I know I wrote about Frank McCourt in The Forest for the Trees, using him, among others, as an example of a late bloomer. My books are still packed away, or I’d dig it up. The salient point: McCourt was published for the first time at the age of 66. You see some of these geezers at writing conferences and it’s hard not to think: game over. McCourt changed all that. But there was something in his NYT obit that touched me even more.
“On the side, Mr. McCourt made fitful stabs at writing. He contributed articles on Ireland to The Village Voice, kept notebooks. But at the Lion’s Head in Greenwich Village, where he became friends with Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin, he felt like an interloper, he said. They were writers. He was just a teacher.”
And then, “An early attempt, when he was studying at NYU, had fizzled out, but three decades later, he said, he had worked through his awkward self-conscious James Joyce phase and had gotten beyond the crippling anger that darkened his memories.”
Finally, the obit explains how, in what he thought was a note to himself, he found his voice, “That was it. It carried me through to the end of the book.”
It’s all there. The pervasive imposter/interloper complex most writers feel (many well into years of having been published). What is that about? Does a musician feel like a fraud if he hasn’t recorded? An artist if he hasn’t had a retrospective a MOMA? What is it about writing?There’s a great Mona Van Duyn poem (again packed away) about taking a vision test for a driver’s license, and the mortification she feels when asked her occupation.
Then there are the fits and starts and thirty year “hiatus” from writing. Oh, yeah, and the crippling anger. I can’t relate.
And last, finding your voice. Like what? An old friend? Like the true self? Like a gift you never expected and probably don’t deserve.
Raise a pint to Mr. McCourt. Four million hardcover copies, Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle. Well, not too shabby for an old geezer.
Betsy Lerner 
I saw Mr McCourt read from his book here in Australia many years ago. He was tired and cranky and asked “Don’t you people have jobs to go to?” But his reading was an absolute delight.
Top Five Most Influential Books for me
Catcher in the Rye
The Bell Jar
Lucky Jim
I, Claudius
Angela’s Ashes – I don’t even want to read it again, it was so riveting the first time, a full-fledged reader’s high. I might as well keep it that way now.
I’m forty-six, and just now getting beyond my own crippling anger. I kept thinking “I’m too old, I won’t look good in an author photo on a dust jacket.” Ridiculous, I know, but that fear was masking the real issue, which is to contribute to the human race, and leave the results up to fate/karma/God.
Now I know the real point is to say what only I can say. Someone is waiting to read it.
Thanks for posting this.
Exactly what I needed right now. I just had my self confidence shattered by someone who holds herself in high regard. (not an agent) Now, my self esteem is something I’ve been working HARD for since I got sober. (I’m a recovering addict and have written a memoir about my addiction and recovery)
I’m in the query process now, and have been feeling good about the interest I’ve received. Woke up this morning, though, to an e-mail that hit my heart in a painful way.
Anyway, I love reading that other people feel the way I do. Tulasi-Priya, I’m 41 and have felt the same way about the dust jacket thing. But look at it this way: that’s a damn positive thing to be thinking, right? I mean, it’s not IF we’ll look go on a dust jacket, it’s just WHEN.
Good for us.
Mr. McCourt was/is an inspiration.
There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.
The Medium is the Massage
Marshall McLuhan 1967
That obit got to me too, and I had to go to some effort to find my way back to it to read it again, because I kept finding other obits. It was the crippling anger. What you have to get past to tell your story.