I watched a movie over the weekend called Margaret. The movie was many things, but at its heart a powerful mother daughter story, or at least that’s how I read it. It said everything I’ve been trying to say with my so-called movie. Only I realized that I have been writing with crayons. Fuck shit piss. It sucks when you realize how low you really are on the ladder of who gets fucked and who doesn’t. And this brilliant movie by Kenneth Lonergan was apparently put on ice for twelve years over disputes among the producers and only just released on Netflix. No red carpet, no party, no Box Office returns. It’s from the same director of You Can Count On Me, which was a near perfect evocation of adult siblings dealing with an infirm father. Laura Linney. Philip Seymour Hoffman. It’s really okay. Every way to look at “where you are” in the great food chain of work getting produced is subject to nausea, panic, and delusional thinking. You just have to keep working and hopefully improving. I’m not giving up the ship, just a little wind taken out of my sails. Margaret, are you grieving, over Goldengrove unleaving?
What have you read or seen lately that made you feel like a piece of shit?
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Don’t start your query letter with the name of your character. Lucy Links is on the rebound! Martine Kessell grew up in Capetown. Carl Noop never thought he was meant for great things.
I ask a writer to add a scene so I better understand a character. He invents a scene that blows me away. It feels so real that I privately think it’s autobiographical. Of course I don’t ask because that would be a) naive b) uncouth and c) uncool. Why does my mind jump there? How much of fiction is autobiographical? Why do we read made up stories? Are we children? Why do we hope to extract truth from fiction? Can you write anything that doesn’t come from your own experience, even in that abstractified, personalized, emotional, autumnal way? Robots, vampires, gullions, wasps. C’est moi. On the 5:40 train this morning, from New Haven to New York, a woman named Laura said over and over, “Mom, we will mail the check to Gordon on Friday. Yes, by mail. Yes, mother. This is Laura. I’m going to the city. I wrote it on the calendar. We will mail the check, yes, mail.”
To a startling and terrifying extent, I think about home invasions. I think about deer turning mean and deadly. I think about being run down by a bike, a car, a bus, a train. I fear running over the Holocaust survivor who jogs by my house every morning at 5:20. I fear squirrels when they stop chewing and take you in their sights. I fear people have died when they are late to meet me. Or that when they show, I won’t recognize them. I fear that a bitchy email goes astray. I fear that people can read my mind. I fear my mind and the sink holes it seeks. I fear that I will always live in this body or never appreciate it. That I will fall out of a helicopter. That I will be decapitated by her blades. That too many people will want to speak at my funeral and it will go on too long and that is all that anyone will remember instead of all the wonderful poems and songs and tributes to a person who lined her casket with bad jokes and Playbills from every show she’s ever seen.
Dear Betsy,
I never mind coming home. I’m a person for whom travel presents a great many challenges (too many and unpleasant to elaborate here). What I love is coming home and returning to my beloved rituals. Especially opening mail, separating the wheat from the chaff, the catalogues, the invitations to join AARP, the circulars from Best Buy. There was a royalty check, a check from giving a talk to graduate students at an esteemed university, just enough to keep me going in the fantasy of This Is Your Life as a writer/sock puppet. I am highly disciplined and will not crack my People until I get my fat ass back to the gym. I scan the contents of The New Yorker like a doctor reviewing a medical chart, interested and distracted at once. I put bills here. I put my husband’s bills there. I have two letters from a friend from graduate school. THese I also put aside for later, only to savor.
The high holy days. As a teenager, it used to mean getting stoned outside the synagogue behind the playground named for kids who died. Why did I become irreverent instead of reverent. Why did I hate everything and everyone? Today in temple, I watched an older man rub his wife’s shoulders, then knead her neck, then run his hands up and down her back. The first knuckle on his index finger was crooked and rigid with arthritis; soon his whole hand would be gnarled like tree roots. I prayed he would stop when I noticed another man rubbing his wife’s back a few rows up. What the fuck is this, I wondered, an epidemic? Then I said kaddish for my father and for my sister, and then for some reason Lucy Grealy, who came into my thoughts unbidden. Then I went to a break the fast party and a woman came up to me and said, “You wrote that book. The fat book. You’re not that fat.”
Betsy Lerner 