Writing Is My Drink (2 page)

single-mom family with siblings scattered. My mother never

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said, “I need their approval,” but even as a kid I could feel it—

in her eagerness to speak, her laugh, her careful y applied pink

lipstick.

After the show, horses promenaded between track and sta-

bles. I remember the satiny ribbons of blue and red and white.

I loved the order of it: first place, second place, third. It was a hot California day in the mid-1960s, the hil s parched yellow

except for the dark green spots where old oaks offered circles

of shade. I stood between my mother and one of the Wilsons’

horses, taking in the all-knowing horse eye, its crazy straight

eyelashes, the fly on the nose tolerated for only a second. And

then the horse shuffled its hooves a bit and one hoof pressed

silently onto my foot. Pain shot through me. I wanted to scream,

but my mother was talking to Mrs. Wilson, and I’d been taught

never to interrupt. Good manners were integral to my identity;

more than once, I’d imagined a chance to curtsy—usual y a fluke

meeting with a queen or a Kennedy. My mother was talking very

quickly, and there didn’t even seem to be a quick inhale of breath

in which I could wedge my voice. Final y, the pain was intoler-

able, and I spoke—very quietly—the line that would soon be-

come legend: “Excuse me, the horse is on my foot.”

A moment later the horse was shooed off my foot and the

incident was over, but the story of my passivity lived on and has

been retold so many times that it has become an emblem of my

childhood self—a sort of calling card for the younger me, the

timid girl too afraid to speak up when needed, or to risk the

displeasure of others even at the cost of her own welfare. I cringe during the retelling of this story, which my mother tel s without

malicious intent and with great affection. When she gets to the

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“Excuse me” part she uses the smallest of voices, unaware that

my silence had once been a boilerplate item in the unspoken

contract between us.

I don’t mind telling this story today, though, because I now

am telling it in my own voice. It’s not a funny story when I tell

it. “Excuse me” is no longer the punch line. The heat, the yellow

hil s, the fly, they’re all mine. When I tell the story myself, in my own voice, I understand why the young me did not speak up

sooner and I forgive her for it. Forgiving her has become an es-

sential part of uncovering my own voice. My “uncovery.”

Like many kids who grew up in the blue cloud of the 1960s, I

spent the bulk of my childhood feeling like I had to be “good.” I

didn’t come up with this on my own. Being good paid off. Dur-

ing the years when I was often told that I was a “good girl,” one

of my “difficult” sisters lived in a convent in another country and another sibling with a wild side vanished to do a stint in a school for wayward girls girls’ school in the bel y of Texas. In my child’s mind, everything dear to me—including the love of others and

my own survival—depended on being good.

What did being good look like? Besides shiny patent leather

Mary Janes and Shirley Temple manners, being good often

meant not talking about what was
real y
happening. The argument that erupted downstairs after you were supposed to be

asleep, mother’s afternoon nap, the inviolability of the five p.m.

happy hour—all of these single events cluster together, and the

cluster has a name: alcoholism.

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But if you don’t have access to that name and if you don’t talk

or think about these things for long enough, you might find that

you actual y have no idea what you think. At least, that’s what

happened to me.

Writing has been part of my recovery from being good, si-

lent, and in denial. All of these were so much a part of who I was

that I have had to keep coming back to the page—to writing—to

remind myself that I, too, possess a version of things, a take on

the world. Not
the
take.
A
take. Mine. The page is where I am free at last from the isolation of unarticulated life, where expression takes the place of silence.

A long time before I wrote regularly and a very long time

before I was published, I knew there was a writer inside me.

Occasional y words would tumble onto the page in a rush and

startle me with their rawness and vitality. Uncut gems tossed

suddenly from a velvet bag, they magnetized me. More often

than not, though, I was avoiding writing, or writing so rarely

that I could never keep track of the thread of a piece. But in

those rare moments of writing with abandon, I did recognize

my own voice.

The road to finding my voice and letting it come to the page

has been a long one. But I’ve come to understand the necessity

of the journey, to see the length of the process as an under-

standable delay rather than a failing. I see now how the river

of silence –parallels the path that alcohol coursed through my

family, that courses through so many families. But my experi-

ence serves as just one example of our many reasons for not

trusting or even hearing our own voices. We’ve spent too long

listening to everyone but ourselves; we’re bombarded daily by

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input that renders us passive and receiving rather than active

and expressing. We work in teams. We live in families. We keep

peace and build consensus. Much of this is good and necessary

and yet leaves us wanting something we can’t name, something

more.

