Writing Is My Drink (7 page)

Setting: a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset

neighborhood on a cold February evening.

WRITER BOYFRIEND:
(after reading his fortune, which was

something like “Everyone loves you and it will always be this

way”): So, what’s your fortune say?

ME:
Oh, um, it’s not that interesting.

WRITER BOYFRIEND:
Hey, I told you mine. C’mon, what’s it

say?

ME:
Let’s see. Okay. It says, “Your lover will never leave you.”

WRITER BOYFRIEND:
Oh.

So, yes, there was warning, but like with most warnings,

there’s not much you can do when they arrive but let life play

itself out. It might have been nice, though, if the breakup hadn’t

landed when I was on page eight of the Hundred-Page Thesis.

But the truth was I’d been stuck on page eight for a month.

Adding to my mounting stress was the knowledge that every

semester that I worked on the thesis would cost more tuition

and would delay my plan for moving ahead: leave the wait-

ressing life and get a job teaching at a community college. But

even knowing all that couldn’t make me write. For three weeks

I stared at the thing. I took it over to the Tart to Tart café on

Irving and gnawed on it over lattes and giant muffins. I took

it home and tossed it onto the rug and wrestled with it down

there for a while before I dragged it back to my desk and tried

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to get out something—anything—and then final y slumped

over my desk in defeat.

I asked the other grad students, but they were either simi-

larly stuck and therefore of no help whatsoever, or just racing

along, typing out pages as if they were being dictated from on

high.

“Just do it,” my friend Margit said. She was twenty-five and

already owned a condo somewhere near the end of the BART

line, which in itself seemed beyond comprehension. “Tell your-

self it’s easy.”

Easy. Okay. Easy. I told myself that, but myself just answered

back that it was easy for Margit. She’d picked a more comprehen-

sible topic. Mine, I knew, was convoluted—a dash of Foucault,

a dash of Derrida, a little structuralism, a pinch of post-struc-

turalism, none of which I ful y understood. But I’d convinced

myself that the topic had to be real y hard to prove that I was

smart. Though apparently not smart enough to actual y write

the thesis.

Desperate for help, I called my thesis adviser and told her I

wanted to meet.

“You have some pages?” The way she said “pages” seemed

ominous. She gave the word a weight one would not employ to

reference eight pages
.

“Some,” I squeaked out, and left the dog-eared eight pages in

her mailbox, hoping for a miracle. We met the next week at the

Ecumenical House across from the university at the southern

edge of the city, where the glamour of San Francisco becomes a

stretch of identical, nameless suburbs.

“Is this a draft?” she asked. “A
rough draft
?”

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I had no idea how to answer that. I was writing a hundred-

page thesis. If we’re looking at eight pages, of course those are

going to be a “draft.” But the way she said “draft,” like a cough,

something to be cleared from the throat, I understood a draft

must be a very bad thing.

She lowered her voice to a rasp. “Don’t
ever
give me a rough draft again. Do you understand?”

“I’ve been having some problems.” I thought of the boyfriend

business but veered away from that, knowing that her disgust

would only be magnified by that getting-your-head-messed-up-

over-a-boy sort of nonsense. Yes, we’d broken up just the week

before, but I knew this would not fly with this venerable feminist

and professor as a reason for not getting your work done. I won-

dered how bad it would be to cry in front of her, this tall expert

on Middle English and Shakespeare. This woman who enjoyed

Dryden. Enjoyed! “I’ve been having some problems,” I started

again, “managing the project. My time, maybe?”

“I can’t help you with that,” she said, threading an arm

through a coat sleeve. “My job is to help you with the
content
.

Get some pages done.
Finished pages
.”

On the ride home on the M and the N trains, her words

rung in my head like some unsolvable puzzle. If her job was to

help me with content and I could never come up with content,

did that mean I would forever be outside of the scope of help?

If she couldn’t help me, could
anyone
? Once home, I dropped onto the sofa and sobbed. The jig was up. I wasn’t going to be

able to do this stupid thesis, which meant the last few years—all

the money, energy, and time that went into getting this degree—

were wasted. It also meant that I wasn’t smart, that I was flawed,

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essential y and inalterably different from people who completed

things, who won prizes and scholarships and had relationships

that lasted—people who had One Real Job.

A few days later, I shuffled into the used bookstore on Ninth

Avenue around the corner from my apartment. There, a book

caught my eye:
Working It Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Sci-

entists, and Scholars Talk About Their Lives and Work
. The cover was clearly an artifact of 1970s feminism with its col age of

black-and-white photos of women of all races—black women

with Afros, fresh-scrubbed women with no makeup and hair

that didn’t require a professional cut. One sported a bun and

a pair of dangling earrings; another sat thoughtful y behind a

typewriter.

I flipped through the book quickly and then looked again

at the women on the cover, who seemed to offer a sort of prag-

matic sorority. They reminded me of the women who’d been my

undergrad professors, women who’d studied, written, and mus-

cled their way into old-boy academia. Women who had spine-

worn copies of
The Second Sex
on their crowded bookshelves.

