Betsy Lerner

What I really love about writing is that when I’m writing I cease to exist. I cease to think about calories, bills, clients, frizz, my mother gone. I cease to think about unreturned calls, nursed hurts, the big scoreboard in the sky, the petty resentments, the regrets. Why do I want to disappear? Please. I wrote to escape as a child in a crawl space beneath the stairs. I kept diaries from high school on. One notebook after another creaking with ink, a roll call of heartbreak and slights real and imagined. I know I’m not alone, but I love being alone.

Why are you a writer?

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 I’ve been in publishing for thirty-three years. I feel like I’m eighteen and  wish I hadn’t partied so hard the night before taking the SATS. But my parents were out of town. What choice exactly did I have? Did I want to work in publishing? No. I wanted to run Paramount Films. I wanted to be a psychiatrist. I wanted to be a potter in Vermont and marry a quiet man. I wanted to write poems and self-destruct. I actually gave that the college try. LOL. I wanted to be in a writers’ room. I wanted to be a part of something smaller than myself. I did not want to be a hero, a victim, or a face in the crowd. I wanted to be free.

What did you want to be.

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I hate it when someone asks at the Q&A when the writer gets his writing done. What is his process. Does it many any difference whether you write at dawn or after midnight? Does it matter if you write sitting down or standing up like Philip Roth? If you double space or single space. Helvetica or Times Roman? It doesn’t matter if you type or write in longhand. Whatever your process is, it doesn’t matter.  Sometimes I get dressed and sometimes I don’t. I have a cup of coffee and a brown pear and put all the words in a Cuisinart and study the blades. Do you really care where Hemingway petted his seven-clawed cats, what kind of rocks lined her pockets. Does it matter that Edith Wharton tossed her finished pages on the floor for her maids to pick up or that Thomas Hardy had mud on his boots when he wrote one of the saddest scenes in all of English literature.

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When I was fifteen, I went to an “alternative” camp. There I met an older camper named Fred. He had long hair, a wash of freckles,  and a lot of swag. I’m quite sure he didn’t know I was alive (was I alive?), but I worshipped him from afar. One day, somehow, we got to talking outside the theater barn. It was there he told  me that he believed authentic feeling was all that mattered.  I disagreed. I believed that execution was all. We all have feelings, what separates artists and writers is their ability to execute a work of art.  He chided me for this. He was all for undiluted feeling. Did I still want to fuck him? Yes, of course. But it was a demarcation for me of people who believed in feeling over form.

Feeling or form? Where do you live?

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Thank you for all the beautiful notes about losing my mom. Until now, I truly believed that there was no excuse for not writing. I believed that a writer should write under any conditions. That a “real writer” wasn’t derailed by things like love, war, life or death. I hated hearing writers make excuses for not getting their work done. Of course, I’d always act deeply sympathetic, but internally I was full of judgement and disdain. Since no one is asking you to write, since no one cares if you write, why would anyone want to hear your excuses for not writing. You’re literally not doing something that no one wants. I prided myself for writing all my books while holding a full time job. I prided myself for writing two books on the Metronorth train from New Haven to Grand Central. I prided myself for getting up at five and blah blah blah. Ever since my mother died, I’ve been in a fog. To avoid facing my own inability to concentrate, I have given myself seven pap smears, make a bumper crop of baked apples, reorganized my button tin, flossed, and brought a pair of slacks I bought in 2013 to the tailor.  I’m not humbled. I’m pissed. No one ever called Camus an asshole.

What stops you in your tracks?

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I’m writing with sad news. My mom, my bridge lady, died last month. A lot of people have said they felt they knew my mother through my book, The Bridge Ladies. I always wanted to ask: what, what do you think you knew about her. I feel bereft that I barely scratched the surface. My mother was beyond complicated and our relationship covered the spectrum. The dressing room wars. The thirty years in therapy. The symphony of criticism. The covert encouragement. When I was eleven or so, we drove past a snow covered field with dead corn stalks sticking up. I said it looked like stubble on a man’s face. My mom was delighted by the comparison and explained what a simile was. Then the field burst into flame.

What did you learn from your mother?

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Every night when I go to the gym (okay, on the rare occasion that I haul my ass into the gym), the woman who has the locker next to me is always there. Yes, we make the perfunctory remark about how the place is empty and here we are right on top of each other. Of all the! This woman takes off all her clothes and sits on the bench and looks at Facebook. She has an athletic body and is proud of it. And why not! I, on the other hand, use my towel like a magician hoping no one can see what’s hiding behind it. I can literally get dressed and undressed behind a towel the size of a postage stamp. Tonight, she was talking on the phone while sitting there naked. It sounded like she was getting estimates on flowers. She liked the paper whites.

Do you have a writer’s body?

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