one more had

been added to our numbers. For me, the book was more than

an initiation into the adult world of sex, though. It was the
voice
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that was so magnetic. I adored the way Xaviera turned to the

camera—just as Blume’s narrator had—and just told her story.

From her ordinary life of johns and tricks, she pulled out a gritty real-life narrative. I didn’t know it yet, but I was falling in love with the first person.

Decades later, in my first quarter of my MFA program in

Seattle, I couldn’t have been more intimidated as a thirty-five-

year-old pregnant woman in a room where the average age was

twenty-six, the average undergrad alma mater Stanford. When

we had to introduce ourselves the first day, I trembled and my

voice broke as I said my name. Intimidated not just by the other

students and the tall and urbane professor, I was daunted by the

fact that my presence in the room announced to the world my

intention of becoming a writer. But it was my intention and I

was prepared to face the challenge.

One of the first assignments was to share with the class a

piece of writing we admired—simple enough, except that it

very quickly morphed into a round of Defending Your Life. As

we read through each piece, the professor would look straight

at the student who brought it in and say, “So? What’s so great

about this?” That’s the thing about love. It’s very hard to de-

fend. When you’re the student, though, you real y only have

two choices: losing face in front of your peers by not going up

to bat, or going up to bat and maybe striking out. So up we al

went, one by one. One guy had brought in a restaurant review.

In answer to the What-do-you-like-about-it? question, he spat

out that he liked the tone of the review, the voice of the writer.

The professor looked aghast, made a sort of scoffing sound, and

said, “Are you serious? This is the most ordinary sort of journal-

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ism I can imagine.” We all swallowed, our own turns just a few

beats away.

I barely survived my defense of an Alice Munro story, tak-

ing a hit for having a “solipsistic aesthetic,” as I’d said that I enjoyed Munro partly because she’s a Canadian woman. Most of us

got through somehow with just minor cuts and bruises, until it

came to . . . I’ll call her Minnie. Minnie had brought in a pretty

decent poem. I can’t remember it completely, maybe because my

memory is blacked out by what happened next, but I remember

it was something about a bird and I thought, Yeah, I can see

liking this. After she finished reading the poem, the professor

started his usual round of questioning. Instead of ral ying and

trying to swat at the bal , Minnie kept saying stuff like “I don’t

know” and “I’m not sure.” The temperature in the room rose.

Throats cleared. We shot looks of encouragement Minnie’s way.

Final y, Tall and Urbane just asked point-blank: “Why,
then
, did you bring it in?”

Minnie spilled the whole truth and it wasn’t pretty: The

truth was she’d looked through pages and pages of stuff and

nothing—how surprising?—seemed good enough. Final y, she

remembered a poem that one of her undergrad professors had

swooned over. He’d been very convincing that this poem was of

tremendous merit and she’d reasoned that if he thought it that

good, surely it must be, and so she decided that’s what she would

bring.

Stunned silence flooded the room. Our eyes darted from

Minnie to Tall and Urbane and back to Minnie.

“Okay,” he said, “I understand why you did this. But you

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hates but that you truly love than to bring someone else’s pick.

You have to
know
what writing you love. You just
have
to.”

After we’d all taken our turns, he shared with us all the low-

brow and highbrow writers that he loved and what they meant to

him. The list did not include the usual suspects such as Faulkner

and Shakespeare. The list also included
Seinfeld
, which excited me beyond measure. He concluded by saying that even though

these writers might not be on other people’s lists, he would go

down defending them.

In that moment and throughout the quarter, I felt his love

for
his
writers. He was a true fan, and his excitement for his writers was contagious. His enthusiasm encouraged me to claim the

writers I loved as my own and to carry them with me, to allow

them to nurture me as a writer. I slowly came to understand

what the professor had been up to in those sweaty tribunals.

He’d been forcing us to defend our people, to gather our own

tribe around us. He knew we’d need their voices to find our own.

I already knew what I liked in writing—in a way, I’d known

it since the sixth grade when I’d read Blume and Hol ander—but

what I hadn’t been able to do before this was to
own
what I liked, to not feel shame that it wasn’t highbrow enough or not avant

garde. Suddenly it was okay that I wasn’t cool enough to like

DeLillo or Pynchon.

It was kind of like when I was in high school, and I felt this

shiver of shame when a new friend would flip though my record

collection—a seventies rite of friendship, to be sure. There were

cool-kid (read cool-boy) sanctioned albums that you were sup-

posed to have—
Led Zeppelin I, II
,
III
,
and
IV
pop instantly to mind. And then there was my collection, which ranged from my

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first purchase (
The Divine Miss M
) to something more recent, like the soundtrack to
American Graffiti
.
I didn’t like Led Zeppelin or any of the other cool-boy music. At al . Sure, I might have

slow danced in the basement of the United Church to “Stairway

to Heaven,” but that music never spoke to me. What was it about,

anyway? “There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold.” Even then—years before reading about what Gloria Steinem called

“the click” you get when you realize something you’ve always

taken for normal is, in fact, horrifical y sexist—I felt a pre-feminist twinge whenever I heard Zeppelin. Maybe it had everything

to do with my early and unrelenting distaste for the word “lady.”