They were the women I’d gone to with every unmet need—for

Mommy, for approval, for validation—when I’d arrived at col-

lege. They’d let me into their shabby offices and listened to me

while I gobbled up their office hours. They took me far more

seriously than I took myself. They were the women who showed

me a glimmer of who I could be in the world, who showed me

that a woman could have a life that revolved around books and

ideas.

I looked inside: four dol ars. On instinct, I bought it and

scurried back to my little apartment.

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W r i t i n g i s M y D r i n k

As I lay on my sofa leafing through
Working It Out
, the

tuition meter whirring away in the background, within a few

minutes calm washed over me. I studied the cover’s black-and-

white pictures of seventies feminists again. I imagined their

lives—with lovers and children and pasta dinners made with

fresh tomatoes and basil. I flipped to an essay entitled “Learn-

ing to Work” and started with recognition as I read the first

paragraph: “A work problem,” it stated, “consists of being un-

able to work, not because of external pressures such as lack

of time, but because of internal problems, which can be ex-

acerbated or disguised by external pressures.” The author saw

herself not as a blocked writer but as a person with a “work

problem,” which she defines as “a problem in doing labor that

would fulfill the true self.” I was pretty sure waitressing was

not labor that fulfilled my true self. As little as I’d written and despite all evidence to the contrary, it would seem that my

“work,” as the author called it, was writing.

My eyes darted to the photo of the author, Virginia Valian,

on the adjacent page. It showed Valian absorbed in her work,

not bothering to look up at the camera, not caring that a city

pulsated behind her through a plate-glass window. My gaze

shifted to the title again: “Learning to Work.”
Learning.
Hope flickered through me. Just maybe, I thought, there was a way

through this after al .

In the opening pages of the essay, Valian sets the scene: It’s

Cambridge, 1970; she’s done all the coursework and now she just

needs to write this pesky dissertation, but she’s doing everything

but write. After analyzing her situation, Valian decides that she

needs to break her work time into measurable and doable units.

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She runs through the possibilities of how long she might be able

to sit at her desk at a stretch. After an opening bid of three hours, which she quickly rules out, she considers shorter and shorter

amounts of increments of work time until final y she settles on

fifteen minutes. She could, she decides, work for fifteen minutes

at a stretch.

Again I glanced at the photo. This respectable, employed

professor was admitting to the world that she saw fifteen min-

utes of work as a stretch she could
live through
. So not
everyone
was working away so calmly. There were people—wel , at least

one person—like me out there. A person who’d struck a bar-

gain with herself to work for fifteen minutes. Then I wondered:

Could
I
work for fifteen minutes?

I thought maybe I could.

So,
fifteen
minutes. What magic had I stumbled upon? I felt like I’d just been given the permission I’d been waiting for all my life—the go-ahead to work on something for a very tiny amount

of time and then to walk away. Ideal y, of course, I would even-

tual y not need to walk away after fifteen minutes. Perhaps one

day soon the allotted fifteen minutes would be the gateway into

a reverie of work from which I would lift my head only to real-

ize that hours had elapsed and a snowbank of pristine, finished

pages had risen around me.

With controlled excitement, I read the section of the essay

subtitled “Rules and Rationales of the Program” (It was a
pro-

gram
! It had
rules
! It would
work
!). “The first rule was that the fifteen-minute period had to be spent solely in working.” Good,

agreed. I could do that. But then, a few lines later: “I also had

to learn that losing myself in my work was not dangerous.” I’d

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never thought of this before, but I definitely knew what it meant.

I’d have to circle back to this later.

Eager to start my first fifteen minutes, I readied the kitchen

timer. But I knew that if I went into the fifteen minutes without

a plan, I could choke. Too afraid to use my first fifteen minutes

on the actual
writing
of my thesis, I bargained with myself that the first fifteen minutes could be spent on brainstorming a plan

for
completing
the thesis. That seemed fair enough. The timer started and I quickly settled in and used the time making a list

of fifteen-minute tasks: Look up this and that; write a paragraph

explaining X; read this source. When the timer went off, I felt a

surge of disproportionate pride, but I also knew that if I didn’t

do a writing task
that day
, I’d still be doomed: I’d end up using my new program as a very elaborate form of procrastination. So,

after the requisite snacks, tea, and some heavy sighing, I set the

timer again and valiantly chose a writing task from the list.

Reader, I wrote. I wrote for fifteen minutes.

It might as well have been a lunar landing for the joy I felt.

The thaw had come after the freeze. Page eight behind me, I

typed my way through page nine. The worst was over. Yes, I had

no boyfriend and ninety-one pages to write, but I knew after

that fifteen minutes that I would continue the fifteen-minute

sessions and soon the fifteen minutes would turn into longer

periods. By the end of the week, I was working for several hours

at a stretch. Probably four hours. Four hours punctuated with

lunch and cookies and coffee and trips to the mailbox, but the

pages piled up nonetheless.

Two months from that first fifteen-minute session, I entered

a small classroom and defended my thesis. I passed. It’s pos-

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sible everyone passes, but so what? It was still my moment of

glory. Right after that, I got word that I’d been hired to teach at a community college in southern Utah. But the degree and the

job played second and third to the most fabulous moment of