I was thinking about making a YouTube about rejection and film people as they receive bad news, like getting rejected by an agent, or getting publisher’s rejections, or not getting on The Colbert Report, or not winning the National Book Award. Then there’s all kinds of other rejection: looking at yourself in the mirror, standing on the scale, having a door not held for you, no sweet smile from the cashier. What does it look getting passed over, pissed on, forgotten, dumped. Let’s just be friends. Not my cup of gumbo. The good part about being a writer, if there is a good part, is that for the most part your rejection is somewhat private. At least that’s how I feel. The dark circus is mostly in my head. Forgot to chalk my palms.
Rejection. Discuss.
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Is it me or is it weird that the NYT reports in a front page article that Philip Roth has decided to stop writing. I guess they report it when a sports figure decides to retire or a Supreme COurt Justice steps down. Most people just fade away, and by most people I mean writers. I’m an avid Roth fan. I think I’ve read pretty much everything he’s ever written and I’ve defended him to feminists for years. I’m just not digging the public au revoir. In fact, I’m pretty certain he’ll write another book once he gets bored playing with his iPhone. According to the article, Roth has a post-it note on his computer that says, “The struggle with writing is over.” Why stop there, it sounds perfect for a headstone. “Writing is frustration — it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It’s like baseball: you fail 2/3 of the time. I can’t face any more days when I write five pages and throw them away. I can’t do that anymore.”
Do you know why you write what you write. Why you write poems, or journalism, or humor, or blog posts? Or fiction or plays or articles or works of scholarship? Is it like wearing corduroys or blue blazers or ponchos or espadrilles? What made me turn to poems in the tenth grade, why did I trust them? What do people like unreliable first person narrators? Sometimes I think we have almost no control over what we choose to write: that it chooses us. But that sounds so douchy to me. When I was very young, I compared a field of corn stalks pushing through a bed of snow to a whiskery beard. My mother explained that I had made a simile. Did that Hallmark moment brand me? I like to think so, I like to think that I pleased my mother in that moment. And that I had a special relationship to poetry books, those anorexic volumes, with their visible secrets. If I was a mark, I was made.
There was an article in the paper the other day about how the 
It’s like a pool table after the break the way people distance themselves in an elevator. Perfectly equidistant. If I were a rat and you were a phone. For twenty-two years I’ve seen the same doctor in the same office building and the doorman never acknowledges me.Today he had a little shower cap on his cap for the rain or threat of rain. Do you have any idea how much I have hated people who talked about the weather. A red headed messenger reminded me of a boy I went out with in college, neither of us being the other’s first choice. Makes for some really abject lovemaking. If you can’t tell, I am my old cheerful self tonight waiting for a manuscript to fall from the sky and kill me.
Are there any writers who you love so much that you read all of their books? That you drop everything when a new book of theirs is published? That you reread them so often that the spines are broken, the pages soft with wear? THat you won’t lend them? That you go their readings and are either too tongue tied to say anything or blather like a fool? That you get into bar brawls over them? And keep buying copies of their books to give to friends. And when they publish a stinker you understand and forgive. After all, who can be a genius all of the time?
I write, produce, direct, and perform brilliant monologues while driving. They are usually inspired by some lingering resentment I’ve nursed throughout the day, being honked at (especially for not responding quickly enough when the light turns green), or seeing someone with a strange outfit as I did today, like the guy in seersucker shorts, orange day glow socks, and a Mohawk gelled within an inch of its life. The monologues, also known as rants, mine the ugliest parts of myself and range widely. I will attack anything and anyone including the aged and infirm. And I will astonish myself at how nasty, degenerate, and cruel I can be. Actually, it comes as no surprise.
Betsy Lerner 