Why We Write Page 7
Booklist once called Kathryn Harrison’s work “diabolically compelling.” Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, Harrison is best known for her memoir The Kiss, an exploration of her four-year sexual relationship with her father, beginning when she was twenty. To label Harrison the Writer Who Slept with Her Father is like labeling Sylvia Plath the Writer Who Killed Herself. But the sales and controversy generated by The Kiss placed Kathryn Harrison where she belongs: on the short list of fearless, brilliant modern American writers to watch, a writer who turns readers into fanatical fans and fans like me into writers who look to her for courage and inspiration.
THE VITALS
Birthday: March 20, 1961
Born and raised: Los Angeles, California
Current home: Brooklyn, New York
Love life: Married to writer and editor Colin Harrison since 1988
Family life: Sarah (1990), Walker (1992), Julia (2000)
Schooling: BA in English and art history, Stanford, 1982; MFA, Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 1987
Day job?: Teaches memoir writing at Hunter College
Notable notes:
• Kathryn Harrison’s parents married at 17, when her mother found out she was pregnant, and separated before Harrison was one year old. She was raised by her maternal grandparents and didn’t see her father again until she was 20.
• Harrison’s grandmother was raised and lived in Shanghai, which inspired Harrison’s novel The Binding Chair. Her British grandfather was a fur trapper in Alaska, which provided the impetus for The Seal Wife.
• New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani called The Binding Chair “mesmerizing.”
Website: www.kathrynharrison.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=646167544
Twitter: nope
THE COLLECTED WORKS
Novels
Thicker Than Water, 1992
Exposure, 1993
Poison, 1995
The Binding Chair, 2000
The Seal Wife, 2002
Envy, 2005
Enchantments, 2012
Nonfiction
The Kiss, 1997
The Road to Santiago, 2003
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, 2003
Seeking Rapture, 2003
The Mother Knot, 2004
While They Slept, 2008
Kathryn Harrison
Why I write
I write because it’s the only thing I know that offers the hope of proving myself worthy of love. It has everything to do with my relationship with my mother. I spent my childhood in an attempt to remake myself into a girl she would love, and I’ve translated that into the process of writing—not intentionally, but just as I was always looking beyond my present incarnation toward the one that would woo my mother’s attention, I’m always looking toward the book that hasn’t come out yet: the one that will reveal me as worthy of love.
I was a neurotic schoolgirl. I got straight A’s from seventh to twelfth grade, and I was class valedictorian. My grandfather offered to give me ten dollars for every A I earned. I said, “I’m not selling those A’s.” My schoolwork was the only place I felt was mine. I was in control there as I was nowhere else in my life. It taught me to be diligent, to come home and do my homework. I’m still a schoolgirl. I love the research, the homework of writing a book.
I’d planned to go to med school. I had countless fantasies of my glorious career as a physician, but once I was in college, studying art history, and I discovered that one could sit in the dark and look at beautiful things and write about them, I was irrevocably set on that path.
When it’s great, writing can be ecstatic. Even when it’s just hard, it’s always involving. The moments that are sublime—I get just enough of them that I don’t lose hope of being given another—are only so because for that moment, when even as little as a sentence seems exactly right, before the feeling fades, it offers what I think it must feel like to be worthy of love. I want praise, of course; it’s a cousin of love. But equally important to me is a bit of evidence, here and there, that a reader got it, saw what I’d hoped to reveal.
I write, also, because it’s the apparatus I have for explaining the world around me, seemingly the only method that works. By the time I was in high school I’d discovered that the process of hammering text on the page—being able to articulate things, to get them right—offered not only consolation but a place I could live inside. Before there were thumb drives, I always carried the hard copy of what I was working on with me. I couldn’t leave the house without it. If the house burned down, I thought, I still have this. This is really where I live.
Writing is a lonely job. You have to be willing to work for months and months without anyone saying, “You’re doing well; keep going.” You have to be willing to live in a constant state of uncertainty. Not very many personalities are well suited for it. Fortunately, mine is.
When I’m in the midst of a book, that’s all I am: the person working on Enchantments. When I lose that connection I’m unmoored for a while. I have trouble letting go of one book before becoming wedded to another. I have any number of aborted manuscripts that I realize, in retrospect, were intermediary masks to hide behind before I got going on the book I was meant to write. Until I get traction with a new book, I can’t not write a fake book.
One thing I love about writing is that in that moment, I am most completely myself, and yet totally relieved of my self. I don’t really like spending that much time with myself when I’m not writing, but when I’m in that strange paradox of being most and least myself, I can be transcendently happy, rapturous. Those moments are rare—I’m doing really well if it’s two percent of the time—but memorable, like a drug high you have to get back to.
