When I set out to learn about my mother's bridge club, the Jewish octogenarians behind the matching outfits and accessories, I never expected to fall in love with them. This is the story of the ladies, their game, their gen, and the ragged path that led me back to my mother.
There is a reason they don’t let me out much. What was it? The beauty of the buildings, slate the color of pigeons, the girl with striped tights, purple water bottle swinging astride. I sat alone in a church and listened to an organist sigh between pieces.I dined with bright minds and tried a new food. I bought a notebook that always spells hope. Flimsy, gorgeous new ideas that blossom and die in a moment. I am at Kenyon College and tomorrow I will talk about the writer’s life. You know that lonely clacking train, that aggravated assault, that self mutilation, that particular hope, that elegant insistence, that awkward moment, that drone in your head, that never ending conversation.
The writer’s life. How would you describe it?
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Betsy Lerner 
The Life of Beautiful Losers.
(with thanks to Leonard Cohen)
“I sat alone in a church and listened to an organist sigh between pieces.”
That is one of the most beautiful lines I’ve ever read. You’re beautiful Betsy. Thank you for sharing.
The writer’s life is one of expectation and disappointment, unbridled joy and sadness so deep it sucks the very breath from your bones. But bones don’t breathe you say, oh yes they do, that’s how deep the feelings of failure. But when the bless-ed word, the perfect sentence, the bloody and salty you soaks the page, there is no greater moment. I would not trade the thrill of what I do or the minnow in a mud puddle I am for anything, well maybe just for one thing…
a fundamental cluelessness is necessary for the writer’s life.
Yo Tet…I can smell weed rising off my Kindle from High Street. I’ve just started. You really should be more famous.
thank you, carolynn. tell everyone you know and let’s see if we can get that started. and tell everyone you don’t know, too, so’s we got all the bases covered.
(no one believes me when i tell them i don’t smoke ennymoar. why iz dat? haz diss kat no cred?)
don’t forget to tell them about all the sex. and the good drugs that writers keep tucked in the inside pocket of their waist-length army green prada jackets (“…look at this peacoat, tell me he’s broke”).
and the hipster perks, the hot guys with beards and ironic t-shirts. always hanging out in the dives nobody knows about with the bands nobody knows…yet.
and all the MONEY, whatever you do, don’t forget the money.
tell them about their phones blowing up nonstop with endless opportunities.
the $800 sushi dinners.
emails from lena.
direct tweets from aaron.
tell them all of it.
(jon steward just introduced fawzia koofi, the woman running for president of afghanistan. ten seconds into her story and i feel like a dip shit for writing such a paragraph.)
More fun than a barrel of monkeys on a roller coaster.
And just as much mess.
Today I had a terrific conversation with these folks: http://www.books-booze.com/ . They were interviewing me and we got into that vast deep, the why. the love. the tango. and, oops, after the hour long interview there was a technical malfunction, so it’s as if it never happened. Story of my life. The shmeg of that that chat lingers, so here goes. If life, the kernel of life, calls you to fuck it sideways, through words and through those disparate visions that visit you in the night, well then, you must. Fuck the call for Happily Ever After. Forget that most of your waking hours involve the trespass of normative toil. Do it. Less and less people are actually doing it. So you must. You must.
Writers do not decide to write. It is the relentless haunting of words that choose the writer. It is the voices in your head that will not allow sleep until they are given form. Writers are hostages. Words our captures. Only in releasing them, are we free. Trying to find a slight of hand. A way to distract from their endless demands. To be a writer is like being a lion tamer. Trying to make prose leap from the page. Desperately attempting to beckon them, come closer. Sit here, lay there. Bidding them to come into the light, so that I may capture their essence. Their meaning. You may use them to build a fortress. To hid within. But they are the true tricksters. The more you attempt to conceal, the more they reveal. Leaving you naked and barefaced. Yes, being a writer is exactly like the ill trained lion tamer. With only your wits and cold coffee. There is no chance that you will come out not unscathed. Ripped open, but hopefully still breathing.