Anyway, my new friend would soon flip past my safety al-

bums kept at the front: David Bowie’s
ChangesOneBowie
and Supertramp’s
Crime of the Century
, and it wouldn’t take long before she got into the real y embarrassing stuff that I deeply

and truly loved. We’re talking Cher’s
Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves
, folks. The Supremes. Al Stewart’s
The Year of the Cat
, an album I’d secretly memorized, which I swore held within it the secrets

to all of adulthood. Joni Mitchel , absolutely. The Beach Boys,

check. And yes, Bil y Joel.

Similarly, I felt that My Writers revealed my questionable

taste, my rudimentary reading skil s, my lack of intellect, my

poor breeding, my ADD, my general lack of savoir faire. But

whatever they might’ve shown about me that I feared, I also

loved them fiercely and hated to risk exposing them to criti-

cism. If someone were to say something untoward about Nora

Ephron, for example, it would feel as if the family name was at

stake. These were the writers who were giving me permission to

be myself. And however low my self-esteem might have been at

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times, there was always a part of me that quietly rooted for the

triumph of my goofy spirit.

And that part of me was a reader. Before anyone becomes a

writer, she is a reader. She may not be an avid reader, but she’s read some writers as if her life depended upon them. Because it has.

The writers who speak to us, who send out the siren call and

lure us to bring pen to paper, are the ones who have revealed a

view of the world that makes sense to us—and that view of the

world is often very different from the dominant view among the

people who surround us, the people who’ve taught us what life

is and who we can be in the world. Sometimes, the examples are

extreme.

A friend of mine, Carlene Cross, wrote a book called
Fleeing

Fundamentalism: A Minister’s Wife Examines Faith
chronicling her experience as a young woman falling into Christian Fundamentalism and falling for a young, charismatic minister, then

crawling her way out of Fundamentalism when she discovered

her husband’s dark, secret life and realized that Fundamentalism

was annihilating her spirit. After Carlene visited my memoir class

one quarter, a student in the class who’d grown up a Fundamen-

talist mailed Carlene’s book to a woman in a similar situation. He

described to me how much hope the book had given this woman,

how she’d kept it hidden and then read it when no one was around,

how it felt like a lifeline out of a hopeless situation.

Sometimes it’s subtler, the need for the book seemingly less

urgent, but the essence of the situation is the same: The beloved

book is somehow allowing you to believe that the way you see

life is valuable and the way you want to express yourself is pos-

sible. The book is calling you to something.

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Right before my twenty-second birthday, back when I was

waiting tables in Santa Fe, a friend who I’d met in a creative writing class my freshman year came to visit. As she was leaving, she

handed me a copy of Nora Ephron’s
Heartburn
. “You’re going to
love
this,” she said.

I spent the day with the book where love often lands us: in

bed. I read all of
Heartburn
that day, pausing routinely to examine the front and back covers and the author’s name, as if

that might give me further entrance into her first-person world.

Written as a novel, the book is basical y a roman à clef
,
pretty much an exact account of Ephron’s divorce from Carl Bernstein

of Woodward and Bernstein fame. The names and some de-

tails were changed. But the sense that you’re reading an actual

account—a funny, heart-searing account—of the author’s own

experience is visceral.

It was more than her sincerity that won my heart, though.

Because I’m, in fact, not a huge fan of the strictly confessional; if a book is described as “heartfelt,” I tend to steer clear. The writers in my tribe mix it up. They go a bit crazy with form. Their

writing sings with their original and quirky voices. They’ve got

big
P
Personality on the page. And in Ephron’s
Heartburn
, I divined that; I couldn’t name it yet. It was more like
grunt me like
this grunt.
Me want to do this grunt.
Now I can pick up
Heartburn
and locate and name what thrilled me then and what thril s me now. First, Nora dropped recipes right into the story.
Heartburn
was published 1983! The word “foodie” won’t make it into popular vernacular for decades. These are the John Updike and

Raymond Carver years, years of Show-don’t-tell fiction. Who

dropped recipes into fiction back then? Nora. Nora alone.

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The other
it
quality of
Heartburn
for me: the way Ephron is just turning right to us—she knows we’re there, she’s address-ing us—and telling us about her life, her dad, her therapy, her

broken heart, her cheating second husband, her neurotic first

husband.

And here’s the feminist moment (if that scares you, be scared

or skip to the next chapter): The life she’s telling us about is
a
woman’s life
. If I follow the bread crumbs of the voices that have spoken to me and especial y those who spoke to me when I was

young (the years when my schools assigned me to read exactly

zero female writers), it becomes clear that I was looking to find