When you write, endless possibility exists before you. The unwritten sentence—perhaps that will be the one, the one that makes life comprehensible, the one that reveals the beauty and order under what can sometimes seem like a landscape of chaos and cruelty. Whenever someone asks me which book is my best, I say I hope it’s the one I’m writing now. If what I have yet to write didn’t beckon with promise, I’d have no inducement to write—let alone the pressure that drives me to hammer and hammer at something until it seems acceptable, good enough for the moment, anyway, enough to be revisable in a day or a month. And so, no matter that it’s characterized more often by a feeling of failure than of success, I am dependent on it.
For me, writing is inseparable from thinking. I could say the entire undertaking is a vast cerebral construct against my demons. It’s the thing that I love. It’s my identity.
Where I write
My study is like a reliquary. I have no family of origin anymore; whatever remains of it fills the shelves and lines the walls of my office: touchstones, my favorite books, the orchids my mother used to grow in my study window in their special light. Every inch of wall is covered with portraits of my family, and portraits my older daughter, an artist, painted. I’m always happy to step into my study. I come here for solace even when solace isn’t available.
How I write
I get off on index cards. It’s pathetic but true. There’s nothing that looks better to me than a stack of index cards with a pen beside it. On my desk right now I have a pile of blanks and a pile I’ve already scribbled on, waiting to be filed in what looks like a glorified recipe box. For the book I’m working on now, the dividers in the box say “Prophesy,” “Enunciation,” “Crowning,” “Betrayal,” “Martyrdom.”
Writing is strangely tiring for something that doesn’t involve moving a muscle. It requires an enormous amount of psychic energy. By the end of the day I’m shot—in a good way.
I can get really tense while I’m writing. As I get more fatigued, the tension builds in my body. My jaw gets so clenched, I once broke a molar while I was working. Over the decades I’ve learned what to do to offset some of the stress. My body pretty much follows along with my head. If I leave my desk happy with the day, I’m ready to let it go.
/> Let us now praise dirty soccer uniforms
God knows what would happen if I lived without people who need things from me. I’d be some kind of monster if there was no dinner to be made, no soccer uniform to be washed. I’d be the monkey who keeps taking coke until his head explodes.
My husband and I met in grad school, at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He could see immediately that I wasn’t somebody who should be living alone. My fridge was always empty. I have no talent for self-preservation. I owe my stability to the people I care about. There’s no going off the rails when you have children. I don’t know how much work I’d get done without my family to keep me in line.
When he married me, my husband knew he had somebody on his hands with a lot of baggage. He’s a pretty intuitive man. He understood that there were limited ways in which I could keep myself stitched together, and writing was one of them.
Writing is a job. If you’re going to do a job, you’re going to do it every day. You’re going to get enough sleep, and not fall into dissolute habits. I never had a romantic idea about writing. In grad school other people would spend the evening drinking, then tear home to write something at three in the morning, thinking the work would be exceptional because of the exceptional circumstances under which it had been produced. You don’t write by sitting in a garret thinking the muse might arise under some particular circumstances.
The thirty-six-hour day
During the late 1980s, I worked as a book editor at Viking Penguin. I loved the job. It was very interesting, and it was useful for me to get over what had previously seemed a fortified wall between publishing and writing. It demystified the process of publishing a book, which I think is a very good thing. But, after I’d been working at Viking for six months or so, my husband said, “This is really stupid. You’re working on other people’s writing instead of your own.” So I began getting up at five in the morning, to write until seven, when I got ready for work. That’s how I wrote my first novel.
When I finished it, I showed it to an editor I’d worked with at Viking. She told me to send it to Amanda (Binky) Urban, one of the most powerful agents in New York. I was terrified, but I did. Two days later I got a call from Binky’s assistant, saying Binky wanted to see me. I hadn’t expected her to take me on as a client—my fear was that Binky had summoned me to her office to chastise me in person for having the audacity to approach her. I’d been working at Viking for a couple of years, and was about nine months pregnant, when I appeared in Binky’s office. She greeted me by reading me the list of editors to whom she was going to send my manuscript. She said she was going to hold an auction. I sat there gravidly, dumbly nodding. When I left I called my husband. He asked what happened, and I told him I wasn’t sure. He said, “Is Binky Urban your agent?” I said I guessed she was, but I’d been so certain of rejection that I just didn’t believe it. I went back to my desk at Viking. That was on a Friday. The following Monday, Binky called and said she had a preemptive offer from a big editor at Random House. I’d been preparing myself for years of rejection. I wasn’t prepared to be handed a golden ticket to skip over all of that.
My grandmother was living with us at the time, and by the time the book went into production I had a baby on my hands as well. I needed thirty-six hours in a day, and my husband was now working as an editor while writing a novel, but we both knew he doesn’t need writing in the same way that I do. So he kept his job and I quit mine. It was scary to leave an office with colleagues and regular paychecks. It was a gamble, and it paid off—that was in 1990, twelve books ago.