Forgive the “not” I really need to learn to train those lions
I dunno I can’t romantize the writer’s life any longer. It’s like working for the railways. Push shunt grunt. Get it on the tracks, steaming, avoid unnecessary collisions. Sure it’s a thrill when it’s pounding through you, but then there is maintenance, fuel, gumption.
Wish I could hop over and hear you speak.
“Sure it’s a thrill when it’s pounding through you, but then there is maintenance, fuel, gumption.”
And so it is.
Dear Betsy, glad you came out to play.
I can’t describe it any better than you did in the last sentence of this post.
Here’s to new notebooks.
Financially restrictive.
Amen!
It’s my happy place.
Reblogged this on critiqueen5 and commented:
Love her
Have fun, Betsy.
Like a sick colored carousel, methodically turning, never stopping, haunting your every minute. Churning in an empty field. It’s a harsh calliope setting the pace and tone, a worm of insistence threading through this thought–and now this one…and
“…that lonely clacking train…” Indeed.
Kenyon? You’re practically on my stomping grounds!
Finally landing in a writing life has allowed me to hang out here, and other venues, with the intense, arty types, rather than the Ivy league jocks or medical people ALL DAY LONG. Phew!
It allows me to hunt literary ghosts in stellar places: Paris, Greenwich Village, Boston, Bolinas, Provincetown, the rocky coast of Maine. I love seeing where they lived & fretted. It’s inspiring every time.
Hyper aware. And hard, hard work.
Stops and starts. Figure it out. Make it work. Learn from last time. Not. Never works the same way twice. Start again. Don’t quit. Can’t quit.
Thick-skin-itis. Edit ’til you cry, and then edit some more. Extreme joy when something you write sings, and it makes someone else sing too.
Today I emailed a fan letter to a writer and got a response within minutes. He told me I made his day. Sometimes this writing life is really what it’s cracked up to be. Here’s to singing and sharing.
In fact, if anyone is interested, here’s the broadcast that inspired me (coincidentally about his own writing life): http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/2013/feb/13/phillip-lopate-his-writing-life/
I only have a toe in the water, and it’s freezing.
The writing life is possible if you can handle being alone…
And thank you Betsy, for your organist (among other things)
A friend and fellow writer recently admitted to me that she thinks many writers have a broader emotional range than the average person, that we feel what we feel more intensely than most.
I agreed; I think our wells run deeper. (I don’t know that this is unique to writers. But it certainly seems a trend.) It means we are prone to bursts of joy as well as misery but ultimately, I think it makes for a richer life.
Right now it feels like pressing my bare skin against hot iron. Let’s hope the brand will be beautiful.
Inside out.
“The writer’s life. How would you describe it?”
Like having bi-polar disorder.
Bipolar. (oops on the “-” )
Similar to birth, a longer labor.
My apologies, Mike, but I have to jump in here. I hope I speak for all women who’ve had 10 lobs pass through them, nothing, nothing is similar to birth.
Ha! I meant to write “lbs” but it came out lobs. Maybe that should be a title of an essay. “10 Lobs.”
good one MSB – 10 lbs, 10 lobs – who cares. It felt both…really. 🙂
I meant, “It felt like both.”
You’re right; I was really just an observer at two births. No offense meant. Respect.
Make that 10 pounds, 4 ounces in my experience. And then I flat lined. Please lord, let that not also be my fate once I get an acceptance letter from an agent.
Engrossing. Sometimes just gross.
Heartbreaking, lonely, exhausting, frustrating — pretty much perfect.
My (yet-to-be-published) writer’s life was quite nice this weekend: a chance to pitch to a publisher, lunch with my writing group, meeting with the book club, invited to attend a meeting by the committee organizing a literary prize dedicate to my late friend and, finally, enjoying a retro fondue party with writers, publishing people, librarians and a psychotherapist.
Thank gawd Mardi Gras was last week!