THE FOREST FOR THE TREES is about writing, publishing and what makes writers tick. This blog is dedicated to the self loathing that afflicts most writers. A community of like-minded malcontents gather here. I post less frequently now, but hopefully with as much vitriol. Please join in! Gluttons for punishment can scroll through the archives.
If I’ve learned one thing about writers, it’s this: we really are all alone. Thanks for reading. Love, Betsy
I went to a memorial service tonight for Joan Didion. There were a dozen people who spoke and I kept having the nagging feeling that no one was telling the truth. Though memorial services are not for telling the truth so much as burnishing it. Joan Didion was fierce. That’s obvious. I think I was in college when I read Play it as it Lays. I found it at the Strand Bookstore and bought it because of the title. I remember that the main character Maria, pronounced it Ma-RYE-ah, was able to cross five lanes on the highway without braking. I can’t get on the highway without thinking of her.
Shout out to Neil deGrasse Tyson, whose new book STARRY MESSENGER publishes this week. Neil’s mission in life is to communicate about the cosmos. He does this in many ways: as the host of StarTalk, host of Cosmos, his 15 million Twitter followers, through public appearances, and (this is where I come in): through books. In Starry Messenger he inverts his telescope and brings his cosmic perspective to life on earth. It’s challenging, enlightening, witty, and bracing whether he’s writing about race, gender, body-mind, aesthetics, conflict and resolution, truth and beauty. Come for the science, stay for the writing.
Went to NYC today and had a full in-person publishing day. Publishing has always been a very social industry. Business contacts between agents and editors forged over bread baskets and tiramisu. Lots of gossip. Lots of schadenfreude to spread around. When I was at the beginning of my career, I was terrified of agent lunches. Every aspect: inviting them, choosing a restaurant, making small talk, making big talk, figuring out the tip in a timely fashion. One very fancy agent who clearly didn’t want to meet another young editor summoned me to her neighborhood place. Once there, menus before us, she put her head in her hands and said that we was going to kill herself if she had to have another Cobb salad. Now, I’m her. World weary, tired of chirpy young editors, been there, done that. But I’m not going to off myself over a Cobb. I still love the Cobb.
My husband floated the idea that I use my self-loathing to mask my ambition. Get to know me. I’m hugely ambitious, I’m profoundly self-loathing. It’s not a schtick. It’s not a Broadway play. It’s not the Luray Caverns. I will most certainly regret, at the end of my life, that I spent so much of it hating myself. I’m not fucking around. It’s not a Rothko, it’s not a poem, it’s not a blade of grass. Ha ha.
How self-loathing are you on a scale of One to Ten?
I was obsessed with a middle aged couple who were constantly touching. Face stroking, leg stroking, hand holding, snuzzling, face cupping, ear tickling. More, they kept looking to see who was looking at them, and then they’d look away as if you were prurient. Then there were two women, one small and stooped over, the other big and stooped over both in a tan bucket hats. There were two friends who kept screaming about their experience last year watching the murmuration. They were swathed in backpacks, fanny packs, binocular holders, rain jackets and tevas. Mostly I fell in love with the young man from Audubon who told us where to look, one o’clock, two o’clock, directly above us. He knew every bird in our state and their habits. He had dimples and manners and lived a life.
I’d always heard about it, but had never seen it. It’s a word that finds its way into poems: murmuration. And why not, it sounds amazing, all those delicious m’s and r’s. We took a boat up the Connecticut River to Essex, where at dusk, over 600,000 swallows emerged as tiny dots then as winged things in great masses forming shapes in the air, moving in unison. The show lasted for about 45 minutes, the birds moving to escape a peregrine falcon who was hunting. Everyone on the boat became five years old again as they spotted the great bird formation sweeping the sky. The only thing that could compare to the bird watching was the people watching. More on that tomorrow.
Thinking about my mother. Thinking about all the mixed messages I received. I think the one that really did me in was that I would be perfect if I was thin. Ha ha ha. I am perfect, mommy dearest. I miss my dead mother so much. I think about her all through the day. What she would like, what she would disdain. My mother was the original hater. She was also gullible and funny and generous and pro-active. She taught me to revere the dictionary and marveled at my similes. She bought me my first typewriter, a Smith-Corona two tone with a side cartridge. Through her eighties, every few weeks, she took a broom and dust pan into the basement to sweep up the dead mice. She said it kept her alive.
A writer who I work with has been struggling for a long time with a project. Over the years we’ve hypothesized about what is keeping her from her goal. Covid, a death in the family, toggling between points of view, no apparent structure, then the psychological possibilities: fear, depression, fear, depression. Anger, fear, depression. Her last book tanked, to be blunt, and there’s that, too. The specter of that failure looming like a dark cloud. In the end it doesn’t matter. You are a writer, you are a tank, fuck the fuck out of it. Delicate flowers need not apply.
A little slow getting out of the gate. I usually love the first day after labor day. I was always better at school than summer camp, better at work than vacation. I also live in New England and the changing colors of the trees is a gorgeous pageant. And then of course long sleeves and sweaters over shorts and and thongs. Somehow, and maybe it’s the terrible shape of the world, makes it harder to root for anything. I think as writers, obligated to no one and nothing, the responsibility, paradoxically, implores us to act. To read and write and publish, to communicate and find meaning.
I read 140 pages of War and Peace. That’s all I got. It’s damn good so far. I love the way T. describes physical characteristics most of all. Everyone has a large, medium or small mouth. I slept a lot, walked a lot on pretty tree covered trails and with pine needle floors of auburn. I had my favorite dinner twice, hot dogs and corn on the cob. We went to semi-hidden waterfall and the few people there all swam, some naked. Yours truly stayed apart on the rocks. Ever as it was, ever as it will it be.
Betsy Lerner 