Headiest experience
The best and the worst, the most exciting and most awful experience I’ve had as a writer was working on The Kiss. I wrote it after spending years in psychoanalysis, trying to understand what had happened between (among) my mother, my father, and me. What I wanted—what I thought I wanted—was something like a pie graph revealing each of our slices of culpability.
Finally I had this shining moment of clarity. I realized I’d reached an impasse, that assigning blame wouldn’t help me to tell the story. I saw who we were, my mother, my father, myself, and I thought, I can just write about what happened. I can try to reveal what happened in ways that make it an understandable story, even if it’s not one anyone wants to hear.
Once I started, I realized I’d been writing The Kiss in my head for a decade. There were sentences I’d revised more than once without ever writing them down. It spilled out of me, not without effort, but in a white heat. I woke up at three every morning, got my kids to school at seven, went back to my desk till they got home at three thirty, and went back there after they were in bed and wrote till midnight. I’d lie down next to my husband for a few hours, then get up and start again. I was afraid that if I stopped I might not keep going.
When the book was published, it sparked a huge debate about what was okay to write about. I believe that you can write about anything. Nothing should be excluded from the world of books; that’s what books are for. But I got reviews whose last words were “shut up.”
It was very difficult to be pilloried in public. I read my reviews because I’m always looking for constructive criticism, but the reviews of The Kiss exposed me to things that were really ugly: character assassination, slander.
I understand myself to be a writer who people aren’t tepid about. People tend to really like my work or find the subjects I choose—the ones that choose me—offensive. I like being that writer, not the writer whose work you read and forget.
I like to hit a nerve. I like to hear from some people that a book of mine saved their lives and hear from others, “You ought to be locked up.” Tepid responses make me feel I’ve failed somehow. I don’t portray myself as who I want to be. I portray myself as who I am.
If The Kiss had been written by a man; if my father, say, had written about us, he might not have been attacked, as I was, for being honest about a shameful thing. I came out of that publication banged up, but it was a good thing for me overall. I realized that I couldn’t do anything to make people say anything worse about me than they’d already said. So it was freeing.
Kathryn Harrison’s Wisdom for Writers
At the end of a workday, leave yourself a page marker, an instruction that tells you where to start the next morning, so you’re oriented immediately when you sit down at your desk.
We all know talented people who piss their lives away, and dogged souls who show up even when they’re uninspired, even when they’ve lost faith in their work. It’s good to have talent and discipline, but there’s really no substitute for self-discipline.
Don’t portray yourself as who you want to be. Portray yourself as who you are.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Gish Jen
It’s the băi shù you’d notice most—the thousand-year-old cypresses—some of them upright, some of them leaning. And their bark, you’d see, if you visited—upward-spiraling, deeply grooved, on these straight trunks that rise and rise. They look as though someone took a rake to them, then gave them a twist, who knows why.
—Opening lines, World and Town, 2010
“Jen knows how to create thoughtful characters who can talk and think about complex issues without making us take notes,” Washington Post reviewer Ron Charles wrote about World and Town. In her review of The Love Wife, New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani wrote, “Ms. Jen takes big social issues like ethnic identity and racial prejudice and filters them through the prism of…individuals so in thrall to their own quirky emotional histories that they never for a moment seem like generic or representative figures.”
A second-generation Chinese American whose parents immigrated to the United States in the 1940s, novelist Gish Jen has built a career on craft and contradiction. The pure power of her prose has earned her a devoted following of die-hard fans and a slew of rave reviews and awards, including a Strauss Living from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. And, while challenging some of America’s most entrenched melting-pot my
ths as only an insider/outsider could, she has somehow managed to defy categorization as an “immigrant novelist.”
THE VITALS
Birthday: August 12, 1955
Born and raised: Long Island, Queens, and Scarsdale, New York
Current home: Boston, Massachusetts
Love life: Married
Family life: Two children
Schooling: BA from Harvard, 1977; MFA from Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 1983
Day job?: No
Honors and awards (partial listing): Grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Commission; a Strauss Living from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; a Lannan Literary Award; member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Notable notes:
• Gish Jen’s birth name, and the name under which she published her first story, Lillian Jen. Her film buff classmates in high school nicknamed her “Gish” after Lillian Gish.
• Jen was premed at Harvard, considered going to law school, and realized she wanted to study writing while enrolled in Stanford Business School.
• Jen didn’t have access to a library until she was in fifth grade, when her family moved from Queens to Scarsdale.
Website: www.gishjen.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/gish-jen/112020422148586
THE COLLECTED WORKS
Novels
Mona in the Promised Land, 1996
The Love Wife, 2004
Typical American, 2007
World and Town, 2010
Fiction Collection
Who’s Irish? short stories, 1999
Periodicals
The New Yorker
The Atlantic Monthly
The New York Times
The Los Angeles Times
The New Republic