For the last seven years, I’ve taught a nine-month course in

memoir writing for the University of Washington’s Professional

& Continuing Education department, teaching new writers to

claim their own take on the world and to write about their own

experiences. Through this program, I’ve met scores of people

who possess both a feverish desire to write and an equal mea-

sure of uncertainty about how to begin trusting themselves, who

are afraid of asserting their point of view onto the page. They

remind me of myself. For so long I was the one who was afraid,

who had drawers stuffed with notebooks filled with half-fin-

ished stories. I was the one who didn’t have the faith to stay the

course from not knowing how a story would come together to at

last knowing. Faith means writing past doubt, holding on to the

knowledge that above the cloud cover the sky is blue. Infinitely

and impossibly blue.

Although my class covers the essential elements of memoir

writing—using dialogue, building a scene, creating a narrative

arc—I’m reminded even as I’m teaching my students these skil s

that learning to trust your own voice, and even to
hear
it, is just as important as learning the technical skil s of writing. Maybe

even
more
important. A piece of writing can be well crafted and even eloquent and still ring hollow.

Teaching memoir writing, I’ve also learned that there are

as many ways into writing as there are people longing to write.

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Some burn to get memories down before they fade away; oth-

ers feel compelled to share a story of a changing time in their

lives. For me, the need to write grew out of all the years of not

saying what I knew to be true, and sometimes not even allowing

myself to think it. Denial, repression—you know, all that good

stuff.

Writing Is My Drink
is the story of how I’ve learned, and am still learning, to trust in my own voice and my advice on how you

can too. I spent a long time hovering above the pool, afraid to

dive into what I yearned to do: to write with abandon, to follow

my thoughts on the page wherever they might take me without

doubt or censure. At the end of each chapter, you’ll find a set of

“Try This” activities designed to take you deeper into your own

discovery process. It might be a good idea to have one notebook

or document folder that you designate just for this purpose. You

can do these writing activities after reading each chapter or read

the book all the way through and then return to the activities.

There’s no one right way. Find the one that works for you. Trust

yourself; that’s the key.

The accusation that we are self-absorbed—whether leveled

by ourselves or by others—seems to be what emerging writers

fear the most. By going off to “find our own voices,” we must be

narcissistic at best, or at worst the narcissist’s less compelling

cousin, the navel gazer. Yet, it’s the work of many such “narcis-

sists” that has given me the greatest solace in times of sadness

and confusion. I have books with covers curled like furled leaves

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from the numerous times I’ve thumbed through them, scanning

for that stray calming passage. When I find that passage, it inevi-

tably settles me like the words of the most steadfast of friends.

Almost everyone I know who wishes to write has a similar list

of books to which they feel an enormous debt, books that have

literal y or figuratively saved our lives.

The time we take to find our voices is the time we need to

prepare to give back. Finding the stories you want to tell and

your voice as a writer readies you for the role of giver, to final y be the host. As the fabulous Anne Lamott has said in the equal y

fabulous book
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and

Life
: “It is one of the greatest feelings known to humans, the feeling of being the host, of hosting people, of being the person to

whom they come for food and drink and company. This is what

the writer has to offer.”

This is my story of false starts, dead ends, and minor and

major breakthroughs. You might see yourself in my story. While

our individual stories of doubt may vary, a common thread runs

through the stories of those of us who’ve deferred a dream too

long. We’ve been very busy delaying that which we need and

want to do. We know we’re holding ourselves back, but that

shame of believing we’re the only ones who are failing ourselves

so miserably just stal s us further. Yes, we know that most ev-

eryone else is out there procrastinating and checking e-mail too

much, but we’re sure our own self-doubt is the stuff of legends.

It isn’t. Our hesitation is simply an expected part of the road to

writing—a rough first leg—but it’s one we should push past, one

we can push past.

I’ve come to believe that even if the process takes us longer

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than we want and even if our words are read by only a handful of

readers—or only by ourselves—they are still worth our time and

attention. Expression in itself is worthwhile. When we commit

ourselves to the page, our lives become larger, if even just incre-

mental y, and our sense of ourselves sharpens. We remember

the value of our own lives and the lives of others. I don’t know

how this happens. I only know that it does.

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this Is What I think. tell

Us What you think.

We come to writing longing to express, and then we turn away

because we are afraid. Expression comes with a price, and we

know it. Once the jack-in-the-box of truth has sprung, it can’t

be stuffed back inside, even if no one else reads our words. Writ-

ing asks us to commit to our understanding of a situation, our

take on our lives, our truth. Much of it might be benign and

unthreatening, but eventual y the story will ask us to give some-

thing of ourselves that we don’t want to give. It may not be a Big, Dark Secret; it may even seem inconsequential to others, but

it’s a big deal to us. We feel exposed. We may be eager to write

but still unprepared to commit ourselves—our This Is What
I

Think—to the page.

I traveled first into the more troubled regions of This Is

What
I
Think in my sophomore year of college in Vancouver, 1 1

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BC. I’d been dragged to a student newspaper meeting by Jean-

Paul, one of my many closeted gay friends. In five years, they’d